The Last Romantics(33)

On the night of Joe’s engagement party, Renee was working overnight in the ER. She was a fellow in transplant surgery, but Jaypa, the attending physician, was short-staffed and had asked her to take a shift. As a medical student, Renee had always loved the ER—it was quick, urgent, dirty, the opposite of transplants—so she told Jaypa, sure, but if she wasn’t out by seven for her brother’s engagement party, she would send his fiancée down to mess Jaypa up.

“Do you promise?” Jaypa said; he’d met Sandrine before. “Sounds like fun.”

The first ten hours of the shift were hectic—a gunshot wound, two heart attacks, three broken bones, a schizophrenic off his meds—but then Renee managed to sleep a couple hours in one of the rickety resident cots. She woke up, ate a bagel, drank some coffee, and the last hours proceeded with a snoozy calm. Now she had only ninety minutes to go. A heart monitor beeped. A nurse’s clogs squeaked. The external glass doors heaved open, and two paramedics entered, talking about the Giants and what a season. They laughed. Renee yawned.

All week she’d convinced herself that the party would be fine, maybe even fun, but in moments like this—her defenses lowered by exhaustion, her mind unoccupied by sewing stitches or drawing blood—she could be honest with herself. No, she did not want to celebrate Joe and Sandrine’s engagement. Two hours of feigned delight at Joe’s unfortunate selection of Sandrine Cahill as a wife. Two hours of forced conversation with bankers, lawyers, and aging frat boys from Alden College. Two hours of answering questions about her marital status—nope, still single, nope, no kids!—and two hours of forgetting that Joe teetered on a ledge of his own making.

Or did he? It was so hard to tell what was simply Joe being Joe—charming, affable, careless—and what was a problem. Renee had struggled to recognize the distinction before. In college she’d misread the signs and thought he’d be fine. Just fraternity partying, that’s how she’d described it to Caroline. But then, so quickly, Joe had spiraled out of control.

Her sisters thought she was overreacting.

Yesterday Caroline had called Renee to tell her this. “Don’t you think Fiona would know if something was going on?” she’d said. Renee had not responded. It was true: Fiona and Joe had always been close, she looked up to him so much. These days Renee saw Joe infrequently. They were both so busy with their work. Even rarer was seeing Joe without Sandrine.

“I can’t come to the party,” Caroline continued. “I’ve got my hands full with the move and the new house. When would we even do this intervention thing anyhow?”

“As soon as possible. We need to act before it escalates,” said Renee. “You can’t leave me alone on this, Caroline. Not again.”

For a moment there was silence on the line. “I was having a baby, Renee. I did not mean to leave you alone.”

Renee recognized that her resentment was unfair. She knew that Caroline had wanted to help that last time. But still. Caroline pushed Renee’s most sensitive buttons. Because Renee did not have children or a family, she was always expected to step in when stepping in was required. Baking the pies at Thanksgiving. Talking to Noni about her will. Giving Fiona money for a security deposit on her apartment. And Joe. Always Joe. Once Renee had relished this responsibility, had prided herself on being the one in charge. Not anymore.

Renee closed her eyes, tilted the phone away from her mouth, and exhaled slowly. Noni had sent her an article about meditative breathing, how it calmed the central nervous system. Whenever Renee thought about her brother, a hectic thrum started in her chest, and now the thrum was galloping. Joe had been working brutally long hours. She wondered if he would be high at his own party. Probably. Ace would be there.

Renee counted to six, inhale, seven, exhale.

“Renee?” said Caroline. “Are you there? Are we finished?”

Renee opened her eyes. The breathing exercise was bullshit, she decided.

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll talk to him at the party. Just talk, and then we’ll see. I’ll let you know how it goes.”

They’d ended the call, but the thrum in Renee’s chest had persisted, an urgent staccato beat of Joe-Joe-Joe that followed her through the rest of that day and the next, and now, tonight, while she sat with her coffee in the ER, the beat grew louder as each passing minute brought her closer to the engagement party.

Jaypa sidled up to the nurses’ station and set his iPhone on the desk. He winked at Renee, then pressed Play. As the opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth filled the space, Jaypa loudly cracked the knuckles on each hand and began to conduct. Eyes squeezed shut, arms pumping, a trail of blood faint on the front of his sky-blue scrubs. He’d almost attended music school, Jaypa had told Renee, but his parents would pay for school only if he switched to medicine. And so he’d switched.

Renee liked Jaypa, though she did not trust him. Once he had said to her, “Renee, you’re not like the other girl residents. I don’t mean that in a bad way. I mean it in a good way.” Currently he was dating a nurse, a lovely twenty-two-year-old brunette from Arkansas.

Renee watched as Jaypa reached the first-movement crescendo. He should really be meeting with one of the residents or catching up with paperwork, she thought. The attending had responsibilities; he made more money than any of them. But Jaypa liked to put on a show. Renee knew this about him. The nurses, the residents, the EMTs, they all knew this about him, and so now they all stopped to watch. Renee saw Jaypa open one eye just a crack to assess his audience; then he continued with a dramatic flurry of hand movements.