Her sisters thought she was overreacting.
Yesterday Caroline had called Renee to tell her this. “Don’t you think Fiona would know if something was going on?” she’d said. Renee had not responded. It was true: Fiona and Joe had always been close, she looked up to him so much. These days Renee saw Joe infrequently. They were both so busy with their work. Even rarer was seeing Joe without Sandrine.
“I can’t come to the party,” Caroline continued. “I’ve got my hands full with the move and the new house. When would we even do this intervention thing anyhow?”
“As soon as possible. We need to act before it escalates,” said Renee. “You can’t leave me alone on this, Caroline. Not again.”
For a moment there was silence on the line. “I was having a baby, Renee. I did not mean to leave you alone.”
Renee recognized that her resentment was unfair. She knew that Caroline had wanted to help that last time. But still. Caroline pushed Renee’s most sensitive buttons. Because Renee did not have children or a family, she was always expected to step in when stepping in was required. Baking the pies at Thanksgiving. Talking to Noni about her will. Giving Fiona money for a security deposit on her apartment. And Joe. Always Joe. Once Renee had relished this responsibility, had prided herself on being the one in charge. Not anymore.
Renee closed her eyes, tilted the phone away from her mouth, and exhaled slowly. Noni had sent her an article about meditative breathing, how it calmed the central nervous system. Whenever Renee thought about her brother, a hectic thrum started in her chest, and now the thrum was galloping. Joe had been working brutally long hours. She wondered if he would be high at his own party. Probably. Ace would be there.
Renee counted to six, inhale, seven, exhale.
“Renee?” said Caroline. “Are you there? Are we finished?”
Renee opened her eyes. The breathing exercise was bullshit, she decided.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll talk to him at the party. Just talk, and then we’ll see. I’ll let you know how it goes.”
They’d ended the call, but the thrum in Renee’s chest had persisted, an urgent staccato beat of Joe-Joe-Joe that followed her through the rest of that day and the next, and now, tonight, while she sat with her coffee in the ER, the beat grew louder as each passing minute brought her closer to the engagement party.
Jaypa sidled up to the nurses’ station and set his iPhone on the desk. He winked at Renee, then pressed Play. As the opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth filled the space, Jaypa loudly cracked the knuckles on each hand and began to conduct. Eyes squeezed shut, arms pumping, a trail of blood faint on the front of his sky-blue scrubs. He’d almost attended music school, Jaypa had told Renee, but his parents would pay for school only if he switched to medicine. And so he’d switched.
Renee liked Jaypa, though she did not trust him. Once he had said to her, “Renee, you’re not like the other girl residents. I don’t mean that in a bad way. I mean it in a good way.” Currently he was dating a nurse, a lovely twenty-two-year-old brunette from Arkansas.
Renee watched as Jaypa reached the first-movement crescendo. He should really be meeting with one of the residents or catching up with paperwork, she thought. The attending had responsibilities; he made more money than any of them. But Jaypa liked to put on a show. Renee knew this about him. The nurses, the residents, the EMTs, they all knew this about him, and so now they all stopped to watch. Renee saw Jaypa open one eye just a crack to assess his audience; then he continued with a dramatic flurry of hand movements.
Men, thought Renee. How many hours had she spent tolerating the ridiculous behavior of disappointed men?
The ER’s external doors slid open, and a gust of cold street air traveled through the waiting room, admissions office, triage, all the way into the examining rooms. Renee shivered and pulled on her cardigan.
“Help!” called a man’s voice. “Help my wife!”
Immediately the sleepy order of the late-shift ER splintered into a dozen different moving parts. A nurse rushed forward with a gurney. Jaypa switched off the music. A first-year resident grabbed her stethoscope and walked-ran toward the entry. Renee yawned again and checked her watch. Forty-five minutes until the end of her shift. Forty-five minutes until the party. She sat back and waited for the patient to arrive.
It didn’t take long. The door burst open with Jaypa and two trauma nurses pushing a gurney. On top lay a hugely pregnant woman, her legs striped with blood, stomach raw and exposed by the lift of her shirt. Holding the woman’s hand was a middle-aged man in jeans and a faded Nirvana tee, his face pale and drawn, eyes red.
Immediately Renee knew what had happened: an attempted home birth. The woman’s long hair was wet from a tub. The smell of sweat and incense came off the man in waves.
“You’re her husband?” Jaypa asked the man, who nodded. “Ma’am, how many weeks? Do you have any health conditions?”
“Forty-one weeks,” the husband answered. “And she’s diabetic.”
“Diabetic?” Jaypa stopped and placed his hands on the taut risen skin of the woman’s stomach. He pushed, assessed. “Macrosomia,” he said to Renee. “We need a C-section.”
Renee picked up the receiver on the wall to call upstairs to surgery.
The woman began to cry. “Don’t let them take me,” she said to her husband. “Don’t leave me.”
“I’ll stay with you,” he answered.
“Don’t let them take me—” The woman inhaled sharply as another contraction hit.
“I’ll find you,” the man said, stroking his wife’s hair. “I’ll always find you.”
Renee was on hold when he said this. She felt the receiver knock against her ear and realized that her hand was shaking.
“Hello? Hello?” said a nurse on the other line. “We’ve got a room, you can bring her up. Hello?”
* * *
I’ll always find you.
Renee never knew his name, she never saw him again after that night, but for many years she thought every day about the man in the car. Every quickening of her heart as she walked along a dark street; every surge of fearful adrenaline; every hiccup of tension or worry when she found herself alone with a strange man for however brief a time—on an elevator, in a waiting room, walking in opposite directions along a quiet sidewalk. All of this, her acute awareness of everyday vulnerability, she blamed on the man in the car.
That long-ago night, Renee stepped off the school bus and there it was, a car she’d seen before. Brown two-door, long and low to the ground, its hood shaped like the snout of a fox. She didn’t know about cars, couldn’t say what make it was, but the shape was distinctive enough that she remembered it from the week before, and possibly the week before that. When had Renee first seen the brown car waiting by the school bus? She couldn’t say exactly. It hadn’t seemed important.
The bus lights blinked ruby red in the early-evening dark. It was a few days into November, a week past Halloween. Fallen leaves dull in their colors lined the sidewalks in sodden drifts and clogged the sunken runoff grates. The trees were stark, empty birds’ nests stuck like clots in the veined webs of branches.
From the school bus, a creaky metal arm extended into the opposite lane, but cars kept right on going.