by Maggie Bloom
I’d lost track of the cereal, which explains how I whacked it off the couch when I sprang to my feet. “Oh, like you’re so innocent?” I said, feeling a wave of mixed emotions: hurt, anger, sadness, regret, wanting.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
I crossed my arms over my chest. “Nothing. Whatever.” After a huff, I added, “Everybody knows about you and Little Miss Goody Two-Shoes.”
“Huh?” He squinted so sincerely that I almost believed him.
The girl in question was Amanda Watts, the daughter of two Milbridge High teachers and a self-styled priss. I was shocked when George started dating her and blown away when rumors of their trysts rolled through school like a taunting thunderstorm. “Amanda,” is all I said, pulling a face that dared him to argue.
“What about Amanda?” he asked, taking the bait. They’d broken up six months earlier, maybe more, but he was still protective of her, the same way he was protective of me. I hated that most of all, even more than what they’d done together.
I gnawed at the inside of my cheek to stop from crying. “Forget it.”
“You brought it up,” he countered.
I stood there collecting my thoughts and steadying my breath. “I’m just saying that whatever I choose to do in my private life is none of your business. You’ve had your fun, and I can have mine too.”
“You’re out of line,” he told me. “Seriously.” He got on his feet, his jaw twitching.
“Well, if I’m so horrible, why don’t you”—this is the part that stings, because I’m sure it’s what pushed him over the edge—“why don’t you just leave.” I flailed my arm through the air. “I mean, it’s not like we have to be friends.”
He stepped backward and crunched the Lucky Charms box underfoot. As he turned to go, he said, “Call me when you get it together.”
“Don’t count on it!” I yelled after him. Without another word, he strode out of the living room—and out of my life.
From the bay window, I watched him disappear across the lawn and into his house. Then I swept up the cereal, crawled into bed and hugged myself to sleep. A short while later, the call from the hospital came in.
* * *
I pull back the living room curtains, terror coursing through my veins. “I think they’re coming,” I tell Haley and Aleks about the Brookses, although there’s no evidence beyond my guilty conscience to support such a claim. “Did you get rid of the masks?” Haley was supposed to schlep the incriminating things around the block and stuff them in an unsuspecting neighbor’s garbage can.
“Check,” my sister says, giving a peppy salute.
Aleks is lounging on the couch—the same couch where my relationship with George imploded—the nesting dolls huddled in a pile, the documents they’ve been protecting spread across the cushion beside him like a poker hand. “Find anything interesting?” I ask, having finally worked up the nerve to abandon my lookout post.
“Mmm . . .” he murmurs, his lips absently twisting. He studies a series of identification cards—driver’s licenses, passports, social security cards—that appear to have been issued to the Brookses under multiple aliases. He cherry picks the ones with Mr. Brooks’s image and fans them out in front of me. “It’s gotta be one of these,” he says, presumably referring to the identity Mr. Brooks used to kidnap George—or, well, Anatoly, “unless they destroyed it.”
Haley flops down on the couch, nearly launching the nesting dolls for the carpet. She wrenches the cards from Aleks, flips through them and then pawns them off on me.
“What if they call the cops?” I ask, a New York driver’s license in the name of Christopher Kent catching my eye. I draw it toward my face for a closer look, my gaze freezing on Mr. Brooks’s vacant stare.
Belatedly, Aleks replies, “They won’t call anyone.”
An unexpected connection between Christopher Kent and George leaps from the ID to my mind. “Oh my God,” I say, astonished. “He was the doctor.”
Haley shoots me a confused scowl. “Huh?”
I toss the other IDs into Aleks’s lap and blurt, “I’ll be right back.”
It takes me all of thirty seconds to zoom to my room, yank the memory box out from under my bed and nab George’s birth certificate. I’m so sure of myself that I don’t even bother double-checking my theory before racing back to the living room.
“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 nigh
tmare. 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 do
esn’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.
What a liar. There was no birth certificate in that pile. In fact, said document has been in my possession for years, so . . .
“Gee,” Mom says in her let-‘em-down-easy voice, “I’ve been holed up in my office all morning. Haven’t even had a chance to . . .” She glances about the kitchen, as if there are chores awaiting her attention. “Kids? Anyone notice anything out of order?”
Haley shrugs, twirls her hair around her finger. “Uh-uh.”
I squint as if I’m confused. “No. We were watching TV, and . . .”
“You should call the police,” Aleks interjects. “I’m sure they’d be interested in helping you recover those papers.”
Is he wacko?
Mr. Brooks appraises Aleks for a long moment. “Perhaps you’d accompany me next door while we await the authorities? Lillian is quite shaken. It would do her good to have some added protection around the house right now.”
It’s a trick, I want to shout. Don’t fall for it. Who knows what he’ll do to you once you’re in his clutches?
Aleks gives a smug grin that says: Game on. “Sure. My pleasure.”
I shoot Mom a pleading glance she can’t possibly interpret, given her lack of knowledge about the Brookses. “Um . . .” I start to say, not knowing where I’m going next.
“Let me get my sneakers,” Mom says, staring at her slippers as if she’s shocked to find them on her feet.
“That won’t be necessary,” Mr. Brooks states.
Haley nods in my direction. “Why don’t you go?”
“Yeah,” agrees Aleks. “Cassie and I will check things out. You guys stay here.”