“Fuck,” Nicholas said. He knew it too. “Go into her bathroom. Grab any pill bottles you find in the medicine cabinet and then come back here.”
The bathroom was next door, and behind the mirror I found a half a dozen prescription bottles. I grabbed all of them with unsteady hands and shoved them into the pockets of my jeans. There was no way to know which she had taken. In the next room I could hear Nicholas saying Lex’s name, trying to get her up.
When I came back in, he had her sitting up, all of her weight flopped forward on his shoulders.
“I can’t get her up,” he said.
“We’ll carry her,” I said.
Together we got Lex to her feet. She wasn’t totally unconscious, but she wasn’t exactly awake, either, and she did little more than hang limply between us as we carried her out to the car. I sat in the back with her as Nicholas got into the driver’s seat.
“Should we call an ambulance?” I said.
He shook his head and gunned the car to life. “This will be faster. Tell me if she stops breathing.”
I shook Lex whenever she started to drift off. “Stay awake!”
In the front seat Nicholas honked at a slow moving car in front of us and cursed when we hit a red light.
“Look at me, Lex,” I said, slapping her cheek just hard enough to focus her. “Keep your fucking eyes open!”
When we reached the emergency room, Nicholas ran inside and came back out with an orderly and a nurse with a wheelchair, who took Lex away. I gave the medications I’d found in her bathroom to another nurse and told them we didn’t know what she’d taken. Then Nicholas and I went to the waiting room and took seats in the plastic chairs against the wall. He called Jessica and told her what had happened, while I called Patrick and left him another voice mail. After we’d both hung up, we just sat there in silence for a long time as the last of the adrenaline burned out of our systems.
“This isn’t the first time, you know,” he finally said. Unnecessary, since his response to the situation was clearly one of familiarity. “Probably no one’s told you this yet, but Lex and pills go way back.”
“Yeah?” I said.
He nodded, staring off into the middle distance. “I guess it started around the time her dad died. But things got really bad after . . .”
“After me,” I said. “I really ruined everything, didn’t I?”
“Not you,” he said. “The animals who took you.”
We were both silent for a minute. I kept seeing Lex’s eyes, unfocused and unseeing. I felt shaky and hollow. What would I do if she died? What would any of us do?
“She OD’d in college,” Nicholas continued after a long pause. “Patrick found her half-dead, and she was unconscious for two days. She went to rehab and relapsed a couple of times, but she’s been sober for almost two years now. At least we thought she was.”
Why now? The question hung in the air between us like the antiseptic smell of rubbing alcohol, thick and sharp. Patrick and I had spent the entire day being questioned by the FBI, and Lex had thrown back a fistful of pills with a half a bottle of wine. I wondered if the connection was as clear to Nicholas as it was to me.
The numb, impassive look on his face was starting to crumble. His lips thinned into two straight lines and his brow furrowed as he tried to hold it in, but he couldn’t. He rested his face in his hands and started to cry.
“Hey . . .” I leaned closer to him. “Hey, it’s okay . . .”
“It’s just first Mom went off the deep end, then Dad got put away, and Patrick became this total stranger,” he said, his voice muffled, “so if something happens to Lex . . .”
“She’s going to be okay.” I didn’t know what to do. Should I hug him? I wasn’t good with things like this.
“This fucking family,” he said. “Who’s going to look out for Mia? I’m going to be trapped here with these fucking people just as I was about to get out.”
I finally put a hand on his back. He tensed beneath the touch at first, but slowly I felt his muscles begin to relax.
“It’s going to be okay. Lex will be fine.” She had to be. “And so will Mia and so will all of us.”
Slowly, then all at once, Nicholas turned and put his arms around me. His hands fisted into the back of my shirt.
“We’ll get through this,” I said, finding the words I wished someone had said to me once. “You’re not alone, okay?”
“Thanks, Danny,” he said, and it sounded so strange that I wondered if it was the first time he’d ever called me by name.
? ? ?
I swiped Nicholas’s phone when he went to the restroom to wash his face and texted Asher, asking him to come. He arrived less than an hour later, so he must have redlined it. He rushed right up to us, pulled Nicholas out of his chair, and threw his arms around him.
“Oh my God, hon, how is she?” he said. “How are you?”
Nicholas’s initial look of bewilderment changed to one that looked like a mixture of pain and relief.
“They told us she’s stable, but that’s all we know,” he said. “How are you here?”
“Danny texted me when you didn’t, you big idiot,” Asher said, still holding him tight.
Nicholas turned his head to look at me. After a moment he nodded his head in a way I thought meant ‘thank you.’
Together, the three of us waited. Asher got us snacks from the vending machine and chided Nicholas until he ate. I tried Patrick’s cell again. We watched the news on the television in the waiting room with no interest.
Patrick arrived—breathless and panicked, explaining that he’d been in the library—just as a doctor came to tell us they were ready to discharge Lex. After a couple of hours of oxygen and charcoal, she was safe to go home to rest. When a nurse brought her out, she took one look at us and started to cry.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, the words practically unintelligible, as Patrick wrapped her up in his arms, nearly swallowing up her tiny frame.
She tried to reach for Nicholas, but he shied away from her, and she just cried harder. Patrick kept an arm around her waist and steered her toward the door, saying he’d meet us at home. Asher stood awkwardly against a wall, keeping his distance, until they were gone. Then he kissed Nicholas and said he would call him in the morning and left as well.
Nicholas and I drove back to the house in silence. Patrick took Lex up to bed, and we all went to sleep.
? ? ?
The next morning Lex made French toast and smiled and asked Mia about her homework, and it was like it had never happened.
? ? ?