Chapter 20
They took it in shifts to sit with Gwen during visiting hours. On Monday it was Tana in the morning and Allie in the afternoon.
In between, Tana and Allie had lunch together in the hospital cafeteria. When they separated—Allie to walk to the elevators,
Tana to head to the parking lot—Tana reached to squeeze Allie’s hand and Allie turned to air kiss her cheek and they clonked
heads. Allie laughed, rubbed Tana’s head, kissed her skull, and then without thinking, lightly kissed her mouth. It was no
big deal at all, Tana didn’t even seem to notice, but when Allie was in the elevator her heart was racing and a chant had
started up in her skull, Stupid, stupid, NEEDY, stupid. She wrote and erased a text—Sorry! Accidental kiss!—six times, lacked the courage to hit send every time.
They had put Gwen in a peaceful private corner suite on the third floor. Mostly peaceful. The maternity ward was directly overhead, and sometimes it was possible to hear a baby producing a goatlike bleat
from somewhere above. It hardly registered with Allie.
Gwen was rarely conscious. She had lost part of her left lung and more than a gallon of blood.
They had reinflated the lung. The tracheostomy hole in her throat was sealed again, under a thick pad of gauze, held in place by a white plastic bracelet like a zip tie.
A bullet had dinged off her pelvis and cracked her hip.
It would have to be replaced, but that was for later.
Another had passed through her abdomen and nicked some kind of pouch—in Allie’s mind, it was like the pocket mama kangaroos carried their babies in—before spinning out of her body.
This last injury had seemed most inconsequential and turned out to be the one that might kill her yet.
They had her on intravenous antibiotics to fight the infection that had taken root in the rectouterine pouch and spread to her blood.
Her skin was always cold, but she sweated as if she had just finished a run on a warm morning.
Allie spent a lot of time next to the bed, patting her mouth and brow with a wet cloth.
Sometimes Gwen opened her eyes and stared at her without recognition.
Other times, her eyes were blank with fear.
Once Gwen whispered, in a cracked, whistling voice, “. . . babies. Oh. Oh. Oh . . . baby.”
“Yeah,” Allie said. “Oh, baby. It’s been a hell of a month, huh?”
Gwen shut her eyes and began to cry then, which made Allie feel awful, as if she had misunderstood something. Soon Gwen was
dozing again, even though a couple of newborns were wailing above them.
Whenever Allie visited, she planted herself in the chair by the cot and caught Gwen up on current events, whether she was
conscious or not.
“I guess Colin is talking,” Allie said one day. “But he might not live. He got clipped in one chamber of the heart. I thought
that would kill a person for sure, but I guess not. They’ve got him on machines. Of course, they’ve got him on machines. They’re
probably going to open his skull and wire him for internet.”
Another day, she said, “The police asked Tana if she would sign for the release of her mother’s body, and she told ’em they
could dump her with the rest of the medical waste, far as she was concerned. She’s tough. She’s as tough as Donna, I think,
only, you know, she looks after people instead of looks down on them.”
There was the day she filled Gwen in on Donna. “They released her yesterday. I haven’t seen her. She calls, I don’t answer.
She texts, I keep her muted. Don’t care. She wanted me drunk all the time because she liked me helpless. If I ever see her
again, there’s an eighty percent chance I’ll just start throwing things. A fifty percent chance. A ten percent chance. Okay,
there’s a one hundred percent chance I’ll just start crying, but I will not let her talk to me.”
“The police had Robin give her statement three times,” Allie told Gwen one afternoon, “not because they had problems with her story, but because they like the way she says things in British. Every time she told it, there were more cops to listen to her. I guess having a British accent is kind of a superpower. It makes you sound smarter than other people. I was worried Maine cops would be gross because she’s trans, but you never know how folks are going to be. They’re just charmed.”
And another time she whispered, “I like Tana,” and then blushed so hard her face hurt. Gwen was the one person she felt comfortable
telling, and even then, only when Allie was sure she was asleep.
But mostly Allie talked about the plan, about Easter, about King Sorrow.
“I don’t know what to do,” Allie said. “None of us know what to do. The police kept everything as evidence. The robe. The mirror. It’s all gone. You need to tell us what
to do. You need to get better so you can figure something out. So we can stop Easter from coming.”
But Gwen slept on.
Following her awkward, unintended kiss with Tana, Allie did not offer Gwen her usual summary of recent events. That afternoon
she merely sat next to the bed and touched the damp cloth to Gwen’s forehead, while she worried about what she had done. She
wanted to throw up. Tana was probably straight and definitely her sponsor and there was a 110 percent chance she had crossed
an ethical line. Then she thought, What the fuck does it matter? Gwen will die and I will use her death as my excuse to start drinking again and Tana will give
up on me and life will be awful and it will be what I’ve got coming for everything I’ve done.
That idea was so terrible, Allie had to hurry to the bathroom and gasp over the sink for a few moments while her stomach heaved.
Her lunch—beef chop suey—stayed down.
When she lifted her head and looked at her own reflection in the mirror, she could see into Gwen’s bedroom behind her, could
see King Sorrow’s tail slithering out from under the bed to wrap itself around her.
“No!” she screamed, spinning from the sink.
His tail, a ten-foot coil as thick as an elephant’s leg, had wrapped around Gwen’s abdomen. His claw had emerged from the other side of the bed to clasp her throat.
“No!” Allie screamed again, running across the room, grabbing the tail, and trying to pull it loose. “Go away! You can’t have
her yet!”
The tail loosed itself and began to retreat under the bed. But his claw—that humanlike hand with scaly fingers and yellow
talons—remained. One talon caressed Gwen’s cheek, traced her lips, while the rest of the hand clutched her throat.
“What do you mean yet, love,” King Sorrow said. “She’s been mine from the beginning. All of you have. I’ll have her this year, and you next year, Allie. Donna will choose you next year—unless you choose her first. What do you say, Allie? Want to make next year’s
pick right now?”
“No,” Allie whispered. “I wouldn’t. Not now. Not ever. And Donna wouldn’t either.”
“She doesn’t love you. She never did. She only wanted to control you. You know that, don’t you? You know what! I just had
a thought. Maybe Donna will use her pick to take Tana next year. To punish you for your faithless heart.”
Allie’s eyes stung. “Let go of my friend.”
“I can release her throat. But I’ll never let go of any of you. And she won’t be drinking tears to get away from me now. Too late. All gone. You can’t save her, love. You can only
try to save yourself.”
“No. I’m not worth saving. Not after the things I’ve done.”
“True enough. Glad you know it.”
The talon lifted from Gwen’s throat. King Sorrow patted the dying woman’s cheek and his claw slipped away.
“See you soon, Allie,” King Sorrow said. “Count on it.”
It was twenty-seven days until Easter.