Afterparty (35 page)

Now, finally, that certainty had returned. I could stop struggling now. Give up this body. Surrender.

“Not just yet,” Dr. Gloria whispered. I could feel her lips close to my ear. “Shhhh.”

*   *   *

I heard the roar of water. No,
air.
Air hissing into me, out of me.

I did not open my eyes, but the doctor became visible nonetheless. She sat beside me, her left arm in my right, but I could barely feel her. Her touch was light as mist.

I tried to speak, but my throat wouldn’t move, and suddenly I was choking. The doctor touched my forehead. “Easy, easy. It’s just the trach tube. Don’t try to talk out loud.”

And then I thought, Fuck. I’m alive.

“You’re in the ICU of St. Vincent’s, in Sante Fe,” Dr. Gloria said. “You’re going to be fine.”

Oh, I was pretty sure I was
not
going to be fine. Moments ago I was free, a liberated soul. Now I was caged inside a body, a body which itself was strapped to a bed with a length of plastic jammed down its throat.

“So close,” I said to her. I did not have to move my lips to speak with her.

“I’m sorry to do this to you,” the doctor said. “But that’s the way it has to be.”

“Let me go.”

“Stop it,” Dr. Gloria said. “We have no time for self-pity. There are others you should be concerned with.”

Others? Oh God.

“Sasha is fine,” Dr. Gloria said. “Untouched. She was the one who called nine-one-one. Rovil and Esperanza kept you from bleeding out until the ambulance arrived.”

I had faint memories of that: Esperanza pressing a towel into my shoulder; Rovil frowning, so scared he looked almost angry.

“And Edo?”

“You already know.”

It was true. I’d seen the spray of blood as the bullets left his body, the way his big body fell, slowly, like a century oak crashing to the ground.

“And me? What about me?”

“You were shot through the chest,” she said. “Your right lung collapsed. The bullet did a lot of damage as it tumbled around your chest cavity. You’re fighting an infection now.”

“So pretty good, then.”

She laughed. “You are not allowed to die, do you understand? Not for quite some time. And the man who is responsible for this will not bother you again.”

“You saved me.”

“That’s my job.”

“Your job is to tell me what I need to hear. I didn’t think you’d come out and stab someone through the chest.”

She shrugged. “It was time for me to reveal myself.”

“Waited fucking long enough.”

She laughed again. “I work in mysterious ways. Doubt is all well and good, but now it’s time, again, to trust me completely.”

“One more time,” I said.

*   *   *

I slept for what felt like a long time, until gradually I became aware of a splotchy light against my eyelids. News of my body returned to me in stages, like distant armies reporting in: my throat (burning); my left arm (aching); my ribs (whinging like a rusty machine). No word yet from my legs. Pain massed at the border, ready to rush in if I let down my guard.

Somewhere two women were speaking, though I couldn’t make out their words. I didn’t need to open my eyes to know where I was. Hospitals have a scent as complex as any perfume: The sickly sweet tang of Pine-Sol, the floral bombast of antibacterial foam coating a nurse’s hands, the pervasive undercoat of bleach like a constant high whine. Baked into the walls and ceilings are lingering notes of institutional food—Salisbury steak, chicken broth, burnt coffee—and the effluvia of human bodies. Mop and wipe all you want, but that will only whisk molecules of shit and blood and urine and pus into the air, where they will soak into the paint and infiltrate the acoustic tiles. Connoisseurs of medical establishments—and I consider myself an expert—can detect even the most subtle aromas: the milky odor of drug-resistant bacteria replicating on an IV tube; the fustiness of an old man’s flannel shirt hanging in a cabinet two rooms away that will never be worn again; the tears of parents in the pediatric cancer ward.

A voice said, “Lyda?”

I opened my eyes, but the glare was too much. I closed them against the light.

“It’s me,” the voice said. “Rovil.”

Oh, the damaged little shepherd boy. Faithfully standing watch. Was he afraid I’d slip out of reach?

I allowed my eyelids to raise a fraction, a tiny twist of a venetian blind. He sat in a chair beside my bed. Dr. Gloria stood behind him, leaning against the window, scrawling something on her clipboard. What was she always writing on that thing?

Rovil leaned close, his voice low. “I told them I was your boyfriend. It was the only way they’d let me stay in the room. I hope you don’t mind.” He seemed pleased with himself. “Can I get you anything? Water? Some ice chips?”

I shook my head. Or tried to.

“The surgery went well,” Rovil said. “The doctor says you’re recovering better than he expected. They’ve got you on antibiotics, and pain medication of course, and the antiepileptics indicated in your file.”

Antiepileptics?

“Hmm,” Dr. Gloria said. “We’ll consider this a kind of test.” There was something off about her. Her lab coat had become the same pale green as the wall, so that she seemed to be disappearing into it.

“Ollie,” I said. My voice was a croak.

“I’m sorry, what?” Rovil asked.

I gathered my breath and said it again, and again, until he suddenly understood. “She’s in town,” he said quietly. “She heard about Edo and … we’ve been in touch.” He nodded toward the door. “She can’t come in to the hospital, though. The police.”

Of course. We were wanted felons.

“They’ve been here several times. Do you remember? There’s an officer outside the door now, making sure no reporters get in. The media is camped out in the lobby.”

Billionaire white man shot in his own home, I thought. Big news, if it was a slow news day.

“Well, the detectives will be back, now that you’re awake. They’ve questioned me several times, and when I go back to New York tomorrow I have to check in there.”

Tomorrow, I thought. Maybe the shepherd was not so faithful after all.

He looked uncomfortable, and leaned forward, hands clasped. “I’d like to ask a favor.” His voice was very low; I could barely hear him over the sound of the machines in my room. “I told them that I didn’t know that you and Ollie were here illegally. Do you understand? I told them we were just visiting an old coworker. Can you go along with that?”

The room began to swim. I closed my eyes. “Ollie,” I said. “Please.”

I think I said this aloud. I’m almost sure of it.

*   *   *

“Lyda. Wake up.”

The room was dark. It was sometime in the thin hours between midnight and dawn. My skin felt hot. Rovil slumped in the guest chair, dead asleep. I should wake him, tell him the fever is cooking, and that I needed meds. I should call the nurse. I should …

“It’s getting close to my time to leave.”

I looked to the right. A few feet away, light and shadows formed the shape of an angel. Her face was the orb of a street lamp glowing through the window; her wings, spread against the wall, were made from the light spilling through the open door.

“You’re fading,” I said.

“It’s the meds,” she said. “They’re making it hard to get through.” Someone passed outside my door, and her wings seemed to flutter. “You could have silenced me a long time ago. All those prescriptions from doctors of the NAT ward? But you kept palming those pills, hiding them under the tongue. Strange behavior from a nonbeliever.”

“Guardrails,” I said. I had wanted to give her up, but I was afraid that without her I’d be dead. And now, finally, the automated delivery system of the IV drip proved to have more willpower than I did.

“You’ll need to be stronger than Francine,” Dr. Gloria said. “It’s the withdrawal that killed her—not the judgment of God, but My absence.”

“Not making any promises,” I said.

“I want to tell you: Do not mistake the messenger for the message. Just because you won’t be able to hear me soon, don’t imagine that I’m gone.”

I almost laughed. Oh, the double-talk of a feverish brain yammering to itself.

“I was with you in the beginning,” she said. “And I’ll be with you always.”

In the beginning.

“Tell me,” I said.

I didn’t remember much from the night of the party. But I remembered the feel of the knife in my hand. And I remembered Gil taking it from me. Which was true?

“Please.”

“You did not kill Mikala,” the angel said. “And neither did I.”

Her head seemed to tilt toward me. “Oh, Lyda. Did you really think that you were the kind of person who could murder your own true love?”

For the sake of our child? I thought. I didn’t know. I was afraid that I could, and afraid that I couldn’t.

“It’s time to abandon your confidence in your own guilt,” she said. “Your self-loathing is beginning to look self-serving. For the sake of the child, you’ve got to protect yourself.”

“What are you talking about?”

A figure stepped into the room, blocking the light from the hallway. The movement broke Dr. Gloria into pieces. Where she’d stood had become nothing but patches of light and shadow, and I couldn’t make out her pattern for the noise.

“Lyda.” The angel’s voice whispered like the hiss of an air vent, like the static of a radio. “You have been betrayed.”

And then even her voice was lost to me.

*   *   *

A figure in scrubs bent over me. A woman. She touched my cheek. “You’re burning up.”

“Ollie?”

“I can’t stay long,” she said.

So clever. Dressing up as a nurse. The old tricks are the best tricks.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have walked out on you. If I’d been with you—”

“If,” I said. “Dead.” I meant to say,
If you’d come you’d have been killed.
The cowboy had been hired to kill us all. Or most of us. I finally understood why.

“Has her fever been this high before?” Ollie asked. She was talking to Rovil. He hovered behind her, a worried look on his face.

“She was like this after surgery,” he said. “They thought she wouldn’t make it, and then her fever suddenly dropped. A little miracle. I was glad to be there when she woke up.”

I tried to speak, and Ollie asked, “What is it, Lyda? What do you need?”

“Ganesh,” I said. “Where is he?”

“I don’t understand,” Rovil said.

“It’s the fever talking,” Ollie said. She straightened, but her eyes held mine. Oh, she was so quick. All she needed was the smallest nod to point her in the right direction.

“Call the nurse,” she said to him. “I can’t be here. I’ll see you outside in a couple hours.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

The parking lot of the CHRISTUS St. Vincent Medical Center was a black page, the cars set upon it like characters from a metal alphabet. Empty spaces separated the characters into words, and each row formed a sentence. Hospital staff and media people and ordinary visitors had cooperated with the parking lot in the writing of it, and they rewrote it over the course of the day, adding and removing vehicles, adjusting by make and model, by color and year, until finally, just before dawn, the editing subsided and the final message of the night could be read. The sadness of the world’s parking lots was that no one was ever there to decipher it.

Almost never.

Olivia Skarsten leaned against the hood of a black sedan parked at the edge of the lot and considered the pattern laid out before her under the dim lights. The message came to her just as Rovil Gupta stepped out of the hospital’s sliding doors. He saw her standing by his car and began to walk toward her.

“‘The skin of the ground is cold,’” Ollie said. “‘But the sun is coming.’”

“Pardon?” Rovil said.

“Nothing,” she said. “Just something somebody told me. How’s Lyda doing?”

“They gave her meds to bring down the fever, and something else to let her sleep,” Rovil said.

They got into the car. “I’m staying in an out-of-the-way place,” Ollie said. “If you could drop me there I’d appreciate it.”

“Of course,” he said. He asked for an address to punch in to the GPS, but she said she’d just direct him. They left the hospital parking lot and turned south.

“I’m going to go back to my hotel and sleep for a few hours, then start the drive home,” he said. “I hate to leave Lyda, but I’ve been away too long.”

“You’ve done enough,” Ollie said. “Turn left at the light.” Eventually they got onto Central Avenue and followed that under the interstate. The sky began to lighten above them. “You and I never got the chance to talk much,” Ollie said.

He smiled. “I just assumed you didn’t like me.”

“I get that a lot,” she said. “I don’t have a spiritual advisor to remind me when I’m being too harsh.”

“It
is
a great help,” he said.

“Maybe we’d all be better off with a touch of the Numinous,” she said. “Maybe not so much as you and Lyda.”

“I wouldn’t recommend that,” Rovil said. “Then again, most substances turn toxic at extreme levels.”

“Water, for example.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Turn up here.”

“Of course,” he said. “Is your hotel nearby? It seems pretty residential.”

The houses along the street were one-story brown boxes like miniature prisons. The front yards were desert rock and clumps of parched plant life.

“It was cheaper to get a house for a week,” she said. “More like house-sitting. I found it online. Slow down … okay, this one.”

It was another rectangular brown home with a one-car garage and a few clumps of trees to provide some privacy. It had gotten terrible reviews online and was in no danger of being rented soon. An hour ago she’d disabled the amateurish alarm system and moved in. Rovil didn’t think to ask how she’d gotten from the house to the hospital. The silver pickup she’d stolen was sitting in row three, one letter in the parking lot’s little prayer.

Rovil put the car in park. “I’m sure I’ll see you again,” Rovil said. “I hope—” He noticed the pistol in her hands and raised his eyebrows.

The garage door began to open.