Sing

up, but he was in a half sitting position and he was as glad to see me as I was glad to see him.

“I don’t have to move!” I announced, kissing him.

“Good?”

“Oh, God you missed the whole thing!” I blabbered. “My Mom put the house into foreclosure and I thought I was going to have to move out really fast, which, hello I have twenty years worth of stuff in that house, so but some investor came and bought it.”

“Ah, who beat me out?”

“No, uh. Crap, she told me.” I wrestled with the granola bar, until he took it from me and got it open in one move, with a bad heart and IVs sticking out of him. “It’s such a load off. I can’t even tell you.”

He broke off a piece of the bar and held it up. “Was it Ganten Investments?”

I took the piece in my mouth. “No, it was a bunch of letters, like DRM, but five letters and not that. I made it into a word in my head but I can’t think of it.”

“Doesn’t matter, I guess.”

“You have to move faster next time, if you want property in Echo Park.” I took another chunk of granola bar from his fingers. “Oh my God, this thing tastes so bad.” I felt light as a feather, waving my hands at him to indicate I wanted another piece. “It’s like, stinky.”

“Stinky?”

“With a touch of dredgy.” And then I remembered, as I chewed, the rhythm of the words and the taste of the stale barley malt brought it to me. “ODRSN. That was it. It sounded like odorous. ODRSN Partners.”

He was looking down at the bar, breaking another smelly piece, when he froze.

“Did you say ODRSN?”

“Yep.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, why? Is that the competition or something?”

He put the bar on the side table, then closed his eyes and took a deep breath. It wasn’t very deep at all. He breathed like he didn’t have room for air in his lungs.

I took his hands in mine. “Jonathan. Should I call someone?”

He shook his head, but I didn’t believe him, I believed the machines, which were silent. But for how long? He was struggling, if not with his breath or his heart, with his mind.

“I need you to marry me,” he said.

“What?”

“Marry me.”

“Are you insane?”

“If anything happens to me, I want to make sure you’re taken care of.”

“I refuse to believe you’re going to die. My God, we’ve been together a few months, maybe.”

“These are extenuating circumstances. I could leave you swinging in the wind.”

“No,” I shook my head like I was trying to get a fly out of my hair. “This is crazy. This is not how I want it. I don’t want you to get better then regret it. And it’s not your job to make sure I’m financially stable. What’s come over you?”

Midway through my little speech, stuff started beeping and lighting up. And by the time I was done, I was being pushed out with both hands by a woman in a blue facemask and gloves. I landed in the hall, back against the wall, trying to stay out of the way.

“What happened?” Eileen asked, standing close to Theresa as if her daughter held her up.

“I don’t know,” I said. “We were talking about something.”

He asked me to marry him and I said no.

I put my hands over my mouth when I realized what had happened, and ran down the hall without looking back. Even when I passed the cafeteria on the way out, and saw Declan in his usual spot talking to Jessica, I didn’t stop. I just kept on running.

CHAPTER 22.

JONATHAN

That went poorly.

I hadn’t intended to ask for her hand until she said the name of my father’s investment shell. He’d bought her house to save her when I couldn’t, or wouldn’t. Whichever. I simply didn’t and the reason I didn’t was I didn’t know she was in that kind of trouble. I could only know and see what she brought to me, and if she chose to protect me, I was impotent to protect her. I was stuck I inside four walls with things sticking out of me, tied to a bed as much as I’d tied her.

By the time the smoke cleared, she was gone, and I couldn’t explain. I didn’t want to talk on the phone. Couldn’t, actually. My body betrayed me with exhaustion, long breaths, and lost consciousness. I needed to be in her visual field, to see what I was too tired to intuit, to let her experience the long spaces between sentences that would seem like anger or petulant silence on the phone, but were me trying to breathe around my goddamn damaged heart.

I loved her. I wanted her. There was no one else. She felt right in ways no other woman ever had. Of course I was going to marry her, one day, when I was out of this shitbox, untied from this bed. After more dinners and late nights. After more boundary leaping and fighting. More touching, kissing, laughing.

Just not now.

Except that it had to be now. I felt myself failing. The dips into unconsciousness came with less warning. The effort to exist was such a task, I couldn’t imagine actually living. Was I scared? Fuck, yes I was terrified, and the only thing that kept it at bay was the thought that I could make her life better than it had been, that I could save her from her chronic penury, keep her from the manipulations of men like my father. If I could die knowing I’d saved her, maybe I would have served my purpose. It wasn’t like the money had anywhere useful to go, anyway.

Theresa sat in the chair Monica usually occupied, leaning forward, fingers knit together. I wanted to explain all of it to her, but I didn’t have the wherewithal to do it right, to explain my fear, my need to know Monica was all right, to keep a slice of control. I gave her the shortest version I had.

“I don’t blame her for saying no,” she said. “You need to get better first.”

“What if I don’t get better?”

“She’ll be a widow.”

At twenty-five. And when was her birthday? She’d told me she was a Cancer, but if she told me the exact date, I couldn’t call it up in my memory. I realized we’d never even celebrated a birthday together. Neither mine nor hers. I wanted to get her something extravagant six months early, to make up for the time we’d never have. And Christmas, of course.

“What’s today?” I asked Theresa.

“The twentieth.”

“Merry Christmas.”

“What do you want under the tree? Besides a ‘yes?’”

“I want her,” I whispered. “I asked for the wrong reasons. But I want her.”

She put her elbows on the bed and her hand on my shoulder. “Do it for the right reasons. Don’t do it because it’s convenient now. Don’t do it because you’re scared. Marry her because you love her, and your life wouldn’t add up without her. Can you do that? Can you promise me you’re not forcing it? It would break my heart to see you do this because you wanted to give yourself a reason to live.”

I rarely saw Theresa so impassioned. She was more like Jessica than any of my sisters in her refinement and grace. She seemed broken down that day, slightly shattered, holding herself together with chicken wire.

“What’s wrong, Tee?”

“I don’t think love should be taken for granted, and I don’t think you should keep on a path of least resistance.”