by Aimee Laine
“Uh … Jessie?” Ian hadn’t seen her since she’d been twelve, so he could have been wrong, but he didn’t think so.
“Yeah.” She stepped to him, offered him a short hug and let go. “How are you? What are you doing here? I thought you lived in the big city.” Her hands wiggled in the air like he’d seen dancers do on stage.
That and the contrast with the white lab coat sent a wave of confusion through his overtired brain. Jessie’d been Michael’s tag-along, the younger sibling he never had and never wanted. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-three to Michael’s twenty-five. The firmed figure, braces-less teeth and smooth skin would have appealed to anyone. Ian kept all his comments and thoughts to himself, realizing he’d been staring for far too long.
“Uh … Ian? What are you doing here?” She ran a hand along his arm.
Good question. “Here with a friend.” Lover. Multiple lifetime partner? Victim? He didn’t know how to describe Taylor.
Jessie cocked a hand on her hip. Her laugh breached the barrier and had his own grin sneaking out. “Girlfriend, Ian? Fiancée? Wife?”
“Could be a guy friend.” He offered her a shrug, though she’d been dead on.
She zipped back and held up her hands. “Right, right. Okay. You look like you haven’t slept in days. From what I recall, you and sleep were well acquainted. I can’t see you staying awake long nights for a ‘guy friend’, unless …”
“Oh, no. It’s not like that.” He rubbed at his eyes as exhaustion overwhelmed them, and pressure wanted to force his lids closed. “She’s … yeah … fuck.” Ian banged his head against the cement wall. “I need—”
“Someone to talk to?”
“No. To do something. Productive.”
“It’s nearly midnight. Maybe you should get some sleep?”
He waved a hand. “Shit. I was thinking I should go give blood.”
Jessie guided him away from the doors. “They aren’t going to take you in this state. You’ll give them the impression you’re a walking germ-pool. You need sleep, Ian. Have you pulled out the chair in the room? It’s not great, but better than sitting upright.”
The chair pulls out? Holy fucking cow! Why didn’t anyone mention that?
They continued walking down the hallway. “Who’s your girl?”
“Taylor Marsh.” He said it with such a monotone even he didn’t recognize his own voice.
Jessie the pig-tailed ten-year-old, at least in Ian’s mind, stopped and smiled up at him. “Room five-twelve?”
He nodded.
Her brows creased. “Really?”
“Yes. Why?”
She hesitated. “She’s a really popular case around here, and I’ve just been assigned to the team.”
• • •
“Ian, it’s Dr. Mathias—I mean, Jessie.”
Jessie? Pressure on his shoulder stirred him enough to flutter his lids open. An inhale brought an over-clean, sterile scent and a hammering heart. He flipped over and stared into the wide eyes of her face. “Jessie?” A hand down his face didn’t wake him as much as her expression. “What’s wrong? Why are you—Is everything okay?” He shot a glance toward Taylor and her bed.
Jessie nodded. “She’s stable.”
Slow beeps filled his mind from the monitors attached to Taylor. “What time is it?” Ian asked.
Jessie tilted her watch up. “Six.”
Ian whirled on her. I actually slept for three hours on the pullout. “No wonder I gotta pee like a bitch.” He’d spent the two hours after he’d met Jessie doing exactly what Tripp suggested—scouring the Internet for historical data.
Jessie hid her chuckle behind a hand. “I can get you a urinal.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Go relieve yourself and come see me at the desk. I gotta leave, but I have a question for you. And, if you want to freshen up, best to do so before the staff changes at seven.”
“I’ll be out in a sec.” Ian maneuvered himself to the bathroom, emptied out a day’s worth of liquid, scrubbed at four-day’s worth of scruff and splashed water on his face. Wrinkles had taken over his clothes, and he reeked from the soap he had to wash his hands with every time he even touched Taylor.
“You look like shit,” he said to himself. “How the hell did you end up babysitting a girl you barely know, who can’t talk to you and who you might have murdered?” He dropped his head, pounded his fist against his heart and stared back into his own eyes. “You better find something that makes all this all go away.” At his exit from the room, Jessie’s head popped up from behind a screen.
She fisted her hand. “You love her, don’t you?”
“Uh …”
Jessie chuckled. Her eyes darted to the left and right. Night and morning staff had already begun their change of shift. “Come with me.” She led Ian to the conference room again and closed the door once he’d entered.
“You’re holding back.” A shiver of worry hit him. “What is it?”
“No. I just wanted to ask you something.”
“Okay.”
“The ring—design—tattoo thing on her finger. It matches yours.”
“Yeah, it does.” The hairs on the back of his neck stood up. “How did you—”
“I remember a lot of stuff from when I was little, Ian.” Her lips curved. “Are you guys … is that a new kind of marriage thing?”
He ran a hand over his head. “No. Not like that.”
She bobbled her head. “It bugged the living daylights out of me when I saw that design yesterday during rounds and couldn’t remember where I’d seen it. Seeing you brought it all back.”
“Brought what back?”
“Um … so, I studied in Greece for a summer—two years ago. Wanted to broaden my horizons, as they say …”
Translation: Find a man.
“… and the woman I lived with had a tapestry on the wall. It was of that tattoo you have—which … why put it around your finger? I always wanted to know. It had to hurt, what with the sensitivity of the skin there and—”
Ian held up a hand. “It was just the right place, that’s all.” He dropped into a chair.
“But on your finger?” She held up both hands and waved them. “Sorry, that’s getting too personal. She told me about it—the design, that is. What a history.”
“Your hostess did? What did she say about it?” Ian leaned back.
Jessie’s cheeks flushed, her eyes dipping down and returning. “You really want to know?”
Ian nodded.
“So … she said to me, ‘Jessica … you need man in life. Man need bosom of woman to survive. Man who not play games. Not man with lifes.’ I had no idea what she was talking about. Still don’t really, but she was so sweet and so kind. I actually thought—” Jessie shook her head and waved, dropping her hand to the back of a chair. In her prim and proper, I’m-a-doctor-and-you’re-not posture, she said, “My profession teaches me to listen, learn, take in the facts and find answers. So … naturally … I asked her to tell me more, and I spent three hours enraptured, listening with a big glass of wine in hand.”
He remembered Jessie’s incessant curiosity. It had been one of the many reasons she followed Michael around as a kid, always asking questions of him or of Ian. He hitched up his chin, dropping it against his palms, waiting for her to go on. When she didn’t, he said, “Maybe you could tell me more? What else you learned? I do love a good story.”
“You really want to hear it? It’s just an old … romantic thing.” Jessie sat and clasped her fingers together on the table, cheeks flushing again.
Damn right, I want to hear it. “It would be good for me to think about non-medical issues for a while, don’t you think? And, I do have this thing, so the stories are all … cool to know.”
Jessie turned her watch toward herself. She nodded. “Yeah. Okay.” Her gaze met Ian’s again even as those cheeks burned.
Why the continued blushing?
“She called the design ‘lov
e roots’. Now, before you freak out—Adonia was the local storyteller. Big on tale. Small on funds. That’s why she took in boarders. And, some people paid her for her stories, believing they would extract wisdom or prophecy. So, the longer the story, the better for her. ‘I give you for free,’ she said to me.” Jessie wagged her hands back and forth.
Ian wanted to say, ‘Move on with it’, but he held his lips shut, waiting for her to proceed.
“Anyway … Adonia said the design was a symbol of a game.” Jessie sighed just a tiny bit.
Shit. Shit. And triple shit. This is a game.
“The game begins with the design appearing—” She pointed to Ian’s finger. “—and ends in someone’s death. All good Greek stories do, right?” She chuckled behind her hand.
Yeah. Sure. Ian nodded her forward.
“The little root things are like the scoreboard. They show the number of tries the person has to find and win their soul mate’s love or be destined to an eternity of searching but never finding. Think Romeo and Juliet in Greek.” She flicked her finger against the table, cheeks flaming again. “‘Make sure find love’, she said. She was always giving me advice.”
So, the thing we didn’t get right is finding each other? But, there’s a picture of us. If we found each other before, then we succeeded. We won. Right? Ian sat up straighter.
“Wouldn’t that suck? To do something over and over without resolution, and when the finale comes, if you’ve failed, you live for eternity without the one thing you wanted most?” She lifted up toward Ian, with a look of longing in her eyes. “You know, like Sisyphus, the one who had to roll a rock uphill only to have it fall back down every time?”
“Uh, yeah. Very true.” How is it a game if we found each other before? Aren’t we meant to be together?
“Of course, with the Greeks, there’s always a catch.”
And, here comes more.
“‘Tree without earth, weak. Tree with earth, strong.’ That’s what she said, anyway. I really have no idea what it means. But … I gathered, since it’s related to roots, that if the two don’t have a foundation somehow, they aren’t strong enough to stand together, and they fail.”
“How do you know who’s playing the game?”
Jessie pitched her head to the side. “Uh … I don’t know. Does it matter? I mean, it is all a crazy story about unrequited love and the tragedy that is everyone’s life when they don’t care for the one right there in front of them.” She turned, eyes toward the floor. “Or don’t care back.”
Ian forced a laugh. “Right. Would suck to be those two, wouldn’t it?” He pushed out another chuckle for show.
She waved a jewel-less hand through the air. “So, anyway, you get the picture.”
What does all this mean?
The redness returned to Jessie’s face. “Maybe never to give up? Never look at someo—something as nothing more than—” She shrugged and picked at a nail.
Once again, Ian didn’t realize he’d spoken out loud. He had to get a handle on his mental ramblings.
Jessie ran a finger in a loop on the table and sighed. Her chin lifted, cheeks brightening again. As quickly as she’d risen, she dropped her head to her arms on the table. “I’m sorry, Ian.”
“What for?”
Face muffled by the table, she said, “Seeing you here. You just … bring back a lot of memories.”
“I hope some of them are good ones.”
Jessie oh so slowly dipped her head down and back a few times before lifting up and turning her watch toward herself. “Hey, it’s way past my bedtime.” She rose and held out a hand, and Ian shook it. “I hope I don’t see you again … I mean tonight … or tomorrow. I’m off. Sorry—” Hand through hair, she took a deep breath and said, “You know what I mean, right? I hope your girl heals quickly. Don’t give up on her, Ian. Medicine is part art, part luck and part science. There’s no telling what we don’t actually know despite the amount of study we’ve had. Every person is different, and while their physiology is basically the same, what works for one person may not for another.”
“That why you already wear a lab coat and Michael doesn’t?”
Her face couldn’t have gone redder.
Michael. Unrequited love. She have a thing for him still?
Jessie angled her head down before lifting it back to face Ian. “I skipped the second and the seventh grades, Ian. When you’re frumpy, really smart and your parents don’t want you to get involved with the boy next door, and the boy next door wants nothing to do with you, the next best thing is to dive into school. I finished college at nineteen and got accepted to medical school at twenty.” Jessie stopped. She fidgeted. “Hey, you know, if you see him, tell him—well just tell him I said ‘hi’, okay?”
Still in love with the boy next door. The story only brought up those memories. “Yeah, sure.”
“Take care, Ian.” With that, she walked away.
Ian stayed in his chair, thinking through Jessie’s story. He put what he’d learned about the design, the symbolism with his blips of memories he knew he didn’t have, Taylor’s call out of ‘John’, Michael’s revelation that Ian, as John, had killed her in their last life, too, her drowning and the bones.
It all swirled in an unintelligible mess with one big question looming.
Why did I kill her if we were together?
• • •
Fire.
Dreams.
Sounds.
Pain.
Darkness.
Water.
Cold.
Earth.
Air.
Taylor drew in a breath. Her lungs brought in cool freshness. A thought to herself suggested she let it free. Her lungs obeyed.
I’m alive.
She tried to force her eyes open, but the action revealed nothing but solid black.
Her body shivered, or so it seemed.
Tuning in for sound brought her nothing.
Am I alive?
A squeeze of her hands gave her no sense of touch.
What the hell is happening?
She tried to move her shoulders, but her arms failed to budge. Pressure built at her back.
My hands. Why are my hands tied behind me?
Taylor gasped, her breath catching in her throat, memories and thoughts jumbling together without coherence.
Ian!
At the thought of his name, her heartbeat slowed. Quiet took over until her mind no longer whirred.
He’d loved her.
Calm.
She’d loved him.
Freedom.
She’d said goodbye.
Torment.
He’d killed her.
Hate.
Neither wanted to be separated.
Desperation.
Both vowed to return.
Desire.
One failed to accept.
Insanity.
22
Feet shuffled around Ian as he stood at the counter again. A cup of toffee-flavored mocha from the hospital vending machine rested in his hand. His gaze stuck on the door to the room the doctors wouldn’t let him re-enter while they made some adjustments to Taylor’s medications.
With so many doctors, nurses and technicians going in and out, he’d stopped watching the who, just looked for any sign he could return, or that something had become worse.
A gasp and a, “Get a doctor in here!” had him tilting his head, and one of the dozen physicians who’d attended to Taylor disappeared into the room, the door not quite swinging closed behind him.
Standing at the counter left Ian with no immediate access and straining for sound.
“What’s wrong with her?” A feminine voice said with a bite as strong as whiskey on a first taste.
A pen tapped against metal. “Honestly, Mrs. Marsh, we don’t know.”
Taylor’s mom?
“Diagnostically, she’s had a fever we could barely control, but tests show no infection.” More taps and shuffling of papers.
“That is not an acceptable diagnosis,” the woman said.
“What happened to her arm?” a deeper voice asked.
That’s not Riley. Who? Her dad?
The doctor reiterated the story that had been told and retold, by Ian, by his father—to anyone who’d asked.
“Why would she be here in New York?” the woman asked.
“There’s a gentleman who can answer that question for you.”
The click against the tile floor suggested a tapping in place versus a walk. “What’s your prognosis?” The bite of her tone wouldn’t be missed by anyone and had Ian leaning his head back against the cement wall near the door.
He caught sight of a couple nurses with eyebrows raised, leaning toward each other with conspiratorial whispers.
“Right now, we don’t know what’s going on with your daughter. We’re running through all her recent records, from her time in the detention center, the hospital in North Carolina. She could have picked up a virus.”
“A detention center … a hospital …” Derision coated the woman’s tone. “What on earth are you talking about?”
“Maybe we should take this outside,” said the deep voice Ian assumed belonged to Taylor’s father.
“I agree.” Back to the doc. “We’d like to keep her the least stressed as possible.”
Sounds grew louder. Ian searched for a place that wouldn’t look obvious toward his eavesdropping if they noticed.
“She was in a jail?” The voice still came from within the room.
Had she not heard the doctor? Ian stood with fists clenched, preparing to give the woman a few choice words.
“Honey, relax,” the man said. “Tay’s a big girl. If something happened, she doesn’t have to tell—”
“Don’t you tell me what she should and shouldn’t tell me. I’m her mother.”
Bingo.
“We’ve been down this road once before. I won’t have someone getting my daughter in trouble and—” The clicks didn’t tap but grew louder. The would-be Taylor clone stood in front of Ian. “You.”
He stared down into a petite, twenty-years-older face that matched Taylor’s. “Me?”
“What did you do to my daughter?” The set of her jaw and the pursed lips brought on a wicked witch effect.
