Dianne puts down the knife, and I feel the barrel of the gun at my back again. There’s nothing I can do. But maybe that’s what’s supposed to happen. Maybe there’s nothing I should do.
No one will ever be able to help you, Camille.
“Give her the juice,” Dianne says.
Penelope hands me a small bottle of orange juice, just a few sips taken out of it. The gun never leaves my back. “Drink all of it,” she says.
I watch Luke, sound asleep on the couch, the rise and fall of his chest. And I raise the bottle to my lips. There’s a chalkiness to the taste, but at least it’s cold. I drink it all, my thoughts slowing and fogging over before I’ve reached the end. The room starts to blur at the corners, and then that blur bleeds into the center and everything turns syrupy. Dianne moves closer to me, that blazing candy cane sweater of hers, the torture of it, all that red in my eyes. I feel nauseous. She puts an arm around me and I can’t fight, I can’t move. . . .
My tongue is thick, my feet useless as she drags me up the stairs. To bed? Is that where I’m going?
We reach the top, and I search her blurring face. Is there something there? A hint of mercy?
“Die like Joan,” Dianne says.
She shoves me hard, and there’s no time for anything, even surprise. I sail in space for a moment, and then my head smacks the floor. Something explodes within me. I’m in pieces. I’m dissolving. Nothing working together anymore.
I want to say Emily’s name, but I don’t have enough breath for that. I’m seeing her now, though, as a baby blinking up at me, her tiny hands grasping the light. I’m seeing my own mother when I was little, her soft fingers on my cheek. I’m kissing Matt for the first time, then dancing with my dad at my wedding, then weeping at Emily’s funeral, my heart ripped in two. I’m screaming at Joan over the phone. You never loved me. You never cared. And then, at last, this past month. From that subway ride on, every second plays out again in this one final gasp of time. It’s all too much—too loud, too pointless—when all I want is to be with Luke. Watch him breathe. Listen to his heart.
Epilogue
One month later
A hospital isn’t the place you want to be these days, what with all this talk of the virus. They’re floating the idea of shutting down production on Protect and Serve as soon as a week from now, and if a TV set isn’t safe, a New York City hospital certainly isn’t. Luke still feels he should be here, though. He was requested, after all.
As he walks through the lobby at New York–Presbyterian, Luke is wearing latex gloves and one of those N95 masks Nora has been hoarding. It still feels extreme to him, all this protective gear just to take the subway. But the whole germaphobe thing is getting to be more and more normal—just this morning he saw a couple of guys on the street, hocking hand sanitizer of all things.
Maybe normal isn’t the word.
“Do it for the baby,” Nora had said this morning as she pressed the mask into his hand. And of course, he’d relented. A father-to-be can’t just think of his own vanity. Luke smiles whenever he thinks of that phrase—father-to-be. He never believed it would refer to him, but that’s the way life is—unpredictable, unplannable, for better or for worse. You have to smile on those rare times when it’s for better.
A month ago he and Nora had planned to go up to Camille’s and tell her about the baby. Luke had pictured the three of them toasting with champagne and sparkling cider, the previous episode of The Bachelor playing on Camille’s DVR. He’d envisioned them getting together in the future, Camille helping them choose a name, eating cake at Nora’s baby shower. . . . Once the baby was born, Luke had thought, it might pull Camille out of the dark cloud she’d wrapped herself in. It might bring back some of her old self, the Camille who Luke had never fully known.
But that’s not what had happened. Camille had killed herself. Luke had been in the same house with her when it happened, passed out from accidentally drinking some of the fentanyl cocktail she prepared. That’s what destroyed him most. He hadn’t left, like her friend Wendy. He could have saved her had he been awake when she came home. But he wasn’t. From what police put together, Camille went upstairs, drank the rest of the suicide mixture, and then, as she was starting to slip out of consciousness, she lost her footing, tumbled downstairs, and died almost instantly. The fall killed her before the drugs could. And he’d been powerless to save her, either way. . . .