Wish You Were Here(17)

I landed in a tangle at the landing, my tights torn, my knee skinned. As I lay sprawled, I considered running back upstairs to change into the spare pair of tights I kept in my desk to prevent Eva St. Clerck from taking one look at me and raising a disappointed eyebrow. I tried to push myself upright and nearly blacked out from the wave of pain that swallowed me.

When I could breathe again, I wriggled my phone out of the pocket of my jacket and texted Rodney with a single hand. Help.

By the time he located me in the stairwell, I was propped against the wall with my legs splayed in front of me, cradling my left arm with my right. He hauled me up and marched me toward the closest elevator bank. “We’re going to the ER,” he announced, looking down at my wrist and wincing. “That is not a natural angle.”

“I can’t just leave. Eva—”

“Does not want to incur a lawsuit because you fell down the stairs when you were trying to appease Her Majesty.” When we reached street level, Rodney bustled me through the lobby and out the front door. The emergency department of New York–Presbyterian was only a few blocks away; we heard the ambulance sirens all the time.

The waiting room was half-full: there were mothers cradling crying toddlers, an elderly man with a bad cough, a couple whispering furiously in Spanish, a man in construction gear holding a bloody towel to a gash in his thigh. The triage nurse took my information down, and forty-five minutes later, my name was called. “Do you want me to come with?” Rodney asked, and even though it was exactly what I wanted, I decided to act like a grown-up and shook my head.

“Good,” he said, “because this People magazine from 2006 is impossible to put down.”

I was brought through the double doors to a little curtained cubicle, where I sat on a gurney, trying not to jostle my arm. It felt like fire under my skin, and all of a sudden it was too much: the pain, the catalog deadline, a potentially broken bone. Tears streamed down my cheeks, my nose started running, and when I tried to reach out with my nondominant hand for a tissue beside the gurney, the box fell onto the floor, and I started to cry harder.

Which was the moment the doctor entered. He was tall and blond, with hair that kept falling in his eyes. “Ms. O’Toole? I’m Dr. Colson, and I’m a resident in …” he said, looking down at my chart. “I understand that you fell—” He glanced at my face, and his brows shot up. “Are you okay?”

“If I was okay,” I sobbed, “I would not be in the emergency room.”

“Tell me what happened,” he said.

So I did, as he gently touched my elbow and wrist, moving it incrementally, stopping when I gasped in pain. His fingers were warm and sure. He asked me questions as he checked me for concussion, examined the scrape on my knee, and a bruise that was blooming on my hip. “So are you always in a hurry?” he asked.

The question surprised me out of my discomfort. “I guess?”

For the first time since he had entered the cubicle, his eyes met mine. “I suppose that’s not a bad thing, if you know where you’re headed,” he said.

“Is that the current way of saying take two aspirin and call me in the morning?”

“No. You’re not getting out of here without an X-ray.” He smiled a little, the corner of his mouth quirking up on one side. “The bad news is I’d lay odds that your arm is broken. The good news is that if you can make jokes, you probably won’t die on my watch.”

“Great,” I murmured.

“It is,” he said. “I’d hate to see my Yelp rating tank.” He leaned out of the cubicle and spoke with a passing nurse. “We’ll get you down to radiology for imaging, and then I’ll come back.”

I nodded. “My friend’s in the waiting room,” I said. “Can someone tell him what’s going on?”

He straightened. “I can get word to your boyfriend.”

“He’s just a co-worker,” I corrected. “Rodney. He brought me here. He’ll be the only one in the waiting room wearing couture.”

The doctor grinned. “You gotta love a hero in Prada.”

It took an hour for my X-ray to be performed and read and for Dr. Colson to come back to my cubicle. I was lying down by then, trying not to move my arm. He showed me the scans on an iPad, the clean white line of the break in my bone. “It’s a simple break,” he said.

“It doesn’t feel simple.”

“That means you don’t need an ortho consult. I can put a cast on you, and you can be on your way.”

He showed me how to hold up my arm, thumb out, while he gently slipped a stockinette on like an evening glove. He took a roll of cotton and wound it up and down again, mummifying my arm. The whole time, he asked me questions: How long had I been at Sotheby’s? Did I study art at school? Did I prefer modern art, or impressionist art? He told me that he was a surgical resident, but that it was his first year, and he was doing a two-week rotation in the ED. He confessed that this was his first cast.

“Mine, too,” I said.

The fiberglass wrap he used was already stiffening in place. For the final layer, he offered me a choice of blue, hazard orange, camouflage, hot pink.

“I get to pick?”

He smiled. “A perk for our first-time customers.”

“Pink,” I said. “Although Rodney would say that’ll clash with my wardrobe.”