Falling Read online

  Ten minutes later, Emma is sitting next to Dominic’s bed, holding his hand, as tears of relief course down her face.

  “I thought you were dead,” she says, attempting to smile through her tears. “For the second time in twenty-four hours.”

  “I’m just tired,” he says. “You don’t need to cry about it,” and he squeezes her hand.

  “How does your head feel? Are you in pain?”

  “It’s not so bad,” he says, closing his eyes for a second. “I can’t believe this happened.”

  “I know. The random nature of life. But you’re going to be fine.”

  “Thank God you found me.”

  “You have no idea how many times I’ve thought that since we got here. Promise me you will never get up on a roof ever again.”

  “That’s really not something I have to promise. I’m not even going to stand on a chair after this. How’s Jesse?”

  “He’s fine. Sophie’s been texting me. I’ll tell her to let him know you’re fine. He’s sleeping over at her house.”

  “And what about you? What are you doing?”

  “I’m sleeping here. I’m not going to leave you, Dominic.”

  “You should go home. You need a good night’s sleep. I’m more worried about Jesse. I bet the little guy’s scared.”

  “Want me to bring him to see you tomorrow?”

  “Not yet. I don’t want him freaked out by all the hospital stuff. Maybe in a couple of days, when I feel a bit stronger.”

  “Okay.” Emma can see he’s getting tired, his eyes drifting closed every few seconds. “I love you,” she says, and she leans forward and kisses him, sitting next to the bed for a few minutes until he is asleep.

  • • •

  Emma is so exhausted that she has to blink furiously all the way home just to stay awake. She doesn’t even remember the last time she was out driving at four thirty in the morning. The streets are deserted and silent, and the streetlights cast warm pools of light on the snow. This is so spectacularly beautiful, thinks Emma, driving slowly and carefully. Her first proper New England snowstorm. If only she were able to enjoy it.

  She’d spoken briefly with Dominic’s parents before leaving the hospital. They seemed as numb as she did, didn’t seem to hear when she said she would take care of Jesse, too fragile and overwhelmed. As was she, but she had too many responsibilities, with Jesse, to give in to those feelings.

  As Emma walks in the door of her cottage, Hobbes immediately curls around her ankles, looking up at her and mewing pitifully. She feeds her, makes her way slowly up the stairs, and pulls her clothes off before collapsing into bed, and sleeping the sleep of the dead.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  There are no texts from Dominic when Emma wakes up. She feels a surge of worry before remembering the signs at the hospital saying no cell phones allowed.

  Poor Dominic. His cell phone—the one she’d found in the pocket of his coat and used to call his parents, the one she’d so carefully returned to him when that kind nurse brought her in to see him—is probably in a plastic bag in a closet somewhere, uncharged. She makes a note to herself to bring his charger with her when she goes back to the hospital.

  She checks e-mail, scrolls mindlessly through Facebook and Instagram before realizing with shock that it is almost nine in the morning. She had no idea it was so late, although she was up half the night, didn’t get to bed until nearly dawn. She shakes her head to clear it. Things will get back to normal eventually.

  She phones the hospital to see how Dominic is, but they won’t give out information by phone to anyone other than family. I am family, she thinks, but she can’t prove it, is too tired to have this discussion. She will go to the hospital as soon as she can.

  Texting Sophie that she is coming to get Jesse, Emma jumps in the shower, swigging water straight from the tap to swallow a couple of Motrin, hoping they’ll stop the pounding headache that comes with no sleep.

  The streets are busier today, the roads no longer blanketed in white, but plowed and already dirty. The Post Road is filled with traffic. Business as usual.

  At Sophie’s house, she gets out of the car and hops up the path. It may not in fact be the path, for there are a couple of feet of snow covering Sophie’s entire front yard. She feels guilty leaving tunnels of footprints in the perfect white blanket, and she pauses in front of the house, looking up at Sophie’s roof, where more thick snow sits, undisturbed, as perfect as a picture postcard.

  Why did Dominic need to shovel snow from the roof? What was so important about our crappy roof on our crappy house?

  She has to spend the day with Jesse, even though the only place she wants to be is with Dominic. It’s not fair to leave Jesse, who must be so worried, even though he isn’t showing it, with Sophie for the whole day. He needs to be with someone he trusts, someone with whom he feels safe.

  With any luck, by the time she gets to the hospital, hopefully midafternoon, his parents will have left. If they were vaguely attentive to her yesterday, it was only because she knew more than they did when they arrived. But she is no one to them. At best, a temporary girlfriend to their son. A tenant. No one permanent.

  Thank God the nurse let her in to sit with Dominic last night. Otherwise, Emma never would have seen him.

  Wasn’t it only in movies that they refused to let you see the patient if you weren’t family? she thought last night. Clearly, given that they refused to tell her anything when she phoned, it happens in real life, too.

  She told the nurses outside the ICU that she was his fiancée, surreptitiously slipping the Russian wedding ring—a gift from her parents on her twenty-first birthday, which she always wore on her right hand—onto the third finger of her left. It was almost true. They both knew they were going to get married. Not having formalized it yet didn’t make their commitment any less meaningful.

  Those nurses let her in to sit with him last night. Whoever answered the phone today wasn’t having any of it.

  Sophie’s mudroom door is always open. Emma walks in and slides off her boots, and as Sophie comes from the kitchen to greet her, Emma starts to cry.

  “I’m sorry,” Emma wails, as her face crumples.

  “Are you kidding?” Sophie takes her friend in her arms and holds her tight. “Let it out, honey. It’s going to be okay. Jesse’s upstairs watching TV. He won’t hear a thing.”

  When Emma’s sniffles start to subside, she pulls away as Sophie reaches over to grab a box of tissues.

  “I’m so sorry,” Emma says again. “I’m just so tired.”

  “Have you slept at all?”

  “A little, yes. But I feel like I’ve been hit by a Mack truck. I think it’s an emotional hangover.”

  “I can’t believe what happened. It’s horrific. What do they say? How long will it take for Dominic to be released from the hospital?”

  Emma tells her that when she left last night, or earlier this morning, things had been looking better. She doesn’t know precisely what his recovery will entail, but the surgery had gone well.

  “There’s something I have to tell you,” Sophie says with a grimace. “I was so worried about Dominic, about what would happen to him, that I phoned your parents.”

  “My parents? Good grief, Sophie, why would you do that?”

  “Because I thought things were looking really bad. I thought you might need them.”

  “What did they say?”

  Sophie’s shoulders slump as she looks up at her friend. “They booked a flight right away. They’re on their way here.”

  Emma shrugs. She’s too tired, too worried to continue to harbor a grudge against her mother. She’ll sort it all out later. “Well,” she says, “it wasn’t necessary, but I can see you thought you were doing the right thing. It’s fine,” she adds, as she sees Sophie’s distraught expression. “Honestly. Don’t worry abou
t it.” She peers at her friend. “When you say on the way here . . . when, exactly?”

  “Rob’s gone to pick them up from the airport. They should be here any sec—” They both turn at the sound of a car.

  Sophie looks miserable. “I’m sorry, Emma. I know you haven’t spoken to them since your trip, and I would never have done this if I’d known Dominic was going to be fine.”

  They both go outside, and Emma says nothing. She watches the car pull up, then park, watches Rob get out and pull suitcases out of the trunk, watches the back door open. First her father, and then her mother get out of the car, blinking at the searing light outside.

  “Darling!” Georgina drops her coat and rushes over, putting her arms around her daughter as Emma starts to cry.

  • • •

  Jesse bounces along in the backseat, a tall furry black hat on his head, his face almost entirely hidden by the strap in front of his nose. He is not strapped into his car seat because Emma hadn’t taken it out of Dominic’s car, and he is excited to be going to the Bluebird Inn for Texas French toast and chocolate chip pancakes, excited to be with new people who not only have shown up unexpectedly but have brought him a toy London bus, a black cab, and the Beefeater hat, which he may never take off.

  Emma has promised him he can have whatever he wants, in a bid to keep him happy and distracted. Her parents are doing an excellent job on very short notice. Georgina, in the backseat next to Jesse, is telling him stories about their farm, which seem to entrance him. She even has photographs from home stored on her phone, and she and Jesse are sliding through them, as she patiently explains who all of the people are and what they do on the farm.

  She is talking to Jesse in much the way she talks to everyone else, as if he is a friend she has bumped into in the village shop and is filling him in on local gossip. Emma keeps shooting glances at Jesse in the rearview mirror, convinced he must be bored, but he is smiling beatifically at her mother and happily looking at the photos.

  They park in the old filling station next door to the restaurant and make their way inside, taking a table by the window. Jesse proceeds immediately to snap off the heads of two of the geraniums in the window boxes before her mother tells him to stop. Emma watches nervously, waiting for him to throw a tantrum, but he seems transfixed by Georgina and immediately does what she says.

  “We’ll talk later,” her mother had said earlier, when Emma had finished crying and stepped out of her mother’s embrace. “I want to hear about Dominic. Daddy has a very old friend who’s a top surgeon at Yale, and he’s already left him a message. We’re going to get him the best help possible.”

  “Thank you,” Emma says gratefully. “I think he’s in good hands, but it will be nice to get a second opinion.”

  “That little one is wonderful,” says her mother now, watching as Emma’s father takes Jesse’s hand in the parking lot and leads him carefully around the idling cars to keep him busy while they wait for their food to arrive. “I understand so much better now. I’m sorry, Emma, for what I said.”

  “You don’t need to apologize,” says Emma, realizing it’s true. There are far more important things at stake than what happened in England; she forgave her parents as soon as she saw them get out of Rob’s car.

  The food arrives soon after. Jesse delightedly digs into his chocolate chip pancakes, demanding that Emma’s mother try some. Emma watches them with a tremulous smile, the first smile she has been able to muster since she found Dominic lying outside on the ground in the snow. It is quite clear that Jesse adores her mother. It is the very last thing she would have expected, that her difficult, judgmental, occasionally imperious mother would be an object of adoration in the eyes of a small boy. But there is no doubt that Jesse is smitten, and her mother, seeing herself reflected so beautifully in Jesse’s adoring eyes, is smitten in return.

  Emma would never have thought to phone her parents for comfort. But they are here, and she is comforted. The small mountain of carbohydrates on the table, drowned, as they are, in maple syrup, is comforting, too. Sitting at this table feels like a slice of normality in a world that has otherwise turned upside down.

  “What’s your name?” Jesse says, midchew, looking at Emma’s mother.

  “Georgina,” she says, pausing thoughtfully. “How about you call me Gigi?”

  Jesse nods, then glances at Emma’s father. “What about him?”

  Emma’s mother furrows her brow in thought.

  Jesse spears another piece of pancake. “Can I call you Banpy?” he asks Emma’s dad. “My friend Dylan calls his grandpa Banpy, and I think you’d be a good Banpy.”

  Emma’s father beams. “I don’t see why not,” he says to Jesse. Then he turns to his wife with a happy shrug. “Well,” he says, “I didn’t expect this!”

  “Instant grandchild!” Emma’s mother is beaming just as brightly. “What an unexpected delight. And entirely worth the wait, if I may say.” Georgina gives Jesse an impromptu hug. Clearly he didn’t follow their exchange, but he hugs her right back.

  “Do you know when my daddy is coming home?” Jesse asks as they wait for the check.

  Emma takes a sip of coffee to stall for time, casting an anxious glance at her parents. But they can’t answer this question for her. Taking a deep breath, she says, “I don’t know. He’s had a big fall and they have to make sure he’s completely fine before they let him come home. It may be a little while, but I can hopefully take you to see him in a couple of days when he’s feeling a bit better.”

  “Can’t I go and see him today?” says Jesse.

  “Not today,” Emma says. “Today he’s just sleeping, resting to get better.”

  Jesse stops wriggling and looks Emma straight in the eye. “What if he dies? Will I get to go and live with my mom?”

  Emma is struck mute. She can’t think of a thing to say.

  “Jesse, don’t say that, darling,” says Emma’s mother calmly. “I don’t think he’s going to die. It was a serious bump on the head, but the doctors think your father is going to be fine.”

  Jesse shrugs an okay, but the rest of them can hardly breathe. Emma gives her mother a grateful glance.

  She is not equipped for this. She has no idea how to talk to a small child about the serious stuff. What if something terrible did happen? How would she explain it? What would she say, after she has already told him his father will be fine? She forces the thoughts away and turns to the waitress to take the check.

  Once they are in the car and Emma is driving them all back home, she thinks again how glad she is that her parents are here, that they can babysit, allowing Jesse to sleep in his own bed tonight instead of at Sophie’s. She is almost starting to breathe normally when Jesse mumbles something behind her.

  “What, darling? I can’t hear you.” She turns the radio down.

  “I want my daddy.” Jesse’s face crumples as he starts to cry. Emma’s mother immediately puts a large arm around him and holds him close, kissing him on the head.

  “I want Daddy to come home,” he says, his whole body heaving. “I want to see him.”

  “I think we can go and see him tomorrow,” Emma says, although she’s sure that tomorrow will be too early. “I’ll ask the doctors later. Why don’t we all go home now, and you can introduce Gigi and Banpy to Hobbes, and maybe Banpy will even help you build a snowman.” She looks at her father helplessly, and receives a nod in return.

  “Gigi can make hot chocolate and cookies, and I’ll be back home before you go to bed tonight. How’s that?”

  Jesse is still crying, more softly now.

  Emma reaches back and squeezes Jesse’s hand. “What about . . . if you sleep in our bed tonight? With me? On Daddy’s side?”

  Jesse looks up and nods. When Emma starts to pull her hand back, he clamps his on top and holds on for dear life, and that’s how they drive, all the way home.
r />   Back at the house, they decide that Emma’s parents will stay at Emma’s, while she stays with Jesse at Dominic’s. Not surprisingly, exhausted by the events of the last few hours, Jesse cuddles up with Hobbes on the sofa and falls asleep. Emma finds she can no longer keep her eyes open, either, and her mother sends her upstairs to bed. Her legs are so heavy that she barely makes it up the stairs.

  She crawls into bed, asleep almost as soon as her head hits the pillow. When she wakes up, staggering out of the deepest of slumbers, she’s deeply disoriented. What time is it? she wonders. What day? The bed smells of Dominic.

  Something is wrong; it takes her a few seconds to remember what it is. With the realization comes the worry, weighing on her chest. She lies there for a while, before remembering that Jesse is home and must be downstairs with her parents.

  How long has she slept? Is Jesse still napping? She has to get up. She starts to stir, then sinks back into the pillows with relief as she hears Jesse clambering up the stairs. He appears in the doorway clutching Hobbes in his arms, before climbing onto the bed and depositing Hobbes on her chest.

  “What have you been up to?” she asks.

  “Banpy and I started to build a snow fort but it got too cold so he says we can’t carry on today, but maybe tomorrow. And we watched Harry Potter one and two,” he says.

  Emma sits up. “Have I been asleep that long? Oh God.” She looks at her phone. It is a lot later in the day than she realized. She is desperate to get to the hospital to see Dominic.

  She puts Hobbes aside, but before she even fully rises from the bed, Jesse turns to her and says, “Nonna called. She said she’s going to come and pick me up so I can stay with them. But why can’t I stay here?”

  Emma stills. Why would Dominic have made a decision like that without telling her? Jesse doesn’t want to go; of course he doesn’t want to go. But Emma can’t do anything about it until she’s talked to him. She supposes it’s understandable for his parents to want Jesse to stay with them while Dominic recovers. They certainly don’t want their grandson to stay with a woman they barely know, a woman they have shown no interest in getting to know.