Eve and Adam

– 37 –

The ER entrance is a narrow, automatic door in a slab of concrete. There’s a cheery pink sign above that reads “Emergency Room,” adorned with a blue teddy bear. I think it may be the ambulances-only entrance, but I decide I don’t care. We slip in behind a gurney carrying a wildly flailing drunk.

The drunk is yelling, “Purgatory! Purgatory!”, so no one notices us.

Until they notice Adam.

The gurney falters. The two guys pushing it stare, their jaws dropping a little. A woman doctor comes out, lights a cigarette, takes a puff, and stops. The smoke drifts out of her mouth. She’s forgotten to exhale.

The drunk—he’s an old dude, maybe sixty, maybe a hobo—stops yelling and looks baffled.

“Excuse us,” I say. No one hears me. No one sees me. It’s kind of getting annoying. I do exist, after all, even when I’m standing next to Adam.

There is zero possibility that anyone will stop us as we move past the gurney and into the busy emergency room treatment area. Nurses bustle, doctors amble, everyone looks dopey-tired.

There’s less shouting and drama than you see on TV shows, and the lighting is much worse. Maybe the doctors are all having interior monologues about their love lives, but it seems more likely that they’re all just waiting for their shifts to be over.

Adam stops the place cold.

I’m concerned that people may be dying while the medical professionals stop to stare.

“Where’s Maddox Menlow?” I ask.

Again, there is apparently no sound coming out of my mouth, so I yell, “Aislin! Where are you?”

“E.V.?”

A white curtain flies back and Aislin’s head pops out of one of the treatment areas. I run to her. There’s hugging. Then I look at the bed. No Maddox.

“Where is he?” I ask.

“They just took him to be operated on.”

“Oh no,” I say. “How bad is it?”

She has a hollowed-out look in her eyes. “They shot him in the stomach. It’s… they don’t know. I mean, there was a lot of blood.”

I don’t know why, but I’d just kind of assumed that if Maddox had really been shot, it was in the foot or the elbow or something. Nothing like this. Nothing potentially fatal.

I feel like a jerk.

“Was it those same guys?” I ask.

Aislin looks down at her feet, embarrassed. “Look, he didn’t give them that money, the nine thousand dollars. He used it to buy some stuff. He was then going to resell it, so he could pay those guys and still keep some.”

Despite vivid images in my head of a gut-shot Maddox, I can’t stop the flame of anger kindling inside me. I got him that money. It wasn’t so he could deal more weed.

I lean against the bed. “Did they catch the guys?”

Aislin shakes her head. “I know, all right?” Her eyes brim with tears. “I know what he is. And I finally know I have to get rid of him. But not while he’s maybe dying, right?”

“Right,” I say, but I don’t believe she’s going to dump Maddox, injured or well. She’ll go back to him, like she always does. Suddenly the sheer doom of it all hits me. Aislin will spiral down with Maddox, or whatever asshole eventually replaces him.

And what’s my own great plan? To help Solo destroy my mother? And then what? Wander the city homeless, with my beautiful creation in tow, stopping traffic?

I realize—and I blame Adam for distracting me—that Solo has no doubt already succeeded. The devastating data is probably on its way. My mother’s doom is sealed.

Not about me, I chide myself. This is about Aislin.

“Let’s get a cup of coffee,” I say. Aislin sniffles into her sleeve, and I guide her from the emergency room to the cafeteria.

I’m sipping coffee before I realize I’ve left Adam behind.

“He’ll be okay,” I murmur.

“I don’t know,” Aislin says miserably, assuming I’m talking about Maddox. Then, bless her, she worries about me. “What’s happening with Solo? Did you guys do it?”

For once I know that when Aislin says “do it,” she doesn’t mean “have sex.”

“He took the flash drive and left,” I say.

“Oh.” She doesn’t know what to say, and that’s okay, because in her place I don’t know that I would be thinking about anything.

Why do I love Aislin? Because with her whole life falling apart, she thinks about me. She still cares about me.

I’m not as good a friend as she is.

“So… your mom?” she manages.

I shrug. My stomach is churning; my head is fuzzy. I’ve been reacting to Adam, not even thinking. What is the matter with me? Solo’s busy destroying my mother and I’m sighing over Adam.

It’s just that he’s so… perfect.

I’m so confused.

“Aislin,” I say, “there’s something I have to tell you. Show you. Someone.”

“Okay. Do you have any Kleenex on you?”

I grab a couple napkins from the dispenser. “It can wait,” I say. “You’ll see, soon enough.”

Suddenly someone sits down in one of the spare chairs. It’s rude, so I shoot the interloper a chilling look.

He’s a good-looking twenty-something Asian guy. He doesn’t smile. He’s wearing a green leather jacket. It takes a few seconds before I realize that I’ve seen him before. In Golden Gate Park.

The blood drains from Aislin’s face.

“Get out of here, you piece of crap” she snarls.

The guy looks at her, vaguely interested and not at all intimidated. He crosses his arms on the table and leans forward.

“I don’t suppose either of you ladies has a spare twelve thousand dollars, do you?”

“It’s nine,” I say.

“It was nine.” He makes a sort of sympathetic shrug. “Interest rates are high.”

“Actually,” I say with all the superior condescension I can manage, “the prime rate is quite low.”

It’s an amazingly stupid thing to say, but he takes it in stride. “We’re not the Fed. Our rates are higher.”

He sees my surprise. “Yeah, I know, I’m a thug so I must be unintelligent and uneducated. Truth is, I do work with some people who are like that. But I’m three credits away from a business degree.”

“Then you should be smart enough to find another job,” I snap.

He laughs, but his laugh is one of those silent ones. “Yeah, if my mom was a billionaire I’d probably feel that way, too. You know what the unemployment rate is for guys my age?”

I don’t. I have the feeling he does.

“I don’t have any money,” I say.

“Well, that’s just a matter of time,” he says. “Maddox had the money, didn’t he? Which means he got it from you. Right? Girlfriend here doesn’t have it, so it came from you.” He shrugs and leans back. “Go get some more. Twelve large to Terra Spiker is like a quarter to me.” He digs change out of his tight jeans, finds a quarter, holds it up between thumb and forefinger. “That’s what twelve grand is to your mom.”

“My mother has—” I begin.

“But you know what twelve grand is to Maddox? It’s life, that’s what it is. Life itself.”

The strange thing is that his dark eyes aren’t cold or without feeling. He seems compassionate. Almost as if he cares.

Maybe he does. Maybe he doesn’t want to kill Maddox.

Answering my silent question, he says, “I hate to see things end that way. You know how I’d like things to end? You meet me tonight—I’ll text you the location—and you hand me a bag with thirteen thousand dollars in it.”

“It was twelve!”

“Our interest rates compound hourly. By tonight it’ll be thirteen.”

He starts to walk away and I yell, “You don’t even have my number.”

“Sure I do,” he says without looking back.

Aislin doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t have to. The nameless guy with the quarter has taken care of that.

“How am I supposed to…” I begin.

“Don’t,” Aislin says. She puts her hand on my forearm. “You know what? Don’t even. You’ve done more than enough. Too much. Really. This isn’t your problem.”

“You’re my best friend. Of course it’s my problem.”

She looks at me gratefully, but then her gaze shifts. She rises without a word. There’s a doctor in line at the cash register, holding a piece of pie.

I follow her to him.

“You’re the doctor who took care of Maddox,” she says, yanking on his sleeve. “What’s happening?”

He looks cornered and not happy about it. “He’s still in the OR. It’s going to be a while. Hours.”

“Hours?” I echo.

“He took two bullets. There are fragments in his spine, damage to his liver, and major internal bleeding. If he survives all that, his large intestine is perforated, which means that all kinds of bacteria have been released into his body.”

“But he’s going to live,” Aislin says.

The doctor says, “He may.”

He may?

I look at Aislin, expecting a breakdown. Her face is almost impassive. But her eyes, they tell me the truth.

The truth shocks me. It shouldn’t, maybe, but it does. Her reaction to those two terrifying words, words conveying the possibility—no, the likelihood—that Maddox will die, causes a gleam.

It’s gone in a heartbeat. But I know I saw it.

There’s a part of Aislin that wishes Maddox would just, finally, die and free her.

Strange, maybe, but that decides it for me. I’ll get the money. Because my best friend is not going to live the rest of her life feeling like she dumped her boyfriend when he was helpless.

Maddox is going to live, if I have anything to say about it.

Then she can dump the jerk.