Maggie Shayne - Sleep with the Lights On

Eric. Killing. God, he couldn’t even imagine it.

Yes, you can. You know damn well you can.

How the hell had it happened? What had driven him to this? They’d had the same childhood. Not perfect, but no trauma. No abuse. What had made his older brother become a monster?

He’s never been right and you know it. And what about all those cats, huh? Why was it we could never keep a cat? They all disappeared. And when they were gone, the neighbors’ cats started vanishing. Remember how everyone thought there must be a wild animal in the area, preying on house cats? Coyotes. They blamed coyotes. And when I asked for a dog, Dad said absolutely not, and there was this look in his eyes, remember that? This look like the thought of a dog was horrifying somehow. Maybe he knew....

The elevator stopped, the doors slid open. He stepped out into the white hallway. It smelled so clean he didn’t think a germ would dare try to invade. Spotting the nurses’ desk, he went over and repeated his brother’s name to the guy sitting there.

“Are you family?”

Mason hated male nurses. Didn’t know why, it just chafed him. They always seemed, to him at least, to be full of themselves. People who see men in scrubs automatically assume they’re doctors, and privately, he thought most male nurses got a huge ego boost out of that and almost never corrected the misassumption.

“I’m his brother.”

“I’d better take you in. Your brother is—”

“I was there when he pulled the trigger. You don’t need to prepare me. Just point me to the room, okay?”

The chubby Justin Bieber–haired blond came around the desk, anyway. “It’s right over here. He’s on a ventilator, but—”

Mason walked into the room, right up to the bed. Eric lay there. His entire head was bandaged and padded underneath, so it wasn’t as obvious that a lot of it was missing. Someone had washed most of the blood away and put him in a hospital gown. His eyes were closed, sunken unnaturally back into his head.

“Have you called his—your—family?” the nurse asked.

“I was just about to.”

“Good. The doctor will want to talk to them as soon as possible.”

“Why?” Mason took his eyes off his brother to look at the nurse.

“I really have to let the doctor be the one—”

“Come on, kid. Do you really think it matters who tells it? Cut me some slack here. I just watched my brother blow his own head off. Just tell me what you have to say already.”

The nurse lowered his head. “He’s brain dead. The machine is pumping air through his lungs, and forcing his heart to keep pushing oxygenated blood through his body. But he’s not coming back.”

Mason nodded and exhaled long and slow. No vegetable brother wasting away slow for the next twenty years. No recovering murderer brother having to face the consequences of his crimes. No being forced to testify against his own sibling or reveal the nightmare to his mother or sister-in-law or nephews. No being driven out of the job he loved.

It was better this way. Was that selfish? Okay, yeah, a little, but not entirely. It was better for everyone this way.

“So the doctor wants us all here to tell him to pull the plug.” It wasn’t a question.

“And to ask you about organ donation, though technically his wife has to make those decisions,” the nurse said with a nod in the direction of Eric’s left hand. “Most families make it together.”

Organ donation. That hadn’t even occurred to him. He let his eyes travel up and down his brother’s body, completely intact except for his head.

“The ventilator keeps the organs oxygenated until the decision is made,” Nurse Bieber went on.

“I see. So he’s...”

“He’s already gone, Detective Brown. I’m really sorry.”

Mason nodded. “Seems like it would be a shame to just waste them, doesn’t it?” he asked. “The way he wasted the rest of himself.”

“Yeah. It does. There’s someone right now praying they’ll stay alive long enough to get a heart, a liver, a kidney, a lung. Even his corneas are still good. He could make a blind person see again. Maybe for the first time.”

A blind person see again.

Maybe this accident happened for a reason.

Mason turned and looked at the nurse, revising his opinion of him. “They should have you talk to all the families in this situation. You’re good at it.”

“Does that mean you’re going to...?”

“Yeah, I’ll convince the family. Marie...she listens to me. But don’t worry, I’ll let the doctor think he talked me into it. Now, about those corneas—can we pick someone to get those? A specific person? If they’re the same tissue type or whatever?”

“Of course you can. Tissue typing isn’t even necessary for corneas anymore. The latest studies, blah blah blah.”

The nurse’s words faded into the background noise inside Mason’s head, where the gunshot was ringing and echoing endlessly. He was staring at his brother, remembering when they were kids, playing on the tire swing that hung from the giant maple up at the lake, seeing who could swing out farther, dropping into the icy cold water.

How do you go from a laughing ten-year-old to a cold-blooded killer?

“Detective Brown?”

He nodded to let the nurse know he hadn’t lost him. “Can you, uh, give me a minute alone with him?”

“Sure. And then you’ll call the family?”

Mason nodded.

The kid left and closed the door behind him, leaving Mason alone with Eric. He moved closer to the bed. “I don’t know what to say to you, brother.” He swallowed to loosen up the constriction in his throat. “Hell, I don’t even know if you can hear me, but...what the fuck, Eric? What were you thinking? You—” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “You killed all those boys, you sonofabitch. And then dumped it all on me? What the fuck, man?”

He sighed, backed away. “Okay, so you win. You’re badass. You make the messes, and I clean ’em up. Just like always, big bro. And now I’ve gotta go call Mother and Marie, and break their hearts. And they’re gonna cry and mourn for a piece of shit who never deserved either of them. Much less the boys. Damn you, Eric, how could you do this to your family?”

He got up, started to leave, then turned back. “Why the fuck did you have to wait for me to get there, make me watch you do that? That’s never gonna get out of my head, you know.”

He left the room, closed the door, lowered his head way down because his eyes were burning with tears, and then, finally, he called his sister-in-law.

* * *

By noon my room was full of balloons, flowers and various idiotic stuffed animals. And people, let’s not forget people. My BBF—best blind friend—Mott Killian was at my bedside, strumming his guitar and singing away, doing his usual half-a-song-then-switch thing. Mott taught American history over at Cortland State. Amy, my irritatingly twentysomething personal assistant, had confiscated my tray table for her laptop. She was clicking away, tweeting and posting hourly updates to my fifty-thousand-and-some-odd followers, and manning her ever-present iPhone to tell reporters no to every interview request. I have no idea about social media. She does it all for me. My agent, Barracuda Woman, was keeping tabs via Skype from her Manhattan office. And my sister was riding herd on the hospital staff and ordering takeout. Her twins were texting nonstop—I could hear the tapping, soft as it was—and sucking down vitamin water. I could smell it. Misty had Berry Blast, and Christy had Mango Peach. They were trying not to let me know that their social lives were positively wasting away while they were doing time at their blind aunt’s bedside, but their frequent sighs were audible, and their impatience wafted from their pores like B.O.