“But you’re not,” he said. “Nick took the ELISA test last month. He’s clean. You know he’s terrified of needles. And the other way—he’s never been into that.”
Jane felt a cold sweat break out. The thought had not even crossed her mind, but now that it was there, she felt sickened by the realization that, even if Nick had been infected, he probably would’ve never told her. They would’ve kept making love and Jane would’ve kept growing their child and she would’ve not found out the truth until it came from a doctor’s mouth.
Or a medical examiner’s.
“You’ll be okay,” Andrew said. “I promise.”
Now was not the time to call her brother a liar. “What about Ellis-Anne?”
“She’s clean,” Andrew said. “I told her to get tested as soon as . . .” He let his voice trail off. “She wanted to stay with me. Can you believe that? I couldn’t let her do it. It wasn’t fair. And we had all this going on, so . . .” His voice trailed off again in a long sigh. “Barlow, the FBI agent. He told me they talked to her. I know she must’ve been afraid. I regret—well, I regret a lot of things.”
Jane did not want him to dwell on regrets. She reached for his hands. They felt heavy, weighted somehow by what was to come. His shirt collar was open. She could see the purplish lesions on his chest.
He couldn’t stay here in this too-warm house with less than half a thimbleful of morphine. She wouldn’t allow it.
“What is it?” he asked.
“I love you.”
Andrew was never one to return the sentiment, but he squeezed her hands, smiled again, so that she knew he felt the same.
Paula mumbled, “Christ.”
Jane turned to glare at her. She had started cutting up a tomato. The knife was dull. The skin tore like paper.
Paula asked, “You two into incest now?”
Jane turned back around.
Andrew told her, “I’m going to rest for a while. Okay?”
She nodded. They would stand a better chance of leaving if Andrew was not involved in the negotiation.
“Get a scarf,” Paula said. “Keep your neck warm. It helps the cough.”
Andrew raised a skeptical eyebrow at Jane as he tried to stand. He shrugged off her offer of help. “I’m not that far gone.”
She watched him lurch toward the swinging door. His shirt was soaked with sweat. The back of his hair was damp. Jane turned away from the door only when it stopped swinging.
She took Andrew’s seat parallel to Paula because she did not want her back to the woman. She looked down at the files on the table. These were the two things that Nick had valued most: Jasper’s signature attesting to his part in the fraud. The Polaroids with their red rubber band.
Paula said, “I know what you’re thinking, and you’re not going anywhere.”
Jane had thought that she was incapable of feeling any more emotions, but she had never abhorred Paula so much as she did in this moment. “I just want to take him to the hospital.”
“And let the pigs know where we are?” Paula huffed out a laugh. “You might as well take off your fancy boots, ’cause you ain’t goin’ anywhere.”
Jane turned away from her, clasped her hands together on the table.
“Hey, Dumb Bitch.” Paula lifted up her shirt and showed Jane the handgun tucked into the waist of her jeans. “Don’t get any ideas. I’d love to shoot six new holes into that asshole you call a face.”
Jane looked at the clock on the wall. Ten in the evening. The Chicago team would already be in the city. Nick was on his way to New York. She had to find a way out of here.
She asked, “Where are Clara and Edwin?”
“Selden and Tucker are in position.”
Edwin’s apartment in the city. He was supposed to wait for phone calls in case anyone was arrested.
Jane said, “Northwestern can’t be far from here. They’re a teaching hospital. They’ll know how to take care of—”
“Northwestern is straight down I-88, about forty-five minutes away, but it might as well be on the moon because you’re not fucking going anywhere and neither is he.” Paula rested her hand on her hip. “Look, bitch, they can’t do anything for him. You did your rich girl slumming at the AIDS ward. You know how this story ends. The prince doesn’t ride again. Your brother is going to die. As in tonight. He’s not going to see the sunrise.”
Hearing her fears confirmed brought a lump into Jane’s throat. “The doctors can make him comfortable.”
“Nick left a vial of morphine for that.”
“It’s almost empty.”
“That’s all we could find on short notice, and we’re lucky we could get that. It’ll probably be enough, and if it’s not—” She shrugged her shoulder. “Nothing we can do about it.”
Jane thought again of Ben Mitchell, one of the first young men she’d met on the AIDS ward. He’d been desperate to go back to Wyoming to see his parents before he died. They had finally relented, and the last eight minutes of Ben’s life had been spent in terror as he suffocated on his own fluids because the rural hospital staff were too frightened to stick a tube down his throat to help him breathe.
Jane knew the panic that came from not being able to breathe. Nick had strangled her before. Once during sex. Once the last time she was pregnant. Once a few hours ago, when he was threatening to kill her. No matter how many times it happened, there was no way to prepare for that terrifying sensation of not being able to pull air into your lungs. The way her heart felt like it was filling with blood. The searing pain from her muscles cramping. The burning in her lungs. The numbness in her hands and feet as the body gave up on everything but staying alive.
Jane could not let her brother experience that terror. Not for one minute, certainly not for eight.
She told Paula, “The doctors can knock him out so that he’s unconscious for the worst of it.”
“Maybe he wants to be conscious,” she said. “Maybe he wants to feel it.”
“You sound like Nick.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“Don’t,” Jane said. “It’s meant to make you think about what you’re doing, because it’s wrong. All of this is wrong.”
“The concept of right and wrong are patriarchal constructs to control the populace.”
Jane turned her head to look at the woman. “You can’t be serious.”
“You’re too fucking blind to see it. At least now you are.” Paula had picked up a knife. She chopped brutally at a bundle of carrots. “I heard you with him in the van. All that loveydovey bullshit, telling Nick how wonderful he is, how much you love him, how you believe in what we’re doing, and then you get here and suddenly you’re abandoning him.”
“Did you hear him in the bathroom, strangling me into unconsciousness?”
“I could happily hear that every day for the rest of my life.”
A piece of carrot landed on the floor beside Jane.
If Jane stood up, if she took one small step, she could close the distance between them. She could grab the knife from Paula’s hand, wrench the gun from her waist.
And then what?
Could Jane kill her? There was a difference between despising someone and murdering them.
Paula said, “It happened before Berlin, right?” She motioned down at her own stomach with the knife. “I thought you were getting fat, but—” She blew out air between her lips. “No such luck.”
Jane looked down at her stomach. She had been so nervous about telling people about the baby, but everyone seemed to have figured it out on their own.
Paula said, “You don’t deserve to carry his child.”
Jane watched the knife move up and down. Paula wasn’t paying attention to Jane.
Stand up, take one step, grab the knife—
“If it was up to me, I’d cut it out of you.” Paula pointed the blade at Jane. “Want me to?”
Jane tried to pretend that the threat had not sent an arrow into her heart. She had to think about her child. This wasn’t just about Andrew. If she attacked Paula and failed, then she could lose her baby before she even had the chance to hold it.
“That’s what I thought.” Paula turned back to the carrots with a grin on her face.