This Was Just Like That

I was still sitting on the couch, laughing with David when They took back Florida.   

Took it back?   

"Too close to call," Wolf Blitzer said.  That’s ridiculous, we said.   

"They’re still going to call it for Gore", I said, "They just need to be sure. Those exit polls wouldn’t be that far off."  

" No", David said.  "This is bad."  I didn't totally believe him, but that’s when I left the living room – I couldn’t stand it, the suspense. 

Like the time in high school Cross Country practice when Amber Herlihy had a seizure in the country club pool we'd borrowed for the afternoon.  She wasn’t breathing and it had been too long since Coach G had pulled her out, started mouth to mouth.  Nothing was happening, she wasn’t breathing.  She wasn’t dead, was she?  Some of the girls on the team were crying, some were still in the water, lined up clutching the pool side, watching.  I had climbed out, dripping and watching from a distance for awhile.  Finally, I went into the locker room and waited in there alone.   

I couldn’t stand out by the pool waiting to find out if Amber was alive or dead.  We were so far out in the country, it would take the ambulance at least 15 minutes to get to her. She was definitely going to die, I decided.  Pacing the locker room, I tried to get used to the idea of her dead.  The scene at school.  At the funeral home, the air close with the smell of roses and too many people in a small space.  The hysterical, hugging teenage girls and the stone-jawed teachers in gray suits who had seen this before but had never grown used to it.   

I stayed in there, digging my fingernails into the surface of my palms and watching the clock in the orange-tiled changing space.  I stayed long enough that I knew by the time I came out, there would be an answer:  alive or dead.  I needed to know which so I’d know what to do next.   

When I finally came out and saw Amber splayed out on the pool deck where I’d left her, my throat contracted.   I thought “OK, dead.”  But the coach was still pumping her chest, and it seemed like only seconds before she seized and foamed orange vomit and fluttered her eyes.   

Alive, as it turns out.  And now it’s just a story, instead of a story. 

So, I left CNN and went to the kitchen because I couldn’t watch Florida dangle between “won” and “lost” anymore than I could watch Amber laying down between life and death.  I needed to distract myself before the final call, to perform my prayers and incantations at a distance from Wolf and the Balance of Power Desk and real time.