Shortly after I got
the phrase “Hell wasn’t built in a day” from the Idiomatic, I came down with a
savage case of the weretonsils, and would up in the ER late at night over the
weekend. My husband joked that I really know how to surprise him with a romantic
date. We settled in for a few hours of intravenous steroids, and as I waited in
the hospital bed, all the ideas I originally had for the story changed and
turned into this as I observed life after midnight in the ER—not my usual style, but hey, why not try something different?
Hell Wasn't Built in a Day
The thread of life was unspooling and near its end. A small
cluster of hospital staff stood around the bed.
“There’s no one to contact?” asked the doctor.
A nurse shook her head over the clipboard she was holding.
“Her former husband hung up on me after saying no one in her family wants to
hear about her.”
From within a remaining spark of consciousness, Karen felt a
great heaviness within her chest. Suffocating…so
cold…
She was vaguely aware of how large the johnny felt over her
emaciated body. Uncounted weeks’ of grime and sweat covered her skin.
“Do we admit her?” asked the nurse.
“There’s no time. She won’t be with us long. It’s amazing
she’s here at all, considering the level of fentanyl we found.”
Karen struggled to remember her last moments before she
landed in the hospital. The touch of hands as she passed by her dealer on
Boston Common and they exchanged money for the sealed packet. Hiding in the
curved nook at the bottom of the stairwell of the Chinatown T stop with her
gear. The exquisite rush as the ambrosia flowed. The slump leading to an
indefinite doze.
She didn’t remember how she found herself walking down the
street, but she did recall the comment someone made about the tourniquet still
wrapped around her arm. The heaviness set in her chest, as though an alien
whisper blew Earth’s atmosphere away in a puff. Then darkness.
It was light years from the life she knew. Fitting the sash
around her shoulders when she got her MBA from Wharton. Dan putting the
platinum ring on her finger a month later. The leather strap of her briefcase
neatly tucking under her lapel as she headed off to her career in health
insurance. The sharpness of that thick strap, holding a goldmine of data and
business deals, was once a joy that could’ve rivaled the rush anticipated when
the tourniquet tightened on her skin.
Her earliest memories were of ruthless ambition, even in
grade school. There was no high greater than a power play, until the pills led
her down the dark path.
The pain killers. The very ones she helped push to a broader
market. There are some kinds of pain that can’t be banished, even with the
strongest of drugs. The images from the moments before the accident seared into
her memory. Distracted by the shrill notifications, she never thought to look
up while she argued with a colleague.
“My husband’s an important lobbyist with pharma! If my CBA
doesn’t support his argument, we’ll lose!”
She grimaced at her colleague’s next text. “What’s a CBA?”
“Cost-benefit analysis! What kind of idiot school did y—”
A thundering crash jolted her in her seat. A sickening
crunch brought her out of her self-centered universe. She had collided head-on with
her husband’s gold Buick. They both looked up from their phones and over the
steering wheels and faced each other, their child’s aqua bicycle crushed
between their cars. The only thing that had kept them together was now gone.
The child wasn’t much more than a status symbol to begin with. An opportunity
to brag about the most progressive charter schools and exotic extracurricular activities
over cocktails and sea urchin foam-covered canapés. How did the nanny allow the
kid to be on a bicycle anyway? That hour was reserved for creating an outline
for the junior entrepreneur program. The nanny ought to be sued for
endangerment. Always arguing about the importance of playing outside. Really.
There was no reason to stay together. Karen and Dan already
had secondary households set up with their respective lovers. Once the
prescription to treat her broken shoulder ran out, she turned to friends in the
business for freebies. Until she wore them out. Until she slept through
conference calls and missed her targets.
The job crashed and burned. She stayed with her sister’s
family until things began to disappear. Blank checks from the checkbook. The
new tablet for her niece’s birthday.
She settled for an apartment on the gritty side of town.
What money she had disappeared as though it had never been there. The ambitious
mean girl was now a denigrated, feeble outcast. It was only a short time before
she was evicted. She slept in the entryway of a vacant office space downtown.
Until.
Until.
“How does it come to this for so many people?” a voice above
her asked.
The doctor clicked his pen. “Hell wasn’t built in a day.”
The last of the light flickered over her eyelids, and she
was gone.
