If We Lived Here

by Lindsey Palmer

  Emma couldn’t help gaping; she’d only ever seen Mrs. Blum in the most elegant of older-woman outfits, all Eileen Fisher and Ann Taylor. (Annie claimed her mom even had her nightgowns tailored.) Here she was dressed like a cartoon duck. “What are you looking at?” she snapped. “I’m the mother of the bride, prepared for anything. Come on, suit up. Then you and I are going on a search party for your lost boyfriend.”

  The rain was still falling steadily and, much to Emma’s surprise, Mrs. Blum didn’t seem fazed by her updo’s fast transformation into fallen frizz. Emma’s boots, a size too large, suctioned into and slipped about the wet earth. This made it difficult to keep up with Mrs. Blum’s clip—although the effort was a distraction from her fear.

  “I told Annie it was ridiculous to have the wedding here, an estate with a hundred acres of woods. Of course we’d lose track of someone. But everything must always be so extravagant with my daughter.” Emma appreciated the chatter, which was clearly voiced for her sake; she knew Mrs. Blum had been the biggest proponent of this venue.

  The longer they trekked across the grounds, the harder Emma’s heart knocked about in her chest. Worry wobbled her thoughts into worse and worse scenarios—a fallen tree trapping one of Nick’s legs, a stumble off an unseen cliff, a pack of hungry bears. Emma had witnessed Nick’s many visits to the bar that night. She hoped the wind was muffling her whimpering.

  Emma had completely lost her bearings—part of her suspected they were walking in circles—when Mrs. Blum let out a sharp puff of air and stopped short. “I believe we’ve found our missing person.”

  Emma looked down. There was Nick, his body curled into itself like a fetus. He looked peaceful, despite the fact that he was lying in a puddle of mud. Emma wanted to believe he was simply taking a nap.

  “Let’s see what we’ve got here.” Mrs. Blum knelt down and nudged Nick. No response. “Help me, dear.” Emma crouched down, and together they gripped Nick’s sides and rolled him onto his back. The newly revealed side of his head was painted crimson with blood. That guttural sound must’ve come from Emma’s own throat. She collapsed onto her boyfriend’s body, tracing her fingers along the branches of red that spread across his cheek. His skin was frigid.

  “What a mess.” Mrs. Blum’s voice was matter-of-fact, like she’d opened a closet and found it untidy. “But it’s not as bad as it looks. See, all of the blood originates from that one gash right there.” She pointed to a cut across Nick’s eyebrow.

  “Nick.” Emma shook her boyfriend. The hood of her raincoat slipped off, and her face was instantly soaked, from rain or tears or both.

  “Gentle, dear.”

  “Nick, wake up!”

  After a moment, he blinked, the eye below the gash a slit. A sleepy smile crept across his face, cracking the dried blood. “Hi, my love,” he said, words slurred. “Ouch, I’ve got a killer headache.”

  “No shit, you cut your freaking head open. How’d you think that would feel?” Emma realized she was yelling only when Mrs. Blum rested a hand on her back.

  “Shh. Let’s hold the hysterics and focus on what needs to be done. First step, we’ll get him up and back to the building. Next, we’ll find the nearest decent hospital. Nick, my friend, do you think you can walk?”

  His smile was charming, but he made no move to get up.

  “I guess that’s our answer,” said Mrs. Blum. “Come on, Emma, now’s the time to show off your fierce upper-body strength.” Each of them grabbed under one of Nick’s armpits and together they hoisted him to his feet. Emma was grateful Mrs. Blum didn’t mention the stench of alcohol screaming from his pores.

  For the long walk back, Nick stumbled along between the two women’s grips. Emma tried to focus on the fact that she was literally being a supportive girlfriend. She also tried to tune out Nick’s blathering—he was cursing Connor and then rambling about marathon times and then assuming a falsetto voice to wish Emma a happy anniversary. He was difficult to ignore, and Emma consoled herself that she could only feel so terrified when she was also feeling mortified. Mrs. Blum hummed quietly to herself.

  Mrs. Blum hopped into the front of the cab, and Emma squeezed in next to Nick, who’d sprawled himself across the backseat. For a while they rode in silence, the driver stealing glances in the rearview mirror, no doubt wondering if his passenger would leave bloodstains on the upholstery. When Nick began moaning, Mrs. Blum craned around to face Emma. “It was a nice wedding, wasn’t it?”

  Emma nodded from her cramped corner. “It was.” For a moment she let herself forget the present, and instead pictured Annie’s antics on the dance floor. Nick’s arm thrashed sideways, bonking her square in the nose, as if in punishment for her straying attention. “Except for all this …” She trailed off, attempting to restrain Nick’s flailing.

  “You know, dear, I feel I ought to tell you something.”

  “Okay.” Emma braced herself for some kind of lecture.

  “Well, Mr. Blum and I never tied the knot.”

  “Excuse me?” Emma sat up straight. Mrs. Blum was the most traditional woman she knew. She was the kind of mom who, during Emma’s childhood, had thrown a fit anytime other parents insisted Annie call them by first name.

  “We’d meant to. Especially after we had Annie. But something or other always came up. Plus I could never quite decide on how I wanted the wedding to be—the planning, the seating arrangements, all that nonsense always sent me into a tizzy. If only I’d known about Xanax back then, right? Anyway, somewhere along the way I found out I could change my name without all the ceremonial hoopla, and that was that.”

  “What about your ring?” The joke was, Annie could see her mom’s diamond from the next town over; of course, the one now on Annie’s finger outsparkled her mother’s.

  “A sham, I’m afraid. I bought it for myself on a trip to Monaco.”

  “Does Annie know about this?”

  “Yes, my dear, and it’s the greatest shame of her life to be burdened with unwed parents. No wonder she went sprinting to the altar—and with that phony, too. Oops! I suppose I’m a little tipsy, aren’t I?” Mrs. Blum’s smile was sly, and Emma couldn’t help giggling along with her. Who was this woman she’d supposedly known all her life?

  Still, Emma felt the need to defend her friend. “Oh, Eli’s sweet.”

  Mrs. Blum shrugged. “He’s just not whom I expected…. Well, it’s exhausting to live up to everyone else’s expectations, isn’t it? That’s the point I was trying to get at.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Although,” Mrs. Blum said, glancing at Nick. He’d fallen asleep with his mouth open and was now emitting sounds that approximated a blender’s range of settings. “Perhaps it is reasonable to expect one’s date to not disappear halfway through a party, and also to not single-handedly drain most of the liquor supply. Perhaps both of those things are reasonable, even in cases when one’s relationship has been unfairly roasted in public speeches. Mr. Blum and I are the ones bankrolling all that booze, you know.”

  “Yeah. I’m sorry about that.”

  Mrs. Blum shook her head. “Never mind, dear.” The cab pulled up to the hospital, and the two women reenacted their awkward shuffling along of Nick inside to the ER.

  It took fifteen minutes for Emma to insist that Mrs. Blum go back to the hotel and at least attempt a nap before the morning brunch; making her case required physically pushing the mother of the bride out the hospital’s automatic doors and into a taxi.

  “Please call me if you need anything. I’ll keep my phone on.”

  “Bye, Mrs. Blum. I can’t thank you enough.”

  As the cab pulled away, Emma lingered on the curb, waving at the woman who was like a fairy godmother. She knew she had to return inside to face her boyfriend, but for a moment she paused, relishing being alone in the night air, soft and damp like a sigh.

  Chapter 10

  The checkin nurse approached the waiting area with a clipboard. “Nicholas O’Hare,” she announced, “and y
ou can come, too, prom queen.” Emma looked down at her pink-and-green dress now streaked with mud. In any other circumstance she would’ve been embarrassed, but she and Nick were surrounded by people much worse off than they were: body parts twisted in the wrong direction, skin bubbled up with burn, a drugstore’s worth of gauze and bandage mercifully hiding who knew what kinds of wounds.

  “Two things you gotta do while you wait for the doctor,” the nurse told Emma, as Nick slept beside her. “Keep him awake in case of concussion”—she flicked Nick’s arm and his eyes floated open—“and make sure he doesn’t touch his face. You don’t want that nasty business getting any nastier with infection.”

  “How long of a wait might it be?” Emma asked. The nurse gave her a look like, Don’t get your hopes up, girl.

  Both of the tasks Emma had been charged with proved nearly impossible. Nick dozed off about two times per minute, so Emma had to jostle him nonstop. And since each time he awoke his hands went straight to the gash on his head, Emma was trapped in an endless loop of keep-away. “What’s happening? Why won’t you let me rest?” Nick whined his questions again and again, forgetting Emma’s responses moments after she’d finished explaining. Exhausted, Emma was reminded of what it was like to try and reason with her niece and nephew; but at least they were cute and smelled like talcum powder, whereas Nick was a full-grown man who reeked of booze and blood.

  Nick’s prospects of seeing a doctor seemed to grow grimmer the longer they waited. It became clear that the system wasn’t first-come, first-served, but rather who-was-most-likely-to-die-if-they-weren’t-attended-to? A mother and her clammy child had joined their ranks; the former held an orange Tupperware in front of the latter’s mouth, which erupted like clockwork every five minutes with choking blasts of vomit. Another man looked like maybe he’d been shot in the shoulder, although Emma couldn’t let herself look close enough to confirm the suspicion. When two guys shuffled in and from all the way across the room managed to stink worse than Nick, the nurse explained to Emma, “We get a lot of bums on rainy nights. Better to camp out in a hospital waiting room, even a sorry-ass one like this, than out in the elements. Some won’t even bother to claim they’re sick or hurt, but we can’t turn them away.” Emma flashed on the black-tie crowd she’d been mingling with mere hours ago and cringed at her current surroundings.

  As the night’s darkness thinned out and dawn began peeking through the windows, Emma dipped into despair. She felt she couldn’t possibly continue to keep Nick awake. She began to wish hateful things upon the checkin nurse, whom she suspected had only assigned her these Sisyphean tasks in order to distract her from the reality of having a bloodied boyfriend in the ER. Emma could barely keep her own eyes open, and the flimsy plastic chairs started looking more and more viable as mattress substitutes. So when the nurse finally called out “Nicholas O’Hare,” Emma’s eyes welled up with tears, so overcome was she with the hours of singing songs and inventing secret handshakes and doing everything she could to keep Nick conscious and safe.

  The doctor was a tall woman with porcelain skin who looked about twenty-five years old. Emma’s thought—God, I’m old—was immediately overshadowed by another—God, I’m shallow to think about that now.

  “Can you tell me who the President is?” the doctor asked Nick.

  “Who is Mr. Barack H. Obama?” Nick answered, Jeopardy-style, flashing a grin at Emma. She felt her muscles relax a notch, only then realizing how tensed they’d been.

  “Can you tell me how to spell ‘world’ backward?”

  “W-O-R—”

  “Now can you try it backward?”

  The doctor was patient as Nick worried his brow. “Uh, D, O, L, W …” Nick trailed off, peering at his shoes. The doctor jotted something onto her paper.

  “Let’s try this; repeat after me.” She listed a series of simple words, and Emma zoned out as Nick, like a special-needs kindergartener, struggled to echo the short list.

  “Do you know where you are?” the doctor asked.

  “New York City,” Nick answered with assurance.

  “Did you attend a special event last night?”

  Nick’s shrug hit Emma like a punch to the gut. This was clearly not just the booze. Even after half a dozen whiskeys Nick could kick her butt in Trivial Pursuit; drunker than that, he was still a formidable opponent in Scrabble.

  “We’ll do a CT scan,” the doctor said. As he was wheeled away, Nick waved jauntily to Emma, as if he believed he was off for an ice-cream cone.

  As soon as he was gone, all remaining energy drained from Emma’s body, and she collapsed across two plastic chairs. She fell asleep and dreamed of a double wedding, she and Nick alongside Mr. and Mrs. Blum at the altar, Mrs. Blum in a yellow gown made of rain slicker material. When it was time for “I dos,” all four of them dispersed in hysterics, flailing their arms and wailing about not being ready for the commitment. Emma reeled about in circles, until she slipped on a branch and—bam!—hit her head. She woke up.

  The young doctor had a hand on her shoulder. “Your boyfriend has a pretty serious concussion, and we detected bleeding in his brain. Mild hemorrhaging is a common result of the kind of trauma he’s experienced.”

  When the doctor stopped talking, Emma heard only a low hum. Her body felt frozen. From the gurney Nick took her hand and patted it gently, as if he was the one who was supposed to be caring for her. “It’s okay, Em.” His speech was like sludge.

  The doctor started in on the medical jargon, and Emma forced herself to imagine it was a foreign tongue from some beautiful faraway land. Her mind wandered back to her dream. She saw herself sprinting from the altar, breathless with anxiety. Would Nick be forever stuck in this space, blood seeping into his brain, unable to spell words or place himself in time and space? Emma pulsed with fear.

  She realized the doctor was looking at her expectantly. “Come again?”

  “I said, we’ll need to monitor him for a couple of days, okay?”

  “Oh, um, yeah.” Was she supposed to protest or ask for more details? Emma didn’t know.

  They moved Nick into a private room, and a male nurse in Star Wars scrubs helped him out of his rumpled suit and into a thin hospital gown. The doctor reappeared, and Emma watched as she removed a needle and thread from her supply kit and then went to work embroidering Nick’s eyebrow. Emma thought of Edith Wharton’s world: fair maidens in fancy dress passing the time with needlepoint, honing the ladylike hobby and, along with it, their eligibility for marriage. And yet, here was this woman in her prime, wearing baggy scrubs and hunched over Nick’s wound, threading a needle in and out of human flesh. Emma found herself wondering if the doctor was married, and whether having such a prestigious job would make it easier or harder to get a guy.

  “There we go, Nick. You’re all stitched up.” She turned to Emma. “We’ve got him on morphine and a diuretic to reduce the swelling. A nurse will come by to adjust the meds. In the meantime, he should sleep, and we’ll wake him occasionally to make sure he’s improving. Two days of monitoring here, and then most likely you’ll be off, good as new, only Nick’ll have a gnarly new scar to show off to all his friends.”

  Emma nodded, torn between thinking that this news was cause for alarm (two whole days in the hospital!) and that it was cause for celebration (just two days in the hospital after a brain injury!). It was Monday, Labor Day. Nick was supposed to start school tomorrow, and Emma had ten clients lined up. Nick was already snoring, and Emma panicked for a good thirty seconds before, exhausted, she, too, drifted off to sleep in her chair. She dreamed of blood—gobs and gobs of it, flowing in gushes and coating everything with its sour stickiness, leaving a metallic taste on Emma’s tongue.

  When she finally awakened, it was from a knock, and then the Star Wars–clad nurse reappeared, carrying a covered tray. Emma wondered what would happen if she showed up to a 1, 2, 3 … Ivies! appointment wearing patterned pajamas. The nurse nudged Nick—“Wake up, buddy”—and then peeled plastic
wrap off a series of casserole dishes: steak and white rice, a side of wilted french fries, and a big slab of chocolate layer cake. They served this junk at a hospital? And why hadn’t Emma told them that Nick was a vegetarian? She felt a pang of guilt.

  The nurse asked Nick the same series of questions—who is the President, how do you spell “world” backward, can you repeat these words, and where are you?

  “In the doghouse,” Nick responded to the last one.

  “Excuse me?”

  “In the doghouse with my girlfriend.”

  Emma smiled. Nick was back, sort of. He looked like a mess and his boozy stench had hardly dissipated, but he was making a joke about his situation, so that had to be something. Emma imagined Nick’s brain like those preserved ones in science class, pink as bubblegum, bobbing gently in a jar of formaldehyde.

  The nurse pointed to the bedside phone on his way out: “To call outside of the hospital, just dial nine before the number.”

  Nick’s parents, Emma thought. Why hadn’t she gotten in touch with them? But just as soon as the thought flashed through her head, Emma pictured Mr. and Mrs. O’Hare receiving her call. They’d be sitting in their twin armchairs, and silently take in the news about their son’s fall and the bleeding in his brain. They’d be too polite to admit their terror, and from five hundred miles away, unable to help. Though they were just a few years older than Emma’s own parents, Mr. and Mrs. O’Hare seemed of an earlier generation, frail and gray. Emma couldn’t bear the thought of the call. Plus, she decided it would be best for Nick to be the one to reach out. She’d mention it when he was feeling a bit better.

  “Hand me the phone,” Nick said. “I’m gonna call Mrs. Caroline and tell her what happened.” Oh no, did he not remember? He waited a moment before saying, “That bitch.” Emma sighed with relief. “Come here, Em. You can have the cake.”