C Reiss - Sing

According to a bank located in Colorado, my little house on a hill was worth six hundred and fifty thousand dollars. I knew this, because my mother had cashed out every dime, and then some, piggy backing mortgages and loans. She’d attempted to squeeze almost another hundred grand in equity out of the thing when I’d had those permits opened. As if there were going to be actual improvements.

She’d bailed on her job in February. She’d been at that church since I was in high school, and had a salary good enough to make all her obligations, if barely, but without that job, it all tumbled on her. I imagined the gentleman in question was the cause of her slide.

“You’re a goddamn genius, ma.”

“Watch your mouth.”

“You know you’ll never pay this back?”

“They won’t miss it. It’s a bank.”

“It’s about four banks. Mom, Christ—“

“Mouth.”

“I can’t even get my head around what to do.” I collected the papers. I wanted to slam and bang them to illustrate my annoyance, but they only made shuffling sounds. “Can you just tell me what happened? Because you didn’t raise me to do stuff like this.”

She put her fists on her hips. “Like what?”

“Stealing. This is stealing.”

“Not if I let them have that house.”

“It’s not worth seven hundred thousand dollars.”

“The appraisers said it was, so it is. That’s what things are worth. What experts say they’re worth. People like us, we’re nothing. Our opinions don’t mean anything. And you agree. In your heart you know it. You think the house isn’t worth anything because you love it and if you love it, it’s garbage right? Well, how much would you pay for it? Huh? How much for your father’s trees? How much for the porch your father and I sat on after you were in bed?”

“Mom—“

“How much for the kitchen where I cooked for you? How much for the side door you snuck into after curfew as if I didn’t know? Or the bathroom where I miscarried two babies? How much is it worth, Monya? Even that cracked foundation your father promised to fix a hundred times before he shipped himself across the world. That house was where I waited for him. Where he wasn’t when I found out I had cancer? How much would a stranger pay for those years? If my life there wasn’t worth seven hundred thousand dollars, what was my life worth?”

I couldn’t take it any more. Her face was red and strained. Her voice had his a crescendo, and I had been a neglectful, indolent bitch. I bolted up from the chair and put my arms around her and let her cry.

“It’s okay, ma. We’ll fix it.”

“I can’t. I tried everything.”

“I have friends who are lawyers. I can—“

I could have them look at the paperwork, maybe explain the situation. But I stopped myself. Jonathan was going to offer to buy the house, no doubt, and I didn’t want him to. I didn’t want to go down a road where he started bailing out my family, then my friends. I didn’t want him to trade Jessica’s financial distress for mine. I could soothe my mother for the moment, but in the end, we’d have to let the house go. I’d tell Jonathan I was ok with it. Make it out like it wasn’t a big deal.

A call came in. Still holding my mother, I slipped the phone out of my pocket. Margie. I missed it by a second and put it back in my pocket while it went to voicemail.

“Let me see what I can do,” I said. She sniffed and stood up straight.

“There’s nothing to do. I’m sorry you have to move.”

“I’ll live.” I waved it off, but I knew I wasn’t convincing. So I changed the subject. “I should have come around sooner.”

“Yes. You should have.”

“I’m sorry.”

A text blooped. My mother and I looked at each other expectantly.

“This the man with the car?” The tone did not bode well for an intelligent conversation. If I had just learned to stop calling myself a whore, my mother hadn’t. She was in a depressive phase but that could change on a dime.

“No it’s his sister, probably.”

I looked. It was a text from Margie, as I expected.

—Where the fuck are you?—

The next one came immediately after.

—He’s bleeding into his chest. Bad suture ripped tissue—

It took me sixty seconds to say goodbye to my mother, promise her I’d do my best for her, scoop up the papers, and get in the car.

MONICA

I texted Margie that I’d be there in two hours. It was getting dark already, and I’d hit Los Angeles right around rush hour, which would literally double the time it would take me to get to Sequoia. The hospital was inside a knot of traffic arteries that made it hard to move toward or away from during peak hours. Either poor planning for the sake of the ambulances and women in labor, but if you wanted a central, urban hospital accessible from the five points of LA, it was prime real estate.

And Jonathan was in the middle of the best cardiac unit in the country, if the internet was to be believed. Whatever happened, I was sure it would be rectified in no time at all. I worried that he might face unpleasantness, and that I wouldn’t be there for him. But he’d be fine. I was sure, positive as a matter of fact, that it wasn’t a big deal.

I finally got into the waiting room at 7pm, and was redirected to intensive care. I didn’t shake, nor did I panic, because in ten years, this was going to be funny.

But when I got to intensive care, it didn’t look like anyone was laughing. Fiona blew past me without greeting. Deirdre smiled at me, but she wasn’t like the rest of them. She couldn’t hide her concern. Sheila, who always came off motherly and kind was talking to Margie like she wanted to bite her head off. Doing my own roll call, I counted off. Carrie not coming. Leanne in Asia. Theresa hadn’t been around in days. Eileen stood by Margie, twisting her diamond ring around her finger with her thumb. Her pumps had been traded for sneakers days ago, when her medication had been upped. She waved to me, but didn’t call me over.

Margie’s presence made me bold. I walked forward.

“This is unacceptable,” Sheila spoke in clipped vowels and hard consonants, he finger pointed at Margie’s throat. “And you treat it like another day in the park. This hospital fucked up. They as good as killed him.”

I gasped, and the three of them paused, glanced, ignored.

“Thanks for the drama,” Margie said to Sheila. “It’s exactly what we need.”

“You need to start a filing a malpractice suit immediately.”

“Like hell.”

“You’re losing your guts.”

“I want us focusing on Jonathan. Not legal battles. Let them do an inquiry—

“And start the cover-up.”

“This is not TV—“

“I’ll hire my own counsel.”

“Exactly what he needs.”

“You—“

“I agree with Margie,” I said. Six light eyes turned to face me and I got my first ever case of stage fright. “It’s going to take years to sue. A week isn’t going to make a difference.”

Sheila turned her head, but didn’t commit the rest of her body to face me. She’s been kind to me from the minute I met her, but I had the feeling that was about to change.

“Who are you?” she spit out.

She knew goddamn well who I was. Nobody.

I walked away and wasn’t followed. Good. Fucking Drazens, all of them. Except the one.

I didn’t know the nurses in the ICU, so I went to the desk and put a harmless look on my face.

“Hi,” I said to the dark-skinned woman with an armful of charts. “I’m looking for Jonathan Drazen’s room?”

“He’s down in x-ray. Come back in an hour.”

I had two choices. Go back and try and find out what I needed from the Family Drazen, or wait in the cafeteria until Jonathan came back. I knew Margie would tell me everything once she shook Sheila, and Sheila herself might even calm down enough to be nice to me. But there was no reason I had to stand there and be abused while I waited.

As I walked into the cafeteria, I saw Daddy Drazen sitting with a long-haired man in sandals, who had his two year-old daughter on his knee. The man was talking fast with his head down. Declan leaned into hear, and put his hand on the man’s shoulder. He didn’t quite seem like a sociopath, which didn’t mean much of anything. I wasn’t an expert on either Declan or abnormal psychology.

I got in line for a cup of tea. A song percolated in my head. I went to get my notebook, but dig as I might, it wasn’t in my bag. I must have left it home. Damn it. I took out a Sharpie and got ready to write it on my arm.

“Monica?”

I heard my name as I spaced out to the music in my head, trying to get words and rhythm to match.

“Dr. Thorensen. I mean, Brad. Hi.” He had a white lab coat over his suit, with a nametag clipped to the lapel. “I’ve never seen you at work before.”

“What are you doing down here?”

“Getting something to eat. I just got in.”

He took me by the elbow and sat me down at an empty table. We sat knee to knee on the same side of it.

“What?” I said.

“I just had to open a transplant assessment of Mr. Drazen.”

I don’t know what I must have looked like. Maybe blank, because a sort of vacuity took hold of me, where I expected more information to be poured into my brain. Or maybe I looked puzzled.

“I don’t understand. It was a bad suture. I know Sheila’s pissed but....”

But I’d assumed she was flying off the handle. But I’d thought he got x-rays all the time. But I thought it was a complication, not ruination. But I was hanging on to my optimism because I missed it.

He glanced around, then back to me.

“Say it,” I said. “I don’t want to hear it from anyone else.”

“It was a suture inside his heart. The tearing’s very bad. He’s bleeding faster than they can pump it out. If they go in and patch him up...well. They can’t. There’s no room. And the tear has moved into his left ventricle.”

“Are you going to fix it?” I panicked. It was the panic of someone whose anxiety was a show, because I knew everything was going to be okay. For sure, there was an easy fix for all this, and Jonathan and I would laugh about how silly I was to worry so much. I couldn’t wait for that laughter. I told the story in my head over an imaginary Thanksgiving dinner, describing the goosebumps on my arms, the dry feeling in my mouth, the sudden breathlessness in my lungs. I’d wax dramatic about holding back tears, and Jonathan would laugh that laugh from deep in his chest, and tears would stream down his own face.

“I don’t know,” Brad said.

“What do you mean you don’t know?”

“We’re still doing the assessment. I have a lot of forms to fill out. I have to talk to the rest of the cardiac team. It’s tricky.”

“What’s fucking tricky, Brad? You’re either fixing it or you’re filling out fucking paperwork.”

“Take it easy.”

“I’m not taking it easy. I will burn your fucking house down if you don’t tell me right now why you assholes can’t fix it immediately.”

He took my wrists and held me to a sitting position. I knew he wouldn’t have done that unless he knew me, and the privilege of whatever information I’d already gotten was courtesy of a few hours of City of Dis.

“There’s a good chance, and I don’t know for sure, because I need to review everything with the committee, but I’m pretty sure he’ll need a transplant.”

“Okay,” I said. I breathed, which I’d forgotten to do. That was a thing. It was a course of action. “Then give him one.”

“We need a heart, and his blood type? AB negative? It’s rare. He needs to get on the list. Monica, I hope I’m wrong. If the surgical team believe they can go back in and fix it, then this whole conversation is moot.”

His eyes, deep blue and a little bloodshot, as if he’d been up too many hours, did not waver from mine. He had the confidence of a man who had held a human heart in his hands and made it beat again. A man who had made life and death happen, and for whom Jonathan was just another patient, another puzzle to solve, another career challenge.

I slipped my hands down until I could hold his hands. I squeezed them and closed my eyes.

“I want you to understand something,” I said. “That man. He’s not some boyfriend in a line of them. He is my alpha and omega. He is the sky over me. Without him, I’m lost. There’s no one else, no one whose soul balances mine the way his does. I waited my life for him, and when he came I didn’t recognize him. Not until very recently. If I lose him I swear, as God is my witness, I will be alone. No man can match him.”