“Are you all right?” I say.
“No,” she says, her voice rising. “I’m not all right. Something’s gone wrong.”
It doesn’t occur to me to call a taxi. Taxis are for Josef; I’m used to going everywhere on buses and streetcars, and the subway. It takes me nearly an hour to get over to The Monte Carlo. Susie didn’t tell me her apartment number and I didn’t think to ask, so I have to locate the superintendent. When I knock on the door, nobody answers, and I resort to the superintendent again.
“I know she’s in there,” I say, when he’s reluctant to unlock the door for me. “She called me. It’s an emergency.”
When I finally get in, the apartment is dark; the drapes are drawn, the windows are closed, and there’s an odd smell. Clothes are scattered here and there, jeans, winter boots, a black shawl I’ve seen Susie wearing. The furniture looks as if it’s been picked out by her parents: a square-armed off-green sofa, a wheat-colored carpet, a coffee table, two lamps with the cellophane still on the shades. None of it goes with Susie as I’ve imagined her.
On the carpet there’s a dark footprint.
Susie is behind the curtain that closes off the sleeping area. She’s lying on the bed in her pink nylon shortie nightie, white as an uncooked chicken, eyes closed. The top covers of the bed and the pink tufted spread are on the floor. Underneath her, across the sheet, is a great splotch of fresh blood, spreading out like bright red wings to either side of her.
Desolation sweeps through me: I feel, for no good reason, that I have been abandoned. Then I feel sick. I run into the bathroom and throw up. It’s worse because the toilet bowl is dark red with blood. There are footprints of blood on the white and black tiled floor, fingerprints on the sink. The wastebasket is crammed with sopping sanitary pads.
I wipe my mouth on Susie’s baby-blue towel, wash my hands in the blood-spattered sink. I don’t know what to do next; whatever this is, I don’t want to be involved. I have the fleeting, absurd idea that if she’s dead I will be accused of murder. I think of sneaking out of the apartment, closing the door behind me, covering my tracks.
Instead I go back to the bed and feel Susie’s pulse. I know that this is what you’re supposed to do. Susie is still alive.
I find the superintendent, who calls an ambulance. I also call Josef, who is not there. I ride to the hospital with Susie, in the back of the ambulance. She is now semiconscious, and I hold her hand, which is cold and small. “Don’t tell Josef,” she whispers to me. The pink nightie brings it home to me: she is none of the things I’ve thought about her, she never has been. She’s just a nice girl playing dress-ups.
But what she’s done has set her apart. It belongs to the submerged landscape of the things that are never said, which lies beneath ordinary speech like hills under water. Everyone my age knows about it. Nobody discusses it. Rumors are down there, kitchen tables, money exchanged in secret; evil old women, illegal doctors, disgrace and butchery. Down there is terror.
The two attendants are casual, and scornful. They have seen this before.
“What’d she use, a knitting needle?” one says. His tone is accusing: he may think I was helping her.
“I have no idea,” I say. “I hardly even know her.” I don’t want to be implicated.
“That’s what it usually is,” he says. “Stupid kids. You’d think they’d have more sense.”
I agree with him that she’s been stupid. At the same time I know that in her place I would have been just as stupid. I would have done what she has done, moment by moment, step by step. Like her I would have panicked, like her I would not have told Josef, like her I would not have known where to go. Everything that’s happened to her could well have happened to me.
But there is also another voice; a small, mean voice, ancient and smug, that comes from somewhere deep inside my head:
Josef, when he is finally located, is devastated. “The poor child, the poor child,” he says. “Why didn’t she tell me?”
“She thought you’d get mad at her,” I say coldly. “Like her parents. She thought you’d kick her out, for getting pregnant.”
Both of us know this is a possibility. “No, no,” Josef says uncertainly. “I would have taken care of her.”
This could mean several things.
He calls the hospital, but Susie refuses to see him. Something has changed in her, hardened. She tells him she might never be able to have babies. She doesn’t love him. She doesn’t want to see him ever again. Now Josef wallows. “What have I done to her?” he moans, tugging his hair. He becomes more melancholy than ever; he doesn’t want to go out for dinner, he doesn’t want to make love. He stays in his apartment, which is no longer neat and empty but is filling up with disorganized parts of his life: take-out Chinese food containers, unwashed sheets.