The Queen of Hearts(93)

“Please say something,” Emma said.

I said nothing.

“Zadie,” she said, so plaintively I was almost disarmed. “I want you to know how ashamed I am. I am so sorry.”

“Why didn’t you ever tell me? How did you keep this secret all these years?”

She shifted her teary gaze upward, as if the answer were written on the ceiling. “I did try to tell you.”

“When?”

“Do you remember our psychiatry rotation?”

Immediately I knew what she was referencing: a bizarre morning in schizophrenic group, a month or two after Nick and I had broken up.

I had found Emma hunched over a sink in the hideous schizophrenic ward bathroom, the olive-tiled walls echoing with her attempts to control her breathing. Without knowing I was going to do it, I flung my arms around her. “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay,” I murmured, holding my friend’s shaking thin shoulders. And then, bewildered by the intensity of her grief: “Is it Graham?”

She looked at me and shook her head. “It’s you,” she said.

By then I was even more confused, but I rallied enough to point out the obvious. “I’m not dead, Emma.”

“I’m lost,” she said, her body racked by a fresh wave of sobs as she twisted away from me.

“You’re not lost. You’re right here,” I said idiotically, adding, “Do you want me to get Dr. Young?”

Emma stopped crying long enough to manage a side-eyed “No.”

“Well, uh . . .” I fluttered my hands until I couldn’t take it anymore. I’d never seen her cry, not even when Graham died. “Emma, please tell me what’s wrong. This has to be about Graham.”

Emma seized my words, gobbling them greedily from the air. “Graham,” she said. “He died because of me. We were breaking up. We—” She began pacing around, her eyes alight with a weird, quick intensity. “We . . . I mean, I . . . I—”

A flash of insight struck me. “Emma,” I interrupted, “I am not just saying this because we’re on a psychiatry rotation surrounded by a bunch of bipolar people. But is it possible you’re having some kind of manic-depressive episode?”

She stared at me and then began to laugh, a sound that could only be described as a humorless cackle. “Yes, I probably am. But what does that change?”

“It changes a lot,” I shouted, energized and relieved to have an explanation of sorts. “We’re surrounded by mental health professionals. We’re standing in a psychiatric hospital. This is the ideal place to lose your mind!”

Her wild breathing calmed, and this time her laugh had a tinge of the genuine. She unbuttoned the top button of her shirt, fanning air toward her face and throat. When distressed, Emma was unable to thermoregulate: her tomato-hued skin always gave her away. She undid another button. “Ah, Zadie,” she said. “If only—” She stopped, sucking her words back into her throat at the look on my face. “What is it?”

“Where did you get that shirt?” I asked, moving closer to inspect it. I could see the upper edge of its design beneath her button-down: the arcing curve of a hostile cartoon bird. The Baltimore Ravens.

She looked down, her lower lip falling open almost comically.

“It was in the laundry,” she said. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have grabbed it.”

I blinked, embarrassed at my reaction to a stupid T-shirt. Nick loved that shirt and wore it often. I didn’t remember him leaving it at my house—we usually met at his place—but he must have.

“Keep it,” I said.

She buttoned her shirt back up, the flames at her throat extending to her face. “There’s something I should tell you about Nick,” she said. “And me.”

“I don’t want to hear anything else about Nick,” I said. “He sucks, and I shouldn’t think about him.”

“Are you sure? Because he—”

“I’m sure!” If Nick had hit on Emma, too, I didn’t want to hear about it.

“Okay,” she said quickly—too quickly—adding: “But if you ever do want to hear about it, just tell me.”

“I won’t,” I said. “I’m never thinking about him again.”

—

“That doesn’t count!” I said now. “I didn’t know what you were going to tell me.”

“You’re right,” she said. “But that was my lame excuse to myself—you didn’t want to know, and I didn’t want to hurt you more than I already had.”

“You took stuff of his,” I said. “From his house.”

Emma nodded: a terse, efficient jerk of her chin. “A few things he wore,” she said. “I left things of mine at his house too, usually in his drawers, under other clothes, so he wouldn’t find them right away. I guess I hoped you’d see them.”

I groaned.

“He had a drawer . . . where he stashed Zadie stuff,” Emma said. “Notes you’d written him. A couple candles. The page from the residency directory with your picture on it.”

I yelped and waved my hands to shut her up. Despite the circumstances, I was beset by a brief flash of wonder. It’s one thing to contemplate the infinite possibilities you didn’t choose, but quite another to have had the choice wrested away without your knowledge. Nick and I had never had a chance. For a moment I drifted in an alternate universe: another husband; different children; shadowy cities and homes and friends I’d never experience. It was too mind-boggling to take in. I stared at Emma.