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Jay laughs, a little awkwardly, and I turn to smile at him over my shoulder. “Are you OK?” he asks, sounding very certain that I am not.
“I was returning,” I say, swallowing down the lump in my throat that could be either my heart or vomit. “An egg,” I lie. “It must have fallen out of the tree in the storm.”
He cocks his head to the side like maybe he won’t believe me but then nods. “OK.” Something draws his attention away, and he looks over his shoulder back into our office and this is my chance to getdownfrom here, so I shuffle a few inches and reach my toe for the crook in the tree that I used to get up. I reach and as I make contact the flat rubber sole of my shoe, slippery from the residual rainwater covering the surface of everything, makes glancing contact with the slick, damp trunk and before I can scream or wish for a time machine or a leftover lightning bolt to strike me down, I’m falling. The ground comes so much faster than I thought it would, but I get my hands out just in time to land between the roots. Pain shoots through my wrist and Jay yells my name, panicked, and I say out loud to my tree, “You broke my arm.”
Jay is at my side incredibly fast for a person who was on the second floor of the building and who is a historian. We are not,historically, a fast people. Miranda has followed him out, her phone in her hand.
“Oh god. You dumbass,” I mutter to myself.
Jay is talking at me, but I’d prefer not to hear a word he has to say. I recite the monarchs of England since 1066 in my head as a distraction. Even my father has made his way down the stairs on his arthritic knees to watch with the rest of the history department as I pound the final nail into the coffin of my social—and professional—life.
I should have chosen self-pity. If I had canceled on Cally and was still lazing in bed, being sad about Jesse’s rejection, none of this would have happened. “In a way, this is Jesse’s fault,” I say to no one in particular.
Jay frowns at me like he is quite worried for my well-being. “Let’s get you to the hospital, Lulu.”
“No.” Slowly, I make my way to standing. I hop from one foot to the other. Other than the residual pain in my arm nothing else really hurts, but I feel creaky, like my body came out of the tree put together wrong. “See, I’m fine. I’m totally fine.”
“You said your arm is broken,” Jay says. “I heard you.”
“But it’s not.” I hold it up, wincing as I turn my wrist in a slow circle.
He watches skeptically. “Even if it’s not broken, we should still get you checked out.” He picks a twig out of my hair and I huff a quiet thank-you.
“You might have a concussion.”
I meet Miranda’s eyes over his shoulder. She nods encouragingly and I look away only to be confronted by my father’s mustache, twitching in confusion.
“Fine.” I sigh. “Let’s go.”
Another code crackles over the intercom but otherwise, the only sound in this teaching hospital is the squeak of the nurses’ Crocs on the floor. It’s surprisingly quiet for midday, which would usually mean I’d have no distractions from the absurd situation I’ve put myself in. Except a very nice doctor decided to overmedicate me and give me a prescription painkiller for my wrist pain, as well as a “mild sedative.” The panic spiral might have been more evident to others than I previously thought.
But at least the pain is numbed along with every other feeling. I’m not embarrassed, ashamed, or even sad. I’m floating on the golden sunlight drifting through the windows set high in the wall. I’m a dust mote, swirling.
I am very, very high.
High heels tap across the floor, so different from the sound of Crocs that I turn my head to the curtain cutting me off from the rest of the emergency room. Miranda pokes her head in and I don’t have the sobriety to hide my wince from her.
“I was hoping you were my dad,” I say. “Although, I don’t think Dad can make it across the floor in your heels.” Even turning my head sends me spinning so I don’t look at her shoes, but I point with my free hand, the one not wrapped in a tensor bandage. My injured arm already feels itchy and while I know the bandage is necessary for the swelling, I want to rip it off. I’m lucky, really. I could have—should have—really hurt myself. I could have broken my neck, and for what?
Miranda perches on the edge of the bed. “Dr. Banks and Dr. Miller are taking your car home and then he’s coming back here to drive you home.” My brain record scratches for a moment on the name Dr. Miller until I realize that Miranda is talking about Jay. Miranda refers to everyone as doctor, which is fair. We’ve all spent so much time becoming doctors, why shouldn’t we use the title?
My head is fuzzy from whatever is in the IV attached to my arm. Each thought feels heavy, turning over like a clunky engine, so it takes a minute before I process what she’s saying.
I swallow a couple of times, my mouth full of cotton balls. “I have to teach my first class of the summer semester today.”
Miranda doesn’t say it but I can hear herOh no, honey, just from the face she makes. “I’ll cover the class for you,” she says, holding up her hands when I start to shake my head, then wince as the world spins again. “The first class is always the easiest. We’ll go over the syllabus.” She shrugs. “And you can owe me one.” She checks her phone screen. “I’m going to check on your discharge papers and get your dad’s ETA.”
I must say something. I think I do. Miranda nods, then the pale blue hospital curtain waves in her wake as she leaves. I doze, the drugs making my dreams of falling and falling and falling strange and liquid. When I wake up, Dad still isn’t here and Miranda isn’t around but my high is wearing off. I no longer feel like I’m in wonderland, and other than a slow throb radiating up my arm into my elbow and down into my knuckles, I don’t feel like I just fell out of a tree in front of my employer.
I stand slowly, contemplate pulling the IV out of my hand myself until I remember that once I passed out watching a character get stitches on a prime-time medical drama. I roll my IV along with me as I shuffle slowly around the perimeter of my curtained-off hospital room, just to get some circulation back in my body. With every small throb of pain in my arm comes the echoing shame. No one has asked what exactly I was doing in that tree, but at this point I think it’s best to stick with the story I told Jay while I clung to the bark. And that’s where the shame comes in. I’m not embarrassed I was found in a tree or that I fell out of it. I’m embarrassed that I felt the need to climb up the tree in the first place.
My pace of shame is interrupted by the chime of my phone and I find it caught up in the sheets of my hospital bed. I think I was sleeping on it.
George: I’m gonna have to cancel our coffee date today. Can I get a rain check?
Me: Yeah np J
I don’t bother explaining to him that I would have been a no-show to our usual Monday coffee date since I completely forgot about it until just now.
