C Reiss - Sing

I wasn’t in a car.

Obviously.

I slowly took my hands off my head and opened my eyes.

One cop had his gun trained on the driver’s seat of Jessica’s Mercedes. Another opened the door. More stood behind car doors. One cop stood over me, the woman who had guarded Paulie Patalano’s hallway.

“Not today, girlie,” she said.

“I was just—“

“Save it. Nothing to see here.” She shooed me.

I got up and backed away slowly, then quickly, walking fast, head down, navigating a newly-formed crowd when I ran into a man who grabbed my biceps. It was Will Santon.

“What was that about?” he asked. “You kneeling.”

I didn’t want to tell him. I wanted what I almost did in that room to disappear forever.

“I grew up in the ghetto. That’s what you do when the cops run after you.” He seemed to accept this, and released my arms. “But it was Jessica,” I said, shaking my head in disbelief. “What could she have done? My God.” Maybe they thought she’d been the one who twisted the catheter then fixed it. Maybe she was going to take an attempted murder rap for me. It made no sense, and I had to consider for a moment, would I let her?

“We’ve been working on this for weeks.” He whispered it and smiled. “Once we stopped having to follow you around.”

“It wasn’t her,” I whispered back.

“Yes it was,” he said with satisfaction all over his face. “She killed Rachel Demarest.”

“But...?”

“Swapped out her antibiotics. Trust me. We’ve been chasing her for weeks.”

I watched as Jessica had her hands cuffed behind her.

MONICA

More waiting.

I felt like I’d spent the past weeks doing nothing but waiting.

The cafeteria was quiet, for once. I stared at my tea, trying to absorb Jessica’s arrest. That had been Jonathan’s plan. it had been what my curiosity had kept him from executing. It seemed so petty now. I looked at my watch, checked my texts for word from Margie, and took out my notebook.

I opened it to the last page, the only one left blank. Much of what I had in there wasn’t even suitable to be put to music. I had drawings and staff notes, compositions for multiple instruments with no idea if there was even a possibility of matching words.

“Monica,” Brad sat down across from me with a prepackaged yogurt cup and toast wrapped in plastic.

“Brad.” I folded my notebook closed. “Thank you for that text. It was...it saved my life.”

“I’m sure you’re exaggerating.” He unwrapped his toast. “You’re off the hook for dinner, you know. But I hope we can still be friends?”

“Of course. And you still need to yell at me for what I did.”

“I’ll give you an earful.” He bit the toast, wrinkled his nose and went for the yogurt. “What are you doing here?”

“Margie said she’d text me when he got out.” I looked at my phone, checking to make sure it was on for the hundredth time.

“How long has it been?”

“Six hours, give or take.”

He stirred his yogurt slowly. “That’s long.”

I took a second to absorb what he said, then snapped up my phone and texted Margie.

—any word?—

“If she forgot to text me I’m going to beat her senseless,” I said more to myself than Brad.

A text shot back immediately.

—Dr came out an hour ago. Issues with the aortic valve. Bad—

“Fuck.”

I didn’t say good-bye to Brad.

MONICA

That fucking waiting room, same as every other I’d seen when they wheeled him from unit to unit. As I exited the elevator I realized what a home they had become, with their greyed colors and worn seats. And I knew that no matter what happened, it would likely be the last day I spent in a waiting room, worrying about Jonathan.

They were all there, like a red-haired baseball team. Even Fiona had stopped blowing by long enough to hold her mother’s hand. They looked at me, eyes shaded from green to blue and back, and I stood by Margie’s seat.

“Sorry I didn’t text you,” she said. “I have other things.”

“Don’t worry about it. Did you hear about Jessica?”

“Yeah.” She waved it away as if she couldn’t care less. Her mouth was tight and she looked drawn and panicked. I never thought I’d see Margie this flustered.

Next to her, Deirdre stood.

They all stood, and looked at a set of swinging doors. Through the window, I saw an older doctor with silver hair take his cap off and pull his mask down. He turned to another doctor, a woman, and opened the swinging doors.

Another followed. An Asian man, snapping his gloves off.

Three of them. One. Two. Three.

They came to us, and the older doctor put his hand on the woman’s shoulder in a gesture of what? Condolences? Professional commiseration? And when the Asian guy cleared his throat? What was that? Gathering strength?

Hope dropped out of me an flowed down an emotional drain, leaving a black despair in its wake.

Shit.

Three doctors. If one took a blow, the other held the family member, one sister, down, and the third called security.

Wasn’t that how it was?

I glanced at Declan, and he must have seen the panic on my face, because he smiled. And then I became that sister.

---TWO YEARS LATER---

MONICA

The crowd wasn’t for me tonight. There was a relief in that. No pressure. I fluffed my dress and tucked my hair into place, fixing the web of pins and curls. The lights on either side of the mirror washed my face out, but I noticed it was rounder, healthier, happier than even that morning.

The dressing room at the Wiltern Theater wasn’t the cleanest I’d been in the previous months, hardly the most glamorous. The table was new, but had the same half-eaten fast food crap that I’d known musicians to eat my whole life. The couch was worn but not ripped, the mirror was clean, the counter had been wiped and replaced some time in the last decade, but I wasn’t there for a dressing room.

Darren blew in, sweating and panting.

“What the fuck?” I shouted. “You’re in the middle of a show!”

“We’re between sets. I had to make sure you were here.” He grabbed a fingertip pinch’s worth of French fries and stuffed them in his mouth.

“I’m here. I’ll be out to do your encore with you then I’m outtie.”

“Is that what you’re wearing?” He pointed to my wedding dress, a sleeveless silk/satin that hugged me on top, and went wild on the bottom, folding in on itself in twenty yards of lace and shine.

“It’s dramatic. Everyone knows I got married today. When I get up on that stage—”