The Blessed (2 page)

Agnes overheard and couldn’t get the image out of her head of a Mad Monster Party going on up there. And if they were waiting for her to “stabilize,” they would be waiting a hell of a lot longer than even the poor uninsured souls in the waiting room seeking treatment.

“Another body outlasting the mind,” Dr. Moss said under his breath as he stepped behind the next curtain to assist with a CPR case, already well underway. Agnes was feeling more herself and she selfishly welcomed the tumult, if only to distract her from her own problems for a minute.
She offered her wrist to the physician’s assistant and tuned into the commotion next to her, like the unwelcome music blaring from a car stereo outside her apartment window on a hot summer night.

13
“Seventeen-year-old female,” the EMT shouted, as she continued compressions. “Suspected drowning.”

The bony, blue-lipped girl in front of the intern was lifeless and turning whiter shades of pale with each passing second. He tried to examine her nails, but they were already painted blue.

“In the river?” the intern asked.

“On the street,” the EMT offered, drawing raised eyebrows from everyone in the room. “Facedown in a pothole.”

“She’s in full arrest. Defib.”

After several rounds of computer-assisted shocks were applied to her chest and rib cage, the tattooed teen bounced, spasmed, and came to.

“Bag her!” a nurse ordered.

Before they could get the intubation tube down her throat, she started coughing and spewing dirty water on the surgical gowns of her caretakers until some spittle ran down her chin. She might even have vomited if she had eaten anything that day. Tinted by her smeared red lipstick, the gravelly discharge left her looking bloody and muddy. Some murky runoff dripped down her underfed abdomen and collected in her belly button, flooding the innie and causing her steel ball barbell piercing to look more like a diving
board, one end bobbing slightly up and down.

An IV was started; labs were drawn and sent off for testing.

“What’s your name?” the nurse asked, checking her faculties.

“CeCe,” the girl said wearily. “Cecilia.”

“Do you know where you are?” the nurse pressed.

CeCe looked around her. She saw nurses and doctors scurrying around and heard relentless moans coming from some homeless people on gurneys parked in the hallway.

“Hell,” she answered.

Cecilia looked up at the crucifix posted above the doorway and rethought her response. “The hospital.” She looked at the mud on her secondhand faded Vivian Westwood bodice, double bird claw ring—gunmetal gold pheasant talons gripping her middle and ring finger—leather leggings, and black ankle boots. “What am I doing here?”

“Technically, you drowned,” the nurse said. “You were found facedown in about an inch of water.”

“Oh, my God,” Cecilia cried, shortly before busting out into hysterics.

The nurse held her hand and tried to calm her before discovering that Cecilia wasn’t crying, but instead, laughing uncontrollably. So much so that she couldn’t catch her precious breath, further depleting her of oxygen.

“There’s nothing funny going on here.” Dr. Moss eyed the dirty residue and acrylic tubes emanating from her. “You almost died.”

Of course he was right, but she wasn’t laughing at the staff, just at the pathetic train wreck she’d become. Inhaling
a puddle full of street gravy. How low can you get? Literally. Her friend Jim, who killed himself by jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge and sucking down thick, murky East River “Chop Suey” water, sure would have gotten a kick out of this. The thought sobered her up enough to replay the evening, to visualize the guy she was making out with on the F train back to Brooklyn from the Bowery and whose name she couldn’t remember, and the gig she wasn’t paid for.

“Emergency contact?” the nurse asked.

Cecilia shook her head
no
. “Where’s my guitar?” She felt around the gurney like an amputee for a lost limb.

She was naturally beautiful, gifted with deep green almond eyes and sharp features from early childhood. Her dark hair was shoulder-length, carefully unkempt in an edgy style. Tall and lean, with long bones and muscles. She would’ve had an easier time becoming a model, she was often told, and not just the kind recruited at shopping mall kiosks by pretty part-time employees with tans and belly shirts—but the real deal. And fashion was important to her. But she just couldn’t stand the idea of becoming a billboard for someone else’s creativity. It was stressful enough hawking her own. If she was going to be a messenger for anyone, it might as well be herself. Besides, music and her look was what got her out of bed in the early afternoon. It was what she lived for.

“The admission desk will have a record of whatever you were brought in with,” Dr. Moss said. “I’ll check on your guitar when things settle down around here.”

“Do they ever?” she asked. The little smile she got out of him fueled her.

“Thanks,” Cecilia said sincerely, as the doctor left her to contemplate her situation. “You’re a goddamn angel.”

“No, I’m a doctor. I can only fix damaged bodies.”

7
“Doctor! Stat!” the charge nurse ordered, interrupting his attempt at a made-for-TV moralism. Without warning, madness burst through the ER entrance, signaling to Cecilia that it might be a while before she got the GPS on her instrument.

“Holy breast-fed Jesus,” CeCe said, trying to decipher what the bright flashes of light against the wall above her cloth divider could be. It was like nothing they’d ever seen, or heard, before. It was almost as if a lightning storm had made its way into triage. The yelling that accompanied the flashes sounded like a pack of famished beasts picking over bones. It was the blaze of camera flashes and the cursing of paparazzi, all jockeying for position. All trying to get a shot. THE shot.

“Lucy, over here!” one yelled.

“Lucy, one shot of you and your IV bag!” another demanded.

“I can’t see,” Lucy mumbled as she put her vintage blond mink jacket over her head to shield her eyes and shroud her face, before promptly passing out.

“Back the hell up,” a security guard at the visitor desk shouted repeatedly.

Neither Agnes nor Cecilia could make out much except what they could see beneath the hanging curtain and hearing the term “OD” thrown around. Articles of clothing began hitting the floor, first one spiked stiletto and then another, black leggings, a strapless push-up bra, Swarovski headband, vintage Chanel purse, and finally a silk dress that seemed to gently float down like a little black parachute.

“Looks like another recessionista’s charge account came due,” Cecilia said under her breath.

“What is this, teen night?” Dr. Moss asked rhetorically as he prepped the oral charcoal.

“No, just Saturday night in Brooklyn,” the nurse responded. “Mondays are heart attacks . . . ”

“Lucy!” another nurse shouted. “Lucy, can you hear me?” The nurse didn’t need to check the clipboard for her name. Anyone who read the blogs or local gossip pages knew who she was and why she was accosted by the screaming paps.

Agnes overheard the chatter between the doctor and the hospital public relations officer who were standing outside her curtain.

“Keep those vultures out of here,” he ordered, looking over at the salivating row of photographers perched restlessly in the waiting room. “No comment and no confirmations from anyone, got it?”

Dr. Moss walked in to examine Lucy. The oral-activated charcoal treatment had already been started. She was gagging on the tube, which he took as a good sign. She awoke
abruptly, as if the starter rope was being pulled on a lawnmower. Fully aware and completely awake.

“Get me out of here,” Lucy screamed, wrenching the tube from her throat. She was fidgety, crazed, almost manic.

“Relax, honey,” a large-and-in-charge nurse said, pushing gently down on her shoulders. “You’re safe from all those reporters out there.”

“Safe?” Lucy scoffed, fussing blindly with her makeup, her voice raspy. “Are you kidding me? This shot is gonna put someone’s kid through college.”

The nurse was clearly taken aback not only by her comment but also by the fact that the girl lying on the gurney was in full media mode.

“What are you talking about?”

“An emergency room photo? Do you know what kind of placement those get?” Lucy gave the irascible health aide the once-over and realized that she probably didn’t. “Like you’d understand.” Lucy pulled the overhead examination lamp closer and checked out her reflection in the chrome tray positioned over her gurney.

“Well, then, maybe you can get that officer outside to understand a little better what someone your age was doing passed out in the bathroom of a club?”

Lucy refused to acknowledge the seriousness of her condition, medically or legally, and reached down for the pieces of her scattered outfit. A searing pain stopped her short, and she doubled over, clenching her stomach in agony.

The nurse placed sticky-back electrodes on Lucy’s chest
and wired her to the cardiac monitor at her bedside. The switch was flipped and instead of the expected
beep . . . beep
of Lucy’s heart rate, the sound was one long extended tone, indicating a flat line.

Then . . . nothing.

Lucy’s eyebrows perked up nervously as the nurse fiddled with the machinery.

“Everyone says I’m heartless,” Lucy jibed.

“Stop moving around,” the nurse ordered. “You’re messing with the monitor.”

“Ugh, I think I’m getting my period.” Lucy dropped her head down on the tiny pillow beneath her head. “Get me some Vicodin.”

Dr. Moss shook his head and left the curtained cubicle. He noticed the photographers and bloggers uploading and posting from their mobiles, calling sources, vigorously updating editors on the second-rate “it” girl’s breaking news. Suddenly, as if the fire alarm had gone off, the crowd dispersed, off to chase the next ambulance.

The nurse poked her head into Lucy’s bay to let her know things had settled down.

“Shit!” Lucy spat, her chance for a little cheap ink thwarted by someone else’s personal tragedy.

Hours passed, lights dimmed, staff, shifts, and dressings changed, and fifteen-minute-interval checks on Agnes’s restraints took place—also mandatory procedure—but the sounds of the sick, the injured, and the dying persisted
long past visiting hours, into the night. It was sobering and depressing. Patients came and went, some discharged, some admitted, others like Agnes, Cecilia, and Lucy left in limbo, waiting for a bed or further observation, forced to endure the suffering of others as well as their own.

Agnes’s cell went off and she knew immediately by the
Dynasty
TV-theme ringtone that it was her mother. She hit the mute button and tossed the phone, limp-wristed, onto the monitor stand next to her gurney, ignoring the caller just as she had the digital cascade of text messages that now clogged her mailbox. She sighed and drifted off to sleep, like Lucy, whose lost photo op, and a first round of questioning by the NYPD, proved totally exhausting.

It was practically silent. Still.