Chapter 17
CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN
The Collapse
Aoife
“Sometimes you have to fall before you can fly.” — Sherrilyn Kenyon
It was a Sunday in August, the hottest week the city had managed all summer.
I had been on the delivery bicycle since eight o'clock and it was now past noon, and I had not eaten since six, and I was walking the bicycle back to the lock on Alderton Street after a four-hour shift when the heat stopped being the background and became something else entirely.
My vision went first. Not darkness but a whitening at the edges, spreading inward. I was aware of the bicycle in my hands and the heat of the pavement through my shoes and then I was not aware of either of those things, and then the ground arrived.
I became aware of voices first. Two of them, professional and calm, calling my name. I said something. I do not know what. Then there was movement and light and the particular efficient urgency of a medical environment assembling around me.
The emergency room at St. Clement's was bright and cool and I was helped onto a gurney and there were hands taking my pulse and a blood pressure cuff on my arm and someone asking me questions about gestational age and medical history and whether I was alone, and I said twenty-five weeks and preeclampsia and yes.
"Yes, I'm alone," I said. "There's no one with me."
And then a voice from the other side of the curtain said, "She's not alone. I'm here."
I turned my head. Jensen was standing at the edge of the curtained bay, still in his jacket, and he was looking at me with an expression I had not seen on him before.
All of the careful containment he usually carried was gone.
His face was open and alarmed and directed entirely at me, and he looked like a man who had been frightened before he had time to decide whether to be frightened.
I looked at him and I thought: of course. Of course it's him. Of course he was on that street at that moment, on the one day in these four months when I went down in public instead of behind a closed door.
I did not have the resources to send him away. I was twenty-five weeks pregnant with twins and my blood pressure was doing something that the faces around me communicated was not fine, and I was in a hospital bed with no one, and he was there.
So I let him stay.
?
The attending physician was Dr. Marcus Tan, a man in his mid-forties with the economy of movement of someone who has been doing this for a long time.
He sat on the edge of the bed and looked at me directly and said, "Ms. Walsh, your blood pressure is reading at 171 over 112.
I want you to understand what that number means. "
He explained it plainly: stroke, seizure, placental abruption. He said bed rest for the remainder of the pregnancy, complete, and that stress was a direct physiological risk factor. Then he looked at me steadily and said, "Do you have family? Someone who can be with you?"
I opened my mouth. I was going to say no. I had said no in various forms for years and I knew how to say it. I was going to say no and ask the doctor what the practical options were for a person in my situation.
Jensen said, "She'll be coming home with me. Tell me everything she needs. Diet, restrictions, warning signs, appointments, all of it. I want a full list before we leave this hospital."
Dr. Tan looked at him and then at me. Jensen was already looking at me when our eyes met, his expression not asking for permission exactly but making a decision regardless, and there was something in his face that had not been there in any of the months I had known him, a seriousness that had nothing to do with composure and everything to do with intention.
I looked at the blood pressure readout and I thought about the apartment on Alderton Street with its second-floor walk-up and the three jobs and Simone who would help if I asked but who had her own life. I thought about what the doctor had just said about stroke.
"All right," I said.
Jensen turned back to Dr. Tan. "Tell me everything," he said.