Chapter Seven
Jo
The patient lying on the bed in front of me could have been seventy or twenty-five. The skin of their hands was mottled halfway
up their arms, spiderwebs of violent purples and greens and yellows creeping higher before my eyes. Next to me: my favorite
nurse, Kristin.
“What do you want to do, Dr.B?” she said pleasantly.
I stared at the patient, at the flat line on their monitor. The tips of the patient’s fingers had turned as black as tar.
Frantic, I searched my mind for what to do next, a nonsensical flurry of mnemonics and medicalese scrolling down my vision
like a credit crawl ( blood gas, pseudomonas aeruginosa, cefepime flagyl septic shock pulsus paradoxus ), until finally, I arrived at my diagnosis.
“They’re already dead,” I said.
Suddenly, a light flickered on, and the room was swirling with activity, anesthesiologists pushing the bed forward to place a breathing tube, a medical student losing his glasses in the yellow-stained tangle of sheets in the patient’s bed as he did compressions. Dr. Makinen stood, ghoulishly tall and perfectly still, at the foot of the bed, peering at me from behind thin-rimmed glasses. I hadn’t noticed him there before.
“How could you let this progress?” he said calmly, his voice preternaturally loud against the dissonance. “You call yourself
a doctor?”
On the bed, the patient began to buck, their chest arching to resist the compressions, their withered hands raised toward
the ceiling. Then, between one blink and the next, they were facing me.
Ezra stared at me through cloudy blue eyes. The mottling had progressed to his face, bruises blossoming up his neck like ink
crawling along a wet page. A tear pooled and crested in his eye before streaking to the corner of his dry, cracked mouth.
“You left me,” he croaked.
I stepped back, horrified, and then his face changed, became rounder, his hair lengthening and becoming coarse, the eye sockets
widening, irises darkening to black.
My mother.
“You ruined me,” she said.
My chest seized, and I scrambled backward, searching for an exit. But the scene chased after me, the room shifting to keep
up like a predator as Prudence Boateng spoke.
“I was right to never love you,” she said, her voice echoing in my skull like she was speaking directly into my mind, and
finally, with effort, I wrenched myself awake.
I sat up, cradling my head. It was still bright outside; by the time flashing on my digital clock across the room, my attempt at a midday nap had lasted only forty-five minutes. My mother’s face lingered in the darkness behind my closed eyelids. It had been thirteen years since I’d last seen her in person, and so in my mind, she’d remained forever in her late thirties, not so much older than I was now. I wondered, not for the first time, where she was, what she was doing. Whether she was even alive.
And then I shook my head. I’d filed for emancipation at age sixteen, and in that time, Prudence Boateng had made minimal effort
to establish contact. Surely she could have found me if she wanted to. I had to be one of the more prominent Josephine Boatengs
in the country, and I hadn’t changed my phone number from the one I’d handed her on the day I moved out of her apartment.
If I was still a stranger to her, it was because Prudence wanted me to be. And if that fact still gave me grief, well, that
just meant I wasn’t as healed as I liked to pretend.
My pillow began to vibrate. I fished out my phone from under it.
“Hey, Dr.B,” my building’s doorman, Raymond, said. “You’ve got a package at the front desk.”
I gritted my teeth, suspicious. I’d played this game before.
“Didn’t realize we got personal phone calls for our packages these days,” I said flatly. “Ezra send something?”
“Yup,” Raymond said brightly. He was a kid, young enough that the shift work didn’t wear on him, brazen enough to pull the
kind of stunts an older man knew could cost him his job, like accepting bribes to guilt his tenants into picking up unwanted
gifts.
Groaning, I tossed away my sheets, threw on a pair of athletic shorts, and made my way down to the lobby.
The irony of trying to get over Ezra Adelman was that I’d never wanted anything to do with him in the first place.
College may have been a place where reedy teenagers went to become capable adults, but I arrived at Gertrude B. Elion University fully grown. Unlike my roommates, I had already paid taxes, found roommates on Craigslist, worked retail, challenged my bank’s overdraft fees. My admittance to a prestigious college was a golden ticket, a chance for a girl like me—poor, Black, effectively orphaned—to find stability through education. There would be no delving into dormitory drama; no house, frat, or pool parties; and certainly no boys, who would offer little more than obstacles to my goal of independence.
And then, one fated Friday night, a very drunk Ezra Adelman barreled into my dormitory room.
“What the fuck?” I’d said, holding my pillow in front of me like a weapon. Ezra didn’t know me, but I knew him. Everyone at
Elion University did. In our ritzy private college full of filthy rich trust-fund kids, he was the filthiest and the richest;
his matriculation at Elion was hailed by an article in the local newspaper: ceo of knydus buys $1.3 million home near elion university campus . Adelman sightings filled the class Facebook groups, grainy shots of the handsome heir buying coffees at the library café
or running across campus in the rain to make it to his next class, accompanied by heart-eye emojis. We shared a class, American
Literature, and on the first day, it had taken the professor fifteen minutes to settle everyone down after Ezra had walked
in.
Most of the time, I felt sorry for him, for his inability to disappear. At that moment, however, I was very pissed to find
him in my room.
“What are you doing here?” I’d said when he didn’t respond. “Get out!”
Ezra raised bleary eyes to me. I remembered thinking that they were jarringly blue, stark against his pale skin.
“Oh shit,” he slurred, pushing his hair off his forehead. “Ellie didn’t tell me she had a roommate. Sorry. I was just going
to take a piss.”
“There’s a common bathroom!” I said. “Use that!”
Ezra shook his head, already making a turn into our bathroom.
“It’s occupied,” he said. To my horror, he didn’t close the door, and I caught the sound of his zipper being undone, our toilet
seat being lifted, urine hitting the center of the bowl. When he reemerged (after washing his hands, thank goodness), he grinned
up at me. “You’re in my American Lit class, aren’t you? I don’t think we’ve met.”
“We’re not meeting now,” I said, blinking away my shock; that class was forty people large. I would never have expected him
to recognize me. Suddenly, I became aware of my state of undress, my thin, oversize sleeping tee, my magenta satin bonnet.
He seemed to notice too, because he cocked his head to one side, regarding me more closely.
“Well, for your reference, my name’s Ezra,” he said. Then finally, he turned on his heel, making for the door. Before his
hand closed over the handle, however, he looked at me over his shoulder and tapped his head. “I like your sleeping hat.”
My pillow bounced against the closed door, and behind it, I could hear Ezra laughing.
Our interactions beyond that had been entirely out of my control. If I sat down at a library table to study, I would look
up to find Ezra sliding into the seat across from me, emptying his backpack like we’d planned to meet. He invited himself
to my previously lonely lunches in the cafeteria or to my quiet afternoons reading on grassy knolls on the quad and attempted
to coax me into breaking into the campus observatory. When someone tried to get credit for my contributions to a discussion
in American Lit, Ezra would adjust his slouch, throw up his hand, and say, insouciantly, “I think Jo just said that.”
I had no choice about whether Ezra Adelman was in my life. If I closed the door on him, he would simply ram it open again.
Just as he was attempting to do now.
“I’m sorry, Dr.B, but you’ve got to take them,” Raymond said, grinning up at me sheepishly.
“You are so annoying,” I said through clenched teeth, staring at the unglazed white vase full of pristine blue hyacinths.
Apology flowers, from the one person I knew pretentious enough to still communicate in Victorian era floriography. Nestled
within the blossoms, a small card with Ezra’s elegant handwriting in dense black ink: I’m sorry. Talk to me please. And don’t get mad at Raymond. He’s a good kid making an honest living.
“I told him to add that part,” Raymond quipped, raising his phone hopefully. “Sorry, I have to send him proof of receipt.
Do you mind?”
“How much did he pay you this time?” I asked, flipping him off for the picture.
“Two grand,” Raymond said cheerfully.
I scowled. For someone so desperate to pretend that the twenty-four-karat-gold diamond-encrusted spoon lodged in his throat
was a mere silver one, Ezra sure loved to test the limits of what his money could buy.
“Ask for more next time,” I said. “The price of breaking my boundaries has got to be higher than that.”
“Got it,” Raymond said, not even playing at contrition. “Just promise to keep your man in the doghouse, okay? If you keep
this up, I might be able to pay off my car this year.”
“He is not my man,” I hissed, storming off.
It would have been easier for me if he had been. Mourning a relationship that had only ever existed in my head was not bad -bitch behavior, and yet here I was, mooning over a man who had never really been mine. If only I’d been braver. If only, nine years ago, when I first felt this stirring in my stomach, I’d told him what it was so he could turn me down for good. I would have moved on, saved time, never caught myself in a position where drawing boundaries between us could inspire nightmares.
Balancing the vase on my hip, I opened up our text thread for what had to be the hundredth time today. Ezra had sent me messages
after the party, but his most recent one, sent twelve hours ago, had replayed in my mind like a bad pop song.
Fine, Jo, I get it. You need a little space. I understand that, and I’ll give it to you. But don’t think that means I’m giving
up. I love you. I know you love me. No matter what, we’ll be okay.
I jammed the up button on the elevator, squeezing my eyes shut as I waited for it to arrive. I was so tired of Ezra’s I love you s, so undefined that they’d become almost meaningless. “You mean like a sister?” I’d asked him once, out of frustration that
I had delivered as a joke, and he’d laughed, shaken his head, and curled his pinkie finger around mine.
“Like something that doesn’t exist,” he’d said. “Like a part of my soul, maybe.”
Suddenly, the vase in my arms felt heavy. I resisted the urge to throw it against the wall. Instead, I scrolled to a different
thread, a newer one. Mal’s.
Unlike Ezra, Mal was naked with his intentions. I’d asked him to get dinner, and he’d responded, minutes later, with a place,
a date, and a time. When I agreed, he said: Great! It’s a date, as if to confirm what he’d rightly assumed. It was refreshing, to be wanted the way Mal seemed to want me. It made me want
him too.
The elevator arrived, and I typed out a text as I stepped in.
I’m going to bring your book to the date. Don’t act too embarrassed when I ask you to sign it.
It took Mal approximately three seconds to respond.
Mal: Jesus. Don’t do that.
Mal: In fact, don’t read it at all. I don’t want you walking around thinking I’m my characters or anything. I’m not nearly
as suave as they are.
I like that you aren’t suave, I said honestly. I was used to the kind of man who could charm a room with a smile, the kind who had a guy who could arrange
out-of-season flowers in an artisanal porcelain vase on short notice. The kind of guy who could tell you he loved you while
simultaneously waltzing around with the person who had once poured spoiled milk down your back in a middle school cafeteria.
I realized, suddenly, that I was furious. Not with Ezra, who had never lived in a world in which he couldn’t have his cake
and eat it too, but with myself. Why had I deprived myself of this, of the little thrills of a budding dalliance, of sending
a text and twiddling my thumbs as I waited for a response? Why hadn’t I indulged the way Ezra always had?
Mal responded, sweetly, the way he always did, with a You do? I’ll lean into my awkwardness then, and I made up my mind then. I would not call Ezra back. I would not think of him at all.
Instead, I thought, as I upended the flowers, water and all, into a garbage can outside the eighteenth-floor elevators, I
would open up to the world I’d closed myself off to, the one I had previously only observed from a distance.
On Friday night, at Il Latini at 7:00p.m., I was going to seduce Malcolm Waters.