“I can call a friend,” Jaspreet kept saying, but she didn’t protest when I joined her on the floor of the waiting room.
“I’ll stay until they show up.” We weren’t friends, but I regretted leaving April to her asshole roommates; I still hadn’t heard from her. If I couldn’t have been more helpful to April, the least I could do was stay here with Jaspreet until her friends came.
Nobody came. Hours passed. I read headlines on my phone. The president called for people to stay home, for health and safety. Schools closed again. Something something legislation something something. It all made me uneasy.
I glanced over to check on Jaspreet, who had her eyes closed and her head leaned back against the wall. “Um, you’ve got new spots. On your neck.”
“I know. They feel like fucking cigarette burns.” She tried to turn on her phone, but her hands shook. She thumbed it unlocked and then handed it to me. “Document this for me. I’ll give you a producer credit if this turns out to be film-worthy.”
I took the offered phone and panned over her spots as she displayed them. Recorded as they pulled her into a vestibule to get her blood pressure and temperature, both through the roof.
The nurse had obviously had a night of it already, but she mugged for the camera. “The good news is, your stats have won you a bump to the front of the triage line. Highest fever we’ve seen all night. The bad news is that we don’t have enough beds. There’s a chair in a hallway and a nice IV of fluids waiting for you.”
“What is it?” Jaspreet asked. “I swear I had chicken pox, and I’ve had the measles vaccine. What else causes spots?”
The nurse shook her head. “We’re not sure yet, but we’re full of it tonight, whatever it is.”
I waited with Jaspreet for another three hours. She slept. I watched a game show on an overhead TV with the sound off and tried my best not to touch surfaces. Whatever this was, I didn’t want it.
The doctor who attended her—for all of two minutes—seemed more interested in cataloging and mitigating symptoms. Pill for the fever, fluids for dehydration, shot for the pain, cream to stop the itching if it started.
“And then I can go home?” Jaspreet asked. She considered the place we lived home, my distracted brain noticed.
The doctor shook her head. “And then we admit you. You’re not going anywhere until your fever drops out of the danger zone.”
“Can you say ‘danger zone’ again for my camera?” she asked, but the doctor had already left.
She turned to me. “You might as well go home. Thanks so much for hanging out all night and distracting me. It was nice getting to know you a little. I think this was the most we’ve ever chatted.”
It was true. I gave her back her phone and told her to call if she needed anything, then returned to the house. Back to the moans of two other sick roommates and the place they considered a home but I didn’t.
It had been midafternoon when I drove Jaspreet to the hospital, and it was nearly eleven now. Eight hours of hospital hum had exhausted me, but there was still one thing I wanted to do, since April’s phone kept ringing through and I didn’t know her roommates. We weren’t even connected on any social media platforms, so I couldn’t look to see who else knew her who I knew.
The plaque on the amp’s back had read “Nico Lectrics,” which was easy enough to search online. I’d hoped for a phone number, but settled for an email address. I dashed off a short message. “Hi, April Mennin loaned me one of your amps the other night—it was amazing, and I’d like to talk to you about buying one sometime—but mostly I wondered if you’d heard from April in the last few days or if you had any way of checking on her. She wasn’t feeling well when I left.” I closed with my name and phone number.
There. That was something, at least.
The phone woke me in the morning. I leaped from the bed, catching my feet in the sheet and tumbling to the floor, then scrambling to extricate it from my jeans pocket before the fourth ring. A New York number I didn’t recognize.
“April?” I rubbed my bashed knee.
“Ah, shit, I’m so sorry.”
“Sorry?” I repeated. “Who is this?”
“My name is Nico. You emailed me. I, uh, fuck. There’s no good way to say this. April died five days ago.”
I dropped the phone as if it had burned me. A spiderweb crack spread across the screen from one corner.
“Hello?” Came a muffled voice from the floor. “Luce? Hello?”
I stared at the crack until the screen lit to tell me the call had disconnected. Kept staring. It rang again, but I didn’t answer. If I pretended I hadn’t heard, if I didn’t answer, it wouldn’t be true. She’d died five days ago. Alive for me, dead for anyone who knew. Five days. I’d been home for a week. She’d died two days after I’d left New York.
I sat down on the floor. Retrieved the phone, traced the crack in its facade, hit redial. He answered on the third ring.
“Sorry,” I said. “You took me by surprise… What happened?”
“It’s this thing that’s going around. She got a real bad case.”
“Did she—did she go to the hospital?” I pictured her tossing and turning the night I’d spent on her floor. I should have tried harder to get her to a doctor.
“She wouldn’t go. Said she couldn’t afford it. One of her roommates called 911 on Tuesday when they found her in the bathroom. She’d passed out and hit her head. She was in the hospital for a day after that, but none of her friends knew. She was unconscious the whole time, anyway.”
“I should have made her go to the hospital.”
“You know she wasn’t someone you could force. It’s not your fault. Who dies of the flu? I thought that was old people and babies.”
“Is that what it is? The flu?”
“No,” he said. “Or, anyway, I have no idea. All they’re saying is wash your hands and go to an emergency room if you get spots or a bad fever.”
I nodded, then realized he couldn’t see me. “Everyone here has that, too. Everyone but me.”
“Yeah, I’m still okay, but it feels like a matter of time.”
“Is there a funeral?” I didn’t know if this was the right question to ask. I’d never known anyone near my own age who’d died before.
“In Nebraska or Arkansas or wherever it is she’s from. Her parents claimed her body, I guess.” From the sound of it, he was new at this, too. “Anyway, we wanted to have a memorial, but the newspapers say to avoid big gatherings right now, so I guess we’ll do it… whenever this flu runs its course? Do you want me to let you know?”
I told him I’d appreciate it. I did want to buy one of his amps, too, but now wasn’t the time. Guilt hit me that I was thinking about amps instead of April. I couldn’t wrap my head around the idea, so my brain took me elsewhere. I sat on the floor and traced the crack in my phone, over and over again. It was readable, but fractured. Fitting. What wasn’t broken at this point?
I called my aunt, who said she was fine, thanks for asking; she’d called an ambulance for a neighbor the day before. She hadn’t heard from my family, but they didn’t talk to her any more than they talked to me. My parents’ number had never been in my phone, but I still knew it by heart. It rang eighteen times before I disconnected. I pictured the Hatzolah ambulances running themselves ragged shuttling people to hospitals, and feverish mothers tending to feverish children by the dozen. I didn’t know what I would have said if they’d answered.
I fought the urge to chuck the phone across the room. What did it do for me anyway? It was a way for people to reach me with bad news at this point, nothing more. No more touring. No more April. Another way for me to lock myself in my room and avoid getting to know my roommates, and who knew if they were going to survive, either.