I put on my left blinker and, seeing a small opening in front of an SUV, raced across the lane of cars. I pulled into a parking space and Jeffrey got out.
“Wait here,” he said. “I’ll be back in a minute.” He went into the Milk-n-Bread.
Nolan clicked the radio on and immediately started fiddling with the dial. “He shouldn’t have given you such a hard time back at the restaurant,” he said, settling on a Van Morrison song.
“It’s his money. He can decide what to do with it.”
“Bullshit. He’s just being negative. I love him, Will, you know that. But he can be such a downer sometimes.”
Maybe so, but Nolan’s observation was based on incomplete information. He didn’t know about Jeffrey’s marital problems, and it wasn’t my place to tell him. And so with Jeffrey inside the Milk-n-Bread changing all of our lives forever, Nolan and I sat in the car quietly and listened to the radio, while the drizzle turned to the kind of soupy rain that was good for vegetable gardens but bad for golf. The forecast was turning out to be wrong, and I hoped that our round tomorrow wouldn’t get rained out.
A white-haired woman left the store using a magazine for an umbrella. She hurried to her car and drove away.
The song ended. Another began. Daylight savings wasn’t for another week, and now that the sun had set night was coming on quickly.
When the next song ended, Nolan unbuckled his seat belt. “Oh, hell,” he said, “I’ll go and see what—”
Just then the door to the store swung open and Jeffrey came outside. But not alone. He was holding on to the arm of a young woman who was wearing the tan pants and red shirt of a Milk-n-Bread employee. They hurried toward us as if she were a young movie star and he her bodyguard, helping her quickly past the paparazzi.
Jeffrey opened the back door and half guided, half pushed her into the car. He climbed in beside her and yanked the door shut. And before I could ask a single thing, he shouted: “Drive!”
That one word, and my mouth went completely dry. All I could imagine was that the cashier had been injured. Another young woman was going to die, and I was about to watch it happen. It felt, suddenly, preordained, as if my life these past three years had been nothing but limbo, a long wait for this exact moment.
“Hurry up, Will! Go!”
“What’s wrong with her?” I managed to ask. “What is it?”
“Just fucking drive!”
What do you do when your longtime friend tells you to drive? You drive. So I did. I fucking drove, stamping on the gas, gunning the car out of the parking lot, and hanging a right onto Lincoln Avenue.
My heart raced, but unlike Jeffrey I wasn’t panicking: I knew exactly where I was going. Ever since Gwen’s death, it’d become a compulsion of mine always to know how to get to the nearest hospital. My house was 5.8 miles from Mountainside. The recording studio was 3.5 miles from Valley Regional. Wherever I was, whatever I was doing, some part of my mind was always quietly mapping routes.
We needed to go six miles—fortunately to the east, where the lane was all clear. I sped up and checked the rearview mirror. The young cashier looked left and right, eyes wide. She was either breathing quickly or shivering. It was dark in the car. Was she bleeding?
“What happened to her?” I asked.
No response.
“Jeffrey!”
“Just keep driving.” His voice quavered.
“I can have us at Mountainside Hospital in ten minutes,” I said.
“Hospital?” Jeffrey said. “Why there?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Forget it. Go somewhere else.”
Now I was utterly confused. “Go where?”
We were at least a mile down the road, leaving Newfield now, passing storefronts and a supermarket and a car dealership. Another driver might have sized up the situation differently, maybe more accurately, but all we had was me behind the wheel. Only me, with my particular history and my refusal ever again to wait around impotently for an ambulance to arrive. It simply hadn’t occurred to me, yet, that this could be anything other than a second chance for me to save a young woman’s life.
The oncoming lane was at a standstill, but we were flying. I sped through the next intersection toward Mountainside Hospital and waited for answers as the road widened to four lanes.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Nolan said, his voice louder than before. “Will somebody explain what the fuck’s going on? Honey, take a deep breath and tell me what’s the matter.”
“Really?” The girl looked at me, then Nolan. Maybe she saw the bafflement in our faces. “He just—” She took a deep breath, and another. Jeffrey was looking down at his lap. “He just—” But then she began to hyperventilate and couldn’t get out another word.
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