C Reiss - Sing

When I opened my eyes, Brad was looking at our clasped hands, head down.

“I didn’t know,” he said.

“I only live next door.”

He looked back up to me. “I’ll do my best, Monica. I can’t promise anything. If he needs a new heart, I want you to be ready for a rough time. He doesn’t have forever to bleed into himself, and healthy hearts don’t come all that often. You need to sleep and eat and live your life while you wait.”

I smirked. “My life is with him, Brad. That’s how I live it. The rest is unnecessary complication.” I felt like Jonathan was there with me, having quoted him.

We sat like that for a few seconds, where I tried to transmit my seriousness. It felt good to just sit with someone and be, even if it couldn’t last.

His cellphone beeped. He didn’t even look at it but let go of my hands.

“That’s my office. I have to go.”

“Will you let me know?”

“You’ll know, Monica. You’ll know.” He stood. “Just the sleeping and eating. Do those. Okay?”

My tea was cold. My granola bar looked more and more like a slab of pressed shit.

“After I see him. Then I’ll go home and go to bed.”

He looked at his watch. “Come with me. Hurry.”

He waved and walked off, hand feeling into his pocket for his phone before he’d even turned around completely. I scuttled behind.

Examination rooms inside offices inside suites inside wards, around corners and up secret stairs, I followed Brad to x-ray. He spoke to a lady in a pink smock while texting, and Pink Smock gave him the name of yet another space I never would have found on my own, and in that space was a gurney. On it was Jonathan.

I assumed Brad said good-bye, because by the time I was standing over my lover, Brad was gone.

Jonathan was either sleeping or unconscious, pale as death, an altar to IV tower gods. I took his hand, pressing my palm to his. He did not respond. It was just warm enough, which was the only way I knew he wasn’t lost. I stayed there until Pink Smock and an orderly came to push him away. I went with them, just to make sure he was okay.

MONICA

I slept in a random waiting room, despite promising Brad I’d go home. I got up aching everywhere and sat in the cafeteria, writing a song on a napkin. Something moved on the table. I snapped out of it. My notebook, with the NOPA inside was being slid toward me. Declan stood over the table.

“I thought you might want this,” he said. “You left it here the other day.”

“Thanks.” I stuffed it in my bag. “You’re like a regular here, these days. Piece of furniture.”

“Like fiberglass and cheap chrome?”

“The Drazen sense of humor is genetic, apparently.”

“Not so apparent.” He sat down. “I haven’t heard my boy crack a joke in twenty years.”

“He’s funny.” My voice cracked. I put my head down. I couldn’t look at him, because I was about to say ‘he was funny.’ My eyes were stinging and my face got red. I didn’t want this man made of fiberglass and chrome to see me cry over his prodigal son.

“Margaret told me,” he said.

I sniffed and tried to get my shit together. “Why aren’t you ever upstairs with them?” I clutched my tea, letting it heat up my icy hands.

“This is as close as I’m allowed. They don’t want me there. My wife, at least. We sleep on opposite sides of the house. Decades of neglect will do that.”

“I’m sure it was purely benign.” My raw emotional mood made my feelings hard to hide, and in that unguarded moment, my voice dripped with inappropriately rude sarcasm. I wasn’t being a woman of grace.

But he seemed to take it in stride. “I had a very, shall we say, intense mid-life crisis.”

“You shared a mistress with your son. Pretty intense.”

“Is that what he told you? Interesting. I guess he could have seen it that way. She was a very manipulative girl, but yes, I did plenty I was pleased with at the time, and now...well now I need a golf cart to get to my wife’s bedroom and my son won’t see me.” He massaged his coffee. “Would he be upset if he knew you were at a table with me?”

“Yeah.” I suddenly felt guilty for being there. Jonathan would not like it. Not one bit. If he was going to get well, he needed to know that I was safe, and I was sure he didn’t think of me as safe around his father. I put the granola bar in my bag.

“I should go upstairs. It was nice talking to you.”

“Yes, it was.”

JONATHAN

I’d already tried to take the fucking little tubes out of my fucking nose. The room lit up like Griffith Park at Christmas and it was Jingle Bells all over again. In my life, I’d be okay if I never get defibrillated again. Odds were not in my favor.

I had a hard time staying awake for long. Exhaustion from lack of oxygen and a body worn out working for nothing, pumping blood that went down a tube, sucking up more blood from a bag. There was medicine too. Bags of it, going into my hand. And a bag of blood that kept getting replaced like a pot of coffee.

I remember one of them saying was that I was a lucky man. I had no idea what he was talking about, but I thought it didn’t have a damn thing to do with my health. He was blond. Nordic looking, and I asked him what he meant, but he just went on with another battery of questions that seemed like every other battery of questions every other white lab coat had asked either me, or the person next to them. If I had a dime for every doctor that walked in and talked about me like I wasn’t there, I could buy and sell myself. The non-entity of me. The skin bag of pain and discomfort. I didn’t feel like I owned my own body any more. I felt like a piece of meat being kept alive until some day when something happened. Some miracle. Or some news.

“I’m not here to make you upset,” I felt lucid when Margie said that, my brain snapping to attention at the thought that there was something I should, but shouldn’t be, upset about.

“Oh, good. You’re here to tap dance.”

“I love that you have the energy to joke, but not give a shit about your condition.”

“I give a shit.” The effort it took to speak was monumental, but contact with someone wearing real clothes and not wielding a needle was too welcome to not answer in full. “Guy just came and told me I’m in a world of trouble. There’s just nothing I can do about it.”

“They called us into a meeting. This must be what it’s about. What did they say?”

“Let them do their jobs. I can’t...” I drifted off. I couldn’t repeat what the guy with the silver hair had said. Dr. Emerson. Like the poet.

As if understanding she put her hand on my shoulder.

“There’s something I took care of while you were down,” she said. “It’s going to create drama.”

“Okay.”

“Okay, you have no problem with it?”

“Okay, tell me what it is.”

“Monica’s broke. She hasn’t been going to work because she’s been hanging around Sequoia Hospital like she works here.”

“Fuck.” My life spinning out of control was bad enough, but I was taking Monica with me.

“I’m giving her money and saying it’s from you. You’re going to back me up.”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

“Margie?” I raised my hand a little and she took it, coming closer to me so she could hear.

“What?”

“You’re my new favorite. Thank you.”

“I’m keeping tabs on every dime, because you’re going to get better, you little fuck. I don’t know how, but this isn’t how it ends. Do you understand me? It’s not ending like this.”

MONICA

The closer I got to Jonathan’s family, the more I understood where he came from. His ability to laugh through anger and tears, the happy face he put on over his worries, the Oscar-worthy show of confidence, came from his mother. The deft manipulations of people and situations, the sadism, the raw hunger, the social charm, came from his father. The passion and protectiveness were learned through his sisters.

Margie had handed me five thousand dollars in an envelope and told me if I didn’t take it she was going to tell Jonathan and it would upset him enough to give him another heart attack. She was exaggerating and being cartoonish, but I got the point. He’d arranged the money, and refusing it would cause him stress.

“I told you not to tell him,” I’d said, holding on to a shred of pride even as I clutched the envelope.

“I ignored you. Tough.”

“I hate this.”

“Take it up with God.”

“Well, thank you,” I said. “I don’t want you to think I don’t appreciate it.”

I needed the money. Badly. After spending a morning on the phone, I found I had long odds of saving the house. I could rescue my mother’s finances by arranging a short sale, but I’d still have to move, and one of the banks was adamant about the current resident vacating the premises. I could have waited for an eviction, and then fought it, but I had too many balls in the air as it was. I needed to find a place to live, a place to store my stuff. I needed to rent a truck, pay a security deposit and first month’s rent. Five thousand would just about cut it.

And now I had other business to attend to. Accepting five grand in cash from my lover’s sister was something I never thought I’d do. Today would be a day of firsts.

I dialed Eddie’s cell phone. He picked up. Oh, the privilege of being me. Six months ago he wouldn’t have returned a voice mail from me, much less taken a call on the second ring.

“What’s happening, Princess?” he answered through a wave of ambient noise. I didn’t like the new nickname. It was too close in concept to “flake.”

“I can’t do a session,” I said. “Jonathan, he’s...it’s bad. I need to be here.”

“How bad?” The ambient noise disappeared as if he’d closed a window.

“Something went wrong. He’s bleeding. He needs a transplant. Maybe. Probably?”

“What?”

“If you have a heart lying around in the next few days...”

“Days?”

My head was screwed up. I was a monster. I’d thought Eddie cared that I was cancelling my recording session, but Jonathan was his friend, and he was dying, why the hell would he care about my fucking EP?

“You should come and see him,” I said.

“Fuck.”

“Are you all right? I’m sorry, I’ve been dealing with this for days. I should have broken it to you better.”

He didn’t answer right away. I thought I’d lost the connection, then he finally spoke up. “When I banged up my dad’s Maz, he took me all over LA to get it fixed. We got it home before my parents got back from Maui. By like, minutes. He drove like such a dick.”

I sniffed, “Don’t eulogize yet, please.”

I had the sudden, physical need to see Jonathan immediately, to stop wasting time in a cold stairway when I could be taking up space with him.

I pushed through the stair doors into the hall.

“Sorry, I...” Eddie caught himself. “Tell him he’s an asshole for me. All right?”

“Sure thing.”

The elevator dinged, and I blocked traffic by standing there, looking at my phone, wondering why I didn’t give a shit about a blown opportunity.

“Monica,” came a voice in the crowd. I turned to the source.

“Jessica.”

“I’d like to speak with you.”

“Sure.”

We stepped away, into a corner by a six foot tall potted plant that looked too fake to be real, or too real to be fake.

“What?” I said.

She raised her eyebrows. “You’ve got no business being sharp with me.”

“Thanks for letting me know my business.”

“I didn’t come here to fight with you. I came to see him.”

“Why? To upset him? I’m sick of this. I’ve never seen anyone crush a man so hard then try to get him back like it was her job. For Chrissakes, I wish he’d just give you your money so you’d leave him the fuck alone.”

“He did,” she said, her face darkening like a desert under rare clouds. “This is a long term hospitalization. The trust will move to irrevocable in a week. He’ll be here.”

It hit me then, her motivation in being there. It was sick. Unbelievably venal.

“Unless he’s dead, right?” I said through my teeth. “If he dies while the trust is revocable, you lose.”

I started to walk away, but she grabbed my elbow hard.

I looked at the place where her fingers dented the fabric of my shirt, then at her.