“Get away from him!”
Hwa shoved the doctor out of the way with a body check. She picked up Joel and felt his skin. Still warm. Pulse still good. Breathing even. “Joel. Joel, come on, b’y. What’s happened?”
“I have a killswitch,” Dr. Carlino was saying. He looked at her with dead eyes. The cameras were off. Black. Empty.
“Fuck you.” Hwa blinked hard. She threaded her arms under Joel’s shoulders. She had carried him once. She could carry him again. She knelt. Prepared herself for a fireman’s carry. Looked up.
A drop of blood splashed on her upturned face.
“For moments like these,” Dr. Carlino said, “a killswitch is the best thing.”
Eileen hung from the ceiling in ribbons. Her skin was a parody of crepe paper, stretched and curled like old-fashioned party decorations along the rafters. Her eyes were gone. Her lips were a rose. Not a real rose, but one made of flesh, as though her face had suddenly decided to bloom instead of smiling or laughing or crying or screaming, which she must have done.
She must have screamed so much. So hard. In so much pain.
Like Hwa was doing, now.
More blood dripped down. It fell warm on Hwa’s cheeks like tears. Some pattered across Joel’s face and she wiped it off, frantically covering his face with her hand and his limp body with her coiled one. He shouldn’t be stained, she thought. Not like me.
How had he done it?
Where had he found the time?
Daniel had been dancing with her. From the moment Eileen left the room. Her eyes had never left him.
“Daniel,” she heard herself say. “Daniel. Daniel. DanielDanielDaniel.”
“I’m coming,” he said, in her bones. “Just stay where you are. Don’t move. I’ll be right there, Hwa. Hwa?”
Her body started to shake. It whispered up her right side first, a slackening, a sudden lack of control, the terrible awareness of not being able to stop it, of not being able to stop anything, of not being able to do anything, of all the things she could not and would never do. How time stretched out in that moment, the moment between consciousness and arrest, between tragic event and brain event. Was that how it was for Eileen? For Sabrina? For Layne? For Calliope? Had the final moment stretched out into an infinite agony?
Was that Hell?
Warm darkness covered her eyes. Warm arms wrapped her and Joel up. Warm lips in her hair.
Daniel.
“I’m here,” he said.
The seizure ripped through her.
PART THREE
NOVEMBER
16
Daughter
“Would this fit you?”
Sunny held up a sheer black wrap dress. “It’s see-through,” Hwa said. “I don’t want it.”
Sunny clicked her tongue. She tossed the dress on the leave pile. The leave pile was a hell of a lot smaller than the take pile and the maybe pile. Hwa looked at the closet. They weren’t even close to done. She suspected that her mother’s closet might actually be connected to a subspace pocket the universe had labelled COLD WATER WASH; LIKE COLOURS.
“The people from the Benevolent Irish Society are going to be here in two hours to collect stuff,” Hwa reminded her. “Why can’t I help you?”
“You don’t know where anything is,” Sunny said. “I can’t ask you to find anything, because you don’t know where I put things. I have a system.”
An avalanche of mesh and velour and feathers poured out of the closet. “Some system.”
Sunny stood up straight. She pointed at Hwa. “Don’t fucking start. Don’t even fucking start. If the Lynches were actually able to catch this crazy motherfucker, I wouldn’t even be in this position.”
Hwa looked at the piles of clothes. The boxes of dishes. Why was Sunny even packing dishes? She barely ate anything, anymore.
“If you’d voted for the Lysistrata strategy—”
“I didn’t join a union so I could strike. I joined for the fucking pension.” Sunny wadded up a pile of pink lace and threw it on the maybe pile. “I work like everybody else in this town. As hard as I can for as long as I can.”
“I know.”
Sunny turned up the drama as she pawed through more piles of stuff. There appeared to be no organization whatsoever. Storage devices on top of clothes on top of old tax records on top of rolls of towels. Over twenty years of total chaos strewn across the floor of the living room. Hwa couldn’t even see the coffee table, anymore. She wasn’t sure that what she was perched on was even a chair, under all the clothes.
“I hate moving,” Sunny said.
“Yeah.” Hwa spotted a Christmas card she’d made in pre-kindergarten sandwiched between the pages of an artisanal blown glass dildo catalogue. She decided not to mention it. “Moving sucks.”
“Is that why you’re staying? Or is it your boss?” Sunny arched an eyebrow. “Is he making it worth your while to stay?”
“Mom!” Hwa buried her face in her hands. “We haven’t … We don’t … He’s my boss.”