38. Janet
JANET
The blood comes out of him faster than I can stop it.
I press both hands against his side, and it still finds a way through my fingers. Warm. Steady. Wrong.
"Go," Mike says. His voice is thin. "You don't need to be here for this."
"Shut up."
I get up and wipe blood off my hands with a towel. I get my phone. My thumb smearing the screen red, and dial with his blood still on me.
"911, what's your emergency?"
"A man's been stabbed. He's still breathing. I need an ambulance and I need the police." I give the address. My voice doesn't shake. I don't know how it doesn't shake.
"Stay on the line, ma'am?—"
I set the phone on the floor by his shoulder, speaker up, and go back to pressing.
"Janet." His eyes find mine. They're losing focus at the edges. "They're going to ask questions you don't want to answer."
"I don't care. Slow your breathing."
A cough brings blood to his lips.
"Don't talk," I say. "Don't you dare die."
His hand finds my wrist, weak, barely there.
"I'm bleeding out."
"No, you're not, you're not going to die."
"It's okay."
"Shut up. Save your breath for staying alive."
"I can save this now." His eyes flutter, come back.
"Stop talking," I say.
"I need to say it while I can." His eyes hold mine, steadier than the rest of him. "Know this, I love you. I fell in love with you."
Something in my chest gives out.
He passes out.
I take his hand. Blood all over us.
"No, no no. I love you, Mike! Mike, stay with me. Please, don't die. I love you, you have to stay."
I press harder on the wound instead, like pressure is a language he'll understand, and the sound that comes out of me isn't a sentence. It's his name, over and over, wet and broken, while I hold him together with my hands.
I look at him.
Sirens rise up through the floor before they reach the door. I count seconds instead of counting the blood. Seconds are a thing I can control. The blood isn't.
There are too many people in the apartment at once, paramedics kneeling where I was kneeling, a hand on my shoulder pulling me back, a voice telling me ma'am, you need to let us work.
I don't let go until someone pries my hands off him, gentle, but a hand is still a hand and mine won't open on its own.
They cut his shirt open. One of them calls out numbers I don't understand. They lift him onto a board like he weighs nothing at all.
"Mike."
His eyes find me one more time before they close. He doesn't have air left for anything else.
He's gone, down the hallway, into the elevator, and I'm standing in a kitchen with a dead man on the floor and blood on my hands that isn't mine.
A police officer starts talking to me. I hear about half of it.
"Ma'am, I need you to sit down. Can you tell me your name."
"Janet Graham."
"Are you injured?"
"No."
"Is this your residence?"
"No. It's his." I can't make myself say Mike's name again. Not yet. Not until I know.
Someone drapes a blanket around my shoulders even though I'm not cold. A detective crouches in front of me, notepad out, and asks me to walk him through it from the beginning.
I do. I leave nothing out. Ryan broke through the door. Ryan had a knife. Mike got between us. Ryan stabbed him and dropped him to the floor. Ryan came at me, and I fired. Three times, I think.
"Is this the weapon?" He points to the gun on the coffee table.
"No, that's not it."
"Where's the gun now?"
"I don't know. On the counter, I think I put it on the counter."
He writes that down without looking up.
"Is he going to make it?" I ask. "Is Mike alive?"
"I don't have that information, ma'am."
"Can you find out?"
"I'll see what I can do."
Nobody comes back with an answer. I ask three more people over the next hour and get the same shape of nothing every time. No update yet. Someone will let you know. Please sit tight.
Two officers take me downstairs. They don't handcuff me.
I sit in the back of a squad car outside Mike's building, wrapped in a blanket that smells like plastic and smoke. Everything outside moves without sound.
They wheel Ryan out under a white sheet. The stretcher bumps once at the threshold. I watch the shape of him pass through the front entrance like it belongs to someone else's life.
I've come to scenes like this as a prosecutor. I've stepped around blood, listened to detectives walk me through timelines, and watched crime scene techs photograph what someone's life looked like after violence tore through it.
Right now I can't remember a single question I would ask.
A woman in a windbreaker with CRIME SCENE UNIT stenciled on the back walks past carrying my gun in a clear bag. I watch it go by like it belongs to someone else.
My phone is somewhere in an evidence bag now.
The car pulls away from the curb. Nobody tells me where we're going. I already know.
At the precinct, someone takes the blanket back and hands me a paper jumpsuit that crinkles when I move. A woman photographs my hands before I'm allowed to wash them. She rolls each of my fingers across an ink pad, one at a time, like I'm the one who did something wrong.
"Am I under arrest?"
"No, ma'am. This is standard for anyone involved in a shooting."
I sit alone in a room with a table bolted to the floor and a mirror I know isn't a mirror. I ask three different people if Mike is alive. I get the same answer three times. No update yet.
Two detectives come in. Neither one is the man from the apartment. The older one sits across from me. The younger one stays standing by the door.
"Did you call Peter McGuire?" I ask.
"He's on his way. Walk us through it again," the older one says. "From when Keller came into the bedroom."
I do. Same story, same order. Ryan with the knife. Mike stepping in front of me. The stabbing. The gun.
"You fired three times."
"Yes."
"He was already down when you fired the last two, or still coming at you?"
"Still coming."
The younger one writes something. The older one doesn't blink.
"You and Mr. Trent. How long were you seeing each other?"
"That's not relevant to what happened."
"Everything's relevant right now, ma'am." He leans back. "Ryan came in, and you're the one holding the gun. Where was Ryan's gun?"
"I don't know. He was fighting with Mike. I don't know. He didn't have it."
"Why?"
"He didn't know I was in the room."
"He didn't?"
"He knew someone was in the room, a woman, but not me specifically."
"How do you know that?"
"I heard them from the bedroom. I told you that."
They leave without telling me anything else. The door shuts.
I ask which hospital anyway, like the room might answer after they don't.
It doesn't.
I sit at the table with Mike's blood dried in the creases of my palms. I rub at one line with my thumb until the skin turns red, but it stays there. Brown now. Not bright anymore.
That scares me more than it should.
I can still see his hand hanging off the stretcher before the EMT lifted it back onto his chest. His eyes closed. His body is still.
That's what I keep coming back to. Mike.
The door opens.
Peter McGuire steps in, coat still on, face set like he already knows what this room is going to cost him.
“Janet.”
He starts toward the chair across from me, stops.
He sits across from me.
“How are you?”
"Ryan Keller is dead."
"I know."
"Am I going to be arrested?"
“They’re not pressing charges against you,” he says. “There’s security footage. Cameras in the apartment. Keller stabbing Trent. All of it. I’ve seen it myself.”
“He had cameras?”
The laugh almost comes out of me.
“Of course he had cameras. You watched it?”
“I needed to know what I was walking into before I sat down with you. It’s clean, Janet. Self-defense. No question.”
I sit back.
For one second, I can breathe.
Peter says, “You’re going to be disbarred. Not suspended this time, full disbarred. You’ll never practice law again.
I bend over.
My bar card. My office. My name on every motion I ever signed. The first time I stood in court and said, “The People are ready.”
Gone.
“There’s no way around it,” he says. “I can keep you out of prison. That’s the best I can do.”
I look down at my hands.
Mike’s blood is dried around my nails.
Peter says, “Mike Trent is going to serve time for stealing your files.”
My head comes up.
“At least a year, if he cooperates.” he says. “If he lives.”
The chair moves under me.
Peter watches me.
“You were in love with him,” he says. “With Ryan Keller’s brother.”
My mouth opens and nothing comes out.
Peter looks at me for another second, exhales.
“That’s a hell of a mess, Janet.”
I swallow.
“Where did they take Mike?”
"Presbyterian. He's in surgery," Peter says. "That's all they'd tell me."
In surgery. Not out of surgery. Not stable. Not anything I can hold onto.
"How long has he been in there?"
"I don't know, Janet."
"Can I ask you a personal question? Why didn't you delete the video?"
"It's one thing to not turn it over. It's a whole other line to destroy it." I look at him. "I couldn't go that far."
He goes to the door.
"Can you please find out if he's alive?"