Hold Me Like a Breath

by Tiffany Schmidt

  Only in those moments when things went wrong—when lazy clouds were replaced by threats and storms, when someone got hurt or killed—only then did I stare down the reality of the Business through a haze of grief and funeral black. My fingers tensed on the edge of the seat.

  “Ignore him,” said Garrett. “He’s just pissy because the people we were supposed to meet with stood us up.”

  “Someone dared to no-show for a meeting with the mighty Carter Landlow?” I teased, hoping to break the gloom settling in the car like an unwelcome passenger. “I assumed it was a Business errand, but if someone stood you up, it must be a girl.”

  “No offense, Pen, but you don’t have a clue what’s going on in the Business.”

  “No offense, Carter, but you’re being a—”

  “Who wants to hear some songs about mattresses?” interrupted Garrett. He reached for the stereo, but Carter swatted his hand away.

  “I’m not an idiot,” I said. And wishing for things that had been denied for so long was idiotic. No less so than repeatedly bashing your head against a wall or touching a hot iron. I knew the answer was no, was always going to be no, so asking to be included in Family matters was like volunteering to be a punch line for one of the Ward brothers’ jokes.

  But I knew the basics. It wouldn’t be possible to live on the estate, spend so much time in the clinic, and not know. The first person to explain it to me had been my grandfather; fitting, since he was the man who’d reacted to the formation of FOTA—the Federal Organ and Tissue Association—by founding our Family.

  The same day I’d demanded a kidney for Kelly Forman, he’d sat me down and demonstrated using a plate of crackers and cheese. “When donation regulation was moved from the FDA to FOTA, they added more restrictions and testing.” He ate a few of the Ritz-brand “organs” on his plate, shuffled the empty cheese slices that represented humans who needed transplants. “This, combined with a population that’s living longer than ever before”—he plunked down several more slices of cheese—“created a smaller, slower supply and greater demand.” He built me an inside-out cheese-cracker-cheese sandwich. “It was a moment of opportunity, and when you see those in life, you take them.”

  This felt like a moment of opportunity. And not to prove that I wasn’t an idiot by listing all the facts I knew—about how the Families provided illegal transplants for the many, many people rejected from or buried at the bottom of the government lists. How more than two-thirds of those who made it through all the protocols to qualify for a spot on the official transplant list died before receiving an organ. Or to recite the unofficial Family motto: Landlows help people who can’t afford to wait, but can afford to pay.

  “Fine, tell me what I don’t know,” I said. “Tell me what’s going on, why you and Father are fighting, and what’s keeping you so busy. Tell me everything.”

  Garrett muttered something that sounded suspiciously like “Don’t do this,” but since my brother ignored him, I did too.

  Carter’s eyes met mine in the rearview mirror. “None of this leaves the car, Pen. I’m trusting you.”

  “I understand.” I sat a little straighter. “And I promise.”

  “Wait,” said Garrett. “Before we drag her into this, let’s just hear what she wanted to ask us. There was something you wanted, right, Penny?”

  I thought about my red folder. Underneath the blood count charts were stacks of glossy brochures, a pile of completed applications. Which did I want more: a future with school, a normal life, friends, or one that included the Family Business?

  “Pen?” prompted Carter. “Is everything okay?”

  “Everything’s really good actually.” I took a deep breath—maybe the two futures weren’t incompatible. Maybe I could have both. “My platelet counts have been decent since mid-May. I’ve gone more than seven weeks without needing an immunoglobulin infusion. That’s my longest in … years. I think I’m heading into another remission.”

  “Serious, Pen? That’s amazing!” Carter slapped his fist against the horn and matched its blaring noise with his own whoop!

  “Wow.” Garrett’s celebration wasn’t hand-waving and yelling. He’d gone still, except for a slight nod of his head and cautious grin. “What does Dr. Castillo say? Your parents?”

  “Dr. Castillo hasn’t said anything yet, not beyond, ‘your numbers still look good.’ But last week’s count was around eighty-five K—and that’s without any treatment for forever! While that’s not impressive for you guys with your several hundred thousand platelets, it’s significant for me. And if this is another remission, I want to take advantage of it.”

  When I was twelve I’d had ten months of steady, healthy, treatment-free counts. It had been a time of tentative parental hugs, nibbles at normalcy, and minutely planned trips off-estate.

  It was during one of these that everything came crashing down. During a fitting for my first bra, the clerk said, “You sure do bruise easily … and quickly.” She’d pointed to the purple stripe her measuring tape had created around my torso. I’d responded by bleeding from my nose and gums. Mother had screamed and screamed. Our driver, Dylan, had broken every traffic law rushing me back to the clinic, which I didn’t leave for a full week.

  One CBC later—platelet count four thousand—and I’d been back in lockdown.

  “Take advantage of it how?” asked Garrett.

  I gulped. This was my most cherished daydream, and I was handing it over for scrutiny. “I want to go to school in the fall.”

  “You hate Nolan that much?” joked Carter. “Though, after dealing with him in Business meetings this summer, I get it.”

  I gritted my teeth at the mention of Nolan. “Isn’t he the most frustrating man on the planet? But no. It wouldn’t matter who my tutor was. It’ll be my senior year and I haven’t been in a classroom since first grade. I just want … school, freedom. Friends! People my own age, so maybe you’ll stop teasing me for being a baby and talking like I’m sixty. I know I can do it, but Mother and Father … Say you’ll help me?”

  “Like, a school school?” One of Garrett’s hands gripped a handful of his jeans, the other clenched the side of Carter’s seat. He twisted so far around he was practically in my lap.

  “Why couldn’t she? Pen, I think it’s a great idea.”

  Garrett turned to glare at my brother. “Maybe because there’s a million things that could hurt her there? Plus, people. Lots of people. Your parents would have to hire her a guard.”

  “Carter didn’t have one,” I said.

  “He had—has—me.”

  “Gare.” Carter’s voice was a warning. “Don’t ruin this for her. There’s got to be a Family member somewhere that’s either her age or can pass for it. Doesn’t Glen from the South Carolina clinic have a son?”

  “Leo, who was caught trying to steal painkillers?” The knuckles on Garrett’s hand turned white as he clenched them tighter. “He’s not going anywhere near her.”

  “Eh, I’m sure my father had yours teach him a lesson. But hey, I know, let’s send you back to senior year. Maybe you’ll learn something this time and be able to keep up in college.”

  Garrett’s jaw locked, and he swallowed hard. “I’m not trying to ruin anything. I’m being realistic and playing devil’s advocate. Isn’t that why you told us, princess? So we can come up with the arguments your parents will use?”

  “Something like that,” I said softly. Though I wouldn’t have minded his support before he tore the idea apart.

  “Have you given any thought to a splenectomy?” asked Carter. “If they cut yours out, there’s a chance that would fix you, and you’d be good to go, right?”

  “Are you insane?” Garrett slapped his palm against the dashboard and looked as if he wanted to slap my brother. “You want her to have elective surgery to remove part of her body?”

  “Um …” I wanted to point out the irony of his statement: his salary, his schooling, his life were funded by people who chose elective surgery
to sell parts of their bodies, but all I could do was laugh.

  “Well, she’d have a heck of an experienced medical team,” Carter said before he gave into his own laughter.

  Garrett’s anger deflated into a chuckle too. “But you’re not going to?”

  “Right,” I reassured him. “My parents won’t even okay steroid treatment because of the side effects. A splenectomy definitely isn’t an option. And it’s not as simple as cut it out and all better. The results are mixed, and Dr. Castillo doesn’t think it would work for me.”

  “Okay,” he said. “And I really am happy you’re doing so well. If you want to go to—”

  A phone beeped with a text alert, almost immediately followed by a ringtone that cut through his words and made them jump. Carter picked up his cell, swore, showed the screen to Garrett, then swore again. All the buoyancy of freedom seemed to evaporate from the car.

  “Now? They blow us off earlier and expect us to answer now?” said Garrett.

  “Well, it’s not like these things can be scheduled,” replied Carter, jabbing the screen of his cell. “Hello?”

  He muttered low and furious into the phone while Garrett tried to distract me: “Did you pick a school? It’d have to be a day school, and one close to the estate.” He even went so far as to fix me with one of his heart-stopping grins and suggest, “Carter might’ve been on to something; I could still pass for a senior. I’ll have Jake go to college with him, and I’ll come hang out with you.”

  Carter hung up, still cursing. “We have to do the pickup.”

  Garrett’s grin disappeared. “No one else can do it?”

  He shook his head.

  “Pick up what?” I asked.

  Carter opened his mouth, but Garrett put a hand on his arm. “She’s seventeen, she wants to go to school. Let her be seventeen. There’s plenty of time to get her involved later.”

  “When we were seventeen we were already sitting on council, visiting the clinics, meeting with patients. She can’t even tell a kidney scar from a skin graft—she needs to catch up.”

  “She can make her own decisions, she is sitting right here, and she is coming along to whatever this mysterious pickup is, so she’s already involved,” I snapped.

  “You are not coming,” said Garrett.

  “We don’t have a choice, unless you want me to leave her on the side of the highway. This is our exit.” Carter was clutching his cell phone, shaking it as if that could erase whatever the text instructed him to do.

  Garrett groaned. “You’re staying in the car.”

  I hid my smile by looking out the window. It had gotten dark while we were driving, the dusky purple of summer evenings. On the estate these nights buzzed with a soundtrack of cicadas and crickets, but there was no nature outside the car. Nothing but concrete and pavement and cinder-block industrial construction. We pulled into a parking lot. A poorly lit, empty parking lot.

  “Where are we? What are we picking up?” I examined Garrett’s stiff posture and the bright gleam in my brother’s eyes. “Does Father know about this Business errand?”

  “No, and you’re not going to tell him,” Carter answered.

  “Oh, really? So what am I going to do?”

  “Stay in the car. Lock the doors. Keep the windows up.” Carter turned around to look me in the eye. “This isn’t a joke, Pen. If I’d known this was going to come up, I would’ve left you at home.”

  “Please, princess,” added Garrett in a soft voice, but his eyes didn’t leave the windshield, didn’t stop their scan of the parking lot.

  “Fine, but when you’re done, you’re filling me in. Then I can decide if I want to be part of it or not.” It was all false bravado. Each one of Carter’s statements tied another knot in my stomach; Garrett’s plea pulled them tighter.

  Carter dumped a half-dozen mints from the plastic container in his cup holder into his mouth—like his breath mattered, like this was a date not a disaster. He waved the container at us, but we shook our heads. He crunched the candies and said, “Gare, you’re hot, right?”

  I blurted out, “You can turn on the A/C, I’m not cold,” before I caught on: Garrett pulled a gun from a holster below the back of his shirt.

  They laughed, but it wasn’t funny to me. I’d been to too many funerals—they’d been to more. I wanted to ask how long he’d been “hot.” If he always had a gun on him. Had he when we went mini-golfing at Easter? Or the time last summer when I slipped on the pool deck and he’d carried me to the clinic? No. He couldn’t have then. He’d been wearing a swimsuit too—there’s no way he could’ve hidden a gun.

  So what had happened in the past year, and why was he carrying one now?

  Garrett was Family, he was a Ward, but he wasn’t supposed to follow his brothers’ footsteps. Or his father’s. They were enforcers, but he didn’t belong in their grim-faced, split-knuckles ranks. That was why he was in college with Carter—Garrett was going to be his right-hand man when my brother took over the Business.

  Not a thug with a gun.

  “Stay here, Pen,” Carter said again, then slipped out into the night. His keys still dangled from the ignition, the engine still hummed.

  Garrett lingered an extra moment. “This shouldn’t take long. And everything’s okay. I don’t want you to worry.”

  “I’m not.” I would’ve sounded believable if my voice wasn’t quivering. If I weren’t clutching fistfuls of my dress.

  “You’re cute when you’re worried.” Garrett winked, and then he too was out in the darkness and humidity and I was alone.

  I tried to lower my window—just a crack, enough to let in voices but not even mosquitoes—except Carter must’ve engaged some sort of child lock. I stared out the tinted glass, watched as their shadows grew gigantic on the wall as they approached the warehouse, then disappeared around its corner.

  No matter how hard I concentrated, my eyes couldn’t adjust enough to make sense of the dark. Maybe it was the placement of the parking lot lights—how I had to peer through them to see the warehouse beyond.

  After they’d left this afternoon, I’d rushed to the clinic to model different outfits for Caroline. She’d teased. We’d laughed. I’d blushed and daydreamed about the lovely combination of me, Garrett, and NYC.

  But in my daydreams, Garrett hadn’t been wearing a gun.

  And now we were parked somewhere made of shadows and secrets and fear that sat on my tongue like a bitter hard candy that wouldn’t dissolve.

  The car still smelled like them. Their seats were still warm when I leaned forward and pressed my hands against the leather. But I couldn’t see them. What if the dark decided never to spit them back out again?

  This wasn’t the Business as I knew it: secret transplant surgeries that took place at our six “Bed and Breakfasts” and “Spas” in Connecticut, Vermont, Maryland, Maine, Massachusetts, and South Carolina, where we saved people like Kelly Forman. She’d been ten when she needed a kidney transplant, but her chromosomal mutation—unrelated to her renal impairment— earned her a rejection from the Federal Organ and Tissue Agency’s lists. According to them, Down syndrome made her a “poor medical investment.” FOTA wrote her a death warrant. We saved her life.

  She graduated from high school a few weeks ago. The past nine years since we’d met—she wouldn’t have had those without the Family Business.

  That was enough. That was all I needed to know. Illegal or not, that was good.

  I heard something. A crack so sharp it echoed and seemed to fill the spaces between my bones, making me shiver. I prayed it was a car backfiring.

  Then it happened again.

  My stomach jumped to my throat, crowded out my lungs, and made it impossible to breathe. I tried the door handle, but it wouldn’t open. Not the first, second, or eighth time I jerked on it. Not even when I pulled hard enough for it to bite into the insides of my fingers.

  Terror was a thing with claws that squeezed my throat and demanded I keep yanking and yanking on th
e handle. It whispered my worst memories in my ear, flashbacks to my tenth birthday when we’d gotten news of an FBI raid at the Nantucket clinic. The local police on the Family payroll had failed to tip them off, so the staff hadn’t had time to activate the spa facade. Things had escalated quickly, badly: handcuffs, gunshots.

  A second call had come in while my family was singing “Happy Birthday”: Keith Ward had passed away from bullet wounds. The candles melted all over my Empire State Building cake; I’d been too busy gasping for air to blow them out. And what was the point? It was far too late to wish Garrett’s oldest brother would be all right.

  Keith had been a thug with a gun. Garrett … he couldn’t be.

  They had to be okay. They had to be.

  I was so focused on that noise and looking out the front of the car, it was perfectly reasonable that I jumped and screamed when I heard a thump behind me. The trunk opened. Something heavy thudded inside. The trunk shut. Carter and Garrett got back in the car, still laughing at me.

  “You scare too easily,” said Carter.

  I refused to let my relief escape in a sob or declaration that I loved him. “Yeah, well … not all of us make a habit of skulking around in shady places,” I finished lamely.

  “Skulking?” Garrett grinned. “Nice vocabulary. What’re you, fifty?”

  “Nope, she’s Nolan Jr. None of that hooligan teen-speak for our Penelope.”

  “Maybe I’d speak more like a teen if I ever got to spend time with any.” I’d tried for defiant, but it came out as wistful. I ground my teeth. “Stop distracting me. Were those gunshots? And were they yours? Did you just put a body in the trunk?”

  “A body?” scoffed Carter. “This isn’t The Godfather, Pen. We’re not a mafia out whacking people … although I’d kinda love to hear you say ‘fuhgeddaboutit’ in your prissy little voice.” His eyes were too bright, his forehead beaded with sweat, his smile stretched wide and smug.

  “I didn’t shoot anyone.” Garrett hit my brother on the arm. “Sorry we scared you.”