Taming Cross

by Ella James

  When I see Cross, I start screaming again. I can’t help it. Maybe screaming will help hasten my end, because as soon as I start, I black out and fall down to my knees. I grab onto the railing when the black spots clear enough so I can see. I just want to make sure he’s gone now—that I really am hallucinating.

  But when I glance into the inferno of the main floor, there he is: bleeding from the head and being hauled toward the stairs on Tito’s back.

  “NO, NO, NO! No…no!” I flop against the railing, pulling my hair over my mouth because maybe it will filter some of the smoke. I end up clutching at my hair and shaking, unable to move. I really don’t think I can breathe this time. I can hear my lungs trying and the sound is terrifying.

  “Cross.” I start to sob. If I’m going to die, I want to feel his arms around me one more time. And then suddenly, I do. I can feel his body behind mine; over the roar of the fire, I can barely hear him whispering my name.

  I hear screaming from somewhere: angry yelling. I can make out ‘David’ and the Spanish word for whore. Cross grunts like he’s been hurt, and I can hear the fire crunching through things around us. It’s so hot.

  “Cross,” I hiss, “I’m sorry.”

  I can’t think straight enough to remember what for, but with the hand that’s not chained to the statue, I grasp around for him, finding something I think is his shirt and holding on.

  “Merri…I’ve got to get your hand out of this thing.” I feel him tugging on my bruised and bleeding hand, the one clasped in the cuff, and I can’t help but whimper.

  “I’m sorry,” he chokes. “I’m so sorry, sweetheart.”

  And then my hand is ripped apart. I’m screaming, screaming, screaming. Then I’m floating through the flames.

  I break Merri’s hand—on purpose. Before she even gets a scream out, her body goes limp.

  I throw her over my agonized right shoulder, holding onto her by her legs as I move through smoke and flames. I try to remember which hand it was: the left or right? Was it her dominant hand? Did I break it in a way that spares her three middle fingers, or will the whole hand be fucked up—like mine?

  I’m so dizzy, the problem of her hand is magnified, so it seems more tragic than the fact that we’re midway down the stairs and fire is everywhere. There’s no way we can pass through that. No fucking way.

  I can barely tell which direction is up, but I can feel the stair rail with my left hip, and that’s how I get us back up to the second floor—by pressing my hip against rail as I struggle up the stairs. When the smoke is too thick for me to breathe, I lean against the railing, praying to God and the Virgin that it doesn’t crumple underneath the weight of us. The prayer must have worked, because I make it back upstairs with Merri still over my shoulder. I can hear her groaning, talking nonsense, but I ignore her.

  I need to think.

  I find a window—big and vertical—but it’s covered with a film of smoke so I can’t see how far it is to the backyard. I turn a circle, but all I see down the hall on either side is flames.

  I lean my left shoulder against the wall, worrying about the smoke Merri is breathing, and then there’s a boom from somewhere and the floor shakes. The ceiling to our right, above the hall that way, has caved in, and fire is rushing toward us like a tidal wave.

  I need to do something, but all of a sudden I’m paralyzed because I’m about to die. And it never seemed right, it never seemed real before, because it seemed like it would be too much. That I’d be cheated out of too much. But now I’ve met Merri. I have Merri with me, and I’m pulling her down my chest so I can feel her face in the crook of my arm, and I’m damn near crying because I wanted something better for us both.

  Merri says, “Cross…” and something else, but I can’t tell what. Her eyes close. I look around me one more time, but it’s an inferno. The only way out is this big, smutty window. I rub a circle on one of the panes and use my limp left hand to make a haphazard cross before I look outside. And when I do, I see the glittering green-blue water of a lit-up swimming pool.

  Right before we jumped out, I heard gunfire. Turns out it was Marchant. After running through the building, trying to get all the staff out, he split off from the EMTs and firefighters in the front of the building—where evacuees had gathered—and ran around to the back, where he used his burned hands to push back a thin slab of concrete below which a pool was hiding. He said he thought it would prevent the fire from spreading, at least behind the building.

  Usually the concrete was pulled back via remote, but somehow he got the thing to slide, so of the 100-someodd feet of rectangular swimming pool in the deck behind the brothel, I had about thirty to jump into.

  Lucky for Merri and me, the Carlsons have always had a pool, and more than once in high school, Lizzy and I jumped out the second-story window of the pool house into the deep end. I knew I needed to get a running start and overshoot it some. I hardly remember doing it, but I know I considered throwing Merri down first, and I discarded that idea because I was worried that she couldn’t swim. Her body was limp, so I jumped with her.

  I remember being worried we would hit cement or yard instead, and I remember that at first I thought we had. That’s how bad the impact hurt my burned skin. I remember thrusting Merri up toward the surface as I choked on chlorinated water.

  And that’s it. That’s where our story ends, at least in my memory.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  I’m in and out of consciousness for two days at University Medical Center, which, so far, is three days fewer than Merri. I’m a big pain in the ass and get myself discharged early, the third day after admission, just as long as I promise to stay off my fractured ankle and let the ICU nurses coming in and out of Merri’s room put an oxygen mask on my face a few times a day. Apparently my lungs are still fried to shit, but I’m told they’ll heal if I suck back this bitter-tasting breathing treatment. I’m glad to do it if I can sit by Merri’s bed and watch her sleep.

  While I like being near her, holding her uninjured hand and playing with her hair, seeing her like this sucks. She was in the brothel longer than I was, and because she was at the top of the stairs, she inhaled a bunch of smoke. No one knows how long it’ll take her lungs to heal, and until the doctors feel satisfied with her progress, they’re keeping her sedated, on a ventilator.

  Yeah—can you fucking believe that? Someone else is in the bed and I’m in one of these dinky plastic chairs. It takes me about two minutes to realize how much I prefer being the one in the bed.

  I drive the nurses crazy with my questions, and the only thing that gives me any peace is that they’re required to answer me. Lizzy had Merri’s fake passport in her purse, still hanging around from when I was in the hospital in El Paso, and when the fire started, Lizzy and Hunter were heading out to dinner—so she had her purse. So far, I’ve used my husbandly rights to micromanage Merri’s sedatives; to demand that she get lip gloss to help heal her chapped lips; to play music from my iPod for her; and to decline a visit from the all-faith minister and select, instead, the hospital’s Catholic priest to do occasional blessings.

  I’m allowed in the ICU almost all the time, and during the two hours they do shift change, usually the nurses let me chill here anyway—on account of my fucked up lungs. I need to rest.

  By the second night, thanks to the sympathies of a nice, elderly nurse named Martha, I’ve got my very own cot right by Merri’s bed. When Martha steps behind the wall to monitor Merri and the other patients via camera, I push it close to Merri’s bed so I can hold her hand through the metal bars.

  The days crawl by. Six days turn into seven before the head pulmonologist starts weaning Merri’s ventilator. She does well, so the next day they cut it down even more, and with it her sedatives. That night, she opens her eyes smiles at me. Then she notices the tube in her throat and starts to cry big, silent tears that rip me up. By the time they take the damn thing out the next day at noon, I’m feeling cagey and helpless. Worried about what
will happen when she and I finally talk.

  I’ve had a lot of time to think, but I still don’t understand what happened that day in the cottage after we had sex. How she kept acting like she didn’t get why I would want her and then she implied that maybe she had sex with my dad. It was like she wanted to make me say I didn’t want her. Because when I told her it didn’t matter, that didn’t make her happy. It made her leave.

  When it’s late at night and I’m lying in my cot, listening to the machines around her bed, the only conclusion I can ever reach is that she just doesn’t want me, and she was using all the other shit as a means to make me not want her.

  This is why, on the evening of the day that they removed her breathing tube, I’m hanging out in the cafeteria rather than the ICU, while the nurses do some X-rays on her lungs to see if she’s able to move to a room outside the ICU.

  I’m on my second plate of bland potatoes and plastic chicken when a dude about my age, in a long white coat, stops at my booth.

  He’s got dark skin; short, curly hair; and the most serious-looking face I’ve ever seen in my life. I’m on my feet before I swallow the chicken in my mouth, because I’m scared to shit that something’s happened to Merri.

  The guy steps back, holding out both hands. “Hey, man. I mean no harm.”

  “Did something?”

  He frowns, then a look of realization spreads across his face and he shakes his head. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to alarm you. I’m here about you. You are Cross Carlson?”

  I feel my breath catch in my throat, and I look the guy over, wondering if he was sent here to fuck with me.

  He smiles, revealing straight white teeth. “Well, are you?”

  I rub my face. “Yeah. Why?”

  He takes a seat across from me and extends his hand again. “My name is Dr. Marty Grantham and I know you as Case Study C from an article published last month in the journal Neurology. You injured your neck in a motorcycle accident, correct?”

  I frown, glancing at the clock behind him on the wall. In just a few minutes, they’ll probably be done with Merri, and I want to be back in the ICU.

  I flick my gaze to him. “Yeah, I fu— I screwed it up. You a neurosurgeon?”

  “Orthopedics—and neurosurgery.”

  “Okay.”

  I stand up and grab my tray, and the guy follows me to the garbage cans, where I scrape the food off my plate and stack my tray atop a bunch of others. When I turn to head into the hall, he folds his arms.

  “Look, Mr. Carlson, I don’t want to waste your time, but I was wondering, has anyone suggested to you that removing the metal caging around your vertebrae and using a simple chicken bone procedure instead could alleviate the pressure on your damaged nerves and alleviate some of the symptoms you’re experiencing in your arm and hand?”

  I blink, then frown, then shake my head.

  “Where are you going? Why don’t you let me walk you back, and I’ll tell you what I have in mind.”

  It’s not until the next day that I know there’s something wrong. Merri’s awake—they don’t have her sedated anymore—and I’m familiar enough with her pulse ox and other monitors to know when she’s sleeping… But she won’t open her eyes and talk to me.

  She doesn’t want me here. I know it. But I just can’t leave.

  I know I can talk now, but my throat hurts so much, I don’t even consider it until the lights are dimmed for the night and I know Cross is somewhere in the room. Before I speak, I turn my head just a little to the side so I can see him. He’s shirtless in what look like scrubs, and in the faint glow of his cell phone, I can see the beautiful contours of his chest and shoulders.

  When my gaze rolls over his face, hot tears fill my eyes. That’s how much I’ve missed him, even though I know he’s probably been here the whole time.

  I want to talk to him, but I’m not sure what to say, so I just lie there and watch him. I try to focus on his handsome face, but too often my mind takes me back to the night Jesus found me in the labyrinth. The way he pushed that knife into my throat and grabbed my breasts so hard he surely left bruises.

  “You’re my wife,” he hissed into my face. “Why did you think that you could leave me?”

  I was so, so shocked, I didn’t even plead for my life as Jesus held a gun to my head and said it was for David. I think he was about to shoot me when he noticed the smoke in the sky. He smiled, and I remembered that devious face from before, when he was about to do something terrible; it made me shiver.

  He dragged me out of the labyrinth and to the back of the mansion, where a couple of his underlings were waiting. People were pouring from the building, which was burning on the left side. I tried to scream for help, but Jesus clamped a hand over my face. There was so much panic, no one even noticed us.

  Jesus pushed me up against the burning building and he tried to rip my pants off. I was still wearing Loveless’s leggings, though, and they were made of spandex, so they wouldn’t rip. I could tell by the way he breathed that he was still very much wounded. He hadn’t died, but he probably almost had.

  He kept trying to get me to tell him I was sorry, but I know Jesus. I knew that if I did, he’d kill me on the spot. When someone apologizes to Jesus, he uses it to justify whatever awful thing he wants to do; they must be guilty, because they said ‘sorry’. I had my eyes shut, praying for it to end quickly, when I heard Cross’s voice. I guess I must have flinched or something, because right around then, Jesus left and some of the others pulled me into the burning building.

  The weirdest thing about it was, I never felt real fear. I panicked, of course, when they started pulling me up the stairs and the smoke was so thick I couldn’t breathe, but there wasn’t that bone-deep fear of death. All I wanted was for everyone else to make it out alive. I guess, in my mind, I’ve been tied up with Jesus for so long, I always kind of knew that it would end badly.

  It’s the main reason I couldn’t be with Cross—or anyone.

  I lie there on the hospital bed thinking about Cross, thinking of what I can say to him to make everything okay. But there’s nothing, so on my last night in the ICU, I can’t bring myself to say a word.

  Sometime in the wee hours, I hear Cross murmuring into the phone. He sounds unhappy. My nurse—the older woman with the nice blue eyes—comes in, and I think she shoos him out. He comes back a few minutes later and gets back on his cot and I can feel him moving close to me. I hold my breath then, wanting his touch as much as I know I shouldn’t, but all he does is rest his forehead on the bars of my bed and breathe.

  I still can’t bring myself to move or speak.

  Morning comes—I know this only because the lights come on—and everyone in my room is excited. I’m doing better. Requiring less oxygen through these plastic tubes in my nose. They’re moving me to a regular room.

  I leave my eyes shut, pretending that I’m resting, but really I just want to know if Cross will stay or go. I’m out of danger now. Maybe he won’t feel obligated to stay.

  It’s not lost on me at all, as they wheel my bed through halls and into elevators, that I’m in Cross’s position. The exact same position that I left him in, in El Paso. It’s also not lost on me that I don’t hear his voice or see his body through my half-shut lids.

  A full day passes. I’m alone in my room. The nurses come and go, and it’s all that I can do to force myself to speak to them. I know my body is healing, but I feel dead inside.

  I’m napping when my door creaks. I slit my eyes open, because it feels too early in the afternoon for another vitals check. I turn my head a little, and my breath lodges inside my battered lungs. Before I can start to breathe properly again, Cross is at my bedside. He’s leaning down and pressing his face into my hair.

  “I missed you.” He kisses my forehead and pulls a chair beside my bed, and while I lie there with my eyes shut, with my heart pounding, he just talks…like this is normal. He tells me about his parents, first.

  “I had to leave beca
use my mom came into town. Sometime while I was down in Mexico, she decided to leave him. My dad.”

  My eyes are still shut. Cross takes my hand and starts tracing my fingers, the way I did one time to his.

  “She’s kind of pissed off. At everyone. She doesn’t want the house in Napa anymore, she said, so she gave me all the keys. Apparently my dad’s been gone a week already.” I hear him shift, and I can sense that he’s leaned forward, closer to my bed. The railing on my hospital bed is folded down now, and I imagine I can feel the heat of his body through my blankets.

  “Last night, at the hotel, I called my dad. I told him you’ve been evaluated by a psychiatrist here and that you’ve told ‘her’ what happened to you. I told him that you’re not sure what you want to do yet, but at least he knows if he were to want to…” Cross pauses. Sighs. “If he were to come after you or some shit, at least he knows he’d be the first suspect. And Merri—” he squeezes my unhurt right hand— “I don’t think he’d ever do that. I just wanted you to feel safe.”

  Silence fills the room, and that’s when the tears start flowing. I didn’t plan to cry, but my body doesn’t ask permission. Cross does what I sense he will and leans down to wrap his arm around me. When he does, I lean into his neck and cry, “I’m married to Jesus!”

  It’s the only way I can tell him, I guess. Like jumping into cold water, I just have to do it.

  I feel his body stiffen, and I cry a little harder as I wait for him to pull away. Instead he gets in bed with me, curling over sideways so he doesn’t crowd me. After a minute or two of my crying and his arm holding tightly to me, he whispers, “Meredith, Jesus is dead.”

  And then I’m crying so much harder, because it doesn’t matter. That’s not the only reason I can’t be with Cross.