One Night

I do not remember what month it was. I remember rain, and that it was night, and that it was cold.

There are some things that happen whereof memory records but a vague impression, for the mind commits itself in those moments to an urgent need to move forward, believes in some deep and unreasoning way that if one moves quickly enough, one may actually move backward in time, undo what has been done, precede rather than proceed. We believe in those first emergent moments that wholeness may be restored, just as we believe that the suddenly severed arm may be pressed back into place and all will be well, as long as the repair is accomplished quickly enough, and thus essentially erased, as if it had never happened.

I will call the one person in this story ‘the man’ and the other ‘the woman’. I will say that they had argued that night and fought. They may have fought about money, or infidelity, or both. I do not remember. They may have fought about everything. They may have spoken of divorce. I do know that the man had said he was leaving the woman. I know that even then he wished that the right words could somehow undo painful events, could bring back what had been taken away – and he thought of it that way: that it had been taken rather than gone.

For a short time, the man left the bedroom. He wandered the house in the dead of night, entered each room as if to stabilize the crumbling structure with his presence, and then he went to the medicine cabinet in the bathroom to take a Vicodin tablet to calm his nerves.

And found the entire bottle, the prescription he had filled just this day, empty.

In the bedroom, the woman lay, already unconscious. 

The man touches the woman. No response. He shakes her.  

“What did you do?” he says loudly. “Did you take these pills?” He shakes the empty, silent bottle.

“Leave me alone,” she mutters.

He searches the bedcovers, the tabletop, the floor.

“Did you take this entire bottle? Did you swallow these pills?”

She shakes her head, turns her face to the pillow. “Just let me sleep” she says. “It doesn’t matter.”

Now the man’s heart is pounding like a drum. His breath is short. He feels as if he himself has swallowed an entire bottle of pills. And he moves, racing to catch up with his heart. He lifts the woman to a sitting position, and she struggles against him lazily. “Just leave me,” she says. He puts his shoulder to her stomach, rises to his feet.

“Stay awake!” he demands, rushing with his burden through the darkened house, thumping against walls and doors along the way. “Stay awake. Help me! We’ve got to go right now!”

“My coat,” she says, catching the doorknob to the closet, sliding down to her feet. She’s standing, swaying. The man helps her with the coat, holding her erect beneath his arm. “I think I’m okay,” she says. “I just need to lie down.”

“No,” the man says. “You’re not okay. You just took an entire bottle of Vicodin. Good Christ! The entire bottle! We’ve got to get to the hospital now!”

She is walking, after a fashion. They are walking together after a fashion, like a couple in a potato sack race. On the porch, he turns to lock the door, and she falls to her knees. The man kneels, leaving the door open. There is no time. He throws her over his shoulder once more, carries her through the pelting rain. He has forgotten his glasses. He has no coat. The woman manages to stand again by the car, and then slide into the passenger side seat. It is night. It is raining. The park way is muddy. The hospital is just a short distance away. He knows this well, because he works there. He goes there almost every day. But he has never been there on a day like this.

It takes perhaps 7 minutes, at perhaps 70 miles per hour, never mind the traffic lights. By the time he pulls up to the Emergency Department entrance, she is more conscious than she had been earlier. She has begun to understand what she has done. In a practical way. She understands that she is in trouble. “I’m nauseous,” she says. She walks beside him, needing only one arm around her waist, trying to hurry. She struggles to make a certain appearance, because here they are, with people looking on, facing sober clerks, business-like, professional.

As for the man, he cannot believe that they want names, insurance cards, needless things. What is needful is that somebody do something now!

“There she goes,” the admitting clerk says, rising from her chair as the woman falls to the floor.

A stretcher is brought. People begin to move more quickly. The man is enormously grateful. People waiting less urgently in the waiting room rise to their feet to see what is happening.

In the ER, a team of doctors and aides goes to work, gracing the man’s own panic with a calming sense of purposeful sobriety. He knows most of the doctors on duty, and for this reason they allow him to stay in the room. He stands in the corner, pinned in, trapped by the motion. IV lines are established, injections are administered. The woman vomits. She begins to cry, revived by fear. She looks at the man in the corner, so far away. He thinks that he may never see her eyes again. May never see them again. And he too begins to cry, and immediately dashes the tears away with the back of his hand.

And the man makes a solemn promise that moment to himself, to his God, to all gods; to the sky and to the earth; upon his heart and upon his soul – regardless of pleasure and regardless of pain; regardless of person or want or hardship or pride -- I will never, in any way, nor forevermore, allow any harm to come to this woman. I will lay down my life, I will make of my heart an altar, I will fashion of my soul a shield and strong tower, and I will never forsake nor forget my cause.

And so did the man. So did he until done. And when all was done and accomplished, he rested.