Serious Moonlight(100)

“But if I hadn’t asked you to help me investigate Darke, would you even have had anything whatsoever to do with me? The way I remember things, you were telling me you didn’t want to talk about what we’d done in my car. You asked me to forget it and pretend it didn’t happen. Because that’s what you do—when you’re afraid of something, if it’s just too hard for you to face, you’ll do anything to avoid it. You didn’t want to talk to me after we had sex that first time. You don’t want to face getting treated for your narcolepsy. And now you’re doing the same thing—because it’s easier to just walk away from us than to talk about all this, right? I know I screwed up, but I screwed up because I was scared of exactly this—that you’d run away again.”

“So this is my fault?”

“I told you I loved you, and you couldn’t even say it back.”

“You told me I didn’t have to!”

“I wanted you to want to say it. But for some reason, you feel more comfortable having sex with me than making any kind of commitment that doesn’t involve a stupid mystery!”

His words were a slap in the face. The telltale signs of bonelessness prickled in warning. It started in my face and neck, and then it spread to my arms. My hands stopped working. I dropped my clutch purse.

“Birdie?” Daniel said, rushing toward me.

But not fast enough. My legs gave out, and I collapsed on the floor like a puppet falling off its wires.

The problem with cataplexy wasn’t the sensation itself, which was disconcerting, sure, but so far beyond my control that I had no choice but to endure it until my body decided to start functioning again.

The problem was that time didn’t stop.

Everything around me moved and talked and breathed while I didn’t. I saw Daniel drop to the floor to help me. I heard him calling my name and saw him touching the side of my head, and his fingers came away red with blood. I saw the panicked look on his face and on all the faces that were swarming around us. People shouting out commands to give me room. I spotted Ivanov, of all people, Mr. Adoption Facilitator. And then Raymond Darke was dropping to the floor alongside Daniel, asking him urgent questions about my health—checking my eyes, checking the blood on the side of my head, demanding that his wife call 911. Daniel’s hands shaking as he fumbled with his phone. Were they bonding over my humiliation? That was some kind of cruel irony.

All of this was happening around me as I lay like a corpse. I wanted to answer Daniel. I wanted to scream.

All I could do was stare.

While Daniel drifted farther away, out of my dreams, out of my life.

And I was stranded on my island again.

Alone.





“Tears never bring anything back.”

—Ole Golly, Harriet the Spy (1964)





31




* * *



After I regained control of my body, details from that night became fuzzy. I knew that my cataplexy fall had lasted only a few minutes, but it was the longest episode I’d ever had—long enough for an ambulance to come. And long enough for me to get poked and prodded by an EMT outside the opera hall while Darke and Daniel talked in the distance.

Daniel had phoned Aunt Mona immediately after calling 911. As luck would have it, she was in the city on Capitol Hill having dinner with Leon Snodgrass, and they rushed over and rode with me to the hospital. I’d cut the shell of my ear during the fall, not my head—my earring popped out and nicked me. At first they suspected a concussion, because I was having trouble staying awake and kept missing parts of questions they asked. Then Aunt Mona told them about Grandpa’s narcolepsy. The ER doctor flashed a series of lights in my eyes and said I was experiencing something called microsleeps. Then she wrote up an entire series of referrals to other doctors that filled up three printed pages.

Daniel was there the whole time, but I just ignored him. Easy to do when nothing seems real and you keep losing consciousness. I remember him apologizing a lot, and I think he started crying at one point, but he walked away, so I couldn’t be sure. I know I told him that I needed some space to think about what had happened. He didn’t argue, so I took that as a sign that he needed space too. When I got released, Aunt Mona pulled him aside and talked to him alone, and then he left the hospital without saying good-bye.

Nothing that happened that night really sank in until the next day, after I’d slept for ten hours with the aid of a drug they gave me in the ER. Aunt Mona spent the night with me, sleeping next to me in my bed, and when I woke, Grandpa was back. Cass had driven him home in the middle of the night when Mona called, and he’d already heard the entire story from her. He was surprisingly calm. Not one word about the opera or why Daniel and I were there. When I tried to explain, he didn’t even want to hear it. He said it was unimportant.

“I’ve failed you,” he told me in the kitchen after I’d come downstairs. He leaned back against the counter, arms folded, while Mona sat next to me at the kitchen table.

“What? Of course you haven’t,” I said, tightening the belt of my robe. “It was just a bad night. It could have happened while you were here. I’m fine.”

“You’re not. And I’ve set a bad example. It’s time we stop ignoring the sleep issues and did something about it.”