The trolley accelerates away and centrifugal force—that’s a misconception, it’s actually momentum—pushes her back against me.
We are the only passengers.
She struggles a little to stand up, but her struggle is not very forceful, and she sits for a while even after the trolley has stopped decelerating.
“Oh my,” she says in a strained voice.
She repeats it, but with a long pause. Like this: “Oh ……… my.” Then, sounding really as if she isn’t talking to me at all but to some other person entirely, she says, “Yes, getting up. Absolutely getting up and moving. Because, no. Wrong, that’s why. So. Getting up.”
With a sudden heave, an uncoordinated pushing off that I find strangely enjoyable, she stands up. She looks wobbly, although the trolley is moving with admirable smoothness.
Evening drops heavily into the seat in front of me. She blows out a long sigh and runs her fingers through her hair and says—again, as though she’s not really talking to me—“Okay. Okay. I can do this.”
I remember her mother’s words and say, “You can do anything you want.”
She answers, “Mrrgghh,” in a high, strained voice.
Twenty minutes later, we reach the hospital.
– 37 –
The ER entrance is a narrow, automatic door in a slab of concrete. There’s a cheery pink sign above that reads “Emergency Room,” adorned with a blue teddy bear. I think it may be the ambulances-only entrance, but I decide I don’t care. We slip in behind a gurney carrying a wildly flailing drunk.
The drunk is yelling, “Purgatory! Purgatory!”, so no one notices us.
Until they notice Adam.
The gurney falters. The two guys pushing it stare, their jaws dropping a little. A woman doctor comes out, lights a cigarette, takes a puff, and stops. The smoke drifts out of her mouth. She’s forgotten to exhale.
The drunk—he’s an old dude, maybe sixty, maybe a hobo—stops yelling and looks baffled.
“Excuse us,” I say. No one hears me. No one sees me. It’s kind of getting annoying. I do exist, after all, even when I’m standing next to Adam.
There is zero possibility that anyone will stop us as we move past the gurney and into the busy emergency room treatment area. Nurses bustle, doctors amble, everyone looks dopey-tired.
There’s less shouting and drama than you see on TV shows, and the lighting is much worse. Maybe the doctors are all having interior monologues about their love lives, but it seems more likely that they’re all just waiting for their shifts to be over.
Adam stops the place cold.
I’m concerned that people may be dying while the medical professionals stop to stare.
“Where’s Maddox Menlow?” I ask.
Again, there is apparently no sound coming out of my mouth, so I yell, “Aislin! Where are you?”
“E.V.?”
A white curtain flies back and Aislin’s head pops out of one of the treatment areas. I run to her. There’s hugging. Then I look at the bed. No Maddox.
“Where is he?” I ask.
“They just took him to be operated on.”
“Oh no,” I say. “How bad is it?”
She has a hollowed-out look in her eyes. “They shot him in the stomach. It’s … they don’t know. I mean, there was a lot of blood.”
I don’t know why, but I’d just kind of assumed that if Maddox had really been shot, it was in the foot or the elbow or something. Nothing like this. Nothing potentially fatal.
I feel like a jerk.
“Was it those same guys?” I ask.
Aislin looks down at her feet, embarrassed. “Look, he didn’t give them that money, the nine thousand dollars. He used it to buy some stuff. He was then going to resell it, so he could pay those guys and still keep some.”
Despite vivid images in my head of a gut-shot Maddox, I can’t stop the flame of anger kindling inside me. I got him that money. It wasn’t so he could deal more weed.
I lean against the bed. “Did they catch the guys?”
Aislin shakes her head. “I know, all right?” Her eyes brim with tears. “I know what he is. And I finally know I have to get rid of him. But not while he’s maybe dying, right?”
“Right,” I say, but I don’t believe she’s going to dump Maddox, injured or well. She’ll go back to him, like she always does. Suddenly the sheer doom of it all hits me. Aislin will spiral down with Maddox, or whatever asshole eventually replaces him.
And what’s my own great plan? To help Solo destroy my mother? And then what? Wander the city homeless, with my beautiful creation in tow, stopping traffic?
I realize—and I blame Adam for distracting me—that Solo has no doubt already succeeded. The devastating data is probably on its way. My mother’s doom is sealed.
Not about me, I chide myself. This is about Aislin.
“Let’s get a cup of coffee,” I say. Aislin sniffles into her sleeve, and I guide her from the emergency room to the cafeteria.
I’m sipping coffee before I realize I’ve left Adam behind.
“He’ll be okay,” I murmur.
“I don’t know,” Aislin says miserably, assuming I’m talking about Maddox. Then, bless her, she worries about me. “What’s happening with Solo? Did you guys do it?”
For once I know that when Aislin says “do it,” she doesn’t mean “have sex.”
“He took the flash drive and left,” I say.