“Declan,” she called, “cover for me. I need to change the keg.” Declan grimaced. She suspected he didn’t think “the girls” should be doing man’s work like lifting the heavy kegs.
She pulled the storeroom keys out of her pocket, unhooked the empty keg, scooted under the bar’s back exit, keg in hand—she was short enough that she didn’t bother to unhook the heavy counter flap—and pushed her way through the crowd, into the back room, where she sat down on a stack of boxes and let her head fall heavily to her knees. For a moment, she thought she might allow herself to fall asleep, right there on the fat brown boxes of Sam Smith Oatmeal Stout. But there was no way she could sleep, for real, with her brain having transformed into a repository for little else but anxiety. Slowly, she ran the wand of her lip gloss over her dry lips, and when she could delay it no longer, she shimmied the new, heavy keg onto its little metal cart. Hopefully, Dr. Gitter had finished his scotch and headed off to his boxy one bedroom in some blank residential tower, where he would recline on his beige couch and watch—what? football? Friends?—on an oversized television.
Outside, in the bar’s main room, the crowd had thickened. “Coming through! Lady with the beer!” she shouted. The tricky part was maneuvering the cart behind the bar, which meant either lifting the counter flap with one hand—balancing the keg with the other—or ducking under the bar while pushing the keg, in a sort of crab walk. The floor sloped up and, regardless of which option she chose, it took strength and control to keep the cart from wobbling. Tonight, she decided to duck under, but the keg resisted her attempts to wrangle it, refusing to roll up the incline. For a bleak minute, she thought she could hold it no longer, that it was going to roll back onto her, over her, and into the small crowd clustered around the opening in the bar. But then, at the last second, grinding her teeth together, she regained her grip and pushed it, with a final jolt of strength, up and into the space behind the bar; stupidly pleased, she ducked down and followed it, emerging on the other side to clapping. A group of spiky-haired soldiers had been watching her. “Good job, Red,” one of them yelled. She smiled weakly—and did a quick check for Dr. Gitter, who appeared, thankfully, to have left—then began rolling the cart toward the taps, at the center of the long bar. But something was wrong, the wheels wouldn’t turn. She gave the right one a push with her sneakered foot and the cart released momentarily, then stopped again as a sharp pressure, hot and metallic, spread across her foot, turning, slowly, to pain. “Oh my God,” she whispered, afraid to look down.
“Oh, shit, oh shit, oh shit,” she heard Declan say, though she couldn’t see him. “I knew it, I fucking knew it. I told you. You shouldn’t have come in tonight. It’s too much.” She nodded mutely. And then the pressure was half gone, but her foot throbbed horribly, like a beating heart, like, she thought, the heart of the frog she’d dissected in tenth-grade biology, the frog that was still alive, its brain killed by a pith, so they could slice it open and note the functions of its valves.
“Oh my God,” she said again, for her legs were turning to something like gelatin and buckling beneath her. But someone—Declan—had anticipated this and was placing a chair under her and pressed her firmly into it, propping her foot on another.
“Is she okay?” another voice asked. Emily’s head had dropped down again, into the palms of her hands.
“I know her,” called yet another voice, “I know her and I’m a doctor. Can you let me through? Let me through.” In a rush, her stomach seized up and her ears began to ring. Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, she thought, her brain echoing Declan’s cry. No, no, no, no, no, no. Not him, anyone but him. And then a hand—Dr. Gitter’s hand—was lifting her foot off the chair—“No, no, no, no,” she heard herself moan, like a child—and then placing it down again on something softer, more pliant, and decidedly more comfortable: a lap. “Okay, I’m just going to take your shoe off,” he said. Quickly, he pulled the laces out of her sneaker—was it good or bad that she had worn sneakers?—and pried the thing off, sending a hot needle of pain through her foot. Wordlessly—as if they were a seasoned pair of EMTs—Declan handed him a bag of ice wrapped in a towel, which he draped over Emily’s foot. She winced. “It’s okay,” Dr. Gitter said, in the same practiced voice he’d used a few weeks earlier as they’d walked down Bedford. She was no less irritated by it now. “You’re fine. I think you’ve probably broken a bone in your foot, but you’re going to be just fine. We just need to get you to the hospital for an X-ray, okay?” What do you know about broken bones, she thought. You’re a shrink. But the foot—it didn’t feel like her foot but like an inanimate object, maybe a football attached to her with glue and string—felt a little better now, cooler, and the stars, she found, were no longer whirling around her. Nervously, she pulled herself upright, but rather than facing Dr. Gitter, she turned to survey the crowd, mostly silent now, hypnotized by the Drama of the Keg and the Foot.
“She’s okay?” called one of the soldiers. I’m not dead, she thought. You can ask me that question.
“Yeah, she’s fine,” Dr. Gitter replied. “We just need to get her to the hospital. Can you guys clear a path?” The soldiers immediately flew into action. And Emily, reluctantly, turned to face Dr. Gitter, who was, to her annoyance, grinning. This is funny to you, she thought. What an ass. But she said nothing and thankfully, neither did he. He looked, absurdly, like a doctor on a hospital drama, with his short, light hair and his dark, round eyes and his long nose with its wide nostrils.
“Okay, Emily,” he said finally. “I’m going to put your foot down for a second, so I can come around and lift you up.” And before she knew what was what, she was being carried outside into the cold, cold air, the odd sensation of a stranger’s arms around her. Declan ran after, awkwardly holding out her bag and coat. Dr. Gitter slung them over his shoulder—again, he himself didn’t have a coat; what was wrong with him?—and slid her into the cab that had pulled up, seemingly without being hailed.
“We can walk,” she said, “it’s only a few blocks.” But he just raised his eyebrows at her, his face too white in the cab’s reflected light, and in a moment they’d arrived at the hospital’s emergency entrance. Dr. Gitter carried her past the dozens of people waiting, directly to the nurse’s station at the front. “I’m really okay to walk,” she said.
“No, you’re not, honey,” said the nurse, padded, Filipino, her hair a funny maroon color. “You can take her right back if you want,” she told Dr. Gitter. “Saul’s on. And Ashwari.”
“Thanks, Lucy,” he said, depositing Emily on a stretcher and covering her with a pile of itchy blankets. Wouldn’t, she wondered, a wheelchair do? A stretcher seemed a bit over the top, but she was, suddenly, too tired to speak. And it felt so good to lie down, even on the cold, hard stretcher. If only she could roll over and go to sleep. “Are you cold?” he asked. Emily nodded. “You’re in shock.” She nodded again. “We’re going to go right up to X-ray,” he told her. She felt strange, lying prone on her back like that, and looking up into his face from below. “This is one of the few benefits of working in this place. No waiting in line at the ER. Those people have been sitting there all night. But you get to cut straight to the chase.”