Chapter 14: Labor Pains

Elliot looked at the guests.

He looked at the phones pointed at him from every row.

He looked at me.

"I kicked her wheelchair," he said.

His voice carried, because he did not try to soften it.

"I kicked it three times in a restaurant. She told me to stop. I pushed her into a table and her chest port tore open."

"Then I walked out and left her bleeding on the floor."

"I did that. Nobody lied to me into doing it. I did it."

The hall made no sound at all.

Judith said, "Elliot, sweetheart, don't," and he did not turn his head.

Courtney moaned on the platform and called his name.

Two paramedics came through the doors with a stretcher.

He looked at her, and then at me, and I saw him decide that a woman in labor came first.

"Go," I said.

He went.

He pulled the white rose off his lapel as he walked past me and dropped it on the carpet.

Then my knees gave out, and Dale caught me before I hit the floor.

"Hospital," he said.

"My chest line is bleeding," I said. "Not the old one. The new one."

"Then hospital."

Mom came down the aisle with her phone clutched against her coat and tears all over her face.

She did not say a word.

She took my other arm.

The emergency room was across town, the same one where my mother had said I died.

A nurse who had been on shift that night looked at my chart, then at me, and said, "Oh, honey," and went to find a doctor.

They put me in a bay with a curtain.

Mom stood outside it, talking to a charge nurse in a low, dangerous voice.

Dale went to buy me ginger ale.

I lay on the narrow bed in my green dress with my shoes still on.

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