No one notices Elise. “What’s going on?” she asks.
“You are?” asks a woman in pink scrubs whose black hair is oiled into twists on her head.
“Jamey’s wife.”
“Oh, okay. We’re taking Jamey to Gracie Square Hospital, toots. You wanna ride with us?”
“Why’s he going to a different hospital?”
They all look at each other. “His family want him there.”
“How do they know he’s here?”
The woman shakes her head. The hair doesn’t move. It’s like hard plastic.
As they ride in a van tricked out like a luxury ambulance, Elise realizes Matt called Jamey’s parents.
Jamey’s maneuvered into the new hospital under a royal-blue awning.
“I’m Jamey Hyde’s wife,” Elise says to the front desk.
The lady looks meaningfully at her. “We’re all set, dear.”
“Okay,” Elise says slowly. “Where should I go?”
“You can wait here, if you like,” the woman gestures at a couch. “They’ll call if they need you.”
Dr. Brandywine comes out to tell Elise that Jamey will be asleep for the next eight hours. He’s got both hands in his white coat pockets, as if to show he’s not combative.
“I’ll stay anyway,” she says, her feet reddened in the high heels, mascara blurred.
“Well, that’s not necessary,” he says, looking her up and down.
“I want to.”
“The Hyde family asked me to make sure you don’t talk about what’s happening to anyone.”
“Why would I talk?”
“It’s for Jamey, the privacy,” he continues, as if he had to finish the paragraph before being done with his task. “He doesn’t need attention for an accident like this.”
“Do I look like I’m arguing?” she says, head starting to cobra-snake.
“Easy now. I’m just stating the obvious. We’re here if you need anything.”
“I need to know when he wakes up.”
“We’ll be sure to let you know as soon as he wakes up.”
She sits primly in the waiting room, bare thighs in the short white dress sticking to the pleather couch. Even though the family knows he’s here, no one shows up. A soda machine vaguely surges with light, and she reads pamphlets written in periwinkle.
Gracie Square provides an individualized treatment plan based on a complete evaluation. They give medical, neurological and psychological consultations, perform detoxification, assess and treat psychiatric symptoms, offer education programs, hold daily group therapy, along with nightly twelve-step meetings where patients share experiences while focusing on abstinence and recovery. They’ve got a twenty-four-hour, seven-day-a-week internist and psychiatrist, progressive discharge planning, and weekend support groups for family.
She falls asleep on the couch, drooling.
Morning. Private room on the third floor. Scrubbed and glistening. He’s propped in bed.
Light comes through the window in clear blue waves, and terror is clamping its teeth on his brain.
There will be no rationale, no logic, no emotions—just terror.
Like trying to get comfortable in a scalding bath.
A doctor. Jamey can’t open his mouth to answer. He can’t hear the questions, that’s part of the problem. He can’t use his hands because he has to clutch the mattress on each side.
He can only make it from second to second, sustaining a minor consciousness—he’d rather be unconscious but can’t do the work of getting there.
Terror has taken his system and all he can do is feel it.
It is his one activity.
A nurse checks his temperature and pulse, he’s injected with a sedative, his eyes close.
Elise buys a vending-machine doughnut and weak coffee. She eats in the waiting room, and it comes roaring through her intestines and she barely makes it to the bathroom.
She calls in to work, and Mrs. Gorowski walks Buck.
Elise’s story is that Jamey collapsed in the subway—it might have been a mild heart attack, they don’t know yet. Everyone is oohing and ahhing, asking to help.
Elise just wants him home. She leafs through a battered Time magazine.
The longer this goes on, the less likely it ends well.
Her panic is animalistic—Get him away from here. Get it done. Run.
Dr. Brandywine comes out to say Jamey is sedated again all day.
“You’ll be doing yourself and Jamey a favor by getting him books, taking a nap, eating something. I’ve seen couples go through this many, many times, Elise. Come back when you’re ready.”
She looks at his white beard and lumpy face. Breath so bad, something’s fundamentally wrong with him.
“Shouldn’t he be okay by now?” she asks.
“Well, many patients would be done with the crisis. But there are cases where the patient doesn’t emerge for forty-eight hours, say.”
“I want it on record he can’t be moved anywhere.”
“We would never do that.”
“He was moved from Lenox Hill without them asking me.”
“Be glad he was moved from Lenox Hill.”
“I never had a say is my point.”
The doctor smiles tightly. “I’ll make an addendum to his file.”
“And can I please, please see him?”
“You can’t go into the room.”
“Can I please just look in the door?”
A nurse takes her to the third floor. The nurse opens the door and Elise looks at Jamey, supported on pillows, sleeping, his face melted and insulted by the sedative, his body strewn in the bed.
A bruise like a dark flower fills his eye socket.
“What’s he on?” Elise asks.
“Three milligrams of etizolam, it’s a tranquilizer, for severe anxiety.”
“What’s gonna happen?” Elise says, sounding younger than she is.
“You know, when patients come in here experiencing a psychedelic crisis, they usually get out in one to three days. Usually the acute anxiety subsides, and we talk them through the experience, decide if they’ll have lingering psychotic feelings or not. And eventually they’re discharged. That make sense, honey?”
Elise nods. Looks one more time. There is nothing repulsive about this vision, but Elise walks away breathless, as if she’d just seen his stomach cut open and his guts hanging out and he was leering at her.
At home she lets Buck into bed, and sleeps with him, his heat passing into her bones.
When she wakes up, she peels off the white dress, showers, scrubs herself of Valentina’s apartment, of the Trump Tower lobby, of the ambulance, of the hospital waiting room. She has to use Vaseline to take off her eye makeup, which has stained her skin.
Eating buttered toast, her eyes tear up, certain that she made all this happen. She chased his ass in New Haven, she loved him first.
Dr. Brandywine asks her to his office, where a plaster model of a human brain is labeled in a rainbow of words.
“I’d love to be blunt, here, Alissa.”
“Elise.”
“His family says you all have been using drugs.”
“We do not, except this one time when he took acid.”
“You’ve never used drugs at all?”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“But you have not used drugs, is your wording.”
“We never used drugs together.”