by Meli Raine
Beep! Beep! Beep!
Some part of my body sets off a sensor on a machine that is connected to a system at the nurse’s desk. Are they there? Will they respond in time?
And then all I do is blink.
Literally.
That’s all I can do.
Until I go down down down again.
The fall is endless.
Chapter 7
The air feeds me. I gulp it, my mouth open, teeth biting down as if you can eat it with a spoon. Like ice cream, it tastes sweet and full, my tongue delighting in the ongoing push of air into my lungs, my abdomen, my core, my essence. Traveling down my chakras, it infuses my spine with energy, every bit of me aligned with all that is and all that will be, past, present, and future indistinguishable.
Just energy.
Just love.
I’m floating on a cloud made of mint and hope.
It smells so good.
I roll over and realize I can, the joy of my body being mine again to move and control at will just a bonus compared to the bliss that surrounds me. Pure happiness, pure joy makes me feel connected to every atom, my breath my harmony, my heartbeat my melody.
I am here.
I can move.
I can talk.
I can love.
“Lily!” An ocean appears to my left, the waves rolling perfectly as Bowie surfs, waving to me, catching the curl at a perfect angle. My sister Gwen is on the sand, building beautiful princess sandcastles, elaborate edifices made with pink taffy and purple seafoam. The scent of seawater and pleasure fills my nostrils, wet sand between my toes a sacrament. Mom’s running ahead of me, Dad at her heels, their pants rolled up as they goof in the surf, ending with a kiss that makes me turn away because no kid, no matter how happy, needs to watch that.
I laugh, the sound like mallets on a marimba, like fingers on a steel drum, like rain on a tin roof, hot and pulsing and special.
Then I’m drenched in ice-cold water, shivering in a cold, dark cavern with stalactites staring down at me, an inch from my nose, drip drip drip growing louder as black water sizzles on my face, burning me. I shake, unable to control my freezing muscles, a cackling laughter filling the void.
“Mom? Dad? Gwennie? Bowie?”
One of the stalactites cracks and falls, piercing my heart. I choke and gurgle until his eyes, oh God, those eyes, meet mine.
“This is the part I love best. Watching you drain away,” he says, until I do, drop by drop, unable to breathe and clawing at my throat with hands that don’t work–
Waking up is a surprise.
Sunlight smacks me in the face like a drill sergeant. The steady hum of machines tells me I’m alive. I inhale, close my eyes, and then feel it, heart slapping hard against my ribs like it’s being forced awake.
Awake.
I’m awake, the nightmare leaving its residue on me, the shiver unmistakable, the sweetness of some parts hard to untangle from the horror of the rest. Romeo’s eyes won’t leave the imprint behind my eyelids, always there the second my brain takes me to darker waters within.
And then I feel it. Here.
A presence.
Jerking my eyelids up, eyes pulling in the socket with more effort than it should take, I look to my right. Dark eyes meet mine.
Romeo.
I close my eyes again. The dream. It’s still here.
I open them again.
Persistent dream.
“Lily,” he says with a dip of the head. The gesture is gentlemanly, of a different era. Charming, even.
Suave.
It’s a mannerism you use when you know you have the upper hand.
My heart rate zooms. I hold my breath.
No.
I stop, breathing slowly. If I set the monitors off every time he’s in the room, he’ll know I know.
My only power is the fact that he doesn’t know if I know.
Making him think I don’t remember is critical.
“How are you?” he asks.
What am I supposed to say? Just peachy?
My throat jumps, the skin reacting to my thready pulse. Pressing the tip of my tongue against the spot on the roof of my mouth right behind my front teeth helps me to relax. To breathe with my belly.
To hold back the scream that can’t escape.
Just because I can’t shriek doesn’t mean the impulse isn’t inside me. It has to come out somehow, or be held back with more control than I possess.
“You are in a very unfortunate position,” he says, turning to me.
I close my eyes. I slow my breathing. My lips go slack. My muscles relax only because that is how I survive this.
Play possum.
Play dead and I might survive.
Opening my eyes a millimeter, I watch him out of my peripheral vision. Every bit of news about my condition goes from my mom to Duff and, I assume, to Romeo. Whatever happened last night after my sensors went off and I passed out is in his memory banks, stored there for analysis. Every movement, every breath, every sound I make will be calculated.
Like Duff said last night, We need to end this. Now.
I am this, right?
I am in an unfortunate position.
“Do you remember who shot you, Lily?” His words come out like a snake slithering on a shadowed sidewalk in the sweltering heat of summer. They feel slick and dry, soft and sinister.
“Nuh.” I speak because it helps to release the tension inside me, the shriek that wants to pull my soul out of my body and clutch it to its breast, fleeing. I shouldn’t have said anything. Why did my brain betray me?
He moves closer. I can smell his cologne, the scent scraping along the back of my nose, the passages dry, the taste irritating. Gagging hurts, so I just breathe carefully, focusing on awareness of my breath.
Hoping to God he believes me.
“Are you sure?”
That day at the counter, my back was turned. The mirror on the shelf was tilted. He couldn’t have seen me see him in it.
Could he?
“Nuh.”
Eyes narrowing, he studies me like I’m a specimen. People don’t look at other people like this, so openly, so brazenly, unless they know they have all the power. Medical staff look at me as a patient. A series of parts and skin and systems that need to be brought back to conventional homeostasis.
They don’t look at me like this.
I’d rather be ignored and in pain than be examined like this. But what I’d rather have or be doesn’t matter.
“I think you’re smarter than everyone realizes,” Romeo says, his hand coming out of his pocket. It’s clenched. He’s holding something. The fingers release and I can only catch the faintest edge of a packet. If I look right at him, I’m dead. I know it.
“Muh muh.”
“You want your Mom?”
“Yuh.”
He laughs softly through his nose. “Oh, Lily.”
Like Duff, everything he says terrifies me. But when I listen to the words without my emotions, they are banal. Neutral. No one watching a video or listening in on this conversation would think twice. They would assume he’s being kind.
That’s what makes evil people so dangerous.
They act just like us.
Until they don’t.
His hand brushes against the side of the bed and a crinkling sound tickles my ears. Then something else tickles my hand. The door is blocked by his body, so the light that normally shines into the room from the hallway turns into a corona that surrounds the outline of his frame. Like an angel.
A smile makes his mouth seem so warm. A full lower lip like a male model, like those black-and-white ads in GQ magazine that make you think for a split second that one day, you could be wanted by a man who drives convertibles along Italian vineyard roads and smiles at you like no one else exists.
Like that’s a real life you could have.
“Lily, everyone in your position wants their mom.” He watches me.
I close my eyes and
pretend to sleep again.
But I know it’s too late.
Something drags lightly against the skin of my wrist. It’s soft and almost sweet, the sensation limited but maddening.
I look down.
When you work in a florist shop, you learn about spiders real quick. Especially working in one so close to the border, where deliveries are super fresh. Critters of every kind stow away on the flowers we sell, but spiders, in particular, are nasty little floral hitchhikers.
My eyes are nearly closed, open just enough to see anything directly in front of me. Chin down, I can only see through the tiny bit of light at the base of my eyelashes. Open my lids a fraction more and I give myself away.
Close them and I know nothing.
There’s that in-between again. The most dangerous place to be, for me.
Turning on his heel, he leaves. Clack. Clack. Clack. Business shoes with hard soles make their drumbeat, like he’s controlling my heartbeat. As the door snicks shut, I take in a deep breath, but keep my eyes closed. It could be a trick. A test.
One I have to pass.
One, two, three long breaths later and I finally take a chance. Open my eyes.
There it is.
The spider.
It’s small. I’ll give him that. Terror pours through me, running up and down my body in random patterns, as if it’s looking for a weak point to escape. That’s how organisms work, right? Viruses attack the weakest cells. Rulers seeking power attack the less powerful. It’s dog eat dog.
And I’m the smaller dog.
About a centimeter square, the spider moves onto the clear IV adhesive that attaches the tube that’s delivering what I need to keep me alive into my bloodstream. A bite would inject something different, something that has the opposite effect. Identifying a poisonous spider is beyond my abilities, but I know this: if Romeo came into my room, questioned me, and positioned his body so no camera would capture what he did, then released a spider onto my hand, it’s not a harmless little prank.
The spider creeps forward.
I’m trapped. Practically immobile. My call button is out of reach.
And all I can do is pray.
Chapter 8
Praying helps for about ten seconds.
“Sssssss,” I try, realizing I need to be able to tell someone about the spider. “Spppppuh.” Why won’t my mouth work? Why does my head hurt so much? What did I do to deserve this? How do I fight back against a bodyguard who is out to kill me? Why me?
Why?
I’ll never know.
I’ll die not knowing.
The spider drags one leg back and forth against my skin a few millimeters, like a dog digging up a little grass before resting in the shade, like a mom sweeping dirt off a bench before sitting down, like I’m something to be cleared off before doing what needs to be done.
I’m a surface.
Nothing more.
I try to move my hand, but I only get an inch or so. The doctors say I’m slowly recovering mobility, but the timeline is about to tick-tock end long before I can prove them right.
My hands are humming. I’m not sure what the song is, but I know this: they’re off key.
“Spiii,” I say, as if calling its name, like I’m asking an insect to be kind to me. Hey, bro, could you help me out here and not bite me with your deadly venom? Thanks.
Some weird sound inside my mind makes me think there’s a demented piece of me that is laughing at this whole mess, but then my mind goes blank. Cotton returns. I’m nothing but cotton balls spread wide, sheared like sheep’s wool, covering the air in layers designed to make me float away.
Too bad I come back.
The awareness returns like a patchwork quilt, but the quilt is my skin. My right-side jawline tingles, an unpleasant feeling that borders on pain, like the skin is turning cold and about to slide off. Then my nose runs hot, the tip making me open my eyes and cross them to get a focal point so I can make sure there isn’t a flame on my face.
Skrit skrit skrit.
The spider climbs up to the soft flesh of my inner elbow and stops. It’s out of my view. That makes this somehow worse.
Still I breathe, the air moving through my nose at erratic rates. The sound of my own respiration echos inside my head, the back of my throat expanding, the sound like wind in a conch shell. Over and over, I replay the loop of Romeo coming into my room, talking to me, the crinkle of whatever package the spider was in. How he made sure his back was to the camera. How the spider itself will go undetected, but lab tests on my blood after I’m dead will reveal the “truth.”
Poor Lily. A random, freak accident. A spider in the hospital. Who could have ever predicted such a thing might happen?
One-in-a-million chance.
One in ten million.
And meanwhile, Romeo and his buddy Duff continue to work for people at the highest levels of power in the country. Don’t they know? Don’t they care?
Tears gather in the curls of my ear.
No.
They don’t.
Either they don’t know, or they don’t care.
It doesn’t matter for me which is the truth.
Spiders jump.
I know because I can see it now, on my breast. There is a piece of tubing that runs under the sheet, up to the central line in my chest, and the spider is on the tube, balanced perfectly on the upside-down arc. Artistry comes into the most surreal moments. He looks poised. Stately.
Why do I assume all spiders are ‘he’?
Weeping alone in a room, unable to even say the word spider while one turns my body into a parkour track and the final jump involves fangs in my flesh, is just too much.
My heart rate zooms. Beep! Beep! Beep!
The door blasts open like someone used a bomb, banging hard against the back wall. I’m shaking, almost convulsing as Duff walks in, taking one side of my bed, a nurse I don’t know on the right. The cotton returns and I can hear them but can’t feel anything other than a single point on my chest, where the center of the universe sits crouched, oblivious to the fact that it owns everything.
I’m flying, my back against the ceiling, my hospital gown open at the back, ass cheeks brushing against the drop-ceiling tiles. It’s easy to fly like this, but you can never escape. You’re stuck looking down, and the scenery’s never Instagram perfect.
It’s a square, though. Just like the make-believe on social media, the frame is equal on all four sides.
It has to be.
Watching my body as the nurse treats its surface, I see Duff look at me, then at the nurse, eyes settling below my collarbone. He reaches towards me.
“What the hell is this?” he mutters, holding up the spider on his finger. Flinging it, he looks down, moving his foot fast. I heard the doctor say that parts of the brain light up when we watch other people move. Our brains mirror the physical impulses. My feet twitch as I fly, because I can move when I’m up here. I get to choose what I do with my body as long as I stay up here, where nothing I do matters.
As Duff stomps the spider, my foot stomps, too.
Sucked down, down, down back into my body, I feel like a vacuum-cleaner cord retracting. Press a button and whip! everything’s back where it belongs.
Trapped but perfectly tucked away as expected.
“Got a spider problem in the hospital?” Duff asks the nurse. I look at her nametag. COR is all I can read.
“What?” She’s distracted, pushing liquid into an IV with a syringe.
“Just found a spider on her.”
“A spider vein?”
“No. Spider. Insect.”
Shrug. “It happens. How weird, though. Doesn’t normally happen this high up. First floor, sure. And in rooms where little kids visit, or there’s a mess at home.”
“She doesn’t fit that profile.”
“I’ll let the custodial staff know.” She looks me over, making notes on a tablet. “Huh. Heart rate’s settling down.”
Duff looks d
own at the spot where he stomped and says nothing.
“What kind of spider?” she asks him across my chest.
“Huh?”
“What kind?”
“Stain.”
“A stain spider?”
“The spider is nothing but a stain now.”
She laughs. The air changes, her energy going out to him with a more casual feel. “You protect her, right?”
“Something like that.”
“I’ve heard the rumors. I’m new. Corinna.” She reaches across me to shake Duff’s hand. He looks down at me, his hand by his side. Slowly, with remorse, she pulls back.
“Sorry, Lily,” she whispers.
But it’s all a game. She did what everyone does. She treated me like furniture.
That’s okay.
Because my inability to brush a spider off my arm proves them all right.
I just nearly died, and these two are making small talk.
“Hey, Corinna.”
“She’s pretty important, huh?”
“Something like that.”
“You say anything other than ‘something like that’?”
Duff’s turn to shrug.
“I get paid to do my job and keep my mouth shut.”
“You just described nursing.”
Minus the mouth-shut part, I think but don’t say.
Because I can’t.
Duff walks around the foot of my bed and moves close enough to Corinna that I go still, holding my breath. For a tense guy who is normally nothing but hard muscle, he’s suddenly present. More relaxed and chatty.
“Corinna, you’re new. How long you been here?”
“Three months.”
“That’s not really new.”
“Two more days and my probationary period’s over.”
“You worked with Lily before?” She bats her eyelashes at him, thinking he’s being nice. That’s not what I’m witnessing.
Duff is interrogating.
“Sure. A few times. Before.” Faltering, she looks at me and points to my head. “You seen what that looks like under her bandage? Jesus. Whoever did this to her was an animal.”
Tension floods Duff’s features.
“Yeah.”
“They say she’s talking, but...”
