She’d been so blindsided and stricken that she’d fallen ill, spiking a fever that lasted for days. James took time off work. Sometimes she woke and heard him down the hall in his office. The filing-cabinet drawers slid open and closed. She had a feverish dream about him stuffing a woman in the filing cabinet, putting her in ass-first and folding up her legs and then closing the door tight so that only a few locks of hair hung over the cabinet’s sides. Sometimes she woke and he was sitting next to her, a look of remorse and concern on his face. I’m sorry, he kept mouthing.
When her fever broke, they went out to dinner. He slid a velvet box across the table. It was from a different jeweler, a better one.
“No,” she said when she gazed upon the canary-yellow diamond ring. “I can’t take this.”
“I just want to show you how I feel about you,” he said. “I just want you to know.”
In the end, she accepted it. Maybe she shouldn’t have—it implied that she forgave him. It meant she wouldn’t bring it up again. But she felt too breathless to fight. She wanted it to be over, forgotten, and maybe she could forget. So she took the ring and slid it on her finger and pretended it was simply a gift, something without subtext.
That was in September. Six months later, in February, James didn’t check in from work at 6 p.m. as usual. Sylvie had been annoyed. Was he ignoring her because she’d brought up the affair again the previous night? Was he punishing her? It wasn’t funny.
The minutes ticked by. Maybe what she’d said the night before had been a turning point, shoving him over the edge. Maybe he no longer cared about holding things together. Who was he with right now? What was he doing? Her heart pounded. She tried to picture him places. She called his cell phone again and again, but there was no answer. The more time passed, the more her panic spiraled. He was out with someone, doing something floridly awful. All of the feelings she’d tried to contain were urgently present. I thought you said you’d let that go, James had said to her at the party the night before. But of course she couldn’t let it go. How could he not understand that? How could he just brush it off? It altered the whole landscape of her life.
When the phone finally rang, the reality of the situation caught her off guard. A cleaning woman in his office had found James collapsed on the executive bathroom floor. He didn’t have his ID on him, and because it was after hours no one knew who he was. Luckily, a doctor in the ER was a friend and had recognized him; he’d sent a nurse to call Sylvie.
At first, she thought it was part of the ruse. Her mind was so fixed in one direction that it was hard to switch gears. She couldn’t turn from scorned rage to … to this. To panic. Concern. Fear for his life. She kept saying to the nurse, “I’m sorry, what?” The nurse had had to repeat what had happened three times, maybe four, before she started to understand.
They’d all rushed to the hospital to be with him. They had to sit in the ER waiting room for the first few hours. Even though it was the middle of the night, the waiting room was crowded, full of screaming babies and sallow-skinned old people and a shoeless, sour-smelling man. Charles sat next to Sylvie, his back straight, his hands folded in his lap. Joanna picked at a loose thread on her sweater until she’d unraveled almost an entire row. Scott slid a pair of padded headphones over his ears and bounced silently to what he called music.
At one point, Scott removed his headphones and asked Sylvie if he could borrow her cell phone. His battery had died, and he wanted to call a friend to see if they were still meeting up tomorrow. Sylvie stared at him. He’d left the music on; she heard a pounding bass through the headphones, someone’s voice pattering tonelessly. Could he really think that far ahead? Could he really worry about something as trivial as a social obligation he had to keep? Was this the kind of kid she’d raised, someone who thought his ailing father was an inconvenience? James had bent over backward to be a good father to Scott. He was still bending over backward, even though Scott barely noticed. And this was what he got for it?
Scott noted her look of disgust and raised his hands in surrender. “Jesus. Forget it.”
Sylvie couldn’t stand to be next to him for one more minute. She stood up, straightened her skirt, and stormed to the vending machine area. She sat in a phone kiosk, picked up the receiver, and listened to the dial tone clang in her ear. She felt like yelling at the operator when she interrupted, demanding that Sylvie insert fifty cents.
Finally, a doctor came and retrieved Sylvie. James had collapsed because of an artery leading to his brain, he explained. The artery had been widening over time, and it had burst. He’d had an aneurysm and was now bleeding quite severely.
They were going to treat the aneurysm by feeding a catheter into a blood vessel in James’s groin, slowly pushing it through the aorta, up into the brain’s main artery, and creating a clot. They were going to excavate him. They were going to dig a trench.
“Isn’t there an easier way?” she asked, mortified. The doctor shook his head and told her that he and his team had talked and evaluated, and this was their best shot at saving him. He handed her a consent form for the surgery. “It’s in your hands,” he said.