Sing

CHAPTER 42.

MONICA

People in movies, apparently, manage to obtain reflexes in moments of stress, and the rest of us dream that this will happen to us; that when we’re at the edge of the cliff we can jump to safety, or to rescue, magically stronger and faster then 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 that we’re not challenged enough.

That never happens, of course, because you know, 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.

This was my purpose. Every choice I’d made had led me here. If I denied it, I’d be the walking dead.

Humanity scurrying, 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 the thumbs up and continued, 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 was going to get caught and I was going to take my lumps. Shame. Prison. A destroyed career.

Patalano’s hallway was clear. Declan must have taken care of this. A fire drill was a diversion so obvious, the police would have planned for it and 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, like I was walking into a familiar place. The whoosh and hum of the machines was drowned out by the siren. They 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 it. Nothing happened. I don’t know what I was checking for, or what about this mattered. He was brain dead. His body was a life system for a functioning heart muscle. End of story. I tore myself away from him and 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 this was going to be simple?

I flipped any switch I could get my hand on, and though the thing whined, there was no way to tell if what I was doing was having the necessary effect.

“That does absolutely nothing,” came a voice from behind me. I recognized it immediately in its shocking cold efficiency. 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.

“Listen,” 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 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 could hear the forced breaths, and if I listened closely, the fluid running through the catheter and the beating of a superfluous heart.

“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 in my knee, and a twist in 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, so 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 like 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 like 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.

“Yes?” I answered.

“Can you come with us?” the lady cop asked.” My heart sank. They’d come for me, despite the unkinking of 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.