Hush
Eighteen
Note: This (lengthy) chapter takes place in a magical world where hospitals, medicine, science, etc. are really just abstract concepts that are subject to the high and mighty rule of Artistic License.
Once the world stopped being fuzzy, sometime around mid-morning on Saturday, Jesse was the first person I saw. He was seated in a chair pulled close to my hospital bed, and his head was bent slightly downward. I was pretty sure he was dozing, but I couldn't hear if his breathing was deep and even, the way it usually was when he slept, over the insistent beepings of all the machines I was plugged up to.
"Morning," I offered.
Even though my voice came out much more weakly than I'd been expecting it to, Jesse's head snapped upwards and he turned to look at me. He blinked momentarily and then smiled.
"You're awake," Jesse said, and I could hear the sound of relief in his voice. His relief coupled with the smile on his face made the bags under his eyes almost unnoticeable.
Almost.
"You look like shit," I said.
"Thank you, querida. You are always doing your best to build my sense of self worth," he said sarcastically. And then he said, more seriously, "How do you feel?"
"Better than I did yesterday."
"That's sort of a low standard for comparison."
I shrugged and then winced at the realization that the movement hurt.
Jesse pressed a hand against me gently in a warning. "Keep still," he said.
There was a beat of silence between us before I asked, "What happened to me anyway?"
"That," Jesse began before coming up with a swear word that sounded about as bad as the one he used for Alexa to use in place in Patrick's name, "shot you."
"I remember that much. I meant what's wrong with me," I said. I moved to sit up further in bed, even though it caused pain to shoot throughout my body. It was a good sign though. It meant I wasn't paralyzed or anything.
"You really shouldn't be moving around, Susannah," Jesse said. "One of your ribs is badly fractured from where the bullet made impact. You're lucky though. The bullet ricocheted and didn't hit any of your internal organs before it exited. Although you did lose a lot of blood from the exit wound, your ribs never punctured your lungs. At least not yet. If you don't stop moving around so much, then I may have to go back on that last statement."
"Fine," I said, "I'll stop moving, alright? But you should go home and get some sleep."
"Don't worry about me," Jesse said offhandedly.
I knew there was no point in pushing the matter. There was no way Jesse was going to leave me without someone, multiple someones most likely, dragging him away from me. So instead of attempting further persuasion, I asked, "How are you not in jail, anyway?"
Jesse looked confused. "Why would I be in jail?" he said.
"Patrick was saying this stuff about California having stand your ground laws and everything. How are we all not in a holding cell right now? Are there officers outside the door right now? Or did Paul and his money handle it?"
"I handled it," Jesse corrected. "When the ambulance and the police arrived, I let them know that you'd been counseling someone who witnessed Patrick at the site of one of the robberies, and you weren't really sure if it was a false lead or not, so you wanted to ask him a few questions yourself before the authorities got involved. Once they saw all of the money in his bookcase, they didn't really have much of a choice other than believing our story."
"How are they going to make sense of the fact that it looks like the robber is invisible?" I asked.
Jesse shrugged. "I think it's understandable that I've been more concerned with your well being than that future court case."
If the case against Patrick was too weak, he'd be back out on the streets probably. That was exactly what we didn't want and exactly what people like Francine Powell didn't deserve. But I didn't say that. I didn't say anything for a moment.
My mouth suddenly felt dry as I remembered that there was someone I needed to ask about. Someone who was much more important than Patrick. My ribs didn't have anything to do with my womb, but considering all of the blood loss…
"Jesse, how is-?"
But my words were cut off as the door to the room opened. A nurse with very friendly looking, and familiar, eyes entered the room soon afterwards.
"I see you're awake," Jill said jovially. Jill was the same nurse I'd run into last week at the hospital during my checkup. She directed her next question towards Jesse. "Is she lucid?"
"I'm lucid," I answered.
"That's very good to hear, Suze. If you need anything, I'll be working until this evening. Dr. Morrison is in surgery now, but he should be by to talk to you soon. In the meantime, are you up for some visitors? There's a whole host of people who have been meaning to see you."
"Sure, visitors are fine," I said, and I figured I'd save the question whose answer I was dreading for a few more minutes until I could see Dr. Morrison.
What I did not know then was that it's not until you get shot that you see how many people you have in your life who care about you. I guess they say the same thing about funerals. The number of people who cry is the number of people who love you, or something. But if you ever want to find that out without dying, the number of people who love you, I mean, then all you have to do is get a bullet lodged in you.
Because the parade of visitors that started a few moments later took a lot longer than a few minutes to end.
I wasn't surprised to see that the first person who burst into my hospital room was my mother, followed narrowly by Andy, my stepfather. Jesse must have called my mother up after I'd arrived at the hospital, and she and Andy had driven up from L.A. to check on me.
"Oh, Suzie," she said, and there were tears in her eyes.
"I'm fine, Mom," I said quickly.
My mother, being my mother, did not believe this at all. She spent the entirety of her visit fussing over me, chewing me out for getting shot, and then chewing Jesse out for letting me get shot. As Jesse seemed more interested in agreeing with my mother in an act of self-flagellation, I defended Jesse myself to the best of my abilities and patiently reminded my mother of my volatile middle and high school years where even she had not been able to stop me from getting into trouble. Predictably, my mother did not listen to this line of logic and continued only to fret and reprimand me more.
Once my mother had relieved all of her pent up emotions, she said, in a much more calm voice reminiscent of the newscaster she used to be, "I'm glad you're OK, Suze."
After my mother and Andy left, someone else entered the room. Someone wearing a labcoat.
My breath caught in my throat slightly as Jesse stood and shook the doctor's hand. I vaguely recognized the doctor as one of the guests from our wedding.
"I wish I could be seeing the two of you under more pleasant circumstances," Dr. Morrison said. "How are you feeling, Susannah?"
"Fine," I said automatically. "Well, in pain actually, but I guess that's about as fine as people usually are at times like these."
"That's not a bad answer," Dr. Morrison said casually, and he began to flip through some of his charts. "I'm pretty sure Jesse here has already explained everything to you, but I'll give you a refresher."
And then he explained entry wounds and exit wounds and blood loss, which, true to his word, Jesse had already covered. He then pulled out a diagram to indicate which one of my ribs was fractured.
"Normally, we'd take an x-ray, so that we could understand the full extent of the damage, but we do our best to avoid giving women x-rays while pregnant."
My breath caught in my throat. "So I'm still pregnant, right? And the baby is fine?"
"That's what we're hoping for, but, to be honest, we don't know just yet. What we do know is that the placement of your injuries means that there's certainly a chance that everything will be fine, but to suffer trauma like this in the first trimester, when many women miscarry without any abnormal circumstances, certainly complicates things. I have you scheduled for an ultrasound in a couple of hours that should give us something a little more conclusive to go off of."
"Oh," I said.
And then I only half heard what he said after that.
I felt Jesse's hand on my knee soon after Dr. Morrison left. "Everything's going to be fine, Susannah," he said. And I wanted very much so to believe him, even though I wasn't entirely sure that I did.
There was no time to argue or agree with him though. I heard the door to the room open, and I forced myself to smile and not think about the things that I couldn't change.
After all, I had not cried in front of Father Dominic a single time since I graduated from the Mission, and I wanted to keep it that way.
"How are you feeling, Susannah?" all snowy-topped six feet of him asked. Father D was out of his wheelchair though his gait was still a bit awkward, and, given how old he was when a ghost had shoved him down the stairs, it was unlikely that he'd ever had the same level of mobility he'd had in years previous.
I told him the same thing I told my mom, and Father Dom looked as though this was satisfactory enough as evidence that he could start berating me.
"I can't believe that neither of you told me about this," he said, waggling his fingers at both Jesse and I like we were naughty children.
Jesse apologized briefly, still feeling guilty no doubt, but I didn't.
"You got pushed down the stairs last time, I got shot this time," I said. "We're all still a team."
Father Dom did not look placated by this, and Jesse, if I was reading him properly, looked annoyed at my insistence that getting shot was all in a day's work for a mediator. None of us lingered on the subject, however, because the door behind Father D. opened and more people began to pour in.
I recognized them all as faculty members from the Mission Academy. A good deal of my former colleagues from my internship days had shown up, and amongst those who came bearing their sympathies was none other than Sister Ernestine. We'd gotten along better after the Lucia Martinez case, but I never could've imagined that the same woman who'd been itching to find a reason to send me home all through high school would hand me a bouquet of flowers on my sickbed.
Look, I'm going to be honest, I got a little choked up. Jesse must've noticed I was getting a little misty-eyed and decided to save my pride because he did his best to encourage the throng of people who had gathered around my bedside that brief visits were what was my best for my health at the moment.
My next visitor surprised me nearly as much as the high number of faculty members who'd just shown up.
Gina came waltzing in, her curly hair pulled back into a messy but somehow cool-looking puff, with Jake by her side.
"Gina, how'd you even get here so fast?" I asked, and I sat up further out of instinct but winced and quickly regretted my decision to do so.
"Don't worry about that," she said. "I'm asking the questions here, and what I want to know is how the hell did you get shot, Simon?"
Gina was trying her best to sound pissed, but her words weren't leaving any sting behind. She, just like everyone else who had come to visit me thus far, was worried.
"Occupational hazard," I replied casually. Gina would know what I meant.
"Of a counselor?" Jake asked. Jake, on the other hand, did not know what I meant.
He whistled and said, "Damn, I thought my job had the potential to get rough." And then Jake narrowed his eyes slightly and continued by saying, "It isn't those people you used to hang out with in high school coming back to make you pay up for quitting or something, is it?"
"What?" I asked.
Jake glanced at Jesse momentarily before he went ahead and said, "Your gang."
I groaned. "I was never in a gang," I said. "No one is trying to revenge kill me or anything. You watch way too much Gangland."
Jake said something under his breath that sounded like, "There's no such thing as watching too much Gangland," but I couldn't be sure entirely. The door to the hospital room opened up again, and a noisy uproar, along with five more people, entered the room.
Brad, Debbie, and the triplets had come to pay me a visit.
The triplets cries of "Aunt Suze" were near deafening as they pushed past Gina and Jake to hover around my hospital bed.
"Aunt Suze, are you OK?" was the first question they asked. It came from Cottontail.
"Of course she's going to be OK," Debbie said in one of her more upbeat and chipper voices. I could tell by her eyes that she wasn't entirely convinced of what she said, but she didn't want the triplets to worry-even if she herself didn't really give that much of a damn about my wellbeing. Despite her shortcomings as a person, Debbie was actually a very good mother.
"Are you going to be OK, Suze?" Gina asked.
"Of course I'm going to be OK," I said, and I sat up a bit further, even though it put me in more pain. Jesse was looking at me, and I could tell that he was holding himself back from chastising me for moving more.
Brad said, "Next time you suspect someone's involved in a robbery and a homicide, would you mind telling me first?"
I said, "I can't make any promises," at the same time that one of the triplets said, "Aunt Suze caught a bad guy?!"
"I did. And speaking of me catching a bad guy," I said, "what's going to happen to him?"
"Between you and me… Or I guess, all of us here," Brad began, gesturing towards all nine people in the room, himself, me, Jesse, Jake, Gina, Debbie, Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail, "the evidence against him is pretty damning. He's got a pretty rare and valuable watch from one of the places, and another one of the stores had a bunch of sequential bills, so we've at least got him linked to some of it. But he won't give us anything about how he managed to be off camera the whole time. We're thinking, you know, since he's a computer science geek and all, that's probably where his little trick is coming from."
"You're probably right," Jesse said. "Computers can do nearly anything nowadays."
Brad nodded and said, "We nabbed him, and that's what counts right now."
I let out a visible sigh of relief, and I could feel Gina's eyes on me. She understood more or less what had happened: ghosts and this guy had something to do with each other. I could also tell that Mopsy was watching me more closely than usual as well. I'd have to talk to all three of the triplets about this before too long.
As it turned out, before too long was less than five minutes later. Gina had reminded everyone that I was probably feeling crowded, and all of the adults began to head out of the room. The girls were pretty stubborn about wanting to visit longer, and, even though Brad and Debbie tried to get them to leave with them, I insisted that it was fine if the triplets stayed behind for a few more minutes.
I'd always wanted to hold off on the talk about how violent and serious mediating could get until they were a little older, but now, with me lying in a hospital bed with stitches and bandages all across my side, seemed like a particularly poignant moment to burst the mediator bubble wide open.
"What's the first rule of mediation?" I asked the second everyone, with the exception of Jesse, left the room.
"Tell Aunt Suze everything," the triplets chorused.
"That's right," I said. "Only your Aunt Suze can get shot and live to tell about it."
Out of the corner of my eye, I could just barely see Jesse rolling his eyes. This factoid was grossly inaccurate, as many people were shot and lived to tell about it later on, but seven wasn't quite old enough to grasp this concept.
"Aunt Suze is gonna live forever," Cottontail said solemnly.
"You say that like it's a bad thing," I said.
"What really happened?" Mopsy asked, stressing the "really."
I shrugged and said, "Sometimes bad ghosts get violent. Never forget that if a ghost is skilled enough, they can interact with real objects. Dangerous objects, like guns," I said.
Alexa hadn't been the one who shot me; that had been Patrick's doing. But Alexa had still stabbed me earlier, and what was important here was that the girls understood how much of a threat ghosts could be. I would tell them the real story, the one where a shifter-ghost and a mediator worked together to build a criminal enterprise to finance their lifestyle for after the shifter-ghost murdered someone and took control of their body, when they were older. I didn't want to get any ideas in their heads right now.
Look, I firmly believe that Brad and Debbie are not going to raise any princesses of darkness, but if Paul Slater's genes are in there, then there's always a chance that one of them might get inspired, and that was not a risk that the world needed to take.
My plan had been to lecture them about dangerous ghosts a bit more, but none of the girls were the slightest bit interested in spectral goings-on anymore. Instead, they started pointing to things around the room and asking Jesse what they were. Jesse was halfway through a simplified definition of an IV drip when the door to the hospital room began to open.
I assumed it was Debbie or Brad, come to retrieve their daughters, but I realized I was only half right a couple of seconds later. Debbie was standing there, but she wasn't by herself, and she wasn't with Brad either. On her left side, with a small stuffed animal in one of his hands, stood Paul Slater. It was like the brief thought of him earlier was enough to summon him up from the bowels of Hell.
OK, that probably wasn't entirely fair. If I was remembering anything correctly from the other night, then I think Paul might have been the one who called the ambulance. I may or may not have owed at least a little bit of the fact that I was alive to him, even if I'd rather not think about it.
"Mom!" Flopsy cried out upon seeing Debbie enter the room. She pointed to one of the screens near my bed and said, "This is a Cadillac monitor."
"Cardiac monitor," Jesse corrected absentmindedly.
"It's Aunt Suze's new heart, and it's huge!"
"That's not…" Jesse began before trailing off in the realization that the damage was done, and now the triplets were convinced that I was at least partly made of machinery. He would've tried to run damage control normally, but I was pretty sure he was too tired to bother today.
"That's nice, Emma," Debbie said patiently. And then she turned to me and said, "I didn't know you were with Paul the other day, Suze. You should have told me. We could have, I don't know, gone out for dinner together. A little reunion to play catch-up. It's been awhile, you know."
I didn't think Debbie would cheat on Brad, but I also wasn't entirely sure if Debbie meant the three of us should've gone out for dinner together or just her and Paul. I could tell that, either way, Paul disliked the idea.
Paul's nigh unshakable veneer of money and coolness was giving way to a look of genuine discomfort. This was understandable, considering that he was talking to the mother of his children, who did not know she was the mother of his children, and standing in a room with three little girls who shared half of his DNA. What must have started as a simple enough visit was probably going to end with him hoping that Debbie didn't look too closely between himself and the triplets. After all, the non-disclosure statements Jesse and I had signed would do nothing against someone else finding out on their own.
"Some other time, Debbie," Paul offered without so much as trying to feign sincerity.
Surprisingly, Debbie seemed to get the memo, so she herded the girls up from where they were standing around my bed, and with a last chorus of goodbyes from the triplets, the number of people in the room dropped to three.
I glanced over at Jesse to see that he was tense. Even though I knew he was tired, he wasn't showing it. His eyes were trained on Paul with a hawk-like intensity.
"You know, I have a clear memory of you saying no one was going to get shot this time around," Paul said.
"I guess I just like the excitement of it all," I said, trailing off.
From the corner of my eye, I could see that Jesse's gaze was as intense as ever. Paul said, more to Jesse than to me, "Relax. I just thought it would be polite to stop by while I was still in the area. I come bearing gifts. Well, a gift."
And he handed me a stuffed bear wearing a tiny sweater embroidered with the words "Get Well Soon."
"Thanks," I said.
And that was that. He turned to leave without so much as a goodbye. I had the feeling I'd see him again though. The universe always conspired to bring us back together when it felt like my life was getting too comfortable, but I was hoping the day when I saw him next wouldn't come around for a long while.
With Paul out of the room, Jesse reached over me and made a grab for the bear.
"We'll burn it in effigy later," he explained.
I tried not to let out a very un-ladylike snort and said, "Jesse, it's just an innocent gift shop bear. It's not like it has a hidden camera in it or something."
Jesse turned the bear over in his hands several times, clearly performing an impromptu investigation for hidden cameras, and said, "Do you know he tried to leave me-up there?"
It took a second for me to realize that "up there" meant Shadowland. When I figured out what he meant, I said, "He didn't."
But the look on Jesse's face said very plainly that Paul had. Tried to abandon him in Shadowland, I mean.
"Next time, he's going to be the one getting shot," I said darkly. "How many bones of his did you have to break up there for him to see reason?"
"None," Jesse said, and then he shifted slightly in discomfort.
"Oh, God. You didn't have to trade him a sexual favor or something, did you?"
The look on Jesse's face was so utterly unamused, I couldn't help but laugh. The pain in my side soon persuaded me to change my guffaws into small chuckles though.
"I am so happy to have amused you," Jesse said dryly.
"I'm sorry," I said, but I knew I was grinning too hard for him to believe me. "What got you out then?"
"You know, I'd tell you, but I'm afraid you'll just laugh at me again. First, you insult my appearance, and then you imply I would be...intimate, with Slater, of all people. Honestly, querida, you've really wounded my pride."
"Tell me," I said. "I'll make it up to you and your pride later."
Jesse didn't say anything for a moment, and I was about to implore him again, when he finally spoke. "It was you. He realized you wouldn't be happy with him if he forced you away from me, so he decided to prioritize his-attraction-to you, over his hatred for me."
"Oh," I said. And I felt a slight sinking in my stomach. The extent to which the spawn of Satan, the engaged spawn of Satan mind you, had developed a soft spot for me was always disconcerting.
"And when we finally did get back and we saw you…" Jesse trailed off, the same way he did when it came to talking about when he'd been dead or what his family was like. Difficult topics, particularly the kind that produced emotional reactions, were his favorite thing to bury.
"When I saw what had happened to you, I wasn't thinking clearly. I was enraged-at that," and here Jesse broke off to swear at Patrick, in English, surprisingly, "and for some reason, I thought it would be better to prioritize handling him."
Jesse broke off again and began to rub the back of his head with his hand. "It took Slater to remind me that I was a doctor and that I should let him take care of Patrick instead. In his own depraved way, he really does care about you."
I wasn't sure what I was going to say to that. I didn't have to figure out my answer though because the stream of visitors continued shortly. My mother returned both to fuss over me some more and to hand her phone over to me so I could speak to a very anxious Doc (both mine and Jesse's phones had died), and then some of my former classmates from grad school came by, as well as one of my roommates from undergrad, and then CeeCee showed up to round out the pack.
She wasn't alone though. Aside from the large bouquet of flowers and candy she was carrying, there was also a man who was, more or less, on her arm. I'd never met him before, but I already knew who he was.
He must've been Hugo Braggart, CeeCee's work husband and the source of the recent conflict between CeeCee and Adam.
"Suze!" CeeCee cried, rushing over to my hospital bed. "God, you look awful."
"Thanks," I said.
"Oh, sorry," she said sheepishly. She took a step back and indicated Hugo, who was hovering slightly awkwardly and more closely to the door, to come near.
"This is the legendary Suze Simon. Well, Suze de Silva now," CeeCee said, and she waved a hand in Jesse's direction to explain why the Simon part wasn't up to date anymore.
"Nice to meet you. Hugo Braggart," Hugo said. "You're not the same Suze who helped to solve that murder that was covered up to look like an accident a few years back, are you?"
"The one and only," I said. And I thought of Michael Meducci for the first time in years.
"You should come and work for the paper," Hugo said. "You're pretty good at solving mysteries and all, and we could always use-."
"She's already got her dream job, Hugh," CeeCee interrupted.
Hugh? CeeCee and I were definitely going to have to talk later. But for now, and with "Hugh" in the room, we wound up only talking about my accident and the cause of my accident, Patrick.
No sooner than CeeCee and Hugo left, Jill, the nurse from earlier, entered to take me away in a wheelchair for my ultrasound.
"The good thing about this," Jill said, trying to be upbeat as we trekked off for the examination room that was going to determine whether or not today was the worst day of my life, "is that you've technically been fasting, so the examination won't have to wait."
"Great," I said. I tried not to let sarcasm creep into my voice, but it was nearly impossible.
I was on the examination table a few minutes later, and the sonographer arrived shortly afterward. The sonographer, however, was not the only person to enter the room.
"I really didn't think I'd ever be seeing you under these circumstances," Dr. Morgana Morgan said.
"I could say the same thing," I muttered as Jesse introduced himself to Dr. Morgan.
A few minutes later, there was cold jelly on my stomach and the sonographer was following along it with some sort of instrument that was cabled together with the ultrasound machine. And then an image of my insides showed up on the screen.
With the way Dr. Morgan was standing, I couldn't make out the entire picture. I looked from the screen to Jesse, but his face wasn't giving anything away. I felt a weight settle in on my chest. Not from anything connected to the machine though. If Jesse looked so impassive, it probably meant that there was nothing ahead but bad news.
I braced myself just as Dr. Morgan said, "Good news for now."
"Good news?" I asked in confusion.
She smiled and said, "There's a baby in there, and it's got a heartbeat."
There was a lump in my throat that I couldn't quite swallow past, and I felt my eyes began to water. It took me a few seconds to figure out that I wasn't having some sort of allergic reaction to something though. Because I couldn't think of a single time in my life when I'd openly cried out of happiness. But there I was, clearing my throat and trying to discreetly wipe my eyes as Jesse and Dr. Morgan spoke to each other.
A few moments later, Dr. Morgan said, "I want to see you again in a couple of weeks. Alright, Susannah?"
"Right," I said. I tried to say it in my clearest voice, but the words ended up getting a bit choked regardless.
Dr. Morgan smiled understandingly at me as both she and the sonographer left the room.
"I told you everything was going to be fine," Jesse said, and he bent down to kiss my forehead. And that was when the dam of emotional fitness I'd constructed to hold my tears back sprung a leak.
Jesse noticed and began to brush away my tears with his thumb. For some reason, that made me want to cry more. Thankfully, I managed to wrangle my emotions back into place by the time Jill came to wheel me back to my room.
It was obvious enough that I'd been crying for Jill to ask, "Is everything OK?"
"Everything is perfect," I said, without a single trace of sarcasm.
Jill looked confused, but she smiled at me all the same.
The world felt strange once it was just me and Jesse by ourselves in my hospital room. In our absence, the flow of visitors had come to a halt, and we were left alone with hulking amounts of flowers, chocolates, and stuffed animals to canvas the room. For the first time, I noticed that I could see the ocean in the window behind where Jesse was sitting.
I smiled, both at him and at the ocean, and said, "It's not the best timing probably, but I think we should tell everyone now. They're all here, and no one will fight each other over who found at first."
Jesse looked surprised for a moment before he said, "Are you sure? You know everyone will fuss over you even more if they know you're pregnant."
"I can handle it," I said, and I grinned at him.
My smile must've been infectious because it wasn't more than a few seconds later before Jesse was smiling, too.
"Little Penelope must be a mediator," I said. "Only a mediator could stand getting shot before even being out of the womb."
Jesse's smile waned as he wrinkled his nose. "I thought I told you that I'm not naming our daughter Penelope."
"Could be a son," I said. "It's too early to tell."
Jesse's family definitely ran more strongly towards daughters, but Jesse just shrugged and said, "We'll love it either way."
My smile grew broad enough to make my cheeks hurt. He was right. We would.