The Queen of Hearts

by Kimmery Martin

  I nodded and mutely started for the exit.

  “Zadie,” Nick said softly. I turned back.

  He met my eyes above Emma’s heaving form. I love you, he mouthed.

  —

  Ken Linker, one of the fifth-year surgery residents, marched me through the ER. People looked at us and occasionally called out, the drama of Graham’s death either unknown to them or already receding. Again I was stricken with the reality of a world proceeding along with or without you. How could everything seem so normal to other people?

  We reached the quad. It was a lovely autumn day, with brilliant sun showering the large square brick-rimmed beds of late-fall flowers. Cascading orange and yellow leaves were caught in swirling currents of sweet, crisp air, dancing and pirouetting merrily before bowing themselves out on the flagstone of the quad’s surface. Nature was, as always, indifferent, but the humans present were another story. Unlike at the vast hospital, things were not normal here at all, since this was the site where Graham had chosen to end his life. The precise spot where it happened was evident, as there was still a police presence, complete with crime scene tape and misshapen black bloodstains, along with a slowly gathering crowd of medical students. They milled around in shocked little huddles, gazing in disbelief at the sticky pools of congealed blood, which were as discordant on the sunshiny courtyard as an assault rifle at a preschool. I saw Rolfe and Landley at a distance, facing away from the crime scene tape; both of their faces dropped into their hands, Rolfe’s dark head and Landley’s fair one hanging parallel to the ground.

  I took a step backward as something loomed up in front of me. A small distraught tornado—Hannah—blew into me, almost knocking me over in a teary hug. She was, predictably, incoherent. Her face was swollen to unrecognizable proportions, an anguished balloon at its bursting point.

  “Maybe I should take her home too,” Ken offered uneasily, as Hannah attempted unsuccessfully to speak. “What service is she on?”

  I answered slowly, “. . . Trauma.”

  Oh no. Oh no. Hannah was on Nick’s service. She would have been paged and gone to the trauma room; it was probably her first-ever trauma code. She would have been there as Graham was brought in, and she would have realized who he was, and she would have been watching as they cracked his chest and fought to save him. She would have seen him die.

  Although I’d been too stricken to comfort my best friend, I had no hesitation with Hannah. I gathered her up, rubbing her shoulders as Hannah clutched me. I managed a nod to Ken, who said, “I’ll let X know I’ve got her too. She can take the day off. If you guys can wait for a few minutes, I’ll swing by with the car right over there.” He gestured to a roundabout at one end of the quad and hastily retreated toward the garage.

  “Oh God, Hannahbear,” I murmured into Hannah’s soft hair. “I’m so sorry. Did you go in to the code?”

  Hannah, who was nearly four inches shorter than me, nodded into my chest, hiccupping a little as her sobs quieted down, giving me the oddly maternal comfort of being able to soothe someone else. We kept holding each other, ignoring the sad, hushed chatter vibrating through the courtyard and the bloodstains and the police and the muted city sounds, until finally I became aware Ken was patiently idling nearby.

  We were almost to the car when I caught sight of a bright iridescent flash in my peripheral vision: Georgia. She was charging toward us, wearing a lime green rhinestoned pantsuit under her white coat, her flaming hair in a fat bun secured by metal chopsticks, her forehead and eyebrows creased by confusion. Across the quad, Rolfe and Landley took notice of Georgia’s presence and began shuffling toward us too.

  Georgia reached out uncertainly. “Dudes,” she said. “Why is everybody crying?”

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  A GOOD WAKE NEEDS HARD LIQUOR

  Autumn, 1999: Louisville, Kentucky

  For a moment nobody could answer. Georgia’s eyes traced across the yellow police tape down to the oily dark patches on the stone, then over to Rolfe, who had almost reached us. “Who—” she began. She stopped. “What is all this? What happened?”

  Rolfe looked wrecked. For the first time I could ever remember, there was not a trace of his insouciant light; he was lifeless and dull. Landley gestured toward him and mouthed to me, Can’t talk about it.

  “Can’t talk about what?” Georgia cried. “Will somebody tell me what the hell is going on?”

  “Graham is dead,” Landley said. “He shot himself.”

  We waited while Georgia cycled through the facial gymnastics of shock: incomprehension, disbelief, pain, and finally openmouthed horror. Her vivid features crumpled on themselves in dismay as Landley, in a low voice, filled her in.

  After a terse consultation, everyone agreed to reconvene at my apartment that evening, with a backup plan in place—Rolfe’s—if Emma objected.

  Ken swung the growly sports car back into the street, alighting a short time later under the porticoed ambulance entrance to the ER. At first it looked as though only Nick was there, inexplicably re-dressed in a white cape, but as we drew up, it became apparent he was wrapped in a coarse blanket from one of the ER’s warmers. Emma huddled underneath it, her face mashed against his chest, her hair in its two long French braids giving her the appearance of a young child. She did not open her eyes as they tucked her into the backseat next to me.

  Nick and Ken had a hushed conversation at the driver’s-side window, their deep, low voices indecipherable but soothing, somehow, like the barely heard sound of protective grown-up voices murmuring outside your room when you are small. I saw Nick hand Ken a slip of paper (a prescription?), which he folded and tucked in his pocket. Beside me, Emma was a frozen lump, her harsh breathing the only sign she was alive.

  —

  By seven o’clock my friends were convened in our apartment. The rooms glowed with candlelight, warm air suffusing through the tidied open kitchen-living space, which I had hastily purged of random Graham paraphernalia: Sports Illustrateds, which had accumulated in the bathroom, providing Emma and me with a source of long-running mockery—what did guys do in there that took so long?—enormous stinky shoes and socks, which tended to fester under the grubby plaid reclining chair Graham favored; on the kitchen counter bottles of creatine, which Graham took for some dubious workout-related benefit; baseball caps clinging to doorknobs; faded, soft Graham-smelling T-shirts; a few nasty tins of snuff, which many of the guys took at the hospital when required to stay awake for obscene periods of time; and, sadly, Graham’s white coat, embroidered with his name, hanging with forlorn droopiness in the tiny foyer, waiting in vain for his large form to fill it again.

  All of this and more I scooped up and placed in a plastic storage bin under my bed, giving each little everyday object a bittersweet caress, not wanting Emma to be confronted with Graham detritus at every glance. But I didn’t have the audacity to enter Emma’s room, where, of course, most of Graham’s things resided.

  “A good wake needs hard liquor,” Landley said, morosely draped over the edge of the sofa. “Whaddaya got, Fletch?”

  “I think there’s some Four Roses above the fridge,” I remembered. I fetched it along with some shot glasses and handed them to Landley, who distributed them. “To Graham,” he intoned, and we raised our glasses, holding them in the air for a great deal longer than the usual toast, as if waiting for Graham to materialize and join us.

  Instead, the door to Emma’s room opened and she drifted out, bumping slightly against the doorframe on the way. Her braids were down and her beautiful hair waved around her, floating halfway down her back. Nick had indeed given her a prescription for Xanax, which went a long way in Emma’s virgin system; she drooped over to the couch and plopped down, half onto me and half onto Landley, the back of her head frizzed up and a tiny bit of dried drool crusting the corner of her lower lip. But the medicine had its intended effect: she was very calm.


  “I love you guysh,” she mumbled, and closed her eyes.

  “We love you too, Em,” said Georgia, stroking Emma’s foot from her spot on the floor. “Anything you need . . .”

  “Emma.” Rolfe stood up and began meandering around the room, picking things up and setting them down, as restless as Emma was blunted. “Should we not talk about it?”

  “S’okay,” said Emma without opening her eyes. She leaned back into the couch, her face a smooth mask.

  “How could he do this?” blurted Rolfe. “I mean, why? Why?”

  “He went to see James this morning,” said Landley. “Some kind of money troubles.”

  I couldn’t fathom it. This made no sense.

  “. . . and I think that his dad used to be an orthopod or something,” Landley was saying, with a sideways glance at Emma, who had fallen asleep; her mouth was open and her head thrown back. “But he retired after he signed with one of those medical device companies. He invented something that made him a fortune, and apparently he had a lot to begin with.”

  “So what?” Rolfe said.

  “So, I heard he donated mucho dinero to the med school, that’s what. Graham would never talk about him, but his name’s on some plaque of high rollers outside Wormer’s office. Maybe this was some family fight?”

  “He didn’t give jack shit to his son—that’s for sure,” said Rolfe. “Graham was always broke.”

  “Hard to imagine Graham ever doing anything to warrant getting frozen out by his own dad, though, right?” said Landley, chugging another generous pour of the bourbon. He blinked hard and abruptly turned his head to look at a poster behind the sofa, but not before I saw the tears on his cheeks.

  “Were you in the ER?” Rolfe asked, nodding at me.

  “I was, but they realized what was happening and Dr. Elsdon hustled me out. Me and Em and James, too. They tucked us in the ED offices so we had no idea what was going on. Where were you?”

  “I was in the quad,” said Rolfe.

  It was the first time he’d confirmed this. We all looked again at Emma, who was snoring lightly, now shifted so her head was resting in Landley’s lap. His small gray eyes flashed a fleeting but fiercely tender expression, and he moved a little so Emma’s ear on one side was firmly pressed against his abdomen; he covered her other with a couch pillow. He looked up a little sheepishly: “Just in case.”

  We looked back at Rolfe. He was transfixed by the searing memory replaying itself in the empty air in front of him. Rolfe was handsome, beautiful even, his unkempt black hair flipping at the ends ever so slightly into curls, all angelic curved eyelashes and very white teeth. It was difficult to reconcile his beauty with the story he was telling, his words flying out like shards of broken glass.

  “I saw him,” he said. “He was across the quad from me, closer to the street, and I was coming out of the library. I think I meant to wave him over—but then the door to the side of me opened, and it was Breath of Freshness.”

  We all nodded meaningfully. Rolfe had just finished his rotation on the general surgery service and he had fared poorly. It had been a brutal stint: the service was slammed, all the beds filling up and overflowing onto some of the internal medicine floors, much to the consternation of the nurses. There was never any sleep. Rolfe had become perpetually unkempt, staggering around with two-day stubble and reeking of tired perspiration. Grayish creases formed under his eyes, and he occasionally was spotted wearing a blob of drool-covered foam around his neck; he fell asleep with such prompt regularity during the seductive dimness of morning Morbidity and Mortality conferences that the surgeons had taken to slipping a neck brace on him to support his sagging cervical spine as soon as he crashed.

  In the midst of all this grim deprivation, he’d become obsessed with an ethereal creature who worked as a unit secretary in the ER. He’d dubbed her Breath of Freshness because she was as wholesome and gorgeous as a gust of spring mountain wind roaring through a scorching slum; she had flawless white skin with blooming cheeks, pale red-gold Rapunzel hair, abundant breasts, straight pearly teeth, and clear eyes the color of heather. When looking at her, you almost had to shield your eyes from the luminous backlit shaft of celestial light in which she seemed to dwell. Nobody knew her name, and Rolfe was too downtrodden by the erosion of his own attractive countenance to approach her. Despoiling her blinding beauty by getting too close would have been like admiring a delicate, perfect monarch butterfly and then crushing it under a muddy boot.

  So all of us knew spotting Breath of Freshness outside the ER, when he was clean-shaven and restored, would instantly distract Rolfe from anything else. He’d babbled about her the entire month of his rotation.

  “I turned away the second I saw her,” he said hoarsely. “I don’t know how long I stood there talking to her—a minute or two, maybe. I can’t even remember what she said her name was.”

  Silence. No one, save Emma, seemed to be breathing. We waited for him to go on.

  “It was loud. I knew right away it was a gunshot. But it was so out of context, and there was only one shot. I looked around, and I didn’t see what had happened at first. I was entertaining the idea of throwing Breath of Freshness down and rolling on top of her—um, in case there were more shots—but then I heard people screaming at the other end of the quad. None of them were dropping or running, though. They were just screaming.

  “I could see a pool of blood dripping out on the rocks, then a hand. A big hand, a guy’s hand. There were people crouched all around him, so I couldn’t see his face. Most of the people seemed stunned, but one guy was trying to tamponade the bleeding—he had taken off his shirt and had stuffed it into this crater in the other guy’s chest. I still couldn’t see who was shot, but the guy on the ground with him was Mack Wolfson—you know, Graham’s friend in the class below us. He saw me and he yelled for me to help him. I took my shirt off too, and I knelt down beside Mack, and then I saw it was Graham.”

  He paused again and then resumed.

  “He was alive. His eyes were kind of glazed, but they were open and he was looking at me. He didn’t say anything. I don’t think he could speak; he was making a rattling sound when he breathed, and he was a chalky color. Mack was screaming for help, and he was doing everything he could to keep Graham’s blood in him. I don’t know how many minutes went by. Then Graham moved his hand toward me, and I picked it up and I held his hand until somebody official got there. He kept looking at me—he knew I was there and that I had his hand and I think he wanted to say something, but he couldn’t. He looked at me and looked at me and then he seemed not to see me anymore.”

  Chapter Thirty

  BUCKETS OF MONEY

  Zadie, Present Day

  I kept an eye on Emma as I gathered my voluminous skirts aloft, trying to cross the street without tripping on the fabric and face-planting onto the asphalt. Part of me had been certain she’d bail on the Arts Ball tonight, given her social isolation in recent months; even in the best of spirits, she tended to dislike parties. But her demeanor in the car on the way here had surprised me. Her voice, leaden and dull since Eleanor’s death, held a note of vibrancy, and she laughed—a real, unforced laugh—when Wyatt accidentally but gallantly presented his arm to help Drew out of the car. I realized how much I had missed seeing a happy expression on her face.

  It was unseasonably warm for the Saturday before Halloween, which was fortunate, because a significant percentage of the people walking around the streets of uptown Charlotte appeared to be nude. The sidewalks and plazas were bright, with ambient light from the skyscraper lobbies mingling with the shine of the streetlamps, casting a warm glow over the revelers. Soft puffs of warm air wafted around the corners of the side streets onto Tryon Street, as if being exhaled from some hidden lounging giant, capriciously ruffling hair and thrusting stray scraps of paper aloft, whirling them around like fall leaves. Where Drew, Emma, Wyatt, and I stood, th
e most eye-catching thing nearby was a conga line of attractive women in their twenties wearing nothing but skillfully applied body paint. Next to this vision was a group clad in firefighting gear, with hoses draped in strategic locations but sans actual pants. They were a merry bunch, calling out bons mots to one another and trilling laughter in their wake. In front of them, cars inched down Tryon, windows open, the occupants ogling the throngs on the sidewalks: superheroes, naughty nurses, giant food items, aliens, leering political figures, enormous zoo mammals, football players, adults in diapers clutching pacifiers, and a whole host of young hipsters in bizarre dress we could not identify.

  “I am so tired of the same old scene every time we go uptown,” remarked Wyatt as the light changed, and he nearly collided with a brigade of dudes who were naked except for inexplicable thatches of wispy purple troll hair covering their unmentionables.

  “Sorry!” I breathed to an irritated kangaroo upon whose tail I’d just trod. The kangaroo sniffed and exaggeratedly stepped over the small train on the back of my gown, wiggling its bottom as it boinged away.

  We made our way down Tryon, passing Trade Street with three of its corners crowned by glorious statues of Transportation, Commerce, and Industry, all of them looking toward the fourth corner, where a bronzed mother stood holding a baby aloft. We stopped in silence. On a more typical day, while whizzing by in a stream of disgruntled commuters, one didn’t really appreciate the subtleties expressed here: the foundations of the city’s past gazing solemnly and hopefully at its future.

  “Ah,” said Wyatt finally. “I think we’re having a moment.”