Chapter 3
The phlebotomist tied the rubber strap above my elbow and asked me to make a fist.
"Pump twice for me, sweetheart."
I pumped twice. The vein came up like a blue rope under the lamp.
"Small pinch."
The needle went in. I watched the dark line start to fill the tube and thought, very clearly, *that is going into her*. Into the woman who walked down my staircase three hours ago in my birthday robe.
I did not pull my arm back. I sat there and let it run.
"You're doing great. Squeeze the foam ball every five seconds."
"Okay."
The ball was blue. It had a smiley face stamped on it, and one of the eyes had rubbed off, so it looked like it was winking at me. I squeezed it. My fingers felt far away.
The door swung open and Kevin came in without knocking. He didn't look at the needle. He looked at the bag.
"How much have they got."
"Four hundred mils," the phlebotomist said. "We'll need another draw in two hours. Maybe a third before morning if her platelets keep dropping."
"Another two."
"Mr. Fort, your wife is — "
"Whatever it takes."
She glanced at me. I kept my eyes on the smiley ball.
"Sir, that's not how it works. She needs four hours minimum between — "
"Then space them out. But she stays."
The phlebotomist's mouth went thin. She left to get a juice box, and Kevin sat down on the rolling stool beside my chair, close enough that his knee touched mine.
I looked at his knee. His suit pants. The dark smear on the cuff that had dried to brown.
"Kev."
"Yeah, baby. Yeah."
"Was it real."
"What."
"The divorce. Tuesday. Was it a paper one. Like you told me."
His knee jerked back from mine half an inch.
I didn't lift my head. I watched the bag fill. The plastic was warm where it pressed against my forearm and I focused on that small heat because if I looked up at his face now I was going to come apart in this chair with a needle in my arm.
"Lena. This isn't — we shouldn't do this here."
"Was it."
"She's dying in the next room."
"Was it."
A silence. The kind that has its own weight. The blood pump on the IV cart made a small mechanical click every two seconds and I counted four clicks before he answered.
"Lena. Ruby is fine. It's not what you think."
*Ruby is fine.*
That was the sentence he picked. Not *I love you*. Not *I can explain*. Not even *I'm sorry*. He picked the one about her, and he picked it without thinking, the way a person reaches for the rail when they slip on ice.
I pressed the foam ball so hard the rubber squeaked.
"Get out."
"Baby — "
"Get out of this room, Kevin."
He stood up. He stood there for another second, the way a man stands when he's deciding whether the lie he's about to tell is worth the breath. Then he walked across the hall and into Trauma 3 and pulled the door not quite shut.
I sat with the needle in my arm and a tear running down the side of my nose and into the corner of my mouth. It tasted like salt and copper. I had bitten my lip raw at the top of the staircase and I had not stopped bleeding in three hours.
Through the gap in the door, I heard her voice.
"Kev. Kev, come here."
"I'm here. I'm here, baby."
"Did you call him."
"Who, sweetheart."
"Johnson. Did you call Johnson. He's going to be scared. He always knows when something's wrong with me, you know that — "
"Hey. Hey, listen to me."
Kevin's voice did a thing then. It went soft the way a hand goes soft on the back of a child's head. I had heard him use that voice exactly twice in five years, both times to a dog.
"Johnson's fine. I didn't tell him Mommy got hurt. He's at the house with Maria. He had spaghetti for dinner and he asked for you, and I told him you were working late, and he went to bed at eight without a fight. Okay? He's okay. You don't worry about Johnson. Johnson is taken care of."
*Mommy.*
*Maria.* The housekeeper at the Hamptons place. *Our* housekeeper.
*Spaghetti for dinner.*
The phlebotomist came back into my room with the juice box and stopped in the doorway. I think my face must have been doing something, because she set the juice box down very carefully on the tray and said, in a voice you use with horses, "Honey. Honey, breathe for me. Slow."
I couldn't.
The room narrowed. The lamp above my head went too bright and then too dim and the smiley face on the blue ball doubled itself, then tripled, then slid sideways off the ball entirely. My ears filled with a sound like water under a bridge. My free hand had gone to my mouth at some point and I bit down on the meat of my thumb because if I made the sound that was building in my throat the entire ER would hear it.
A child.
A child old enough to ask for spaghetti. A child old enough to know when his mother was hurt. A child named Johnson, which was not a name you gave a baby last week. That was a name a kid had carried for years. Four. Five. Six.
Six.
Kevin and I had tried for two and a half years. I had lost the one in Capri at six weeks. I had lost a second one in our bathroom last March, alone, while he was *at the office*, and I had wrapped the towel around myself and called him and he had said *I'm in a meeting, baby, I'll be home as soon as I can*, and he had come home at midnight smelling like a perfume that was not mine.
Maria. The Hamptons house. *Spaghetti for dinner.*
I made a sound. I don't know what shape it had. The phlebotomist's hand was on my shoulder and she was saying something about pulling the needle, and I shook my head, and she pulled it anyway, and pressed cotton hard into the crook of my elbow.
"Sit. Drink the juice. Sit, honey. Sit."
I sat. I drank nothing. I did not cry, exactly — what came out of me was something dry and wrong, my whole chest folding in on itself like a paper bag with the air sucked out, and my hands were shaking so badly that when I tried to pick up the juice box I knocked it off the tray and it rolled under the chair.
I don't know how long I sat like that.
Long enough for the cotton at my elbow to soak through. Long enough for the blue smiley ball to roll off my lap and onto the floor and stop, winking at me, against the leg of the IV cart.
When the shaking dropped from a full-body tremor down to just my hands, I stood up.
I walked past Trauma 3 without looking at the door.
The corridor outside the ER had a row of plastic chairs and a vending machine that hummed at a pitch that hurt my teeth. I pulled my phone out of my coat pocket. The screen lit my face up blue in the dark glass of the machine and I saw myself for one second — hair stuck to my temple, a smear of dried blood at the corner of my mouth, eyes I did not recognize.
I scrolled past Kevin. Past Sophia. Past my mother, whose number I had never deleted in eleven years.
I stopped on the contact saved as **DAD**.
I had not used it in seven years.
Three rings. Four. On the fifth, a voice came on the line that had not gotten any older.
"Lena."
He had not even said *hello*. He had picked up and known.
I opened my mouth. Nothing came out. I tried again, and my throat made a small click, and then I heard my own voice, low and very even, like it belonged to a stranger standing two feet behind me.
"Dad."
"I'm here, sweetheart. I'm here."
"That thing you said. About the company. About me coming home and taking it over."
A pause on his end. One breath.
"Yes."
"I'm saying yes."
The vending machine kicked over to a new cycle and the hum dropped half a tone. Down the corridor, a door clicked open and a pair of shoes started walking toward me on the linoleum, slow, then faster, and I knew without turning my head that the cuff of those pants had a dried brown smear on it.
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