Save Me (19 page)

T
he hail is what wakes me. It pops against the roof, a mad staccato, and the wind howls and howls.
I don’t remember hearing anything about a storm,
I think, jumping out of bed as another sharp crack of thunder hits. I go to the window, tentative because it’s so awful outside. The windows are so old that I wouldn’t be surprised if the storm shatters them. I jump away as another blaze of lightning strikes and illuminates the yard in erratic flashes.

The thunder booms and shakes the floorboards as I walk quickly down the hall to the guest room, Blue following close behind me. Storms have never bothered me before, but this one is different.

The sky earlier was as clear as could be. I’d spent the evening outside, walking the perimeter of the flower beds, which were so well tended at this point (victims of my obsessive, misplaced anxiety) that there was hardly a weed to pluck or a yellow leaf to inspect. I was turning on one of the sprinklers from the spigot on the side of the house when I heard Owen through the open window above, talking on the phone to his mother, I knew, because he asked something about her algebra students. I could only make out snippets, a word here and there, but I heard him say
Texas
and
funeral
. There was murmuring, an
I don’t know
, and then I heard him say
mistake
.

I knock before I push the door open. He is sitting up in bed propped up on his elbows. He’s just woken.

“Crazy,” he says, combing a hand through his hair.

I nod and take a couple of steps into the room. It smells sour and warm, like sleep. “Surely it can’t last with it being so strong,” I say, hearing my mother in my voice. She always said this to Lucy and me when we got stuck sitting in the parking lot at the pool during sudden summer storms. Blue hops up onto the bed and Owen curls an arm around her.

Owen and I have hardly spoken in almost two weeks, just perfunctory hellos and good-byes. And then yesterday, as he filled his travel mug with the coffee I’d brewed, he mentioned that he’d finally found a promising rental and asked if I’d read the email he sent about the house. He’d called our real estate agent about the possibility of putting it on the market.

“I scanned it,” I said, motioning for him to hand me the pot. The truth was that I couldn’t bring myself to read it, even though I was the one who asked him to get in touch with her in the first place.

“We should talk about it,” he said, jamming a stack of files into his bag.

“We should.” I turned to get more sugar out of the cupboard. The door clicked closed behind me.

He sits up and pats the side of the bed. “Come sit down.” It’s only four steps from the threshold to the edge of the mattress but the walk feels agonizing. He shifts his feet under the covers to make room for me to sit and I do, tentatively. This is the first bed we ever slept in together, my bed, the one that my parents took me to buy at a warehouse store just before medical school. The linens are the ones that we put on our wedding registry. Owen’s mother bought them for us.

The branches of an old oak tree are swaying violently just outside the window. The hail pops against the roof. There’s a boom and the lamp on the nightstand flickers, and then the room goes dark.
Of course.

“I’ll go get a flashlight,” he says.

“They’re in the cabinet above the washing machine.” I’d put them there the week after we moved in, along with a book of matches and a first aid kit. I’d labeled the shelf “Emergency” with my label maker, which I knew when I was doing it was a little silly. It seems asinine now.

Moments later I see a cylinder of light bob down the hallway and then Owen, holding a flashlight and my phone, which is ringing. He hands it to me.

Mary Elizabeth.
It’s one o’clock in the morning.

“Sorry,” she says when I answer. I can barely hear her for the noise outside. I press my fingertip to my other ear.

“Sorry, what?” I say. “What is it?”

Owen catches my eye. “What?” he mouths.

“Patient,” I mouth back.

He nods and sits down next to me and then flops backward onto the bed. He points the flashlight up to the ceiling, casting a canopy of light over the room.

“I’m sorry, Dr. Mitchell,” she says. “Can’t do it.”

Shit.
Her voice is all lazy hissing.

“Mary Elizabeth, where are you?”

“Why?” she says.

“Where are you?” I can hear the faint trill of music and laughter in the background.

“Birthday party downtown,” she slurs. “Some friend of a friend. I don’t know. Anyway. Anywaaay.”

“Mary Elizabeth, why did you call me?”

“I’m not going to Caron or whatever it’s called. The treatment place. I don’t need it.”

“You
clearly
need it.” Owen sits up. The light from the flashlight bounces on the wall. “Who’s with you?”

“Some old friends, some new friends…” Her voice trails off.

“Where are you exactly?”

I glance at Owen. He furrows his brow at me.

“Parrish Street, I think? Some new cocktail place. Yeah, Parrish. Parrish.”

She’s not just a little drunk. She sounds like a mess. A dangerous mess.

“Can you put someone on the phone? Someone who’s with you?”

I hear a fumbling and then nothing.

“Mary Elizabeth? Are you there?”

“Yeah, yeah,” she says. “What?”

“Mary Elizabeth? Is anyone with you?”

She sighs heavily into the phone. “Treatment. I don’t need treatment,” she mumbles.

“Listen. Stay where you are, okay? Just stay there!”

I stand up and race down the dark hall to my room to throw on some clothes, all the while listening to her mumble. Owen follows behind and watches me from the threshold.

“What are you doing?” he says.

I hold the phone away from my face. “I’m going to get her. She’s a disaster.”

“But you can’t—”

“I know it’s unorthodox, Owen, but I really think she’s in trouble. I need to do something. She’s confused—she’s hardly making any sense. She’s been drinking and God knows what else and she’s diabetic. I’m worried she’ll go into a coma.”

He looks out the window. The rain might be pouring even harder now.

“Daph, you shouldn’t risk this. What if something goes wrong? We could call the bar, couldn’t we? Call 911? Send an ambulance? It’s bad out there.”

I know he’s right, but something in my gut tells me I need to do this. I need to get her to a hospital, where her parents will be forced to see her like this, and I think if I have the support of some other doctors—more troops—then she might be convinced to get the help she needs.

He knows what I’m thinking without my having to say it. “I’ll come with you,” he says. He hurries down the hall to get his clothes and shoes.

Mary Elizabeth is droning into the phone, practically incoherent.

“You don’t have to come,” I say, sprinting past him and down the stairs.

“No, no,” he says, wiggling one foot into his shoe. “I’ll drive. You stay on the phone.”

I know I’m doing the right thing when we get downtown and I see her slumped underneath the awning of an old shoe repair shop. She has waited for me, which means that even if she won’t admit it, she wants my help. She knows how low she’s sunk.

It’s half the battle, maybe more.

The temperature outside is probably in the sixties but she is shivering and clammy, two signs that her blood sugar is dangerously low. Owen and I get her into the backseat of my car and she tries to brace herself, her body wobbling despite the fact that we’re not moving yet.

“Whooss he?”
she slurs, nodding her head toward Owen.
“Your huss-bin?”

Neither of us says anything.

We get to the hospital and Owen runs in to get a wheelchair. As we’re racing in, I give the providers her history, and within minutes, she receives a glucagon injection, which will quickly raise her blood sugar level before she loses consciousness.

I call her parents after finding their number on her phone. As I suspected, they look more irritated than relieved when they finally arrive forty-five minutes later. As I shake her mother’s hand, I notice that she either wears a full face of makeup to bed or she took the time to apply it before coming here.

We talk again about the treatment center and they nod their heads impassively as I speak. I may as well be reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. I do my best not to notice the way that they look me over—my rain-soaked hair and wrinkled clothes not giving off the impression they expect from their family physicians, I’m sure—but by the time Owen and I leave, I feel confident that they are going to do the right thing. When I check on Mary Elizabeth before we go, she’s sleeping soundly.

“That was something,” Owen says as we’re driving home.

I look out the window. The storm has passed but it’s still raining.

“Thanks for coming with me,” I say.

“Of course,” he says. “You were right. You did the right thing. She was a wreck.”

“That she was,” I say, stifling a yawn. The adrenaline’s worn off and I’m officially exhausted.

“How old is she?”

“Twenty-seven.” I notice his subtle grimace when I say it. She’s about the same age as Bridget.

We’re quiet for the rest of the drive. No matter what he says about what he wants for our marriage, I know he’s mourning her. When I peek at him, I can see it all over his face. More to the point, I can feel it.

I reach out and put my hand on his arm. “Are you okay?” I say.

“Yeah,” he says bluntly. He presses his lips together and stares out at the road.

“Are you sure?” I ask. I don’t know exactly what it is that I’m searching for. I suppose I want to know if he’s being honest with me, and with himself.

He nods. “I’m okay.”

“You did a good job tonight,” he says once when we’re back in the house. He locks the door behind him and flips on the outside light.

I walk to the kitchen for a glass of water and he follows behind me.

“I was really impressed seeing how you handled her,” he continues. “I never thought of your work consisting of emergencies like that, I guess.”

He means it as a compliment but it stings regardless. “Well, I’m glad you got to see that I do more than diagnose sinus infections,” I say, taking a glass from the cabinet.

“Daph, that’s not what I meant,” he says.

“I know,” I say, stifling another yawn. The last thing I’m interested in right now is a debate with Owen about whether he respects my work. “It’s fine. Thanks for your help.”

“I was happy to do it,” he says, and then looks at his watch. “I should probably go to bed.”

“Okay,” I say, walking to the pantry. “I know I should, too, but for some reason, I’m starving.”

“You know what?” he says, as I pull a box of crackers off of the shelf. “I’m kind of hungry, myself. Do you want a grilled cheese?”

Owen has made me thousands of grilled cheese sandwiches over the past decade. They are his specialty, if only because they are the only thing that he can cook.

I glance at the clock. It’s almost four o’clock in the morning. “You know, that actually sounds pretty good.”

“With tomato? Bacon?” he says, walking to the refrigerator.

“I don’t think we have either.”

“Just the classic then?”

“Yes,” I say, walking into the living room. “Just the classic.”

It feels like a long time before my eyes adjust and I realize that it’s morning. The first thing I see is the uneaten sandwich on a plate on the coffee table in front of me. Bright white columns of early morning light are streaming through the windows across the room.

I am lying on the couch and Owen’s arm is around my waist. He is asleep, breathing shallowly, his stomach rising and falling against my back.

Nothing has happened. I’m sure of that. I must have simply fallen asleep while he was cooking. And for whatever reason, he decided to snuggle in next to me.

I don’t move. I don’t
want
to. The familiar weight of his arm around me is a comfort. His breath on the back of my neck, a salve. Here, sleeping, we can be our old selves. I can fence in this moment and ignore everything else.

Maybe it’s that I’m still in that hazy fog before consciousness, or maybe I know exactly what I’m doing, but I pull my fist from underneath my chin and uncoil my fingers, and carefully, or maybe carelessly, I rest my palm on top of his hand. It feels like it’s where it belongs.

And I don’t stop there. I realize that once this starts, there is no going back.

I lace my fingers into his and then I pull his hand up to my chest, holding him closer to me. He stirs and I pull him even closer, and then he wiggles his fingers away from mine—I can’t tell whether he’s awake yet, I don’t want to know—and he moves his palm down to my torso. He pulls me closer, drawing me to him. He’s awake.

I don’t move at first. If I’m asleep—or pretending to be—I’m not responsible for anything. I snuggle back closer to him. He wraps his foot over mine. His nose nuzzles behind my ear. I keep my eyes closed.

This shouldn’t be happening. I
want
this to happen.

He whispers my name and I don’t respond, pressing my lips together as if to keep anything from pouring out. Yes. No.
I don’t know.

I want this.

I need this.

He kisses my neck, softly, tentatively.

His face stays there, pressed into the crook of my neck, and I know what he’s feeling because I am feeling it, too. He is home now. We are home.

He kisses me again, a bit more insistently. His palm cups the dip of my waist, pulling me toward him. “Daphne,” he whispers again. He might know that I’m awake, he probably does.

I stretch my chin up toward the ceiling—stirring, waking—and I open my eyes but the sun streaming in is so bright, I close them again and turn to Owen,
my
Owen, the only one, and I kiss him.

He kisses me back, eagerly, and at first I do the same because it is like our lives depend on it.