Destined (36 page)

“Or, we could have been live on TV
when it happened,” she pointed out.

I looked around for the cameraman, who
was shooting the men who were working on the utility pole. Steve Mason walked
back over to where we were standing.

“That was great!” he crowed, very
excited. “We just did a breaking news segment, and we’ll have really good
footage for the eleven o’clock news!”

“We’re so happy for you,” I said
glumly. “But that pretty much does it for us today, wouldn’t you say?”

He looked startled, then a bit
abashed.

“Yeah, well, sorry about that,” he
said. “But you’ll be up and running again by tomorrow, right? For the last day
of the sales?”

Sarah nodded confidently. Hooking her
arm through his, she led him over to watch the men working behind the tent,
talking in his ear nonstop all the way. An ambulance had appeared along with
the other emergency services vehicles, and now it let out a little hoot from
its siren and pulled slowly out of the intersection, swinging back into the
alley behind our building to turn around. I said goodbye to Josie and dragged
myself back across the street, in dire need of a towel and some dry clothes.

Our sale tables were standing
unattended, dripping onto the sidewalk. I climbed the stairs and went inside.
The shop was empty, and I wondered where everyone was. Then I heard voices from
the back hallway, and went through the showroom to see what was going on. Tony
was standing on the back porch, and Siri, Bella and Amy were outside, watching
the ambulance pull out of the alley. They all looked upset.

“What’s up?” I asked, coming up behind
Tony.

He turned and put his arms around me.

“It’s Henry,” he said, very tense. “He
collapsed. Lexi’s friend said it looked like a heart attack. They just took him
to the emergency room! I’m going now. Will you come?”

I nodded, shocked and a little dazed,
and I looked at Siri.

“You go, Emily, we’ll take care of
things here,” she said quietly, and Bella nodded.

“Just a second,” I said, and ran
inside to grab my purse and a couple of kitchen towels. When I got back
outside, Tony had pulled his car out of the parking space and was waiting for
me to get in, the engine running. I spread out one towel and sat on it, using
the other one to dry my arms and legs, and rubbing my wet hair. I shivered and
looked over at Tony’s face, tense and concerned. I had a feeling it was going
to be a long, hard night.

I quite simply
could not picture my world without Henry Paradis in it. I couldn’t, and I
didn’t want to, so I wouldn’t. I deliberately turned my thoughts to a world
with Henry looming large within it, calling up his vivid presence in my mind. I
held the image there like the seed of a dream as we drove to the hospital in
silence, afraid to discover what would happen next.

Description:
 
A woman kneels next to a pool, with one
foot in the water and the other on shore. She is perfectly balanced between the
conscious and the subconscious worlds.

Meaning:
 
Hope, optimism. Firm belief in the
inherently positive nature of life, the glass half-f.

When we walked into the emergency room entrance, Lexi was
waiting for us at the door. Her doctor boyfriend, Michael Sheehan, was nowhere
in sight. I hoped that the neurosurgeon from Boston had been able to cut
through the hospital protocol and would help us find out what was going on.

“I’m so glad you and Michael were
there when it happened!” I said, accepting a warm hug from Lexi. Now the tables
had turned, and she was actually comforting me! It was strange.

Tony went straight over to the window
where a nurse sat behind a desk, and spoke to her. I asked Lexi what she knew.
She said Michael had been allowed to go inside when they wheeled Henry into the
triage area, but she hadn’t seen him since. She’d been sitting in the waiting
room, where about half of the chairs were occupied by people with glazed eyes,
who had apparently been there for quite some time.

“They’re asking for insurance
information,” Tony called to me, with an irritated, impatient tone. “Do you
know anything about that?”

 
“It must be Health New England, the same kind as mine. We
work together,” I told the nurse. “I don’t know what his number is though. I
can get any information you need from the files at the office, tomorrow.” She
thanked me, saying she would give the insurance company a call. Tony went
inside the little office to help her fill out the papers.

We sat down and we waited. And waited.
A hell of a long time. It was the worst kind of soul deadening, physically
excruciating, completely maddening emotional torture I had ever experienced.
The waiting room was surrounded on three sides by big plate glass windows that
held back the matte black night, and the fishbowl space inside was lit by
greenish yellow fluorescent lights. One of the bulbs flickered slightly in a
subtle, nauseating staccato rhythm. We sat in hard orange molded plastic chairs
on a gray linoleum floor, slippery and unyielding. A TV chattered on and on and
on from the corner of the ceiling, where it was mounted on a metal bracket.
Presumably this was to put it out of the reach of any crazed detainees like me
who might want to turn it off, or smash it with something, or rip it down from
the wall and throw it out the window.

I fantasized killing the TV as I slid
around in my uncomfortable seat, my damp skirt squeaking a little. I reached up
and touched my hair, surprised to find that it was still wet too. I looked down
at my bare legs and sandaled feet. There was black grit from the puddles on
Market Street between my toes. It seemed poetic. I felt a tiny bit better. But
then the air conditioning came on again with a huge gust of frigid
antiseptic-scented air, and I started to shiver uncontrollably.

Lexi looked at me with concern.

“You’re soaking wet! You must be
freezing in here!”

I nodded, my teeth chattering. Tony
put his warm arm around my shoulders and hugged me, rubbing my upper arms
briskly. “I’ve got a jacket in the trunk of my car, I’ll go and get it,” he
said, glad to have a mission. He stepped out of the fishbowl door and
disappeared into the opaque blackness. Lexi went over and spoke to the nurse,
pointing at me. The irritating flutter of that bad fluorescent bulb was giving
me a migraine. A needle of pain suddenly shot from the back of my left eye
through my left temple and down my neck into my left shoulder. My vision
blurred on the edges for a moment. Lexi came back with a clean white hospital
towel, which she put around my shoulders, and I clutched it with both hands.

 
Reaching up to unfasten my hair clip, Lexi looked at my
unfocussed expression with alarm, and said sharply, “Emily! Are you going to
pass out on me? What’s going on, Emily?” She waved her hand in front of my eyes
and grabbed my shoulder.

“It’s just a migraine. I’m OK.”

“You sure? No passing out?”

“Thank you, Lexi,” I said, as she sat
closer to me and used the towel to dry my hair. I could have done it myself,
but I let her do it. I think she needed to help.

Tony came back with his workout jacket
and I put it on, gratefully. Lexi loaned me a comb and I got it through my hair
with some difficulty, making a quick trip to the ladies’ room to clean up the
rest of me, as well as I could. Meanwhile, my left eye pulsed painfully with
every step I took, every motion I made. I felt disconnected, like I was
floating. When I walked back to the waiting room, my feet stepped very
carefully across the cold, slick floor, somehow doing this all by themselves. I
sat down again between Tony and Lexi, my two pillars of support. They held me
sitting upright with their warm adjacent shoulders, between which I drooped,
listening now only to the drum-throb-hurt-burn-dizzy-nausea sound of my heart
and head, beating together in unison.

Henry, I was so worried about Henry.
Henry, Henry. His image flashed before me. His face pulsed along with my blood,
on-off, on-off. I saw him the way he looked the first time we met, when he
opened the door to my knock. I saw him sitting under the umbrella at the
sidewalk sale, in his wild outfit and sunglasses. A deep well of pain swelled
up from my tense anxious belly and burned its way up the left side of my back,
into my left shoulder, and on up to my temple where it met the answering throb
of my left eye socket. I swayed a little in my seat when it blossomed into
burning sparkles and took my breath away, closing my eyes and leaning against
Tony. He reached over and took my hand, holding it loosely. I zoned out again,
riding the next wave of pain down a dark tunnel into a very, very deep place in
my mind, a still and quiet place. This was my mental air raid shelter, a place
where I could ride out nearly anything. I was surprised to see Henry standing
there. He looked confused.

“Not feeling well?” he asked by
thinking it at me. “You look terrible!”

I nodded my head in confirmation. The
pain seemed duller and more distant now.

“How about you?” I asked mentally,
unable to move or speak. We floated in a sort of gray misty place, where we
both flickered in and out.

“I’m not sure,” he thought back at me.
“Did something happen?”

“Yes,” I nodded mentally. “You need to
come back, Henry. You need to stay with us.”

He looked confused again. “Really?” he
thought doubtfully, frowning and stroking his mustache.

I nodded very earnestly, thinking it
at him hard, but the imaginary motion set off another big wave of pain and
nausea, and I swayed again and felt Tony squeezing my hand. I opened my eyes
and he kissed me on the cheek.

The swinging doors that led into the
hospital opened, and Lexi’s boyfriend Michael strode through them
energetically. He spotted us and headed our way. We all stood up to meet him.

“They’re taking him up to Intensive
Care right now,” Michael said, professional and sharp. “He definitely had a
heart attack. He’s going to be fine. We got him here in very good time, and
he’s being medicated. They’re doing several tests. This will mean some changes
in his lifestyle from now on.”

He looked at Tony and me appraisingly.

“Does he have any family?” he asked
us.

We looked at each other and I
shrugged, not really knowing the answer.

“I think he may still have a brother
alive somewhere,” Tony said, “But aside from that, we’re his family.”

“Does he live alone?”

“He lives over the store,” I said. “We’re
there nearly every day, but not at night.”

“He may have to spend some time in
rehab then. He won’t be able to handle stairs for a while. And he’s going to
need follow-up health care. Someone will have to be there with him. He’s in
pretty good shape for his age, but he may not bounce right back.” He spoke
frankly, seriously.

“We’ll take care of him,” Tony said,
determined. “He’ll bounce back faster in his own home. We can work it out.” He
looked at me confidently and I smiled in agreement, still feeling woozy and
sick, but extremely relieved.

Lexi told Michael I was having a
migraine and he spoke to the nurse behind the window for a moment, scribbling
something on a pad of paper. She came out in a few minutes with a pink tablet
in a foil wrapper, and I swallowed it with some water from the drinking
fountain. Michael said that Tony and I had permission to see Henry for just a
second, but cautioned us that he was extremely groggy and might be asleep. Lexi
stayed in the waiting room while Michael led us inside the swinging doors.