Chapter 13
SOMETHING brEAKS
I.
The garbage is in the kitchen.
I've been thinking about it from the couch for twenty minutes.
A plastic bag, half full, tied loosely at the top.
Nora tied it before she left yesterday. She also wiped down the counter, refilled my water, plugged in my phone, and set the painkillers within reach — a sequence so practiced I stopped noticing it until she stopped coming every day, and now I notice it like a tooth the moment it starts to ache.
She's not here today. She texted this morning: Hope you slept ok. I'll come by tomorrow. Let me know if you need anything.
I didn't need anything. I said so. I said all good with an emoji that I picked carefully — not the thumbs up, which is dismissive; not the smiling face, which is a lie; the simple check mark, which is nothing. The nothing emoji. The emoji of a man who is doing fine.
The garbage bag is right there.
Camille called twenty minutes ago. Voicemail.
She's at the patisserie — Wednesday is her day for custom orders, and she once told me that leaving ganache mid-temper is a crime worse than arson.
Marc texted yesterday asking if I wanted company.
I said maybe this weekend because maybe this weekend is the polite Canadian version of please don't come watch me be this.
The bag is three feet from the counter and the bin is by the door and the door is ten feet away.
Thirteen feet, total. I've walked further than that. I walked to the bathroom this morning. I walked to the kitchen. I made instant coffee, which was terrible — terrible enough to clarify how good Nora's coffee is and how I will not, under any circumstances, think about that.
Thirteen feet.
I grab my crutches. I stand — the usual process, edge, plant, push, the stiffness through my left side that has graduated from sharp to deep to this: a dull, heavy thing that catches when I move wrong, like hardware settling into bone that hasn't decided whether to accept it.
I'm standing. My phone is in the pocket of my sweats.
She told me to keep it there. Weeks ago — it feels like months — she said keep your phone on you, in case something happens.
At the time it was just her being practical.
The way she's practical about everything — the pills sorted, the crutches positioned, the phone charged.
In case something happens.
I take a step. Good. Another. The crutches hit the floor with the dull thud that has become the background music of my life. Thud thud step. Thud thud step. I make it around the corner. I reach for the bag.
It happens on the reach.
Not dramatically. Not the way it happens in movies, where the music swells and the camera goes slow-motion and the audience holds its breath.
It happens like this: I shift my weight to my right side and bend slightly forward and my left crutch slips — the edge of the rug, a sock, nothing, it doesn't matter — and my balance goes, and I grab for the counter but the counter is three inches further than I thought, and my hip seizes, and I'm on the floor.
I'm on the floor.
The garbage bag is next to me, still tied.
The crutches are — one is under the kitchen table, the other is by my side.
The floor is cold. The floor is the same floor where Nora sat and cried and tried to tell my cat things she couldn't tell me, and now I'm on it, and the irony is not lost, and the irony doesn't help.
I try to get up.
I can't.
The mechanics are simple: roll to your good side, get a hand under you, push up to kneeling, grab something stable, stand.
I know the steps how I know extrication procedure — in order, from memory, hundreds of repetitions.
But my body is not interested in procedure right now.
My body is interested in the specific, clarifying fact that I am a thirty-four-year-old man on his kitchen floor because he tried to take out the garbage, and the reason he tried to take out the garbage is because a woman used to do it and the woman isn't here anymore and he told her not to come.
I try again. My arm shakes. My hip sends a signal that translates roughly to stop.
I stop.
Bagel appears. He sniffs my face. He sits down next to my shoulder with the calm interest of a creature who has seen humans on floors before and finds it unremarkable.
"Thanks," I say. "Very helpful."
He purrs.
I reach into my pocket. My phone. The screen lights up: two cats, one black, one orange. She told me to keep this on me. Of course she did. Of course the one piece of advice I actually followed is the one that's about to prove her right.
I open the phone. I scroll to Camille. I press call.
It rings. It rings. Voicemail. Again.
I try Marc. Four rings. Voicemail. And Marc doesn't have a key anyway — he gave the spare set to Nora weeks ago, the day before I came home from the hospital. The only people who can get into this apartment without me opening the door are Camille, who isn't answering, and Nora.
I put the phone down on the floor next to me and look at the ceiling. The crack is still there — the one from the light fixture to the corner, the one I noticed the other night. Cosmetic. Not structural.
I pick the phone up. I open my contacts. Her name is right there. Alphabetical. Nora.
I know she'll come. That's the part I can't stand — the certainty of it.
I know she'll drop whatever she's doing.
She'll put on her coat and she'll climb fourteen stairs and she'll open the door and she'll find me here, on the floor, next to a garbage bag, and she'll handle it, because handling things is what she does, and I will have proven — to her, to myself, to this floor — that I cannot do a single thing without turning it into a reason she has to stay.
I hate that I know she'll come.
I press call.
It rings twice.
"Ethan?"
"Hey." My voice is normal. My voice is the most normal thing in this apartment. "So — I'm going to need you to come over."
II.
I'm twenty minutes away when he calls.
At Sophie's place in the Plateau, actually — her afternoon off.
I'd asked if I could come over to work on the Bellini proposal somewhere that didn't smell like my own anxiety, and Sophie is a friend who says yes before you finish the sentence.
My laptop is open on her kitchen table, two mugs of tea between us, Sophie proofreading my tagline options because she's better at words than I am and she'll never admit it.
The Wednesday light is flat and grey through her window.
My phone buzzes. Ethan.
My chest clenches before I answer, because Ethan doesn't call. Ethan texts. Ethan sends the check mark emoji and the word fine and the particular kind of nothing that has become his primary language. Ethan calling means something has stopped working.
"Ethan?"
"Hey. So — I'm going to need you to come over."
His voice is calm. Deliberately calm. The calm of someone holding the edges together and hoping no one looks too closely.
"What happened."
It's not a question. Questions have uncertainty. This has none.
"I'm — on the floor. In the kitchen. I'm fine, nothing's — the hip is fine, I just can't — I tried to get up and I can't get the right—"
"I'm coming."
I'm already closing my laptop. Sophie looks up. I'm already putting on my coat.
"Nora, it's not—"
"I'm coming."
I hang up. Sophie is standing. "What—"
"He fell. He's on the floor. He can't get up."
The words are very simple and very small and they do not contain any of the things I'm actually feeling, which is good, because the things I'm actually feeling would take up more space than Sophie's kitchen can hold.
"Take my car," she says.
I take her keys. I take her car. Twenty minutes of icy roads and every red light is a personal insult and my hands are steady and my brain is doing the thing it does in emergencies, which is become very clear and very fast and completely incapable of processing anything that isn't the next action.
Fourteen stairs. Key in the lock. I practiced this once — the first time, when Marc gave me the keys, when I installed the grab bars, when I made his apartment safe for a version of him that hadn't happened yet. The key turns. The door opens.
I see him.
He's on the kitchen floor. One crutch under the kitchen table. One by his side. Bagel is sitting next to his head, purring. There's a garbage bag right next to him, tied at the top.
He's fine. He's completely fine. He's not bleeding. He's not lying wrong. He's a man on a floor next to a bag of garbage because he tried to take the garbage out because he —
The fear leaves. The fear leaves and what arrives has been waiting for weeks, packed tight and pressed down and stored in the same place where I keep the smile and the correct mug and the words I'm fine.
"Are you serious?"
III.
He's looking up at me from the floor and his face does the thing — the small adjustment, the rearranging, that half-second where Ethan Morin decides which version of himself to be.
I've watched him do it enough times to recognize the mechanism even from here, even with my chest doing whatever it's doing.
"I slipped," he says. "It's not—"
"You tried to take out the garbage."
"The bag was right—"
"The garbage, Ethan. You — you fell because of garbage."
He doesn't answer. He's still on the floor. Bagel shifts closer to his shoulder. The apartment smells like yesterday's soup and the particular staleness of a place where someone has been alone too long.
"Why didn't you call 911?"
"I didn't need 911, I needed—"
"A person. You needed a person. And Camille didn't answer so you called me."
A look crosses his face. I see it land and I know I shouldn't have said it like that — with Camille's name first, in that order, making the math visible. But I can't stop. The thing that arrived when the fear left is still arriving, spilling sideways, filling the kitchen.
"That's not—" he starts.