Empathy Read online

  “Oh, shoot,” Emily said, blood pounded in her face. “I’m sorry, Samuels.”

  He gave her shoulder a quick pat. “Not to worry, not to worry. It’s been a long time since Greta went. Nineteen and eighty-four. It still hurts, but it’s a hurt to which I’ve grown accustomed.” He held up his left hand and inspected the white band of flesh around his finger. “It was damned hard to get the thing off. You’ll pardon my vulgarity, but it took a lot of spit and yanking.”

  Emily snickered.

  Samuels lifted an eyebrow. “Caught that one, did you? Sick mind. Good girl.”

  “Why do you take it off, though?” she asked, then quickly added, “I hope you don’t mind my incredibly rude prying or anything.”

  “Not at all, dear. I’d say we’ve progressed past the basic levels of bullshit politeness already this evening, wouldn’t you?”

  Emily nodded and almost smiled. Her lips moved anyway.

  “No, I take off my wedding ring because I want to make sure I’ve got a constant physical reminder of why today is special. You wear a wedding band long enough and you’ll forget it’s there as surely as you forget your own fingernails. Every now and again, I’ll look down and get a start because it’s not there. Then I’ll remember why, if I wasn’t already thinking about it.”

  “How long were you married?”

  “Since she was fifteen and I was nineteen. We eloped over state lines and lied on the marriage license to make her legal. When I think of the kind of trouble a person would get in for something like that these days…” He shook his head.

  Emily’s mind dredged up Sheriff Andy Burton’s voice. Ten to twenty in a federal pen for kidnapping, transporting a minor over state lines and forgery for starters, pop.

  “You must miss her a lot,” Emily said and was struck by the strangeness of the question. She’d never asked anyone how they felt about anything before. The knowledge had always just been there, right next to her own feelings, or worse, mixing in with them.

  “Missing Greta’s a great deal like my joints,” Samuels said. “Always there, always painful, but mine.” They reached the sidewalk in front of the Morgan and he put his hand on her arm. “Once you face a pain, accept it, you own it and it can’t rule your life anymore.”

  Emily took Samuels’s hands, the skin spotted with age, papery and cold. The flesh under his nails was brushed the thinnest blue. So strange, how simple it was to slur over and ignore the usual social boundaries, like touch and sharing personal information. Emily had been slipping into other people’s personal space her entire life without a second thought. Now that it wasn’t happening as a matter of course, she felt disconnected without the extra intimacy.

  She looked into Samuels’s eyes—about to thank him for the wonderful conversation—in time to catch them rolling back in his head. His lips quivered and his knees collapsed as if a puppeteer had cut his strings. Emily caught him before the sidewalk could snap his glassy old bones. It was like clutching a pillow case filled with balsa wood.

  For a moment, she just stood there in a one-sided, clumsy dance with an unconscious old man. Her father’s ghost smacked her upside the head and Emily began to shout for help. She expected the night manager of the hotel to come running through the front door. The entrance threw a wide bar of yellow light, but nothing else. Her voice grew horse with shouting after about twenty seconds. Samuels was getting heavy. Andy Burton spoke in her mind again, This isn’t Janesville, girl. This is New York. What’d I teach you?

  Emily took a huge breath and brayed, “FIRE!”

  Three seconds later, the Morgan’s front door disgorged the night manager, a little man with a strawberry mark on the side of his neck, heavy glasses and armpit stains. Emily hefted Samuels and flashed a bright smile, “Call 911, okay?”

  “What’s going on here?”

  “NOW, JACKASS!”

  He disappeared back into the hotel, his feet touching the ground half as much as they had on the way out. It was 2:41 in the morning.

  AT 2:58 EMILY found herself in the back of an ambulance that warbled and stammered over the streets. She pressed herself up again the wall and tried to give the EMT as much room as she needed. Samuels lay on a gurney, his eyes at half-mast. But he was breathing. The EMT, a stocky black woman in her thirties who smelled like soap and lilacs, muttered that his pulse was thready, but there.

  “Looks like a relatively minor episode,” she said, loosening Samuels’s collar. Her motions and tone were all business, quick and efficient, but then she placed a hand on the old doorman’s forehead and inclined her head a little. “You gon’ be fine, gran’ dad.” She looked up at Emily. “You related? Don’t look like you are.”

  “No, ma’am. He’s—we’re friends.”

  “Uh, huh,” she nodded and picked up a clipboard, began ticking off information. Radio chatter mixed with the muted blaring of the siren as the ambulance bumped over seams in the pavement. Light gleamed from crowded instrument arrays. After about a minute the EMT said, “This isn’t your first time in an ambulance.”

  A montage of memory flickered behind Emily’s eyes like the circus of lights on top of the vehicle. “No.”

  “Me neither.” The EMT flashed her teeth. “He’s gonna’ be okay, honey.”

  Another minute or so of flashing, gently rocking silence passed between them, punctuated by the breathing of an old man in trouble. “When else?” the EMT asked.

  “Sorry?”

  “You been on an ambulance. Don’t mind my askin’.”

  Emily waved her off. “No, no, it’s fine.” Her memory thew images, sounds, creased her brow. “My mother was killed when I was very young. I rode in the front seat next to the driver.” A far-away smile played on her face. “He let me talk on the CB. I was really little and I didn’t really get what was happening.”

  “Sorry about your mama.”

  “Yeah,” Emily said. “That was a long time ago.” She thought to stay silent after that, but it seemed to belittle the loss, how it had shaped her. “It’s been hard, though.”

  “Should be. Your daddy take care of you?”

  They took a hard corner. The EMT somehow managed to keep her center of balance without seeming to move at all. Emily had to steady herself with one hand against the wall. “He sure did.”

  The EMT looked up, searched Emily’s face for the briefest moment, then went back to her work.

  “He was my second ambulance ride.”

  They bumped over a curb. Glass objects giggled off each other in some hidden cabinet under Emily’s seat. Her center of gravity was thrown forward and left there. The EMT looked up.

  “We’re here.”

  THE HOSPITAL SENSED their arrival and opened its mouth, twin glass slabs whispering aside on their tracks. Emily trotted along just behind the gurney. She watched with a sense of detachment as the hospital gobbled up the old man who was not her father. Samuels’s left hand flopped to one side and time doubled on Emily. For a moment, she could have sworn she saw a ring on that hand where she knew one was not. It looked an awful lot like the scratched copper band that had served her father as a wedding ring. She blinked and the ring was gone, replaced by a line white line.

  Emily’s feet stopped at the door.

  Hospitals were bad places for her. She’d been rushed through doors like these as a child, her mother bleeding to death from gunshot wounds. And so recently, her second trip. But aside from all of this, she dreaded hospitals for the miasma of emotion that always wafted from them like the breath of an adrenaline junky, thick with panic and poison. Funeral homes were harsh too, but at least the feelings had a consistency she could get used to. Emergency rooms in particular, had always thrown a range of intensity at her that was impossible to predict: rage and relief, panic and hope, joy and terrible acceptance. That last had always been the worse for her. It was the emotional equivalent of realizing that you could no longer tread water; that as the waves closed over your head you wouldn’t be able to struggle u
p for one more breath.

  The sensor over the door held the glass jaws wide for her. This would be one of the greatest tests of her plan.

  Emily took a breath and hummed, “If I can make it here, I’ll make it, bum-dah, dum.”

  She took five steps forward—she knew it was five, she counted—and the glass doors thumped shut behind her. Emily closed her eyes, found as much quiet in herself as she could and stretched. In the dark of her mind, the city’s heart sounds rushed and swelled into a roar. She could feel herself scrunching up her face, waiting for the hammer, but none came. The white noise was louder here, more intense, but the alien feelings were still drowned out. In fact, it seemed as if the more emotions there were, the more indistinct each became. Instead, of standing in the surf, she was standing in the surf during a downpour. She was getting soaked, sure, but it was even harder to keep track of each individual drop of water.

  Now, even the rush and swell began to quiet as her mental ears became attenuated. Her other senses began to speak in the dark—edge of disinfectant on the cool, canned air; something to her left was beeping and she could hear the squeak of rubber-soled shoes approaching.

  “Miss?”

  Emily opened her eyes and tilted her head down a little to meet the eyes of a man in sea-green scrubs with a rough, stubbled head. The flesh beneath his eyes was puffy but they were bright. She guessed he might be wondering why this strange woman with the scrunched up face was just standing in front of the doors with her eyes shut and her fists bunched at her sides. As if to confirm this, his right eyebrow pulled a Mr. Spock. A smile ran up from Emily’s tummy. “Hi,” she said.

  Charlie caught her smile and returned it, surprised. “You okay?”

  Her eyes skipped over his scrubs, noting his posture and round shoulders. “Are you a doctor?” she asked. And, oh, what was that, Miss Burton? You were just checking him out, weren’t you? Her face grew warm. “I came in on the ambulance.” Oh, Jesus. She felt like smacking herself in the head. I came in on da am-bu-lance with da’ pretty lights.

  “I saw that,” he said and jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “They took the man you came in with into the back to make sure he’s stabilized.”

  Emily dropped back in from lah-lah land, looking around the waiting area and front desk as if she needed to confirm what he’d just told her. “It was so strange, we were just talking and he went right down.” God, he had nice eyes. Brown with little flecks of gold around the rims. What was going on with her?

  “Heart attacks happen like that sometimes,” Charlie said. “It’s not always like somebody grabs their arm first, or clutches their chest or whatever.” He brought his forearm up vertical and then brought it down horizontal with a whistle. “Sometimes it’s just—zort!” Zort? The fuck does zort mean, Charlie? Why don’t you flex a bicep while you’re at it, tell her about all the poetry courses you took in college. He looked at his feet. “Denny said he was already pretty stable, though, so I wouldn’t worry too much.” Looking at his feet made him feel shorter. He whipped up his head.

  “Denny?”

  This girl had some seriously amazing eyes. Super green. “Woman you rode in with on the wagon. Denise is her real name—Denny.”

  “Oh, I liked her.”

  “Yeah, I like her too. She’s tough.”

  “Nice, though.”

  “Yeah.” Zort. The fuck, man? “You want to sit down. You looked like you were about to fall over there for a second when you first came in. You okay now?” He opened his face a bit more and jerked his thumb over his shoulder again. “I could get a doctor.”

  “No, no. I’m fine. I, um, I think I’m just really tired.” And she was. Emily had been asleep for the better part of two days until just a few hours ago, but it was still after three in morning. Her brain was nagging at her eyelids to shut. “It’s been an eventful evening.”

  Charlie nodded and smiled sideways. “You want a cup of coffee?” Oh, crap.

  “Sounds good.”

  Oh, crap. “Okay, take a load off. I’ll go get us some joe.” Take a load off? Some joe? Was he going to fall into a full western twang, maybe swagger like a trail hand?

  “Thanks,” she said. “Sounds good.” Maybe she could say “sounds good” a few more times. Just as long as she didn’t make too big a show of staring at his butt as he turned around.

  “Be right back,” Charlie said.

  Emily found she was, in fact, not just staring at his behind as he walked away, but scanning his entire body, admiring the way he moved. The guy rolled over the floor like a dancer, but he was solid. And, it just so happened that he did indeed have a very nice ass. Again, she was struck with how weird the way she related to other people had become since the volume on her power had muted. The empathic ability was shorted-out, so now she had to connect in other ways. Was this going to turn her into a slut or something? Charlie and his nice butt disappeared around a corner and Emily looked up.

  Julie, the duty nurse, had returned to her station behind the front desk and was grinning at Emily, eyes squinted, head nodding ever so slightly. Emily turned as red as a July tomato. “Hi,” she said. Caught, so caught. She scrambled for something to say and came up with, “He’s nice.” Oh, for the love of Jehovah.

  Julie chuckled. “Single, too.”

  Emily crossed her arms, cupping her elbows with her hands. “Don’t tell him I was looking, okay?”

  Julie winked and wiped the smile off her face as Charlie came back around the corner. “I didn’t know if you’d want cream or sugar or anything,” he said. “So I just crammed some of the fake stuff in my pocket.”

  Julie snorted a laugh. Charlie ignored it, but his ears went holiday red. He handed Emily her cup and motioned for her to sit down. “Seriously, you should chill for a while. I’m not sure how long it’s going to be before we know something about your friend.”

  Emily sat, exhaustion withering her onto one end of a bench. “Thanks,” she said and took a long inhale over the cup. “This is just what the doctor ordered.” She sipped and the heat ran the course of her veins as if she’d been injected. “Oh, hey,” she said. “You never answered my question. Are you a doctor?”

  “No,” Charlie looked left, then right. This was the part where they suddenly started treating him differently. “I’m a nurse.”

  Emily didn’t blink. “Neat.” She patted the seat next to her. “Thought you were going to join me.”

  Charlie’s face bloomed in a smile. He plopped down on the other end of the bench, hoping she hadn’t seen him trying to judge where to sit. He hadn’t been sure if the distance between them was right. He wasn’t very sure of anything at the moment. It felt like a lot more than just having the hots for someone. He was just plain delighted by this person.

  He took a sip of his own coffee, the acid reacted with his saliva and made the inside of his cheeks hurt for a second. The first sip always did that to him. He swallowed and a yawn rolled out of him. “Oh, man. I’m sorry. This isn’t usually my shift. I took over for someone today—tonight. This morning.”

  Emily nodded. “How long have you been awake?”

  Charlie checked his wrist. “About forty hours.”

  Emily noted the mix of delicacy and strength in his hand. His finger-nails were clean. She glanced at her own. They were clean. Mostly.

  “How ‘bout you?” he asked.

  Emily laughed. “Oh, I’ve only been up since about ten this evening.”

  Charlie’s eyebrow did the Spock thing again. “Yeah? How come you’re so tired?” She had patted the seat to tell him to sit down. It was absurd how much he liked that.

  “That’s a loaded question.”

  “I’m sorry,” Charlie blurted. “Listen, I didn’t mean anything.”

  “No, no. It’s okay. I’ve just…” She looked at him. “I did a lot of traveling recently. Really long drive.” A sigh slipped past her lips chased by a laugh. “That and the first friend I made in New York passed out in my arms about a
half an hour ago.”

  “So you’re not a New Yorker,” he said, nodding.

  “Way I talk, right?”

  “You get a lot of accents in this town, but not usually ones that sound like commercials for dairy farmers.” She blushed. Charlie smiled and said, “You remember the old commercials with that guy who’d come on and say, ‘Wizghansin cheese is behtah’?”

  She leaned back in her seat. “Okay, I don’t sound that bad.” She gave him a side eye. “Do I?”

  “Nope. Difference between your accent and that guy’s is like John Cleese versus some Cockney cab driver. Yours is pretty light, but you can definitely tell you’re from Wisconsin.”

  She tipped her head. “You like John Cleese?”

  “When I was a teenager, my best friend Ronny Erkhardt and I would sneak out at night and perform the Holy Grail as an opera. We used to go to this park near my house and jump around on the benches, singing and shouting the lines.” Charlie shook his head. “I must have seen that movie a hundred times.” He puffed out his chest and crackled, “How could a swallow carry a coconut?”

  Without skipping a beat, Emily chimed in with an equally bad British accent, “It could grip it by the husk.”

  Charlie’s eyes opened wide. “Tell me you’ve seen Apocalypse Now and I’ll ask you to marry me tomorrow.” As soon as it was out of his mouth, he wanted to yank it back in. Way to scare the hell out of the gorgeous woman you were just hitting it off with, Captain Awkward.

  Emily’s eyes dropped to half-mast. She tipped her head to one side and threw an arm over the back of the little bench they shared. “Original or Redux?”

  Oh, this was just too good. Charlie sat forward, now keeping his cards close. “And Star Wars—your take on Jar Jar Binx?”

  “We could start by boiling him alive and feeding his remains to the Rancor Monster.”

  Charlie couldn’t believe what he was about to ask. It just wasn’t his style, but—“You seeing anyone right now?” His heart began to thud so loud he was afraid she would hear it.

  Emily could feel the grin bubbling up from her tummy again, that helpless, electric build as she said, “Depends on what you’re doing later.”

  Was this how it happened? She just walked into a place and found someone? Was it really that horribly random? Her heart had slowed to a Zen crawl, a sense of warm calm draping over her shoulders like a shawl. Emily looked at Charlie and felt good, excited and happy, but as if this was the most normal thing in the world. She kept thinking, Of course. Of course. Daddy would just kill her—would have killed her.