The Former Assassin by Nikki Stern

Author:Nikki Stern
Format: epub

Chapter Nineteen

Nothing exists outside this room. Surely life goes about its noisy business. I simply don’t care about any of it. My heart and soul live within these four walls, bathed by night in the ambient glow of a table lamp and by day in filtered sunlight through sheer curtains.

St. Mary’s Hospital is a highly rated trauma center that has the advantage of being relatively close at hand. As we come tearing in, I have a passing thought about the other people who come here, other patients who are sick and injured, other panicked families consigned to wait. I dismiss them all from my mind. There is only my son.

I’ve been in the hospital twice before. Once, when I was nine, my parents dropped me off at a nearby clinic when I complained of a sore throat. They promptly forgot about me. Two days later, they returned only because the kindly doctor who treated me tracked them down at City Lights Bookstore. If I’d been feeling up to it, I might have begged him to let me stay.

Michael’s birth occasioned my second visit, not quite twenty-eight years ago. How happy I was, notwithstanding my husband and I were terrified of being discovered. I sprawled in the bed, spent. Brian stood to one side, along with a grinning friend of ours. What was his name? I saw the smiling doctor and nurse through a happy haze of drugs and exhaustion. On my chest rested an impossibly tiny human. You are mine and I will never let you go, I remember thinking. My fierce possessiveness startled me.

Yet I did let him go, didn’t I? He spent his childhood without a mother but with a target on his back. Others shielded him, to be sure. His innate common sense protected him. I used to think my love did as well, but that’s a foolish conceit. The present circumstances give lie to the notion.

This room, whose contours I perceive only vaguely, is larger than most hospital rooms, I suppose. It feels smaller, perhaps because I’ve scarcely left it the last thirty-six hours. There are so many people crowded in here, it seems. Friends have stopped by. I heard someone whisper something about “saying goodbye.” I put it out of my mind.

Tommy and Maggie stand a respectful distance back from their daughter. Kate sits on the right side of Michael’s bed, holding his hand. She is as immobile as a statue. I see tear tracks but no tears on her lovely face. The English and their reserve, I note. The thought is a loving one.

I’m half kneeling in front of the armchair I’ve pulled by my son’s bed, across from the machine monitoring vital signs with implacable insistence. I am the only information you need, it declares. In that moment, it speaks the truth. Beneath the surface of my calm, I am a roiling cauldron of unquenchable fires and bestial urges. I need to scream, to tear, to rip open someone’s throat or pierce his heart.

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