Rachel to the Rescue E-Book

Elinor Lipman

• Herausgeber: Lightning Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Rachel Klein is sacked from her job at the White House after she sends an email criticising Donald Trump. As she is escorted off the premises she is hit by a speeding car, driven by what the press will discreetly call 'a personal friend of the President'. Does that explain the flowers, the get-well wishes at a press briefing, the hush money offered by a lawyer at her hospital bedside? Rachel's recovery is soothed by comically doting parents, matchmaking room-mates, a new job as aide to a journalist whose books aim to defame the President, and unexpected love at the local wine store. But secrets leak, and Rachel's new-found happiness has to make room for more than a little chaos. Will she bring down the President? Or will he manage to do that all by himself? Rachel to the Rescue is a mischievous political satire, with a delightful cast of characters, from one of America's funniest novelists.

Leseprobe

BOOKS BY ELINOR LIPMAN

Into Love and Out Again

Then She Found Me

The Way Men Act

Isabel’s Bed

The Inn at Lake Devine

The Ladies’ Man

The Dearly Departed

The Pursuit of Alice

Thrift

My Latest Grievance

The Family Man

Tweet Land of Liberty: Irreverent Rhymes from the Political Circus

The View from Penthouse B

I Can’t Complain: (All Too) Personal Essays

On Turpentine Lane

Good Riddance

Published in 2020

by Lightning Books Ltd

Imprint of EyeStorm Media

312 Uxbridge Road

Rickmansworth

Hertfordshire

WD3 8YL

www.lightning-books.com

Copyright © Elinor Lipman 2020

Cover by Ifan Bates

The moral right of the author has been asserted. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Printed by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

ISBN: 9781785632563

For Jonathan

The president’s unofficial ‘filing system’ involves tearing up documents into pieces, even when they’re supposed to be preserved… It was a painstaking process that was the result of a clash between legal requirements to preserve White House records and President Donald Trump’s odd and enduring habit of ripping up papers when he’s done with them

—Politico, June 2018

CONTENTS

1 THE BAD NEWS FIRST

2 VISITING HOURS

3 AM I VIRAL?

4 SOMETHING’S GOING ON

5 THE BUZZ

6 WHY ME?

7 WHOSE MOVE NOW?

8 I MEET DOUGIE

9 I RETURN

10 PASSING MUSTER

11 WHEN CAN YOU START?

12 I CAN DO THAT

13 HOW, WHEN, WHERE AND WITH WHOM?

14 I’M NEW AT THIS

15 OFFICE VISIT

16 I’M A JOURNALIST NOW

17 THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

18 SOME THINGS YOU’D RATHER NOT KNOW

19 THE AWKWARD REALM OF THE PERSONAL

20 NIGHTS AND WEEKENDS

21 THREE’S A CROWD

22 PERSONAL MATTERS

23 THE WRONG RACHEL KLEIN

24 BETWEEN THE LINES

25 TOWARDS A BETTER “BLIGHT”

26 SATURDAY NIGHT

27 MY FUTURE SANITY

28 INCREASINGLY UGLY

29 AN EXCELLENT IDEA

30 TABLE FOR SEVEN

31 STATE OF THE UNION

32 CALM DOWN, KLEIN

33 NEXT SHINY OBJECT

34 COME FOR DINNER

35 SHABBAT SHALOM

36 NONE OF MY BUSINESS, BUT

37 SHABBAT REDUX

38 LOVED ONES

39 WHO KNOWS WHEN?

40 LIKE AN EPILOGUE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

1the bad news first

Unless I amend it, my resume confirms that I truly did work for the forty-fifth president of the United States, if you can call my daily torture-task a job. Even when I hide behind my formal title (Assistant, White House Office of Records Management aka WHORM) I eventually confess that I spent my days taping back together every piece of paper that passed through the hands of Donald J. Trump.

How would a person end up in the administration’s most unnecessary office? Unemployed, I had searched every online job site, including USA.Jobs.com, where I typed in Washington, D.C., and for fun, under locations, “White House”. I rationalized it this way to my one-sided friends and family: 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is the People’s House. It doesn’t belong to any one man or woman or administration, so calm down.

I hadn’t worked on any campaign nor did I have family connections, but someone must’ve liked my professional qualifications, which I could claim as the personal assistant/typist/proofreader/errand-runner for a wealthy New Yorker who intended to self-publish a memoir after his parents were no longer alive to read and disown him. But he died, a fatal heart attack at the breakfast table, before he’d dictated anything beyond his freshman year at, of course, Yale. My White House security clearance sailed through, probably due to my bare-bones employment record, and bachelor’s degree from a college in a red state.

A distracted woman interviewed me for the entry-level job in slapdash fashion. She said my duties would involve a lot of reading; in fact nothing but. Well into the first term of the 45th president, I found myself in a cubicle, one of a dozen men and women of various ages reading incoming mail. There was the positive, the negative, the donors in search of favors; the dangerous, the hate letters and the love letters, the requests for pardons, for clemency, for commuted sentences, for loans, for business advice, for autographed photos; the macaroni paintings, the coffee mugs, the velour renditions of the president; the edibles. The wedding invitations addressed to President and Mrs. Trump were sent to the East Wing. Under the law, letters we would’ve tossed had to be kept — even those griping about service at Trump hotels and building supers in Trump residential buildings.

I didn’t complain about the brittle, discolored, sometimes crumbling paper that had been irradiated before delivery. I look back and wonder, did I stand out in some way in that entry-level correspondence job? Was my lateral move a reward or a punishment? Was I especially hard-working or just expendable? Whichever — someone must have noticed that I was a nimble restorer of paper in need of mending.

So, after only thirteen weeks in the Office of Correspondence, I moved to the Old Executive Office Building, upholding the Presidential Records Act. Unstated job description: tape tape tape. Did I get the easy ones, the rare memo that had been merely ripped down the middle? No. I got the confetti. Thankless task? How about an unnecessary one? How about the nagging reality that the leader of the free world was unteachable?

I knew from my days in Correspondence that the President didn’t actually read what the world wrote to him. So, it was no small irony that my very own email reached him, or someone with the power to hire and fire. I didn’t mean to send it; should not have composed it above a department-wide email about refrigerator courtesy. Just for fun, or so I believed, I described my daily grind in terms unflattering to the shredder-in-chief, addressed to my alleged best buddy in the office, whom I mistakenly thought — with the judgment one can have late at night after too many Cape Codders — he’d find amusing. I also wrote that I might as well be slaving away in Tehran because every day I identified with the Iranian student militia in “Argo”, who reassembled shredded documents. Probably not a smart reference, nor was my post-script that said, “It would be nice to have a president who had a learning curve.” And then my tanked-up finger hit “reply all”.

It was the epistolary equivalent of death by cop. I didn’t get past Security the day after I sent it. Though I do appreciate that my somewhat treasonous e-letter now resides in the National Archives, not one thing about my three long months on Team Scotch Tape is helping me make friends in 2020.

Luckily my health insurance was good till the end of the month. After being figuratively kicked to the curb, I wandered in something of a daze across 17th Street. Well, halfway across, at which point I was knocked unconscious by a big black car driven by what the newspapers would one day diplomatically refer to as “a personal friend of the president’s.”

2visiting hours

A policewoman had figured out from the “mom & dad” listing on my phone, how to reach my next-of-kin. Almost a full day later, when I regained consciousness, they were at my bedside, trying to look chipper.

“You were hit by a car, sweetheart,” my mother said with a sob.

I asked if I was dying.

“No, no, not at all. Just some broken bones.”

“Do you know who we are?” my father asked.

“Bill and Hillary Clinton,” I said, managing to move one corner of my mouth into a half-smile, my inner actress floating up from the bottom of my mental swamp.

“She’s okay!” he crowed.

I tried to sit up, but got no farther than the first inch due to the pain in my midsection. I yowled.

“Just broken ribs, thank God,” said my mother.

I moaned, “Whaddya mean ‘thank God’?”

“It could be so much worse!”

“And there’s a concussion — either when you were hit or when you bounced off the car,” my father said.

“Who hit me? Did they stop?”

“On 17th Street, with the world watching? They had to,” my mother said.

A male doctor or intern or resident or nurse with a shaved head was carefully, slowly buzzing my mattress up to a slight elevation. “Good morning! Nice to see you back in action.”

“Am I? Did you have to restart my heart or anything? With paddles? Was I technically dead?”

“What a question,” said my mother.

“No and no,” said the man, who turned out to be a nurse, and of the height and strength I would soon find out could lift a person from bed to wherever she needed to be next.

I asked where I was.

“Washington, D.C., hon,” said my mom.

“I know that. I meant what hospital.”

“G.W. Best in the biz,” said the nurse, pointing to the embroidered letters on his scrub.

“How’d you get here so fast?” I asked my parents. “Was it fast?”

“The accident was yesterday,” my mother said. “We got on the first Acela—”

“Faster than flying,” said my father. “Believe me, we checked.”

“Thank you for coming,” I said, my voice suddenly choked.

“Are you in pain?” my mother asked.

“Are you kidding? How about ‘agony’?”

“Your head or your middle?”

“Everywhere.”

“It was one of those big VWs,” said my mother.

“A Touareg,” said my dad.

“How did you find all this out?”

“We know what the police know.”

“Was I run over or just hit?”

“Hit. Bumped. Thrown up onto the car,” my mother said. “Then slid off when the driver slammed on her brakes.”

I asked if it had been my fault. Neither answered immediately. Finally, my father said, “You weren’t crossing at a pedestrian walkway.”

I don’t remember if I asked my next question out of hope or dread or too much handling of White House press releases. “Did this make the newspapers?”

“In a police report,” said my dad. “Location, driver, victim of course. There were lots of witnesses.”

“And, hon,” said my dad, “we now know that you were fired.”

For the first time, I staged fogginess. “I was?”

“You were seen being escorted out of the building, and the security guards knew you, so with a phone call or two up to your department, they learned you’d been…separated.”

I said, “Now I remember. I would’ve told you if I hadn’t been nearly killed.”

“She wasn’t almost killed, was she?” my mother asked the nurse.

“Not even close,” he said.

My dad asked me if I’d been promised a severance package, or two weeks’ notice? Or letters of reference?

I closed my eyes, prompting the nurse to say, “Maybe she needs a snooze.”

My mother said, “Aren’t you supposed to keep waking patients up every few hours if they had a concussion so they don’t slip into a coma?”

“We’re on it,” said the nurse.

I asked if I’d been cut and bleeding and needed stitches.

“Miraculously no,” said my mother.

“Give it to me straight,” I said.

“One black eye,” my mother said. “But not so bad. It’s already turning yellow. A little foundation will cover it.”

I asked if she had a mirror in her purse. She said too quickly, no, she didn’t.

“You know what the good news is?” my father said. “No damage to your spine! Everyone breaks a rib or two. I once broke a rib sneezing!”

I asked the nurse if it was okay to sleep, or was my mother right?

“Since you’re awake and carrying on a conversation and there’s no bleed, and your pupils aren’t dilated, you can sleep.”

“She was bleeding, though,” my mother said.

“Not that kind.” He touched his head. “Inside.”

“Now that we know she’s out of the woods, I could use a sandwich and a cup of coffee,” said my dad.

I asked what time it was and how long I’d been here.

“Almost noon,” said my mother. “The accident was early yesterday, during rush hour.”

That sounded right — sacked as I arrived for work.

“Call us if you need us,” my mother said. “I think your phone is with your backpack, somewhere.”

I said, “Go have lunch. I won’t need to call you.”

“She’s very alert,” my father said. “Sounds like the old Rachel.”

“Thank you for coming all this way,” I said.

“We’re not going anywhere — just to the cafeteria. Did you think we’re sending you home to that fourth-floor walk-up with a room-mate who’s never home?”

“Third floor,” I said.

Mom kissed me on the cheek, gingerly. Dad gave my closest, un-tubed hand a squeeze. “You’re doing great,” he said. “Can we bring you anything from the cafeteria?”

I said no thanks. And try to relax. I didn’t die.

“Don’t even say that!” my mother wailed.

They finally left, walking backwards, waving, but no relief visible in their strained smiles.

The nurse said, “Nice folks,” then asked about the pain. I said, “On a scale of one to ten? Nine and a half.”

“Ouch. Sorry.”

“Whatever you’re giving me for the pain, it’s not working.”

“We can give you some extra-strength Tylenol.”

“That’s it? How about morphine?”

What about that question made him smile? “Morphine isn’t for broken ribs, darlin’.”

“Opioids?”

“No and no. The pain tells us a lot. You don’t want to mask it.”

“Yes I do. Then what’s in the I.V.?”

“Nutrition.”

“You’re nice, too,” I said.

“I try.”

He left with a reminder that he was only a call-button away, here, practically in my hand. I lay there, wondering if it was okay to press my ribs diagnostically or if that would send a splintered one into an organ. Did the police still have my phone? My backpack? I was repeatedly moving my legs and wiggling my toes. Everything down there worked. I could feel socks on my feet and the blanket on my shins. How long does a concussion last, and does it fix itself?

Five minutes later? Fifteen? The nurse was back, leaning halfway into my room. “There’s someone here to see you.”

“Who?”

“A woman.”

“A doctor?”

“No. She has a big bunch of flowers.”

How bad could that be? Was it visiting hours? I said okay.

This visitor must have been at his elbow, because she walked right in, fur-coated, brief-cased, leather boots to her knees, carrying a giant arrangement of flowers.

I didn’t know this person. “Are you sure you’re in the right room?” I asked.

Her answer was, “I’m an attorney.”

“Seriously?” I said, meaning, Don’t tell me I’m being visited by a literal ambulance chaser?

“First of all, how are you?” she asked.

“Terrible. My entire ribcage is killing me. And I have a concussion.”

“I won’t be long. Thank you for agreeing to see me.”

Had I?

“I represent the driver whose car you ran in front of, and I hope you know that they weren’t at fault.”

My now-favorite nurse had stuck his head back in and asked, “Everything good here?”

“Could you get us a vase?” this visitor asked.

“She’s a lawyer,” I told him. “She represents the driver who ran over me.” If I’d been able to roll over to one side and turn my back on her as an act of dismissal, I would have. Instead, I closed my eyes and simulated wooziness.

“Rachel?” I heard her say — not in the whisper you’d use when addressing a patient who was drifting off to sleep, but a rebuke. “I have a few questions I’d like you to answer.”

I murmured, “I’d better not. My parents aren’t going to be thrilled that you barged in here.”

“Are your parents attorneys?”

Huh? No, they weren’t attorneys, but both were excellent diplomats. As owners of a paint and wallpaper store, they’d negotiated with customers who wanted their money back after the room had already been decorated or their kid’s scribbles hadn’t come off with Mister Clean’s Magic Eraser. I said, “No they aren’t attorneys" — adding a sarcastic twist to that word as if it were too pretentious for ordinary speech.

“I think they’d be interested in why I’m here, as you will be, too,” she said.

Now that she mentioned it, I was a little curious. I waited, staring with what I hoped was a cool lack of tell-tale interest.

She took off her gigantic coat and tossed it across the foot of my bed. Before I could say, “hey!” or “ouch!” she turned girlfriendy. “Rachel, I apologize for coming on too strong. Do you think you could grant me a few more minutes? I’ll leave the second you ask me to.”

I said, “Just know that I’m being monitored. The nurse’s station is watching what’s going on. That nurse, that big guy, told me that he once caught a patient getting smothered with a pillow—”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I’m a member of the bar.”

“Then please back away. I’ll hear what you have to say, from over there.” After she’d sat down on the squeaky plastic armchair, I added, “I hope you’re not expecting me to comment or sign any papers or whatever you came for.”

“You’re sounding very cogent to me, which comports with what I was told, that you weren’t seriously injured.”

That did it! My whole body was sorer than it had ever been, and my head had never felt this heavy and off-kilter. “I’m very injured. I’m in intensive care!” Was I? No one had said that, but hadn’t I been knocked unconscious? “I’m a ten on the pain scale. And you don’t know me when I’m uninjured so you can’t judge how cogent I am.”

She took out her phone and started scrolling. After too long without a question or comment, I asked, “So who was the driver?”

“A client of mine.”

“No kidding. Famous?”

“Of course not,” she said, still scrolling diligently.

I asked her if I could borrow her phone.

“I’m sorry. It’s strictly for work.”

“I think it’s work when the victim wants to call her next of kin.”

She let out an exasperated sigh. “Number?”

Oh dear. Their mobile numbers were in the Cloud, not what remained of my memory.

Another nurse, this time a woman with a shaved head and very long earrings entered the room, briskly. Had a monitor summoned her? “What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Nothing. Just gonna get your vitals and look in your eyes.”

“Don’t they ever leave you alone here?” the lawyer asked.

“Please wait outside,” I said.

As soon as she’d left, I told the nurse, “I don’t even know her. She’s a lawyer. She represents the person who ran me down.”

“Ran you down? On purpose?”

Well that was a new thought. Had someone on the inside, in the White House, in the press office, in the family quarters, wanted to shut me up? Was Scotch-taping everything that the president touched so embarrassing that I had a price on my head?

“I worked for the Trump Administration. I was fired for sending an insulting email.”

“Please don’t confess to anything I’ll have to testify to in court. That happens, you know.”

“I didn’t threaten him. I don’t even remember the exact wording, but it was along the lines of what an idiot you are. I’d had a little too much to drink when I wrote it—”

“I don’t want to know that! I don’t want to testify that you got hit by a car because you weren’t in full control of your faculties.”

I said, “No, no, the drinking was unrelated to the accident, just to the stupid email I wrote.”

She had no comment except, “Temp is normal. Let me look at your pupils.” When I opened my eyes wider, the light hurt.

“Good?” I asked after some back-and-forthing with her penlight.

“Good enough.”

“I hurt everywhere.”

“We know.” With that, she produced a small, white paper cup containing the alleged pain reliever, and poured me a glass of water. I took the pill and drank the entire glass. “Good,” she said. “Hydrating’s good. Call us if you need to pee. It’ll be good to get you up.”

After making a notation in my chart, unfortunately out of my reach, she asked if she should send my guest back in.

Permission wasn’t necessary. The lawyer was peeking in from the open door.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s get this over with.”

“I’ll get right to the point. My client would prefer not to settle through her insurance. I have a check that would cover—”

Then this visit was about money. Shouldn’t I check with a lawyer, an insurance agent, my parents, the police? I was shaking my poor heavy head: no, sorry.

Even a concussed layman knows that you turn down the first offer. And just from living in the real world, I surmised that when a lawyer comes calling and offers a check before anyone asks, the payee probably has a good case.

I said, “It must be against some legal ethics to negotiate with someone in the intensive care unit. I mean, isn’t that a real no-no — like here, change your will. Sign this. Leave everything to me.”

“That makes no sense, and does not apply—”

Should I ask how much the alleged check was for? Did I look as if I were wavering? Possibly, because she tried, “Let me remind you, as you turn down a check at this juncture, that you were fired.”

“So?”

“Lost income? Earning potential? Hard for a jury to calculate how employable you’d ever be.”

Jee-sus — a jury! I said, “Please leave. You can keep your check. It’s probably for some laughable amount anyway, since you consider me unemployable.”

Was it just a bargaining strategy when she said, “So this is your final decision: I’ll take my chances. If I’m never able to walk again, I might be able to get disability.”

I said, now up on my elbows, the pain almost taking my breath away, “I can walk! Do you see a bedpan? No, because I can get up and pee on my own! And that was a really nasty thing to say, by the way. If you had such an innocent client, you’d be doing this through the proper channels, not sneaking into my room.”

“Don’t be foolish,” she said, gathering her coat and briefcase.

“And I am not okay. I hurt everywhere. And my vision is blurry. I hope I’m not brain-damaged.”

How was that? I didn’t want to sound too well or too sharp. If there was a settlement ahead, it was best that I appear like a defendant pleading not guilty on the basis of insanity — a lot diminished and a little dangerous.

3am i viral?

When I woke from my potentially life-threatening nap, my mother was at my side, brandishing my backpack and announcing, “Not lost! Not stolen! Not run over!”

“Wallet?” I grunted. “Phone?”

She itemized aloud: wallet, phone, charger, the plug part that goes into the outlet; keys, headphones, lip gloss, tampons, sunglasses, gum, a Snickers bar. Did I want to use the phone? Anyone I needed to call?

Was that a note of social optimism I’d heard — perhaps a reference to a previously unannounced boyfriend who’d be sick with worry somewhere?

“Just charge it,” I said.

My father, so clearly wanting to do anything, said that he’d spotted the outlet! With some ceremony, he affixed the phone to the cable, the cable to the adapter, the adapter into the outlet. He asked if he should jack the head of the bed up a bit — he’d be careful; he’d seen the way the nurse had done it. I said yes, okay, but slowly. Stop if I scream.

Had I really been out cold and phoneless only one day, I wondered, because as soon as the phone came to life, there was a slew of voicemail, email, and text messages.

Before I could open or answer anything, a call came in with a D.C. area code and no I.D. “Aren’t you going to answer it?” my mother asked.

“No.”

She took the phone from me. “Rachel Klein’s line. This is her mother speaking.”

What was that look I was getting? Intrigue? Excitement? Her whole face was signaling: Wait’ll I tell you. She was saying yes, yes, no, yes, no, I don’t know, and finally “No comment.” And finally, “You’re welcome… Beverly Klein, the usual spelling…her mother.”

“Who was that?”

“A reporter!”

“A reporter for what?”

“I didn’t catch it. A man. Very polite.”

“Did he say how he got my number?”

“I didn’t ask—”

I tried without success to prop myself up on one elbow. “A reporter calls out of the blue and you just answer the questions without asking why the hell he’s calling and how he got my number?”

“I wasn’t thinking clearly! I’m sorry! My only child was hit by a car. You know what it’s like when the police call and the first thing you hear is, ‘There’s been an accident’? You lose your mind!”

“Worst call of our lives,” added my dad. “A nightmare! And when you try to reach the doctor’s, it’s only ‘press one’ for this and ‘two’ for that. I’ve never been so frustrated! And when you finally reach a real person, she can only say next to nothing because ‘anyone can claim to be a patient’s parent!’”

“I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking of that end of things.” I took the phone back, put it down on the side table, changed my mind, and rested it on my chest. Would all these text messages, emails and voicemails explain why a reporter wanted to speak to me?

Boom! Someone had captured my accident on a phone and posted it on Facebook. One of my cousins wrote, I tried to call Aunt Bev & yr dad, but they weren’t at the store and their voicemails were full!!!! OMG R U OK? LMK!

My first instinct was open Facebook. But look under what or whom? I didn’t know which paparazzi wannabe had posted it, or how they knew it was me.

“What?” my mother was asking. “Did you find something?”

I told her that concentrating was hard and reading harder — not a lie: I had halos shimmering on the periphery everywhere I looked. Easier: hitting the number of the nameless reporter who’d just called.

A man answered with a distracted “Associated Press. Loftus.”

“This is Rachel Klein. Someone from this number just called me.”

“Oh wow. I didn’t know if you’d be able to talk.”

I asked if he knew about the accident from Facebook, and if that was true, how did he know it was me in the video?

“You don’t know?”

Would that be information gleaned from a police website that over-shared? “An accident report?” I asked.

“No. The press briefing.”

The press briefing? Had there been news so major, so life-changing — the president resigned or died or been assassinated? — so that the press was going down the list of every single employee for comment until someone answered his or her phone? “What happened?” I whispered.

“You don’t know? I assumed you did.”

“Give me a sec.” I checked text messages first: more OMGs and R U Oks????, plus “press briefing”, “press conference”, “press secretary”, “White House”.

I hit the speaker icon and said to my hovering parents, “Listen to this, in case I’m hallucinating.” He summarized, clearly from notes, that before some underling press secretary took questions on matters of state, politics, and presidential hot water, an even more junior staff member read from a slip of paper, offering Rachel Naomi Klein — spelled it — recently of the Office of Presidential Records and before that The Office of Correspondence, get-well wishes from The President and First Lady. Further: thankfully, Ms. Klein had sustained injuries of a non-life-threatening nature soon after leaving the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.

My parents were smiling for the first time since I’d opened my eyes. Good Democrats both, yet my father put his arm around my mother’s shoulders and gave her a squeeze. Was their daughter more important than either of them realized? More beloved by the office that canned her?

“Did anyone say, ‘who’s Rachel Klein?’” I asked the reporter.

“He didn’t have to. He stated what your last two jobs were.”

“Then what?”

“Well, you know the White House press corps…”

“No she doesn’t!” my mother yelled.

“Well someone asked what ‘recently’ meant. ‘Could he be more specific: did that mean resigned? Fired? Retired?’”

“Oh, crap,” I said.

“Which one was it?” the reporter pressed.

“What did the spokesperson say?”

“He’d find out and get back to us.”

“Why would it matter? I was a nobody. I mean, in the great scheme of things, I only worked there like a minute.”

“Well, let’s just say everything is suspect.”

“Me? I’m suspect?”

“Not you. Maybe what happened to you.”

I said, “I’m very tired. Did my mother tell you I had a concussion?”

“I knew that. Sorry. Can I call you back later?”

“Please don’t.”

“One more question: Do you know who was driving the car that hit you?”

“Do you?”

“I’m working on it. I mean, I have the license plate number—”

My father asked, loud enough for it to carry through the phone, “Do you think Rachel might’ve been hit on purpose?”

“No one said that. ‘How do you spell ‘Rachel’?”

I said, “Doesn’t the Associated Press have bigger things to cover? There are people dying in refugee camps on every continent, including ours!”

“Would I be wrong to assume that you were fired for cause?”

My father was shaking his head, frowning and gesticulating like a man worried about a daughter who might never get another job. Not a word!

But how would a “no comment” sound? I asked, “By ‘cause’ do you mean I did something that the White House didn’t like — a fire-able offense?”

“It’s a simple question: can you tell me why you were fired?”

I blame what followed on exhaustion, on my phone blowing up with email dings and ring tones, on the sharp pains in my ribs, on my dry mouth, my concussed brain. I told him, “Okay; I wrote a critical email, a joke really, and hit ‘send’ by accident.”

I told him it wasn’t that bad — merely a rant about my stupid job, and maybe, probably, some venting about Donald Trump’s learning curve. That’s all. Yes, it had gone to my whole department, an inadvertent “reply all”. And yes, I suppose it was the kind of thing you pound out late at night in a fit of pique, but by the light of day don’t send.

4something’s going on

The past twenty-four hours had improved my mother’s mood, color, and appearance. Was it only the application of lipstick and the jaunty scarf tied in the manner of a talented accessorizer? It shouldn’t have been a surprise. When not frantic over her only child’s brush with death, she’d always been charming. She could close a deal with the fussiest, most impatient customer, who claimed to have found nothing in dozens of wallpaper books and was now considering stencils.

Newly cheerful, she distributed the abundance of post-press conference flower arrangements and inappropriately celebratory balloons to patients who might be less heralded than the now-famous me. Yes, she knew I was in pain, but how about thank-you notes?

“Could you? I’ll sign them. You’ll say ‘Rachel is still recuperating but didn’t want any more time to go by before thanking you.’”

“You spend enough time reading your emails. Maybe you could manage writing one or two an hour?”

“To people I don’t even know?”

“Oh really?” she said, waving a large, monogrammed card. “You don’t know Ivanka and Jared?”

I asked if that was a joke — Ivanka and Jared? Had she shown me what they’d sent before it was re-gifted?

“Nothing special. Tulips.”

“For once I might be giving this White House some credit,” said my dad.

“For the flowers? Or the shout-out?”

“Both. I say that as an employer: even if the person who’s hit by a car is leaving under…not the best of circumstances, you rise to the occasion. Do you remember that guy who worked for us who was an actor? Brett, Brent, one of those names? He falsified his resume, claimed he’d worked at Farrow & Ball? Always late, knew nothing. But if he’d been hit by a car on his way out the door, your mother and I would’ve waved the white flag and done the right thing.”

“He was very good-looking,” my mother said. “And a little too popular with the decorators.”

Someone else, an L.P.N., an R.N., a secretary, knocked. Another flower arrangement — birds of paradise and hollyhocks. Huge.

My mother helped herself to the card, took it out of the envelope, lifted her eyebrows.

“From…?”

“’Your friends in Correspondence. We miss you. Get well soon!’”

“Didn’t they let you go?” my dad asked.

“Correspondence was the first job, before my transfer to Scotch-taping.”

“And this is no bunch of daisies,” said my mother.

“Something’s going on,” I said.

My next visitor was a white-coated resident, who entered after an insincere rap on the door. She had a long black braid down her back and a lilt-y accent. My mother asked when I’d be discharged.

Stethoscope earpieces in place, she didn’t answer. “Deep breath,” she was saying to me. “Another. Another.”

“Ow!” I said with each intake.

“I know,” said the doctor. “Even one cracked rib can make every move very painful.”

I had three, the X-ray had shown. “Is it a hairline crack or are they smashed? Because I worry that they’re all splintered and could puncture something. Plus, they hurt like hell.”

Without even a disclaimer such as unlikely but…, she said, “Rib pain can cause poor inspiratory effort, insufficient lung expansion and subsequent pneumonia.”

“But she can go home with any of that, right?” asked my mother.

“The attending will be in later. He’s the one who has to sign off on a discharge.”

“Put in a good word for her,” said my mom. “And us! She’ll be getting excellent care at home.”

Home. We hadn’t discussed my destination upon discharge. I waited till the doctor left before saying, “I’ll be going back to my apartment.”

“With no one to look after you?”

That parental inference was my fault. I’d painted an unflattering, inattentive portrait of my room-mate, Elizabeth — not the warmest person, not prone to caretaking or even having a single meal together. “You’re coming back to New York, and that’s that,” my mother said.

“This time we’ll fly,” said my dad. “Or rent a car if you’d prefer.”

I said, “I think I should stay in D.C. until I figure out what’s going on. And by the way, who’s paying my hospital bill?”

“Your insurance, we assume. Otherwise we’d be hearing about it.”