Five minutes later I was outside, running toward Regent Street—my phone to my ear—as I tried to make my way closer to the one person I had to tell: what I’d figured out, what I wanted most.
In the meantime, I was making a phone call. I was making a call that needed to be made. But I was relegated to voice mail. I was relegated to the voice mail of the one person I most needed to reach first.
“Hey Nick,” I said, after the beep came on. “Can you give me a call when you get this? I need to talk to you. I think I should talk to you in person, probably, but either way I need to ask you something. . . .” I started to hang up. “Oh, and it’s Annie, by the way.”
Then I went to hail a cab—to get me to my flat, and then to Heathrow Airport, to fly to Logan Airport and get myself to western Massachusetts, exactly where I needed to go—but before I could, the phone rang.
The phone rang and the number I couldn’t believe I was seeing right then—a number I was so happy to be seeing right then—came up, and then a voice I couldn’t believe I was hearing was there, talking to me, too fast.
“Annie, you need to come here, okay?” he said. “You need to get on a plane and come home.”
“What’s going on?” I asked.
Then, as time stopped, Jesse told me.
36
If my life depended on it, I don’t think I could tell you how I managed to get to the airport (I assume a taxicab), or onto the plane at Heathrow (I must have shown my passport, but did I have it with me? I don’t recall having it with me), or ho
w I got from Logan Airport in Boston to the emergency waiting room at Cooley Dickinson Hospital. I probably couldn’t tell you, and wouldn’t want to see a video of the evidence.
But somehow I ended up there, in the cold, badly lit emergency waiting room, looking around until I spotted Jesse slumped in the corner with a woman I’d never seen before. A woman I’d never seen before with bright red hair I had seen twice before—on Sammy and on Dexter. Cheryl.
They jumped up out of their chairs, out of their stupor, Jesse throwing his arms around me, seemingly relieved to have something to do, even if it was as useless as letting me know what was going on.
“It’s called status asthmaticus,” Jesse said.
My heart was pounding—I could actually feel how hard—now that I had stopped moving.
Cheryl turned toward Jesse. “Jess, don’t scare her,” she said. “Talking like that is going to scare her.”
I almost folded right there, at such a small and necessary kindness.
“Basically,” she said, keeping her voice soft and low, “it’s a serious asthma attack.”
“How serious?” I said.
“We don’t know yet,” Jesse said.
I looked down and away, as if not looking at Jesse would manage to make that part less true.
“His chest closed down,” Jesse said. “He was out cold when someone found him, in the back of the kitchen.”
“At the restaurant?”
Jesse nodded. “And the question is how long he was like that before we got to him,” he said. “We don’t know for how long. He’s been working all the time, and he just forgot his inhaler. If he’d had it . . .”
“I get it,” I said.
“He hasn’t done that since he was a kid,” he said.
“They’ve got him on a mechanical ventilator,” Cheryl said. “And he has tubes and a mask on. You should know that too. Before you go in . . .”
Then she touched my arm gently, like we knew each other. And I guess, in a way, we did.
“Is that your way of telling me it looks worse than it is?”
“That’s my way of telling you it still is worse than it is,” she said. “The doctor said we almost lost him. We don’t know the repercussions yet.”