Page 7 of Thicker Than Water
“So they stabbed him, suffocated him,andsutured his lips?” one of the nurses says. “Why all three? And why bother with the mouth at all when they’d already killed him?”
“I don’t know,” another answers. “But speaking of mouths: that cut on his abdomen? I hear it looked like a smile.”
Twenty-four hours after we first arrived at the hospital, my brother’s condition remains unchanged. We’ve spent the day staring at Jason, pinching off bites of muffin from the vending machine, walking loops around the long hallways, just to feel our legs again. Not once today have Jason’s eyes so much as flicked with dreams beneath his lids. Nurses have come and gone, regarding us with compassionate nods, and while I swiped again and again to Clive Clayton’s Instagram, checking for new posts, new anger to distract me from despair, Julia sent sporadic texts to Aiden about food in the freezer, bringing the mail inside.
She said she messed up the script I gave her. She rushed through some of the words, stumbled over others, and when Aiden asked if Jason would be okay, she said,Yes, he’ll be fine, they just put him to sleep.She covered her head with her hands when she mentioned that part to me—I told my teenage son that the doctors put his dad to sleep. Like a dog. Like killing a dog.Then she looked at me with horror that quickly melted into hysteria, both of us laughing so hard it counted as an ab workout.
None of this is funny. We know that. But we don’t have much practice with sustained seriousness. Even earlier, when we scannedthe contents of the vending machine, it was my instinct to ask whichmotatoesJulia was getting. But the old joke, Jason’s exquisite mistake, stuck to my tongue, tasting like tears.
Now, for the millionth time today, I study my brother, desperate to detect a change. His hands are so still they look fake—props attached to his wrists. His bruises shine. Dry skin flakes at the corner of his mouth, and his lips gape around the tube, a fish on a line.Nothing new to report, I say to myself, the same thing the nurses have been telling us all day.
Movement by the door pulls my gaze away from my brother, and when I turn my head, my eyes instantly widen.
My ex-boyfriend is here, in uniform, standing at the threshold of the room. A transceiver chirps on his belt, hisses static, before a woman’s voice relays a code and location he ignores.
“Wyatt,” I say, and I’m conscious of Julia’s surprise in the chair beside me. I speak his name as if this is the first I’ve seen him since we broke up a year ago. Because as far as Julia knows, it is.
The edges of his Hillstead Police badge glow under the lights like a reflector. Of course Wyatt would know about the accident; someone, at some point, told us it happened in Hillstead, Wyatt’s town of jurisdiction. But still. The gall of him, showing up like some kind of boyfriend.
“What the hell are you doing here?” I ask him, standing up.
Julia stands, too, muttering so quietly only I can hear it: “Cool your fire.”
I take a deep breath. My lungs are hot and tight, but the mantra does what it’s supposed to. It loosens me, turns down the temperature of my anger. Still, it’s not as effective as usual, because Julia has misread my stiff posture. She thinks I’m mad at the sight of Wyatt, which I am, but mostly I’m panicked that him being here will make it obvious that he and I are hardly estranged.
Julia and I tell each other everything, but I haven’t been able to tell her this: for the last six months, I’ve been sleeping with Wyatt again. Even though he cheated on me at a bachelor party. Even though I broke up with him immediately, deleted all our pictures, repainted my apartment so it would look nothing like it did when he slept inside its walls. So many times, almost as a reflex, I’ve opened my mouth to share this with Julia, but I’ve found there’s no way to explain why I keep a list in my phone called “Plan for Punishing Wyatt,” which goes: (1) text him to come over, (2) pull him close, (3) undress us both a little, (4) back away suddenly, (5) button my shirt, and (6) leave him breathy and throbbing as I tell him to go. And I really don’t want to tell Julia my recurring problem—because it’s a part of myself I don’t even recognize, a part it would humiliate me to admit: in the moment, I always forget number four,back away, and then the next thing I know, I’ve got my legs clamped around Wyatt’s hips, my teeth sinking into my bottom lip, his words hot against my ear: “I’ve missed you, Si. I miss you all the time.”
“Sienna,” he says now, and I’m relieved he’s using my full name, for Julia’s benefit; I’ve made clear to him that she needs to think we’re still estranged. “I’ve been calling you.”
Julia shoots me a puzzled glance. Every time Wyatt’s name lit up my screen today, I flipped the phone upside down.
“And I’ve been ignoring you,” I say.
But there was part of me, damn it, that had wanted to pick up. Wanted to place my pain in Wyatt’s hands.
“In case you can’t tell,” I add, “I’m busy.”
Wyatt looks over my shoulder, his eyes landing on Jason, comatose and discolored, and he swallows. He lingers on my brother for a few moments, then shakes his head. But the expression on his face isn’t one of sympathy. It’s the one he wore that night he confessed tocheating on me. It’s a mix of anguish and dread, a crinkle around the eyes that usually accompanies his laughter but on that night was the wince of knowing he had to hurt me.
“I’m actually here,” Wyatt says, “on official business. The calls were— I wanted to warn you.”
“Warn me about what? Is this about the crash? Did they find out somebody hit—”
“No, no.” Wyatt turns to scan the hallway before facing us again. “Listen, Beck’s in the bathroom, I was supposed to wait for him, but—”
“Beck? The detective?”
Jerry Beck. One of Wyatt’s colleagues. I hung out with him several times over the two years Wyatt and I dated, department barbecues where I was a reluctant plus-one, and his presence—loud and commanding, desperate to be the smartest person in the room—always rankled me.
But why is he here?
“Spit it out,” I say when Wyatt hesitates, and my heart thrashes, an echo of the night he told me about the woman at the bachelor party, whose name he didn’t even remember, whose body he only knew he entered because of the condom he woke up wearing in her bed.
“It’s not even supposed to be me,” Wyatt says. “I’m only here because Sam’s kid got sick. But God—I don’t want you to hear it from Beck first, so I—”
“For fuck’s sake, Wyatt.”
“Jason’s a suspect.”
