Chapter 14
Night Five
Zeke
Zeke didn’t realize for at least a solid minute that Sybil was bleeding or that she had a chef’s knife jutting perpendicularly out of her foot. Instead, he was staring at Betty, who was sheet-white and glassy-eyed when she stumbled into the kitchen.
“Betty, are you…okay? Aren’t you supposed to be at work? Did something happen there?” He took a step closer to her, surprised at how much he wanted to protect her. It was an unfamiliar feeling for Zeke—wanting to look out for someone else.
“I—” she started, then stopped. “I—had to run an errand by Grand Central and I thought I saw…but I’m not sure…
I don’t—it doesn’t matter.” Her eyes shifted to Sybil, like Sybil would understand, which naturally made a lot more sense to Zeke.
Zeke followed her gaze, and that’s when he noticed that there was blood pooling on his kitchen floor and Sybil was frozen, mouth half open, staring at her sliced sneaker, like she couldn’t believe it either.
“You’re bleeding!” he shouted. An obvious observation. Sometimes, he really was the dumbest person in the room. “Sybil! There is a knife in your foot!”
That seemed to startle Sybil out of her trance, and she jolted.
“Shit! Shit shit shit.” She allowed herself one beat to freak out, then got steady. He watched it happen in real time. “You need to take me to the hospital. Now.”
“We need to remove the knife!” Zeke shouted again. Jesus, was he not the person she’d want in her foxhole; he was making that abundantly clear.
“No,” she said, and this time, he could see why she would have been a world-class surgeon.
A total pro. Calm. Cool. A veritable cucumber.
Good god, he hated himself, but…it was a turn-on.
Maybe if they slept together, then they would actually sleep?
His mind would finally find the balm it needed?
“If we remove it here,” she said like she was on Grey’s fucking Anatomy, “we run the risk of being unable to stop the bleeding and increase the chances of infection.” She looked toward Betty. “Can you drive?”
“I can drive,” Zeke said.
“You can’t. You’re already down one arm,” Sybil said. Correctly so. How was she the one thinking so clearly in this situation? She had a knife jutting from her foot. He hoped that when she thought back on this moment, she’d attribute his inadequacy to his sleeplessness.
Betty swallowed, then Zeke saw her spine stiffen, color returning to her face, as if she was happy to be useful, to prove that she could be as helpful as Sybil was so often helpful to the rest of them.
“I can drive,” Betty said. “I also know first aid. I mean, it’s self-taught, but can I help?”
“No, thank you, Betty. I just need you to drive.” Then: “Zeke,” Sybil shouted, as if she were the head surgeon in the OR. Zeke wanted to rip her clothes off. “Call the garage, have them bring your car around. We’re going to Mount Sinai. Mark will be working.”
“Mark, your husband?” Zeke asked. Now this plan immediately grew less appealing.
“He’s not a particularly good doctor,” she said. “But we’ll be seen quickly, and I can tell him what to do.”
“Remind me not to have an emergency at Mount Sinai,” Betty muttered as Zeke punched the phone number for the garage.
“Do you have crutches?” Sybil asked.
“How are you not, like, dying?” Betty said as Zeke scrambled to his gear closet where he did, indeed, have crutches from the time he came down wrong on his ankle in spring training.
“I nearly gave birth to twins without an epidural,” Sybil said, and Zeke almost got a hard-on. “Until Eloise, naturally, decided to be stubborn. But right up until the C-section, I was good to go. I was fine.”
“Here.” He eased the crutches underneath her armpits, and she winced, but that was the only ounce of pain she betrayed.
“What about the blood?” she asked, meeting his eyes. “It will stain your floor.”
“Oh god, Sybil, fuck the floor,” he said, and he was delighted, if one could be delighted in such circumstances, to see a hint of her smile.
They managed to get her down to the garage where the car was waiting. Betty floored the gas as they turned the corner from his building, and the tires spun out.
“Holy fucking shit!” Zeke yelled. “Betty, can we get there in one piece?” He grabbed the handle above the back window with his good arm, feeling slightly emasculated that he couldn’t be the hero. He glanced at Sybil, but she had her eyes closed, her head tilted back against the headrest.
Betty drove like she’d grown up as a professional Formula One driver.
If Zeke hadn’t been so terrified, he would have been impressed.
She dodged taxis and late-night dog walkers in the Central Park Transverse, and she pulled an absolutely insane move where she went around a city bus on the wrong side of the street.
Zeke was certain he foresaw his own death.
By whatever miracle, Betty bounced right up to the curb by the ER, and Zeke—having texted his agent, Timothy, that he needed someone waiting for them at the Sinai ER with a wheelchair, only to get into a tedious back-and-forth with Timothy that he was not the one who needed it and no, he couldn’t get into the details now, and no, there was not going to be a lawsuit—waved down the nurse.
Sybil was wheeled away, and Zeke looked for a nearby bush by the curb because he thought he might throw up.
“Are you okay?” Betty asked.
“Where’d you learn to drive like that? And no, I’m about a minute away from vomiting.”
She pursed her lips together into a flat line, as if debating what to tell him.
“I drove the tractor a lot on my family’s farm.”
Zeke couldn’t help himself. His staccato laugh erupted so loudly that Betty jumped away from him.
“What?” she said.
“Betty, I know that I’m not Sybil, and I know that I’m not even Julian, but seriously, I’m not that dumb. If you’re going to lie to us, you’re going to have to learn to do it a little bit better.”