Her hands opened and closed like claws, grasping out. She said, “I’m sorry.”

I drove her to the emergency room while she dozed against the window of my car. “Don’t think I haven’t seen it,” she mumbled. “Lord knows I’ve seen it.”

What did she mean? I didn’t know.

“What’s that?” I said loudly. “What are you saying?”

I had no idea what she was talking about, but I wanted to keep her talking. She had to stay awake. I remembered: reindeer, bubble bath. It had almost been a year. I turned up the radio to fill the car with sound. It picked up a Hispanic station. A man sang with the voice of a boy: “Mi profesora en el amor, y en tus clases de amor . . .”

At the hospital, she gripped the nurse’s slim wrist and said, “No catheter. No catheter.” She tried to tell me she wanted her stomach pumped. She gripped her belly and grimaced. “Right now,” she said. “Jesus, now.”

The nurse shook her head. “Whatever pain you’ve got, this won’t feel much better.”

She led Tilly into another room. I pictured her behind the swinging doors: gripping the paper-covered table while they threaded tubes through her nose and pulled out the poison in a salted trickle. Suppose she hadn’t called? Suppose I’d found her an hour later? What then? Suppose her brain had already gone dark from the liquor? Suppose we got home from the hospital and she couldn’t remember the word for “apple”? Or “door”?

Suppose suppose suppose. The heart rails like an animal inside.

A young doctor came out and found me. He was frowning. He had dreadlocks and a long scar running down his cheek that made his skin look like hardened lava. He said her blood alcohol was .41. This was a number that meant you could die. He explained about running the liquid charcoal inside. He mentioned a vitamin drip.

“Was she fine?” I asked. “With the procedure and everything?”

“Oh, she knew the drill. She knew it better than I did.” He paused. “She needs to be taken care of. You get that? If she keeps this up, she’ll kill herself.”

I found her sleeping. I searched under the covers for her cold-sweated hand, but I was careful to hold her palm from beneath. She had an IV tube slid into her skin. It looked like a long vein that had been pulled, clear and gleaming, from her body. It was connected to a hanging bag of yellow fluid.

“The nurse calls it my banana bag,” Tilly whispered. So she was awake.

“How was it?”

“The doctor told me I had rollers. He meant my veins.”

Apparently, they kept rolling away from his needles.

“But they finally got one,” she said. “What they needed, I guess.”

Outside, dawn was lightening the sky. The shades were made of thin fabric, and they looked a bit sick themselves. “Do you want me to raise them?” I asked.