He Called Every Truth a Lie novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Three Calls

The hospital confirms Joanna's reaction was real, the paramedic admits he answered two earlier calls to her house, and her mother-in-law is waiting on her sister's stairs with a thermos.

The emergency room kept me for four hours.

Ethan stayed in the corridor outside my curtain the whole time, writing up his run sheet on a clipboard.

I could see his boots under the gap.

The doctor was young and tired and did not ask me a single question about whether I was exaggerating.

She drew blood, listened to my chest and read the number off the screen out loud.

"Your tryptase is high. That's a real allergic reaction, Mrs. Nordin. You were right to use the pen."

I started to cry, and I didn't understand why until I heard myself say it.

"Say that again."

"You were right to use the pen," she said, slower this time.

Nobody had told me I was right in five years.

I asked her to write it in my chart in plain words.

She did, and she printed me a copy with the time and the lab value on it.

I folded it into the Ledger and held the book against my ribs.

At two in the morning the curtain slid back.

Tristram came in with his coat open and his hair wet from the rain.

His mother was behind him.

"Jo," he said, loud enough for the nurses' station. "Thank God. Thank God you're all right."

He put his arms around me.

He smelled of the cedar soap I bought him every Christmas.

"I was so scared," he said into my hair. "We'll go home and put all this behind us. I'll burn the book myself."

I stood very still.

Everyone watching would have seen a husband who loved his wife.

"Take your hands off me," I said.

His arms stayed where they were for a moment, and then he stepped back and gave the nurse a small, sorry smile.

"She's overwrought," he told her. "It's been a hard year."

"It has," Inez agreed. She set a thermos on the tray table. "I brought your tonic, dear. You always sleep better after it."

I looked at the thermos.

I thought about the pills I had taken every morning for a year.

"I'm not going home," I said.

"Joanna." Tristram's voice dropped, gentle and patient. "You've been given a drug. You can't make decisions tonight."

"I made one at the table."

"Mrs. Nordin is an adult and she's said what she wants," Ethan said.

He was standing in the gap of the curtain with the clipboard against his chest.

He didn't raise his voice.

Tristram turned and looked him up and down, taking in the jacket and the name patch.

"And you are?"

"The paramedic who took your call." Ethan held his eyes. "Your wife's blood work came back. She wasn't faking."

Inez's smile did not move.

"Of course she wasn't, dear," she said. "Nobody said she was."

Tristram had said it to a dispatcher, in his own voice, before the soup was served.

I kept that fact to myself and wrote it down in my head.

Then I picked up my phone and called my sister.

Bridget answered on the second ring.

"Jo? It's two in the morning."

"Can you come get me? I'm at the hospital. I'm not hurt." I stopped. "I left him."

I heard her feet hit the floor and her keys rattle.

"Twenty minutes," she said. "Don't sign anything."

Tristram didn't argue.

That scared me more than if he had.

He picked up his mother's thermos, looked at me, and nodded once.

"We'll talk in the morning," he said. "At home."

When they had gone, Ethan came in and sat on the stool beside my bed.

He turned the clipboard around so I could see it.

It was a printed log, a list of dates and times and one address.

"I checked the system while you were being seen," he said. "This is the third call from that house in a year."

"The third?"

"Seven months ago, somebody called in a fall. Eleven months ago it was an unresponsive woman. Both times the husband met us at the door and told us she'd had too much to drink."

He didn't look away.

"I took both of those calls, Mrs. Nordin."

I stared at the page.

Seven months ago I had woken up on my bathroom floor with a paramedic's flashlight in my eyes.

I remembered Tristram saying I was a drinker.

I had never had more than one glass of wine in my life.

"I wrote down what he told me," Ethan said. "I didn't write down what I should have."

Bridget came through the swinging doors in her scrubs and her winter coat with the fur collar she wouldn't take off.

She looked at the book in my arms and then at the man beside me.

"Who's this?" she said.

"The one who's going to help me prove it," I said.

At Bridget's building, in the dark of the stairwell, a woman was already waiting at the top of the stairs.

She had pearls on, and a thermos in both hands.

"There you are, dear," Inez said. "I thought we might have our own talk."

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