4. Georgie #2
He pauses. “Your Franny gave me explicit permission to stay on the line until you’re out of there, so yes, I will stay.”
“And if we get disconnected?”
“There’s a note to transfer directly to me. You just tell them it’s Georgia and they’ll pass you right over.”
I scrunch my nose, even if he can’t see it. Or maybe he can, it’s hard to tell anymore. “Only my mom calls me Georgia.”
He sounds genuine while he asks, “Should I continue to call you G then?”
I smile softly up at the camera. “Sure. That works.”
There’s silence between us; me taking a moment to breathe, and him patiently waiting for me to initiate conversation.
“Georgie?” I hear a voice call to me, not from the phone line, but from outside the elevator.
“Holy shit.” I scramble across the floor to the door.
“Is everything alright, G?” N asks, but I ignore him for a moment to listen for the voice calling me.
“Georgia, can you hear me?!” Her voice echoes through to me.
“Franny!” I scream back, echoing down the elevator shaft.
“Are you okay?” Franny asks.
“No!”
“Are you still on the call with the elevator guy?”
“Yes!” I shout back.
“Okay! I’m trying to see if there’s anything I can do. We’re going to get you out, okay?”
“Okay!” I turn back to face the dreary, dark room of containment where I’m alone. This day is absolute shit.
N’s voice startles my mind back into the elevator.
“Was that Franny?”
“Yeah.” My voice comes out breathy and barely there. I hear the groan of movement in the elevator shaft. I look to the ceiling, as if it will show me what the hell is happening. The car sways a bit, and I can feel my heart hammer in my chest. All I want is to make it out alive. “Shit.”
“Hey, G? You okay?” N’s voice calls out to me, and I realize just how quiet I’ve gone on him.
The tears don’t return; I’ve cried myself out and ruined the last smear of makeup I was wearing from this morning. What time even is it? How long have I been here? One spiral leads to another and I start to tremble again.
“I’m really scared,” I whisper to him after a few moments of silence.
“How can I help?”
“I don’t know.”
“Let’s count things. Five things you smell, four things you hear, three things–”
“N?”
“Yeah?” his voice echoes.
“I’m in a dark, dingy elevator that smells like desperation and sadness and slightly like someone has peed in here. Also, the floor is sticky, and my legs are too shaky to even consider getting up. I don’t think the counting thing is going to help.”
He hums, as if he’s in agreement. I close my eyes, lean my head back, and breathe. Then again. The two of us breathe in and out at the same time, him likely to the pace he hears me breathing in.
“Tell me something good,” I say to him.
“Something good?” he questions, but then I hear him make a small thinking noise. “My sister is having a baby.”
“Right now?”
“No! No, she’s about five or six months along now, but it’s my first time being an uncle. And I guess that scares me too. Hmh. Would you look at that? Never admitted that out loud before.”
I look up to the dark ceiling, imagining that that’s where he is and not somewhere so far away. It’s comforting to pretend I’m not alone. “Don’t you find it exciting?”
“Sure, but I’ve never… the only baby I’ve ever held was a cousin, and I was—like—barely six.”
“How old are you now?”
“Twenty-five next month. You?”
“Twenty-five. My birthday is in October.”
It’s a welcomed distraction, to have a reason to talk about something so trivial as a birthday party.
I tell him about how Franny threw me a surprise rooftop barbecue party for all my friends and family.
The crowd really only consisted of Franny and my mom, plus the neighbours she knew I spoke to in the halls from time to time, and a few friends from high school I still keep in touch with.
Franny had decorated everything in white balloons, streamers, and soft twinkling lights. When the sun went down, it felt like a rooftop of whimsy. I’m sure she got the idea from Pinterest, where she gets most of her outrageous, planned-to-exact-details ideas, and I tell him all about them.
“I should take notes for Sienna’s baby shower. Apparently because ‘She never got the sister she always wanted’, she’s had to settle for me planning a sprinkle and shower. What even are those? Aren’t they the same thing?” This makes me giggle.
“Not quite.”
“Maybe I should hire Franny.”
“Hey, get your own party-planning best friend,” I tease.
We talk about everything that comes to mind.
He tells me about the book his sister made him read that’s about to be a movie, and I tell him about how I took up crochet and needlework the summer I turned fourteen—when I broke my leg and had nothing better to do.
I tell him about the hats and blankets I make for the babies in the local NICUs, and he paints a very vivid picture of the time he almost got lost as an adult in the zoo on a family trip.
We talk about the little things; the things you might not tell someone you hardly know.
Like how his favourite thing about going to the beach is the feeling of the sand at the very edge of the water where the tide rolls in and out between his toes.
I say how sand is my least favourite thing about the beach, and he tells me that I’ve got to see the sand at one of the provincial parks, how it reminds him of the white sand beaches in Florida.
I’ve never been there either, but I think if I told him that he might lose his mind.
“How are you feeling now?” he asks sincerely.
“Better. All things considered.”
“Good. I’m doing my job then,” he says.
Then, part of me feels sad. I know this is his job, I know I asked him to stay, and I’m sure this is well out of his jurisdiction to do this.
He might get fired for it and it would be my fault.
But for a moment, one could pretend that this wasn’t just him talking to me for a job.
That he actually cared whether or not I’m okay.
“That you are,” I mumble back. I fall silent, unsure how to continue.
“Georgie?” A deep voice, not N’s from the speaker, calls out to me. I look around for the source of the voice, and then I look up.
“Holy shit. Hi!”
The voice in question comes from the shadowed man in the ceiling. They’ve literally taken out the ceiling tile of the elevator. He tells me, “You’re going to be fine. We’re almost ready to get you out of there.”
While thoroughly confused by my rescuer's confidence in getting me out of the floating metal death trap, one that’s now being illuminated from the light of a hallway above the elevator ceiling, I realize I’m stuck in between floors.
“How do you plan to get me out? Are you going to turn the elevator back on?”
“No, we can’t do that,” he tells me before turning around to talk to someone outside the elevator shaft.
“Everything okay in there?” N asks.
“The um… technician? Fire dept? I don’t know. Someone is hanging out in the ceiling of the elevator. And, apparently, they’re going to get me out–”
“–through the ceiling.”
As I hear the tail end of the sentence and my eyes widen. “Oh, hell no,” I say in response to the rescuer turning back to me.
N’s voice comes through again. “What are they saying?”
“That they’re going to get me out through the ceiling….” I turn back to the man in the sky. “Excuse me, sir. You do realize I’m fat and absolutely not going to fit through that tiny ass square, right?”
“Don’t worry. We’ve got this.” He disappears again, and then I see him tying what looks like rope, or some material, into a detailed knot.
“Supposedly, they’ve got this, N,” I say while turning back to the speaker, then glancing to the camera, hoping he sees me.
“Right. Well, I’m… glad you didn’t die, G.” His voice is soft, but distant.
I press my lips in a thin line. “Me too. Although the jury’s not out if they think a little tiny piece of rope is going to work.”
“I think it’s best to let the professionals take it from here. I’m glad I could help you, G. Good luck… with everything.”
Slowly, I wave to the camera. How do you say goodbye to someone you just bared your soul to? Told your fears, all the things you don’t share with strangers? I can hear it, the moment he hangs up. The elevator becomes eerily silent. I stare at the speaker for far too long, thinking he’ll come back.
I never even got his full name.
“Ready to get out of here?” the man in the ceiling asks me, causing me to look up at him, and the promising light of day.
“Ready as I’ll ever be.”