Jessica Winter - Break in Case of Emergency

Monday, 9.30 a.m.

The bell was ringing, and Jen was sprinting across a field toward it. Her heart thumped so hard it clapped the grit from her chest cavity and rib cage, kicking up a swirl of dust that made her cough and retch as she ran. She knew this and could feel it. She had to touch the door before the bell stopped ringing. She had to. That was the rule. But her legs were giving out. The sockets of her hips were oxidizing. Her sides cramped and seized. Twenty feet from the door she fell forward, and some force pulled her arms behind her, and just as her face slammed into the ground she opened her eyes and saw her cell phone in bed next to her, ringing.

“Hey, Jen,” Karina was saying on her speaker phone. “Happy fall.”

“Hey, Karina,” Jen murmured.

“First day of autumn still feels just like summer.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“I got your husband’s email and thought I’d call to check in.” Karina’s voice echoed and spun around in the air. “Feeling under the weather?”

“Um, yeah,” Jen said, her tongue thick and filmy. She became aware of the ache in her lower abdomen, a pulling and shredding, and remembered.

“I’m sorry to hear that. Did I wake you?”

“Thanks, and no, it’s okay,” Jen lied, with a small, weak laugh. Why do you always laugh? she thought. Why is everything you think and say laughable?

“Should you be in the hospital ?” Karina asked.

Jen regurgitated the same little laugh. Stop stop doing that, she thought. “I’m just home.”

“So it’s not a life-threatening situation, I take it,” Karina said.

Jen pictured her: the eyes narrowed into Möbius strips of empathy and disappointment, the rhythmic encouraging nods.

“Oh, no, nothing like that,” Jen said.

“Do you have the flu?”

“Uh, no. No.”

Karina sighed. “I’m hearing a tone of evasion, Jen, and I want to understand. I’m calling out of concern for you and concern for your achievements. We have a lot of work to get done in the next few days ahead of the launch, and we’re counting on you to be fully present. That’s how much we value you.”

“Sure, of course, but—”

“This is a time for all of us to come together, even if we’re under the weather. We can make little sacrifices now, or we can make big sacrifices later. That’s our choice to make. You’re a key part of the team, Jen. What do you say? We’ll give you all the support you need if you’re not feeling one hundred percent. But we need the same support from you.”

“Karina—” Jen’s throat seized and clicked. She closed her eyes.

“Are you still there?”

“I can’t come in today. I can’t. I can’t.” Jen’s voice bent and shuddered.

The line clattered as Karina picked up the phone. All at once her voice was inside Jen’s head. “What’s wrong?”

“I had — it’s just—”

“What is it, sweetie? Take your time.”

“I had a — I had a—”

“Oh, sweetheart,” Karina said. “Are you—”

“No—”

“ Were you—”

Jen began sobbing. For a second she felt relieved.

“Oh, darling,” Karina said. “I’m so sorry. I thought that maybe you were — other women can always tell — and now — oh, sweet Jen. That is the hardest, hardest thing any woman can go through.”

Karina’s cooing voice, higher-pitched and unfamiliar, stroked Jen’s relief into trepidation. “No, it’s okay,” Jen said, her voice still slushy. Her teeth seemed in the way of her tongue. “This wasn’t — it wasn’t — I hadn’t planned—”

She was about to say I hadn’t planned to tell you, but then she remembered that she hadn’t told Karina anything at all.

“I see,” Karina said after a moment. “Still. It must be hard.”

Jen had stopped paying attention. She breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth. “I’m going to go now. Okay, Karina? Is that okay?”

“Okay, sweetie. Feel better, take care.”

Monday, 12.30 p.m.

Jen was dozing in bed when her cell phone rang. It was Jim.

“Hey, honey, just checking in. How are you feeling?”

“I’m okay. I’m glad to hear your voice.”

“I’m glad to hear your voice, too, sweetheart.”

Jen turned on her side and pulled her knees up, nestling the phone between her ear and her pillow, and listened to Jim not talking for a minute or two.

“Okay, well,” Jim said, “I was just checking in.”

“Stay a little while longer.”

“Of course,” Jim said. “Did you — by any chance did you talk to Pam?”

“No.”

“I bet you could call her, honey. I mean, if you wanted to.”

Jen said nothing.

“She would want to hear from you. If she knew. She would.”

“Number one, she told me not to—”

“But that was before—”

“And number two, I don’t — she has a right to be angry with me. She does.”

“Okay, that’s fair, but so what? Circumstances change.”

“If I tell her what happened, it’s like the scene in a bad movie when you find out that the unlikable antagonist watched her parents drown when she was a kid or something, and that explains why she’s such an asshole, and doesn’t everything seem so different now.”

“No. It’s not like that at all.”

“Plus I don’t want to draw a connection in her mind between the thing with her and this thing,” Jen said.

“I don’t think she would.”

“I would, if I were her,” Jen said. “She might even think I was blaming her—”

“That’s irrational,” Jim broke in, and caught himself. “No, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t say irrational. I don’t mean to invalidate anything you’re feeling. But trust me, she would never think that.”

“Why not? One thing happened and then another thing happened.”

“Sure, honey, and I just ate a sandwich and now I’m going to teach my kids some Greek myths. That doesn’t mean my sandwich wrote the Greek myths.”

“I think she would connect the two things,” Jen said. A theatrical singsong was creeping into her voice. She knew now that she was performing, saying things for effect, reveling in the novelty and miserable thrill of her predicament. “It certainly makes for a tidy narrative,” she said, the words syncopated. Tidy narrative swooped up and down on the scale, hitting middle C on the first syllable of narrative. “Cause and effect.”

“Okay, enough,” Jim said. “This is absurd. This is not a fucking narrative, Jennifer. It’s not an input-output model. What happened is not your fff — you know what, fuck this. Fuck your narrative.”

Jen felt a guilty satisfaction, a bilious tickle of delight, at the controlled explosion she had detonated on the other end of the line. She wondered if the kick could overcome the shame sufficiently to produce its own modest endorphin rush.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“You don’t have to be sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry. You’re going to be okay. I have to go to my next class, okay? I love you.”

Jen could hear Jim hesitating before he hung up the phone. “You should get your artwork back from her,” he said. “From Pam.”

“There’s a lot of things I should do,” Jen said.

Tuesday, 9.30 a.m.

Jen and Franny were still asleep in bed when her cell phone rang.

“Hey, Jen, how are ya?” It was Sunny on speaker.

“Oh, hey, Sunny.” Jen’s lips stuck gummily together.

“Listen, hon, it’s nine-thirty. When can we expect you?”

“Wait, what?” Jen wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and sat up. Franny sat up, too, arching her back. “I talked to Karina yesterday and told her I needed to take a sick day.”