Complete Submission: (The Submission Series, Books 1-8) (92 page)

“You’ve come so far,” he said. “You’re not the same woman I met. You have control. You can take it and channel it into the work. If I promise you that, would you believe me?”

“I can’t.”

“You don’t know your own power. Please. Go sing. Sheila will watch me.”

“I’ll think about it.”

He nodded as much has he could, and I pressed my lips to his. I kissed him like I kissed him every time since he fell into my arms—like it might be the last.

MONICA

I
’d gone home to shower and rest. I shouldn’t have. The Drazens had a suite at the hotel across from the hospital, and I should have eaten humble pie and gone there. But I couldn’t ask Sheila for the key. I didn’t have a change of clothes or the resources to buy new. Fucking pride. Now I was stuck in traffic ten blocks from the goddamn hospital. Another hour lost.

Sitting in traffic in thebestfuckingthingever was far better than sitting in traffic in the Honda. It beat the bus by a mile. But traffic was traffic, and sitting still in a Jaguar while helicopters beat the air was infuriating. Having grown up in Echo Park—before it was a real estate investment opportunity waiting to happen—I was familiar with that situation. The police were sealing off a perimeter so every car could be checked. Usually, a cop-killing created that kind of chaos. Or a gang assassination. Maybe a child abduction. I ticked off the list then closed the windows and sang a couple of the songs I’d prepared for the EP. I belted them out in the shitty acoustics of the car.

I flipped on the news. Music was just messing up the rhythm in my head, which I needed. Talk talk talk, and I half listened to the clipped chat about a mob shooting outside the golf course. No child abduction but a typical drive-by. I felt as though I knew the details without even hearing them, and I internally restated my belief that penalties should be harsher for crimes committed during rush hour. I would be there a while. I sang to the leather dash, letting the news drift away.

Yea, though he stands in the fear of the dark
I shall walk at his right hand
I have drawn rod and cudgel
In his defense
I shall lead him to the gate
And if he seeks his end
My heart shall keep him safe

I can walk
            Without it
I can work
            Without it
I can sing
            Half a woman

Surely goodness and mercy
Prevail in a city of sin
As barter for a life
Beats for beats
Breaths for breaths
Trade a heart for what’s mine

I can breathe
            Without it
I can see
            Without it
I can sing
            Half a woman

I was leaning my forehead on the steering wheel when I finished. I couldn’t get out the rest of the song. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t see through my tears. He didn’t have long. I saw it in the doctors’ faces when they spoke as if their careers were on the line. The inconvenience of his death would be epic for them.

Meanwhile, I’d die with him.

The phone rang. Fuck it. It wasn’t as if I was moving. I picked up Margie’s call.

“Hello?” I realized how snotty and blubbery I sounded when the last vowel came out in a froggy croak.

“Are you okay?”

“The love of my life is dying, so no.”

“Well, I called with a little something. Some mafia kingpin just came in with half a brain and a working heart. We’re fighting our way up the list, and they’re checking for a match. But he’s the same blood type.”

“Oh, God. Really?” My face exploded in prickly happiness, and tears sprung into my eyes.

“Top secret, okay? This is not public knowledge, as a matter of fact, me knowing is illegal. But don’t get your hopes up. The guy’s family’s going to be an obstacle. Donor cards don’t mean anything without a living will, and his family has more hope than Jonathan has time.”

“Is it evil to hope he dies?”

“Yes. You and I both.”

“See you in hell,” I said, with a little less despair in my voice.

“I’ll buy the hand basket.”

The traffic broke, and I was waved through the blockade on Beverly and Rossmore.

MONICA

“I
 sold the house. Thank God, Monya. Cash. At market price.”

My mother had called just as I stepped into the elevator with nine other people. I was about to tell her I hadn’t made any headway, nor had I found an opportune time to ask for Margie’s help, when she blurted out her news like a kid blowing the date of a surprise party.

“That’s great, ma,” I whispered so I wouldn’t annoy the three people pressed up against me. “Did they say when they were moving in?” I was happy for her. I really was. But the bank would have to put all my stuff in a Dumpster because I couldn’t leave Jonathan long enough to move out.

“That’s the good news! They’re okay with a tenant. Okay with your rent and everything. You have to make your checks out to an investment company. ODRSN Partners. The address is 147—”

“Can I get it later? I’m in an elevator. I’ll call you back.”

We hung up, and I molted a few layers of anxiety. I must have bounced into Jonathan’s room because he smiled when he saw me. The oxygen tubes were gone from his nose. The sun shone through the window. Yes, he had that auto-squeeze thing on his arm, and yes, he was in that god damn hospital bed, and yes, his heart was ripped up, but he was in a half sitting position and he looked as glad to see me as I was to see him.

“I don’t have to move!” I announced, kissing him.

“Good?”

“Oh God, you missed the whole thing!” I blabbered. “My mom put the house into foreclosure. I thought I was going to have to move out really fast, which is impossible—hello, I have twenty years of stuff in that house—but some investor bought it.”

“Ah, who beat me out?”

“Crap, she told me.” I wrestled with the granola bar until he took it from me and got it open in one move—with a bad heart and IVs sticking out of him. “It’s such a load off. I can’t even tell you.”

He broke off a piece of the bar and held it. “Was it Ganten Investments?”

I took the piece in my mouth. “No, it was a bunch of letters, like DRM… But five letters and not that. I made it into a word in my head, but I can’t think of it.”

“Doesn’t matter, I guess.”

“You have to move faster next time if you want property in Echo Park.” I took another chunk of granola bar from his fingers. I felt light as a feather, waving at him to indicate I wanted another piece. “Oh my God, this thing tastes so bad. It’s, like, stinky.”

“Stinky?”

“With a touch of dredgy.” Then I remembered, as I chewed, the rhythm of the letters. The taste of the stale barley malt brought it to me. “ODRSN. That was it. It sounded like odorous. ODRSN Partners.”

He was looking at the bar, breaking another smelly piece, when he froze. “Did you say ODRSN?”

“Yep.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, why? Is that the competition or something?”

He put the bar on the side table then closed his eyes and took a deep breath. It wasn’t deep at all though. He breathed as if he didn’t have room for air in his lungs.

I took his hands. “Jonathan? Should I call someone?”

He shook his head, but I didn’t believe him. I believed the machines, which were silent. But for how long? He was struggling, if not with his breath or his heart, then with his mind.

“I need you to marry me,” he said.

“What?”

“Marry me.”

“Are you insane?”

“If anything happens to me, I want to make sure you’re taken care of,” he said.

“I refuse to believe you’re going to die. My God, we’ve maybe been together a few months.”

“These are extenuating circumstances. I could leave you swinging in the wind.”

“No.” I shook my head as if I was trying to get a fly out of my hair. “This is crazy. This is not how I want it. I don’t want you to get better then regret it. It’s not your job to make sure I’m financially stable. What’s come over you?”

Midway through my little speech, stuff started beeping and lighting up. By the time I was done, I was being pushed out by a woman in a blue facemask and gloves. I landed in the hall, back against the wall, trying to stay out of the way.

“What happened?” Eileen asked, standing close to Theresa as if her daughter held her up.

“I don’t know,” I said. “We were talking about something.”

He asked me to marry him and I said no.
I put my hands over my mouth when I realized what had happened, and I ran down the hall without looking back. Even when I passed the cafeteria and saw Declan in his usual spot talking to Jessica, I didn’t stop. I just kept running.

JONATHAN

T
hat went poorly.

I hadn’t intended to ask for her hand, but then she said the name of my father’s investment shell. He’d bought her house to save her when I couldn’t or wouldn’t. Whichever. I simply
didn’t,
and the reason I didn’t was I didn’t know she was in that kind of trouble. I could only know and see what she brought to me. If she chose to protect me, I was impotent to protect her. I was stuck inside four walls with things sticking out of me, tied to a bed as much as I’d tied her.

By the time the smoke cleared, she was gone, and I couldn’t explain. I didn’t want to talk on the phone. I couldn’t, actually. My body betrayed me with exhaustion, long breaths, and lost consciousness. I needed to be in her visual field to see what I was too tired to intuit. She needed to experience the long spaces between sentences that would seem like anger or petulant silence on the phone but were just me trying to breathe around my goddamn damaged heart.

I loved her. I wanted her. She felt right in ways no other woman ever had. Of course I was going to marry her one day, when I was out of that shitbox and untied from that bed. After more dinners and late nights. After more boundary leaping and fighting. More touching, kissing, laughing.

Just not now.

Except that it had to be now. I felt myself failing. My dips into unconsciousness came with less warning. The effort to exist was such a task, I couldn’t imagine surviving. Was I scared? Fuck yes, I was terrified. The only thing that kept it at bay was the thought that I could make her life better than it had been, that I could save her from her chronic penury, keep her safe from the manipulations of men like my father. If I could die knowing I’d saved her, maybe I would have served my purpose. It wasn’t like my money had anywhere useful to go, anyway.

Theresa sat in the chair Monica usually occupied, leaning forward with her fingers knit together. I wanted to explain all of it to her, but I didn’t have the wherewithal to do it right. I had to explain my fear, my need to know Monica was all right, to keep a slice of control. I gave her the shortest version I had.

“I don’t blame her for saying no,” she said. “You need to get better first.”

“What if I don’t get better?”

“She’ll be a widow.”

At twenty-five. When was her birthday? She’d told me she was a Cancer, but if she told me the exact date, I couldn’t recall it. I realized we’d never celebrated a birthday together, neither mine nor hers. I wanted to get her something extravagant six months early to make up for the time we’d never have. And Christmas, of course.

“What’s today?” I asked Theresa.

“The nineteenth.”

“Merry Christmas.”

“What do you want under the tree? Besides a ‘yes’?”

“I want her,” I whispered. “I asked for the wrong reasons, but I want her.”

She put her elbows on the bed and her hand on my shoulder. “Do it for the right reasons. Don’t do it because it’s convenient. Don’t do it because you’re scared. Marry her because you love her and your life wouldn’t add up without her. Can you do that? Can you promise me you’re not forcing it? It would break my heart to see you propose because you wanted to give yourself a reason to live.”

I rarely saw Theresa so impassioned. She was more like Jessica in her refinement and grace than any of my sisters. She seemed broken down that day, slightly shattered and holding herself together with chicken wire.

“What’s wrong, Tee?”

“I don’t think love should be taken for granted, and I don’t think you should keep on a path of least resistance.”

“This is hardly—”

“Can you honestly say that if you were healthy, you’d marry her?”

“Yes. But we’d have a proper engagement.” I thought about all Jessica and I had had together, and I wanted to give it to Monica but couldn’t. A party, a ring, a wedding. I wanted to see her smiling as she came down the aisle toward me for the last time before we folded into each other’s lives forever.

Theresa pressed something into my palm. It was hard and scratchy and oddly shaped. “Give it back when you can buy her her own.”

I lifted my hand. It was her engagement ring, a two-carat sapphire cut that was totally Theresa and utterly wrong for Monica. “Daniel won’t be happy.”

“He’ll tell himself he cares. But we cancel each other out. We add up to nothing. Trust me when I say I’d rather break up for the right reasons than get married for the wrong ones.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. I can’t explain why I feel okay about it, but I do.”

I held the ring in my fist as if I was afraid to lose it. “Thank you.”

“I’ll try to come back, but you might not see me for a while.” She kissed my forehead and left.

I fell asleep with the ring in my hand.

MONICA

J
onathan was out of his room. More tests, more prep. More shit piled on top of shit. A hundred thousand checklists to make sure he was worthy of whatever heart came in. My mother texted me the address to send the rent check, and a quick internet search revealed J. Declan Drazen owned ODRSN Partners. Anger and gratitude swirled together inside me like a marble cake.

Dr. Thorensen was in his office looking at four computer screens. “Monica, come in.” He stood. “Close the door.”

“Thanks. I got your text, but I was driving.”

“Sit.” He stood in front of a little counter with a sink and poured water into a pot, leaving his screens unattended.

“You’re playing
City of Dis
, aren’t you? Where do you find the time?”