We run some more. We reach a trolley just as it pulls to a stop. We leap aboard, then wait impatiently for several minutes while the driver gets out and inspects his vehicle.
“Don’t believe what my mother told you,” Evening says.
I feel a rush of terror. “Evening, all I really know is what your mother told me. If I were actually to stop believing everything she told me…”
We are sitting beside each other. Her thigh and shoulder are pressed against mine. She turns to me and I turn to her and this brings our faces very close together.
“I—” she says, and then her voice makes a croaking sound. Her eyelids lower, as if she’s sleepy. Slowly, slowly she’s moving closer.
Suddenly, her eyes widen. I see something like alarm in her gaze as she pulls away.
“I have to sit somewhere else,” she says in a rush.
“Why?”
“I just do, that’s all.”
She has not moved. “Where?”
“What?” Her eyes are at half-mast again. “Oh. Yes. This seat in front here.”
She gets up, but just then, the trolley lurches. To keep her from falling over into the aisle I put my right arm around her abdomen and then she slips down a little so that my arm slips up and then stops because it can’t go any farther.
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.