“HELP?” I DRAG JULY THROUGH the automatic sliding doors, regretting agreeing to this plan. July is dead weight, and I don’t lift much that’s heavier than a sandwich, but also this idea is ludicrous and bound to fail. At the same time, my ex–best friend returned from the dead and I broke up with a guy who’s basically perfect, so lots of things that shouldn’t be happening are.
The emergency room chairs are filled with people, most of whom look exhausted and worried. Straight across from the doors is a glass window. A nurse behind the desk pops up and disappears, and ten seconds later rushes out to meet us.
“What’s wrong?”
“She’s dead.”
“Dead?” the nurse asks. “Are you sure?”
“Does she look alive to you?” I raise my voice a little to make my point, and two minutes later, July’s on a bed in the hallway. The nurse tells us they’re short staffed and busy and that someone will help when they’re available, but based on the skeptical and exhausted tone in her voice, I’m not expecting that we’ll be seen soon. Which is a good thing.
July sits up. “See?”
“That’s creepy,” I say.
“What?”
“That you can lie perfectly still like that.” I grimace. “For a second, I thought you were actually dead again.”
“I wish,” July says. “Now what?”
I whip my head around to face July. “This was your plan.”
July wears a satisfied grin. “And it worked. I got us inside the hospital. Now it’s your turn. Do some science and figure out why I’m not-dead.”
“This is a hospital, not a lab.” I stare at her incredulously. “What do you expect me to do? Take your temperature? Your blood pressure?”
“Sounds like a decent place to start?”
“I already know the results! No heart, no blood pressure.”
July’s enthusiasm seems to be waning. A moment later, she slips off the edge of the bed and heads toward one of the rooms.
“Where are you going?”
“If you can’t help me, maybe there’s someone else here who can.” She peeks into the first room, moves onto the next, peeks in it, and then slips inside, leaving me to stand by her now-empty bed wondering how I got mixed up in this. July was right, though. For most of the night I’d been complaining that we needed to figure out what was happening, but the truth is that this is far beyond my abilities. Even with access to a laboratory filled with fancy equipment, I wouldn’t know where to begin. Should I look for physiological evidence or for answers in the realm of the divine?
I get why July thought it would be a good idea to sneak into a hospital, but solving the mystery of July Cooper is going to require help from someone much smarter than me.
“Dino.” July pokes her head out of the room. “You’ve got to see this.”
The room is crowded with three beds separated by curtains. July leads me behind one curtain where a woman is lying in a bed with leads stuck to her chest, and wires running in a bundle to machines that silently mark her heartbeat. She’s about my mom’s age. Dark hair, puffy skin, the right side of her head and face are covered with gauze, but something’s wrong. It’s like that half of her face is collapsed.
“What—”
“A chunk of her head is gone, Dino.”
“That can’t be,” I say. But I move closer to her and measure the geometry of her face. The woman’s eye follows me as my brain comes to the only conclusion it can. “She should be dead.”
“Ma’am? Can you hear me?” July snaps her fingers in front of the woman’s good eye but doesn’t get a response.
“She won’t answer,” says a voice from one of the other beds. It’s followed by violent retching. “Accidental shooting. More brain missing than is left.”
“This is my fault,” July whispers.
I start to tell her it’s not, that it can’t be, but I’m interrupted by vomiting, which July leaves to investigate. Maybe this is July’s fault. Not intentionally. She’s a lot of things, but she’d never willfully cause this kind of suffering to another person.
“I’m so sorry,” I say to the woman. I don’t know if she can hear or understand me, but I hope she’s not in pain.
I follow July to the next bed. It’s occupied by a guy holding a pan on his chest filled with black sludge that looks like tar. His body shudders and he sits forward and pukes into the pan. More of the black stuff pours out of his mouth. Tears stream down his eyes and he wipes them and then his mouth with his hand.
“What happened to you?” July says.
“Took too many pills.” His voice is raw.
“On purpose?”
I smack July’s arm. “You can’t ask someone that.”
But the guy nods. He looks like he’s maybe in his twenties, though it’s difficult to tell. His hair is receding and he looks exhausted and threadbare.
“Did you die?” This time when I try to interrupt July, she slaps me away.
The man shakes his head. “Should’ve,” the man says. “Doctor said so. We should all be dead.”
“We?” I ask.
The guy motions weakly at the bed with the woman in it. “Her, everyone. Overheard a nurse say no one’s dying that ought to.”
Until now we’d only had the word of the paramedic at Monty’s that people had stopped dying, but this guy and the woman missing half her brain prove it’s true. July isn’t the only anomaly.
“Why?” July asks.
We have to wait for the guy to throw up again before he can answer. I can’t believe how much of that black stuff is coming up. Now that I know why he’s here, I guess that it’s charcoal. When he finishes, he says, “You know what depression feels like?”
This isn’t the “why” July wanted to know about. She meant to ask why he wasn’t dead. I expect her to interrupt and rephrase the question. Instead she says, “No. Why don’t you explain it.”
“Imagine you’re in a room with everyone you care about. Partying. Enjoying yourself. They’re laughing and having fun. You are too.” He coughs and spits out more charcoal. “Then it changes. Gets dark. You can still see your friends, but they can’t see you. Can’t hear you. You can’t touch them or get them to pay attention to you.”
“That sounds like a nightmare,” I say, though I don’t mean to say it out loud.
The man nods. “And there’s a voice whispering that you deserve to be alone. That they never liked you and only pretended to be your friend out of pity. That they’re so much happier when you’re not with them. You don’t want to believe the voice, but you know deep in your heart that the voice speaks only the truth.”
July inches nearer to the bed. “So you decided to take some pills and end it?”
“Why bother with life if it’s nothing but pain?”
“That’s ridiculous,” July says. “You wouldn’t cut off your hand if you got a splinter in your finger.”
“You might if it got infected and gangrenous.”
“We should go, July,” I say. Arguing with someone who attempted to take their own life isn’t a good idea, and I don’t see how it helps us figure out why July’s not-dead, but July ignores me.
“How do you feel now?” she asks. “You didn’t die. The doctor told you that you should have died, but you didn’t. They put that charcoal shit in you and it’ll get the poison out, and you’re going to live.” July looks at the man expectantly. “You’re glad for the second chance, right?”
The man shakes his head. “If the next words out of your mouth have to do with Jesus, I’m dumping this pan over your head.”
I hear voices outside of the room heading our way.
“Then what’s the point?” July says.
“Exactly.”
We can’t risk being caught in this room, so I pull July toward the door and peer out. Two nurses are walking in our direction. I do the only thing I can think of, and grab July and run. One of the nurses sees us and yells, but I don’t have time to see if we’re being followed.
A doctor in a white coat makes a grab for me but only gets a handful of my sleeve, which I twist out of his grasp.
“Come on!” I burst into a stairwell and run up. July and I climb to the top and out onto the roof. I gently shut the door and lead July behind a huge AC unit. It’s big enough to hide us from being seen, but so loud that we won’t be able to hear anyone if they sneak up on us.
I’m sweaty and gross, but we’re so close to the intracoastal that there’s a light breeze coming off the water, and it feels amazing. The moon is three-quarters waxing and hangs overhead, seeming to loom much larger than normal.
I give July a couple of minutes to collect herself, hoping she’ll decide to talk on her own, but she sits on the gravel roof with her knees pulled to her chest, rocking from side to side.
“You said you wanted to figure out why you were not-dead, not to interrogate someone who tried to end their life.”
“That woman,” July says. “You think she was in pain?”
“I hope not.”
“What do you think happens to her if this thing ends?”
Neither of us even knows what this “thing” is, so guessing when or how it ends is useless, but I say, “I hope she’ll be allowed to die.”
“And the other guy?” July says. “Do you think he’ll die too?”
“I don’t know.”
July looks at me. “Neither do I. This should be a good thing. People get hurt, like the guy who got hit by the car outside Monty’s, but they don’t die, which gives their bodies a chance to heal.”
God, Monty’s feels like forever ago, but it was only a couple of hours. “I don’t think there’s any way to fix what’s wrong with the woman we saw.”
“Why is this happening if it’s not to make people better?” she says. “I want to go home, but I can’t. It’d be cruel to make my parents live with my decomposing corpse or to spend a few days or weeks with me and then have to lose me for a second time. No matter what, I’d be hurting them.
“I thought I could live with this if it helped other folks, but what the hell good is it if it means they’re going to suffer like that woman or if they don’t want to live in the first place?”
July stops and cocks her head to the side.
I get on my belly and slowly poke my head around the condenser. Two doctors are standing by the door smoking. They both look haggard, but I can’t hear what they’re saying. I’ve never understood how doctors can smoke. It’s like a firefighter deliberately disabling the smoke detectors in her house and then setting fire to her couch.
We wait for them to finish, and I consider what July was saying. It seems like a miracle on the surface—no one dies; everyone lives—but based on what we’ve witnessed, the miracle looks more like torture. And I get why July might think it hopeless, but we’ve only seen a small piece of what’s going on. She doesn’t have the whole picture.
Eventually, the doctors finish their break and leave.
“Go on,” I tell her.
But the fire’s burned out of July. She’s sunken in on herself. “That guy didn’t want to live—he still doesn’t. Who are we to deny him what he wants?”
“That’s silly and you know it,” I say. “Depression isn’t rational. I read once that the majority of people who survived jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge said they regretted jumping immediately after doing it.”
“Did that guy look filled with regret?”
“No,” I say, “But here he’ll get help. This time he’s been given could be exactly what he needs to realize he made a mistake and that life is worth living.”
She throws up her hands. “Good for him, but what about the woman missing part of her brain? What about me?”
“Look, I know you don’t want to see your parents or Jo because you think it’ll hurt them too much to see you like this, but I think you’re wrong. I think they’d gladly take that pain for the chance to see you, even if you are gassy and falling apart.”
“Stop,” she says in a low voice.
“I’m not saying you could take up your old life or even that your life would resemble normal, but you could at least be with the people who love you most in the world. You don’t have to do this alone.”
“Stop,” she says, a little louder.
“And I know we’re not friends and that this one night didn’t erase the things we did to each other over the last year, but I’ll look after you. I’ll keep more of your skin from sliding off, and I’ll keep government scientists from taking you away to perform gruesome experiments on you. Friends or not, I’ve got your back.”
“Stop it, Dino! Just fucking stop!” This time July yells. She takes my hand and looks into my eyes, and I know what she’s going to say before she says it. “I died. And unlike these other folks, I was meant to die and to stay dead. I don’t know what cosmic mistake caused this, but it’s time to correct it.”