her hair; she shook her head again, buried her face in a cushion. “Pumpkin.”
Ed placed his hand on hers. She swatted it away.
He looked at me, helpless.
A child is crying in your office. What do you do? First pediatric psych course, first day, first ten minutes. Answer: You let them cry it out. You listen, of course, and you seek to understand, and you offer consolation, and you encourage them to breathe deeply—but you let them cry it out.
“Take a breath, pumpkin,” I murmured, cupping her scalp in my palm.
She choked, spluttered.
A moment drifted past. The room felt cold; the flames shivered in the fireplace behind me. Then she spoke into the cushion.
“What?” Ed asked.
Lifting her head, her cheeks smeared, Olivia addressed the window. “I want to go home.”
I watched her face, her quaking lip, her streaming nose; and then I watched Ed, the creases in his forehead, the hollows beneath his eyes.
Did I do this to us?
Snow beyond the window. I watched it fall, saw the three of us collected in the glass: my husband and my daughter and me, huddled by the fire together.
A brief silence.
I stood, walked over to the desk. Marie looked up and shaped her lips into a tight smile. I smiled back.
“The storm,” I began.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Is it . . . how close is it? Is it safe to drive?”
She frowned, rattled her fingers over her keyboard. “Heavy snowfall isn’t due for another couple of hours,” she said. “But—”
“Then could we—” I interrupted her. “Sorry.”
“I was just saying that winter storms are tough to predict.” She glanced over my shoulder. “Are you folks wanting to leave?”
I turned, looked at Olivia in the armchair, Ed crouching beside her. “I think we are.”
“In that case,” said Marie, “I’d say now’s the time to go.”
I nodded. “Could we get the bill, please?”
She said something in reply, but all I heard was the skirling wind, the crackle of flames.
36
The crackle of an overstarched pillowcase.
Footfalls nearby.
Then quiet—but a strange quiet, a different quality of quiet.
My eyes spring open.
I’m on my side, looking at a radiator.
And above the radiator, a window.
And outside the window, brickwork, the zigzag of a fire escape, the boxy rumps of AC units.
Another building.
I’m in a twin bed, sheathed in tucked-tight sheets. I twist, sit up.
I back into the pillow, telescope the room. It’s small, plainly furnished—barely furnished, really: a plastic chair against one wall, a walnut table beside the bed, a pale-pink tissue box on the table. A table lamp. A slim vase, empty. Dull linoleum floor. A door across from me, closed, frosted panel. Overhead, a quilt of stucco and fluorescents—
My fingers crumple the bedding.
Now it begins.
The far wall slides away, receding; the door within it shrinks. I look to the walls on either side of me, watch them ebb from each other. The ceiling shudders, creaks, peels off like a sardine tin, like a roof rent by a hurricane. The air goes with it, whipping from my lungs. The floor rumbles. The bed trembles.
Here I lie, on this heaving mattress, in this scalped room, with nothing to breathe. I’m drowning in the bed, dying in the bed.
“Help,” I shout, only it’s a whisper, creeping through my throat on tiptoe, smearing itself across my tongue. “He-elp,” I try again; this time my teeth bite into it, sparks raining from my mouth as though I’ve chewed a live wire, and my voice catches like a fuse, explodes.
I scream.
I hear voices rumble, watch as a scrimmage of shadows crowds through that distant door, lunges toward me, bounding in impossible strides across the endless, endless room.
I scream again. The shadows scatter in a flock, flare around my bed.
“Help,” I plead, with the last gasp of air in my body.
Then a needle slips into my arm. It’s deftly done—I hardly feel a thing.
A wave rolls above me, soundless and smooth. I’m floating, suspended, in some radiant abyss, deep, cool. Words dart around me like fish.
“Coming back now,” someone murmurs.
“. . . stable,” says someone else.
And then, clearly, as though I’ve just surfaced, just drained water from my ear: “Just in time.”
I swivel my head. It bobs lazily against the pillow.
“I was about to leave.”
Now I see him, or most of him—it takes me a moment to scan him from one side to the other, because I’m high on drugs (I know enough to know that) and because he’s holy-shit vast, a mountain of a man: blue-black skin, boulder shoulders, a broad range of chest, a scrub of thick dark