If I Die

“Danica, who was the father?” I whispered, leaning forward in my chair again.

“Doesn’t matter,” she whispered back, her eyes closed. “Not anymore.” She fumbled for the controller and pressed a button to lower the head of the bed again. “I need to sleep now,” she mumbled, clearly exhausted by the visit. “Thanks for coming…”

I stood and watched her doze for a second, then I was heading for the door when Danica groaned, and I glanced back at her.

“Maybe this would have happened later anyway,” she mumbled, so low I could barely hear her. “Maybe I wasn’t meant to have kids. But I wanted this one…”

“Visiting hours were over two hours ago,” a sharp female voice barked as I closed Danica’s door, and I spun around to find an elderly nurse—her name tag read Debbie Nolan, RN—in pale purple scrubs frowning at me.

Oops. Busted…

“Sorry. I didn’t get off work in time to visit, and she’s my cousin, so…” I was almost disturbed by how easily the lie flowed. When had I gotten so good at that?

“Oh…” Nurse Nolan’s frown melted into a bruising look of sympathy. “I’m sorry. It’s so sad, with her so young.” She glanced behind her, like someone might be watching, then gestured for me to come closer as her voice dropped into a conspiratorial whisper. “Do you want to see your aunt, too, while you’re here?”

“My…?”

My aunt was suffering an eternity of torture in the Netherworld at the hands of the hellion she’d sold her soul to. But Nurse Nolan meant Danica’s mom. When Danica said her mother was sick, I’d assumed from the way she said it that “sick” was a euphemism for drunk, or stoned, or psychotic.

“Sure…” I said at last, hoping the nurse hadn’t followed the progression of my thoughts across my expression. What kind of fake cousin would I be if I didn’t visit my fake aunt while I was there?

“Room 348, at the end of the hall,” she said, still whispering. “I’ll give you ten minutes, if you promise not to tell….”

“Of course. Thank you.” I’d hoped to sneak out when she went back to the nurse’s station, but I never got the opportunity because she escorted me down the hall to a perfect stranger’s hospital room, while my heart pumped panic-fueled fire through my veins.

How the hell am I going to explain this to my not-aunt? If Mrs. Sussman ratted me out, my dad was going to be pissed. Especially considering I hadn’t yet told him about the gruesome miscarriage or my nonhuman math teacher, or Sabine’s theory about a possible connection between the two. I wonder if encroaching death is a plausible excuse for temporary insanity?

I held my breath as Nolan opened the door, scrambling for some way to explain and excuse my intrusion. But if hearing about Danica’s private pain and loss was heartbreaking, meeting her mother was downright creepy.

Mrs. Sussman—Amanda, according to the bracelet on her wrist—was sleeping. Deeply. So deeply that her chest barely moved with each breath.

“How long has she been like this?” I asked, and the nurse looked at me strangely, like I should already know the answer to that. “The days all run together….” I said, scrambling to fix my mistake.

“It’s been almost four weeks now,” the nurse said as we stood at the bedside, shaking her head over the tragedy. “Her daughter comes in on the weekends, and her ex-husband has even come a couple of times. But there’s nothing any of us can do for her.”

“What happened?” I asked, before I realized that a real niece would already know the answer to that. Fortunately, Nurse Nolan thought I was asking for medical specifics.

“The doctors aren’t sure. And they’ve brought in several of them. She came in like this—your cousin found her, you know.”

I nodded, like I’d really known.

“Brain-dead from the moment she arrived, but she keeps breathing, and as long as they keep feeding her—” Nolan ran one hand gently over the tube protruding from Mrs. Sussman’s left arm “—she’ll be here just like this.”

“How awful…” At least my mother’d had a clean death. This was… I didn’t even have words for what this was, though it had to come close to my own aunt’s eternal torture. “Thanks, but I… I have to go.” I backed away from the bed, suddenly grateful for the knowledge that I wouldn’t have to linger like this. At least, not for more than six days.

In the hall I jogged for the elevator, running away from pain and anguish that put my own into startling perspective, and ran right into Tod. Literally.

“You okay?” he said, and I knew without asking that no one else could see or hear him, though he was fully corporeal for me.

“What are you doing here?” I whispered, tugging him toward the elevator, grateful that Nurse Nolan had evidently found something to do in Mrs. Sussman’s room.

Tod dug for something in his pocket while I jabbed the call button. “Your dad asked me to find you. You forgot your phone.” He handed me my cell, and when my fingers brushed his, there was a sudden swell of color in his eyes—not quite a swirl, but…something. “And that’s not all you forgot….”

“Huh?” I stepped into the elevator, and he stepped in after me, grinning, the teasing light in his eyes comfortable for its familiarity when everything else around me now felt cold, and foreign, and sharp.

“You forgot your date.”

Crap! I closed my eyes, cursing myself silently. I’d forgotten all about Nash.

4

“What were you doing at the hospital?” Tod asked, as I shifted into Reverse and backed out of my parking space.

“Trying to distract myself from the fact that next week, my address changes from a house number to a plot number.” But that distraction had proved temporary, and without Danica’s problems to occupy my mind, my own tumbled back in, clamoring for attention like a dog willing to howl until it’s fed.

Tod chuckled, and oddly enough, coming from a reaper, laughter in the face of death didn’t seem terribly inappropriate. “Yeah. Been there.”

And suddenly, as I pulled out of the lot and onto the street, I realized Tod was the only person I knew who might possibly understand how I felt.

I glanced at his profile as I braked for the stop sign at the corner. “Did you know you were going to die before it actually happened?” My voice was barely a whisper—a trembling reflection of the quiet terror lurking at the back of my mind, leaping into the spotlight every time a failed distraction left me vulnerable.

“Only for about five minutes.”

“Were you scared?” Because I felt like the pendulum on a grandfather clock, ticking toward my last seconds, dizzy from the motion, but unable to stop….

“Like I’ve never been, before or since.”

I had a million other questions, but his answers wouldn’t help me. They probably wouldn’t even be relevant, because my death wouldn’t mirror his, or anyone else’s. I was on my own, in death. I knew that, if little else.

“Kaylee?” Tod said, as I turned the corner into my neighborhood.

“Yeah?” I was hardly listening now, lost in my own thoughts, and the effort not to think them.

“I’m scared now.”

Something in his voice made me look at him, in the fading glow from a passing streetlight. Then something in his eyes made me pull over, two streets from home, in front of a house I didn’t recognize.

“Why are you scared?” I asked, and suddenly the night seemed so quiet, beyond the soft rumble of the engine.

“Because I can’t fix this.” He swallowed thickly, one hand braced on the dashboard. “There’s nothing I can do, and that’s hardly ever true for me, and I hate how helpless and useless it makes me feel. But at the same time, that makes me feel human, and I haven’t felt human much lately, either.”

“Because Addison’s gone?”