by Hamel, B. B.
I stepped back, shut the door, and locked the bolt and the chain.
Erica hovered a few feet away, arms hugging herself.
“That was them,” she said.
“We knew this would happen.”
“But not so fast.”
“I don’t think they realized you were in here, and they didn’t know we’d gotten married.”
She nodded, looked away. “Still. They found you.”
“We knew it would happen,” I said again, keeping my voice soft and calm.
I walked over and put a hand on her shoulder. She looked at me, eyes confused for a moment, and my hand drifted down toward her hip. She chewed on her lip and I could tell she was having a moment with herself, maybe wrestling with uncertainty or anger or fear, I couldn’t be sure.
“What are you going to do if they decide to get violent?” she asked.
“I’ll handle them.”
“They’re thugs. They’re used to this sort of stuff.”
I shrugged. “And I’m a doctor. I’ll break their knees.”
She laughed, and I think she did it despite herself. She shook her head, flyaway strands of her hair brushing up against her cheek and forehead.
“Come on, Gavin. This is stupid, right? You can’t protect me from them.”
“Yes, I can,” I said, my voice a growl. “I told you they wouldn’t try anything against me, and if they do, I’ll be ready.”
“I can’t ask you to do that. You’ve already done too much.” She glanced down at the ring on her finger.
I took her hand in mine and touched the ring with my thumb, then on impulse held it to my lips. She seemed surprised and stared at me, mouth open, before pulling away.
“I swear they won’t get near you,” I said, my voice steady and even, because I wasn’t lying. I wouldn’t let those men anywhere near her, and I’d fight them myself if it came down to it.
I’d do to those men what I should have done to my sister’s husband all those years ago, back when I realized what he was—back when I realized he was a bastard and deserved to get hurt. Ever since then I’d been taking boxing classes after work, and every time I hit the heavy bag, I’d think about that piece of shit’s face getting pummeled under my fists.
Maybe some part of me wanted those mafia bastards to try me. Maybe I had a death wish in me, a violent and reckless streak that begged to get hurt, or maybe I wanted to do for Erica what I should have done for Jamie. I couldn’t be sure, but at least I knew that I wasn’t lying to her, that I’d do anything I could to keep them away and to keep her safe.
“I believe you,” she said, “although I don’t think I have any other choice.”
We lingered there in the hallway. I wanted to touch her again, kiss her fingers, her wrists, her arms—her lips and neck and ears and chest. I wanted to pull her against me and hold her until she felt safe again.
Instead, she turned and drifted back to the couch.
I knew following her would be dangerous. I had a stab of adrenaline running through me, and I was worried I’d burn it off by taking it out on her. Instead, I went back to my room and shut the door, and spent the next half hour pacing around and picturing what I’d do if either of those men tried to hurt her. Maybe it was juvenile and foolish, but the more I pictured getting hurt for her, getting badly injured, the more I thought I’d step up when the time came to put myself and my safety on the line.
10
Erica
I stared up at the ceiling most of that night, thinking about the thugs that appeared at the front door. I kept picturing them coming back in the middle of the night and breaking inside, stealing me away, and forcing me to bend my knees for their bastard boss. I imagined Gavin defending me, and although he was big and strong and tough, I kept wondering if he really could keep me safe from two violent mobsters.
I didn’t get that much sleep. I kept spinning my ring around my finger, picturing those assholes coming to get me—and thinking about the kiss I shared with Gavin on our wedding day.
He knocked on my door early, just after sunrise. I stirred and sat up.
“We’re going to the hospital,” he said without coming inside. “I’m heading out in an hour, and I figured you’d want to come with me.”
I chewed on my cheek. “I’ll be out in a little bit.”
I heard him walk off before climbing out of bed and using the bathroom. I showered, got changed, and met him in the kitchen for coffee and breakfast. We didn’t speak as he read the newspaper and wordlessly passed me each section as he finished with it. I stared at the paper, skimming the headlines, then dropped it on the floor—and rubbed my fingers together where the ink coated them, making the lines stand out stark white on black.
His commute was pretty easy. We walked downstairs then out into the beautiful morning air. “If the weather’s bad, I’ll call an Uber,” he said as he strolled along past people standing in line outside of a fancy bagel shop, past men in suits and women in skirts and tasteful jackets carrying big designer bags, briefcases, mugs of coffee.
“Must be nice,” I said.
“Truth is, I don’t get to pay much attention to all this.” He slowed his pace and looked at me. “I spend most of my time at the hospital.”
“Really?”
“Honestly, these last couple days have been the most time off I’ve taken in a few years.”
I let out a little laugh. “That can’t be true. Don’t you have scheduled shifts?”
“Sure, I have shifts, but even when I’m not on duty, I’m at the hospital in my office, making calls or checking on patients.”
“You have friends, right?”
“Most of them are doctors, too.” He laughed and ran a hand through his thick hair. “They sort of understand the lifestyle.”
I looked up at him and frowned a little. I couldn’t imagine living all my life between two places, a hospital and a small, lonely apartment—but then again, I existed in the same way before, drifting between my mom’s apartment and my job as a waitress. Except I had my mom at home to keep me company, and I had my friends at work to hang out with when shift was over. I wondered if they were worried about me—I’d gotten a few calls from my manager and texts from coworkers that I hadn’t responded to yet, and I more or less assumed I’d been fired, but found I couldn’t bring myself to care about that, not yet at least.
That would matter down the road if I survived all the rest first.
“Sounds pretty lonely,” I said.
“Sometimes, but mostly I stay busy. I like being a doctor.”
“I guess you’d have to, and the money must be nice.”
He shrugged a little. “Money’s nice, but that’s not why I do it. That’s not why most doctors do it.”
“Oh, come on.”
“Seriously. Look, if you want to make money, you become a dentist, or a plastic surgeon, or something like that. But most of the doctors that work at our hospital do it because they want to help save lives and take care of people. It’s demanding and grueling and difficult as all hell, but it’s rewarding when things go right and someone lives to spend more time with their kids or grandkids because you made the right calls and gave a damn.”
“I guess I can understand that then.” I shook my head a little. “I’d never thought about work as anything other than making money. The idea that I might love my job—it always seemed like that was for someone else.”
“Why do you say that?”
I swept my hands outward, gesturing at the street around us, toward Rittenhouse Park, toward the fancy restaurants, toward the high-powered people in their nice clothes and their perfect hair. “This isn’t my world.”
He made a face. “Tell me what you mean.”
“My dad was an addict. He sold drugs. He stole from people, got into fights, drank himself half to death, hit my mom, screamed at me, and kept coming back, and we never told him to stay away. My mom, she worked herself to the bone, smoked like a chimney, cursed like a sailo
r, had a great sense of humor, but she didn’t go to college and I didn’t either, there was never money for that. I’ve never had a chance to do anything but keep going, you know? As soon as things looked okay for us, Dad would come home and take anything we had.”
He looked at me and for the first time since we’d met, I felt judged and seen in a way that I didn’t like—but then he reached out and put an arm across my shoulder. I should’ve pulled away, but the gesture felt so real and genuine that I pressed myself against him for a second in a sort of sideways hug.
“I’m sorry you had to go through that,” he said, voice low. “I understand what you’re saying. My parents died when my sister was fifteen, but they’d already set aside money for my college and had saved up for hers. They left us a house, which I sold when Jamie moved in with me, and that money floated us both for a long time. I guess I got pretty lucky in a lot of ways, even if I struggled through med school and helping to raise my teenage sister.”
“You must’ve loved her.” I looked up at him.
He nodded. “I really did. And when she was taken away, I was bitter for a long time.”
“How’d it happen?”
His eyes narrowed and he stared off into the distance. “She married a man she shouldn’t have, a man that didn’t treat her well. A man with problems.”
“You said his name was Silvo and he’s in jail now.”
He nodded and looked down at me. He dropped his arm and walked forward, eyes into the distance again, and I could tell he was remembering something ugly, something he didn’t enjoy thinking about, and I felt bad for asking, I wished I could pull it back from the air and let him off the hook.
“It was late one night. I don’t know how it happened, because I wasn’t there. She married him when she was eighteen and moved in with him the day she graduated high school, because she’d promised me she’d finish school before marrying him.”
“You’re a good older brother.”
“Not that good.” He took a deep breath. Ahead, the hospital loomed up from the city, brown brick and layer after layer of glass windows. He paused and stepped beneath the awning of a shoe store as the morning rush hour traffic passed by on the sidewalk. “I got a call late one night, two years after she’d moved in with him. She was barely twenty years old, but sometimes I thought she was older. This was three years ago, when I was thirty, and I remember thinking— this couldn’t be real. It was the police on the other end, and they said something happened to Jamie, and that her husband had done something, and I needed to come down to the morgue immediately.
“They had me identify her body. Half her face was bashed in. I don’t know how it happened, but they’d gotten into an argument, he was apparently drunk or high or maybe both. He beat her with a bottle, and when he realized he’d gone too far, I guess he decided to finish her off—and shot her in the head. The neighbors heard the screams and the fighting and the gunshot, called the cops, and they caught him as he tried to run away. He went through the court system pretty fast, and he’s in jail for the rest of his life now, but Jamie’s gone, very much gone and I guess none of that matters.”
I stared at him and tried to force myself not to cry. I couldn’t imagine going through something so horrific, so visceral or awful. The accident had been like that for me, something scarring and deeply affecting, and I was still processing it in my own way, still trying to come to grips with the fact that my mother was in a coma and there was no promise that she’d ever wake up—but his sister was dead, his parents were gone, and he was left alone.
I took his hand in mine and squeezed it. “I’m sorry,” I said. “That’s so awful.”
“Now you can probably understand why I feel so strongly about helping you.”
I chewed my lip and met his eye. “I’m not your sister.”
“No, you’re most certainly not.” A little smile played across his lips. “My sister’s gone, but you’re still around. I can still help you.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. I didn’t want to feel like I was taking advantage of a grieving man, didn’t want him to think that I was pulling him along deeper into this hell with me—but then again, he seemed to think that helping me could redeem him somehow. And truthfully, I needed his help more than anything in the world, and wanted him around me.
“Come on,” I said, turned toward Mercy. “I want to visit with my mom.”
He nodded, dropped my hand, and headed out again. I hurried to keep up, trying to picture what it must have been like for him, standing in a morgue and staring at the destroyed face of his dead sister, trying to come to grips with the fact of her death, with the truth of his future without her—and trying to do the same thing for my own life and my own mother.
* * *
I sat on a plastic chair and leaned forward, elbows on the bed. Mom’s hand felt like rubber wrapped around a skeleton. Her chest rose and fell in time with the beeping machines and she didn’t move, didn’t stir.
“The wedding was surprisingly nice,” I said, stroking her palm with my fingers. It was a strange sensation, touching her like that, but I felt close with her and always had, and I halfway hoped that by tickling her, by giving her some sort of sensation to grab on to, maybe it could help pull her back out of the darkness and bring her back to me.
“I wore black though,” I said, laughing. “I didn’t feel right wearing white, you know? Since it wasn’t a real wedding. But he gave me this enormous engagement ring, and a nice band, and, I mean, we kissed, you know, during the ceremony.” I blushed a little, feeling stupid. She couldn’t hear me, so it was probably okay to tell her this. I didn’t talk to my mother about boys, although there hadn’t been many boys in my life. A few kisses here or there in high school, but no real boyfriends, nothing too intense. “I liked that part. I thought it’d be weird, since he’s a total stranger, but he makes me feel seen and heard, and that kiss was… it was just right. It felt really good.” I laughed again and shook my head. “I think I’m crazy, but I can’t help it.”
I heard a noise behind me and half turned, heart rate jumping. The privacy curtain was pulled around my mother’s bed and her room’s door was shut, so I couldn’t see who came in. I figured it was Fiona or one of the other nurses, come to check on Mom—but instead the curtain pulled back, and Cosimo smiled in at me.
I recoiled back and the chair slid away from my mom’s bed. It almost tipped and fell, but I scrambled and caught myself before it dumped me on the floor. He grinned, his white teeth straight, his thick dark hair in tight curls on his head. He had scruff on his cheeks and chin, and his dark brown eyes were handsome—but he was all wrong somehow. His hands were too big, his nose too square, his eyes too quick to stare down at my breasts and my lips, and there was too much greed and eagerness in his expression. He wore a pair of dark jeans and a simple white button-down shirt tucked in without a belt. His style was European, but still somehow functional.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“I thought I’d come visit, pay my respects.” He nodded at my mother. “Poor old bird. She wasn’t meant to get hurt this bad, you know.”
Anger flared up hot and fast. I half stood—but stopped when he looked at me. “You did this to her.”
“That’s right, I did.”
“Why?” The word came out choked, rushed.
“Because you denied me one too many times.” He tilted his head and stared at me. “You had to learn your lesson.”
I held up my hand and turned it toward him, showing the ring on my finger. “Well you can’t have me anymore, you asshole.”
He let out a mocking laugh. “The doctor, right? Gavin Majors? An interesting man, I’ll give you that. I don’t understand what he wants from a gutter bitch like you, though. He could certainly do better.”
I dropped my hand, heart racing. I wouldn’t let him bait me. “You shouldn’t be here.”
He gestured around him. “Your husband wanted to speak with me, and so here I am
.”
I got completely to my feet and stepped toward the curtain, I reached up to pull it, but he held up a hand.
I hesitated. “I need to get him.”
“Wait. Maybe you and I can speak first.”
“I have nothing to say to you.”
“Do you like your new husband? Is he a nice man?”
I clenched my jaw. “He’s fine.”
“I assume you don’t want him to end up like—” He gestured at my mother.
“Are you threatening me?” I asked.
“Yes, yes, I am.” He tilted his head. “I thought that was obvious.”
“Fuck you.”
“Gladly.”
I felt like gagging. “You can’t force your way into this, Cosimo.”
“So you think.” He waved a hand. “Go get your husband. I’ll wait here.” He walked to the chair on the other side of my mother’s bed and sat down. “I’ll keep your mother company while you wait.”
I hesitated and didn’t want to leave him alone in that room, but turned away, yanked the curtain open, and fled. I hurried toward the nurses’ station, spotted Fiona, and she must’ve seen something in my expression. She stood and came to me.
“What’s wrong? Your mom?”
I shook my head. “I need Gavin. It’s important.”
She hesitated then nodded. “I’ll page him. Wait here.” She walked around the nurses’ station, sat down, and made a quick call. When she finished, she put the phone down and rejoined me. “Should I call security too?”
That was a loaded question. “No. I don’t think so. I think… no. It’s okay.”
She nodded but didn’t look reassured. We waited together and I moved nervously from foot to foot, craning my neck back toward my mother’s room. I hated leaving her alone with that bastard, but I didn’t know what else to do.
Fiona watched me patiently and I could tell she was trying to assess what was going on with me. I wished I could explain but I had the feeling that if she knew Cosimo was back there in that room, she’d call the police. That would only make things more difficult—men like Cosimo didn’t disappear because of the cops.
