“It’s all right,” I repeated over and over again. She stopped resisting, and a moment later I felt her go limp.
“Is there anything I can do?” asked an anxious voice.
I had forgotten the woman. She was still there, watching, terrified, too decent to leave. “There’s a man at our table: heavyset, reddish wavy hair, dark blue suit. Would you ask him to come?”
She hesitated, wringing her hands. “Should I call an ambu-lance, a doctor?”
Jennifer was breathing quietly now and all I could think about was the quickest way to get her home. “No,” I told the woman.
“She’ll be fine. It’s nothing serious. If you’ll just get my friend.
His name is Howard Flynn.”
“Do you think you can get up?” I whispered when the woman had left.
Pale and exhausted, Jennifer looked at me with quiet, curious eyes as if I was a stranger she instinctively knew she could trust.
With my help she slowly struggled to her feet. Holding her, I bent down and picked up her purse.
Flynn arrived as I opened the door. He turned white when he saw her. “Home or the hospital?” he asked as I lifted her into my arms.
I was not sure anymore. I wanted to say home, but now it seemed like some place far away. Flynn read the answer in my eyes.
“Lay her down in the back seat,” he said as he held the car door open. “You better get in with her,” he added as he went round to the driver’s side.
He drove carefully, trying to keep the ride as smooth as possible, while I held her head in my lap, mumbling words the sound of which seemed to soothe her. Once, just before we got there, she grasped my hand and held it tight against the side of her face. From the moment I found her on the bathroom floor she had not spoken a word or opened her mouth to try.
The emergency room of the hospital was nearly deserted. A large Hispanic woman looked up with a start as I burst in shouting for help. A thin, agile nurse and a thick-armed orderly took Jennifer from my arms, put her into a wheelchair, and whisked her through a set of swinging double doors. I signed everything the admitting nurse put in front of me, and without listening to what I was saying, answered every question she asked while I kept my eye fixed on the green doors behind which Jennifer had disappeared.
Forty-five minutes after we arrived-forty-five minutes of anger and fear and strange discordant thoughts whose only connection was that they all had something to do with the woman I had known all my life and hardly knew at all-the doors opened and a young doctor with a surgical mask draped around his neck and a thin file folder under his arm called my name. I followed him through the door and down the corridor. There was a smell of disinfectant in the air, and for an instant I remembered the hospital where as a small boy I had followed my father on rounds.
The doctor led me to an empty examination room and shut the door behind us. I sat on a molded plastic chair wedged between a stainless steel sink and a color diagram of the human circula-tory system pinned to the wall.
“Has this happened before?” he asked. It was ten-thirty at night, but his voice made it seem like three o’clock in the morning. I knew what that was like: to work so long that you forget what it was like to be tired.
“No,” I replied. “Maybe,” I added. “I don’t really know.”
He looked at the chart, and then put it down on the corner of the examining table. “I know you already went over this with the admitting nurse, but, if you would, tell me what happened.”
I described what I had seen when I found her, and he asked if there was anything else I could tell him.
“Jennifer is a manic-depressive. She was hospitalized once-a long time ago. So far as I know, she hasn’t had any trouble-any serious trouble-with it since.”
“She’s on medication?”
“Yes.”
“Lithium?”
“Yes.”
“Does she take her medication regularly?”
“Yes, I… I think so.”
“Do you know exactly when she was hospitalized, or how long?”
“About seven years ago, I think. And I think she was there for about six months. I’m not sure,” I replied, hanging my head.
I felt his hand on my shoulder. “It’s all right,” he said. “We’ll get her records. It shouldn’t take more than a few days.”
I raised my head. “A few days?”
“She is going to have to stay here for a while.”
“A few days?”
“Hopefully, it won’t be any longer than that,” he said. “But I’m afraid I can’t really say for sure. We’ll have to run some tests.”
I was getting confused and I was getting angry. “Look, you’re a doctor. What’s wrong with her?”
“I don’t know yet. She’s had some kind of seizure, some kind of episode.”
It seemed a strange word to use. “Episode?”
“I’m an emergency room physician, Mr. Antonelli. I’m not a specialist in psychiatric medicine. What I do know is this: Manic-depression is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain.”
It was a condition, he went on to tell me, that could be there for years, without any symptoms, and then, suddenly, with just a slight alteration in the body’s chemistry, everything changed. Usually it happened only once, and then, with the right treatment, the balance was restored and the patient lived a normal life. But sometimes it happened more than once, sometimes after a long interval. No one could tell when it might happen and no one yet knew why.
I heard what he said and I understood it, but it seemed to come from somewhere far away and to be directed to someone other than me. All I could think about was Jennifer.
“Can I see her?” I asked before he was quite through.
“Yes, of course,” he said as I got to my feet. “She’s asleep. She’s been given a sedative. But, yes, of course you can see her.”
We walked down the corridor to the last room at the end. Behind a white curtain pulled to separate her bed from the empty one next to it, Jennifer was lying with her head on a pillow. An IV was connected to her arm.
“We have some very good people in psychiatric medicine. She’ll have the best of care,” the doctor said as he slipped her file underneath that of the next patient he had to see.
I stood next to the metal hospital bed and looked down at Jennifer’s gentle face. In the dim light of the room the tiny lines at the corners of her eyes became invisible and her skin was as smooth and fair as the first time I saw her, a pretty girl I never stopped thinking was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.
I stood there for a long time, looking down at her while she slept, talking to her in my mind, telling her what I felt, telling her what she already knew. I would have stayed there longer, stayed there until they made me leave, but Flynn was waiting, worrying about what had happened to us both.
“Is she going to be all right?” he asked as he caught up with me and we walked together out of the hospital.
“She’s going to be fine,” I said, staring straight ahead, wondering as I tried to wipe the tears away when I had first begun to cry.
Twenty-eight
Ihad the strange sensation of spinning rapidly in the same place, taking everything in, unmoved and unaffected by what I saw and what I heard, the invisible observer of everything around me.
For the first time, I knew what it was to be like Danny, and maybe Elliott Winston as welclass="underline" alone and apart, forced out of the world, the last link severed, no hope left of a normal life. I could hear Morris Bingham talking to me from the bench; I could see the twelve men and women in the jury box, solemn and attentive, turning their eyes to me, waiting for my response, all of them-judge and jury and everyone else in that crowded courtroom-concentrating on someone who was sitting where I was but who was not really me. I waited, like everyone else, to see what I would do, and then, like everyone else, looked to see what the judge would say when I said nothing.