I said, "I know." I didn't. But I knew now.
I didn't sleep that night. I hadn't expected to. I sat up in bed with the lamp on and my phone on the blanket beside my hip, and around eleven I went downstairs and got the old phone out of its sock against the toaster, unplugged it, watched it die in my hand, and carried it upstairs with its cord and plugged it into the outlet behind my nightstand. It took me twenty minutes of fiddling, with the sock and then with a paperback propped against it, before the lightning bolt came on and stayed on. My own phone was right there, set at seventy now. But I wanted his too. I wanted to hear what he'd been hearing.
At nine minutes after three, they both went off.
His first, by maybe half a second. I'll never forget the sound of it — not the rising tone, which I knew, but the way the cracked screen buzzed against the wood of the nightstand, a harsh rattling buzz, like a wasp in a jar. Then mine. Sixty-eight, arrow down. I was up before the second one finished.
The hall was dark and I didn't turn on the light, because I didn't want to wake her any more than I had to, and I went the eight steps to her door with my hand on the wall, and I had a strange dizzy feeling the whole way that I was walking somebody else's path, that the carpet knew these steps better than I did. Her door was open a crack. Her nightlight was on, a plastic moon that turned slowly and threw shapes on the ceiling. She was asleep on her stomach with one arm hanging off the bed and her phone under her cheek, screaming into her face, and the receiver on the nightstand screaming too, and she didn't move. She didn't so much as twitch. I stood there and watched her not hear it, and something in my chest folded over on itself.
I sat on the edge of the bed and said her name and shook her shoulder. She made a sound. I said it again and she opened her eyes partway and looked at me without seeing me.
"Juni. You're low. Sit up. Drink this."
I got a juice out of the basket. I couldn't find the straw. It was stuck to the side of the box in its plastic, the way it always is, and I tore at the plastic in the dark with my fingernails and I thought about her on the floor on the sixth with her fingers that wouldn't work, and my hands started to shake, and I dropped the straw on the carpet.
A hand came past my shoulder holding another juice box with the straw already in.
Kellan was standing behind me in his T-shirt and boxers. I hadn't heard him come in. He didn't say anything. He just held it out, and I took it, and put the straw in her mouth, and she drank it with her eyes closed, the whole thing, in long sleepy pulls, the way a baby drinks a bottle.
"Again," Kellan whispered. "She'll need another one. She was dropping fast."
He was already holding the second one out.