Treasure Island!!!

control of my faculties, and a little unsure of where the irony of the situation lay.
    Soon after I hung up, my mother called from the St. Vincent emergency room to tell me she and Adrianna were walking through the entrance (I could hear the ppppphhhht of the pneumatic doors). My father was parking the car, she said; I wondered, aloud, if he would manage to come out of it. We hung up, and I rushed around the house in a pointless mania, washing teacups and plates, rearranging pillows. Ten minutes later my mother reported that my father had surfaced and that all three of them were waiting in triage. A kind nurse had given Adrianna something to staunch the blood. An hour later, she called again and said, “We’re still in the emergency room. The delays are unconscionable.” And then again at ten, she called, saying something incomprehensible about Adrianna’s blood pressure. Most people can sustain a hand injury like hers without any trauma, so I ventured to wonder if Adrianna’s complications had something to do with her excess weight.
    “This is hardly the time to talk about
that
. Do you realize you may have cut the ulnar nerve?” My mother hung up.
    By midnight, when they had not returned, I felt the need to propitiate the gods, so I took my calfskin bag and walked through the cold night air to the library, where, though I had marked it, bent it, and left thumbprints of garlic mayonnaise through most of Chapter XXIX, I returned the book to a weatherized steel book bin. It made a dull thud as it landed, scattering, no doubt, a bone pile of other books, whose titles and contents I’ll never know. I felt a wild desire to stick my hand down the box’s maw and grasp my treasure again, but I consoled myself by saying I could no longer be trusted with it. And that I could check it out again, if need be, when the library opened. Or buy my own copy, though of course it wouldn’t be the same. No, no—scratch that!—I was done with the book. That was the point of the gesture: heal her hand! Plus, something else would come along one day and waft my consciousness higher.
    At 2 A.M. my parents staggered into the house, looking grey and haggard. The TV had been blaring in their ears all night; they had eaten a lot of candy bars in the waiting room. Adrianna still hadn’t seen a doctor and there was some concern about the ulnar or maybe it was the median nerve. I got the distinct feeling that my parents’ patience with me had been exhausted. All these years in which I had refused to drive a car, all these months in which I had refused to get a job, they had indulged me without seeming to indulge me, but now they spoke to me with a flat expectancy in their voices that almost embarrassed me with its bare expression of confidence: as if I had been walking around naked all this time, and someone had casually handed me a towel.
    “Take your father’s keys,” my mother said. “We told her you’d be there as soon as you could.”
    “Maybe I could take a cab?”
    “You don’t have cab fare.”
    “But I’m directionally clueless. I’ll get lost.”
    “I’m going to draw you a map.” My mother leaned over the breakfast bar, sketching quickly on a piece of pearl grey stationery. “This is our house, all right . . . You’re going to go east on Curtis Boulevard . . . ”
    “She may not even want me there,” I said.
    “She’s mad at you, all right. But she needs you. She’s frightened out of her wits. She asked the triage nurse what was the worst-case scenario with a hand injury like hers.”
    “What did the nurse say?”
    “It wasn’t a rational question,” my father said.
    “The nurse said she didn’t know what was the
worst
-case scenario
,
but she’d had a man in yesterday who severed his finger in a snow blower.”
    “Adrianna has a knife wound,” my father said.
    “—The nurse said sometimes you see a case where the hand doesn’t get taken care of soon enough, so the nerves get compressed, and the hand just stiffens—” My mother stopped writing and held up one hand like a claw.
    “Do you think she’s going to
lose her hand
?” I asked.
    “No,” my father said firmly.
    “No,” my mother admitted, a little reluctantly. She was angrier with me than I’d realized. I didn’t want to think about that.
    I’ve never liked Long John Silver, but reading about him vigorously stumping around on his wooden leg prepared me to see the positive side of a crippled life. I shudder to think of it,