Love Over Matter (22 page)

“
Yup,” I say, trying to
rein in the cockiness in my voice. “Look. It’s right here.
Attending physician: Christopher Kent. That must be how
he . . .”

You could knock Aleks over with a
feather, as they say. (Maybe I should grab the one Clive just lost
and give it a try?)

Aleks holds out his hand, and I turn
the certificate over to him. “I knew he worked at a hospital,” he
drones, “but I never thought . . .”

“
Why didn’t he take you?” I
wonder. “I mean, why kidnap only one twin? That’s kind of
. . .
weird,
don’t you think?”

A glint of recognition crosses Haley’s
face. “So we found it? We’ve got the proof?”

I can’t help grinning. “I’d say
so.”

Aleks regains his
composure. “They
tried
to take me, I think. Or at least that was the rumor among the
sleepers. But the logistics of it . . .” He shakes
his head, the depth of his loss over George palpable. “I didn’t
realize he was
the
doctor.”

I fight off a sudden chill. “He
probably delivered you,” I say, immediately regretting it. Under my
breath, I mutter, “How twisted.”

“
What’re you gonna do now?”
Haley asks. She makes a slicing motion across her neck. “Get rid of
them?”

I wish she wouldn’t be so crude,
considering what happened to Ruth Dawson. “I’m sure Aleks knows
what he’s doing,” I defend. “Stay out of it.”

Haley rolls her eyes, but Aleks looks
wounded. “I’ve been keeping a dossier on them for a while,” he
reveals. He shuffles through the IDs and culls a matching pair,
presents me with shockingly better-looking 1980s versions of the
Brookses, frozen in big-hair time under the pseudonyms Melvin and
Gloria Swan. “But these were the only names I had for them—until
now.”

“
Glad to be of service,” I
say, feeling a rush of satisfaction at having helped him come to
grips with his tragic past.

His reply is a smile.

Mine is a sigh. I see
nothing—nobody—but George.

* * *

I was still in bed, floating
agitatedly in and out of sleep, when our home phone rang. Even
though its volume is set to rock concert, I usually don’t hear it,
my brain trained to respond to the shrill techno tones of my cell
phone instead. But this day the clunky relic and its maniacal
ringing had a direct line to my nervous system, its first violent
spasm of sound jolting me awake and onto my feet.

“
Hello?” I gasped into the
receiver, narrowly saving the call from hitting the answering
machine. For half a second, I expected George’s voice. Then, before
the caller even spoke, I knew.

“
Cassandra?”

The air turned to stone; my eyes
pulsed sharply. “Yes?” I whispered.

“
I’m afraid there’s been an
accident,” Mrs. Brooks informed me in a cool, bored voice, as if
she was reading from a lawnmower manual. “George is . . .
well, he’s in a coma.” She dropped the news on me, just like that.
“We thought you’d want to know.” She awaited my response, but I was
frozen with shock. And fear. “Cassandra? Are you all
right?”

How
could
I be? “Where? Where is
he?”

“
St. Mary’s Hospital,” she
told me. “The doctors have done what they could to relieve the
pressure on his brain, but . . .” A hint of a sigh
escaped her airways and started my stomach churning. “When the test
results are back, they’ll know for sure if he can . . .
continue.”

If he can continue?
If?
Continue what?
Living? “What happened?” it occurred to me to ask.

“
It’s not definitive,” she
said, her voice going somehow even more monotone. “But the
preliminary data point to multiple causes: speed; weather;
texting.”

This must be a nightmare. I am still
tucked in bed, imagining all of this. And soon I will wake up.
Apologize to George for being so juvenile. Declare my love for him,
and . . . “Can I come see him?” I asked, though I’m
not sure why. Her answer wouldn’t have mattered.

“
We’ll be in the
cafeteria,” she replied, playing the part of the dutiful
mother.

I mumbled a weak goodbye, dropped the
receiver in its cradle, sank to the floor and wailed.

* * *

I wore out my hysteria in the back of
Mom’s station wagon on the way to St. Mary’s, so I could be brave
for George.

“
I don’t know if this is
such a good idea,” Mom told me, her gaze snagging on my swollen
eyelids as we exited the car in the parking garage.

I dragged an arm across my face,
hoping to erase the tearstains. “We’re doing it,” I told her, iron
in my voice. I snorted back a wad of pain until it dropped to my
roiling stomach.

Mom wrapped me in a hug, pecked at my
forehead, which was suddenly aflame. “This will be hard,” she
warned. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of, if you need
to . . .” Her voice wavered. “We can leave
anytime.”

I didn’t want to leave George.
Ever.

In a haze of disbelief, I plodded
along behind her as we boarded an elevator to the skybridge, then
crossed to the zigzag corridors of the hospital. My vision
tunneled. Time stretched out, collapsed on itself, dissolved into
nothingness.

We met the Brookses in the
cafeteria.
She
was
halfway through a tuna fish sandwich.
He
had a shrink-wrapped blueberry
muffin dissected into bite-sized chunks, a crumb-caked knife
teetering on the rim of his plate. They exchanged solemn
pleasantries with my mother, then we all marched lockstep to the
third floor. Outside George’s room, we paused. A passing nurse eyed
us with pity.

“
He can’t speak,
obviously,” said Mr. Brooks. “But it’s possible that he can hear
. . . something.”

“
What about the tests?” my
mother asked gently. “Have you
heard . . . ?”

Mrs. Brooks gave a grim
nod:
He cannot continue.

He
has to
continue.

I swallowed nothing, my mouth the
consistency of baked sand. “Mind if I go in alone?”

The Brookses swapped inscrutable
looks. He held the door for me. “I’ll be right here,” my mother
said as I crossed the threshold.

George didn’t look like George. Nobody
had prepared me for that. I knew there’d be tubes and wires.
Machinery. Whirrs and blips and clacks. But some naïve part of me
had expected the peaceful repose drawn over the faces of the dead.
Instead, this George was alive, in the strictest sense of the word.
But he was also violently undone. And as motionless as he was, he
looked pained.

My feet made small, belated
steps. A voice inside my head chanted:
Fix
him! Fix him! Fix him!

The hospital bed was elevated
slightly, George’s head angled to accept the breathing apparatus
pinched over his mouth and nose. The impact of the crash—or perhaps
the brain surgery—had left him bandaged in gauze from the eyebrows
up. Still, there was blood to see. Unnerving splotches of pink and
red, black and brown. Cast over him as if he were a Jackson Pollock
canvas.

The rails of the hospital bed were up,
suggesting he had just been moved—or was about to be. I leaned over
the cool metal, the rail digging into my ribcage. “Hey there,” I
whispered, trying to keep my voice light and even, in case he could
hear.

Whirr. Blip. Clack.
Pause.
Whirr. Blip.
Clack.
Pause.

The urge to touch him overwhelmed me.
I ran a shaky palm along the inside of his forearm, scraped some
dried blood from his wrist with my fingernail. “You did a bad, bad
thing,” I said, overreaching for a joke.

If only he could laugh.

Or smile.

I’d lay down my life.

Right here, right now.

His eyes were shut, a touch of mercy
that allowed me to catch my breath. I rested my hand over his
heart, absorbed the gentle hiccupping of life against my skin. “I’m
sorry,” I murmured, “about everything I said before.” My resolve to
stay strong disintegrated, tears skidding down my cheeks in unruly
streams. “I never planned to go out with José,” I admitted. “I just
said that to”—a gasping sob escaped my mouth—“to make you
jealous.”

Wake up!
my subconscious screamed at him.
I need you! Can’t you see?

Almost imperceptibly, his
nose twitched.
Whirr. Blip. Clack.
Pause.
Whirr. Blip.
Clack.
Pause.

I went on with my apology:
“You’re my best friend. We’ve been through . . .
everything
together.
You’ve always been there. Taking care of me. Protecting me. Making
me laugh.” I gave a useless sniffle and, in a far-off voice, said,
“Why didn’t I ever tell you that?”

There was movement behind me, perhaps
a nurse poking in to replace the clear bag of fluid trickling into
George’s veins. I must’ve looked even more pitiful than I thought,
because the visitor retreated without interrupting, leaving George
and me to say our goodbyes in peace.

But suddenly words were meaningless.
Unworthy. Beyond my grasp. What could I possibly say that would be
a fitting end to him? To us?

Nothing.

Instead, I fiddled with the hospital
bed until I figured out how to lower its rails, allowing me
unfettered access to George—or at least the perfect human specimen
of a body he’d been born into sixteen short years ago. “I love
you,” I told him, soft and low, the syllables sweet and weighty on
my lips. I shot an over-the-shoulder glance at the door, then
climbed carefully into bed beside him. His skin was warm, though
bruised and unresponsive. I snuggled into the crook of his
shoulder, let my lips brush his neck, my arm drape intimately
across his waist, my hand settle on his hipbone, which was
protruding through the threadbare hospital gown.

It was the closest George and I had
ever been, physically, emotionally, spiritually. Yet we were also
far apart. Too far, even, for the pulsing beat of love to
conquer.

Whirr. Blip. Clack.
Pause.
Whirr. Blip.
Clack.
Pause.

He cannot
continue.

On the wings of sleep, I murmured, “I
know.”

chapter 18

Aleks, Haley, and I have just finished
a nervous lunch of chicken noodle soup and saltine crackers when an
urgent rap on the door startles us.

A round of hesitant glances
crisscrosses the table. “Oh-oh,” says Haley ominously.

I look to Aleks. “Should we answer
it?”

He slips out of his chair and goes to
the window. “It’s him.”

There’s only one “him” he could be
referring to: Mr. Brooks.

“
I’ll get Mom,” Haley
declares, hopping up and heading for our home office.

“
Oh my God,” I say,
picturing a bloodbath of a showdown with submachine guns and rocket
launchers. I mean, these
are
Russian spies we’re dealing with here. The rapping
stops, then starts up again. “What’s he doing?” I ask.

“
Well, not going away,
apparently,” Aleks says. I can’t tell whether he’s panic-stricken
like me or itching for a fight.

“
It looks more suspicious
if we
don’t
answer, right?” I say, sneaking over to the door and bracing
my hand on the knob. As soon as I hear Haley and Mom marching up
behind me, I ease the door ajar. “Oh, hi,” I say, as if I’m
surprised to see the man.

His eyes seem to have grown two sizes.
“May I come in?” he asks in a clipped tone, his jittery hands
wringing.

Mom reaches past me and pulls the door
wide open. “Yes, please do,” she says with absolute sincerity, even
though she’s never really liked the Brookses.

I’m trapped behind the door for the
time it takes Mr. Brooks to act upon Mom’s offer. Once he’s solidly
in the kitchen, he hesitates over how to proceed.

The four of us stare him
down.

“
Everything okay?” my
mother asks, motioning for him to sit, although the rest of us are
standing.

He ignores her directive,
puts his back to the refrigerator and says, “It seems there’s been
some”—his gaze searches our faces, one by one—“
unusual activity
next door. I was
wondering if you’d seen anything.”

Mom can’t—or doesn’t—control her
surprise, which makes us look less guilty. “You mean a break-in?
You were burglarized?”

“
So it seems.”

She rests a consoling hand on his
forearm. “Are you all right? What about Lillian?”

He bobbles his head. “Fine. Just
fine,” he says. “But I’m afraid the miscreants made off with some
valuables. Important documents. Even George’s birth certificate.”
He raises an eyebrow at Aleks.