When you’d returned from wherever within yourself you’d fled, and the ER nurse who’d kept asking You kids and drugs, why-though we weren’t kids-had Q-tipped the crust of blood from the nostril where they’d attempted to insert the tube to pump your stomach until I demanded they stop, and the IV was finally disconnected, and the doctor said you could get dressed and go, a bearded orderly in scrubs remained in the room. I told him thanks, we don’t need help, but he stood there officiously as if his professional rights were being violated. “We’d prefer privacy,” I had to insist. I knew he wanted a look at your breasts as you slipped from the hospital gown into your blouse-a silky, lake-blue blouse threaded with silver horizons. I’d been along when you’d bought it on sale at Saks shortly after we’d met, when shopping together felt intimate.

It was morning by then, before seven. I remembered driving through the lakeside vacation town lost, frantically searching for a hospital and noticing a Pancake House sign glowing after midnight and, aware of your love for pancakes, I thought if we get through this there’ll be a stack with maple syrup. At an all-night Shell, the attendant, a man with graying eyebrows, hightops, and a Michael Jordan shaved head tried giving me directions and when he saw they weren’t registering said, “Aw, hell, man,” and climbed into the back seat to guide us, leaving the station unattended. Wrapped in a beach towel, you leaned against the front door, breathing audibly, exhaling moans, eyes shut against the sight of ghosts. I saw them, too, emerging from the reflections of streetlights on the windshield, but was able to override and deny them in a way you couldn’t.

“She early?” our guide asked.

I didn’t say it wasn’t a baby. That on our secret weekend away you’d asked to try hashish. You were thirty-one and quipped champagne was your drug of choice, but you wanted to try something different with me while we still were young. The foil-wrapped wad I’d bought from a friend in a band, and mixed with honey, must have been laced with something.

At the red-lit Emergency entrance our guide raced into the hospital, and you mumbled, “Sorry…is this really happening?”

“It’s all right, baby, I won’t leave your side,” I told you. Then, unable to override the words, blurted, “I’ll always be with you, not just crazy for you, I love you, no matter what happens we’ll be together.”

You were unresponsive, slumped against the door, and I thought: better that you hadn’t heard what was too early between us to say. It would sound only like the drug talking, until time would prove it to be true. Twelve years later, when we were breaking up, in a letter you’d write: “Those people we were will be ghosts haunting us.” Time’s proved that to be true, too.

Orderlies rushed out rolling a wheelchair. Our guide had disappeared-‘d try, but wasn’t able to find the Shell station to thank him. We lifted you into the chair, and wheeling into ER paused momentarily when an elderly lady with a cane, her head bandaged beneath a clear shower cap, bent down to look at you and say, “My God, she’s pretty!”