Good Riddance(54)

There was no answer. I knocked some more. She was home and clearly avoiding me.

After another bang, I put my ear to the door. This time I did hear something, a muffled noise. Was she in the bathroom? I yelled, “It’s Daphne. I need to talk to you.”

A noise came back, and I swear it was a “Help!”

“Are you all right?” I yelled back. I tried the doorknob. Locked. More helps from within, louder. “Can you let me in?” No, of course not. Why even ask! Now I was scared in the way of a daughter whose mother had collapsed from an aneurism and had been found by her walking buddy after not showing up at their appointed time and corner. I yelled that I was getting someone to open the door for me—the super, a doorman, anyone! I’d be right back.

I ran for the elevator, then realized, No, faster to call him. I patted my pocket. Oh, shit. Nothing! I ran back to my place, got my phone, yelled into it that Geneva Wisenkorn in 11-J couldn’t come to the door, maybe an accident, maybe—who knows!—shot, stabbed, being held hostage.

“Calm down,” said the super, whom none of us liked.

“Please get up here with a key!”

“I’m on my way,” he said wearily.

“Fast! She could be bleeding to death. Or having a heart attack.”

He did come, and brought his wife, name now forgotten, who explained as he tried various wrong keys, “He brings me when it might be a woman who fell getting outta the tub—like the way a doctor has a nurse in the room when he examines your privates.”

Finally, the right key and the click of the lock. “Okay. You’re in now,” he said.

“I’m not going in alone! What if she’s dead? What if those two guys who escaped from prison upstate are in there?”

“Oh, sure. With doormen around the clock? That makes a lotta sense.”

“Geneva?” I was yelling, now inside the foyer, down the hallway, past the bathroom, toward the wounded-animal noises. And there she was, splayed on the bedroom floor, blood on the carpet and dripping down her forehead. She was fully dressed, caftan over flowing pants, barefoot, toenails painted a startling emerald green. The super asked her, “What happened? Did you break something?”

“My head, you idiot! Look at me. And my arm is killing me.”

“Did you fall?” asked the super’s wife.

“I don’t know. I must have.”

“You must’ve?” the super’s wife repeated. “How does someone not know if she fell?”

“Sometimes you just fall! I hit my head on the corner of the goddamn bureau. I need stitches!” She explored her head and screamed at the sight of the blood that came back on her fingertips.

I said, “I’m calling 911. Can you get up?”

“Would I be flat on my ass if I could get up?”

“What if we each took you by the arm—”

“I broke it! Or some part of it!”

“You’re not supposed to move an injured person,” said the super’s wife. “You could do something to the spine and she’d be paralyzed for life.”

I said that settled it: I’m calling 911 and getting a facecloth. I’d be right back. Not to worry. Everything would be fine. Head wounds bleed a lot. You probably won’t even need stitches.

“Want us to stay?” the super asked when I returned.

“Oh, is your lunch getting cold?”

“No need for sarcasm,” said his wife. “It’s not like we can do anything.”

Geneva’s eyes were fixed on me, and maybe I was projecting, but they seemed to be asking, Why did SHE have to find me? I’m in the hands of the enemy.

“Did someone do this to you?” asked the wife. “Like a boyfriend?”

“Jesus! I fell! I passed out and fell, or I fell and got knocked out.”

What to do but wait for the ambulance, stroke her arm, issue reassurances, convey that I would do no harm.

“I’m going with you in the ambulance,” I told Geneva. “Oh, wait . . . your handbag. You’ll need that.” And to the super, “Stay with her while I look.”

“What do you need her pocketbook for?” asked the wife, immediately identifying herself to me as someone who couldn’t be trusted with another person’s purse.

“Her insurance! Her keys! Her wallet! Her phone! Did you think I was going to help myself to some cash?”

“Just do it already,” said her husband.

“Do you know CPR?” I asked them. “Just in case?”

Geneva was now swearing in a way that wasn’t pain-filled, but in indignation over our discussing an imminent downhill slide. I said, “No, no, you’re going to be fine. I don’t know why I asked that. I’m sure the emergency room doc will just write a prescription and you’ll be on your feet as soon as I can fill it. I’ll be right back. Do you have insurance cards in your pocketbook? And your keys?”

“I don’t know where the hell my phone is. The kitchen? My study? Just get it.”

Her shoes were next to the bed, one of them under her torso. I freed it gingerly and handed the pair to the super’s wife. “Here, put these on her.” And repeated to Geneva, “I’m not going anywhere, I promise. In the meantime, you guys listen for an ambulance”—which in this city was as logical as saying, “You guys listen for a horn to honk.”