The program runs long so I tiptoe out to get home as promised.
The late afternoon light blazes and sparkles. Earlier, I’d called Ficre to check in. He has remembered to pick up the salmon I plan to cook for dinner, with roasted potatoes and sautéed broccoli rabe. Months later, when I can bear to return to the fish market, our fishmonger will tell me that Ficre was his usual cheerful self that day, joking in Spanish with the guys in the back as Lance cut him an extra-nice piece of fish. Once a chef, always a chef, with special courtesies.
I walk down Edgehill Road to the house from the bus. From his bedroom window lookout spot, Simon sees me approach and comes running downstairs to the door. “Big Solo is not coming to Easter!” he calls out. “Sólome has the chicken pox!” News from the family in diaspora: an admired older cousin in Montpelier, France, will not join us for the holiday as planned because his three-year-old daughter is contagious. I go inside and call to my husband, as I have called so many times—hundreds of thousands of times?—with a smile in my voice, “Fiiii-kiii!” “I’ll get him!” Simon sings. Later I will look at video made close to that day of the children watching the rapacious hawk, and hear the light tinkling bells in Simon’s voice and think, he was so young that April.
And then Simon is screaming. I run downstairs and see Ficre slumped on the floor, the treadmill still running. There is a raw slash where skin has come off of his head. I think, the treadmill was set too fast; he fell and hit his head. Which he had. I think, he will have a horrible concussion. There is a small amount of yellow fluid pooled next to him. Strangely, I see no blood. Some months later, Solo comes home from school and says: I know what the yellow liquid was. It was plasma. Blood separates into red and yellow, plasma and protein, he tells me.
I tell Simon: Leave, get the phone, get your brother, call 911, bring me the phone, and I am alone with Ficre. His eyes face mine directly. He is so warm; he is the right temperature. One half of his face seems slack to me so I then think, he has had a stroke and that it is worse than a concussion, but he will recover. I never think of his heart.
Both children appear with the phone; there is no time to engage their panic. 9-1-1. I speak to the operator. I experience myself as perfectly calm, cool, and collected, but she says, “Let me speak to the child, ma’am. You need to calm down. Put the child on the phone.”
I tell the children: Go upstairs, wait for the ambulance, bring them down quickly when they come.
I am alone again with Ficre. It is just the two of us. I speak to him, low and urgent and gentle. I hold him carefully and try to wake him with my words and touch. I breathe into his warm mouth. I don’t try to lift him, lest his spine be injured. I am certain he can hear me.
A young woman comes down into my basement, someone I have never seen. “I’m an RN. I was walking by your house and saw your boys outside, and they told me what happened. Let me help.” An angel. She takes over the CPR and also calls 911 again and answers their questions. I cannot hear her answers. She is there when the paramedics come. When they move me aside to take over, I look to her to see if I should let them, and she nods. She is my guide now. I go upstairs. My next-door neighbor Stephanie is in the foyer. I call my friend Tracey, who lives around the corner, tell her Ficre has to go to the hospital and I need her to stay with the children.
The paramedics tell me I should ride with them to the hospital, but in the front with the driver, as they need space to “work on him” in the back. I want my hands on his body, so he knows I am there. It’s me, Elizabeth. It’s Lizzy. But they insist I sit in the front.
We drive down Whitney Avenue in slow motion. “I should call someone, shouldn’t I?” I say, to the driver, who is a woman. “Yes, you should call someone,” she says. “I don’t know who to call,” I say. The kids are safe, my parents are hundreds of miles away, and I don’t know what is happening.
The medics rush him into the emergency room, and the doctors usher me in the roomette where they work. I keep my hand on his calf the whole time. He is still warm. They cut off his clothes. As his body is exposed, an Indian doctor in a turban closes the curtains.