I was working on this story deep into the night on Saturday, Sept. 24, trying to finish it by the Three-Minute Fiction contest deadline the next day. About 3:00 am, I went downstairs for a smoke break when I found this very young, petite woman passed out in the stairwell of my apartment building. I asked her if she was all right, and she roused and sat up. I could smell alcohol from her. She was so out of it she couldn’t remember what apartment she came from or had been heading to. I couldn’t even figure out from her incoherent statements if she lived here or was just staying with someone. At one point, she even asked what city she was in. She kept saying, “This is not good, this is not good,” and that she just wanted to sleep.
I couldn’t leave her there. If someone found her they might call the cops, and I wanted to spare her that trouble. I told her she could crash on my couch and sleep it off. I took her to my place, I gave her a glass of water to rehydrate and left a plastic container nearby in case she had to throw up. She fell asleep. I continued working on my story and turned in a little after 5:00 am.
About 5:30 am, when I was in bed but not yet asleep, I heard her leave my apartment. I heard her in the hallway knocking on doors. I didn’t hear any response. Then she knocked on my door, having given up or thought better of it, and I let her back in. She was so distraught. I found out she was staying with a friend. She thought she had somehow left her friend’s place and fallen asleep on the stairs, though she couldn’t remember having done that. And she couldn’t remember her friend’s apartment number. I said she couldn’t go around knocking on doors so early in the morning, so just get some more sleep, we’d figure things out later. She went back to the couch and I went to bed.
At 8:00 am, I woke up, she was sitting on my couch, still very upset. She still couldn’t remember what had happened that caused her to end up in the stairwell; it was all a blank to her. She kept repeating how this was the worst night of her life. I asked her her friend’s name, which was Debra. I went out and knocked on one of my neighbor’s doors to see if she was Debra, and found that my neighbor had heard knocking at 5:30 am and had been so frightened she had called the cops. I had to explain to her the circumstances and reassure her that there was nothing to be worried about. I went to the apartment manager’s unit to see if he could tell me what Debra’s apartment number was. He was upset that I had woken him up so early on a Sunday morning. He wouldn’t tell me the apartment number (which I understood: a matter of confidentiality), so I asked him if he could give Debra a call and let her know her friend was with me, and to call me.
I went back to my place. She and I decided to go downstairs and look around, to try to find her car or try to figure out where her friend’s apartment was. She couldn’t find her car (or couldn’t remember where she had parked), which upset her even more. She knew her friend’s apartment was on the poolside part of the building, so we went to the pool area. Looking up from there, she thought she recognized her friend’s place through one of the windows. We went to that apartment, she knocked on the door, and it was the right one. Her friend let her in, and I went back to my place. I got a few hours more of sleep, then was able to finish my story in time.
It was only towards the end that I learned her name. I asked her just before we went down to look for her car. Her name was Wendy.
True story.
(October 2011)
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