Fingers massaged her chest. Something inside cracked and popped like bubble wrap.
“Crepitus present.”
Isabel tried to gasp, but succeeded only in producing a rasping wheeze.
“You’re going to be okay,” said the voice attached to the hand attached to the oxygen mask. “Do you know where you are?”
Isabel tried to inhale, and the pain was like a thousand knives. She mewed into the mask.
A male face appeared above hers: “You’re going to feel something cold on your skin. We have to insert a needle to help you breathe.”
A freezing swipe of antiseptic, a long needle flashing above her and then down and into her chest. The pain was excruciating, but accompanied by instant relief. Air hissed through the needle and her lung reinflated. She could breathe again. She gasped and sucked so hard the mask inverted against her face. She clawed at it, but the hand holding it stayed firm, and Isabel discovered that even though it flattened against her face, it still delivered oxygen. It stank of PVC, like cheap shower curtains and the type of bath toys she avoided buying for the bonobos because she’d read that they exuded fake estrogens when the material began to break down.
“Get her on a backboard.”
Hands maneuvered her sideways, holding her head, then eased her onto her back. A radio sputtered in the background.
“We have a female, mid- to late twenties, victim of an explosion. Tension pneumothorax-needle decompression performed in the field. Breath sounds present. Facial and oral trauma. Head injury. Altered level of consciousness. Ready to evacuate-ETA seventeen minutes.”
She let her eyes drift shut and the bees swarmed again. The world was spinning, she was nauseated. When the crisp night air hit her face, her lids snapped open. Each movement of the gurney was amplified as its wheels crunched through the gravel.
The parking lot was full of flashing lights and sirens. Velcro straps prevented Isabel from turning her head, so instead she turned her gaze. Celia was off to the side, screaming and crying and pleading with firemen to let her past. She was still clutching a cardboard tray of grande caramel macchiatos. When she caught sight of the gurney, the tray and drinks splattered to the ground. The video camera swung from a strap on her wrist.
“Isabel!” she wailed. “Oh my God!
When the front wheels of the gurney met the back of the vehicle and folded beneath her, Isabel caught a glimpse of a dark shadow at the top of a tree, and then another, and then another, and she bleated into the mask. At least half the bonobos had made it out.
The ceiling of the ambulance replaced the starry night and her eyes flickered shut. Someone yanked them open, first one, and then the other, and shone a light into them. Against the ambulance interior she saw faces and uniforms and gloved hands, bags of intravenous fluid and crisscrossing tubes. Voices boomed and radios hissed and someone was calling her name but she was helpless against the riptide. She tried to stay with them-it seemed the polite thing to do, given that they now knew her name-but she couldn’t. Their voices echoed and swirled as she sank into a chasm that was beyond the bees and darker than black. It was the complete absence of everything.
3
John opened his front door and came to an abrupt halt. It was the scent of Pine-Sol that startled him.
Nine weeks earlier, the death of their cat had pushed his already-teetering wife into an abyss from which she seemed unable to emerge. It was the end of a long progression that had begun more than a year earlier, before they moved from New York City to Philadelphia for John’s job at the
John had known moving wouldn’t be easy for Amanda. She was still reeling from the near-simultaneous loss of both her book contract and her agent-what was euphemistically termed “an economic downturn” turned into a mudslide that swept away her entire publisher. Her agent was so disenchanted she left the business to start a natural-fiber yarn boutique, leaving Amanda a literary orphan.
John did his best to infuse Amanda with enthusiasm for Philly-who wouldn’t love its food, its neighborhoods, its architecture?-but she wasn’t swayed. She missed her friends. She missed the city. She even spoke wistfully about their tiny six-story walkup, seeming to forget that it had been infested with mice. John had hoped their new house in Queen Village with a private garden and alley would cheer her up, and it did give her new energy: she was so determined to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat that she immediately holed up with her laptop to finish her second novel. She worked in complete isolation, prompting John to suggest that she volunteer at the animal shelter. He had hoped she would meet some people and make new friends, but the inevitable and alarmingly swift result was that she fell in love with a cat.
Although named Magnificat, the creature in question was an ancient twenty-three-pound one-eared Maine coon with a permanently crooked tail. He also had a flaking skin rash that left him scaly and bald in places, which might have been bearable except that he also insisted on sleeping between their heads, spreading his considerable heft between their pillows and batting at their heads if they didn’t pet him enough. Amanda didn’t understand why John got so upset about a bit of dander on his pillow, and John didn’t know how to explain that he had fully expected she would adopt something, but that he had assumed it would be a sweet little baby something, not a monstrous beast with a weepy eye whose tongue stuck out perpetually because he had no teeth left to hold it in place. And yet, eight months later, when Magnificat’s kidneys failed and they had to have him put down, John was as shattered as Amanda. They wept over the empty cat crate in the car, clutching each other for a full twenty minutes before John felt composed enough to drive. Back home, Amanda drew the blinds, crawled into bed, and stayed there for three days. It killed John to see her like that: she had no friends within a hundred miles, her writing career was in tatters, her cat was dead, and there was nothing he could do about any of it. His suggestion that they get another cat was met with a look of horrified betrayal. His suggestion that she see a therapist went over even worse, although even John could see that she was clinically depressed.
She ate barely anything. She couldn’t sleep, although it took her longer and longer to get out of bed in the morning, and when she finally did, she rarely got dressed. She moved from bed to couch, lying under a quilt with her laptop on her knees and the curtains firmly drawn. The only light in the room was the ghostly blue glow of her monitor.
John hadn’t realized just how much of the housekeeping Amanda had been doing until she stopped. Clean underwear and socks no longer appeared in his drawer. The pile of shirts remained in the corner of the closet until he gathered them and took them to the cleaners. Greasy cobwebs sprouted along the undersides of furniture and reached with filmy fingers to ensnare the baseboards. The hall table all but disappeared under towering piles of bills, catalogs, and credit card offers. John had taken over the kitchen to some degree, but there were always stacks of dirty dishes in the sink, and usually on the counter too. At this point, Amanda’s efforts were limited to spraying lemon Pledge in the center of the powder room and turning the towels around if someone threatened to come over.
Alas, “someone” was always his parents. Their proximity was something he had failed to factor in when considering their move, an oversight for which he and Amanda were paying dearly.
For almost a year after they moved, Patricia and Paul Thigpen tried to persuade John and Amanda to join their church. If it had been anybody else, John might have considered it simply because it would force them to meet people, but the idea of his parents being even on the periphery of whatever social circle he and Amanda eventually assembled was unthinkable. The elder Thigpens had apparently given up, but now they inexplicably showed up at noon each Sunday to recount the sermon and wax on about how darling, how
Patricia’s thin-lipped and accusatory glares grew more overt in perfect correlation with the decline of the house. Sunday after Sunday John watched as Patricia shot smoldering blame rays in Amanda’s direction. John knew he should do something to shield his broken wife, but his family dynamic was not such that he could address his
