10

Afterward, Brody would not remember the drive to the hospital, the adrenaline blast to his system, the way his hands kept slipping off the wheel as he sped across intersections where yellow lights were going to red. The entire thing would be lost to him, and in moments when he wasn’t plagued by other things he would be plagued by the idea that he might have hurt someone, that he didn’t know he hadn’t hurt someone on his breakneck race.

What he started with, what his memory would start with, was the emergency room waiting area, where Liz’s parents were watching for him, both of them.

“Where is she?” he said, and Marguerite tried to take his hands, and the image of her hands—her soft, wrinkled, slightly arthritic hands as he pushed them away: this was flash-printed onto his mind.

He sprinted past them and pushed through a pair of swinging doors. All he’d really gotten on the phone was: Lauren, hurt herself, ambulance, hospital, now. He dodged an elderly man on a gurney, and there was Liz, turning and seeing him and bursting into tears.

Again, all he could say: “Where is she?”

“Brody,” she cried.

He remembered himself and took her in his arms, felt her weight against him, felt, as he pulled away, her hair detaching from his cheek, where the dampness of her face had made it stick.

“Where?” he said.

“God,” she wailed, but then she indicated a door, and he pushed through it and saw: Lauren’s bare legs, three people standing over her, machines and an IV bag.

“Sir,” the one man said, “you can’t come in here.”

“I’m her father.” He moved for a better look: her eyes were closed, and there was a tube in her nose, something black smeared all over her face. “What happened? Is she unconscious?”

“Sir,” said one of the women. She was doing something between Lauren’s legs, and Brody looked away.

“OK, I’ll go,” he said. “But just tell me…”

The man—Brody took him to be the doctor—faced him. “Your daughter had a drug overdose. We’re monitoring her vital signs and giving her activated charcoal to absorb the toxins.”

“A drug overdose?” Brody said. This was impossible; Lauren didn’t do drugs. Everything was happening too fast. “What do you mean, what did she take?”

“Tylenol. And apparently some Benadryl. The medicine cabinet was empty when your wife found her.”

Brody’s pulse raced. He knew from somewhere that too much Tylenol could be really bad; that was why the liquid stuff you gave babies came in such tiny bottles. He put his palms together and took a deep breath. He had to slow down. He turned away, only to realize that he’d been looking at Lauren’s left wrist and that it had been wrapped in a bloodstained bandage. He looked back: the other wrist, too.

“Oh, my God,” he said. “She slit her wrists?”

The doctor was studying one of the monitors. “The cuts are the least of it—we’ll stitch her up in a minute. It’s her liver we’re worried about.”

“Her liver?”

“Why don’t you wait outside? We’ll talk in just a bit.”

To Brody, the lights were suddenly far too bright, and a wind roared past his ears. Then things were normal again.

“OK,” he said. “I’ll wait outside.”

In the hallway, Robert and Marguerite had joined Liz. As soon as she saw Brody, she broke away from them. “What’d they say? Are they pumping her stomach?”

“The doctor said he’d come talk to us in a minute.”

She put her face in her hands and wept. “No, no, I can’t stand this.” He touched her, and she jerked back. She looked at him and cried: “I went to get coffee.”

He had no idea what she meant, and he turned to Robert and Marguerite. Was there a coffee machine in the waiting area? Did she want coffee?

“After she dropped Joe at school,” Marguerite said. “She went to get coffee before she went home.”

“No,” he said. He took hold of Liz’s shoulders and bent to look in her eyes. “Oh, no.” He meant Don’t do this to yourself, but a terrible sound came out of her, and she wrenched herself away and sobbed harder.

“You didn’t know,” he said.

“I did!” she shrieked.

“Honey.” He reached for her again, but she pulled away. “Liz. Where did you find her?”

“Stop!” she cried. And then: “In their bathroom!”

He tried to picture the inside of the medicine cabinet in the kids’ bathroom, but all he could come up with was some very old Johnson’s Baby Shampoo sitting stickily on a glass shelf. There was Tylenol in there? Benadryl? He remembered bribing Lauren to take Benadryl when she was four or five—for every tiny sip she got a jelly bean. Joe stood nearby, waiting for a jelly bean or two of his own.

The door behind him swung open, and he turned. One of the nurses came out, and behind him Liz and Robert and Marguerite moved forward, almost as one. They crowded behind him, and he had a sense of himself as not just their spokesman but also their protector. “What?” he said, but the nurse just held up her forefinger and kept going.

         

After several hours in the emergency room, Lauren was moved to the pediatric ICU, but it was a while before Liz fully registered the change, how it was calmer here, and quieter; and the light, thank God, was dim. Lauren had a tiny room to herself, and she said over and over again that she wanted to go home: she said it crying, not crying, crying again. She couldn’t go home, though, and so Liz wouldn’t, and so it was Brody who left at ten to pick up Joe from Trent’s house, where he’d spent the evening.

Joe. Sitting in the dark next to Lauren’s sleeping body, Liz thought back to the middle of the afternoon, when Brody had left for the first time, to meet Joe after school. The plan had been for Brody to call once he’d told Joe what had happened, but it was Joe who called, saying “Mom?” when she answered, his voice breaking slightly on the single syllable, and it had taken her long moments to be able to speak.

Light from the hallway bisected Lauren’s face. Liz leaned forward and ran her hand over Lauren’s hair, then held the backs of her fingers over Lauren’s mouth to feel her breath. Terrible things had been done to her today, following the terrible things she’d done to herself: they’d punctured her veins for IVs, pumped bottle after bottle of charcoal into her stomach. By far the worst was the vile liquid they’d made her drink, four separate times—it was sulfurous and repulsive and necessary to counteract the effects of the Tylenol on her liver, which remained, even now, in great danger.

She could go into liver failure. She had to keep drinking the horrible stuff, every four hours through the weekend, and she could still go into liver failure.

Liz leaned back in her chair and tasted salt at the back of her throat. How could she have allowed this to happen? How could she have let the last months happen, sitting by while Lauren fell? She was on a tiny island, surrounded by the vast ocean of her guilt, and the water lapped and lapped at her ankles, its undertow strong enough to pull her in should she somehow avoid the headlong dive she kept imagining. All that kept her out was how much Lauren needed her now, how much more than ever, though she’d not need her now if only Liz had had an ounce of sense, a gram, in the last few months. What had she been doing this fall? Yoga! Painting a bench! In her mind she slammed a mallet against the bench, splintering the wood; she threw paint remover on it and watched with pleasure as it burned through her gay colors. She reached into her body and tore at her muscles, then plunged her fingers into the crevices of her joints and ripped at them until they were permanently damaged.

Then she thought: Is this how Lauren lived? Ravaged by self-hatred? And she wept again.

A sound woke her sometime later to the bed she had improvised, her upper body curled in a chair, her legs reaching under its wooden arm to rest on the metal frame of Lauren’s bed. She was incredibly sore, her mouth dry and sour. Lauren was still asleep. How soon before they came to draw blood again? To administer the next dose of the disgusting stuff.

She pulled her legs back and sat up, moving as quietly as she could. Slowly, painfully, she stood. She edged out of the narrow space described by the chair, the bed, and the table, and she went into the windowless bathroom. She hit the light and hid her eyes for a moment, then stared at herself in the mirror. She was wrecked, hideous. Then she realized that was exactly what she was looking for, evidence that this had undone her, and she turned from the sight of herself and wept. She eased herself onto the closed toilet and sobbed at her own self-pity, and she sobbed at it all: Lauren, Joe, Brody, her parents, her family, her life, her home, her child, her child. She sobbed and sobbed. And then, after a while, there came a moment when it ebbed, and she watched herself through it curiously, unwilling to allow a single moment of falsity; she felt she could cry, but only if she couldn’t not cry. She couldn’t not: it was back and she sobbed again. But it slowed, and it faltered, and after a while she could not, so she stopped. She mopped her face with a hand towel. She began to feel composed, and she glanced at her surroundings, a hospital bathroom, and then she was going into the bathroom again, the kids’ bathroom yesterday, Lauren bleeding in the bathtub, and she began to cry again. This happened several times, the slowing and the fresh onslaught. Finally, in a lull, she went to the sink and ran cold water over the towel and pressed it to her eyes, and because the coolness felt so soothing she bathed her eyes with handfuls of water, then dried her face and ventured the mirror again. You, she said to herself.