For over an hour, Monica refused to entertain the idea of going to a hospital. She brushed off Grace’s insistence that her injured ankle needed to be X-rayed and dismissed Nora’s suggestion of a possible concussion, even launching into a long, roundabout explanation of the physical symptoms of concussions (Liam, apparently, had suffered one a while back) and how none of her symptoms were even remotely the same. Besides, it was almost two in the morning! She couldn’t bear the thought of having to sit in a dingy emergency room for another two or three hours just so that she could get her foot taped up and be given a few Tylenol. “Please,” she said for what must have been the third time. “Please, let’s just get into the city. All I want is a hotel room, a hot bath, and a little bit of sleep before I have to go in and face the firing squad.”
They stopped pushing. After all, it was Monica’s call. Her mind was obviously occupied by a number of other things, namely the litany of events that would take place at the precinct in a few more hours. And since nothing seemed to be horrifically injured and she did not appear to be in agonizing pain, there was no need to add to her stress level, especially if she was insisting otherwise.
They were on the Henry Hudson Parkway, the city on their left, lit up like a carnival, when Monica turned awkwardly, grimacing as she rearranged herself against the seat. It was then that Nora saw the blood, like a smear of blackberry jam against the filmy fabric of her shirt.
“Monica?” She reached over, her fingers hovering just above the spot. “You’re bleeding back here.”
“I am?” Monica reached around with two fingers, wincing as they came in contact with the wound. “Oh, I got scratched, I think, on the way down. It’s tiny. I can hardly feel it.”
“Can I see?” Nora asked.
Monica leaned over a little so that Nora could push up her shirt. There were three wounds, each about two inches in length, running just along the outside of her backbone. They were small but deep, the surrounding area already beginning to bruise a sickly yellow color. The one closest to the outside was still moist. As Nora leaned in closer, she could make out weblike trickles of blood leaking out from the bottom. She lifted her eyes, but Ozzie was already watching her in the mirror.
“I knew it.” Ozzie made a hard turn into the left lane and then skidded to a halt in front of a red light. A flurry of angry honks rose up behind them, but she turned around in her seat and leaned all the way over until she could see Monica’s injury for herself. Her face darkened as she shook her head. “No way. Uh-uh. Monica, you have to get checked out. A sprained or broken ankle is one thing. These are puncture wounds, which are serious even if you hadn’t gotten them from a shit-heap like that. Are you up-to-date on your immunizations? When’s the last time you had a tetanus shot?”
Monica stared at her blankly. “Um . . .”
“That’s what I thought,” Ozzie said. “All right, let’s go. Grace, will you get your phone out and Google me the closest hospital?”
“No!” Monica gave the effort a final stab, reaching forward with both hands to grab Ozzie’s shoulders. “Please, Ozzie. I hate hospitals. I’ll call my doctor on Monday. After . . . everything else.”
“Forget it,” Ozzie said. “You don’t have time to screw around here, Monsie. If you got tetanus from some nail in that place, you can get symptoms within twenty-four hours. Fever, stiff neck, even spasms. Now, we’re finding you an ER and getting you looked at. End of story.”
Monica lowered her hands from Ozzie’s shoulders, letting them fall limply into her lap. Then she turned, pushing her face into the seat, and sobbed.
“Monsie.” Nora put an arm around her shoulder. “Why are you so upset? It’s just the—”
“I don’t want to go!” Monica wailed. “I hate hospitals! And I’m fine!”
“All right?” Ozzie nodded at Grace, blatantly ignoring Monica behind her. “Where’re we going?”
“Lenox Hill,” Grace answered. “It’s about four blocks away, on East Seventy-Seventh. The ER’ll be on your right.”
The Escalade shot forward, narrowly missing a parked car, and careened down the street. Nora moved in as close as she dared and patted Monica’s thin shoulders, which rose and fell under her staggered weeping. She thought she might know where Monica was right now, at least inside her head. It was a place she’d been many times before, when the threat of one more thing, even a single, unnecessary word, felt as though it might break her completely. It had been a long weekend. And it was not over yet. She smoothed Monica’s damp hair back from her head as Ozzie drove through the narrow streets and held on tight.
If the hospital had not been identified by the bright blue LENOX HILL HOSPITAL sign out front, Nora thought she might never have been able to tell it from a high-rise apartment building. With its dull brick exterior and small windows, it took up most of the block and rose so high up above them that Nora could not see the top of it. Inside, the space was all sleek chairs and shiny floors. Wide hardwood walls rose up like fortresses around a row of hanging lights, and the scent of lemon oil and rubbing alcohol hung in the air. Directives were everywhere: QUIET, PLEASE and LINE FORMS HERE and PLEASE HAVE ALL INSURANCE CARDS READY AT CHECK-IN, each one written in neat block letters.
Nora helped Monica into a blue chair against one of the walls as Ozzie walked across the room and launched into a conversation with a red-haired woman behind a desk. Grace stood next to her, still fiddling on her phone. Every so often, Ozzie’s voice would rise, and she would lift an arm, pointing in Monica’s direction.
“She’s the bossiest person I know,” Monica murmured, watching Ozzie across the room, “but I think I could be in hell and I’d still be okay if she was with me.”
“Me, too.” Nora squeezed Monica’s hand, wondering how it was possible to reconcile such a statement with the reality of Ozzie’s life back home. It was not so much that Ozzie was in a horrible relationship—such a thing wouldn’t have shocked her about any one of them, really—it was that she had stayed for so long. That she had stayed at all. Even her explanation about the familiarity of it and being able to navigate through such volatile territory had sounded hollow, as if she had believed such a thing before but now it wasn’t quite holding its weight. But maybe that was what saying things out loud did sometimes: it made a situation tangible, forcing you to look at it in a way you never had before. Maybe for the very first time.
After a few minutes, an aide dressed in maroon scrubs and white shoes came out and helped Monica into a wheelchair. His long hair had been tied back into a ponytail and a gold star-shaped earring adorned his right earlobe. They followed him as he wheeled her back into the emergency waiting room. “It’ll just be a few minutes,” he said, adjusting the wheel brake. “I’ll come back for you when they’re ready.”
“Famous last words,” Ozzie muttered, sinking into a chair. “Which reminds me, Mons. You ever get hold of your attorney?”
“I left him another message,” Monica said, staring at the floor.
Ozzie looked hard at her and then dropped her eyes.
Nora looked around the waiting room. Two middle-aged men sat a few seats down from them, their heads tipped back against the wall, eyes shut tight. The one closer to Nora had his hand draped lightly over the other’s, a gold wedding band glinting on his fourth finger. Next to them was an overweight woman with a pink bandanna over her head and a teenage girl, an emaciated slip of a thing with bright blue streaks in her brown hair and quarter-sized holes in her earlobes. She leaned heavily against the woman, who was reading a magazine, and picked at her cuticles. But it was the woman across from them, dressed in a dirty khaki coat, who held Nora’s attention. She was slumped sideways in her chair, either too exhausted or in too much pain to sit up straight. The toe of one black sock peeked out from a hole in her sneaker, and the other shoe had no laces. The combination of a green knit hat pulled low over her forehead and the grime on her face made it impossible to tell her exact age, but Nora guessed she was in her late fifties, maybe even early sixties. Every few minutes, she reached up and yanked at one of the ratty braids sticking out from the bottom of her hat. Nora watched her chew on the end of it, biting down hard and then pulling with her lips, as if trying to suck marrow from a bone, and she wondered with a vague sort of horror if the woman was hungry.
As if reading her thoughts, Ozzie leaned forward. “Anyone hungry?” she asked. “God only knows how long we’ll be here. I can try to find an all-night place that delivers.”
Monica shrugged. “A little.”
“I could eat,” Grace said.
Ozzie walked back over to the desk. “You guys have a yellow pages I could look through?” she asked.
“Just use my phone,” Grace said, holding it out.
“I hate all those iPhones.” Ozzie waved it away. “I can do it faster this way. Trust me.”
She tucked the phone book under one arm and gestured toward the front door. “I gotta call Gary, too. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
Nora watched as Ozzie let herself out the side door and held the phone to her ear. She wondered what Gary looked like, what kind of expression came over his face, his eyes, when he got angry. If it was anything like the tone of voice she’d heard on the phone, it couldn’t be pretty. But was he handsome otherwise? Did Ozzie ever look across the room at a party and exchange a wordless, intimate look with him? Have him come up behind her at the kitchen sink while she was doing the dishes and kiss the back of her neck? Did he do nice things for her, maybe on her birthday or Mother’s Day or Christmas, take her to breakfast with all the kids, or book a bed and breakfast just for the two of them? Were the occasional kindnesses how Ozzie justified staying with him? Was that really all she thought she was worth?
Nora looked over at Monica. “How’re you feeling?”
“Okay.” Monica let her chin drop into her hands. “Tired. What time is it?”
“Two forty-five,” Grace said.
Monica shook her head and closed her eyes. Nora watched as she inhaled deeply through her nose, the planes of her cheeks widening like wings on either side.
“I bet we’ll be out of here in thirty minutes, tops,” Grace said. “There’s not that many people here in the waiting room and it can’t be that backed up at this hour.”
In fact, they didn’t call for Monica until 4:26 a.m. By that time, Ozzie’s Thai food order had been delivered, everyone had eaten, and Ozzie and Grace had nodded off. The old woman in the khaki coat had been summoned twenty minutes earlier, hobbling across the room as her name was called and then reappearing again just a short time later, only to head immediately for the side door. Nora was filled with an ineffable sadness as she watched the old woman go, one hand clutching the front of her coat as she limped down the street. She thought of running after her, tapping her lightly on the shoulder, asking where it was she was going, just so she could hear her say “Home.” But Nora did not move, and when she leaned forward to catch sight of her again, the woman had disappeared into the night.
A young Indian doctor with a red bindi in the middle of her forehead ordered an X-ray of Monica’s foot, which turned out to be badly sprained, and tightened an air cast around it. She gave Monica a tetanus shot, as well as something called tetanus immune globulin to prevent further infection, put clean bandages over the wounds, and told Monica to come back in two weeks.
It was almost six a.m. by the time they got to the hotel Grace had found them on East Sixty-Fifth Street. They’d argued on the way from the hospital whether or not it was even worth it to get a room at this point; the hour was so late and since they had to be at the precinct before noon, what little sleep they might get would probably be light and restless. It was Grace who’d insisted finally, convincing them that even four or five hours of sleep would benefit Monica—and the rest of them—more than they might realize. The hotel was only two blocks away from the police station where Monica had to turn herself in, but Nora was more relieved to see that it had recently been cleaned. The bathroom, with its white fixtures and spotless mirror, smelled like eucalyptus, and there was not a trace of dust on any of the furniture. Grace and Ozzie collapsed on the pull-out couch, while Nora helped Monica into the queen-size bed and got in next to her. Thirty minutes later, she could still hear Monica next to her, tossing and turning.
“You okay?” she whispered finally. The room was dark; the heavy curtains over the window obliterated even a hint of street light outside. Still, she could hear the faint sounds of traffic below, the occasional beep and screech of a tire.
“Oh, I’m sorry!” Monica rolled over awkwardly, her casted foot heavy behind her. “Am I keeping you awake?”
“No,” Nora lied. “I can’t sleep either.”
“Not tired?”
“Exhausted.” Nora arranged an arm behind her head and stared up into the inkiness above her. “Just thinking.”
“Me too.”
“About what?”
“About how scared I am,” Monica said.
Nora reached down and took her hand. “I know. But you’re doing the right thing.”
“I am, right?”
“You are.”
Monica rolled over so that she was staring at the side of Nora’s face. “You know what else I was thinking about?”
“Hm?”
“Running away.”
“Running away?” Nora blinked. “From here?”
“Yeah. Well, from tomorrow, actually.”
“You can’t run away, Monica. That would just make things worse.”
“I know. I just like thinking about it.”
“Where would you go?”
“I don’t know.” Monica rolled back over and sighed. “Mexico, maybe. Venezuela.”
Nora turned her head a little. “Do you know Spanish?”
“¿Cómo se llama?” Monica said. “Hola. Gracias. Could get me around for a little while, at least.”
“How about Paris?”
“I don’t know any French,” Monica said. “And they’re supposed to be pretty rude to Americans.”
“You’ve never been?”
“Next year.” Monica paused. “With Liam. I hope.” Her voice broke on the last word.
Nora waited, wincing inwardly at the question on her lips. She closed her eyes. “You really love him, don’t you?”
“Yes,” Monica whispered. “I do.”
“Then you should tell him about this.” She squeezed Monica’s hand. “Secrets ruin everything. People always find out about them sooner or later.”
For a few moments, the only sound in the room was the rush of fading traffic behind the windows.
There was a long pause. When Monica spoke again, her voice was clotted with tears. “I’m still such a little girl,” she whispered. “I still need so much.”
So much what? Nora wanted to ask. Love? Attention? Forgiveness? She turned all the way over and ran a fingertip over the faint outline of tears on Monica’s face. “It’s okay,” she said. “We all do.”
Neither of them spoke again after that. In fact, Nora was pretty sure Monica had fallen asleep; her breathing had shifted to a deeper, lower decibel, and every so often, one of her arms would jerk to the side, as if she were catching herself during a free fall. Maybe the words Nora said next weren’t supposed to be heard. Maybe they were just supposed to be put out there, the way so many of the first lines she recalled these days were, so that they might drift along and find their way to the person who needed them next.
But she said them very softly anyway—“In an old house in Paris that was covered with vines, lived twelve little girls in two straight lines”—before closing her eyes and going to sleep.