The Pain Nurse - [18]

Down the hill was Over-the-Rhine, the old immigrant German neighborhood. The Germans were long gone and it was one of the toughest ghettos in the Midwest, a fact barely belied by its impressive architecture and dense, mystical streets. Many of the buildings had been left to rot and drug dealers ran the street corners. The mentally ill homeless roamed the sidewalks and camped in decaying Italianate landmarks. Years before, the city had stowed most of the social services in OTR. Tote up all the calls, all the cases, and Will had spent years of his career there. Main Street and a few other places were being gentrified and celebrated in the newspapers. Soon all those grand old row houses would be restored and gleaming, they said. But Will knew something the white chamber of commerce types didn’t: OTR was defiantly black territory. Lots of hardcore Over-the-Rhine residents regarded the renovations and teardowns and Saturday night bar traffic by the westside white kids as an invasion. Cross Central Parkway south and you were in the white territory of downtown. But the north side of Central Parkway was an invisible boundary.

Cincinnati was good at boundaries. Interstate 75 was the Sauerkraut Curtain: to the west lay Price Hill and, beyond, the neat houses to which the German families had moved in the 1930s and 1940s as they grew more prosperous. East, beyond downtown, ranged the once-grand neighborhoods of Mount Auburn and Walnut Hills, now decrepit and dangerous. Once-grand estates had been subdivided into a dozen rat-infested apartments, and the teenagers carried guns like white kids carried cell phones. Then, another boundary, and you slipped into the leafy affluence of the old gentry in Hyde Park and Mount Lookout and Indian Hill. It was a nice polite midwestern city on the surface. Anybody who paid attention knew better. Neighborhood was identity, and some of the neighborhoods were lethal.

The leaves were all gone. Nothing could conceal Cincinnati: half its population decamped for the suburbs or the Sunbelt, leaving lovely old buildings and trees that had lost their leaves. His best friend from high school had left last year to sell houses in Arizona. The stubborn ones stayed and loved the city. Sometimes he felt that Cincinnati was a museum that was building new stadiums, a torn and wounded city without even knowing it, old money and denial being the camouflage, the best pain drug. Will knew better. Every place he looked he remembered trouble. It was the cop’s lot. In college, he had taken a course on urban planning where the books would inevitably talk about this or that city as a “contradiction.” Cincinnati was different. It was one reinforcement laid upon another, like the levees that held back the Ohio. Yet the great river still had its way.

Still, to Will’s wonder Cincinnati looked luminous. Cindy looked luminous. He was alive. He had held her for long minutes. She was still as slender as the first day he had met her, and he could still touch his elbows with his hands when he embraced her. She kept trying to pull away gently and he knew he must smell rank, but he just held on, feeling her sharp shoulder blades, the firm warmth of her breasts. For those minutes it all went away, the hospital, the killing, the pain.

She had pulled away before he could kiss her. Now he wheeled the chair around from the big windows and faced her. She wore her new charcoal gray suit. She had come straight from work. Her blue eyes that were startling in their intensity, and her chestnut hair looked the same color as when she was twenty-two, because or in spite of those expensive trips to the salon that they had once bickered over. So much money for such a severe hairstyle. He loved her hair natural, parted in the middle, and slightly wild as it hit her shoulders. She had said she couldn’t look like a high school girl and be taken seriously at the bank. Just as she had said, after being promoted to senior vice president, that she would prefer to be known as Cynthia. He had squirmed when she wanted him to go with her to the symphony or the May Festival. Baseball bored her. It all seemed foolishly trivial now.

“You look beautiful.”

She patted his knee. He couldn’t really feel it.

“Cindy, you’ve got to get me out of here.”

“What are you talking about?”

He knew he had blurted out the words with too much desperation. He looked down, slowed his breathing. He laughed and spoke in a slower voice.

“It’s been nearly two weeks. Now-a-days they kick people out in two days after major surgery, but I’m stuck here.” As he talked, he could hear the anxiety taking control again. “I feel like I’m in prison. I can’t sleep. I can’t get better.”

He glanced up and she had an utterly foreign look on her face.

“Let me come home, please.”

“You don’t even like the house.” She gave a light laugh. “‘Out in Maineville, middle of nowhere.’ That’s what you used to say. What’s the first thing you did when we separated? Moved back here to the city. Do you know how dangerous it is? A girl from our department had her purse snatched by a black kid just yesterday. I was walking down Court Street and there was this group of young, black men ahead of me. One of them bent down and a gun fell out of his pants! He just picked it up like nothing had happened. I dread the drive in here every day. But somehow you like it.”