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Murder?
“He didn’t murder anybody,” I protest. “You have to listen to me.”
Elliot looks at me curiously. “You saw the cameras in that room?”
I nod.
“Then you have to understand, this looks pretty bad for him. He’s been charged with murdering the girl he raped. He did it right in front of you.”
“If you saw him do that, you must have seen the other guy shoot her,” I spit. Alarms start to go off; my blood pressure is suddenly sky-high. The doctor at the end of the bed jostles the cop out of the way, adjusting some monitors, pressing an oxygen mask to my face. “No more questions until she’s stabilized,” the doctor instructs Elliot. “Her blood pressure spikes much higher, and she could go into cardiac arrest all over again.”
Cardiac arrest. Huh. Sounds serious. So why don’t I care?
“Can’t you give her something for that?” Elliot asks impatiently. “I still need to get her statement.”
“I can’t give her anything because of all the opiates in her system,” the doctor says sternly. “The Narcan is staving off the worst of it, but her body has been through a lot. The only reason she’s even conscious and breathing on her own is because she’s a fighter.”
“Okay,” Elliot says, taking his hands out of his pants pockets and holding them up in a gesture of surrender. “No problem, doc. I won’t take her statement. I just have a few pressing questions that I need Miss Capulet-”
“No more questions,” the doctor barks. I’m kind of impressed by her tenacity. She’s barely five feet tall, and the cop towers over her. I guess she’s dealt with his kind before.
“Avery,” the doctor turns her attention to me, smiling warmly, “How are you feeling?”
Like death, doc. How do you think I’m feeling?
“Everything hurts,” I say, my voice still husky from when the breathing tube was down my throat.
“We’ve given you some local anesthetic and cleaned you up, but you’ll need some more stitches and possibly surgery,” the doctor says. “Can you tell me the pills you took?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know. They had red hearts stamped on them.”
Elliot looks up sharply. He whips his iPhone out, scrolling through photos before holding it up in front of my face. “Did they look like this?”
The doctor keeps her mouth shut. I guess she wants to know just as much as him what drug I took. I study the close-up photo of a single white pill, a red heart stamped in the center. “Yes,” I say dejectedly. Those pills didn’t kill me, I want to tell them. Those pills saved me.
“Fentanyl, oxycontin, LSD and some other stuff,” Elliot tells the doctor. “At least, that’s what the batch we seized was comprised of.” They keep talking, but I’m not listening. The doctor pats my leg gently, promising to return, and then it’s just me and the cop again.
An unspoken moment passes between us. He seems to have relaxed about the questioning, which is a mercy I’m happy to accept. I can barely talk, let alone dig up and rehash everything that’s happened to me in the past weeks. How long has it actually been since Daddy plunged into that pool, bullet-ridden and bleeding out?
I push the tragedy from my mind.I can’t think about that right now.Instead, I’m trying to think of who could be the family he’s talking about, the one that’s apparently here and ready to see me.
As if reading my mind, Elliot repeats, “Your family is here to see you. Do you want to see any of them?”
I blink in confusion, remembering the night I was taken. My twenty-fifth birthday. It seems like another person’s life now, an alternate universe. I have lived an entirely new existence in the dark, and I can barely recall what came before. It’s as if the memories of my first twenty-five years of life are so bright, they hurt my eyes just as much as if I were staring at the sun. So bright that they’re completely washed out, overexposed, so that I can’t see them at all.
Who could be here to see me? Aren’t they all dead now? My mother. My sister. Our baby brother. And Daddy. Daddy was shot. He fell in the pool. The last bright memory, strings of fairy lights illuminating the blood that pumped from his bullet wound and stained the blue water red.
“My father was shot. At my party. Did he die?”
“He’s in the ICU,” Elliot says. “He’s alive. He hasn’t woken up yet.”
I nod, looking down at my hands. They’re pale, but more than that, they’re sickly. It’s strange what happens to your skin when you’re deprived of any sunlight.
“Will he die?”
“He’s getting the best care money can buy.”
“That’s not what I asked. Is he going to die?”
