My mom tells me I worry too much. I’d like to dismiss it as involuntary, but maybe there’s a part of me that finds it to be pleasingly logical.  I like to think that anxiety functions like some invisible buffer from tragedy; after all, the world can’t pull one over on me if I exercise constant vigilance.  It’s fascinating, though, my body’s physical reaction to fear.  Eating, for instance.  The food that barely makes it in takes a funhouse slide to its exit; I gag on my toothbrush.  I find long hairs that amalgamate from brown to gray along the strand, like a turning leaf.  Must be from moving last month, I think.

It’s not like I enjoy this discomfort.  I simply see its merits.  But I concede her point.  Nothing softens to blow of truly bad news anyway, so why take years off my life and add gray hairs to my head when it won’t actually help anything?  Makes sense, I think.  But that doesn’t keep my heart from skipping a beat when I get a call from her at 7:42am or 11:53pm, when I pick up the phone with what’s wrong?! instead of hello, figuring there’s no offense like a good defense.  I find if there’s a small, preemptive part of me that assumes cancer, car accident, Alzheimer’s, whenever I see my parents’ phone number on the caller ID, I can hide my relief under the rosy greeting.  Me-1, I think.  Death-0.

***

I WAS CURLED up on the couch with my knitting and a particularly boring On Demand episode of Intervention when I pushed aside my blanket and reached for my computer (indeed, all A&E connoisseurs know that alcoholics tend to be less apologetic, and certainly less attractive, than the average junkie, so I had to assume that there was something–anything–more titillating in my inbox).  I yawned, fiddled, inattentively typed.

One email, from E.: Got stuck with a needle changing the trash.  I’m in an ambulance, on my way to MGH.

“Oh my God,” I said aloud, involuntarily, meaning it.

It’s funny, the series of disjointed thoughts that go through your head as you throw on a sweater and look for your keys.  Do these bobby pins make me look like I didn’t take the time to do my hair before I rushed to the hospital?   What if he has to go on anti-AIDS meds?  What if he never again has the energy to ride a bicycle?  Should I bring my knitting?  Does that look callous?  But it might be a while.  Will we ever have sex again?  Dammit, I was just ready to go to bed.  God, I love him.  Nothing is more important than him right now.  Shit.  How do I even get to MGH from here?

I pulled out my iphone from my purse to get directions, and realized that it was dead.  He must have tried to call me.  I had let my guard down, and now he was in an ambulance, going straight to voicemail.

Well, I thought, that’s what you get.

***

FOR UNKNOWN REASONS, he was “fast-tracked” at MGH, meaning that to find him I had to follow a green line on the floor that wandered around corners and through doors, zig-zagging me under industrial fluorescent lights and past bed after bed of people moaning, or sleeping, or staring at nothing with glazed eyes.  E. was wrapping up his conversation with a doctor, who was congratulating him on so shallow a nick that he didn’t even need an HIV test, never mind a few rounds of AZT.  E.’s pant leg was rolled up; he hugged himself in his sweatshirt. “It’s so weird,” he later told me on the ride home, “how long it takes for your brain to catch up.  I was at work, suddenly I’m in an ambulance, and here I am in the ER, but not really here.  And leaving before I feel like I ever actually got here.”

It was only as we walked into the parking garage to pay that I actually felt the evening close in on me.  I bawled into his arms, hearing myself echoing off open floors of concrete.  Most of it was gratitude; he was fine, of course, and was always going to be fine.  Emergencies have never actually happened to me, and when yet another is dodged, you begin to believe in your own invincibility.  But, then, it hits.  That other voice.  What I saw in the periphery of my rapid trek along the green line.  That moment, which I like to think I’ve perfected the art of anticipating, doesn’t give you a chance to outsmart it.  How terrifyingly little it takes to change your genre.  How could I ever feel comfortable knowing my guard was down?  How much advance notice did they have, with the luxury of questions of knitting and bobby pins, before they found themselves lying there, half alive?