Jesus. No ambulance yet?
No.
Did she really call them?As I head down the street and out onto the boardwalk, birds wheel across the sky, and a lone jogger moves steadily along the seafront. I pull my phone out of my pocket and search on Google Maps. The hospital isn’t that far away, thank God, but a taxi has to be our fastest option now. I flick over to Uber and order one. I scan up and down, and after walking for about five minutes, I spot a small figure huddled against a painted brick wall next to a bike lying on its side. The front wheel is badly twisted. When I reach her, Jane’s face is tearstained and her cycling shorts are ripped and torn, her legs all scraped up. Her helmet is lying split on the ground, a graze running down one side of her face, and a nasty bruise is coming up on her temple. She’s cradling her left arm.
I squat down beside her. “How are you doing?”
She shakes her head. “I can’t breathe. The pain in my chest … my arm … Jim, maybe I had a heart attack.”
God, I hope not. I came here out of a sense of duty, and coming all the way out here has really tested my patience, but seeing her now like this, I can’t help but feel sorry for her. “The Coney Island ER is just over the beltway. I’ve organized a cab to pick us up just down the boardwalk. It’s probably five minutes. Do you think, if I help, you could walk to it?”
Her eyes are glassy as she gazes at me. “Thank you,” she says, voice breaking. “I didn’t have anyone else to call.” A tremor rolls through her as the rain starts to seep into the collar of my jacket.
This is the trouble with moving away from home: Who do you rely onwhen things go south? Perhaps Jane is right to go back to Philly where she isn’t reliant on an annoyed ex-boyfriend. At least she hadsomeoneto call. Jane and I relied on each other so much in New York; being together for so long meant we neglected to build other friendships here. In some ways, I’m luckier than her; I have Des and Jo, and now Sadie, and I know other people in the office would help me if I needed it. We’ve built an amazing company. My chest warms with the whole idea of it. The least I can do for Jane, despite all her strange behavior, is to be here for her now.
“Just as well your work is flexible,” she says. “If this had happened to you and you’d called me at my finance job, no way would I have been able to leave.”
That comment should sting, but somehow it doesn’t, like I’ve slowly become immune to it all. I would never call Jane now. My mind skips over all the stuff at the office I had to abandon. Coming out to help could wipe out my entire week. My inclination is always to give, but I was too amenable with Jane when we were together. She always wanted a lot from me. After so long, I can’t imagine not being friends with her, but all the stuff lately has made me wonder. And God, I need to start drawing some boundaries.
“Don’t kid yourself. I still have a mountain of work to do. I’ll have to spend all week catching up.”
And she starts to cry.
Okay, so maybe that wasn’t the most tactful approach. “God, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that to come out so bluntly.”
My phone buzzes in my pocket. Saved by the bell. But when I pull it out, it’s a number I don’t recognize.
“Hello?”
“Alan here. I’m your taxi. I’m on Beach Walk.”
“We’ll be with you in five minutes.”
I detach her lock from her bike, pick it up, and secure it to the railings along the boardwalk. Not that I think anyone would want to steal it in this state, but she can come back later to collect it. I wrap my arm around Jane and manage to get her on her feet, and she leans on me, cradling her elbow as we move slowly across the boardwalk to where a portly man is standing next to a white Hyundai.
He scans down her body, frowns, and starts muttering about havinginjured passengers in his cab. I talk to him about how we need to take her to the ER, that it’s not as bad as it looks, and he purses his lips but nods. Once I maneuver her into the back seat, I leap in the front, and then the driver does the slowest trip known to man down the road to the hospital. When we pull in, a nurse comes out, talks to Jane, and then calls a doctor out. In minutes, she’s on a gurney going straight back to be seen.
Jane clutches my fingers and begs me not to leave, so I sit through an X-ray and a head scan and then we wait. Eventually, the doctor tells us she’s broken an arm and her collarbone, and they’ll need to put the arm in a cast and immobilize the collarbone with a sling. They think her head is fine, but he lectures us both about keeping an eye on it, and I start to wonder whether she could go to Philly for a few days. It’s not that far away, after all. They treat all her scrapes and give her painkillers, and all the while she doesn’t let go of my hand. I’m not happy about her clutching my fingers, but it seems churlish when she’s crying and talking about how the hell she’s going to manage, what her work will say, how she’s got so much on her plate, and that Kevin is going to be livid.
“How did you do it?” I ask.
“I don’t know! One minute I was cycling along, and the next minute I was flying over the handlebars.”
“Christ, you’re lucky it wasn’t worse.”
She glances at me. “You think this is lucky? Why do you always have to try and find a positive in everything?”
What? I was trying to make the best of a bad situation. She didn’t break her neck, did she?
She must read something in my face because she looks away. Then she says, quietly, “I’m sorry, James. I really appreciate you coming out to help me. Thank you.” She squeezes my fingers again. The strange, insensitive Jane I’ve seen more recently has vanished, at least for the moment. Her eyes scan over my face. “Will you stay while they put the cast on?”
I nod mutely.
After a lot of back and forth, we get out of the hospital, and I pay for an Uber to take us back to our old apartment.
“Will you come up?” she says as she struggles with the door of thebuilding and I push it open for her. “Goddamn this sling … It’s going to be so difficult even to do everyday tasks.”
I’m resigned to the idea that my workday is a write-off. The gray walls tilt in on me as I walk through the lobby, and my stomach turns over. I haven’t been back here since Kevin turned up grinning at our door with a bunch of flowers, that fateful night on the roof. Jane clutches my arm as she limps along, unaware. Once we’re in the elevator, she slumps against the paneling, face white, then shifts so she can lean on me. All I can think is how wrong it feels.
