by Britney King
TWO DAYS after she returned home, Ann texted, and asked me to come down and help her with the hotline.
To be honest, I wanted to say no. I could just as easily field calls from the comfort of my own home. But the messy truth is, I missed her.
I’m afraid that we are living on borrowed time, the two of us so, how could I not agree to her request for help?
Let yourself in, she texted. I’ll be in my office.
I did as she asked, and I did find that she was in her office. But then, so was my handyman. Neither one of them were dressed, and they were doing what Ann said was trouble.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
SADIE
“I know you’re angry at me,” Ann says when she phones later that evening. “But it’s not like I meant for it to happen.”
“What about Paul?” I ask, a question that has been weighing on my mind, really, more than any other. “I thought the two of you were happy…”
“Of course we’re happy.”
“Then why would you—”
“I did this for you, Sadie.”
“For me?”
“Yes, for you. You get yourself tangled up in these situations, and sometimes it’s like I just can’t get through to you.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about—”
“Look,” she interrupts. Her voice is cold, but the bite is almost gone. “You think you know things, but there are a lot of things you can’t know.”
I don’t have a proper response for her. I’m too irate. I can’t see straight, much less possibly formulate coherent thoughts and turn them into words that she will understand. What she has done is unforgivable. And worse, she dragged Chet into the mix.
“Anyway,” she says like a confession. “I didn’t want this to happen.”
“But it did happen.”
“Oh, Sadie, love. This is what you should know about liars, cheats, and deceivers: It’s easy for someone to show up in your life and tell you that they love you; it’s much more difficult for them to demonstrate that love consistently. That’s why Chet couldn’t say no to me. He doesn’t love you. Which means he isn’t worth your time.”
“It wasn’t about love.”
“That’s where you’re fooling yourself. Everything is.”
I hear someone speaking to her in the background. She places her hand over the speaker, then I get muted. When she comes back on the line, her tone has gone from indignant to sanguine. “Anyway, even you can’t turn a blind eye to what this means. It’s opened a door for us; we’ve turned a corner. I know your secrets— and now you know one of mine.”
“One of them?”
“Everyone has secrets, darling. You know that. Although, that’s not why I called. I have a favor to ask of you.”
She is impetuous, and I am half in love with her, and so I say the only thing in the world that makes any sense. “What?”
“We’ll discuss that later,” she says quickly. “I just wanted to know you’re not terribly mad.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine. But you will be. Soon enough you’ll see that this was for the best. One day down the line, when you and Ethan have reconciled, you’ll understand. Sometimes you have to tear things down before you can rebuild them.”
“We—” I try to tell her that I filed for divorce. I try to tell her that she’s just fucked up the one bright spot I had in my life. But as usual, she cuts me off before I get the chance.
“We can’t let a man come between us, Sadie. Not now. Not ever.”
I don’t say anything. What would be the point? She’s already won so completely.
“Oh and Sadie,” she whispers into the receiver. “That handyman of yours…let me tell you, he knows a thing or two about tearing things down and rebuilding. God, I wish you’d told me sooner. He is amazing in the sack.”
ANN FINDS her way into my bedroom. The clock beside my bed reads 12:43 a.m. She climbs under the covers and slips her hand up my T-shirt. I ask her helplessly how she got in. She says she ripped the key off of Chet, of course. She tells me she’s very resourceful. But she proves it when she twists her fist in my hair and kisses me on the mouth. Hard and relentless, desperate and seeking. At first, I tell her no, but I wasn’t sleeping anyway and I suppose what she’s come for is better than lying there bored.
She heads south and I let her do what she does, not only because she does it well, but because she owes me after what she did with Chet. She whispers her secrets into the darkness and my thighs. We make love, and I don’t say no to that either, because she’s offering a kindness I want to take.
I don’t say no, because every love affair has its rituals. And because if she stops her brand of sorcery, I just might kill her for what she’s done, and like Ethan says, this is the kind of sex I like. He says it’s the only way I know how to connect. My husband is right. I know this because afterward, Ann orders me to get dressed. She says she has something she wants to show me. Something unbelievable.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
HER
I smell blood before I see it. She is asking for you, they tell me. Who they are referring to, I don’t yet know. I only know I hate blood, and this feels keenly like my worst nightmare.
Ann told me where we were going. To see Paul at work. I hadn’t really thought too far past that, which as it turns out is usually a mistake.
She leads me into an office, and then into an operating room, and the next thing I know I’m inhaling burning flesh.
The room is cold and sterile. About like you might expect. There’s music. Classical. It almost, but not quite drowns out the whirling and the buzzing of the machines. I hate surgery, I say to Ann. She smiles and tells me to hold my breath, it’ll all be over soon. She reminds me of my mother in that way.
I don’t listen about the breath holding, a pity really, because something smells like barbecue and now I realize I’ll have to hate barbecue forever. A day will never come again when the smell of it will not remind me of flesh opened up.
But how could I not want to see this for myself, Ann demands, as I hurl into a bag she has shoved into my face. She was asking for you, after all, she says incredulously, and then she tells me it’s sort of my fault that she’s here.
If I weren’t in the process of wrenching up my guts, I would remind her of what she says in her book: Guilt is a useless emotion.
She grins proudly as I wipe the remnants of the contents of my stomach from my mouth with the back of my hand. You’re very sexy when you’re vulnerable, she tells me, and that’s when I hear the small voice. She’s there, Ann says. Behind the partition.
“Please,” the girl pleads. I step around so that we’re face-to-face. Her eyes are wild. “Please don’t let them do this.”
“It’s going to be okay,” I say. I don’t really know this, of course. But sometimes you have to lie in order to tell a greater truth.
“No,” she cries. Her hair is matted. She’s put up quite a fight, Ann says. “I’m sorry,” the girl says. Her breath is ragged, and her face is as white as the lights shining down on her. “I’m going to die, aren’t I?”
“Shhh,” I whisper, patting her hand. “Are you in pain?”
She shakes her head from side to side to the extent that she can. “That’s good,” I tell her as my fingers brush against her restraint. She flinches. It’s subtle, but we both notice. I release her hand and walk around the table in order to have a word with Paul, as much as I’d rather not. “What is going on?”
“Come with me,” Ann says, and she’s whisking me back around to the other side where the patient is crying. “Paul needs to focus.”
“I don’t want to die,” the girl says. I don’t tell her she isn’t going to die, because the truth is, I don’t know. The best I can offer her is a reassuring smile.
“It’s funny,” Ann says. “All they can think about is dying, and then you get them on the table, and it’s the last thing they want.”
“Who
is she?”
“Kelsey,” she replies hollowly. “From the hotline.”
I watch as Ann injects more drugs into her IV. Paul leans over the partition and offers a furtive glance, a knowing look. He’s good at reading facial expressions and mine asks why she isn’t asleep. Mine asks what the hell is going on.
“Why?” the girl manages around sobs. “Why me?”
Ann watches me carefully. She tells me not to worry. She says they always ask these things. “Don’t worry,” I say to Kelsey. “The doctor is very good. He’ll take care of you.”
Her eyelids flutter before they close completely. Maybe it’s the drugs, maybe it’s resignation. Only time will tell. “This is what I had to show you,” Ann exclaims. “It’s the final secret between us.”
I’m not sure I follow. She senses this. “This is the reason for the hotline,” she motions toward the girl’s head. She’s
very pretty. Her face is nearly angelic when she isn’t crying. “We’re traders.”
“What’s a trader?”
“We give those who want to live the chance.”
I know there’s more. “And?”
“And the ones who don’t—the ones who call seeking a way out—they give their organs.”
“What my wife means to say is—we’re matchmakers.”
“But Kelsey isn’t dead.”
“She’s one of the lucky ones,” Ann tells me. “Sometimes, we give repeat callers something to be grateful for.”
“Like a new lease on life,” Paul interjects.
“Or we help them die,” Ann shrugs. “It depends—it’s an art—not an exact science.”
“It’s pretty exact, dear,” Paul counters.
They have an entire argument, as Paul cuts and sucks and extracts, about the exactness of medicine in the modern world. It lasts an age, and at the end, even I am not sure who came out victorious. Ann says life is like that. She then goes on to explain how they can’t save everyone but they can save someone. Someone, she tells me, who is a fighter, someone who has the will to live.
The girl doesn’t speak again. Paul echoes his wife. She’s a lucky girl, he assures me. He says he’s only taking a kidney. It could have been worse. I’m lucky too, Ann wants me to know. Lucky that it wasn’t.
I ask what I’m doing here. I ask her what will happen if the girl talks. She won’t, Paul says. He doesn’t expand on why, and I don’t ask him to.
“You know that old saying?” Ann asks. “You sweat in practice so that you don’t bleed in the game? Well, it carries a lot of truth.”
A kidney is good for my first assist, Paul says.
It’s not as bad as the corneas, Ann says.
Or bone, Paul agrees. Bone is almost as bad as taking a person’s eye, he says. Skin is particularly messy. It takes forever.
Lungs are arduous.
Hearts are tricky.
CHAPTER FORTY
SADIE
Ann is just standing there, dropping bombs. Telling me how it all started, telling me how much she is helping people, telling me how much money there is to be made selling organs to those in need. But mostly, she’s saying it isn’t about that at all.
It’s a slow morning for the hotline, something that I now know to be grateful for. Gratitude expands, Ann says, the more you practice it.
Except, I’m kind of not grateful all of a sudden, because Ann keeps talking, and it goes on forever and it never ends.
She’s telling me what a relief it is to have everything out in the open. She’s saying she’s been on the hunt for someone like me, for a partner, for too long. Penny Lane seemed like as good a place as any to find what she was looking for. She’s telling me that when we met, she just knew. Right from the start, all of her prayers had been answered.
I was it.
Forever and always.
Her twin flame.
I don’t even know what that means. Ethan is my soul mate, and I was under the impression we were only allowed one of those. But maybe I’ve gotten it wrong. I’d ask—but I know how she gets whenever I bring him up, so, I might as well save it.
Not that I could get a word in, even if I wanted to. Ann is pacing. She’s rummaging through drawers. She’s flinging things around the room. All the while, her mouth is moving a mile a minute.
It feels a bit strange to see her flying off the handle. Maybe this is her undoing, her unraveling. Maybe I should be concerned. After all, she’s entrusting me with so much. Little does she know if she’d just shut up for a second, I have a plot twist of my own.
There’s time for that. For now, I’ll let her have it. She has come alive under the weight of her words: she’s dramatic and wild. She’s beautiful and scary; she’s unpredictable and precious. As always, everything is about her. And, this moment, this morning, is no different.
She does this sometimes, I’ve come to realize. Overcompensates. It’s the reason for her parties, her over-parenting, and her strange obsession with making sure Paul is incessantly happy. I tell her she needs to slow down, take it easy, and let me help. She says it’s nothing—she swears everything is fine—especially now. She assures me that I am helping. But she can’t know what I know.
She says it’s probably just a touch of resistance over her writing that has her so worked up. It’s the new book. There’s so much pressure. I can’t imagine. “Oh God,” she cries. It could be writer’s block coming on. Apparently, there are no atheists when it comes to book deadlines.
But I know better.
It’s not about the book.
It’s not about the organs.
It’s not about the pressure.
It’s none of those things.
Ann is avoiding the truth. She has elaborate ways of going about it, not unlike the rest of us. Her fans, all the people she is trying to help…she’s no different. It’s far easier to pick apart other people’s inadequacies rather than face your own.
“Look at this place,” she says, and believe me, I am looking. Her office is a wreck, not entirely unlike the rest of her life is about to be. Copies of her manuscript, marked up in red ink, are spread out everywhere. There’s a method to her madness, she swears. “Oh, Sadie,” she cries. “I’ve got to get myself together. Paul is due home this evening.”
“Sit down,” I say. “Let me help.”
She doesn’t budge, and I make a move to start tidying up. But I know better than to touch her work. That, I steer clear of. She’s more sensitive about it than most things. Well, most everything aside from what I’m about to bring up.
Momentum is momentum, and once the decision is made, I can’t stop myself. After all, as she would tell you, these are the kinds of risks you take when you love a person. When you want the best for them. When you really see them for who they are, not what they want you to see.
When the room is tidy, the only thing left to do is to tackle the bigger mess. “Sit down,” I say again. I motion toward the chair I had been sitting in. “There’s something I need to tell you.”
“It’s about Amelia,” she says. “Isn’t it?”
Ann knows things. She always knows.
“Yes,” I admit. “It is.”
She doesn’t sit. She picks up her manuscript and shuffles it. Then she glares at me. With her eyes. With everything she is. She knows that what I am going to tell her is going to change everything. Eventually, she sighs. She goes to the office window and stares out over Penny Lane. “She’s sleeping with her math tutor, isn’t she?”
“He tutors her?”
“Yes,” she tells me. “After school.”
I hadn’t realized.
“I saw them together,” I confess. “I thought you should know.”
She says, “I’m going to kill that bastard.”
I say, “Let’s be rational.”
“That is rational. Men like that, Sadie, they never stop.”
“So…what? You’re going to kill him?”
“Did you ever expect any other outcome?”
“No.” Not really. “How?”
I wait for her to answer. Instead, she scrolls through her phone. I don’t think the answer can be found there, but maybe I am wrong. “I haven’t decided yet…”
“What if you didn’t?” I say. “What if there were a better way? What if you went to the police?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she snaps. “What good would that do?”
“They’ll put him in jail.”
“So?”
“So, he’ll be punished for what he did.”
“Sometimes,” Ann tells me, “punishment isn’t enough.”
I WAS afraid Ann might do something risky. Something riskier than all of the other things put together. I’d never seen her that upset, or that angry, to tell the truth.
This is why I confronted Ethan at work that afternoon. I knew he wouldn’t expect it, not there, and I knew the ball was in my court.
Of course, he denied anything inappropriate was going on. But it was clear in the snow-white color of his face and the stunned look in his eye that he was lying. I told him her parents knew. I told him I was going to the police the following morning if he didn’t go directly there himself and confess to engaging in a sexual relationship with a minor.
He looked at me. I could tell he was trying to gauge whether or not I was serious, and I could tell he’d made his decision when he ran his fingers through his hair and swore she said she was eighteen.
Sixteen, I said. She’s sixteen.
I’m sorry, he said.
I know, I said. But not half as sorry as you’re going to be.
Help me, he said.
I smiled and told him I was.
Afterward, I texted Ann and told her what I’d done.
That was brave of you Sadie, she wrote back. Call you later.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
HER
Of everyone, she means the most to me. My little girl. I can recall vividly the day we brought her home from the hospital. She was so tiny, so wrinkled and pink. She was and still is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
I’d hoped she would turn out to be a boy, because a part of me always knew it would come to this. There is only one other person I have ever loved more, and that is her mother. The day she was born was the day I realized an even greater love was possible, and that I would do whatever was in my power to protect it all. Forever.