Someone Else's Love Story

by Joshilyn Jackson

  Natty’s psychologist convinced Shandi that direct interaction might be too stressful. She modified William’s plan. While William set up his MacBook in the hospital cafeteria, Shandi walked Natty through a quiet wing of the hospital. She showed him beds full of ­people resting, explaining that hurt ­people have to lie down, and that doctors and nurses are there checking on them, every minute. The psychologist told her how to explain a coma to a three-­year-­old, and she did that, too. That part went well; now they are in stage two.

  Shandi and Natty sit by the MacBook, running FaceTime. William and his iPad are on their way upstairs to Stevie’s room. With the iPad’s camera, William can show Natty reassuring things from a safe distance: the cop outside the door, the peaceful room, Stevie lying motionless and quiet. William can send select still images or a live-­feed video, depending on how upsetting Stevie’s tubes are.

  William passes the nurses’ station. It’s technically illegal for William, the victim in a crime, to visit Stevie, but Stevie was transferred out of ICU after they took him off the ventilator. They needed the bed, so he has become the floor nurse’s problem until he can be moved to a long-­term care facility. William waves at the young nurse manning it, and she waves back, smiling. The only true barrier is the cop outside the door, and Detective Bialys has cleared it with him.

  William turns right, following the room numbers as they rise toward Stevie’s. He’s only a few rooms away when he passes a short, stump-­ended branch of hallway that only goes left. It’s little more than a nook containing a few chairs, a magazine rack, and a Coke machine.

  There is a girl sitting in one of the chairs. She’s so familiar that he pauses. He cannot place her, but he knows this profile, knows this chopped, flat fall of burgundy-­brown hair. He takes two steps toward her. She senses it and turns her face to him. She gasps and leaps to her feet. She knows him too, this very curvy girl wedged into a tight skirt, her large breasts tumbling out of a low-­cut V-­neck T-­shirt.

  A black and yellow bird is tattooed on one breast. He knows this bird, this thing with feathers, and he recognizes her even before her mouth opens into a surprised O, showing him the front teeth, broken off to stumps.

  It’s the weeping clerk from the Circle K, out of context in this waiting area off the hallway to Stevie’s room.

  She tries to dash past him, angling left, but William matches her movement and blocks her in.

  “Are we going to have a chase?” he asks, incredulous.

  She gulps and her eyes roll around as she backs toward the Coke machine. He follows her into the alcove, and at his advance, she panics. She runs at him again, faking left before trying to dart right, telegraphing every move. William back-steps and matches her, blocking her path but avoiding actual contact.

  William has put it together by then. She belongs to Stevie.

  She is the reason Stevie knew when the Grants would be emptying their cash safe and making their weekly bank run. He can’t help but admire how cool she was—­how cool she and Stevie both were—­working to seem unconnected. Stevie made her lie down on the floor with the rest of them. Even after the robbery went sour, he kept her up against the hostage wall, protecting her. The whole time she was his mate, her real fear making it easier to crouch and hide among them.

  She pauses, and her eyes twitch back and forth in their sockets, seeking a way around him. He flexes his hands, spreading his arms out wide so she can take in the size of him.

  He says, “It’s no good. I’ll catch you.”

  The stumps of her teeth bite down on her lower lip, and William has to stop himself from flinching. His tongue runs over the surface of his own teeth, checking them, and the motion causes a wave of déjà vu.

  The clerk backs up to the closest chair. She plops down into it and slumps there in a heap.

  Another piece clicks into place, and William says, “Did you set my car on fire?”

  She hunches down, curling even farther around her own middle.

  “No?” she says. It lilts up, asking if he will accept the lie.

  But the timing fits. Earlier that day, the uncle agreed to remove Stevie from the ventilator.

  “You set my car on fire,” he says, not a question now. “Get up.”

  The cop outside Stevie’s door can cuff her to something and call Bialys to come get her. She rises to her feet, still hunched, her elbows bent so that her hands cup at her belly. He looks at her hands, pressing into herself. The clerk, in the Circle K, was built like a taller, fuller version of Shandi. Shandi is a figure eight, her center impossibly narrow, but this girl’s middle has thickened. Her hands press into her abdomen, shielding it.

  She’s pregnant. Not hugely so. Not yet. But enough for him to see it, now that he is looking.

  I’m a daddy, too, Steven Parch said. William heard it as a boast, but perhaps it was a message to the mother of his child, sitting with her back against the hostage wall.

  Steven Parch’s child exists.

  His earpiece chirps. He checks the phone. Shandi, wondering why he hasn’t made the FaceTime connection yet.

  He taps his Bluetooth and says, “I ran into some red tape. Give me a minute? I still have to check in with the cop.”

  “Okay,” she says.

  He clicks off, as phone efficient as Bialys, though her breath was on the intake, prepping for more words. He hopes that they were only pleasantries. All his focus is here.

  Tears are spilling down the clerk’s cheeks, making black mascara tracks. Now she looks more like the girl that he remembers.

  “What’s your name?” he asks her. He has forgotten it.

  “Carrie,” she says. “Carrie Miller. What are you going to do?”

  What should he do with a pregnant girl, one stupid enough to come creeping around the edges of her own botched crime? She has probably been here most days, trying to overhear news of Stevie’s condition. Blowing ­people’s cars up, albeit poorly, when she’s gotten that news.

  “I don’t know,” he says.

  “If you make me leave, I think he’ll die. I’ve been sitting here praying him to be alive. Don’t make me go.” Her voice is thick with snot, and William’s neck and back are stiff with tension.

  Why is this day so full of awful, hopeless love? That young man spouting poetry, and now this damp, burbling girl. William is no better, racking himself into remembering the day he won his wife while staring at another woman’s bed. All this overblown, untenable human feeling, and to what end, when nobody gets out alive?

  Carrie crouches protectively over her pregnancy. She’s been hiding out in the hospital, though her presence is tantamount to a confession. A glimpse of her, and William put the whole thing together in a matter of seconds. Bialys wouldn’t have needed half that time.

  She should be arrested for her shitty car bomb, and her part in the robbery, too. She stands weeping and trembling with her hands wrapped around her gestating midline. What a worthless set of parents this poor spatter of hopefully multiplying cells has drawn.

  “Oh, fucking fuck,” William says. He can have her arrested later. “Come on. I’ll get you in to see him.”

  Now she stares at him with such wild hope that he can’t stand to look at her. He turns and grasps her elbow, and together they go out of the alcove and down to Stevie’s room.

  The cop outside is an old guy, reading some kind of novel. He stands as they approach.

  “I’m William,” he says, and they shake hands. He doesn’t explain Carrie, and the cop doesn’t ask.

  “You can go on in,” the cop says. He opens the door for them like a butler, and he closes it behind them.

  Carrie gasps when she sees Stevie. He is curled on his side, facing out into the room. His eyes are closed, and that’s good, for Natty. The more it looks like he is sleeping, the better. His hair is growing in, brown fuzz over the place where William hi
t him.

  Carrie starts toward him, but William still has her elbow. He clamps down on her.

  “Sit,” he says, and points to a chair by the window.

  “I need to—­”

  “No. There are more ­people downstairs, and this delay could make them come up here. You sit. I need to send them video, now. You stay out of the shots and don’t make sounds. You can get close to him later.” He doesn’t say while I decide what to do with you.

  Carrie subsides into the chair, but she never looks away from Stevie. She swallows and wrings her hands, leaning toward him in the chair. William can’t connect her rapt expression to the reality of the scrawny boy who is curled on his side. The Stevie she sees is probably no more realistic than Natty’s huge fanged version.

  William connects to the laptop with FaceTime. He is careful to hold his iPad at an angle that shows only his face and the wall behind him. Not Stevie yet, and certainly not Carrie. On the screen, he can see Shandi, with Natty on her lap. Natty has one finger in his mouth, sucking it. Shandi, peeking from behind him, looks tense.

  William makes a relaxed smile and says, “Hello, Natty.”

  “Is he there?” Natty says. His voice is very low.

  “Yes. I’m in his room, and you see that I’m fine. It is very quiet here, because of the coma. Stevie is here, sleeping, and that’s all he does. All day and night. All the time.” These are lines from the doctor’s script. Shandi went over it with him. He is to describe the coma as a special kind of permanent sleeping. “Do you want to see him?” William asks. There’s no reason to use still shots. Stevie is inert and his tubes are minimal, only some IV equipment and a clear line running up into his nose.

  “I’m scared of see him,” Natty says. He and Shandi have the same face, their eyebrows pushing inward, lips down. The turnips are worried.

  “I’m not,” William says.

  “But you aren’t scared of any things,” Natty says, and oh, but William wishes that was true.

  In the corner Carrie is trying to cry silently. William hopes they can’t hear her moist snuffling over the hum and beep of the machines in the room.

  “Could I see him only little bits?” Natty asks.

  William turns the camera, careful to keep Carrie out of it. He takes Natty on a small, fast tour of Stevie.

  “You see his eyes are closed?” he says.

  “Why do he beeps?” Natty says.

  “William?” Shandi says, and William flips the camera back to his own face.

  “The beeps are from his heart monitor,” he says. “They keep that on because Stevie is so quiet, all the time, they need it to know he’s all right. That tube is to feed him. He’s so sleepy, he can’t wake up to eat.”

  He shows the heart monitor, but angles the iPad camera so Natty can see part of Stevie, too.

  Natty says, “I don’t think that sleepy man is Stevie.” His voice sounds better. Less afraid.

  “It’s him,” William says. He goes closer to the bed, aiming the camera down to Stevie’s face. In Natty’s head, Stevie is seven feet tall with gun-­hands, so of course this version is unfamiliar. “You see?” The face has not changed. It is still short-nosed, puffy.

  After a pause Natty sucks his breath in, and he says, “That’s really Stevie.”

  “Yes,” William says. “He can’t come to your room anymore. He can’t go anywhere. Not ever. He’s very sick. He won’t get out of this bed anymore.”

  Natty says, “William? Why are you sad?”

  “I don’t mean to sound sad,” William says. It is expedient and often kind to lie to children, but William can’t do it. Not right now. He turns the camera to himself. Now all Natty can see is William’s face and the wall behind him. He looks and looks at Natty. Not Shandi, hovering worriedly behind him. And not beyond the iPad to the weeping girl, rocking the baby inside herself back and forth with her arms wrapped tight around it. “I’m sad because I’m the one who hurt him. It was the right thing to do. He had a gun, and he was doing a crime. I couldn’t let him hurt you or your mother, or the Grants.” He leaves Carrie out. She was never in danger. But he says these things both to Natty and to the girl who loves this sorry excuse for a man so much that she set William’s SUV on fire. “I’m sorry it turned out this way. I wish he would wake up. I only meant to stop him from hurting anyone.”

  Natty’s small face pushes forward so he fills the iPad screen. He peers through the technology at William’s face. “You want him to wake up?”

  “Yes,” William says. “Very much. He would go to jail, so you wouldn’t have to worry. But yes, I wish he would wake up and go there.”

  Natty thinks about it, then he says, “Me, too, then. I want him to wake up and go to jail. I could call him to wake up.”

  “It’s not likely he could hear you, Natty,” William says.

  William looks at Stevie’s face, and through the iPad he hears Natty say again, very loud, “Stevie!” Natty can’t see Stevie, only William, but he yells to Stevie anyway. “Stevie! You can wake up now!”

  Steven Parch’s eyes open.

  William feels his body flush into heat, though he knows intellectually that Parch’s open eyes mean nothing. Coma patients often open their eyes, even move their limbs, following an unconscious daily schedule. It is only the timing that makes it disconcerting.

  “He won’t wake up, Natty,” William says. William keeps his own face carefully neutral. Stevie’s open eyes stare into nothing. “I’ll be down in a few minutes, okay?”

  “Okay,” Natty says.

  William kills the connection and closes the iPad cover. He sets it aside on the rolling table by the hospital bed. The second the lid is closed, Carrie is across the room, leaning over Stevie.

  “Baby?” she says. She kisses his cheek, burrowing under the nose tube to kiss at his slack mouth.

  “It doesn’t mean anything,” William tells her.

  Carrie hovers over him anyway, and it sure as hell seems like Stevie is looking back.

  “Baby?” Carrie says, and Stevie blinks. His mouth works.

  “Wha happ’n?” Parch says, and his voice sounds rusty and unused.

  William rocks backward like he has been punched. Stevie’s eyes track the motion, and he looks past Carrie, blinking more at William, confused. “Did you . . . hit me?” Parch asks, and then Carrie leans in closer, blocking their view of each other.

  “Baby, baby, oh!” she cries.

  William keeps backing up, his heartbeat roaring and banging in his ears.

  William can hear Stevie’s rusty voice, saying, “Hey, honey.”

  “Oh, baby, oh, honey, oh,” Carrie says. She puts a lot of little kisses on his face.

  William wants to pull her back, away, but he can’t bring himself to touch her. This is not medically probable.

  His heart pounds in him and his rational mind begins lecturing, explaining very calmly that there was always a small chance that Stevie could wake up. Perhaps it is Carrie’s voice that called him back. There is plenty of scientific research suggesting that the voice of a loved one can be heard in a coma. This is coincidence. Or it is Carrie’s presence. There is no causal relationship between Natty’s order and Stevie’s awakening.

  “We need to get a doctor,” he hears himself say to Carrie, from very far away. “We need to get out of here.”

  “I won’t leave him!” she says.

  “Then you’ll go to prison,” William says.

  That pauses her. Her hand flies to her belly. He takes her arm at last, pulls her back. He wants out of here, too. This is so medically improbable it approaches infinity. William doesn’t want to be in the room with it.

  In this very hospital, when he was a patient one floor down, Shandi asked him, Do you believe in miracles? The Red Sea. A virgin birth. In one of the Gospels, William remembers, the product of a virgi
n birth stands well outside a tomb and calls, Lazarus, come forth.

  Stevie blinks and stares around, confused.

  William’s hand is clamped so hard on Carrie’s arm now he can feel the grind of her bone. He pulls her toward the door with him.

  “Don’t talk,” he says. He can’t be in this room.

  He opens the door and says to the cop, “He’s awake. He’s up. You need to get a nurse.” Even as he speaks he is moving. Pulling Carrie out and down the hall.

  “What?” the old cop says. “What?”

  William keeps walking, calling over his shoulder, “You know that we can’t be found here. I don’t want to cause you trouble. Get the nurse.”

  “You’re hurting me,” Carrie whines as he tows her around the corner. He tries to ease his grip. It was her voice in the room, no doubt. William is positive Stevie’s consciousness returned when she said Baby. That is how it must have been. There is research. He will not think about the fact that Natty, however technically, was born of a virgin.

  But wouldn’t Bridget love this? She would love this. If she were here she would be crowing at him, saying, In your face, Will! In your face!

  He thinks he might fall down. His head is light. His lungs are constricted. He pulls Carrie back into the alcove.

  “I need to be with Steeeevie,” Carrie says, but she wails it in a whisper.

  He releases her. “Run back there if you like, and go to prison.”

  She stays where she is, staring at him wild-­eyed. Panting. Her hands again press protectively against her thickened middle.

  “You’re gonna send me anyway,” she says, but her facial expression is a mix of crafty and hopeful.

  He puts his head down, blowing. There is nothing he can do for this stupid, pregnant girl and her stupider lover. They have made terrible choices involving reproduction and robberies. Her life is lurching toward a bad end, whether she goes back to the room or not, whether he turns her in or not. Even if he keeps his mouth shut, Bialys might still figure it out, or Stevie could sell her out for a reduced sentence.