Page 140 of It Happened on a Sunday
“I just want to be prepared,” I tell her as I bend over and deliver two more breaths, making sure Sloane’s chest rises and falls.
Marco takes over monitoring her pulse while I breathe for Sloane over and over again as we wait for the ambulance to arrive. Somewhere in the middle of it, Marquis jumps onstage and says, “There’s no AED, man.”
“It’s okay. She’s still got a pulse, right, Marco?”
He checks again. “It’s still there, but it’s really hard to find.”
Fuck, fuck, fuck. “Are you sure we don’t need to start CPR?” I ask the 911 operator.
“Not if there’s a pulse,” she responds. “Just keep breathing for her. The ambulance is close.”
“How close?” Pauline shrieks.
Just then, I hear a siren in the distance and can only pray that it’s for Sloane.
“Come on, baby,” I mutter. “Come back to me. Please, please come back to me.”
I give her two more breaths just as the paramedics burst through the venue doors and come racing for the stage.
“What happened here?” the female paramedic asks as she pushes me out of the way and checks vitals.
“I don’t know. She passed out onstage, and by the time I got to her, she wasn’t breathing. There’s a heartbeat, but barely.”
“She’s nonresponsive,” the male paramedic says into his phone as the woman begins compressions. “Pupils dilated, pulse thready, no respiration.”
He’s pulling stuff out of his bag even as he’s speaking.
“What kind of drugs is she on?” his partner asks. The way she looks at Sloane—like she’s a problem, not a person—makes something hot and ugly coil in my gut, even when I know it’s her job to do so.
“None,” I tell her. “She doesn’t do drugs.”
“She’s not going to be in trouble for it,” she tells me. “We just need to know what she took—”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I don’t think she tookanything. Something else is going on here.” Even as I say the words, I know how naive they sound, even before the two paramedics exchange a look.
“What’s her name?” her partner asks.
“Sloane.”
I can see the second it hits him. He looks at Sloane sharply, then up at me, then over to Pauline, and then back at me. “This is Sloane Walker,” he tells his partner.
And just like that, any chance I have of convincing them that this isn’t an overdose goes out the window.
This is how it starts. The whispers, the headlines, the assumptions. The Black Widow caught in her own web until it strangles her.
“We’re going to give her Narcan, see if it gets her breathing,” he tells me.
“If it does?” I ask, even though I know the answer.
“If it does, she’s on an opiate,” the other paramedic answers. “If it doesn’t, we’ve got bigger problems.”
“This doesn’t make sense,” I tell Pauline, but she’s not listening. She’s staring down at Sloane like will alone can revive her.
“Here goes,” the paramedic tells his partner as he inserts what looks like a nasal spray canister into Sloane’s nose and depresses the bottle.
Please, please let it work.
Even as I beg God and the universe and fate for the Narcan to work, I doubt it’s going to. Because nothing I know about Sloane, nothing I’ve seen in the months we’ve been together, has given me any reason to believe she uses. I know we haven’t been together in person that much and that addiction can be a hidden disease. But we’ve talked every single day, multiple times a day, since our first date, and she never sounded anything but stone-cold sober. And she doesn’t drink, either. Not the way I’d expect someone with substance abuse problems to.
