Her key was already in the lock.
She came in. Took two steps into the apartment. She saw Bonnie and me on the floor. The phone in my hand.
She didn't panic.
Mrs. Park worked as a nurse for thirty-eight years. She retired at sixty because her knees gave out. In all the time I'd known her, she never panicked — not once — and she didn't panic now. She knelt down next to Bonnie and placed a hand on her forehead.
“Hey, Mama. Hi, baby girl. Hi.”
The paramedics came up the stairs. They were quick and exact. They got Bonnie onto a stretcher, and carefully brought her down.
Mrs. Park stayed beside us the whole time, holding the medication bag — the inhaler, the prescription bottles, the laminated card with Dr. Reyes's contact — and telling Bonnieshe was going to be fine. In the lobby, she put the bag in my hand and squeezed my elbow.
“I'll meet you there as soon as I can.” She let go of me.
I followed the stretcher.
Bonnie was on oxygen and a monitor in the back of the ambulance. I was holding Bonnie's hand. I wasn't, for the entirety of the ride, in my body.
Dr. Reyes was on call.
He met us in the ER. He put a hand on Bonnie's forehead briefly. He spoke to her at her face's level. He told her she was going to be fine and that he was going to take her into the back and have a look.
He looked at me.
“Ms. Vela.”
“Yeah?”
“Family lounge is around the corner. We will come get you after.”
I waited in the family lounge.
I paced from the door to the window, from the window to the door, and back to the door. The window looked out at a courtyard with a fountain that wasn't on. The fountain had a leaf in the bowl. The leaf wasn't floating because the fountain wasn't on, and it was very flat and very still, and it was the part of the courtyard I couldn't look at.
I stood at the window. My breath was on the glass. The leaf in the fountain bowl hadn't moved.
I didn't have a phone call I could make.
There was no number for Bonnie's father. There had been a number for him for about three months in my life, and the number had been disconnected for the rest of the time, which was nine years.
There was Beau on my phone.
I wasn't going to call him.
I wasn’t going to call him because he was with his mother, and his mother had been having bad nights. I wasn’t going to be the woman who dragged him away from his mother just so he could hold the hand of a woman who, by any agreement we’d ever made, wasn’t owed that hand. I wasn’t going to be the woman who broke the deal.
Sabrina, Sabrina, Sabrina, don't. Don't call him. Don't call him. Don't call him.
I gave in and called him anyway, because I couldn’t hold it in me anymore, because the silence felt worse than the mistake I was about to make.
He picked up on the first ring. "Sabrina."
"Beau."
"Where are you?"
"The hospital. It's Bonnie. She — "
