I was halfway down the stairs when I heard Merris fall.
Chapter 16
The hospital was a hospital: depressing and sterile, somehow both too bright and incredibly dingy at once. I picked at my cuticles and looked around guiltily for somewhere to sit. Two middle-aged women who seemed to be sisters were spread out on the last available bench, doing a Sudoku and lightly crying and looking like they’d been awake since they were born. I did not feel high anymore. I felt like the worst piece of shit on the earth.
It had been horrible, every part of it: Merris on the ground; Ryan shining his phone’s flashlight in her eyes as Amy asked her to count back from ten; a small crowd forming as I called 911 and repeated the words Amy was yelling at me; the paramedics arriving, briskly checking Merris’s wrists, ankles, and knees before loading her onto a stretcher. Only one of us was allowed in the ambulance with her, and I said, “Please, Amy,” and she let me. As they closed the doors, I saw her fall into her clown boyfriend’s arms in tears.
Merris had looked so old on the stretcher, although she’d spent the entire ride loudly insisting it was ludicrous that they’d put her in one. It was easy to forget, talking to her, that she was over seventy. Occasionally she made jokes about her arthritic limbs, or how people automatically gave her their seats on the bus, but for the most part she seemed vital, sharper than ever, indestructible. I took out my phone and googled some statistics about seniors and falls, an idea that revealed itself instantly as a bad one.
Down the hall near the reception desk, a man bleeding from his head tried to urinate into a water bottle while two cops spoke rudely to a woman who seemed confused and upset. Everyone the nurses wheeled by looked to me like they could plausibly be dead. I thought about how smugly I spoke to Americans about having access to free health care and decided I would not bring up this kind of thing next time I did. I asked a man holding a toddler in his lap if I could take the seat next to him. He stared back at me, either uncomprehending or angry or too tired to care about some woman wearing open-toed sandals in the middle of winter. The child in his arms said, “We’ve been here one thousand and one million hours.”
I bunched my stupid rented dress around my knees and sat on the floor. My phone was on 1 percent battery; I had no idea how long Merris’s various tests would take. There was a plug beneath some benches, between the Sudoku women and a guy in athletic gear who was cradling his left arm and periodically wincing. I tried to reach the socket from a seated position, leaning behind them and sliding my arm along the wall, but it became clear I’d have to lie down on the floor to get there. I was halfway under the bench, my fingertips straining to give the charger a final, decisive push, when someone stopped in front of me and said, “Maggie?”
I looked up from the ostentatiously sensible shoes at my eye level and met the aggravated face of Amirah. She was wearing pale purple scrubs and a stethoscope decorated with a small stuffed snowman I recognized from a children’s film about not being afraid to be who you are. The hospital she worked at was across the street. Amy must have texted her.
I crawled out from under the bench, jostling the Sudoku siblings.
“Did you yell at Amy?”
“No,” I said. “Yeah. Fuck, Amirah, it’s so bad. It’s so, so bad.”
“Is Merris okay?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “She’s getting x-rayed. They won’t let me in because we’re not related.” I brushed a line of fluffy gray dust off my arm and my eyes filled with tears.
“What the fuck happened?” There was an exasperation in Amirah’s voice that I didn’t care for. She sounded like she was at her wit’s end, but she’d just got here.
“I didn’t see,” I said. “She was behind me. It’s been so cold out . . . maybe there was some ice, or she tripped or something . . . I don’t know.”
I ran my fingertips under my eyes, and they came back flecked with mascara. I wished Amirah would hold me and comfort me or grab my hand and lead me out of here.
“Are you engaged?” I asked, sniffling.
Amirah reached into her pockets and proffered a tissue, a kind gesture performed coldly. I took it and blew my nose, then wiped off what was left of my lipstick.
“Yes,” she said. “I don’t want to talk about that right now.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I said I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Well, congratulations,” I said. Then, in case it sounded sarcastic: “I really am happy for you.”
“Thank you.”
Something beeped, and she took out and examined an actual pager. My friend the hero, taking a quick break from saving babies’ lives to scrape me off the emergency room floor. I straightened my posture and adjusted the front of my whorishly diaphanous dress. I felt light-headed and wondered if it was panic or the first glimpses of my impending hangover. My jaw hurt.
“I think maybe it was too soon to go to a wedding,” I said. “I think they make everyone go a bit nuts, just in general.”
Amirah sat down beside me but didn’t say anything.
“Especially our generation, you know? Like we were promised these great lives, and they aren’t materializing—”
“Oh my god, sorry, no,” Amirah said. “You’re not doing your weird rant about capitalism and fucking millennial ennui. I’m not sitting through it again. It’s such bullshit. And you’re, like, smart, right, so you must know, somewhere, that it’s bullshit. I don’t know what you think you’re doing. I don’t even know if you are thinking about it, which makes me feel, like, completely crazy.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ve been a bad friend.”
“Yeah, you have.”
Although I knew it was true, I hadn’t expected her to agree with me. It struck me that I was possibly still a little high, because I had an abrupt and surprising urge to slap her in the face. I settled for shaking my head in disbelief.
“I’m grieving,” I said. “I’m having a hard year.”
“Yeah, well, so is Amy,” she said. “And she’s not treating me like shit, or going ballistic on the internet, or talking about her breakup like it’s some large-scale societal problem. You and Jon didn’t break up because the concept of marriage is broken. You broke up because you couldn’t make it work, a normal thing that happens to millions of people. It doesn’t have to be some big conspiracy. It doesn’t have to be special. It can just be bad.”
“But—”
“No, no. That’s all.”
Amirah got to her feet. I figured I should probably look her in the eye before she left and scrambled up to mine as well.
“Lauren suggested we do an Asshole Intervention weeks ago,” she said. “Can you believe I said no?”
I smiled a little. The idea of my friends gathering for a specific conversation about what to do with their messy, pathetic pal was mostly horrible and a little bit nice. I took a risk and pulled her in for a hug. This time she allowed it. Her stethoscope was freezing against my bare skin. She patted my back, and I could smell her expensive hair oil beneath the stronger scent of antibacterial soap.