Before they closed the doors, he looked at me. His face was the color of February. His hand was gripping the stretcher rail. He opened his mouth — reaching for another joke, anotherdeflection, another piece of armor to put between himself and the fact that he was lying on a stretcher outside my apartment because he'd been trying to help my best friend's car.
But nothing came out. He just looked at me. And the look said something his words had been running from all night.
The paramedic turned to me. "Vous voulez monter?"
Do you want to ride with him?
I opened my mouth. And nothing came out either.
Because getting in that ambulance was a girlfriend thing to do. Sitting in the front seat, giving his mother's phone number to the intake nurse, being the person they look at when they need someone to make decisions — that was a girlfriend's job. And I didn't know if I was that. We'd never said it. We'd been on four and a half dates and we'd kissed twice and he'd brought me shelf brackets and I'd made him pasta and none of that added up to a word I was authorized to use.
The paramedic was waiting. One second. Two.
"I'll — I need to lock up," I heard myself say. "My apartment door is open. And her car—"
He nodded. Closed the doors.
And just like that, the decision was made. I filled the silence with logistics. My apartment door. Sophie's car. Things that needed doing. Reasonable, practical things that a reasonable, practical person would handle before going to the hospital.
The ambulance pulled away. The siren split the silence in half, then quarters, then eighths, until it was a thin line of sound dissolving into the city.
I stood on the ice. Alone.
Sophie's grey Corolla sat against the curb, abandoned, looking like it had absolutely nothing to be sorry about.
I went upstairs. Checked the stove. Put the leftover pasta in the fridge. Locked the door. Each step precise, automatic, themotions of a person who is absolutely fine and has a to-do list and is working through it.
Then I came back down. Got in the Corolla. I pushed Sophie's keys into the ignition and started the engine.
The tires spun for a terrifying second before biting into the strip of pavement beside the curb.
The seat was still adjusted for Sophie — too close to the wheel, mirror angled wrong. I didn't fix either.
And I drove the car that broke him to the hospital where they were trying to put him back together.
4
THE WORST MEET-THE-PARENTS EVER
The ceiling has a crack in it. Not a dramatic crack — not the kind you see in disaster movies before the building comes down. A hairline thing. A suggestion. It starts near the fluorescent light and wanders east for about a foot before it loses interest in itself and stops.
I've been staring at it for — I don't know how long. Time is doing something strange. The morphine makes everything arrive late, like the world is being translated from a language I used to be fluent in. Things happen. Then I understand them. There's a gap between the two that I can't control and don't trust.
My pelvis is broken. I know this how you know something you've been told but haven't verified — the words reached me through a fog, someone in blue scrubs leaning over me, a voice in French saying things I should understand but that keep sliding off.Fracture. Bassin. Chirurgie.The words are real. The pain is real. Everything between the two feels like a rough draft.
The bed is too narrow. Everything from the hip down has been locked into a position I didn't choose and cannot change. When I breathe, something grinds. Not sharp — not anymore, the morphine took that part — but a deep, interior friction,like bones remembering where they used to fit and being angry about where they are now.
I should be making a joke about this. That's the thing I do — take the worst part, turn it into something someone can laugh at, and then it's smaller. It works. It always works.
But right now I can't find the joke. The morphine took the sharp edges off the pain but also took the sharp edges off everything else, including my ability to be funny, which means I'm just lying here, staring at a crack in the ceiling, wearing a hospital gown with no back, trying not to think about the fact that below my waist, pain is the only thing reporting back—
Don't.
Don't think about that.
She's here.
I don't know when she arrived or how long she's been sitting in that chair. Time collapsed at some point and reassembled in the wrong order, and now there are gaps — stretches where I was somewhere else, or nowhere, or just inside the pain, and when I came back she was there. In the chair. The stiff vinyl guest chair tucked in the corner.
