I bolted to the bed and I sat Melanie up and I slapped her face, “Melanie…Melanie…can you hear me?”

Melanie just barely opened her eyes but then she closed them again and she fell back against my arm. Her face appeared bluish in the dim light of our bedroom. I pulled her back up.

“Melanie…Melanie…did you do this?” I thought perhaps, hopefully, that she had tried to end her own life…that Sarah had not plied her craft yet again. Not that that would have been good either, but not as horrifying as the alternative.

“Whaaaat?” Melanie eyes fluttered open but then floated back into the top of her head.

“Did you do this?” “Whaaaat?”

“Did you put sleeping pills in your drink?”

Melanie did not respond.

I panicked. I lifted Melanie from the bed and slung her bare-assed over my shoulder and flung open the door and started to carry her to the car. Then I thought better of that idea and I returned and laid her back onto the bed and I scrounged through her dresser drawers and found and slipped a sweatshirt over her head and pulled her arms through the sleeves and I grabbed a pair of sweat pants and pulled them over her legs and I lifted her, as though I were dressing a child, and I pulled the sweats up to her waist; then I hoisted her once again and I carried her through the house and down the steps and through the darkness and into the back seat of my car where I dumped her with less care than I aught.

Driving to the hospital I pegged the accelerator to the floor making a rushed pause at each stop sign until I reached the main road. I realized then that I didn’t know where the nearest hospital was located, or for that matter where any hospital was located, so I turned right onto the strip hoping to locate a hospital sign or to see someone who might be able to direct me. I cruised through red stop lights, slowing just enough to see that no car approached from the sides. I had gone several miles and I had not passed a single car or a living soul. I looked over my shoulder at Melanie. She didn’t look good. The knot in my stomach grew to the size of a bowling ball and felt just as heavy. Tears were streaming down my face. I couldn’t let her die. I couldn’t’ let it happen again. I punched the gas and I sped down the road no longer slowing at red lights. I was hoping to pass a cop; to have them spot me rather than I having to slow to look for them. I needed help if I was going to save Melanie. I could not bear to have her death on my conscience. I could not bear to lose her.

The speed limit was thirty-five. I was doing sixty-two. I passed through a business district: convenience stores and video stores and computer stores and carpet stores seemed to creep like turtles past my side windows leaving a wake of dust behind me. Then I heard the short blast of a siren and I saw flashing blue lights in my rear-view mirror. I rolled my driver-side window down as I slowed to the speed limit and I waved the police car forward. The cruiser pulled alongside me and lowered the passenger window. There sat a thin young policeman in a blue uniform with glasses too big for his long narrow face and a thin mustache that made him look more like a teenager than a man.

“Hospital!” I shouted as loud as I could, “Where is the hospital?” I pointed toward the back seat of my car to where Melanie lay.

“Follow me.” Was his muffled reply. The policeman turned his siren on and the repetitive blaring whine pierced the deadened silence of night and echoed off of the buildings like sonar to a submarine as we passed them and the sound of the siren faded into the emptiness of space as we flew through open building-less spaces.

Time seemed to slow and distort the world around me. Intersections and landmarks crept closer as minutes became hours. I thumped the steering wheel impatiently. We passed a blue and white “H” sign mounted to a light pole near the freeway entrance which indicated that a hospital lay ahead. And then the hospital came into view and slowly grew in size as we approached. We turned into the emergency entrance and through a traffic loop normally reserved for ambulances.

As I opened my car door the normal speed of the universe seemed to catch up to me and clock me from behind as my knees buckled and I crumpled to the ground. I gripped the car door and pulled myself up as two paramedics wheeling a gurney came racing alongside my passenger door. Before I could round the car on my wobbly legs they had Melanie on the gurney and were wheeling her toward the emergency entrance and through two large automatic sliding glass doors. As I weakly followed and entered the emergency room a doctor began working on Melanie applying pressured rhythmic pushes with his palms to her chest while a nurse forced oxygen into her lungs through a large plastic tube.

“What happened to her?” A doctor in a powder blue uniform grabbed my shoulder and spun me towards him.

“Overdose.” I said.

The policeman, who was standing just behind the doctor, looked over the doctor’s shoulder and up at me, “What kind of drugs were you doing?” he said accusingly.

“None.” I heard my voice break. “She took sleeping pills.”

“How many?” asked the doctor.

“Six…maybe seven.”

“Do you have the bottle?”

I fished inside my pocket and pulled the topless bottle out and handed it to the doctor.

“Did she try to kill her self?” said the cop who had moved to stand beside the doctor.

Up close I could see that he was much older than I had originally thought.

“I guess so…I don’t know.”

I turned my head and watched as they wheeled Melanie through a set of doors and disappeared down a corridor. I was in a state of shock.

“I’m going to need to ask you a few questions.” The cop said to me leading me by the arm to a waiting area of plastic lime green chairs shaped like quarter moons with stainless steel legs. A television set tuned to a news channel was mounted to the wall near the ceiling but the sound was turned down and letters appeared on the screen as the anchor’s lips moved. The cop and I sat across from each other.

“What is your name?”

I paused and thought about the question for a moment.

“Your name?” he said impatiently. “Mohamed.” I blurted. “Mohamed

Assad.” I reached for my wallet to show him the driver license of the store owner I had taken it from.

“You don’t look Muslim.”

“I’m not.” I forced a smile, “But my father was and it’s the name he gave me.”

The cop formed a puzzled look as he compared the driver license photo to my face and then he handed my wallet back to me. “What is the woman’s name?”

“Melanie Burke.”

“And what is your relationship to her?” “She’s my girlfriend.”

“Any idea why she would try to kill herself?”

“I don’t know. We haven’t spoken to each other for a week. We had an argument.

But I don’t see how that would make her want to kill herself.”

A paramedic in a white uniform poked his head into the waiting room, “You’re going to have to move your car sir…you too officer.”

I rose from my seat and I followed the policeman outside to the circle where an ambulance was waiting to unload its cargo. The policeman turned his head back towards me. “We’ll finish this afterwards.” He said; then he stepped into his cruiser and pulled out and disappeared into the mass of cars in the parking lot.

I was pretty scared at that point. I hadn’t had any positive experiences with the men in blue. I felt that I would soon be found out. If he had asked my date of birth or my height and weight my cover would have been blown. I had never thought to memorize Mohamed’s personal details. I climbed inside the Mustang and slowly pulled out and I turned to the opposite side of the parking lot as did the policeman and drove sluggishly down an aisle. When I came to a parking space nearest the exit I turned off my headlights and left the car running and got out and closed the door and started to walk back towards the hospital. I saw the cop observing me from the emergency entrance but once he saw me walking towards him he stepped inside the sliding doors and disappeared. I took that opportunity to rush back to my car and with the headlights off I pulled forward and onto the street and I drove down the main drag for a few miles and then turned down a side street and I took the side streets back to Melanie’s house. The car was registered now to Mohamed Assad and it was addressed to my old house so I didn’t have to worry about having the car traced to Melanie’s house.