Syndrome E

2

The shrill ring tone yanked Lucie Henebelle from a deep sleep. She jerked up in her chair and groped around for her cell.

“Hello…?”

Pasty voice. Lucie glanced at the clock in the room: 4:28 a.m. Opposite her, her daughter Juliette, a glucose drip in her right arm, was fast asleep.

The voice on the other end of the line was shaky:

“Hello? Who is this?”

Lucie brushed her long blond hair off her face, her nerves on edge. She had finally managed to doze off. It was very definitely not the time for practical jokes.

“Who am I? Who the hell are you? Do you have any idea what time it is?”

“Ludovic—it’s Ludovic Sénéchal… Is this… is this Lucie?”

Lucie Henebelle quietly left the room and found herself in a neon-lit hallway. She yawned and tugged at her shirttails, trying to look halfway decent. Distant babies’ wails ran along the walls. In Pediatrics, silence was a pipe dream.

It took her a few seconds to place the caller. Ludovic Sénéchal. An e-dating fling, following several weeks of intense messaging, that had ended seven months later in a café in Lille, for reasons of “incompatibility.”

“Ludovic? What’s going on?”

In the receiver Lucie heard the sound of a crash, like a glass falling to the floor.

“Someone has to come get me. Someone has to…”

He couldn’t speak, seemingly overcome by panic. Lucie urged him to calm down, talk slowly.

“I don’t know what happened. I was in my cinema. Listen, Lucie—I can’t see a thing. I turned all the lights on and it didn’t make a damn bit of difference. I think… I think I’ve gone blind. I called a number at random and…”

That was just like him to be watching movies at four in the morning. A hand on her lower spine, Lucie walked back and forth past a huge window that looked out on the various hospitals of the Lille medical center. That crummy armchair had given her a stiff back. At thirty-seven, your body doesn’t shrug things off so easily.

“Hold on. I’m sending an ambulance.”

Ludovic might have bumped his head on something. A scalp wound or head trauma might provoke this kind of symptom and could prove fatal.

“Make sure you’re not bleeding by feeling your head and licking your fingers. Skull, nose, and temples. If you are, cover it with ice cubes and press with a towel. The EMTs will bring you to the hospital right next door to here and I’ll come check in on you. Whatever you do, don’t lie down. You still live at the same address?”

“Yes. Please hurry!”

She hung up and ran to the emergency desk, from where she had them dispatch an ambulance. No doubt about it, her summer vacation was getting off to a rousing start. Her eight-year-old had just been admitted for viral gastroenteritis. Nobody ever had such crappy luck in the middle of summer! The illness had blasted through like a hurricane, dehydrating the poor girl in a mere twenty hours. Juliette couldn’t swallow a thing, not even water. The doctors were predicting a stay of several days, with lots of rest and a special diet after she got out. The poor kid hadn’t been able to go to her first summer camp with her sister, Clara. Being apart was hard on the twins.

Lucie leaned on the window. Watching the revolving light of an ambulance as it sped out, she reflected that in the police station or out in the world, on vacation or at work, life always seemed to land her in the shit.