“I’m on my way.” I end the call and dash downstairs, hailing the first cab and booking it to Clinton Street.
***
I hear the baby’s cries the second I reach Eva’s floor. Taking long strides toward the end of the hall, I pound on her door. Five stiff strikes.
The door flies open. An older woman with gray hair swept back into a bun bounces the crying baby in her arms.
“Beckham?”
“Yes.” I show myself in. The place is a mess. Pillows are strewn about the living room. Scattered laundry covers the floor. The kitchen is spotless save for a few washed-and-dried baby bottles. I doubt Eva’s eaten much of anything since coming home. “Where is she?”
Elizabeth points toward Eva’s room. I take a deep breath and head back, where I find her face down in her bed, her hair knotted and tangled.
“Eva.” My presence springs her to life. She rolls to her back, her eyes adjusting as she watches me in her doorway. Her lips curl up at the corners.
She scrambles out of bed as best she can, a painful wince smeared across her face. She’s unable to get to me fast enough.
“Slow down,” I say. “You need to take it easy. You’re supposed to be resting, lying down. You had surgery, Eva. Remember?”
She smells of unwashed hair and stale clothes, and her hands frantically grasp for every inch of my body.
Eva’s lips press into my neck over and over. Between kisses she mumbles, “Mi amor, mi amor…”
I glance behind, sensing Elizabeth. Sure enough, she’s watching everything from a careful distance, the baby securely in her arms.
Eva is gone. Mentally. Her lips are moving, nonsensical gibberish filling the room. She speaks a mix of Spanish and English, none of it coherent and all of it flavored in frenzied desperation.
“Elizabeth.” I keep my voice low and calm. “I need you to look up the number for Dr. Evan Brentwood. Call his office. Tell them it’s an emergency. Give them her name. Can you do that?”
She nods, dashing down the hall with the baby in her arm and her phone in her hand.
“Eva, you need help.” I take her by the wrists and carefully lead her to the foot of her bed. She stares up at me, her dark eyes fading. I’m not sure she even sees me anymore. Her spindly body swims in her oversized clothes, preventing her from looking like someone who gave birth days ago.
For a brief moment, my heart sinks when I look at her. I wish she had a better life raft than me. Even if I wanted to be her rock, it would only set her back. She needs help, and she needs to learn to stand on her own without resorting to desperate and illegal manipulative practices.
I stare at the woman who was once dynamite in bed; the one who made me reconsider my non-fuck buddy policy and make a one-time exception.
And then I hear the baby crying again, the wails slightly muffled by the hushed sound of Elizabeth speaking into her phone. The crying stops, and the apartment is quiet for a second. Eva is still as a statue, staring ahead at her dresser and all the half-pulled drawers with clothes dripping over them.
“He’s on his way,” Elizabeth says from the doorway. There’s a tiny bottle in the baby’s mouth, and she’s sucking vigorously, crying out every so often. The nanny offers a timid shrug. “She doesn’t like the formula. She’ll get used to it though.”
“What did she name the baby?” I ask.
Elizabeth shrugs. “She refuses to tell me.”
“She refuses to tell you?”
“She claims her name is just…Baby.”
I push a burst of air through my lips. Knowing Eva, she wrote Baby on the birth certificate as a final act of defiance when the nurses told her I wouldn’t be coming back to sign anything.
Sitting with Eva until Dr. Brentwood arrives feels like an eternity, but I won’t leave her side. I don’t want her hurting herself or anyone else. She’s rocking, and I slip my arm around her to keep her from falling off the bed. I’m the only thing she has right now, or at least until I get a chance to call her friend from Baltimore again.
Thirty minutes later, her doctor shows up. I brace myself for a chiding that never comes. He rushes to her side immediately, asking questions of Elizabeth and finally myself.
“We have to commit her,” he says. “An emergency commitment requires no judicial hearings. I can call the mobile crisis team and have them here within the next hour. She’ll go back to New York General, and we can do a full evaluation there.”
Eva turns to me slowly, her eyes pleading as if she’s grasping what’s going on. She shakes her head, softly at first and then forcefully.
“I don’t want to be away from you. I can’t be away from you, mi amor. They’re going to take me away. Stay with me. I need you. I can’t live without you…” Eva grabs my shirt collar and cries into my chest, her body shuddering with each sob. “Don’t let them take me.”