“Please, Father, bless this man’s soul and give him the strength to carry on. Please ease his suffering and help him to recover, to be there for his family.”
The Sister, despite her best efforts, could not stop thinking about the cameras watching her as she prayed. All around the room, from every angle, tiny cameras were trained on her and Jared Stone. Later that night, she knew, she would be on television. More people would be watching her prayer in one night than watched The Duke Hamblin Show in a month.
Maybe, she thought, he’ll have me on as a guest.
She pushed the thought away and continued her conversation with the Lord.
A moment later, the doctor entered, looked at the bank of machines monitoring Jared’s vital signs, and sprang into action.
“Sister, code blue,” he said matter-of-factly but with enough edge to make his point.
The Sister got off her knees and went to the phone. She had practiced this many times. She dialed the number, said “code blue” when the person on the other end answered, and hung up.
Exactly forty-five seconds later, the doors of an ambulance flew open—the network paid to have it staffed and parked in the driveway—and a team of doctors and medical experts poured out.
Exactly forty-five seconds after that, Jared Stone was connected to an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation machine, a dialysis machine, and an anesthetic machine. He was alive, but only in the clinical sense.
There but for the grace of the machines went he.
***
When bad things happened to Ethan Overbee, which wasn’t very often, they tended to come in twos.
In the second grade, Ethan was scolded by his parents for tying one end of a string around Taffy, the family cat, and the other to his father’s car. His parents saw what Ethan had done in time to save the cat from any harm, but they took away his television privileges for two days. It was one of the few times in his entire childhood that Ethan—a boy both coddled and adored by his parents—had been punished, and the memory stuck with him. To make matters worse, later that same day, when he was playing an aggressive version of “doctor” with Rita Fitzsimmons, the little girl who lived next door, her parents heard her crying and reprimanded Ethan, banishing him from their house and calling his mother. (Having already punished Ethan for the feline felony, his parents elected not to hold him accountable for what was tantamount to grade school molestation.)
On Ethan’s seventeenth birthday, he failed the road test for his driver’s license, only to have his girlfriend break up with him that same night. She threw a lot of SAT words at Ethan—narcissist, pedagogue, vapid—which made him think she was too much of an egghead for him anyway, but it stung.
During his first semester in college, on the same day he learned he hadn’t won a part in the school’s production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, his parents called to tell him that Taffy the cat had died. He never really liked that cat, but still, he was starting to see a pattern develop. When one bad thing happened to Ethan, another shoe was sure to drop soon after.
When Ethan learned that Jared Stone, the star of his television show, had slipped into a coma, he was not surprised to see Roger Stern’s name on his cell phone. The other shoe. He let it go to voice mail.
As far as Ethan was concerned, Jared’s condition was a mixed blessing. He had eight hours to flood the world with Life and Death promos—sizzles they were called in the industry—letting viewers know that what they had been waiting for, what they had been ghoulishly hoping for, was finally coming to pass. And, of course, he had those doctors and that nun, the latter of which was turning out to be a better ally than he could have hoped for, to make sure Jared stayed clinically alive as long as possible. From what they told him, he could continue to ride this for weeks.
On the other hand, with Jared—whose moments of confusion, whose physical decline, had made for such compelling television—no longer an active participant in the drama, and with his family causing problems, the ratings would suffer. Ethan knew he would need to get creative, to schedule more celebrity drop-ins, make the show more interactive. He had already sketched much of this out. Now he just needed to put it into action.
Ethan was in his office at the ATN headquarters when he got the news. He conferred briefly with Andersona to make sure that the medical team was in place and that they had what they needed. His next call was to the advertising and marketing apparatus that fueled viewership for the show. From what Andersona told him, they had incredible footage of Sister Benedict praying by Jared’s bedside as the doctors rushed in. They would flood the airwaves with that clip.
Satisfied that the situation was in hand, he listened to Roger’s message. It consisted of only two short, clipped words: “Call. Me.”
Before Ethan could tap the “call back” icon on his voice-mail screen, a text message popped up. It was from Thad St. Claire, and it had a link to the fourth episode of The Real Family Stone of Portland, Oregon.