Love Her Madly (31 page)

I noticed McMurphy was now staring at us. After a moment, he looked back at Cyn, stone-faced.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I did it again. I gave in too fast. I told myself I wouldn't cave to you and your pretty pink mouth without some proof, some real proof that your old life is done. What's his name?”

“Ryan. Think for a minute. I could tell you any name. How would you know?”

I cringed. Not the time for real talk, Cyn. I felt my heart pumping as McMurphy stared down at her dumbly, like a puzzled golden retriever.

“I don't have any reason to lie to you, Ryan. I wanted to see my friends, one last time. I'm sorry. But I've done it, and I'm yours now, for as long as you want.”

He shook his head and chuckled softly. “Very convincing. I don't even . . . know how you do it.” He looked up toward the ceiling as if blinking back tears, his pitch rising alarmingly. “You're so, so good at it. You hate me, despite everything. You despise me. I can see it. I'm not an idiot.”

“Ryan,” Cyn lifted her hands, palms open, desperation creeping into her voice. “Please—”

“No! I should turn you in myself. No, I should hold you for ransom. Get some big money for you from the motherfucking cartel. That would solve my problems, and it would serve you right.”

“No!” Glo shouted, releasing my hand.

Cyn raised her arm, gesturing for Glo to stay back, all the while keeping her eyes on McMurphy. Glo slipped past me, fast as the shadow of a passing jet, and I saw the dark holes that hid McMurphy's eyes turn toward her.

“Glo!” I yelled, my fingertips just brushing the hem of her blouse as she lurched forward into space.

I saw Cyn's face, white as a ghost, as she glanced over her shoulder and saw Glo rushing the stairs.

My life is over
, I thought as McMurphy's gun hand began to pivot toward Glo. My own body had finally settled on a response, which was to jump in the air, throwing my arms wide, in an attempt to wrest McMurphy's attention away from Glo. But it was too late.

I was staring right at them, fifteen feet away, and I'm still not sure exactly what happened those next few milliseconds. I know that Cyn jolted toward McMurphy, her elbows lifting like a bird about to take flight. I almost expected her to rise into the air, when in a stunning reversal, her body collapsed like a doll's, pounded earthward by a giant, unseen fist. Only then did I hear the bang, chased instantly by Glo's piercing shrieks. Glo dropped into a tight crouch on the steps, her panicked eyes meeting mine in the instant before she rolled for cover behind a row of seats. I watched, frozen, as McMurphy stared openmouthed at Cyn's body, crumpled at his feet.

“Oh. No,” he murmured. He looked at the gun in his hand, and then up at me.

Before I could even open my mouth to shout, he pressed the gun beneath his chin and pumped the trigger, hard. I saw it all in terrible detail. His crown exploded into a cloud of dark matter, and he dropped backward, collapsing at a sickening angle against the wall.

There was a second of utter stillness before Glo clambered,
sobbing, up the stairs to Cyn. Together, we turned Cyn over. I held her head. Her eyes were closed, dark blood was soaking her white dress. There was an open wound over her left breast, just where her heart must have been.

“Oh god, no,” Glo wailed. “Cyn!”

“Go upstairs. Call an ambulance,” I urged.

“Cyn!” she screamed, shaking her as if she could be readily awakened.

“Glo! Please get help. Hurry!”

She heard me. I watched her lurch over McMurphy's body and I heard the theater door slam behind her.

I held Cyn's body in my arms, and pressed my hands over her wound. I could feel her heart still pumping, faint and weak. Hot blood sluiced through my fingers at a pitiless rate, and I watched the skin around her eyes go paper white. I willed those eyes to open, and when they didn't, I found myself speaking to her, urging her to hang on, to keep it together, to not give up. My voice grew hoarse and my clothes became soaked with her blood, and with McMurphy's, which was dripping down the stairs in gruesome rivulets.

It's hard to say what I was thinking in those agonizingly long minutes before the firefighters arrived, followed in quick succession by the paramedics and then the police. Toward the end, as the color drained from Cyn's lips, I leaned close, and whispered all the true, sweet things that were the flip side of the vitriol I'd disgorged only moments before, in what already felt like a different lifetime. I wept as I asked her forgiveness and told her that she was loved, always. Forever. I wanted her to take that with her, to enter whatever was next fully wrapped in a shroud of love, as if that could mitigate the violence that had sent her there. I was so, so far from the perfect person to send her off, but I could offer her that much.
She was loved, Next World, she was. Please be kind
.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Glo

She didn't die. Not that day at least.

As the doctor explained it to me, the nose of the gun had bucked upward when McMurphy fired, sending the bullet on an upward slant through the space just above her heart, ripping a hole just millimeters away from her pulmonary artery. She was very lucky, he said, as if this were news to me.

She coded a few times in the ambulance. Raj told me as much. He rode with her to the hospital, bloody and stunned like the lone survivor from a horror movie, while I stayed behind to run interference with the cops. When the paramedics arrived and said she was still alive, I somehow had the wherewithal to get right on the phone with both the FBI and the State Department. It gave me something to focus on, and I also knew if her name were released, if she became a story again, her life would be over even if she survived. This time I would not fail.

The local police weren't exhibiting any willingness to listen to me until the FBI showed up, at which point things got a little easier. I convinced them it was worth it from an intelligence standpoint to pressure the NYPD into declaring a “Jane and John Doe situation” until Cyn's prognosis became clearer. The State Department was also happy to oblige, considering they were facing what looked like a scandalous and shameful crime
involving one of their own. I spent the next several days on the phone, stammering vague responses to questions for which I had no answers. “She'll tell you everything when she regains consciousness,” I uttered, over and over, the knot tightening in my stomach as I wondered if it were true. I was putting my reputation on the line on the basis of Cyn's promises of future information, and in truth, I had no idea if she really knew anything at all.

Meanwhile, the press had descended upon the story of the mysterious attempted murder-suicide in the dramatic environs of an underground theater like horseflies to spilled blood. Raj declined all interviews and postponed the opening of his play, which, due to all the press and the new allure surrounding the “haunted” theater, had sold out well into the foreseeable future. He had been rapidly rehired as Dr. Seager in
The Queen's Keys
. The producers weren't stupid, recognizing that his newfound mystique was box office manna. His agent, too, made a robust reappearance, calling him up with auditions for principal roles in major feature films. There was a new happiness in his eyes that I hadn't seen in years. If I hadn't been so stressed out about maybe going to jail if Cyn's tale turned out to be fantasy, I would have been happy, too.

It took about a week for Cyn to stabilize. They had a pair of armed guards stationed outside her door twenty-four/seven. I stopped by a few times to check up on her, but the blinds on her window were always closed, and she wasn't conscious. No one was allowed in anyway.

It was Sunday when I got the call that Cyn was awake. Raj was onstage, so I texted him the news.

A new stoicism had settled over him since that afternoon at the theater. “Cyn and I weren't good for one another,” he told me. “We never really were.”

That he had been painfully and deliberately guided toward
that conclusion was not obvious to him, but I saw otherwise. When Cyn goaded him into the rage that culminated with his hands around her throat, she and I alone knew that it was an exorcism she was performing. By all accounts it had worked. When Raj and I talked about her now, there was no frisson of tension underlying our words. By shattering her spell over Raj, Cyn had given us both one last gift.

I went to the hospital and was stopped, as always, at her door. There were new guards stationed outside, not the crew I had grown used to seeing.

“Someone called and told me to come,” I explained when they summarily dismissed me. “She wants to see me.”

“She's not seeing anyone, ma'am,” the older guard informed me.

“I'm the closest she has to next of kin,” I said. When that did nothing, I persisted, “Someone here called me, and I'm her de facto attorney. I'm not leaving until I speak to whoever that was. Can you please check it out?”

With a heaving, soap opera sigh, the older guard disappeared into her room, closing the door quickly, but not before I glimpsed two suited figures seated at her bedside. Square shouldered, gray haired; they had to be the feds. My palms began to sweat as I wondered how far they had gotten in taking her statement. I prayed it would be sufficient. I waited in silence with the other guard, my nerves making me so twitchy that I forced myself to take a quick walk to the water fountain to chill out. As I returned, I noticed the horizontal blinds in the room were slowly opening. The first guard reappeared, firmly shutting the door.

“They said you can't go in, but you can visit through the window.”

“Okay, thanks.” I slowly turned to the window and raised my hand to block the glare. Cyn was propped up in bed, looking pale and small in her sea-foam green hospital gown. Her arms were laced with tubes, and her bed was bookended by twin towers of monitoring equipment.

With obvious care, she turned her head toward me and smiled. It wasn't her typical megawatt beamer, but it was enough that I could see her spirit remained intact. She raised one arm a few inches and wiggled the fingers in greeting, then winced and rolled her eyes.

I laughed, and raised my own hand in salute, pressing it against the window.

One of the feds turned around to look at me. I searched his face for some indication of how things were going, but his expression was impossible to read. One of the men must have spoken, because Cyn looked at him and frowned. She turned her face back toward me and smiled again, only this time the smile was underscored with sadness. I knew it was good-bye.

Good-bye, Glo
, she mouthed.

“Bye, Cyn,” I said aloud, even though I knew she couldn't hear me. “Good luck.”

She lifted her hand as high as she could and presented me two fingers, a peace sign, just as one of the suits rose and moved toward the window. I blew her a kiss, trying not to tear up as the blinds slowly closed. I knew, somehow, that it was the last time I would ever see her.

Raj was waiting for me on a bench outside.

“You saw her?” he asked, rising as I approached.

“Through the glass. They were interviewing her, so I didn't get to visit.”

“Oh.”

We began walking north, slowly, like an old-timey couple out for a promenade.

“That was it. I'm not going back.”

“Really?”

“Really. I've done what she asked. She knows it. I meant what I said in the theater. She's dangerous. I want her to have a good life, but I don't want her in mine.”

“You'll probably never see her again,” he said, reaching for my hand.

“It's okay.” We walked for a while, in peaceful silence. “You know what I got from this, and you did, too?”

He looked at me quizzically. “I dunno. Night terrors?”

“No. We got a better ending. She's not dead or missing or lost. Presumably, she'll go on to be a normal person out there, living her life with her family. Just like us.”

He nodded, thoughtfully, but I knew there was a rebuttal coming.

“And that makes these past couple weeks worthwhile to you? You could have been shot.” He pressed his hand against his chest dramatically. “This man right here could have been shot.”

“Worthwhile, no. Worth something, yes.”

He shook his head and pulled me toward him as a spring rain, thin and vaporous, began to fall. He wrapped his arms around me, holding me tight. “Well then, best of luck to her.”

“Yes, best of luck.”

I thought of our magnanimity that evening outside the hospital eight months later, when we were on an airplane, flying down to Florida to surprise Raj's parents with the news of my pregnancy. I was flipping through the cheesy in-flight catalog, amusing myself with pictures of Victorian canopied dog beds, when one image caused me to choke on my ginger ale.

Available for the price of $24.99 was a rainbow-colored polyurethane pinwheel, featured in a tidy suburban lawn. Sharing the scene was a tiny girl with curly reddish hair, one arm reaching out toward a kitten.

Glorianna.

I sucked in air and placed my hands on the photo to frame the image as Cyn had showed it to me on her phone. It was unmistakable. I imagined her taking the photo on her flight in from wherever it was she had come from, tucking it away just in case she needed added leverage to get me on her side. It had worked, flawlessly. She knew me so damned well.

I flashed back to her face the last time I saw her in the hospital, shooting me that peace sign. Only now did I realize, perhaps it wasn't a peace sign after all. Her eyes had been saying something else, and at thirty-five thousand feet, her true message hit me like a shock wave.
Twice, Glo
. Twice she had thrown herself on the grenade for me. Two times I would walk away intact, with my true love at my side. Those slender fingers were a reminder to me of a much larger truth: I may have been a sucker, but I was undoubtedly the lucky one.

Something flipped in my head, and I started to laugh. Tears rolled down my cheeks, and I began to hiccup uncontrollably. It was several minutes before I could even catch my breath to explain to Raj what was so hilarious. At first, his face went flush and his jaw tightened in that old familiar way. But he watched, side-eyed, as I ripped the picture out and folded it carefully so that it fit into the picture window of my wallet. When I was done, I heard him snort.

I looked up and met his laughing eyes.

“Do you want to see my daughter?” I asked, holding it up.

“She's beautiful,” he said, his composure breaking in tandem with mine.

“I named her after you,” I managed, before losing it completely. I pressed the photo facedown against my tray table, and together we shook with laughter, delirious and attracting stares.

“Wait, wait. Let me see her again,” he said breathlessly.

I presented it anew, my face glowing with motherly pride. “Here she is!”

“So precious,” he said. “Congratulations.”

At that moment in the air, we truly understood that we would never, ever get any answers. We would never find the real truth about who Cyn became, or who she ever was. And we realized there was only one real response.

If you can't laugh, you cry.