No, a drone. An airplane high in the sky … or a mosquito buzzing by my ear.
I hear a scuffing sound. People walking on thick-soled shoes. A door clicking shut.
But there is no door. Is there?
Maybe.
An alarm goes off, blaring.
“Katie?”
I look sideways and see that I am alone. I shiver with an unexpected cold. What’s
wrong? Something is changing …
I concentrate hard, will myself to see where I really am—I know I’m in that hospital
room, hooked up to life support. A grid engraves itself into existence above me. Acoustical
tiles. A white ceiling, pocked with gray pinholes. Rough. Like a pumice stone or old
concrete.
And suddenly I’m back in my body. I’m in a narrow bed, with metal railings that undulate
like eels, flashing silver as they move. I see my mother beside me. She is screaming
something about her daughter—me—and then she is stumbling away. Nurses and doctors
rush in and push her aside.
The machines go silent all at once and look expectantly at me, their anthropomorphic
forms straightening. They whisper among themselves, but I can’t make out their words.
A green line moves across a black, square face, smiling and frowning, beeping. Beside
me, something whooshes and thunks.
Pain explodes in my chest, coming so fast I don’t even have time to yell for Kate.
Then the green line goes flat.
Twenty-three
September 3, 2010
6:26
P.M.
“She’s dead. Why are we still here?”
Marah turned to Paxton. He sat on the floor in the waiting room with his long legs
stretched out, crossed at the ankles. Beside him lay a brightly colored heap of food
wrappers—cookies, cakes, potato chips, candy bars; he’d bought whatever was for sale
in the vending machine by the elevator. He kept sending Marah to her dad for more
money. She frowned at him.
“Why are you looking at me like that? On TV, when someone flat-lines, it’s over. Your
dad texted you, like, ten minutes ago that her heart stopped. Then the doctor wanted
a meeting. We know what that’s about. She’s toast.”
All at once, she
saw
him. It was like having the house lights go up on a decrepit theater that had looked
magical in the dark. She noticed his pale skin and pierced eyebrows and blackened
fingernails, and the dirt that discolored his throat.
She scrambled to her feet, almost fell in her haste, righted herself, and started
to run. She skidded into Tully’s ICU room just as Dr. Bevan was saying, “We’ve stabilized
her again. Her brain activity is good, but of course we can’t know anything for sure
until she wakes up.” He paused. “If she wakes up.”
Marah pressed back against the wall. Her father and grandmother were standing by the
doctor. Dorothy stood off by herself, her arms crossed tightly, her mouth crimped
shut.
“We’ve begun warming her body temperature and we’re bringing her out of the coma,
but that’s a slow process. Tomorrow we’ll reconvene and assess her progress. We’ll
take her off the ventilator and see.”
“Will she die when you take her off the machine?” Marah asked, surprising herself
by speaking aloud. Everyone in the room looked at her.
“Come here,” Dad said. She understood suddenly why he didn’t want her brothers to
be here.
She moved cautiously toward him. They’d been at odds for so long it felt weird, going
to him for comfort, but when he lifted his arm, she sidled in close, and for a beautiful
second, the bad years fell away.
“The truth is that we don’t know,” Dr. Bevan said. “Brain injuries are impossible
to predict. She may wake up and breathe on her own, or she may breathe on her own
and not wake up. Or she may not be able to breathe on her own. When she’s off the
medications and her body temperature is back to normal, we’ll be able to assess her
brain activity better.” He looked from face to face. “She has been very unstable,
as you know. On several occasions her heart has stopped. This is not necessarily indicative
of her chances for survival, but it is worrisome.” He closed the chart. “Let’s meet
again tomorrow and reassess.”
Marah looked up at her dad. “I want to go get her iPod—the one Mom gave her. Maybe
if she hears her music…” She couldn’t finish. Hope was such a dangerous thing, so
ephemeral and amorphous; it didn’t fit in the concrete world of words spoken aloud.
“There’s my girl,” he said, squeezing her upper arm.
She remembered being his girl suddenly, how safe she used to feel. “Remember how they
used to dance to ‘Dancing Queen’?” She tried to smile. “They had so much fun.”
“I remember,” he said in a voice that was tight. She knew he was thinking of it, too:
how Mom and Tully used to sit together on the deck, even when it got bad and Mom was
as pale and thin as a sheet of paper, listening to their eighties music and singing
along. He looked away for a moment, then smiled down at her. “Will the doorman let
you into her apartment?”
“I still have a key. I’ll take Pax to her house and get the iPod. Then…” She looked
up. “We could come back to the house. If that’s okay.”
“Okay? We moved back to Bainbridge for you, Marah. I’ve kept the light on every night
since you left.”
* * *
An hour later, Marah and Pax were in a cab, heading toward the waterfront.
“What are we,
servants
?” Paxton sat slumped beside her. He found a thread coming loose on his black T-shirt
and pulled on it until a corkscrew of used thread lay in his lap and the neckline
of his shirt gaped.
It was at least the tenth time he’d asked Marah this question in the last eight blocks.
She didn’t answer. A moment or so later, he said, “I’m hungry. How much money did
the old man give you? Can we stop at Kidd Valley for a hamburger on the way?”
Marah didn’t look at him. They both knew full well that her dad had given her enough
money for a burger and that Paxton would spend every cent she’d been given.
The cab pulled to a stop in front of Tully’s building. Marah leaned forward in her
seat and paid the cabbie, and then she followed Paxton out into the cool Seattle evening.
The blue of the sky was darkening by degrees.
“I don’t see why we have to do this. She can’t hear shit.”
Marah waved at the doorman, who frowned at her and Paxton, as almost all adults did.
She led Pax through the elegant cream-colored marble lobby and into the mirrored elevator.
On the top floor, they exited the elevator and went to Tully’s condo.
She unlocked the door and opened it. The hush inside felt weird. There was always
music playing in Tully’s place. She turned on lights as she made her way down the
hall.
In the living room, Paxton picked up a glass sculpture and turned it over in his hands.
She almost said,
Be careful, that’s a Chihuly,
but bit the warning back. It never did any good to criticize Pax. He was sensitive
to the point of edgy and he could get angry in no time.
“I’m hungry,” Pax said, already bored. “Is that Red Robin still down the block? A
cheeseburger would be good.”
Marah was happy to give him enough money to get rid of him.
“You want anything?”
“No. I’m fine.”
He palmed the twenty from her dad. When he was gone, and the place was quiet again,
she walked past the coffee table, where piles of mail lay strewn about. On the floor
beside it lay the newest
Star
magazine, its pages open to the story.
Marah’s legs almost gave out on her. Tully had been reading the magazine last night …
before she got in her car. Here was the proof.
She looked away from the evidence of her betrayal and kept walking. The iPod station
in the living room was empty, so Marah went to Tully’s bedroom and looked around.
Nothing by the bed. She went into Tully’s big walk-in closet and came to a sudden
stop.
Here, try this on, Marah. You look like a princess in that. I love dress-up, don’t
you?
Guilt swirled around her like dark black smoke, rising, tainting the air she breathed.
She could smell it, feel it wafting over her exposed skin, raising gooseflesh. She
dropped slowly to her knees, unable suddenly to stand.
He’ll ruin you.
That’s the last thing Tully had said to her on that terrible December night when
Marah had chosen Paxton over everyone else who loved her. She closed her eyes, remembering.
Had it really only been nine months ago that Dad and Tully had stormed into her dorm
room? It felt like a lifetime. Paxton had taken her hand and led her out into the
snowy night, laughing—laughing—calling them …
Romeo and Juliet.
It seemed romantic at first, all that “us against them.” Marah quit college and moved
into the run-down apartment Paxton shared with six other kids. It was a fifth-floor
walk-up in a vermin-infested building in Pioneer Square, but somehow it didn’t matter
that they rarely had electricity or hot water and that the toilet didn’t flush. What
mattered was that Paxton loved her and they could spend the night together and come
and go as they wanted. She didn’t mind that he had no money and no job. His poetry
would make them rich someday. Besides, Marah had money. She’d saved all of her high
school graduation-gift money in a savings account. During college, her dad had given
her enough money that she’d never needed to crack into her own savings.
It wasn’t until the money in Marah’s account ran out that everything began to change.
Paxton decided that marijuana was “lame” and that meth and even sometimes heroin were
“where it’s at.” Money began to disappear from Marah’s wallet—small amounts; she was
never one hundred percent sure, not enough to accuse him, but it seemed to go more
quickly than she expected.
She’d worked from the start. Paxton couldn’t hold down a job because he needed nights
to slam poetry in the clubs and days to work on his verses. She’d been happy to be
his muse. Her first job had been as a night clerk at a seedy hotel, but it hadn’t
lasted long. After that, she’d gone from one job to the next, never able to keep one
for long.
A few months ago, in June, Paxton had come home from a club one night, late, high,
and told her that Seattle was “over.” They packed up the next day and followed one
of Paxton’s new friends to Portland, where they moved into a sagging, dirty apartment
with three other kids. She’d gotten her job at Dark Magick within the week. The bookstore
job was different from her other jobs, but it was also the same. Long hours on her
feet, helping rude people, coming home with very little money. Months passed like
that.
It wasn’t until ten days ago that Marah really understood the precariousness of their
life together.
That night she came home to an eviction notice nailed onto the door of their apartment.
She pushed open the broken door—the lock hadn’t worked when they moved in and the
super never cared enough to fix it—and found her roommates sitting on the living room
floor, passing a pipe back and forth.
“We’re being evicted,” she said.
They laughed at her. Paxton rolled sideways and stared up at her through glassy, unfocused
eyes. “You’ve got a job…”
For days, Marah walked around in a fog; fear set in like an iceberg, deep and solid.
She didn’t want to be homeless. She’d seen the street kids in Portland, panhandling,
sleeping in dirty blankets on stoops, rifling through Dumpsters for food, using their
money for drugs.
There was no one she could talk to about her fear, either. No mom. No best friend.
The realization made her feel even more alone.
Until she remembered:
My job is to love you.
Once she had the thought, she couldn’t shake it. How many times had Tully offered
to help her?
I don’t judge people. I know how hard it is to be human
.
At that, she knew where she had to go.
The next day, without telling Paxton, she called in sick to work, took her last few
precious dollars, and bought a bus ticket to Seattle.
She arrived at Tully’s apartment at just past seven o’clock at night. She stood outside
the door for a long time, fifteen minutes at least, trying to work up the nerve to
knock. When she finally did, she could hardly breathe.
There was no answer.
Marah reached in her pocket and pulled out the spare key. Unlocking the door, she
went inside. The place was quiet and well lit, with music playing softly from Tully’s
iPod in the living room. Marah could tell by the song—“Diamonds and Rust”—that it
was the iPod Mom had made for Tully when she was sick.
Their songs.
TullyandKate’s. When had Tully played anything else?
“Tully?”
Tully came out of the bedroom, looking like a street person, with messy hair and ill-fitting
clothes and tired eyes. “Marah,” she said, coming to a dead stop. She seemed … weird.
Shaky and pale. She kept blinking as if she couldn’t focus.
She’s high
. Marah had seen it often enough in the past two years to know.
Marah knew instantly that Tully wouldn’t help her. Not this Tully, who couldn’t even
stand up straight.
Still, Marah tried. She begged, she pleaded, she asked for money.
Tully said a lot of pretty things and her eyes filled with tears, but in the end,
the answer was no.
Marah wanted to cry, she was so disappointed. “My mom said I could count on you. When
she was dying, she said you’d help me and love me no matter what.”
“I’m trying to, Marah. I want to help you—”
“As long as I do what you want. Paxton was right.” Marah said the last words in a
jangle of pain. Without even waiting for Tully’s response, she ran out of the condominium.
It wasn’t until she was in the bus station in downtown Seattle, sitting on a cold
bench, that she knew how to solve her problem. Beside her was one of those celebrity
magazines. It was open to a story about Lindsay Lohan, who’d been pulled over driving
a Maserati while she was on probation. The headline read
STAR OUT OF CONTROL ONLY DAYS AFTER LEAVING REHAB
.