The mechanics are simple: roll to your good side, get a hand under you, push up to kneeling, grab something stable, stand. I know the steps how I know extrication procedure — in order, from memory, hundreds of repetitions. But my body is not interested in procedure right now. My body is interested in the specific, clarifying fact that I am a thirty-four-year-old man on his kitchen floor because he tried to take out the garbage, and the reason he tried to take out the garbage is because a woman used to do it and the woman isn't here anymore and he told her not to come.
I try again. My arm shakes. My hip sends a signal that translates roughly tostop.
I stop.
Bagel appears. He sniffs my face. He sits down next to my shoulder with the calm interest of a creature who has seen humans on floors before and finds it unremarkable.
"Thanks," I say. "Very helpful."
He purrs.
I reach into my pocket. My phone. The screen lights up: two cats, one black, one orange. She told me to keep this on me. Of course she did. Of course the one piece of advice I actually followed is the one that's about to prove her right.
I open the phone. I scroll to Camille. I press call.
It rings. It rings. Voicemail. Again.
I try Marc. Four rings. Voicemail. And Marc doesn't have a key anyway — he gave the spare set to Nora weeks ago, the day before I came home from the hospital. The only people who can get into this apartment without me opening the door are Camille, who isn't answering, and Nora.
I put the phone down on the floor next to me and look at the ceiling. The crack is still there — the one from the light fixture to the corner, the one I noticed the other night. Cosmetic. Not structural.
I pick the phone up. I open my contacts. Her name is right there. Alphabetical.Nora.
I know she'll come. That's the part I can't stand — the certainty of it. I know she'll drop whatever she's doing. She'll put on her coat and she'll climb fourteen stairs and she'll open the door and she'll find me here, on the floor, next to a garbage bag, and she'll handle it, because handling things is what she does, and I will have proven — to her, to myself, to this floor — that I cannot do a single thing without turning it into a reason she has to stay.
I hate that I know she'll come.
I press call.
It rings twice.
"Ethan?"
"Hey." My voice is normal. My voice is the most normal thing in this apartment. "So — I'm going to need you to come over."
II.
I'm twenty minutes away when he calls.
At Sophie's place in the Plateau, actually — her afternoon off. I'd asked if I could come over to work on the Bellini proposalsomewhere that didn't smell like my own anxiety, and Sophie is a friend who says yes before you finish the sentence. My laptop is open on her kitchen table, two mugs of tea between us, Sophie proofreading my tagline options because she's better at words than I am and she'll never admit it. The Wednesday light is flat and grey through her window.
My phone buzzes.Ethan.
My chest clenches before I answer, because Ethan doesn't call. Ethan texts. Ethan sends the check mark emoji and the wordfineand the particular kind of nothing that has become his primary language. Ethan calling means something has stopped working.
"Ethan?"
"Hey. So — I'm going to need you to come over."
His voice is calm. Deliberately calm. The calm of someone holding the edges together and hoping no one looks too closely.
"What happened."
It's not a question. Questions have uncertainty. This has none.
"I'm — on the floor. In the kitchen. I'm fine, nothing's — the hip is fine, I just can't — I tried to get up and I can't get the right—"
"I'm coming."
