Free On a Night Like This by Ellen Sussman Page B

plate.
    She found the tuna, wrapped and marked:
For Blair: Make it worth it. Daniel.
She smiled—Daniel loved what he had created, a food maniac who lay in bed at night dreaming up new versions of the same old thing. Funny, she hadn’t thought about food for a while now. Since her last doctor’s appointment? Or had she lost her appetite somewhere along the way and not stopped to notice? She was certainly losing weight—she had cinched her belt tighter today just to keep up her pants.
    She unwrapped the tuna and smiled—it was beautiful, worth eating raw, worth wowing Daniel. Which was secretly still her ambition—to make the guy proud of her. She cleared her work space and gathered together the herbs and spices she’d use for the dish. She turned around to find her cleaver in its drawer behind her, and the room seemed to close in on her, space becoming narrower and tighter, light disappearing from the edges of her vision until her vision itself was gone and then she wasn’t standing anymore. She was curled on her side on the cold tile floor and then suddenly her arms and legs were thrashing about, on their own, as if they weren’t connected to her body at all. Her torso jerked forward and down, so that her head smacked hard on the tiles. She felt her legs convulse, kicking at something that wasn’t there, her arms pumping the air as if fighting with someone. And then she blacked out.
    When she came to, without any notion of how much time had passed, she thought first about the tuna, unwrapped, unrefrigerated, unmarinated.
Daniel will kill me.
And finally she realized she must be on her way to her own self-made death, here on the floor, chilled and numb. She knew she was wet, that she had peed and was lying in her own puddle. She was suddenly a sick woman, a dying woman, a woman who passes out in the middle of the day while trying to make tuna tartare.
    She couldn’t get up. Her legs were numb and her arms were weak. She tried calling out, but her mouth was dry and parched. If any time had passed, why hadn’t Daniel arrived? And then she shuddered at the thought of Daniel finding her—he was so clean, so fussy, so elegant—he would hate the messiness of this spillage on his floor.
    So she pulled herself across the floor to the edge of the counter and worked her arms up one of the cabinets until she could reach the telephone cord and then yanked at it, miserable, swatting and missing. Before she fell back to the floor, she tried once more and this time caught the cord and pulled the phone with her to the floor. It toppled over her, banging hard against her shoulder, then clattered to the floor. She picked it up. And then thought:
Who do I call?
    Amanda was at the café—she didn’t want to call and scare her. She couldn’t call Daniel, didn’t want to be here when Daniel arrived. She didn’t want to be anywhere but home, in her bed. Casey! She dialed his number, fumbling the phone and picking it up in time to hear his recording: “You know what to do and when to do it.” She hung up. She didn’t have friends the way other women had friends. She had her daughter, her boss and a hippie landlord.
    She could call 911. She could tell them to come find her under the rotting tuna. But as much as she hated dying, she hated dramatic ambulance-wailing scenes.
    Luke. Luke Bellingham, Hollywood star. Savior of dying women. She didn’t need to fall in love with him after he saved her. She just needed a ride to the hospital.
    She dialed information. Luke Bellingham. He’d be unlisted, she was sure. But the operator was telling her his number and she was dialing it with the one hand that still seemed to be working.
    “Hello?”
    “Luke. It’s me. Blair.”
    She stopped to catch her breath and then remembered the last time they had talked, when she told him to disappear forever.
    “Don’t say anything,” she said. “I need your help.”
    “You OK?”
    “No. I’m on the floor. At the restaurant. Where I work. I