Page 3 of The Throwaway

A room enclosed entirely by glass sits at one end of the floor, and someone has closed the blue curtains that hang from floor to ceiling so that the patient in the bed isn't visible to anyone standing outside.

"Okay." William pauses at the door and holds the handle for a moment as he turns to look at Marigold. "Mr. Hartley is currently not conscious," he says. "He has suffered from a seizure brought on by an overdose, and when we go in, you will see that he's hooked up to several machines."

Marigold's heart plummets in her chest.An overdose? Cobb?She puts a shaking hand to her mouth and nods slowly. Of course she knows that Cobb and his bandmates--and really everyone else they know in the music business--dabble in marijuana, alcohol, and occasionally hallucinogenics, but anoverdose? Isn't that for people who do hard drugs and have no control over themselves? That's not Cobb--not by a long-shot.

"It was cocaine," William Masters explains gently. "He had a seizure and went into cardiac arrest."

"Oh my god!" Marigold's hand falls away from her mouth.

In response, William turns the knob and takes her hand, nearly dragging her into the small glass room. He closes the door behind them, and she's confronted with a sight she never in a million years would have wanted to see: her boyfriend--her strong, funny, talented, kind boyfriend--lying pale and motionless beneath a white sheet. Sure enough, machines are attached to him with various wires, and the beep and hiss of mechanical life forces fills the little space. A small window on the wall looks out at the gray sky; rain has begun to fall in earnest.

"I'll leave you here with him," William says, watching Marigold while she steadies herself against the cold metal railing of Cobb's bed. She grips it with both hands, her knees weakening. Cobb's eyes move beneath his blue veined eyelids. "If you need anything at all, please press that button there," William says, pointing at what looks like a doorbell on the wall. "A doctor will be in shortly to update you."

As soon as the door closes behind William Masters, Marigold sinks into a chair next to the bed. She lets a strangled sob escape her for the first time, covering her face with both hands. It doesn't even occur to her to find a bathroom and wash off her makeup, and soon she's sitting there with rivers of black mascara cutting trails of black tears through her foundation and over her powdered cheeks.

There's a knock at the door and Marigold swipes at her face with the backs of her hands. "Come in," she says, sounding choked.

A young doctor opens the door and enters. He can't be much more than thirty, but he looks exhausted and worn down.

"Mrs. Hartley?" he asks, looking at the chart in his hands to give Marigold time to compose herself.

"Marigold," she says, standing up unsteadily. "Marigold Pim. Cobb and I aren't married. Yet." She adds this last part without even thinking. Certainlyshe'sconsidered what life would be like as Mrs. Cobb Hartley, but they're young and have only been dating a year, so it's not as if Cobb has proposed or anything. At least not officially.

"Pleased to meet you," the doctor says, looking at Marigold with what feels to her like pity. "And I'm sorry that you're here under these conditions, but this is serious. Mr. Hartley has suffered from a severe cardiac incident."

Marigold lets an audible sob escape her again before she covers her mouth. "I'm sorry."

"No need to be sorry," the doctor says gently, reaching for a box of tissues and handing it to her. "I'm told that Mr. Hartley was at a recording studio midtown when he began to seize, and an ambulance was called quickly. They resuscitated him, and once he was stable, they brought him here. He hasn't woken up yet, but I would imagine that when he does, he'll have a terrible headache from the seizure, assuming that he banged his head against the floor when he fell. That's fairly common."

"When can he go home?" Marigold asks hopefully.

The doctor gives her a small, patient smile. "Well, he'll need to wake up for us to give him a full assessment and to determine what sort of therapies or treatments he's going to need. These next couple of hours will tell us a lot. But Marigold, I think he's going to be alright." He pauses and gives her a long, searching look before going on. "This kind of cardiac event could have easily ended in tragedy. If you have any pull with Mr. Hartley, I'm going to encourage you to use it."

"Any pull?" Marigold frowns. She's having a hard time processing much of anything as she holds Cobb's cool, unmoving hand in hers.

"Yes, if you have any influence at all over his choices, and I'm guessing that you do, you'll convince him to seek professional help and get off drugs entirely."

Marigold's eyes fall to the floor and she tightens her grip on Cobb's hand. "Okay," she whispers. "I'll do everything I can to get him to stop."

"I'll be back by to check on him. Will you be here?" The doctor holds a clipboard under one arm.

"I'll be right here," Marigold promises, turning to look at her boyfriend as the doctor lets himself out. "Do you hear me, Cobb?" she whispers to him as his chest rises and falls. He's got oxygen tubes in his nose, and there's dried blood on a cut over his eyebrow. "I'm going to beright here. Forever. I'll never let you go, and I'll never leave your side. It's you and me, baby, until the end of time."

In response, the machines continue their incessant humming as they work their magic on Cobb Hartley, and Marigold closes her eyes, imagining herself as his loving wife.

If Cobb marries her, she'll do everything she can to make him happy. She'll have his children. She'll go with him to treatment. She'll cook for him and travel with him and make sure that he's got everything he needs so that he can make his music without a care in the world.

He just has to survive this.

Please, God. Just let him survive this.

Marigold

Marigold's bungalow on Shipwreck Key is a feminine cottage that pays no mind to masculinity whatsoever. It is robin's egg blue paint on the front door, mismatched teacups, and fluffy white hand towels. It is a queen-sized bed covered in so much white bedding that it looks like a dollop of whipped cream. It is a cupboard full of ironed linen tablecloths that she's collected over the years. Marigold has turned it into a retreat that speaks to her tastes and her tastes alone, with each room painted a different pastel shade. The wall behind her bed is papered in light blue covered with a hand-painted garden of wildflowers, and the majestic wrought-iron bed sits beneath an ornate chandelier and on top of a giant, soft pink rug. Without fail, every single room--even the bathrooms--has at least one white bookshelf, upon which Marigold has shelved Jane Austen next to Julia Child's cookbooks, and sandwiched her favorite memoirs between books of poetry and trashy paperbacks that she's read on the beach.

Everywhere in Marigold's little home there are nods to English country living, with a weathered bench perched just inside the door that leads from her bright, airy laundry room to the side porch, and an old-fashioned larder in her kitchen with a small window that she leaves cracked in the winter to keep her bins of onions and tomatoes and cartons of eggs cool. Her marriage to Cobb had meant nearly twenty years of living in The Cotswolds, close to where he'd grown up, and everything about that lifestyle still informs the way that Marigold lives today. She turns on the BBC as she stands at her kitchen sink, hand washing pots and pans each evening. She goes around to all of her closest neighbors to deliver bits of anything she bakes, and to share bits of gossip or island news, and she keeps a small garden behind her house, difficult though it is to grow anything in the sandy ground that even passingly resembles the bed of roses and hollyhocks and hydrangea and foxglove that she'd loved and nurtured in The Cotswolds.

Marigold wakes up inside this English-cottage-on-a-tropical-island one Saturday morning the week before Christmas and makes a kettle of hot water to pour into the French press on her wooden kitchen counter. Marigold has her long hair pulled loosely into a braid that hangs down her back, and she's wearing a pair of black sweatpants, a gray t-shirt with an image of theGolden Girlson it, and the thick, black glasses she wears when she doesn't have her contacts in. She's humming along to "Blue Christmas" as Elvis sings on the kitchen radio when she hears a knock on her front door.

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