“No problem. Thanks.”
The Sweets’ stairs were large, gleaming slats of hardwood hung on a stainless-steel frame. The gap between each step was wide enough that a small child could easily slip through them; they were “lovely and lethal,” Jenny had said apologetically one of the first times I had come over. She and Matt planned to fix it before they had a second child, she told me, but years had passed since then.
Matt was at the foot of the stairs. The expression on his face instantly reminded me of the blank stare Miles wore when he was sleepwalking and was seconds from mistaking a corner in my bedroom for a urinal.
“Are you okay?” I asked. Stupidly—it was clear he was not.
“No.” He was holding his phone out toward me. I could hear that someone on the other end was speaking, though I could not decipher what they were saying.
The fine hairs on the nape of my neck were still standing at attention. “What is it?”
“It’s . . . Jenny.”
Stop there, I thought. Don’t let your beautiful mouth utter another word. Let’s have one more minute where life is what I believe it to be and everything is fine. And yet I said, “What about her?”
Matt’s eyes were on me, but he was still looking right through me. “I think she’s dead.”
FOUR
But I didn’t have time for Jenny to die.
It was a terrible thought—the selfish, overly rational sort that surfaces before you’ve allowed yourself to admit everything has changed and trivial matters like space and time no longer matter. It was still what first popped into my head as I ran toward Matt.
He stood there, frozen, then handed me the phone and sat down on the last step. I glanced at him before stepping around him.
Upstairs, the hallway looked the same as it ever did: crisp gray walls decorated with a variety of framed candids and professionally shot photos; the wide, gleaming mahogany floor and its Persian runner, which probably cost twice as much as our monthly mortgage payment. No blood anywhere, let alone signs of chaos, I noted, though my heart was still galloping in my chest: dead-dead, dead-dead, dead-dead .
I lifted the phone to my head and heard a voice say, “Sir? Sir, are you there?”
To my left, the spare bedroom was empty. Just beyond it, Cecily’s room was empty, too. “This is Penelope Ruiz-Kar,” I said quietly into the receiver. “I’m . . .”
I’m looking for my friend, who may or may not be alive.
“Can you confirm your location?” asked the woman who had answered what I assumed must have been Matt’s 911 call.
I rattled off the Sweets’ address.
“Ma’am, are you in a safe place?” asked the woman.
Was I? “I think so.”
“Does there appear to be an intruder in the house?”
This possibility had not occurred to me. If there were, Matt would have been behaving differently . . . wouldn’t he? “I don’t know. I’m pretty sure there isn’t.”
“Ma’am, I’m going to have to advise that you take yourself and anyone else in the home outside while you wait for the police and emergency personnel to arrive.”
“Okay,” I said as I walked into Jenny’s bedroom.
The room was supposed to feel like a sanctuary, at least in its current iteration—Jenny had redecorated it twice since she and Matt had moved in, each time for a feature for her website. In this latest round, she had the walls painted a delicate gray, and the heavy velvet drapes had been replaced with pale cotton curtains and Roman blinds. Her king-size bed was a sea of white linens, and there were plants everywhere—tall fiddle-leaf figs in ceramic pots on the floor, air plants in delicate glass bubbles hanging in front of the windows, orchids in matte-glazed planters on the dressers. Jenny said Matt told her he felt like he fell asleep in the rainforest every night. I had never been clear whether this was a good thing.
At any rate, Jenny was not on the bed, or anywhere else in the room. I braced myself as I opened the door to their master bath, but she was not in their claw-foot tub, or in the spacious shower stall.
The woman on the phone was still speaking, but I was no longer listening. Her office, I thought at once.
I found Jenny sitting—sprawled, really—in the cream-colored armchair in the corner of the room. With her arms gracefully outstretched, legs straight and bare feet resting just so, she looked like a dancer. The chair was beside a window, and the last of the day’s sun cast a strange light over her face, which was—
The phone slipped from my hand and hit the rug with a thud.
Her face was all wrong. Though they were closed, her eyes appeared to be looking in opposite directions. But her mouth, which was not the usual bright pink but so pale it nearly blended into the rest of her skin, was gaping open—too wide, I thought, much too wide. There was a dribble of something—food, or maybe vomit—on her bottom lip. For all her fretting about sun damage, she had already tanned to a golden brown in mid-June, but now her limbs looked like pale putty.
Worse, her chest wasn’t moving. And when I put my hand over her mouth, I couldn’t detect even the thinnest stream of air.
But she didn’t look dead, I thought ridiculously—I’d never actually seen a dead person outside of a funeral home. If she was dead, her eyes would be wide open . . . wouldn’t they? She had to be napping. Passed out, maybe.
“Jenny,” I said softly, like I was trying to gently wake her. “Jenny!” I said, this time loudly. By the time I took her by the shoulders to shake her leaden body, I had realized that Matt was right. She was not alive.
Which meant she was right in front of me . . . but not there. Not there at all.
A terrible, strangled sound escaped me, and I touched Jenny again—poked her, really—in the stomach. I don’t know why I did it, and thank God no one was there to see me prodding her. Maybe I just needed to be sure that I had not been mistaken. My fingers were met with the thinnest layer of soft flesh over a plane of muscle. Had she really grown so slim? I need to take her out for a burger, I thought. Then I reached for her hand, which was no longer a hand at all but rather a cold and lifeless thing, and realized there would be no burgers in her future.
But how stupid was I? What if Jenny had only been dead a few seconds? Or had suffered a heart attack or stroke and was still just the tiniest bit alive? (Was there such a thing as a little alive? Obviously seven years of working for the medical school had given me no real insight into matters of life and death.) I needed to try to resuscitate her. Immediately.
I had gone through CPR training right before I had Stevie, but like so many other things stored in my mind, motherhood had overwritten that file. Did I pinch her nose and put my mouth to hers? Press her chest . . . yes, but at the same time I was breathing into her mouth?
“Ma’am?”
I jumped straight up in the air. A police officer was behind me, and a man and two women were wheeling in a stretcher through the door. It took me a second to realize that they were emergency medical technicians or paramedics.
“We’re going to need you to leave the room,” the officer said.
“Going,” I mumbled, slinking to the door, like I was somehow responsible for Jenny’s condition.
In the hallway, Matt was walking toward me. His face was etched with a distant sort of pain; it looked almost as though he were watching this unfold from somewhere far away. I immediately recognized the feeling, even as I told myself to stay present—if not for Matt, then for Cecily.
“Don’t go in,” I told him.
His eyes welled with tears. “Then I’m right.”
“I don’t know, but don’t go in there.”
“She’s dead,” he whispered.
I stared at him. Yes, I was pretty sure she was dead. But . . . maybe the emergency responders had an antidote to bring her back to life. Maybe we would all wake up any minute now and realize this was a terrible dream. Or—well, I didn’t know what, but something other than this.
Then I saw another set of policemen marching up the stairs, each with a hand on his holster, and reality came rushing back at me.
Matt must have felt that way, too, because he suddenly said, “I might throw up. Can you find Cecily and keep her away from this?” He didn’t wait for my response as he ran toward the bathroom.
I could keep an eye on Cecily.
But who would be there for me?
As I descended the stairs, I found myself thinking back to how Jenny and I became friends—a story that began even before we met. The night before Sanjay and I left Brooklyn, our closest friends threw us a farewell dinner at our favorite restaurant. Stevie was six months old and at that point a wonderful child, the kind that tricked you into thinking that you had this parenting thing figured out. I bounced her on my knee as small plates were passed and wineglasses were refreshed again and again. At one point my friend Alex smiled at me with bright-red lips and said in her odd Wisconsin-by-way-of-West-New-Guinea accent, “Don’t worry, darling. You’ll be back.”
“Of course we will,” I said, though I knew nothing of the sort. “If all goes as planned, maybe even as soon as four years from now for Sanjay’s residency.”
We three Ruiz-Kars were headed West—not even halfway across the country, though at the time even New Jersey seemed like Timbuktu. But our course was already set. After years of preparation, Sanjay had been accepted into the ninth-highest-ranked medical school in the country, where he planned to become a neurologist or nephrologist or maybe even a psychiatrist like his father.