Her brow lifted. “Just one with alcohol,” she said. “You both thought that was smart?”
“Please. Tell the doctor. Please.”
She nodded and got up, handing him a sheaf of papers clipped to a board, a blue pen with bite marks along its stem, attached with a small cord. “Fill these out,” she ordered. “I’ll find the doctor.”
He stared at the forms, the words swimming in front of him. All he wanted to do was throw down the paper and barge through the forbidden door and grab Stella and say, Come on, we’re going. Come on, wake up. Everything’s going to be different now. You’ll see.
He didn’t have her insurance card—he’d have to give it to them later. Then he noticed his jeans, wet from the knees down, and his sneakers, soaked. He also realized he was shivering so hard that he could feel his bones knocking. He finished the form and set it on the desk. He looked around the waiting room, not knowing what to do. There were a few old Time magazines scattered about, but they were tattered and unappealing. He glanced at the TV. A cartoon was playing and he didn’t know how to change the channel. He couldn’t stand it, this waiting, the way his mind skittered from terrible scenario to terrible scenario. Stella unconscious. Stella paralyzed.
Stella dying.
He started to pace. What were they doing to her? Were they pumping her stomach? He didn’t know whom he hated more right now, Kevin for giving the pill to him in the first place or himself for being so reckless. Himself, he decided. He definitely hated himself. He had lied to her that the pill was Darvon. He had taken care of himself this morning first, giving in to his crankiness before he noticed her. He had even thought about starting a new life out in LA without her. What kind of person was he?
He knew the answer to that.
He could feel terror rising in his chest, and he jumped up and pushed through the ER doors. No one stopped him. He heard someone vomiting. He saw a young woman sitting on a table, dazed, her nose bleeding onto her blue hospital gown, into her hands. Then he saw Stella’s red socks at the end of a gurney and he ran to them.
A doctor, her hair across her lab coat as bright red as a tomato, was threading an IV into Stella’s arm, flashing a light into her eyes. Simon saw her name tag: Dr. Libby Marks. He didn’t know her, didn’t remember Stella’s ever mentioning that name when she told him about her days at work, but still, she seemed vaguely familiar. “You can’t be back here,” Libby said.
“I’m her boyfriend,” Simon said, and the doctor looked over at him.
“I don’t care who you are.” Libby shut off the light and Simon saw her smoothing Stella’s hair off her face. She might be all procedure, but she cared about Stella, and that made him feel better.
“Was she drinking?” she asked.
“We both were. A little wine.”
“What’s a little?”
“I don’t know. Two glasses. Three. Wait, maybe four. She has this ridiculously low tolerance.”
“Four,” Libby said, her brows rising. “She do drugs with that wine?”
“No. Not Stella. Just aspirin. Sudafed, maybe.” He sucked in a breath, which tasted rusty, like the inside of a tin can. “I told the nurse. She took a secobarbital.”
The doctor finished with the IV. “That’s a barbiturate. Phenobarbital. It’s not great with wine, but it shouldn’t do this. Did she take more than one?”
Simon tried to think, and his mind fuzzed into static. Her hands were in his pocket while they danced and he had shut his eyes, moving with her. What if they’d had more than the two pills and he didn’t even know it? “I don’t know,” he said.
The doctor wrote something on a chart. “I’m admitting her. She’s unresponsive. The tests should tell us a little more.” Libby seemed to dismiss him. Stella had told him once that doctors were abrupt because they had to be. Sometimes they couldn’t waste valuable time being nice or kind or chatty. Not when someone was sick and they had to focus.
“Coma can be complicated,” Libby said.
Simon froze. “What?” Coma. “She’s still alive?” Simon said.
“Of course, she’s alive.”
“Does she know I’m here? Can she hear me?”
“I don’t know that.”
“She’ll get better, won’t she?”
Another orderly appeared and began wheeling Stella away.
“Where are you taking her?” Simon couldn’t breathe. His heart thrashed in his chest. “Is she going to get better?”
“We’re going to get her in a room and cool down her whole body,” Libby said. “There’ll be less brain trauma that way.”
“Brain trauma . . .” All Simon could think about was how cold it was outside, how still and white, and here in this heated hospital they were going to re-create that for Stella.
“Go home,” the doctor told him. “Get some rest. You won’t be any good to her if you don’t.” It wasn’t until the doctor had vanished that Simon realized that Libby hadn’t answered his question: Is she going to get better?
HE DIDN’T GO home, instead returning to the waiting area. A man walked by and banged into Simon’s legs, but Simon didn’t say anything, didn’t complain. He deserved every outrage thrown at him.
He sat on the hard plastic chair watching whatever was on TV, one show sliding into another. He grabbed his cell from his pocket and looked up coma. He learned that only 50 percent of coma patients survive. Only 10 percent come out completely unchanged. There was a Glasgow Coma Scale, 3 to 15. What was Stella’s number? He shut off the phone and hugged his arms around himself. No. No. No.
He didn’t know how much time had passed when Libby pushed through the doors, and as soon as she saw him, she started and then composed herself. “You’re still here?” Libby said coldly.
“I am,” Simon said. “How is she?”
“We won’t know anything for a while. If she comes out of it in the next few days, we’re home free.”
“Her brain . . .”
“Oh no, no. In a coma state, the brain works. We’re just not sure how. She’s responding to some stimuli, too, which is good.”
Simon tried to swallow. “What about the Glasgow scale?”
Libby tilted her head. “Don’t go on the internet,” she said. “You’ll make yourself crazy.”
“What about it?”
“We’ll know more in the next week.”
“A week?” Simon’s body began to shake, and Libby put a hand on his arm.
“We?” Simon said.
“I’m just part of a team of doctors. They’ll do an EEG to assess her brain waves, an MRI for brain atrophy.”
Simon, shocked, couldn’t speak.
“You can’t do any good here right now. Go home.”
“I can rest here,” Simon said. After years on tour, he was used to sleeping on the bus, in chairs, on the floor, and on his feet, sometimes, if he had to. He could sprawl out on this orange plastic bench and be just fine.
Simon noticed the dark rings, like bruises under the doctor’s eyes, a faint stain on the lapel of her lab coat.