“I have to go,” I tell my mom.
They’re back in the bathroom. Dot’s on the ground, her body shaking violently, and Ivy’s holding her on her side and saying, “Okay okay okay it’s okay you’re okay Dot. Oh my God.”
“I’m calling 911.”
Ivy nods. “Now. Do it now.”
She’s still seizing. Holy shit. Ivy lowers her forehead to Dot’s hip, holding on.
I call 911. I tell them my friend took something and we don’t know what and she’s having a seizure. I give them the address. I don’t tell them her name. Dot stops seizing, and they have me stay on the line to watch her breathing and take her pulse. It’s so, so fast, and her heart’s skipping around like crazy. She doesn’t really wake up after the seizure, just takes these shocky breaths in and gags white foam onto Ivy’s bathroom floor, and the overwhelming thought I keep having is, I shouldn’t be here. I do not know how to handle these things. I do not know what I’m doing. This is not my life.
“Are they coming?” Ivy keeps asking me. “They need to come, are they coming?”
“I think so, I don’t know, I don’t know what’s taking so long.” But I check my phone, and I’ve only been on the call for two and a half minutes.
The paramedics show up, and I don’t know how they get in without being buzzed up, but they do, and I can’t keep track of everything they’re doing. They don’t really talk to us. They attach monitors and machines to Dot, and I can’t figure out why it’s taking them so long to get her out of here. They use words I don’t understand.
“What’s her name?” one of them asks Ivy when they’re trying to get Dot to wake up, but Ivy just shakes her head.
The other one pulls Dot’s wallet out of her pocket. “Dorothy Nguyen.”
“Dot,” Ivy and I both say automatically, and Ivy curses and drives her palm into her forehead.
“Dot,” the paramedic says. “Can you tell us what you took? Can you wake up for me? Stay with us, honey.”
“She said she couldn’t breathe,” Ivy says.
“You two need to clear out of here,” the other one says to us. “Give us some space. You can meet us at Kent, okay? We’ll probably beat you there.”
“We just leave her here?” I say.
“We’re about to take her. I don’t have time to explain this to you. Your friend’s in serious danger.”
I’m surprised that he snaps at us, and then I realize that they probably think this is our fault.
I realize that Ivy probably thinks this is her fault.
I take Ivy’s wrist and lead her out of the building and to my car, and she follows me like she’s in a trance. It’s not until I have my phone telling me where to go, there’s rain beating down on my windshield, and we’re driving to the hospital to meet someone who isn’t even there yet, someone who we just left unconscious on the floor, that Ivy starts to break down. She stares out the windshield and starts crying, these big, shuddering sobs that start in her stomach and shake her all the way to her shoulders.
“She’s going to be fine, okay?” I say. “She’ll be okay.”
“Sh-she graduated,” Ivy says. “She just graduated. I was just fucking trying to do something nice for once in my fucking—”
“I know.”
“What the fuck, what the fuck, an hour ago she was fine, she was here and she was fine.” She gasps in a breath in fits and starts. “This stupid fucking kid, thinks she’s invincible, this absolutely goddamn idiot kid, oh my God. Oh my fucking God, she broke. I broke her.”
“Ivy,” I say, but she doesn’t say anything for the rest of the drive. She just sits forward and pants, tears coming down her face and dripping onto her lap.
An hour ago, we were fine.
An hour ago, Dot was the annoying girl who could do no wrong and I had no idea how much Ivy cared about her.
We get to the hospital, and I give them Dot’s name and ask if she’s here yet. She’s not in the system, so the nurse behind the counter turns to the other and asks if she knows about her ambulance coming in.
“Is that the teenager on the way with the heart attack?” the other one says, and everything gets really, really real right then.
A fucking heart attack?
Ivy sinks to a crouch on the floor, her head in her hands.
I say, “We didn’t know that,” because I don’t know what the fuck else to say.
“You should sit down,” the first nurse says to me gently. “We’ll let you know when we have any news.”
I walk over to a bench on autopilot, leaving Ivy on the damn floor, but a minute later she sits down next to me. She’s not crying anymore. She just looks haunted. By a ghost of someone who isn’t dead.
Yet.
I take her hand.
She blinks slowly and says, “I should have known this would happen.”
I have absolutely no idea what to say. I feel like someone took my voice away. “How?” I finally croak, and it sounds like it comes from somewhere outside of me.
“What the fuck am I going to do?” Her breath catches. “Who… She’s the one who knows what to do in these kinds of situations, she’s the one who talks, I don’t…”
“Ivy.”
She shakes herself off. “I should pray.”
“You what?”
She makes this desperate noise in the back of her throat. “She’s Catholic. She’d want me to pray. I don’t know how.”
“I can do it,” I say. “I’m Catholic, I’ll do it, okay?”
“Yeah. Yeah, okay.” She looks up and past me at the ER entrance. “Oh, fuck.”
I turn around. It’s Dot’s mom and a man who I assume is her father. She’s crying and he looks furious, like my dad does when he doesn’t want to look scared.
“I should talk to them,” Ivy says, and before I can say anything, she gets up and intercepts them on the way to the front desk. She starts talking to them, slowly and awkwardly. In Vietnamese.
God.
God. I close my eyes and clasp my hands together in front of me.
Come on, God.
Come on, Dot. Be okay.
I hear Dot’s mom wail and Ivy’s voice break while she says, “I’m sorry; I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”
You have to be okay.
June
Italy is everything I’d imagined and read about and seen in movies, except it’s actually real and happening to me. There are cobblestones under my feet. There are Vespas trying to run me over. There’s food I can’t even believe the taste of in my mouth.
I would say that real life feels so far away, but this is real life. This is really, actually happening to me, and it’s not a fantasy and it’s not a story and it’s not somebody else’s.
It’s mine, all mine, and I try so hard to stay in the present and not think about home, to push it away, gently, like I push away my wineglass when I’ve drained it at dinner and I’m full of olive oil and gnocchi and hope.
There’s a day in Milan where I’m in the middle of a street fair, sitting on a fountain with a beat-up paperback I borrowed from one of the other girls by an author I’d never heard of. There’s music everywhere, and dancers, and I have an ice cream bar melting down my arm.
There’s a minute to breathe.
I think it makes me a terrible person, but it is such a relief, just for a moment, to not think about people left behind.
And then Jenna, one of the girls in my group, says, “To being here,” when we toast on our last night, and it hits like a brick that everything has changed and that being here isn’t the kind of guarantee it used to be.
To being here. As long as you can be.
…
I get home from Italy on June fourteenth. My mom meets me at the airport with a sign that says andrea, like I wouldn’t recognize her otherwise. It’s the kind of
silly thing I missed so, so much. I drop my bags and wrap my arms around her.
“Look how tan you are!” she says. She smells like lime and lavender and home.
I squeeze her. “Grazie.” It’s about the only Italian I picked up.
“That’s my girl. Come tell me all about it.”
So I do. We get in the car, and I tell her about the trains to the hill towns, and the sunlight on the alabaster buildings, and the drafty churches, and the college kids who (mostly) didn’t treat me like shit, and the books, the books, the books. But the closer we get to home, the farther away it all feels, and by the time Mom pulls into the driveway, I’m sort of questioning if any of it actually happened, just like I was afraid I would. But seriously, I jetted off to Italy for two weeks? That doesn’t sound like me. It barely sounds like anyone, considering what I left behind.
But the trip was nonrefundable. What was I supposed to do?
Maybe I should pretend I had a bad time.
Maybe I should have had a bad time.
I take a deep breath. “So how are you? How’s Dad?”
Mom turns to me with a small smile. “We’re good, sweetie.”
Here we go. “Ivy never answered any of my calls.” I tried almost daily, from sketchy internet cafés in whatever city we were in that day. My parents always picked up, obviously, but they would never tell me anything; they’d say that everything was fine and that I shouldn’t let it ruin my trip, this was once in a lifetime, everything could wait until I got home, and now I don’t feel great about the fact that I listened. After the past few months, it was too tempting to just turn away from it all for two weeks.
Mom nods a little.
“Have you seen her?” I say.
“We dropped off food a few times,” Mom says. “She’s lost some weight. I’m not sure she’s eating much. Drinking plenty, from the look of her. I tried calling her mom, but I couldn’t reach her.”
Figures. “If I text her now, is she going to answer?”
“I don’t know, honey. It’s worth a try. If she’d respond to anyone, it’s you.”
“Yeah.”
She puts her fingers around my wrist and squeezes. “I have a little surprise for you.”
“Is it cake?”
It is, along with Melody and Diana, who jump up and down in my kitchen and hug me like they haven’t seen me in years. We eat cake and I tell them about Italy and they come upstairs with me to unpack and tell me about Alyssa breaking up with her girlfriend in Boston, and Melody making a fortune in tips the other night, and Diana finally sleeping with Hot Yoga.
“Have you seen Ivy?” I ask them eventually, when I can’t pretend I’m capable of thinking about anything else for any longer.
Melody nods, looking guarded. “She comes out sometimes. Drinks and snorts shit and hooks up with anyone she hasn’t had before.”
“Business as usual,” Diana says.
This isn’t adding up. None of it is. “Where the fuck is Dot?” I say. “She’s not making Ivy wait on her hand and foot?”
Melody turns back from the closet, where she’s lusting over some of my band tees. “In the hospital.”
“What? Still? I thought she’d be home by now.”
“Yeah, I don’t know,” Melody says. “But we sent flowers yesterday and they said she got them, so she’s definitely still there.”
“Have you been to see her?”
“She hasn’t answered any of our texts,” Diana says. “We figured we shouldn’t show up uninvited. When my mom was in labor with my sister, she about bit the head off anyone who came in unexpected.”
“She’s not in labor,” I say. They don’t understand. They weren’t there. Nobody fucking gets how scary this was besides Ivy and me. “Ivy’s been to see her, right?”
They don’t say anything.
I say, “Tell me Ivy’s been to the hospital since that night that we sat there for six hours waiting to hear if Dot was going to live or die.”
I don’t know which I hate more: that she’s doing this or that I’m not even surprised that she’s doing it.
“If she has, she hasn’t said anything about it to us,” Diana says.
Melody snorts. “Say anything about visiting her? She’s too busy fucking her way through Providence to mention Dot’s name. It’s like she never existed.”
“Like I said.” Diana takes a shirt out of my suitcase and folds it dramatically. “Business as usual.”
I can’t really concentrate on holding a conversation after that, because I’m so confused and annoyed and just plain goddamn angry. She’s not visiting the hospital; she’s just staying home and drinking and not eating? Why does everything have to be so fucking dramatic? Dot overdosed. She’s alive. Why the fuck can’t Ivy button up her shit, stop performing this off-the-rails-partner routine, and be an adult about one thing, ever?
Anyway, I’m not great company, and unpacking isn’t all that thrilling, so they leave before too long. I’m antsy, so I go downstairs to where my mom’s watching Bake Off. “Where’s Dad?” I say.
“At the club,” she says. “It’s been busy lately.”
I feel a swell of pride, but it turns into something else when I remember who’s really responsible for saving the club. Still, I manage to say, “I like to hear that.”
“Mmmmmm-hmm.”
I sit down next to her on the couch, and I must look serious, because she pauses her show, which she only does on very dire occasions.
“What’s wrong, Duck?” she says.
I don’t even know where to start. “What’s going on with Dot?” I say. “Why is she still in the hospital?”
She sighs and turns to me.
“There’s something you’re not telling me,” I say. “Melody and Diana don’t know it, either.”
“No, I don’t imagine they do.”
“You kept telling me everything was fine,” I say. “I’d ask how she was and you said she was doing better and she was okay.”
“She is okay. She is doing better.”
“Then why isn’t she home?”
She adjusts herself on the couch. “The heart attack caused a lot of damage. She needed surgery to have a pacemaker put in.”
“Okay. Okay, that doesn’t sound so bad.”
“And they’ve diagnosed her with early-stage heart failure,” my mom says.
I feel cold. “Her heart’s failing?”
“Early stage. It’s starting to.”
“Well…well, what the fuck happens when it’s not early stage anymore? Is she going to die?” You can’t live without a heart, my brain reminds me helpfully.
“It means eventually she’s going to need a heart transplant.”
Or else she’ll die. “When is eventually?”
“Probably within the next three years.”
I slump back on the couch.
“She’s seventeen,” I say.
“I know.”
“So by the time she’s my age, she’ll probably have had to get a fucking heart transplant. And then what? They don’t last forever, right?”
“About ten years, and then she’d need another.”
“And in between, she’s going to be sick. She’s going to be sick for the rest of her life. Because of one fucking night. This is…this is not real.” We should have been more careful. We should have taught her better. We should have known better. “It’s not like… She’s not some regular drug user,” I say. Hell, I do more than she does. “This shouldn’t have happened.”
“It only takes bad luck one time. That’s what I’m always telling you.”
“I know, I know.” I rub my forehead. My thoughts are coming all slow and tangled up. “She’s starting college in the fall. She was so excited.”
“She can still have a life, honey.”
�
��But it’s going to be different. Because of one stupid mistake.” I take a deep breath. “When does she get to come home?”
“Soon,” my mom says. “They needed to keep a closer eye on her for longer because of the amount of damage.”
“How is she? Have you seen her?”
She nods. “She’s quiet. She’s got a lot of anxiety from what happened.” She pauses. “And she’d really like to know where the hell Ivy is.”
Fuck. I’d forgotten about that whole aspect of our sordid tale. “She really hasn’t been to see her?”
My mom shakes her head.
“Why?”
“Maybe it reminds her too much of her dad. Maybe she’s trying to protect herself. Maybe she feels guilty and thinks Dot is better off without her.” She shrugs. “Maybe she’s a heartless shit.”
“Yeah, seriously.”
“The only person who can answer that is Ivy,” she says. “But Dot’s going to be out of the hospital soon. Ivy can’t hide forever.”
“Yeah, the hiding stops now,” I say.
…
Ivy doesn’t answer my texts, and she doesn’t pick up when I call, so after I’ve gotten a few hours of sleep, I resort to driving to her apartment and hitting the buzzer until she finally lets me up, like I did all those months ago. Except nothing like I did all those months ago.
Her apartment door is still closed when I get up the stairs, and it takes a while of pounding on that before she opens up. My mom was right; she’s definitely lost weight. Her hair’s a mess, and she’s wearing sweatpants and a ratty tank top with no bra. She is still, obviously, beautiful.
“Look, it’s the conquering hero,” she says, and I can tell right away that she’s drunk. “All hail.”
“I didn’t exactly conquer anything.”
“Well, the night is young.” She turns and heads back into the apartment, and I follow and close the door behind me.
“How are you?” I say.
She raises her arms like she’s proud. “I’m fabulous.”
“Yeah, you look it.”
She sits on the couch for about half a second before she springs back up and says, “You want to go out? Let’s go out.”
“That’s what you have to say?” She doesn’t want to talk, or cry, or go to the hospital?
The Love Song of Ivy K. Harlowe Page 17