Chapter 5: The Emergency Room
On the morning of the seventh day, I got my chance. At eight forty-five, Ethan kissed my forehead and told me he had a meeting in Mooresville and would be back by lunch. Ten minutes later, Denise poked her head in, already wearing her coat, and said she was running to the pharmacy to get me something stronger for my pain. She said it kindly. I remember wondering what something stronger meant, and I remember the hair on my arms standing up. The moment her car left the driveway, I got up. I went down the stairs holding the rail with both hands. I went straight to Ethan’s little office and pulled open his desk drawers until I found my phone in the bottom drawer under a stack of mail. The battery was completely dead. I grabbed it and I grabbed the charger from the wall and I shoved both in the pocket of my robe. Then I looked at the kitchen wall. My father’s landline phone still hung there, an old beige thing with a long curly cord next to an answering machine the size of a hardcover book.
I had never disconnected it after he died. I paid the bill every month, thirty-one dollars, because the outgoing message on that machine was in his voice, and I couldn’t stand the thought of a stranger’s recording saying the number was no longer in service. I picked up the receiver. The machine clicked the way it always did and played the greeting back into my ear. “You’ve reached the Graysons. Leave a message and then go outside. The lake’s waiting.” I stood in the kitchen with the phone against my face and couldn’t breathe for a second. It was the first time I had heard his voice in a year. “I’m going, Dad,” I whispered to nobody. His Rolodex was still on the counter by the phone. I flipped through the cards with clumsy fingers until I found one I remembered. Lakeside Cab with a phone number in my father’s square handwriting. I dialed. A woman answered. I gave her the address. “Where you headed, hon?” “Lake View Regional,” I said. “The emergency room.”
When we pulled under the emergency room awning, Walt turned around in his seat. “You want me to wait, ma’am?” “No,” I said. “Thank you. I need to do this part by myself.” He nodded like that made perfect sense to him. Dr. Hail pulled the rolling stool up to the edge of my bed and sat so that his eyes were level with mine. “Victoria,” he said quietly, “who makes your food at home?” It was such a strange question that I answered it honestly. “My mother-in-law cooks. She makes me tea every night. Ginger tea for my stomach, every night for about five months.” He closed his eyes for a second. When he opened them, he kept his voice low. “I’m going to be very straight with you because I think people have not been straight with you. Those lines on your nails are called Mees’ lines. You see them after repeated exposure to certain poisons, heavy metals especially. Put them together with the numbness in your feet, the hair you’ve lost, the vomiting, the headache, the bruises on your wrist, and somebody at home telling you not to see a doctor.” He stopped. “I think someone has been harming you for a long time. I can’t prove it yet. I need blood and urine, and the tests take a few days, but I need you to not go home. Do you understand me?”
I understood every word. I just couldn’t make them mean anything. I sat there and thought about the cream-colored mug with the swirly V. I thought about Denise knocking with her hip because her hands were full. I thought about the mug shattering on the floor on the fifth night and how I’d felt a tiny bit better the next day after I poured my tea down the sink. “He’s coming here,” I said. My voice sounded very far away. “My husband, he shares my location. I turned my phone on in the taxi.” “Then we’ll be ready for him,” said Dr. Hail. “Do you want him in this room?” “No.” “Then he won’t be.” He was wrong about that. It wasn’t his fault. Ethan got there twenty-two minutes later. I know because I watched the clock over the nurse’s station through the gap in the curtain the entire time. Dana had started an IV in the crook of my right elbow to give me fluids, and I sat holding that arm very still, as if staying still could make me invisible.
I heard him before I saw him, his voice at the front desk, warm and worried and polite. “My wife, Victoria Grayson, she came in alone. She’s not well. She gets confused.” A pause, then less polite. “I’m her husband. I have every right to see her.” Then the double doors to the treatment area banged open. He came down the hallway fast with Denise right behind him in her good coat clutching her purse. Ethan swept the curtain aside. “Okay,” he said. “Okay, Tori, we’re going home.” He didn’t ask. He slid one arm under my back and lifted the way you’d lift a sleeping child out of a car seat. And the IV line pulled taut across the bed rail. I grabbed the rail with my free hand. “Let go of me.” “Tori, you’re confused.” He pulled harder. Something in the crook of my elbow tore. A hot, bright sting, and the catheter came out of my arm. Blood ran down my forearm onto the white sheet in a long red line. Behind him, Denise had my purse open on the foot of the bed. I watched my phone disappear into her coat pocket like a card trick. “That’s mine,” I said. And then, because something in me finally broke loose, louder. “That’s mine. He’s the one. They’re doing it to me.”
My voice came out too loud and too high. And every face in that hallway turned toward my bay. I saw myself the way they saw me. A thin, pale woman with her hair falling out in a hospital gown shouting at a nicely dressed man in a quarter-zip who was trying to help her up. I looked exactly like the woman Ethan had been describing at the front desk. Dr. Hail came through the curtain from the other side. He put himself between Ethan and the bed and put one flat hand on Ethan’s chest. “Sir, step back.” Ethan shoved him. Not hard enough to knock him down, but hard enough that Dr. Hail stumbled backward into the curtain and the metal track above it rattled. Then the security guard was there and a second one behind him, and they had Ethan by both arms. And Ethan let go of everything at once, raised both his hands in the air, palms out, and put on the most reasonable face in the building. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry. My wife has been having difficult episodes. I was trying to get her home where she’s comfortable. I panicked. I’m sorry.”
Denise was already backing away down the hallway. Nobody stopped her. Why would they? She was a nice older lady with a purse. She was gone through the double doors before I could make anyone understand that she was carrying my phone. A Mooresville police officer arrived ten minutes later. His name was Pruitt and he was young and he listened to everyone. He listened to Ethan say episodes and confused and she’s been through so much since her father died. Then he listened to Dr. Hail. “I watched him lift her off the bed against her stated objection,” Dr. Hail said, “and pull an IV out of her arm. The bruises on her left wrist were there before he walked in. I documented them.” Officer Pruitt looked at my wrist. He looked at the blood on the sheet. He looked at Ethan for a long moment and something in his face decided. They arrested my husband for assault. I watched them walk him out with his hands behind his back. He looked over his shoulder at me once and his face wasn’t angry. It was hurt, wounded. The face of a good man whose sick wife had turned on him. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have believed it, too.
