Wake for Me (Life or Death Series)

by Irons, Isobel

  Reaching up to pat him on the face, she laughed. “Then again…something tells me that this might be the one situation in your life where you don’t do the smart thing. At any rate, let me know how it goes.”

  “Thanks, Mom,” Sam said, backing away slowly. “I think.”

  ***

  Four hours later, Sam screeched into his apartment’s designated parking space, cringing as his mom’s minivan almost took the back corner off of his neighbor’s BMW.

  Giving the paint job a cursory glance, Sam shrugged and sprinted toward the stairs, taking them two at a time until he’d reached the fourth floor of his building. His plan was simple: he’d run in, grab his cell phone charger, change into something less sweaty, then go to the hospital and see if she’d shown up there. After that, he’d canvass all of the spots in the city that could have anything to do with her family business, her parents, her non-uncle…basically with anything that might have come up in conversation they’d had last night, right before she’d fallen asleep.

  It had taken Sam almost the entire drive down to figure it out, and he still wasn’t one hundred percent sure, but the best hypothesis he could come up with was that last night he had said or done something to set this off. Whether it was another irrational episode like the one she’d had on the roof, or a memory that had shaken loose remained to be seen. Either way, Sam was determined not to let her go through it alone.

  That was another thing he’d realized on the drive. Yesterday, he’d spent almost the entire day feeling relieved. Like he’d fixed something major, by managing to temporarily pull Viola out of her head and into his arms. But they hadn’t exactly talked about what was really wrong. It was like putting a band-aid on a severed limb. She might have been physically well, and she might have seemed sane, but that didn’t mean she was out of the woods. There were still all kinds of side-effects she might be going through as a trauma patient. Hadn’t he been the one to point that very concern out to Dr. Chakrabarti just a few weeks ago during rounds?

  Once again, Sam understood that it all was his fault. That he’d failed her. If he’d treated her as a patient instead of as his girlfriend, she wouldn’t be in danger. She wouldn’t be lost.

  Hurrying down the hallway to his apartment, Sam reached into his pocket for his key, but he pulled his hand right back out, empty. He didn’t have it. It was on his key ring. With Viola. God only knew where.

  Swearing a black storm, he dug out his phone and called Brady, praying that he still had the spare key from the last time he’d crashed on the couch.

  Before the call could even connect, the door swung open.

  “What’s with all the cursing out here?” Viola said, looking mildly annoyed, like this was her apartment and he was a random stranger causing a ruckus in the hallway.

  “Thank God,” Sam said, pulling her into his arms. “I thought I was going to have to chase you all over the city.”

  “That doesn’t sound like a very good plan.”

  Too soon, Viola withdrew from his embrace. She turned and walked back into his apartment, heading down the hallway toward his bedroom. Feeling uneasy, Sam followed her, noticing how jerky and impatient her movements were. She didn’t seem to be hurt or upset, just incredibly unenthusiastic to see him. By itself, that wasn’t enough to make him doubt her mental state, but when combined with auto theft and leaving unannounced in the middle of the night? It all seemed a little bizarre.

  When she reached his bedroom, she went straight to his study desk, littered with open medical textbooks and looseleaf paper. She sat down in front of it, rummaging through the pages like she was searching for something. Cautiously, Sam came to stand behind her, and noticed that on one corner of the desk, his laptop sat open, glowing dimly with various search engines: Google, Wikipedia, WebMD, MedLine Plus. It was like he’d tripped backwards and fallen through time, into his book years. Only now, Viola was the med student, and he was the outsider wondering what she could possibly be so obsessed with discovering.

  The whole situation was totally Invasion of the Body Snatchers bizarre.

  “Viola,” he asked, trying to sound both calm and supportive. “What are you doing?”

  “Finding answers.” She didn’t bother to turn her head, answering his question in that same odd, emotionless voice.

  Sam felt suddenly cold. He remembered once, during his psych rotation, when he’d met a patient with severe paranoid schizophrenia. The woman had exhibited almost total detachment from her surroundings, and when asked questions, had always responded in the same impatient tone. Like a robot who had been interrupted, mid-task—exactly like Viola was doing now.

  The thought that the girl he loved could be headed down a similar road was a new kind of nightmare, because he’d be losing her again, but on a whole different level. He wouldn’t bring himself to believe it, though, not until there was some kind of proof.

  “What kind of answers are you looking for, Viola?”

  This time, she didn’t answer him. Instead, she reached into the pile and pulled out a large, red folder. Opening it, she ran her finger down the first page, comparing it to a graph in one of his books. No, not a graph, Sam realized—an EKG. The book’s illustration was of an atrioventricular block, but the EKG in the folder showed acute myocardial infarction.

  “Viola, whose chart is that?” Sam asked the question, even though some part of him had already guessed the answer. When Viola ignored him yet again, Sam reached around her and pulled the folder out of her hand. She didn’t put up a struggle, as if she hadn’t even noticed. Instead, she turned back to the computer and started typing something into the search bar.

  “Viola.” Sam repeated her name, hoping to wake her gently from whatever alternate reality she was currently living in. When that didn’t work, he finally gripped her chair and pulled it away from the desk. With a small cry of protest, she tried to stand and move it back. Throwing the file down on his bed, he reached over and pulled her up, pushing her shoulders against the wall with his hands and forcing her to face him.

  “Viola, how did you get a hold of your father’s medical records? Those are restricted, and on top of that, they’re not allowed to leave the hospital.”

  She exploded.

  “What does it matter how I got them? Don’t you understand what’s happening here? All of this, everything that’s happened to my family, it’s all part of Jacques’ plan to take over my legacy! First, he tried to kill me, by crashing my car. Then, he crashed my parents’ car. Once they were gone, and I was still hanging on, he paid Dr. Chakrabarti to try and smother me, to finish me off. I remember now, because he didn’t just smell like cigars. He smelled like spices, Sam. He put his hand over my mouth, and I couldn’t breathe.”

  “Viola, slow down,” Sam told her. Nothing she was saying made sense. But maybe, if he figured out what had triggered this delusion, he could help her unravel it. “Just take me through it from the beginning, okay? I need to know how this all started. What happened last night, before you left?”

  At his condescending tone, Viola’s face immediately went from angry to disgusted. She shrugged free of his hands, and Sam let her go. But he didn’t step away, in case he had to restrain her again.

  “I know how crazy I sound to you,” she said. “But I don’t need to explain how I know that I’m right. All I have to do is prove it—there.” She pointed at the file on the bed. “Somewhere in there is the evidence I need to show that my father was murdered. It wasn’t his heart. Or, if it was, someone gave him something. I don’t know, poison maybe. Something to make it look like a heart attack made him crash the car.”

  There was so much conviction in her tone, it was hard not to question the facts surrounding Étienne Bellerose’s death. But Sam had already done that, and the answers had all added up to the same conclusion: it genuinely had been an accident.

  Reaching out to take her face in his hands, Sam gently told her the truth.

  “When your EMTs brought your parents in that
night, I thought it seemed like too big of a coincidence, too, so I asked Dr. Chakrabarti if I could double-check. Because your parents’ files hadn’t been restricted like yours, I was able to go back and see everything.” He paused, taking a deep breath. He knew Viola would need as much detail as possible if she were to believe him.

  “Six months ago, your dad was diagnosed with congestive heart failure. He was taking ACE inhibitors, cardiac glycosides and diuretics, but he didn’t want to undergo surgery. He told Dr. Stone—his cardiologist—that he wanted to wait until he’d finished a very important business deal. But then, when you got in your accident, he stopped taking his medications as regularly as he was supposed to. Dr. Stone told Dr. Chakrabarti that the myocardial infarction—or heart attack—was sudden and acute. If he hadn’t been driving, if it had happened in the hospital, they might have been able to stabilize him. But because of the crash, there were added complications. His injuries put too much strain on his ailing heart, and he suffered sudden cardiac death. I’m sorry, but from a medical standpoint, there’s nothing suspicious about his death.”

  “No.” Viola shook her head, either in denial or else undeterred by the facts. “He wasn’t sick. He would’ve told me. Those records had to be faked. My father never would have kept something like that from me. It’s wrong. It has to be wrong.”

  Letting go of her, Sam took a step back. His chest felt tight, like he’d been holding his breath underwater for too long. As much as he wanted to be on her side, to protect her from everything she was afraid of, he couldn’t protect her from what was going on inside her own head.

  “You have to believe me, Sam.” Even as she said it, Viola seemed to rethink her statement. “I mean, I don’t care if you believe me. Because I believe me. But…it would really mean a lot to me, if you didn’t think I was crazy.”

  Even as her tone played up how confident she was, Viola’s eyes seemed to plead with him. She needed him to say that he believed her. She needed to feel like she wasn’t alone.

  But Sam couldn’t, in good conscience, lie to her.

  “You still haven’t told me how you got this.” He pointed to the file again, changing the subject.

  Viola shrugged, and her eyes took on that empty, driven look once more.

  “Julia wasn’t at her desk. I used your security badge to get into Medical Records. I figured it would be pretty easy, since you were able to get away with stealing a thirty-thousand dollar watch right out of the security office.”

  “You…you used my badge?”

  Sam closed his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose with his fingers to keep from losing his temper and shouting at her. Or, hell, maybe even crying. God knew, he felt like doing both. Unbidden, Jacques Gosselin’s voice came drifting through his head. A scheming cat. She spent her life learning to manipulate people to get the things she wanted.

  “Well, yeah, Sam.” Viola scoffed, like he’d just asked her the world’s dumbest question. Sam couldn’t bear to open his eyes and look at her, to see the carelessness written across her face. “How else was I supposed to get into the file room? It’s not like I could just ask Julia, and she’d just let me in.”

  “Did it ever cross your mind,” he asked her quietly, “that I could lose my license? That I could go to jail, if anyone found out that you used me to steal private medical records?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  “No mortal can keep a secret. If the lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.” –Sigmund Freud

  “Jail?” she repeated the word, as if it were an alien concept. It was a possibility she hadn’t even considered, that Sam could actually go to prison for what she’d done.

  Viola took a step back, her body instantly recoiling as her mind tried to process yet another piece of overwhelming information. Like the idea that her father could have been dying, it didn’t make any sense.

  Sam’s entire future could end, and it would be her fault.

  Somehow, that fact seemed like it should have been terribly important to her, but at the moment, instinct ruled her—body and soul. No epiphany, no matter how earth-shattering, could possibly trump the burning in her chest that had led her to this place.

  As if her brain was a giant typewriter, it stuttered in mid-thought and jumped to a completely new line.

  ‘Me.’ Sam hadn’t said, ‘you used my badge’ just now. He’d said ‘you used me.’

  “Oh, I see where you’re going with this.”

  Slowly, Viola processed this new thought out loud, fighting with everything she had to stay in control of her body. Of her face, which threatened to contort into an expression of terror over what she was feeling. Of her fingers, which wanted to pick up something fragile and hurl it across the room. Of her throat, which wanted to let loose an impotent scream of rage and disappointment, and just keep on screaming. Forever.

  “You think I never had any feelings for you, right? You think that this was all just…part of the plan? To make you care about me, then use you for your privileges as a doctor? For a little piece of plastic that I could’ve taken off any other hospital employee? At any time? No, that’s fair. I totally get how you would think that. Especially since you’ve only really known me for…what, a couple of weeks? Just hours, really, if you want to take the time we’ve spent alone together and condense it into one, little, easy-to-digest pill.”

  The throbbing in her head, which had started about an hour ago, was building to a fever pitch. Everything she thought she knew was exploding, right in front of her eyes. Her parents had been murdered. Someone had tried to kill her. Jacques was the only person in the world who could benefit from her death. Her father had never lied to her. Her father had loved her. Sam was the one person who could keep her safe. Sam trusted her. Sam loved her….

  “Viola, I need you to calm down, okay?” He reached for her arm, and Viola flinched away. He was looking at her with completely new eyes, and in that moment, he was a completely new Sam. She no longer felt safe with him. He didn’t believe her. He thought she was crazy.

  “I’m not crazy,” she told him, backing away faster now, toward the door. Her purse was on the kitchen counter, next to his keys. If she turned and ran, he might not see it coming. She might make it out the door before he could stop her.

  “Dr. Chakrabarti,” she said, trying to convince herself now, as well as Sam. “He was the only one who could’ve done it. Jacques was in France, he was away when they died. He came back a few days later, to bury them. To bury me.”

  Sam shook his head, moving toward her slowly, purposefully. The look on his face was the same look Kevin always had when he was talking to Naked Ronald. Calm and controlled, but always waiting for something to happen. Never trusting. Never letting his guard down.

  “Viola, listen to me. Listen to what I’m saying. Dr. Chakrabarti could not have tried to kill you. No one tried to kill you. I was in your room when you coded that night. The room was dark. No one was there.”

  “But the monitors…” she protested, almost to the doorway now. “Brady said they were off. Someone might have turned them off, so that they wouldn’t go off if I stopped breathing. If my heart stopped beating.”

  “I looked into that, too. One of the nurses rolled the wheel of your bed over the EKG cord. Your pulse ox showed an apneic episode, but there were no other signs of distress. No airway obstructions, no broken blood vessels in your eyes that would indicate suffocation. For some reason, for just a moment, you just stopped breathing. It happens sometimes, Viola. Sometimes, the body just does things on its own. And it’s no one’s fault.” His voice was hard and thick now, like he was trying not to lose his temper. “Please, just let me help you. Whatever’s going on right now, it isn’t you. We’ll get you the help you need, okay?”

  Viola couldn’t help but hear the promise beneath the pleading. He was going to send her back to the psych ward, only this time it wouldn’t be voluntary. This time, there would be no three-day lette
r, no getting out. No helpful techs or understanding doctors. She’d be treated like a prisoner. People would find out. Everyone would know.

  “I can’t,” she whispered. Then she turned and ran.

  Out of Sam’s room. Through the hallway. Past the kitchen counter, where she only had time to scoop up her purse before Sam had grabbed her arm again.

  “Viola, wait—you have to calm down!”

  “No, I don’t!” Acting on pure instinct, Viola swung her purse at Sam’s head. He ducked, letting go of her for a split second. It was enough.

  Ducking under his arm, she ran for the door. Wrenched it open. Flung herself into the hallway, and started running for the stairs. The hallway seemed to stretch in front of her for miles, and her legs felt heavy, like it had been far too long since she’d used them properly. Sam caught up with her easily, pinning her to the wall.

  “No!” Viola screamed, fighting with every bit of energy she had left. Her muscles screamed in protest. She was so tired—how long had it been since she’d really slept?

  “Calm down,” Sam told her again, repeating what was quickly becoming her most hated phrase. “It’s going to be okay, but you need to calm down!”

  Viola sobbed, still fighting. There was nothing in the world, now. Nothing to look forward to, nothing to hope for—nothing standing between her and a lifetime of locked doors and long, empty hallways. Just like Hannah Truitt, the girl whose life she’d ruined.

  Except, she realized, the hallway was no longer empty. A man—one of Sam’s neighbors, undoubtedly alarmed by the commotion—was poking his head out of his doorway.

  Without thinking, Viola screamed at him. “Help me! He’s trying to attack me! Get him away from me, please!”

  “What?” Sam looked at her, his face incredulous. Then he turned to face the neighbor, who was barreling down the hall, directly toward them. “Wait. No, you don’t understand. This isn’t what you think, she’s—”