Don't Breathe a Word (18 page)

Chapter 36

“Joy?”

It was strange to hear her name spoken. It was even more strange to hear it in a voice I'd known since birth. Before birth, even.

“Joy, is that you?”

Instantly I felt like I was six years old, the time I got separated from my family at the zoo, fell down the concrete stairs and hit my head. There'd been blood everywhere, exactly like there was now—only this time it wasn't my blood.

Here was my mom just like on that day—hugging me and holding me tight, filling my nose with the scent of her hair, clean and peachy, and pressing against my skin, dirty and streaked with Santos's blood.

I'd expected to feel numb when I saw my family, not this horrible tearing in two between fear and relief. They drove up behind a police cruiser just as the EMTs wrapped Santos's barely breathing form in blankets. I knew that by saving Santos, I would be returning to captivity.

I didn't expect the tears to fall at seeing my littlest brother again. Jonah jumped out of the car and ran toward me as my parents watched the medics lift Santos's body onto a stretcher.

But one thing I had expected. As the ambulance pulled away with Santos and May by his side, she watched me from the window, her eyes filled with a mixture of envy and hate.

She was right, after all. I was just 'Burbs, a girl from Issaquah, playing at being homeless. I was going back, and she was going to the hospital with Santos, who might not survive.

Both my parents were crying and hugging me—Dad crushing my head against his chest, and Jonah clinging to my waist and almost making me topple. Part of me hated that they were here, and the other part just wanted to let them hug me to sleep.

What are you doing here? What happened? Were you kidnapped? Did you escape? Are you all right? How did they find you? Did anyone hurt you?

The questions kept coming, one on top of the other amid the hugs and smothering and tears. They touched my head and face, to know I was real in front of them.

Not invisible. Maybe I never had been.

My mother gently stroked my hair, the white and washed-out blue and dark roots, betraying my true identity. “Did
he
do this to you?”

She meant Stench. That's what they thought—that he'd had me all this time. They knew nothing at all about Asher.

She was crying softly, her hands never breaking contact. “Did he . . . how did you . . . did he hurt you?”

“Elena . . .” My dad's voice was a warning.

“I mean . . . you don't have to talk about it right now. Right now you're here, you're safe.” She clutched me in her arms.

“She's shivering,” my mother called to the police officers.

But it's hot,
I thought. Though I didn't have the strength to tell them. My eyes were blurring from heat, then cold.

The cops produced a small silver emergency blanket, nowhere near enough to keep out the chill. My potato coat was down the street, still stuffed into a bush. I must've looked like hell in my shredded black lace dress and streaming eyeliner, ten or fifteen pounds lighter than when I'd left.

“Joy, what happened?” my mother was saying. “Are you all right?”

A sob wouldn't let the words out. I couldn't get enough air for words. Fluid pressed up through the depths, as if I were drowning.

My dad hushed everyone. “Let her alone,” he whispered, hugging me tight. “We don't know what she's been through. Let her have a chance to breathe. We can figure everything else out later.” He gently pulled Jonah away from me and touched my mom on the shoulder.

“Here, baby, take this.” My mom pressed a brand new inhaler with my name, my own name, on it. “I've been keeping all of your meds in the car, just in case we found . . .”

But she couldn't finish her sentence. It was too much, me being here.

The music wafting through the cold night air had shifted dramatically in the last few minutes, signaling the headline band taking the stage, and Creed . . . Creed would be looking for me.

“Wait, I have to go back,” I pleaded, pushing the words through the blinding pain that had suddenly enveloped my head.

“What are you talking about?” my mom demanded frantically. She pushed her lips to my head and released.
My God, Peter,
I heard her say.
She's burning up. Look at her skin—she's white as a ghost!

The cough I'd been holding in burst out of me as I struggled to fill my lungs, which felt like they were full of flood and fire.

Creed wouldn't find me. I would disappear without a trace, with only May to tell him what had happened—if she ever saw him again. Who knew what Maul would do to her now.

“We need to take her to the station,” the cop was saying. He tried to step between my parents and me, and my mother turned on him in slow motion.

“Like hell you do,” she roared through the waterfall rushing past my ears. “She's not going to the station. She's going to the hospital.”

I looked over the scene behind me and captured it like a living photograph—the gravel and garbage strewn all over the alley, the pools of rain and blood, the pounding of the headline band drifting through the air and settling on me like a dew.

Peter,
growled my mom,
help me get her in the car so we can take her to the ER.

But I can't,
I said miserably, feeling my knees buckle.

There was no escaping Joy now. Would Asher be waiting for me? Barbed wire tightened in my chest.

Where was Creed?

My dad led me into the car, and I was still looking over his shoulder. Toward the warehouse, where Creed would be looking for me.

I was good at leaving, I'd told him that. I just didn't think I'd be leaving him.

A tall figure emerged from the darkness, warm breath pumping mist into the freezing air and creating a halo of light around his head.
Creed
.

The car door closed with a thud, and my dad got into the front seat. Everyone's eyes followed mine, to where Creed stood in the concrete landscape, his face stricken. With confusion. With betrayal. With hurt.

And maybe a flash of terrible understanding as he watched us drive away.

Chapter 37

My first memory was the day I stopped breathing.

I was five years old. It was just Jesse and me then. We were supposed to go school shopping for kindergarten, only I'd been sick again, and Mom had been beside me with the nebulizer full of strange-tasting medications that made my tongue numb and my food taste funny.

Only this time it was different. There was the coughing. Coughing I couldn't stop.

I was underwater and everything was a dream—a tired dream, where I could barely suck air and Jesse came in and out of my room to check on me, and I couldn't eat. Couldn't sleep. Then there was only sleep, and I was dreaming again about the pink boots I wanted to wear for my first day of school.

And then I was drowning.

I didn't know where Mom was, or why she hadn't seen the waters rising in my room until I couldn't focus on the letters of my name on the wall: J-O-Y. Like the song, only I couldn't get a breath enough to sing it. My fingers and toes started to tingle and shake.

The letters got dark and my skin so cold.

That's when Jesse found me.

The rest was a nightmare of riding to the hospital in the ambulance, and then tubes and monitors and acrid smells as my parents hovered over my bed.

Jesse whispered in my ear, “I won't let you die. I won't leave you ever again.”

That day, everyone made a vow to the gods of the underworld: They would wrap me gently, keep me in a cage, and watch over me as if my life depended on it. They would suffocate my spirit to save my body, and then hand the keys to Asher, who engraved our vow on a bracelet with a dangling crow.

Only I'd broken their vow, and now the gods were here to claim me.

By the time we got to the emergency room, Mom had already made calls to let them know we were coming. “She's turning blue, Peter! Hurry!”

Dad carried me, wrapped in the silver blanket like an offering. The cop car pulled up behind us at a crazy angle.

They met us at the door with a gurney. I sank gratefully into the clean whiteness, even as I struggled for air.

The rest I couldn't distinguish between reality and the memory of what had happened when I was five. Doctors rushed in and out of the tiny room, covering my mouth with a mask. It tasted bitter with a hazy steam of drugs.

There were tubes and needles, and a brief suck of oxygen before the coughing started again, deep and wet in my lungs as if I were in my childhood bedroom again and feeling the floodwaters rise.

“She's stopped breathing,” my mom said hysterically, and the tingle in my hands and feet spread up my arms and legs. I would have had a panic attack, but I couldn't get enough air to cry out.

“How long has she been like this?” a doctor asked, and my parents had no answer.

“She was kidnapped. The police just found her, tracked by her 9-1-1 call. . . . She's been gone over two months.” They were talking over each other when the police officer appeared.

“We don't believe she was kidnapped.” The officer.

“What? What about that homeless man?” My mom, angry.

I didn't want to listen. I felt like I was going to throw up. I gasped for air as a nurse prepped me for an IV and stabbed me with another needle.

“He was released this morning, ma'am,” said the officer. “Your daughter has been living on the streets for several months now . . .”

“Can you people take this outside?” It was the doctor, with a deep and commanding voice. He was tall and lean, like Creed. Maybe he could save me, if it wasn't too late.

My lungs wheezed and crackled as I sank into the river of drugs, brought out of the dream state long enough to cough as though my ribs would break. I felt like I'd been lifted up by the hands of the party crowd and then slammed into the concrete with a vicious thud.
Light as a feather, free as a bird.
Then I was falling, until I hit the bottom like the shattering of glass.

I strained to hear my parents and the officer outside. He was saying something about an AMBER Alert.

There was an AMBER Alert? When did that happen?

That's what I'd wanted, for them to believe I'd been kidnapped. They might still, if I hadn't called to save Santos. He could be in this same ER, only a few rooms away.

“She's been living with a gang of homeless runaways.”

Did he mean Creed and Santos and May? “They're not a gang,” I tried to whisper, but the doctor didn't seem to be listening. He was hooking me up to some other monitor while a nurse put a tube down my throat.

“One of them is a known drug addict and prostitute with a homeless mother dealing in the U District . . .”

May.

“One of them prostitutes himself outside of clubs, has been kicked out of the foster system, and has been arrested for petty theft and burglary . . .”

Santos.

“One of them doesn't have a record, but we believe him to be a protector who is pimping out the girls in his circle . . .”

Creed? No! It wasn't like that.

“I suggest you have your daughter tested for drugs and STDs . . . any number of things she could have picked up while working the streets . . .”

No.
I moaned, but I couldn't get the word past the tube, which was making my throat go into convulsions.

“Shhhhh,” the nurse said. “Rest now.” She added something to the IV, and in just a few seconds, I was spiraling into darkness.

Chapter 38

Days and nights passed like dreams—or nightmares, depending on where I was in the cycle of drugs, or coughing, or fighting against my airways, full of water and yet dry as crackling glass.

I don't like what you did last night, Joy,
Asher said to me as I slept.
We're going to have to fix it.

I gasped for air, sending the oxygen monitor into an insistent beeping.

Someone pushed a mask onto my face, tinged with the bitter taste of medicine. I was five again, when this vortex of family terror had officially begun. Perhaps it would end here, as we all faced our worst fear together.

If I didn't die, I would have to face Asher.

Through the web of illness, a familiar sound made the hairs on my neck stand on end. A rumble. The distinctive roar of a DeLorean, as if Asher were outside this hospital room, waiting for me.

Was he here already? Would my parents let him in? But I'd heard them say no one could see me, only my family. It couldn't be.

I opened my eyes to see a sliver of light dart across the wall, a rare moment when I didn't sense another presence in the room—my mom or dad, or the hospital staff poking or nebulizing or checking my X-rays.

I crept to the window, expecting to see the low, silvery shadow of Asher's car in the moonlight, my options flashing before my eyes like I was about to die. But there was nothing but bushes under the window, bathed in the pale glow of clouds.

A nurse came in one morning and started questioning me through the haze.

Was I involved with Asher Valen? Was I living with prostitutes on the street? How did I survive so long out there if my asthma was so severe?

I coughed in response. Why was she asking me these things? Where was my mom?

Another nurse came in to check on me and roared at the other nurse.
I told you and the rest of the press to stay out of here! I'm calling security. . . .

The press
. Oh, God
.

If I could hide here forever, I thought fleetingly, reality would not come crashing down.

But then I got better.

My parents were still by my bedside at every waking moment as my pneumonia turned a corner. I was still weak, like I had fallen three stories and broken every bone in my body. Every muscle ached.

I'd been changed into a hospital gown. The scar . . . someone would have seen it. My mother? No. She still believed I'd been kidnapped, despite all evidence to the contrary. She couldn't get her mind around the truth. “They're going to catch this criminal,” she'd whispered.

I was in a private room now, rarely alone except at night, when my parents went home to take care of Jonah, and I was under the watchful glare of the night staff. They had begun letting me take short walks to rebuild my strength. And that's when I managed to slip out.

Memories of Santos that night echoed in my mind—he had to be in intensive care, if he was still alive. The hallway to the ICU wound down a long corridor and through several sets of white doors. Metal signs instructed us to cover our coughs and wash hands thoroughly to prevent spread of infection.

I found the ICU waiting room, an open space with chairs, a fish tank, and one lone girl. Her thin, broken figure waited in a corner, huddled around a pillow. Her hair spiked every which way, and she looked brittle as a twig.

May.

I don't know why I hadn't expected her to be here, or that my identity as Joy and my identity as Triste might someday collide. Who would I be now?

May looked up, eyes streaked with black and sleeplessness, and maybe withdrawal. She looked fully present, nothing like the last night I'd seen her. She concentrated her full venom on me.

“Get out of my face, 'Burbs. You don't belong here.”

May didn't seem to notice that I was wearing a hospital robe myself.

“I came to see how Santos is doing.”

“You're a little late,” May spat. “He's already been here a week.”

“I know.” But she had no idea I'd just spent a week here, too. “Is he better?”

“If you can call a coma better, then yeah. They're in there rearranging his face, but at least he's not dead. They said he's gonna be here for at least another month, and then who the hell knows. But his life is pretty much over, thanks to you.”

The walls waved a little in the direction of my stomach. “I'm the one who called 9-1-1—how can this be my fault?”

“You're kidding me, right? Juvie? Foster care? The suck-hole who did this to him? Wherever he goes, he's fucked.”

I thought I was saving him, calling 9-1-1. I didn't know what to think now—but May was right. A coma was better than dead.

“Creed's gonna be heartbroken—not that he isn't already.”

“Creed? Heartbroken?”

May choked on a laugh and coughed wildly, as if she were the one with pneumonia. “What did you expect? You faked us all out, you lied to us, and then you get into a police car and go back home to your warm, cushy house. Was it some kind of experiment? See if you could hack it? Well, looks like you can't. I never should have tried to save your ass—not when you were going to run home to Mommy and Daddy.”

The old anger bubbled up, the same feeling I had every time she talked about herself and how she would kill herself if she looked like me. She would kill herself if she'd been a 'Burbs girl. She would kill herself before going to see her mom. She valued May about as much as I valued Joy, which was not at all.

“The ass you should be saving is your own,” I said.

May huffed. “Whatever. I'm dead the second I leave this hospital anyway. As soon as I walk outta here, Maul's gonna kill me.”

I understood, perhaps for the first time. I was waiting for the same thing, for Asher to kill me.

“Isn't that what you want?” I asked softly.

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“I'm talking about you. Every time you talk about yourself, it's all about how much you want to die.”

She stared at me, daring me to say more.

“May, it doesn't have to be like that.”

“Oh, really? How can it be, 'Burbs? How can it be for someone who's spent their whole life on the streets, with a crack addict for a mom and no dad, and my only real friend is about to kick the can in the next room?” A nurse walking by glanced over, but May didn't seem to care. “The only thing I can do to keep from being him is to screw people for a living, and as soon as I walk out that door, I can't even do that because Maul will be there. I got no one, 'Burbs. So tell me, how can it be for someone like me?”

All of our street powers had gone to hell—they were all in my head. Survival skills, that's what Creed had in his music. Santos could talk his way out of almost anything, until he couldn't save himself. May could control people with her body, until someone gained control of her.

And I—I could hide in plain sight, but I couldn't even hide from myself.

“You think the only thing that's worth anything is your body, but you're wrong, May. What about this?” I pointed to my hair, jagged from her cut and white from her dyes. “What about this?” I pointed to her hair. “What about Creed and Santos? You could disguise anyone. You could disguise yourself, if you wanted to.”

She said nothing.

“You don't have to go back to Maul. You don't even have to stay in Seattle. You could go somewhere else.”

May looked down, and I wondered if she was preparing for a fresh assault, gathering her energy. Everything was quiet before a certain storm.

Then a drop fell, a drop I never expected. A tear, falling onto the blue herringbone of her chair.

“But what about my mom? Who would take care of her if I left?”

I felt a thud in my spirit.

I wanted to throw my arms around her and tell her everything was going to be okay. To thank her for the sacrifice she made, even though it meant sacrificing herself. But I couldn't—there was an invisible field between us, no matter how hard I tried to penetrate it.

“What about New Ho's? Ron could help you—they're building that housing above the church parking lot. Or a women's shelter? Or Mary's Place? There has to be somewhere you'd be safe . . .” My voice trailed off as she watched me. May already knew what I refused to believe.

“There's no hope for me, 'Burbs. No matter where I go, no matter what I do, death is always gonna be there, waiting. I might as well meet it halfway.”