The Queen of Hearts(49)

“Oh dear,” Hannah murmured. “Is it really bad tonight?”

“Is what really bad? Who wants a wee dram?”

“Me! Me!”

“Oh, why does James live in this really confusing neighborhood?” wailed Hannah. “Is this where I turn?”

“Hannah! Watch out!”

We all shrieked as the Hog abruptly wheeled down a side alley, narrowly avoiding a head-on collision with a truck, which screeched to a stop next to us. The window creaked down and an angry man stuck his head out.

“What in the Sam Hill is wrong with you, missy?” he barked. “You nearly hit me!”

“I’m so sorry. I didn’t see—” Hannah started. She was interrupted by Rolfe from the front seat, who was raising and lowering both arms in a Settle down. I’ve got this gesture.

“Sorry about that, Bald Truck Dude,” he began.

“Say what?” sputtered Bald Truck Dude, who did not appear to appreciate his new moniker.

“Perhaps if your farm vehicle were a brighter color. Oh my. Are those overalls?”

The man was now opening the truck door, gripping something in his right hand.

“Go, go, go, Hannah,” Georgia screamed. In one fluid motion, Hannah threw the car into first and gunned it, burning rubber down the alley behind James’s apartment in Cherokee Park.

“Roffff. Were you trying to get us killed? That guy weigh two-fiddy and had tire iron,” Landley slurred.

“Whew,” Hannah said shakily. “Has anybody ever wondered who Sam Hill was, anyway?”

Rolfe: “There were several famous Sam Hills. An early-nineteenth-century businessman whose establishments carried a wide array of odd inventory; a road builder in the Pacific Northwest who was thought to represent impossible projects; and my fav, Samuel Ewing Hill, an emissary of the governor of Kentucky, who was sent to intervene with the Hatfields and McCoys in 1887.”

Dead silence.

Then, from Georgia: “What the hell, Rolfe? Did you just eat an encyclopedia?”

“My IQ is stratospheric. Please try to keep up.”

“Your IQ is about the same as your penis circumference, jackass.”

“Exactly.” Rolfe smirked. “Thank you for acknowledging that, Georgia. Oh, here it is, Hannah.”

We wandered in. The party appeared to be full-blast, which is to say the guests ran the gamut from sweet and well-dressed wives who would fit in nicely at a Wednesday evening Bible study, to a bunch of barbaric drunks. The med student wives were clustered in the Sober Kitchen, having an occasional sip of white wine, blond coifs gleaming. The drunks were scattered, but we located a conglomeration of them outside near the keg.

The party took place in a rambling old townhome from the early part of the nineteenth century, with soaring ceilings and ornate crown moldings, along with unusable, drafty fireplaces and Stone Age plumbing. With extensive renovation it could have been spectacular, but as it was, it languished in a row of ghettoized student housing. Nearly every house on the street sported crumbling trim and rickety back fire escapes, along with the requisite bedsheets in the windows—the universal denotation of student decorating budgets.

Ignoring the revelry, I plunked myself down on a hideous purple futon just off the kitchen, wrapping my arms around my knees. Suddenly my head felt unbearably heavy, the gargantuan weight of my thoughts squashing my neck straight down into my chest. I moaned a little and toppled onto my side.

“Whoa, Zadie! How wasted are you?” I felt the impact of a large body crashing down next to mine.

“I’m not drunk,” I protested feebly.

“Yeah, well, you look like you’re trying to cling to that couch to keep from falling off the earth.”

Blearily, I opened one eye: Graham. He wore a flannel button-down and cargo shorts, and his wavy brown hair was rumpled endearingly. His cheeks were flushed.

“I am very drunk,” he said happily.

“Yes,” I agreed. “You are.”

“Yes.”

I waited, but nothing more came. Since the conversation appeared to have stalled, I closed my eyes and returned to my pit of misery. All the endorphins generated at Nick’s apartment a couple days ago had fled, leaving me stuck in an endless feedback loop of the bad thought. I kept replaying it in my mind: I’d messed up. I’d done something very bad, something catastrophic, and I couldn’t undo it. I moaned again.

“Zadie? Zadie? You okay?”

This time I opened both eyes, to find Graham’s face an inch or two from mine, his brow furrowed in alarm. Gently, he hooked his arms under my armpits and heaved me into a sitting position. One of his hands wiggled out from my armpit and began patting my back in a rhythmic thump. The thumping was a little too vigorous, but also nice, like I was a baby or something. I hiccupped.

“Is it bad?” His voice was soft. “Whatever’s bothering you?”

“Oh,” I said. I hiccupped again, which then turned into a full-blown sob. I covered my face.

“It’s okay. It’s okay,” he said. “Shhh, Zadie, it’s going to be okay. Do you want to talk about it?”

It came flooding back: the knifelike awareness that had struck me as Edict’s intubation had changed from exciting to terrible. One minute, I was blithe and confident; the next minute, a rush of shame and fear engulfed me in a clanging drumbeat. Don’t keep trying for longer than you can hold your own breath, Nick told me. Without the tube to breathe for her, she would suffocate to death in a matter of moments. I’d felt my lungs screaming for air and still all I could see was a featureless landscape of homogenous pink in her airway; there was no sign of the vertically slanted whitish vocal cords, which were the structures I had to locate in order to get the tube into her trachea. Nick had taken over as soon as it was clear that disaster loomed, and we bagged her, but her oxygen levels had not risen. After an eternal agony of time, Nick had managed to get her reintubated. But by then crucial minutes had passed without oxygen.