The ER returned to calm. The electronic blip of a blood-pressure monitor. The soft chatter of the triage nurses.
* * *
Renee never considered herself a prude. She liked to think about sex. She masturbated, each orgasm a small, perfect miracle, and found herself aroused equally by the sight of Mr. Quigley’s firm, round buttocks in math class and the kissing scenes in Top Gun. And yet by the age of eighteen she had never had a boyfriend, never dated, had kissed only one person—a pimply high jumper at a postseason track conference—and found it pleasant but not pleasant enough that she wished to repeat the exchange. She didn’t blame the man in the car for her ambivalence, not exactly. The line of causation was not so straight. But an unease rose up in her throat, the slightest taste of disgust, whenever she felt herself the subject of male sexual attention. Plus, she was busy. So busy! Track meets, academic decathlon, four AP classes, part-time work at the lab in New Haven, tutoring on Saturday afternoons, volunteering at the soup kitchen on Sunday nights. This was the reason she didn’t date, Renee told Noni, who offered her wholehearted approval.
“There’s plenty of time for dating,” Noni said. “High-school boys are Neanderthals anyhow.”
But then, toward the end of Renee’s senior year, Brett Swenson asked her to prom.
At eighteen years old and 205 pounds of pure muscle, Brett had been the star of the high school’s championship wrestling team. Thick, dark brows, a full, sensitive mouth, ears flat to his square head. Brett was cute, at least that’s what her friends said, and Renee appreciated certain aspects of his physique: the wide shoulders, the hard, flat stomach that he displayed often—in the lunchroom, in biology class, passing in the hall—by lifting the hem of his shirt to wipe his face or lips as though the simple task of carrying his prodigious muscles was enough to raise a sweat.
Yes, Renee liked the flash of that stomach. But she did not particularly like Brett. He laughed too loudly and too often and strode the halls as though the high school were his home and all the other students and teachers merely guests enjoying the whims of his hospitality. Stories circulated about Brett: the college girl he’d dated, the night he slept with two girls at the same time. Jennifer Garrit had slept with him, Renee heard, and Sarah Cooper and even a freshman, coltish Julie Farley, with her long legs and braces. All of these girls became marked by him, carrying with them through the halls a badge of experience and allure and tawdry knowledge. Brett never had a girlfriend. Such official couplings generally happened within the school band or the chess club, involving people without the wealth of opportunities that presented themselves to young men like Brett. He had a social obligation, it seemed, to spread himself around.
It was a distinct surprise when Brett asked Renee to the senior prom—a shocking event, thrilling to her friends but nausea-inducing for Renee. Weeks of back-and-forth communications ensued: his friends talking to her friends, handwritten notes, chats beside her locker. He called her once at home to detail the limousine his parents had rented, its long sunroof, its television and white leather seats. Renee had been swayed, almost, by these shows of consideration, but in the end she said no—Renee always said no—and spent prom night at the movies with her friend Gabby watching Pretty Woman and eating sticky Raisinets.
Two weeks later she passed Brett in the hall on her way to class, her arms full of books, hair unwashed and pulled up in a ponytail. He said, looking straight at her, his voice an undertone but the words distinct, “What a fucking waste.” He shook his head. Gone were the affection and attraction that he’d put on display during those fervent weeks before prom. The look he gave her was dismissive, with a whiff of disgust.
Renee pulled back as though slapped and did not reply. She kept walking.
What a fucking waste.
Later that night, at home in bed, Caroline snoring faintly in the bunk below, all Renee’s life choices arrived for her in stark relief. She was eighteen years old, six weeks away from high-school graduation, five months from starting at the University of Connecticut in an accelerated premed program for which she’d won enough scholarship and grant money that Noni would pay nothing. Renee had worked so hard to excel academically, to keep her body lean and strong for cross-country, to keep an eye on Joe and her sisters, to watch Noni for signs of relapse into depression. Had she expended so much energy and time on these pursuits that something precious had slipped away? Her adolescence was nearly over—what did she have to show for her teenage years?
Caroline, Renee knew, had not wasted a minute of her time. She and Nathan were practically married already. They held hands in the hallways and on the street. They went to movies together, Nathan driving the ratty green Volkswagen Bug he’d been given by a dying uncle, Caroline installed in the passenger seat like a queen. Caroline had been on the pill for a year now. All the nights Renee had stayed in to study, all the parties she’d missed, all the beers she had failed to drink—these choices struck her now as safe and, yes, wasteful. And whatever it was she had wasted, she would never get it back.
That night Renee thought about the tan, smooth stomach of Brett Swenson and the senior prom that she did not attend and the ways in which she had already closed herself in. One small voice in her head wished she could go back and say, Yes, Brett, bring me to prom and feed me schnapps and vodka and take my virginity in the slippery, heated backseat of that rented limo. But the louder voice wished she could go back to that hallway and punch Brett Swenson in the face for making her question herself like this.
* * *
A buzz came from the triage nurse: a new walk-in patient designated urgent but not life-threatening. A thirty-eight-year-old white male in overall good health. No medications. Laceration on the left palm with persistent blood loss.
“Sorry, Renee, you’re the last doc standing,” the nurse said.
Renee groaned. “On my way.”
When Renee pulled open the curtain, the patient was sitting on a gurney holding his left hand with his right. His name was Jonathan Frank and it was the tenacity of his bleeding that struck her first.
“What happened?” Renee asked. Jonathan’s left hand was wrapped in a dish towel soaked with blood. Brilliant drops of red fell to the floor as Renee unwound the cloth to get a better look at the cut.
“Just a bread knife. Newly sharpened,” Jonathan answered. He looked pointedly at the woman standing beside the gurney. “No one told me.”
The woman rolled her eyes. She wore a long green dress under a longer black coat. A large diamond sat on her ring finger, throwing a tiny rainbow onto the blue curtain that divided this examining space from the one beside it. “Who decides to have a bagel after five courses at Jean-Georges?” she said. “Who?”
“Are you on any medication?” Renee asked Jonathan.
“No.”
“No blood thinners?”
“No.”
“And when did this happen?”
“Thirty minutes ago.”
“More like an hour,” said the woman. “I’m worried about him. He’s such a bleeder.”
“When have you seen me bleed, Simone? When, in the last ten years?” Jonathan Frank’s face was tight and neat, with short dark hair that rose in a little crest over his forehead. He was tall, over six feet, Renee guessed by the length of thigh that extended past the gurney’s edge, and thin as a pole vaulter. His whole person seemed drafted by an architect: it was precise, efficient, self-contained.