She went immediately to the bathroom to take more Percodan, wet a towel and wrapped it around her head like a turban. She was on her way to the bedroom, going through the doorway, when she felt a terrible crushing blow on the back of her neck. She almost fell. For a moment she thought someone concealed in the room had hit her, and then she thought she had hit her head against something protruding from the wall. But then another crushing blow brought her to her knees. She knew then that something terrible was happening to her. She managed to crawl to the phone beside the bed and just barely made out the red sticker on which was printed the paramedic number. Alice had pasted it there when her son had been visiting them, just in case. She dialed the number and a woman’s voice answered.
Janelle said, “I’m sick. I don’t know what’s happening, but I’m sick.” And she gave her name and address and let the phone drop. She managed to pull herself up on the bed, and surprisingly enough she suddenly felt better. She was almost ashamed that she had called, there was nothing really wrong with her. Then another terrible blow seemed to strike her whole body. Her vision diminished and narrowed down to a single focus. Again she was astonished and couldn’t believe what was happening to her. She could barely see beyond the stretches of the room. She remembered Joel had given her some cocaine and she still had it in her handbag and she staggered to the living room to get rid of it, but in the middle of the living room her body was struck another terrible blow. Her sphincter loosened, and though the haze of a near unconsciousness, she realized she had voided herself. With a great effort she took off her panties and wiped up the floor and threw them under the sofa and then she felt for the earrings she was wearing, she didn’t want anyone to steal the earrings. It took her what seemed a long time to get them out, and then she staggered into the kitchen and pushed them far back on the roof of the cabinet where it was all dusty and where no one would ever look.
Still conscious when the paramedics arrived, she was dimly aware of being examined and one of the medics looking in her handbag and finding her cocaine. They thought she had overdosed. One of the paramedics was questioning her. “How much drugs did you take tonight?”
And she said, defiantly, “None.”
And the medic said, “Come on, we’re trying to save your life.”
And it was that line that really saved Janelle. She went into a certain role that she played. She used a phrase that she always used to scorn what others value. She said, “Oh, please.” The Oh, please in a contemptuous note to show that saving her life was the least of her worries and, in fact, something not even to be considered.
She was conscious of the ride in the ambulance to the hospital and she was conscious of being put in the bed in the white hospital room, but by now this was not happening to her. It was happening to someone she had created and it was not true. She could step away from this whenever she wished. She was safe now. At that moment she felt another terrible blow and lost consciousness.
– -
On the day after New Year’s I got the phone call from Alice. I was mildly surprised to hear her voice; in fact, I didn’t recognize it until she told me her name. The first thing that flashed through my mind was that Janelle needed help in some way.
“Merlyn, I thought you’d want to know,” Alice said. “It’s been a long time, but I thought I should tell you what happened.”
She paused, her voice uncertain. I didn’t say anything, so she went on. “I have some bad news about Janelle. She’s in the hospital. She had a cerebral hemorrhage.”
I didn’t really grasp what she was saying, or my mind refused the facts. It registered as an illness only. “How is she?” I asked. “Was it very bad?”
Again there was that pause, then Alice said, “She’s living on machines. The tests show no brain activity.”
I was very calm, but I still didn’t really grasp it. I said, “Are you telling me that she’s going to die? Is that what you’re telling me?”
“No, I’m not telling you that,” Alice said. “Maybe she’ll recover, maybe they can keep her alive. Her family’s coming out and they’ll make all the decisions. Do you want to come out? You can stay at my place.”
“No,” I said. “I can’t.” And I really couldn’t “Will you call me tomorrow and tell me what happens? I’ll come out if I can help, but not for anything else.”
There was a long silence, and then Alice said, her voice breaking. “Merlyn, I sat beside her, she looks so beautiful, as if nothing happened to her. I held her hand and it was warm. She looks as if she were just sleeping. But the doctors say that there’s nothing left of her brain. Merlyn, could they be wrong? Could she get better?”
And at moment I felt certain it was all a mistake, that Janelle would recover. Cully had said once that a man could sell himself anything in his own hand and that’s what I did. “Alice, the doctors are wrong sometimes, maybe she’ll get better. Don’t give up hope.”
“All right,” Alice said. She was crying now. “Oh, Merlyn, it’s so terrible. She lies there on the bed asleep like some fairy princess and I keep thinking some magic can happen, that she’ll be all right. I can’t think of living without her. And I can’t leave her like that. She would hate to live like that. If they don’t pull the plug, I will. I won’t let her live like that.”
Ah, what a chance it was for me to be a hero. A fairy princess dead in an enchantment and Merlyn the Magician knowing how to wake her. But I didn’t offer to help pull the plug. “Wait and see what happens,” I said. “Call me, OK?”
“OK,” Alice said. “I just thought you’d want to know. I thought you might want to come out.”
“I really haven’t seen her or spoken to her for a long time,” I said. And I remember Janelle asking, “Would you deny me?” and my saying laughingly, “With all my heart.”
Alice said, “She loved you more than any other man.”
But she didn’t say “more than anybody,” I thought. She left out women. I said, “Maybe she’ll be OK. Will you call me again?”
“Yes,” Alice said. Her voice was calmer now. She had begun to grasp my rejection and she was bewildered by it. “I’ll call you as soon as something happens.” Then she hung up.
And I laughed. I don’t know why I laughed, but I just laughed. I couldn’t believe it, it must be one of Janelle’s tricks. It was too outrageously dramatic, something I knew she had fantasized about and so had arranged this little charade. And one thing I knew, I would never look upon her empty face, her beauty vacated by the brain behind it. I would never, never look at it because I would be turned to stone. I didn’t feel any grief or sense any loss. I was too wary for that. I was too cunning. I walked around the rest of the day, shaking my head. Once again I laughed and later I caught myself with my face twisting in a kind of smirk, like someone with a guilty secret wish come true, or of someone who is finally trapped forever.
Alice called me late the next day. “She’s all right now,” Alice said.
And for a minute I thought she meant it, that Janelle had recovered, that it had all been a mistake. And then Alice said, “We pulled the plug. We took her off the machines and she’s dead.”
Neither of us said anything for a long time, and then she asked, “Are you going to come out for the funeral? We’re going to have a memorial service in the theater. All her friends are coming. It’s going to be a party with champagne and all her friends giving speeches about her. Will you come?”
“No,” I said. “I’ll come in a couple of weeks to see you if you don’t mind. But I can’t come now.”
There was another long pause if she were trying to control her anger, and then she said, “Janelle once told me to trust you, so I do. Whenever you want to come out, I’ll see you.”
And then she hung up.