Hush
Seventeen
"What the hell happened?" Patrick asked. He stood in a panic as he looked at the two unconscious bodies and the spot where his fiance had been standing.
"You didn't get to that part of Dr. Slaski's writing?" I asked. "When you take your soul or whatever up to that foggy place you have to leave your body behind momentarily."
"So they're trying to exorcise her-again. That didn't work last time, and there's no reason for it to work this time."
"Have you ever been up there?" I asked him.
He shook his head, and I was fairly certain that, unlike earlier, he wasn't lying.
"The whole place is enshrouded in a fog and lined with doors. And there's this guy who looks like a gladiator basically. He's called the gatekeeper. I'm not entirely sure why he's up there, but at least part of his job is warning people not to go through those doors. You see, no one who goes through those doors ever comes back."
Patrick's eyes widened at this.
"No," he said, and then he repeated the word more loudly. He took a hold of Jesse's body and began to shake him roughly, as though he could dislodge him from Shadowland that way. I knew that technique wasn't going to work. When you were up there, you had no awareness of the physical body you'd left behind. However, that didn't mean I was OK with Patrick deciding to rough up my husband.
I crossed the room in an instant and began to pull him off of Jesse. Patrick might have done some jogging or something, but he definitely wasn't hitting the gym on a regular basis. He struggled against me, and I couldn't subdue him entirely, the way Jesse had earlier, but I kept him away from both Jesse and Paul's bodies.
"Dammit," Patrick cried, and he flung himself away from me and further towards his bookcase. "Dammit, dammit, dammit. I can't lose her."
"Stop worrying about Alexa and start worrying about yourself. Now is a prime time to start preparing for prison, you know. I'm sure you've got all those stacks of money around here somewhere, just waiting to be found," I said.
And I was right.
Patrick began to fling items off of the bookshelf. I started to dodge them, but I realized he wasn't aiming them at me. He just kept throwing things, mostly books, to the ground. Until finally I realized that there was something very strange about the books that were beginning to fill up the ground between us.
They were all hollow.
The space on the bookshelf where the hollow books had been was not empty. Instead, it was filled with piles of cash. The books were only there as a decoy to mask the neat stacks of crisp bills that were burrowed behind them.
Patrick threw back a final hollow book, and I realized that there was something else on that shelf, too: a gun.
I made a movement towards Patrick to stop him from picking up the gun, but I stopped myself short as his hands wrapped around the gun's handle.
"Remember what you said earlier," I said quickly. "You didn't want to do anything bad to that woman in the jewelry store. That wasn't your idea. You're not like this. You're not the type of person to kill someone else. You're not, Patrick."
Patrick gulped nervously, and his eyes were wild.
I glanced towards Jesse and Paul, who were both still up there in Shadowland. Patrick's eyes followed my gaze, and the end of the barrel of his gun began to shift from me to Jesse.
"That won't help," I said quickly, and I positioned myself so that I was standing in front of Jesse's prone body. "That's not how it works when you shift somewhere."
"It doesn't matter how it works," Patrick said. "They're going to get rid of Alexa."
Why had I gloated at him earlier? How could I have thought giving him an honest explanation of what was going to happen to Alexa was a good idea? Of course he was flying off the handle, and it was all my fault. If anything happened to Jesse, if anything happened to my child, it would all come back to me having run my mouth.
"We'll leave, and we won't ever bother you again. You'll get to have all of that money, and you'll never see us again."
"I'll never see Alexa again either!" Patrick shouted. His hand was shaking, and there were tears in his eyes.
"Murder is illegal. You'll never see freedom again either if you shoot," I said.
Patrick laughed. It wasn't cold like Alexa's laughter had been either. It sounded manic. "California," he stammered, "California has stand your ground laws. I think it's got… Yes, stand your ground laws. I don't have to let any of you leave here alive. You… You forced your way in, and I'm defending myself. I'm just defending myself."
"You don't have to do this," I said slowly. I was using my best counselor's voice, the patient one that I used with stubborn kids who were reluctant to open up. "Even if you don't go to jail, it's hard to bounce back from murdering people. I've talked to enough ghosts who have killed people to know that. Even if you never get caught, it still feels like your soul is in prison," I said.
This was absolutely not true. The ghosts I'd spoken to who had murdered other people usually did not give a shit about their immortal souls, if immortal souls were even real. And the ones who'd gotten away with murder usually just wanted to gab to me about how clever they were. Patrick was a mediator himself, but, as he seemed to be the crappy kind, I was hoping he didn't know this.
"I have to. You don't understand, you don't understand," Patrick said. He reminded me of one of the triplets throwing a tantrum. His eyes were wet and he was hysterical. And he kept waving that damn gun around.
"Look, if you just calm down," I began.
And he shook so fiercely I thought he was having a seizure or something. I put out my hand towards him to, I don't know, make sure he didn't swallow his tongue or something, when I heard a loud bang. It sounded like a thousand firecrackers or as if all of the balloons in the Macy's Day Parade had pins put through them.
It sounded like gunshot.
And then I realized a moment later that it had been gunshot. Patrick's eyes went wide as he looked at me. I wasn't sure exactly what had caught his attention until I looked down at myself and saw the blood. I'd been shot.
A lot of things happened then in such quick succession I wasn't sure which came first.
For one thing, I'd stopped standing, and I'd fallen to the ground instead. I could hear voices behind me, Jesse and Paul. I saw the gun clatter to the floor, and I heard Patrick's voice, too. It was panicked. There were loud noises. Shouting. A quieter phone conversation in the background.
The world was a hazy afterthought to the pain that I felt racking through my body.
I watched everything through a screen as Jesse, who was no longer behind me, slammed his fist into Patrick's face. The image felt familiar, like it was him punching Paul in the Mariner's parking lot all over again. But then I saw Paul in front of me as well. And then Paul was pulling Jesse away from Patrick, and Paul and Jesse were arguing.
I knew they were speaking English, but their words sounded warped, like I was underwater or something. I felt so wet. I must've been underwater.
Paul and Jesse reached an agreement a few moments later, and Paul grabbed Patrick and began to drag him from the living room into another room somewhere. I wasn't sure Patrick's house had other rooms. It felt like anything farther than a few feet from me didn't really exist at all.
With Paul gone, Jesse knelt beside me.
And then the world tilted. I must've been lying on my stomach before because all of a sudden, all I saw was the white of the ceiling. And then, what was a distant pain, like a thunderstorm in the vicinity, became an all consuming and very much so burning pain.
A choked laugh bubbled up from my throat. I couldn't help but laugh. That was what I always did whenever I felt pain this bad. It had never been this bad before though-never. I wasn't entirely convinced that pain like this was even real.
"Susannah," Jesse said. Had he been saying my name all along?
I realized quickly that everything was burning now because Jesse's hand was pressed into my side. That must've been where Patrick had shot me. The space where his hand was felt like being stabbed with a knife made out of ice and lava. I didn't know much about gunshot wounds, but I knew that you were supposed to apply pressure when you wanted to stop bleeding. How much blood was I losing? Judging by how dazed I felt, it must've been a lot.
"Stay with me," Jesse said.
I wanted to laugh some more because that was such a cliche line. Did Jesse even know how cliche it was? I wasn't sure if I'd shown him enough movies for him to know how funny it was that he was telling me this. Stay with me, just hang in there, don't die on me… They were all classics.
"Susannah," he said again.
And I realized he was waiting for a response from me.
"I'm really sorry," I slurred. "You were right about how I should have taken a break until January. It was pretty selfish of me to put the baby in danger."
"Don't blame yourself, Susannah. You were trying to make the world a place where the baby could live in. It's my fault. I should have known something like this would happen. I shouldn't have let you come," Jesse said. His hand on my side hurt. Everything hurt.
The idea of Jesse successfully forbidding me to do something was very funny to me in my pain induced stupor. I smiled and said, "Don't beat yourself up. You have to promise me, if I die, that-."
"You're not going to die. Neither of you are going to die," Jesse said. And then he said it again. And then a third time. That meant he wasn't sure. He needed to say it out loud to convince himself as much he needed to convince me.
I wanted to keep talking, but the act of moving my mouth and making words come out was starting to feel impossible. The world felt fuzzy again, and my eyes kept fluttering, and my vision began to fill with black spots and…
I swore loudly as Jesse pressed hard into my wound.
"I told you to stay with me," Jesse said. "I didn't get resurrected after a hundred and fifty years in purgatory for you to leave me behind."
"I don't call the shots," I mumbled.
"Just keep talking to me," Jesse said. "I know you're stronger than this, Susannah, you have to keep fighting."
I wanted to keep fighting, but did Jesse have any idea how hard fighting was? I couldn't bring myself to articulate this, so I moaned in protest instead.
"Susannah," Jesse said insistently. And then he said, more quietly. "Querida, please."
I had never heard that note in Jesse's voice before, like he was lost. Jesse was always certain. I never saw him waiver or flinch in the face of anything. He had a steadfast way about him that was as strong and brilliant as the sun. I didn't want him to be lost-especially not because of me.
I tried clearing my throat before I spoke, like it was connected to the bloody hole in my side and would help rectify the situation. It didn't help much, but I didn't care. I spoke anyway-because Jesse asked me to.
"Did I ever tell you about this psychic lady I met in Brooklyn?" I said. My words were slow, but I could tell, even with how my vision was foggy, that Jesse was hanging on my every word.
"No, querida, you didn't," he said. His voice was still soft, but it didn't sound so scared anymore. He just sounded gentle.
"I know you don't really take stock in psychics," I continued, slow as ever, "but Madame Zara was the one who told me everything. She got out her tarot cards and just knew that I spoke to the dead. She was the real deal, I guess."
"She sounds impressive."
I tried to cough this time, but I didn't have the energy to do it. There was a period of silence where Jesse kept pressing insistently into my side.
"Susannah," he said urgently. "Keep talking. Tell me about something else."
"Still not done with the Madame Zara story yet," I said. "She told me one more thing."
And I hesitated before I spoke again. It wasn't because of the pain this time though believe me, it was still there. I hesitated because what I was about to say next was just embarrassing. Even though Jesse and I had been together for years now, we didn't exactly exchange sappy words on a daily basis if we could help it. Neither of us were the most romantic people, after all.
Jesse didn't know that this why I paused though, and I heard him say my voice with the same urgency as before, and his fingers dug into my side a little harder.
"Promise me you won't laugh," I said.
"I wouldn't dare."
"She said that I would only have one love, my entire life, but that it would last for all eternity. Um… I just thought, you know, as the one love and all, you might want to know that."
Jesse didn't say anything for a moment, and I wondered if the sappiness of all of it was too much for his masculinity to take seriously. When he spoke a few seconds later, I realized I was wrong.
"Why would I laugh at that, querida?" he asked. And his voice was still quiet, but it sounded...thick? Like he was choking on something.
"Oh my God," I said. "You're crying, and I can't even see it properly."
"You tell me that after you've been shot, while you're bleeding in my arms, and you blame me for being a bit emotional? I thought you wanted me to start being more open about my...feelings."
The way he said feelings, hesitantly, like it was a dirty word or something, made me giggle for about two seconds until I remembered that giggling could only exacerbate my pain. "I bet you still look sexy when you're crying," I said.
"Nombre de Dios, Susannah," he said, in the same annoyed tone he always took when he said that to me. And I couldn't help but try and laugh some more, even though it hurt like hell to do so.
Jesse's next words weren't annoyed. They were genuine and burned as fiercely as the sun. "I love you too, Susannah," he said. "You are going to make it."
This time I believed him.
Note: For the record, California does not technically have stand your ground laws. Also. I read up on gunshot wound experiences on Quora, but I still want to apologize for the record breaking number of medical inaccuracies this chapter likely contains.