Demanding Ransom (36 page)

“How are
the fish?” I say, pacing toward the low table in front of the window. The soles
of my shoes stick to the linoleum floor.

“Damn
staff here. Can’t keep anything alive,” Tom grumbles, wheeling his chair toward
me, painstakingly slow. “Hard enough time keeping people alive, let alone
goldfish.”

My eyes
drop to the bowl. Swimming frantically around the circumference is one orange
fish; the other floats belly up in the middle like a bobber a lake.

“Do me a
favor and flush it.”

I lift
my hand up to my mouth and cup it, but I feel the tear that slips down the
ridges of my knuckles, and I see it when it drops into the bowl underneath me,
rippling out toward the edges.

“Sure,”
I sniff. “Of course.”

“Oh,”
Tom continues, his voice gruff and curt. “And tell that Patrick to apply
himself and actually show up for work every once in a while. We’d all like to
be able to watch a little TV around here.”

I nod as
I press my fingers to my mouth. There’s a clear plastic cup on Tom’s nightstand
and I pick it up, and then dip it into the fishbowl to retrieve the floating
goldfish. The water displaces and it takes a few tries before I’m able to scoop
him up, and even after I’ve done so, the remaining lone fish continues her
circular swimming, like she’s just going through the motions. Maybe she is. And
maybe that’s all she’s expected to do now that she’s completely alone in her
empty glass bowl. Maybe it’s all any of us are expected to do.

***

“Maggie?”
I try to walk past without him seeing, but it’s impossible. His bike is parked
immediately to the right of my truck, tilted and leaning on the kickstand. Ran
pulls his helmet off and shoves it under his arm, confusion written in thick
lines across his face. “Maggie, what are you doing here?”

It’s
been three weeks since the coffeehouse. Three weeks of trying to live my life
without Ran. And now, at this point, I’ve spent more time without him than with
him. We had two months together. Now it’s late March and I’ve gone three months
without him. Time is a weird thing. How it sometimes rushes when you need it to
slow, and other times it drags on like a funeral dirge. It never seems to
cooperate.

“Hey,” I
mumble, shoving the cup with the dead fish behind my back. “I volunteer here
twice a week.”

“Yeah?”
Ran rests his helmet on the hood of my truck and slings a messenger bag over
his shoulder. “For school?”

“Yeah.
Psychology.” I wonder if he knows this is my vehicle, the way he drops his
belongings onto it. I’m pretty sure I got it after our fight, after his last
memory. “I’m doing a paper on Alzheimer’s and have to research a few case
studies.”

Ran hooks
his fingers under the strap of his bag and slides them up and down across his
chest. His broad shoulders tighten. “Happen to meet a guy named Tom in there?”

“Yeah.”
I don’t look at him.

“That’s
my dad.”

“No
way,” I reply, but it’s too monotone. I should have worked on adding a little
inflection to indicate some sort of shock.

“Yeah.”
Ran shifts his weight and peers around my shoulder. “Hey, what’s that?”

I
squeeze my eyes shut. Damn. “It’s just a dead fish I need to get rid of.”

His face
drops. “Oh.”

“Yeah,”
I say, my voice quivering. “Stupid goldfish. These things are impossible to
keep alive. You’d think they could get their patients pets that are a little
sturdier, like turtles or something. I think those are pretty hard to kill.” I
scoot past Ran toward the gutter at the edge of the lot and tilt the cup,
emptying the water and its contents into the grated drain. I hear the faintest
splash as the fish hits the bottom.

Ran’s
mouth falls open and I can see him swallow, his throat tugging up and down as
his chest rises quickly. “Okay,” he says, shaking his head like he’s trying to
erase what he just saw. He scoops up his helmet. “I’ll see you around, Maggie.”

“See you
around, Ran.”

I grab
the driver’s side door to my truck and slam it closed once I’m in the confines
of the cab. Ran turns his back to me, and I watch him take long and precise
strides toward the nursing home’s doors that stretch open and swallow him up. I
wait until his shadow slips down the hall and I lose sight of him.

Then I
completely fall apart.

CHAPTER
TWENTY-EIGHT

Finals Week — June

Voices
follow the shuffling footsteps down the hall. The bars must be officially
closed for the night. That would explain the sudden influx of students and the
buzz of noise at nearly three in the morning. And it sounds like the drinking
and partying have picked up where they left off in the student lounge at the
other end of the dormitory.

I roll
onto my side and tuck my hands under my pillow. Cora’s bed is empty and I’m
wide-awake, half anticipating her to burst through the doors with another
random guy attached to her lips. I hope that’s not the case because I can’t
take up my usual roost in the loveseat in the lounge tonight. I really need a
good night’s sleep in my own bed. The past three were all-nighters, and I’m
praying my grades reflect that just as much as the purple bags under my eyes
do.

I try to
keep my eyes closed, but it doesn’t work. Papers and finals flash behind my
lids, and when those disappear, they’re replaced with the nervous anxiety
that’s held tight in my chest, manifesting itself in the hazy images of Mikey’s
doctor, charts, and CT scans.

I
finished my last final this morning, and while the rest of the school
impatiently awaits their final grades, I’m holding my breath, dreading a
totally different result: the results of Mikey’s most recent scans. He
completed his doctor’s initial treatment plan two weeks ago, and it’s been a
waiting game ever since.

I
honestly think there’s nothing I hate more than this state of not knowing.
Limbo
. It sucks. I wonder if it’s
possible for limbo to become a permanent place, rather than just a temporary
holding cell. Because I feel like I’ve been locked in it forever. At least for
the last decade. Ten years of waiting for my life to move out of this
indeterminate state. Waiting to finally experience those inalienable rights Ran
talked about. Being happy. Finding love. I was so close. I was almost out of my
purgatory. My waiting game was almost over.

My eyes
meet the clock.
3:15 a.m.
If I fall
asleep now, I can still get four hours of sleep before my alarm jolts me awake.
That’s not terrible. The boxes are already stacked high in the corner of the
room like a cardboard Christmas tree. All that’s left out is my laptop, my
clock, and a few things from my makeup bag. I’ll strip the bed, fold my
comforter into the last empty box, and there will be no trace left hinting at
the fact that I inhabited this dorm room for the past nine months. It will
belong to someone else just after summer break, and it will be as though my
year in room 504 in Hawthorne Hall never happened.

I’ve
almost surrendered to the loose promise of sleep when I hear a faint knock on
my door, so quiet that at first I think I’m imagining it. Several seconds pass and
I strain to hear, squinting my eyes in the dark, which really makes no sense.
Like when you turn down the radio when you’re trying to find a place while
driving. But for some reason I think it helps, and when I hear the echo through
the wood the second time, I leap out of bed and rush toward the sound.

“Hey
Maggie.” There’s a blast of alcohol that greets me along with the voice.

“Brian,”
I gawk, stepping back to avoid his staggering body that careens toward me.

He grabs
me around the waist. “We made it, Mags,” he croons in my ear.

I shove
him off. “Made what?”

His eyes
are dilated and his lips form sloppily around his muddled words. “Made it
through freshman year.”

“Just
barely.” I push him onto Cora’s bed and sit down on my own. In this small room,
this is about as far away as we can get from each other.

“You
heading home for the summer?” He slides down and closes his eyes, tucking his
legs up under him like he’s in the fetal position. Oh no. This is not going to
work. Brian is not going to fall asleep here in my dorm. This is not how my
year ends. Brian is not a part of it.

“I don’t
know what my plans are,” I say, resigning to the fact that I’m going to have to
physically touch Brian to get him out of the room. My skin crawls like I’m
covered in thousands of fire ants. I wonder what made him think he’d be welcome
here in the first place. “It all depends on Mikey’s results.”

“That
sucks so bad that he has cancer,” Brian slurs against the sheets and it sounds
like he has cotton in his mouth.

“Yeah.” I
yank on his arm and cringe at the feel of it, hot and clammy against my palm.
“Time for you to go, Brian.” I manage to pull him into a sitting position, but
he teeters for a couple of seconds before swaying back over to the other side,
crashing onto the foot of Cora’s bed.

“Sophia
won’t have sex with me anymore.”

I didn’t
see that coming. “What?”

Brian
nuzzles his face against the crumpled duvet cover. I think he’s drooling. I’m
never going to hear the end of this from Cora.

“She’s
sleeping with Colby.” I don’t know who Colby is, nor do I care. All I really
care about is getting Brian out of my room without him emptying the
liquor-laced contents of his stomach all over the floor on his way out. “She’s
sleeping with
Colby
, Maggie.”

“I’m
sorry.” I’m not. I’m more sorry that I answered the door in the first place. I
should know better than to respond to three o’clock in the morning wake-up
calls.

“He’s my
roommate. She slept with my
roommate
.”
He belches a wet hiccup that sounds like it’s accompanying something else. He
cannot throw up on Cora’s bed. Drool is one thing—she may forgive me for
that. Vomit is a completely different story.

I tiptoe
to the foot of the bed and prop my hand between his shoulder blades. It’s
disgusting how sweaty he is. I find it impossibly hard to believe that at one
point in time, Brian’s sweaty body on my bed would have turned me on. This is
the polar opposite of being turned on. I’m actually a little worried that I
might throw up, too.

“It
sucks to be cheated on, Mags,” he groans, just at the same moment I managed to
rally my strength to shove him off the bed. Brian tumbles to the concrete floor
with a thud. “Uggghhh,” he moans, clutching his side.

“Yes, it
does.” I wipe my hands across one another. “Brian.” I crouch down to his level
and his pained eyes look up at me. “You have to go.”

Closing
his eyes, he nods at least ten times, like he’s one of those bobble heads on a
dashboard of a car. “Yeah.” He slumps back onto the floor.

I stand
above him with my hands on my hips for a moment, trying to figure out what I’m
going to do with him. It’s almost like disposing of a dead body, the list of
possibilities my mind runs through. I finally decide on grasping him around the
ankles and dragging him out into the hall to become someone else’s problem,
when he pushes up on his elbow and stares at me, clarity flitting briefly
across his face.

“I’m
sorry, Maggie.” Brian gives me a soft, apologetic smile. He pushes all the way
up to sit cross-legged, but continues to wobble unevenly. “I was a dick. I
shouldn’t have done that to you.” He shakes his head as though he’s scolding
himself. “Not after three years. Not after what I took from you.”

The
sound of the party raging down the hall rattles the old windows, and Brian’s
quivering voice matches it to a T.

I bend
down to his level. “You didn’t take anything from me, Brian. I gave it to you.”
He looks up at me expectantly. “And I forgive you… I think I actually forgave
you a while back.” The light that catches Brian’s eyes reveals the relief that
I think he’s been seeking for quite a while. I can see it slipping out of him
and feel it breathed through him.

I don’t
know when it happened exactly, when I chose to stop hating Brian for what he
did to me. But it occurred somewhere along the line, and seeing him like this
tonight—this hurt, confused man balled up on my floor because someone did
the same to him—makes me realize what I have for him must be true
forgiveness. Because even though the thought of him still disgusts me on some
level, the fact that I feel bad he’s experiencing the same pain has to mean
something. It feels like forgiveness—however foreign—and something
in me is lighter just by giving it out.

“You
should go, Brian.”

“I know.”
He nods slowly. “I’m so sorry, Maggie. You didn’t do anything to deserve what I
did.” He shrugs. “I guess I deserve what Sophia did, though. You know, like
payment for my sins or something.”

“I don’t
think that’s how it works.” We’re eye level now, though Brian’s eyes shift
unsteadily side to side as his body sways. “And I bet you’ll forgive her
someday, too. We all make mistakes.”