The Last Romantics(34)
Men, thought Renee. How many hours had she spent tolerating the ridiculous behavior of disappointed men?
The ER’s external doors slid open, and a gust of cold street air traveled through the waiting room, admissions office, triage, all the way into the examining rooms. Renee shivered and pulled on her cardigan.
“Help!” called a man’s voice. “Help my wife!”
Immediately the sleepy order of the late-shift ER splintered into a dozen different moving parts. A nurse rushed forward with a gurney. Jaypa switched off the music. A first-year resident grabbed her stethoscope and walked-ran toward the entry. Renee yawned again and checked her watch. Forty-five minutes until the end of her shift. Forty-five minutes until the party. She sat back and waited for the patient to arrive.
It didn’t take long. The door burst open with Jaypa and two trauma nurses pushing a gurney. On top lay a hugely pregnant woman, her legs striped with blood, stomach raw and exposed by the lift of her shirt. Holding the woman’s hand was a middle-aged man in jeans and a faded Nirvana tee, his face pale and drawn, eyes red.
Immediately Renee knew what had happened: an attempted home birth. The woman’s long hair was wet from a tub. The smell of sweat and incense came off the man in waves.
“You’re her husband?” Jaypa asked the man, who nodded. “Ma’am, how many weeks? Do you have any health conditions?”
“Forty-one weeks,” the husband answered. “And she’s diabetic.”
“Diabetic?” Jaypa stopped and placed his hands on the taut risen skin of the woman’s stomach. He pushed, assessed. “Macrosomia,” he said to Renee. “We need a C-section.”
Renee picked up the receiver on the wall to call upstairs to surgery.
The woman began to cry. “Don’t let them take me,” she said to her husband. “Don’t leave me.”
“I’ll stay with you,” he answered.
“Don’t let them take me—” The woman inhaled sharply as another contraction hit.
“I’ll find you,” the man said, stroking his wife’s hair. “I’ll always find you.”
Renee was on hold when he said this. She felt the receiver knock against her ear and realized that her hand was shaking.
“Hello? Hello?” said a nurse on the other line. “We’ve got a room, you can bring her up. Hello?”
*
I’ll always find you.
Renee never knew his name, she never saw him again after that night, but for many years she thought every day about the man in the car. Every quickening of her heart as she walked along a dark street; every surge of fearful adrenaline; every hiccup of tension or worry when she found herself alone with a strange man for however brief a time—on an elevator, in a waiting room, walking in opposite directions along a quiet sidewalk. All of this, her acute awareness of everyday vulnerability, she blamed on the man in the car.
That long-ago night, Renee stepped off the school bus and there it was, a car she’d seen before. Brown two-door, long and low to the ground, its hood shaped like the snout of a fox. She didn’t know about cars, couldn’t say what make it was, but the shape was distinctive enough that she remembered it from the week before, and possibly the week before that. When had Renee first seen the brown car waiting by the school bus? She couldn’t say exactly. It hadn’t seemed important.
The bus lights blinked ruby red in the early-evening dark. It was a few days into November, a week past Halloween. Fallen leaves dull in their colors lined the sidewalks in sodden drifts and clogged the sunken runoff grates. The trees were stark, empty birds’ nests stuck like clots in the veined webs of branches.
From the school bus, a creaky metal arm extended into the opposite lane, but cars kept right on going.
“You gotta stop, it’s the law,” the driver called weakly out the window.
Renee waved good-bye to Missy and Katie and Theresa, each of them hurtling off onto different streets toward home, shoulders pulled forward with their backpacks. Missy with her flute case knocking against a hip.
Renee, alone on the sidewalk as the bus pulled away. Across the street, the car. Lights off, but Renee saw a figure in the driver’s seat. A male silhouette. One elbow out the window. Sunglasses, despite the dark. She noticed the man, but she was not afraid, not at first. This was year three of the Pause. Renee was too busy to be afraid. Track practice, homework, Joe’s baseball, cooking dinners, running baths, washing dishes and clothes. Any childhood fears had been so fully realized—darkness, death, solitude—that she saw them now almost as comforts. Obstacles she had surmounted. Fears converted to routine.
Renee began walking fast, she always walked fast, thinking of the frozen pizza she would put in the oven for dinner—or had they eaten that on Monday? She recalled also a box of mac and cheese, an orange the color of a highway worker’s vest. She was hungry. She picked up the pace.
It was then she heard his voice.
“Hey, baby. I’ve seen you before.”
The car was there, right beside her, inching along the road. His voice was not threatening, not loud. He spoke so faintly she almost didn’t make out the words. She looked ahead: No one on the sidewalk. No cars passing. It was dinnertime. Lights blazed in the windows of every house she passed. Each one its own private universe.
Renee turned her head and smiled—why did she smile? Smile at the nice man. It was an instinct, a directive from childhood, and she regretted it as soon as she felt her lips split.