Complete Submission: (The Submission Series, Books 1-8) (98 page)

MONICA

I
 had fifteen minutes.

I felt far away, my body a borrowed suit, my mind a blunt instrument, my soul in a room full of family curled up next to a dying man. Fifteen minutes to kill. I couldn’t sit still. I went to the vending machines and stared at cheerful paper packets of synthetics, crisp under the unappetizing blue light. At a refrigerator-sized box of cola containers, eleven buttons all yielding the same drink, I felt like an alien standing in front of something new and unknown. People about to commit murder in movies seemed so sharp and aware. They could kick and punch with lightning reflexes. I didn’t feel like that at all. I felt more as if I was walking under water.

Ten minutes.

More than anything, I wanted to rest. The thought of finding a waiting room and falling asleep on a couch seemed appealing. I’d sleep through my opportunity, and none of it would be my fault. Jonathan would die tomorrow or the next day, but I’d be okay. I’d go to work on Tuesday, and go on like I had before. Except for never touching him again, or hearing his voice, or kneeling before him like the slave I was. All the other chunks of my life would be the same.

Ultimately, I was being selfish. I wanted him to live for my sake. Because knowing he was there soothed me. Because I didn’t truly believe I had any control over myself or my life if he wasn’t there. Because without him, things were
wrong.
The wrongness was my perception. The world would be fine without him. Really. He wasn’t Mother Theresa.

Five minutes.

Are you talking yourself out of this?

Calm yet somehow panicked, like a wheel moving so fast it appeared to be still, I went up the stairs. I knew where I had to go physically, but mentally, I felt as if I’d painted the floor from door to corner in blood. I pushed open the door with my fist and walked into the second floor. It was after two a.m. Skeleton crew. No visitors. I made eye contact with the cop reading the paper because anything less would make me out to be suspicious before I did this thing. And this thing needed doing.

Three minutes.

I went to the bathroom. The mirrors were streaked with cheap cleaning fluid, and my face looked poorly-wiped, tired, too fucking thin by a lot. I didn’t look strong enough to do it. I looked like a wax doll.

One minute.

No. I couldn’t do it. I would have to just deal with life without him and everything we could have been to each other. I would have to let him die. I couldn’t rescue him. I wasn’t strong enough. It wasn’t the consequences that would break me but the act itself. I didn’t have the spine for brutality. I was a child in over her head. A spineless coward, and an exhausted, hungry, stupid child.

A light flashed, and a squeal cut the air.

I would stay in the bathroom and watch myself fail. When they came to evacuate me for the drill, I’d run out with the crowd in a nice, orderly, single-file line.

I wasn’t going to do it.

MONICA

P
eople in movies, apparently, obtain reflexes in moments of stress that the rest of us dream will happen to us. We dream that when we’re at the edge of the cliff, we can jump to safety or to rescue, magically stronger and faster than we’d been an hour earlier. We’re entertained by the idea that we could be that capable when it’s necessary, and our daily incompetence is simply due to the fact that we’re not challenged enough.

That never happens, of course, because life doesn’t happen on the edges of cliffs. It happens in bathrooms and hallways. It happens when a fire alarm goes off, and all the avoidance slips away like a silk nightgown. For me, it happened by the second whoop of the siren when everything clicked together.

Go time.

Every choice I’d made had led me there. If I denied it, I’d be the walking dead.

Humanity scurrying and shouting. Parts of a machine spinning and thrusting. Patients wheeled down the hall. A nurse demanding I go left, me doing it, then flipping back as soon as she turned away. A security guard shouted to me. I gave him a thumbs up and continued. I grabbed some coat slung over a chair as if I’d turned to retrieve my things, and again, I turned another corner when his attention shifted.

There would be cameras, and they’d see me. I didn’t waste my time trying to dodge them. I would get caught, and I would take my lumps. Shame. Prison. A destroyed career.

Patalano’s hallway was clear. Declan must have taken care of that. A fire drill was a diversion so obvious that the police would have planned for it. Even the stupidest mobster would have dismissed it, yet they were gone.

I walked into his room. It was dark, and he was alone, lying on his back. Everything was exactly what I expected, as if I was walking into a familiar place. The whoosh and hum of the machines was drowned out by the siren. The machines were bigger than the ones in Jonathan’s room, with more dials and gauges. Patalano’s face was hidden by tubes going down his throat and a bandage on his head. His neck was kept stable by a plastic apparatus, and the eyes taped shut.

I waved my hand in front of him. Nothing happened. I don’t know what I was checking for or what about that mattered. He was brain dead. His body was a life system for a functioning heart muscle. End of story. I focused on the machines. There had to be a switch or a plug. Right?

There were switches and plugs everywhere and nowhere. All the wires ran behind a two-ton apparatus and disappeared. Fuck. Why did I think it would be simple? I flipped any switch I could get my hand on. Though the thing whined, I had no way to tell if what I was doing was having the necessary effect.

“That does absolutely nothing,” came a voice behind me. I recognized it immediately. Jessica.

“Get out,” I said.

In two steps, she was at the machines, flipping everything back to the way it was. “You don’t move a girl in a vegetative state and care for her for ten years without learning something.”

“Get out!” I shouted.

“Declan said you wouldn't know what to do,” she shouted back. Our voices were covered by the fire alarm, but for how much longer? “Find his catheter.”

I froze for a second, battling everything I believed about Jessica and analyzing what I saw in front of me. She was trying to help me. Was it love? Or was she saving the goose and the golden eggs? Did it matter? I found the tube coming from the center of the bed and ending in a sealed bag under it.

She saw me look at it. “Put a kink in it. It’ll back up, and he’ll die of septic shock in an hour.”

A few drops of yellow liquid flowed through the tube. Jessica put her hand on my arm. She wasn’t going to do it. It was all me.

He loved me because he thought I was
good
. Would he love me if I ruined myself for him?

The fire alarm stopped. The silence was overwhelming. I heard the forced breaths, and if I listened closely, I heard the fluid running through the catheter and the beating of a superfluous heart.

"Why?" I said. "Why are you even here?"

"I told you I loved him once. One day you'll understand."

"I won't throw him away."

“Do it,” Jessica whispered.

Do it and risk my own life. Do it, recognizing that Jonathan hadn’t done it to Rachel because he must have believed something bigger, deeper, more spiritual lived in our bodies. Do it, and lose Jonathan even if he lived.

With a bend of my knee and a twist of my wrist, I kinked that thing, and the fluid running through it stopped.

“Run,” Jessica said and was gone.

I became aware of voices, the squeak of gurneys, the rustle of human activity. I backed out of the room, watching that tube fill up. In my ignorance, I hadn’t silenced my phone. When the
bloop
of a message came in, I jumped to turn the thing off. When I did, I saw it was from Brad.

—We have a heart. Coming from Ojai. One hour.—

Like a kid diving for the piñata candy, I went for that kinked catheter and smoothed it until the liquid flowed. I ran out as though I was coming back from a fire drill, slapped open the stairwell door, which was packed with people coming back from the drill, and backed into a corner, breathing in gasps as if my soul had been saved at a minute’s notice. I waved away anyone who looked concerned. I just needed a moment to collect myself. Breathe. That was the scariest thing I had ever done.

“Ma’am?” Two police officers, the woman and man I’d seen outside Patalano’s hall, approached me.

“Yes?” I answered.

“Can you come with us?” the lady cop asked.

My heart sank. They’d come for me. Despite unkinking the catheter, I’d tried it. Attempted murder. Someone had seen me and pointed me out. When they unraveled everything, they’d see my prints all over the place. The video. My seemingly meaningless appearance in the hall the previous night. Of course.

I was finished.

JONATHAN

I
 heard a fire alarm, but apparently it was on a lower floor. Nothing to panic about. My family laughed with relief, even my father, who I believed didn’t actually understand levity. I stayed still and silent because I didn’t have the wherewithal to do anything else. A room crowded with people who loved me, and I’d never felt so alone. I wanted Monica to come back. I felt childish wanting her so badly, but I felt scraped down to a nub without habit or discipline, no expectations or social cues. Just the core wants and revulsions unfiltered by a personality built up by half a lifetime’s worth of experiences.

I was scared to die.

My body was uncomfortable.

I wanted Monica.

Past those three overwhelming sensations, I had only sensory inputs and petty feelings. Even the slight excitement that followed the end of the fire drill didn’t move me. There was some happy news amongst my family, like an unlikely Dodger win or an upcoming wedding. People scurried in wearing sage green and pink, shouting orders. My mother came to me, smiling, and kissed my cheek. She stroked it until Dr. Emerson, the silver-haired one who came in and out of my room seventeen times a day, pulled her away. Her face was replaced with his.

“We have a heart. It’s a match. We’re prepping you for surgery.”

They handled my body like a jacket they were mending, and I felt humiliated and shut down but hopeful.

“Monica.” I choked the word out to a nurse I didn’t recognize. She looked up and past me to someone I couldn’t see. There was a conversation I couldn’t make out.

She said to me in a voice designed for clarity, “We’ll let her know.”

“Where is she?”

“We don’t know. Just keep still now.” She lifted my head and strung something around my neck. It was happening too fast. I’d already let Monica walk out of the room. I’d let it happen because I was weak, and now I’d lost control of the situation entirely. That couldn’t happen. They couldn’t wheel me away and cut me open again without me seeing her. They’d done it last time, and look what happened.

“No!” I swung my arm. It must have been truly pathetic because they just strapped it down as easily as if I was made of bone and rag. I said her name to myself over and over, but she didn’t appear.

MONICA

I
 tried not to fidget even after they took my phone.

I was raised to think cops believed fidgeting meant lying. I wasn’t lying much. I wasn’t with the mob or associated with any kind of underground business, which was what they kept implying. I didn’t know anyone they asked about. I was just me. One of the thousands of tall, skinny, struggling artists in that intestinal tract of a city.

“I wanted to look at him,” I said. The guy cop tip-tapped into a laptop, and the lady cop leaned her elbows on the table. The break room stank of stale coffee, non-dairy creamer, and sugar glaze.

“Why?” she asked.

“Because my husband’s up on four waiting for a heart transplant. This guy’s brain dead with this nice heart, and I just wanted to say a prayer that he died. I know that makes me a bad person.” I left it there. That was about as much lying as I thought I could get away with. I could have told the truth, but they weren’t looking for someone who’d screwed with his catheter. Their questions told me they were looking for a true assassin.

“That your ring?” she asked.

I held out my hand. “The diamond is his sister’s.”

“The other one’s unusual.”

“Quickie marriage to a dying man who I’d really like to see.”

“Wait outside, please.” They led me to a row of chairs they’d set up for people they were questioning. A stocky guy with black hair went in next. Fuck, how long could it take? I couldn’t stop fidgeting. After twenty minutes, I looked at the clock.

Ten minutes to three a.m. Did the morning count? I waited for ten minutes, hands still, suddenly not fidgety at all. When the second and minute hands hit the twelve, I closed my eyes and put my fingertips to my lips. I don’t know how long I held them there. They pressed my skin until the lady cop came out and handed me my phone and ID.

“You can go.”

I ran like hell.

JONATHAN

I
t was bright. The voices around me spoke like robots to each other and with fake kindness to me. They narrated what they were doing, but all I knew was I was strapped to a gurney, staring at the ceiling, with no way to see what was happening around me.

“Okay,” said a man somewhere behind me. “I’m Doctor Chen. How are we doing today?”

“Ask yourself half the answer.”

“Right. Okay. I’m going to put this mask over your face. You need to just breathe and count backwards from ten.”

“Wait.” He bent over to look at me. Asian guy. Mid thirties. Cap. Hissing gas mask in his gloved hand. “What time is it?”

“Uhm...” He seemed put-upon by the question. “Three.”

“Exactly three?”

“One minute til.” He started to lower the mask again.

“Wait.” I looked around the room as far as my position would let me. Five people stood around me wearing the light blue uniform of doctors and nurses, hands up with their palms facing toward their shoulders. More scuttled in the background. I didn’t think I could be loud enough to be heard over the ambient noise. “Unstrap me. One hand.”