Break in Case of Emergency (12 page)
Read Break in Case of Emergency Online
Authors: Jessica Winter
No, I justâI was just agreeing with you.
Pardon?
I was just agreeing with you to be polite. I don't want to argue, you know.
We only want the truth here. That's what these conversations areâthey're a search for the truth. The truth of your spirit, the truth of your soul, the truth of Pam's purpose here on earth.
Yeah, no, I get that.
So, then, what is your truth, Pam?
I don't know. I really don't know. Um, so do you guys think you have enough material to work with now?
The time-elapsed bar at the bottom of the screen showed about thirty seconds left on the video, but Jen closed the tab, exited the video player, leaned over, and vomited neatly into her wastepaper basket. The ginger ale was amenable, she'd found, but she'd have to remember to chew the saltines more thoroughly.
whatDaisyknew: I'll be right back with some water and paper towels
Jen pushed the wastepaper basket under her desk with her foot and watched the package of saltines. She was surprised to find herself still seated inside the pocket of time, as if pressing play on the video had pressed pause on the autonomic avalanche to come.
“The biker,” a deep, familiar voice was saying.
Jen looked up at an out-of-focus image of Donna standing in front of her desk, where Pam had just stood. Donna's face was a picture of heavy-lidded perturbance, as if her umbrage had rudely awakened her from a late-afternoon nap.
“The biker?” Jen asked, guarding Donna from her breath by sipping from her ginger ale.
“The biker.”
“The biker,” Jen repeated.
“Friend of yours.”
“Pam?”
“The biker.”
“Are you asking,” Jen said, holding her hand over her mouth in what she hoped looked like a pensive gesture, “for general impressions of my friend Pam, whose interview with you didn't go as well as either of you had hoped?”
Donna stared back at her impassively. “You need to put a collar and a leash on that attitude and take it out for a long, hard run.”
Jen pressed her lips against the can of ginger ale and pretended to sip to keep from laughing.
“And,” Donna said, “you need to think twice before you put your friends' needs ahead of the organization's needs.”
A bolt of pain cracked a ragged diagonal down Jen's lower abdomen, and she hugged her waist and leaned forward, wincing. “Message received, Donna,” she said to the carpet.
“What is
wrong
with you?” Donna asked.
“I'm fine,” Jen gasped, surprised by pain.
“Well,” Donna said, swallowing the word in hesitation, unsure whether or not she should press her advantage, “we can't use that footage. Of your friend. Total waste of time.” Jen could sense Donna shifting on her feet, her bangles jostling one another in discomfort.
A hand stroked Jen's back. Daisy was standing beside her, holding a glass of water.
“I don't think she is feeling very good right now, Donna,” Daisy said.
Jen, doubled over, heard Donna exhale through her nose. “You set a good example for us all, Daisy. We can learn from you. You can teach us. And I hope you feel better, Julie,” Donna said as she clinked and clanged away.
Later, Jen remembered feeling happy for Daisy just then, that she had inspired such words of praise from the LIFt board chair. She made a mental note to remind Daisy to mention it in her six-month performance review. That happiness in turn produced a secondary happiness in Jen, that she was capable of considering the feelings of others even at a moment when she was bending and folding into herself, crumpling into a ball under the terrifying pressure of at least two types of pain, and she had no one but herself to blame for the pain, and no more space left in the pocket of time to put off the pain and its outrageous demands.
Sometimes it was crying, sometimes it was sobbing, and sometimes it was something else. The something else felt as though there was too much oxygen inside her, too much airâ
too much life,
Jen thought;
ha ha what a hilarious notion
âexpanding and kicking against either side of her rib cage until it would crack, air pushing, pushing, air bottlenecked just below her sternum, air that could escape only in small gulps, a mouth wide open but so little coming out of it, a wet ripping sound producing nothing but more of itself.
Nothing will come of nothing
Speak again
Jen would squeeze her eyes shut and pound her fist on the duvet, on the sofa, on the edge of the obscene bathtub under the screaming bathroom lights, as she tried to push, push the air out, again and again.
So much effort and so much time and so much waste and for what?
she thought, as water roared out of the tap.
The thing that happened started happening on a Friday evening. Jen didn't want Jim to see what was happening. She locked herself in their bathroom for hours, for an entire day. He went to the bar down the street to use the men's room. They called no one but the doctor's office. She went to the doctor's office alone, which was a mistake.
“I'm sorry, honey, I'm so sorry,” she cried into Jim's chest after she came back from the doctor's office. “Who
does
that? Why did I
do
that? I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry. I left us alone. I left us alone.”
“No, you didn't,” Jim said. “You never did. I'm here. We're here.”
“I'm sorry,” Jen said.
“You didn't do anything wrong,” Jim said.
“I'm sorry,” Jen said again, and after that she did not recognize the sounds spurting from her as her own.
The crying turned into sobbing and it turned into something else. Jim held Jen as she shook and shrieked with the effort of pushing, pushing the air.
“It's justâit's just air,” Jen cried.
“It's okay,” Jim whispered into her hair.
“It's justâpanicâpanicâ”
“Shhh, you're okay. You're going to be okay.”
Jen fell asleep crying and woke up crying. By the second day both of her eyes were swollen almost shut. She hurt already and the crying made the parts that hurt hurt even more. But she couldn't stop.
She dreamed that the blood in her veins turned to blackstrap molasses. A nurse with a giant needle struggled to tap a viable vein, then extracted four vials and offered her a taste. Jen refused, and the nurse shrugged and took a sip.
“I wasn't expecting it to be bitter,” the nurse said, licking her lips.
Jen had other dreams, dreams that she tried to forget, dreams that made her think part of her mind had gone rotten and pestilent, that it should be cut away before it infected the rest.
They never called the thing that happened by its name. After it was over, Jim never asked about it, and Jen never brought it up. The thing that happened was a country unto itself. Its borders were permanently closed. It spoke for itself in the event of itself, once, and it brooked no further discussion.
The bell was ringing, and Jen was sprinting across a field toward it. Her heart thumped so hard it clapped the grit from her chest cavity and rib cage, kicking up a swirl of dust that made her cough and retch as she ran. She knew this and could feel it. She had to touch the door before the bell stopped ringing. She had to. That was the rule. But her legs were giving out. The sockets of her hips were oxidizing. Her sides cramped and seized. Twenty feet from the door she fell forward, and some force pulled her arms behind her, and just as her face slammed into the ground she opened her eyes and saw her cell phone in bed next to her, ringing.
“Hey, Jen,” Karina was saying on her speaker phone. “Happy fall.”
“Hey, Karina,” Jen murmured.
“First day of autumn still feels just like summer.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“I got your husband's email and thought I'd call to check in.” Karina's voice echoed and spun around in the air. “Feeling under the weather?”
“Um, yeah,” Jen said, her tongue thick and filmy. She became aware of the ache in her lower abdomen, a pulling and shredding, and remembered.
“I'm sorry to hear that. Did I wake you?”
“Thanks, and no, it's okay,” Jen lied, with a small, weak laugh.
Why do you always laugh?
she thought.
Why is everything you think and say laughable?
“Should you be in the
hospital
?” Karina asked.
Jen regurgitated the same little laugh.
Stop stop doing that,
she thought
.
“I'm just home.”
“So it's not a
life-threatening
situation, I take it,” Karina said.
Jen pictured her: the eyes narrowed into Möbius strips of empathy and disappointment, the rhythmic encouraging nods.
“Oh, no, nothing like that,” Jen said.
“Do you have the flu?”
“Uh, no. No.”
Karina sighed. “I'm hearing a tone of evasion, Jen, and I want to understand. I'm calling out of concern for you and concern for your achievements. We have a lot of work to get done in the next few days ahead of the launch, and we're counting on you to be fully present. That's how much we value you.”
“Sure, of course, butâ”
“This is a time for all of us to come together, even if we're under the weather. We can make little sacrifices now, or we can make big sacrifices later. That's our choice to make. You're a key part of the team, Jen. What do you say? We'll give you all the support you need if you're not feeling one hundred percent. But we need the same support from you.”
“Karinaâ” Jen's throat seized and clicked. She closed her eyes.
“Are you still there?”
“I can't come in today. I can't. I can't.” Jen's voice bent and shuddered.
The line clattered as Karina picked up the phone. All at once her voice was inside Jen's head. “What's wrong?”
“I hadâit's justâ”
“What is it, sweetie? Take your time.”
“I had aâI had aâ”
“Oh, sweetheart,” Karina said. “Are youâ”
“Noâ”
“
Were
youâ”
Jen began sobbing. For a second she felt relieved.
“Oh, darling,” Karina said. “I'm so sorry. I thought that maybe you wereâother women can always tellâand nowâoh, sweet Jen. That is the hardest, hardest thing any woman can go through.”
Karina's cooing voice, higher-pitched and unfamiliar, stroked Jen's relief into trepidation. “No, it's okay,” Jen said, her voice still slushy. Her teeth seemed in the way of her tongue. “This wasn'tâit wasn'tâI hadn't plannedâ”
She was about to say
I hadn't planned to tell you,
but then she remembered that she hadn't told Karina anything at all.
“I see,” Karina said after a moment. “Still. It must be hard.”
Jen had stopped paying attention. She breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth. “I'm going to go now. Okay, Karina? Is that okay?”
“Okay, sweetie. Feel better, take care.”
Jen was dozing in bed when her cell phone rang. It was Jim.
“Hey, honey, just checking in. How are you feeling?”
“I'm okay. I'm glad to hear your voice.”
“I'm glad to hear your voice, too, sweetheart.”
Jen turned on her side and pulled her knees up, nestling the phone between her ear and her pillow, and listened to Jim not talking for a minute or two.
“Okay, well,” Jim said, “I was just checking in.”
“Stay a little while longer.”
“Of course,” Jim said. “Did youâby any chance did you talk to Pam?”
“No.”
“I bet you could call her, honey. I mean, if you wanted to.”
Jen said nothing.
“She would want to hear from you. If she knew. She would.”
“Number one, she told me not toâ”
“But that was beforeâ”
“And number two, I don'tâshe has a right to be angry with me. She does.”
“Okay, that's fair, but so what? Circumstances change.”
“If I tell her what happened, it's like the scene in a bad movie when you find out that the unlikable antagonist watched her parents drown when she was a kid or something, and that explains why she's such an asshole, and doesn't everything seem so different now.”
“No. It's not like that at all.”
“Plus I don't want to draw a connection in her mind between the thing with her and
this
thing,” Jen said.
“I don't think she would.”
“I would, if I were her,” Jen said. “She might even think I was blaming herâ”
“That's irrational,” Jim broke in, and caught himself. “No, I'm sorry, I shouldn't say
irrational.
I don't mean to invalidate anything you're feeling. But trust me, she would never think that.”
“Why not? One thing happened and then another thing happened.”
“Sure, honey, and I just ate a sandwich and now I'm going to teach my kids some Greek myths. That doesn't mean my sandwich wrote the Greek myths.”
“I think she would connect the two things,” Jen said. A theatrical singsong was creeping into her voice. She knew now that she was performing, saying things for effect, reveling in the novelty and miserable thrill of her predicament. “It certainly makes for a tidy narrative,” she said, the words syncopated.
Tidy narrative
swooped up and down on the scale, hitting middle C on the first syllable of
narrative.
“Cause and effect.”
“Okay, enough,” Jim said. “This is absurd. This is not a fucking
narrative,
Jennifer. It's not an input-output model. What happened is not your fffâyou know what, fuck this. Fuck your narrative.”
Jen felt a guilty satisfaction, a bilious tickle of delight, at the controlled explosion she had detonated on the other end of the line. She wondered if the kick could overcome the shame sufficiently to produce its own modest endorphin rush.
“I'm sorry,” she said.
“You don't have to be sorry,” he said. “I'm sorry. You're going to be okay. I have to go to my next class, okay? I love you.”
Jen could hear Jim hesitating before he hung up the phone. “You should get your artwork back from her,” he said. “From Pam.”
“There's a lot of things I should do,” Jen said.
Jen and Franny were still asleep in bed when her cell phone rang.
“Hey, Jen, how are ya?” It was Sunny on speaker.
“Oh, hey, Sunny.” Jen's lips stuck gummily together.
“Listen, hon, it's nine-thirty. When can we expect you?”
“Wait, what?” Jen wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and sat up. Franny sat up, too, arching her back. “I talked to Karina yesterday and told her I needed to take a sick day.”
“Right, hon, but that was yesterday. What about today?” Sunny's voice was now muffled and small, balled up in paper, as if she'd turned away from the speaker to fish for something in her handbag.
“Sick
days,
plural,” Jen said.
Sunny said nothing.
“I'mâI'm entitled to them?” Jen asked.
“Entitled, ha! Don't I know it,” Sunny said, her voice big and clear again. “Jen, babe, we
neeeeed
you here. We're depending on you. Leora's gonna
fa-reek ow-oot
if she doesn't have her team intact, kiddo.”
Jen's teeth began chattering against the phone. She held it slightly away from her. “I talked to Karina yesterdayâ”
“I
know,
hon, I'm so sorry. I can't even imagine what you're going through.”
Jen dropped the phone on the bed and picked it up again. “So Karina toldâand Karina saidâ”
“Jen, honey, Karina
asked
me to call you.”
“Okay,” Jen said. “Okay. Um, okay. What I was going to say was, I talked to her yesterday and thought weâwe had an understanding.”
“We
do
understand, honey, but we've got a launch! We can't afford to lose another dayâ”
“You
understand
?” Jen said. “That's funny, a second ago you said you couldn't possibly imagine.”
“Hey, now, hold up, girl, don't take this out on me. Channel that sorrow, channel that womanly power and passion, but don't wield it against someone who's on your side. Use it for good.”
Jen looked around the bedroom and logged the items in it. This was a technique taught in the mindfulness seminar that was compulsory for all new LIFt staffers. When feeling upset or impulsive, the instructor explained from her lotus-pose perch atop the conference-room table, you should take sixty to ninety seconds to take stock of the physical reality surrounding you. The goal, the teacher said, was to “hit a mental reset button,” in order to make friendly everyday objects feel realer and more immediate than whatever source of anxiety might be flooding your frontal lobes at that instant.
The sun was shining. Jen watched the curtain drifting in the windowâoff-white on purchase, now a dusky yellow. She counted the watercolor-textured peacocks on the bedspread. She tugged absently at the fitted sheet, puckered in its perpetual slow-motion efforts to unpeel itself from the mattress. She cataloged the books on Jim's side of the bedâAstors, astrophysics, Aztecsâand the stacks of art catalogs and sketchbooks on her side. She logged Franny, purring on the bed beside her. Franny generally preferred not to be crowded, but she didn't wriggle as Jen pulled her close and pressed her face into her fur. The phone slipped from between Jen's ear and shoulder and dropped to the bed again.
“Jen? Are you there?”
Jen stroked Franny's fur where her tears had dampened it and picked up the phone. “Sunny,” Jen said, “are you seriously telling me I have to come in today?”
“I'm not your keeper!” Sunny said. “I'm not the boss of you.
You're
the boss of you. I'm telling you what's what. I am
providing you with information.
”
“Jen!”
Slowly, methodically, Jen stood up from her desk and turned to see Karina across the floor of the LIFt offices. Karina made a tossing motion over her shoulder: a big beckoning arc. As Jen began to walk toward her, Karina turned her back and returned to her office.
Jen halted. She turned, walked back to her desk, and sat down, the chair wheezing under the impact. She held her fists in her lap and waited.
Her phone rang. Karina's extension. “Did you get lost?” Karina asked.
“No,” Jen said.
“Well, then, get over here, kiddo, I'm dying to see you.”
Jen slammed the phone down and stalked across the floor to Karina's office. Her limbs were stiff and heavy. Her face felt sunburned. Everything hurt.
“How
are
you?” Karina was asking.
“Fine, fine,” Jen said. “Soâ”
“Sit, please, hon, and shut the door,” Karina said.
Jen shut the door but remained standing. “So we have the first passes on the edits on the videosâ”
“That's good. But I wasn't asking how are the edits. I was asking how are
you
?”
“I'm fine.”
“Feeling okay physically?”
“Yup.”
“And what about emotionally?”
“Yup.”
“You're sure?”
“Yup. Yeah. Yes.”
“Oh, honey, I wish I weren't out of tissues.”
Jen swiped the back of her hand across one cheekbone, then the other. “No, I'm okay, I justâI don't want to talk about it, if that'sâI don't want to talk about it.”
“Well, you don't have to talk about it with little old me. But you shouldn't keep it bottled up. Forgive me for asking, but is there a licensed professional you've been in contact with?”
Jen could feel her tears hitting her blouse. She stared at the cluster of framed photographs on Karina's desk. Karina with Leora, blurred at a cocktail party, their eyes rabid red in the camera's pop. Karina with her tousle-haired, bespectacled husband on some beach. Karina with her son and daughter when they were babies, toddlers, preschoolers. “I'm okay,” Jen said. “I appreciate your concern.”
“What I can'tâ” Karina paused. She looked up toward the ceiling, as if for celestial counsel, and then spoke very slowly. “What I can'tâ¦put my finger on⦔ she said, “is whyâ¦well, given that this was unplannedâ¦why you are so upset.”
Jen kept looking at the photographs. Karina's son had his father's features and his mother's coloring; her daughter had the inverse. “I guess that is strange, isn't it,” Jen said to the photographs. Her mind busied itself projecting their faces, tracing the projections, painting the traces.
“Strange? No, that's not the word I would use,” Karina said. “I just don't understand, and I
want
to, because I care about you. We all do. We're all thinking about you right now.”
The beachy highlights in Karina's daughter's hair might be tricky to mixâtoo much white would turn them to toothpaste, but too much yellow would bleach them chlorine green.
“I have the edits,” Jen said to the photographs, “and I'd love to know if you want to watch them or if we can go ahead and finish up with them.”
“Of course,” Karina said. “You want all of this to be over with.”
Jen kept her head down as she walked back to her desk, one cupped hand held faux-pensively to her philtrum to conceal any redness or swelling until she
flump
ed back into her chair. Daisy knocked gently on their shared cubicle wall, and Jen knocked reassuringly back.
whatDaisyknew: ARE YOU OK
jenski1848: No. But yes.
Daisy replied by attaching a .jpg file of a dachshund puppy enfolded in a hamburger bun.
jenski1848:
Thanks, D. You're a good friend.
Daisy did not reply.
