Thursday, October 29
Glio was ready to go for gold. Replete with almost all of Jared’s memories, and emboldened by his experience manipulating the conduits to the outside world, it was time for the tumor to become the host.
The plan was to stretch his mass to each of Jared’s sensory centers simultaneously, to use the sum total of the knowledge he had collected, and to interact with the outside world in the first person. And Glio had his target. He wanted to talk to that nun.
Everything in Jared’s memories had taught Glio to fear and respect nuns, in that order. He knew that they had devoted their lives to God, eschewing mortal pleasures, but he couldn’t understand why. Glio had learned a lot about mortal pleasures in a relatively short time. To reject them, he believed, was to commit a kind of suicide of the soul. Not that Glio really understood what a soul was. But that was the word Jared would have used.
There was one memory in particular from Jared’s teenage years that formed the basis of his feeling toward nuns. Jared’s first semester in high school was spent at the all-boys St. Leonard’s Catholic Academy. (The irony that Leonard was the patron saint of prisoners was not lost on the students. Their sports teams, officially called the Scarlet Knights, were more commonly known as the Convicts.) Jared hated every minute of it. He hated the uniforms. He hated the religious instruction. He hated the complete and total lack of girls. But most of all, he hated Sister Louisa.
Most of the nuns in the school were caring and well-educated, if a bit dowdy, teachers. Sister Louisa was another story and, like Sister Benedict, a throwback to another era. It wasn’t uncommon for the faculty at St. Leonard’s to use harsh tactics to ensure discipline, the punishment usually taking the form of a yardstick applied with medium force to the transgressing student’s knuckles. But Sister Louisa took it a step farther and a step too far.
Beyond the usual litany of high school crimes—talking or chewing gum in class, failure to do your homework, tardiness—Sister Louisa punished independent thought; she did not like students to ask questions. This was an approach that most schools would consider anathema to teaching history.
When one of Jared’s classmates asked why the Founding Fathers didn’t abolish slavery at the time of the Revolution, Sister Louisa’s answer confounded the entire class.
“Because,” she said, “slavery wasn’t a sin until much later.”
There was a momentary pause, which the Sister quickly filled by going on to the next point in the lesson plan.
“But, Sister Louisa,” another boy interrupted, “how can that be true? How can something be okay one day and a sin the next? Didn’t they know it was wrong?”
When the boy saw the rage in Sister Louisa’s eyes, he pleaded for mercy, but it was too late. She advanced on him with violence and relish, like Hannibal Lecter. Her yardstick missed the boy’s knuckles and caught the side of his face. She would later claim it was an accident, but every student in fourth-period American Studies knew better.
Even though Sister Louisa was summarily dismissed from her post over the incident, Jared begged his parents to let him transfer to public school after Christmas. They complied.
It was this memory that Glio was examining and reexamining as he prepared for his trip to the outside world.
He started slowly, moving down the nerve endings in Jared’s extremities, thinking he would start by wiggling Jared’s toes and tapping Jared’s fingers. He stretched himself to the full limit of his being, found the contact points, and … and …
Nothing happened.
He tried again.
Nothing.
Something was wrong.
Glio tried the same with Jared’s other senses. There was no taste. There was no smell. There was no sound. He tried the eyes, but they were shut, and no manner of poking or prodding of Jared’s oculomotor nerve would make his eyelids open.
Glio retreated to the center of the temporal lobe to ponder his predicament. Jared’s brain was still functioning, but barely. As he examined the situation more closely, Glio saw that the medulla oblongata was having trouble communicating with Jared’s lungs, which meant less oxygen was getting to Jared’s blood, which meant less useful blood was getting to Jared’s brain. It was, he knew, the beginning of an irrevocable downward spiral.
Desperate to complete his journey and become Jared, Glio tried to seize total control of Jared’s brain, to force his host back to a state of corporeal animation. He used every weapon in his arsenal, massaging, pounding, electrifying neurons, but it was no use. Though not yet technically dead, Jared Stone was gone.
Glio knew from Jared’s memories what people thought of cancer, what they thought of tumors, what they thought of him. He knew that they couldn’t comprehend the reason for his existence, and he knew that he and those like him were among the most reviled things on Earth. But until that moment, Glio believed with all his metaphorical heart that he existed as a caterpillar, waiting to emerge from his cocoon as something beautiful and new, as Jared. Only now, at the end, did Glio see the tragedy of his life, of all life.
And for the first time, Glio felt sorry. Truly, and horribly, sorry. Maybe if he had become Jared it would have all been okay, but now that he was confronted with the truth, he understood what every tumor comes to understand:
Life—his life, Jared’s life—has no meaning intrinsic to the life itself. It just is. Life, he now saw, is only what you make of it. And even though he knew it was through no fault of his own, Glio had spent his life as a thief and a murderer. The realization was overwhelming.
Glio howled in agony as he retreated into himself.
***
“Mr. Stone?” Sister Benedict gently shook Jared’s shoulder. There was no response. “Mr. Stone?” she said again, shaking a little harder. “Time to wake up. Time for breakfast.” Again, there was no response.
One of the Sister’s young novices, Sister Nadine, was attending to Jared with Sister Benedict. “Go, child,” Sister Benedict said to her, “find the doctor.”
After the young girl left the room, Sister Benedict got down on her knees and prayed.
“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.
***
When Jackie got back to her house, the world had turned upside down. That in itself was astounding as it had been upside down for weeks. Does that mean the world is right-side up again? she wondered. No, it was more like the world was a Möbius strip, something she had learned about in math class. “Why did the chicken cross the Möbius strip?” her teacher had asked. “To get to the same side,” he said, answering his own joke. Jackie, along with the rest of the class, groaned, but for some reason, walking into the madness that was her home, it finally seemed funny.
Medical personnel were everywhere. They were drinking coffee in her kitchen, talking on cell phones in her living room, even smoking cigarettes in her backyard. (Seeing doctors smoke made Jackie wonder if maybe it wasn’t so bad for you after all.) And, of course, they were squeezed into the room that used to be her father’s office and was now an extension of the Saint Ignatius Hospital.
As soon as Deirdre learned about Jared’s condition, she left to pick her daughters up from school and bring them home. When Jackie saw her mother in the principal’s office, she knew the news was bad. She thought maybe the network had seen The Real Family Stone of Portland, Oregon, and they were all going to jail. Or maybe her father had died.
Somehow, the coma was worse.
If her father had died, this would be over. His suffering would end, and Jackie’s life could get back to something closer to normal. When her dad first got sick, she was certain that the hole created by his absence would devour her. But if she could survive Ethan Overbee and the American Television Network, she was pretty sure she could survive anything.
No one spoke on the ride home. Megan started to say something, but Jackie shushed her. “Remember, they’re listening here, too.”
All three of them did their best to ignore the strangers and equipment and noise as they walked through the house. Jackie looked up once or twice at the cameras on the ceiling, knowing they were watching her every move. She put them out of her mind, and, trailing behind her mother and sister, made her way to her father’s office.
When they entered the room, everything seemed to stop. The air was heavy with the toil and sweat of the medical workers, television crew, and clergy, and dripping with the feeling of death. Jackie felt like she was trying to swim through some sort of foul-tasting milk shake.
The lead doctor gave Deirdre an update while Jackie and Megan listened. Jared had fallen into a coma, and there was little prospect he would come out of it. They were keeping his lungs breathing and his blood circulating, and they were giving him morphine to keep him comfortable, but they had entered the endgame.
“How much longer?” Deirdre asked without emotion.
The doctor looked at Sister Benedict, who seemed to be watching his every move.
“It’s hard to say, Mrs. Stone. We’re doing all we can to preserve his life for as long as possible.” Again the doctor’s eyes found the Sister, who smiled in response. Jackie fixed her own gaze on Sister Benedict. She imagined using a World of Warcraft spell to immobilize the nun in creeping vines, and a second spell to blow her head clean off her body.
“All right, everyone,” the doctor said, “let’s give the family some space.” One by one everyone left. Even Sister Benedict moved to go, giving a long look over her shoulder at the tattered mess that was the family Stone.
Megan reached for and found her mother’s hand. Deirdre took it, but with no emotion, like she was on autopilot. Jackie saw this and could tell that her mother was distracted. At first, Jackie thought she was grieving for her husband, for the father of her children. But there was something else; Deirdre looked like a prisoner plotting an escape.
Jackie turned her attention to her dad. He looked so small, so breakable. His skin was the color of the Portland sky: gray, hazy, foreboding. His nose, mouth, and chest were covered with tubes and wires. The flight deck of machinery by his bed whirred with an electric hum that made Jackie’s hair stand on end.
“Mom?” Jackie started to ask. But her mother shook her head no, raising her eyes to the ceiling.
“Right,” Jackie answered, understanding right away.
“But what do we do now?” Megan asked. It was basically the same thing on Jackie’s mind.
Deirdre paused a moment before answering. “Girls,” she said, “let’s go out to lunch.”
***
Ethan had to watch The Real Family Stone of Portland, Oregon three times to believe what he was seeing. Jackie Stone wasn’t working alone. He knew he shouldn’t have been surprised, but he was. Smart little bitch, he thought.
He listened to the final plea, to “free Jackie Stone,” over and over again, and he wondered if he’d been playing this all wrong. He had unwittingly turned a high school kid into a martyr, and if the world had learned one thing over the years, people loved martyrs. From Jesus to Gandhi, martyrs were the shit. Maybe it was time to back off.
That thought rolled around Ethan’s mind, but it couldn’t find purchase. It was too late for him and Jackie to find some accommodation. Besides, his tactic was working. Ethan knew that the two million people who had watched the YouTube video paled in comparison to the tens of millions watching the TV show. The numbers bore that out: the network focus testing showed that Jackie’s approval rating had dropped a full ten points after the last episode. He needed to stay the course.
By the time he picked up the phone to call Roger Stern back, he had the confidence he needed to convince his boss that everything was in hand. Roger’s phone rang five times before going to voice mail. Ethan was just opening his mouth to leave a message when the door to his office flew open with a bang, rattling the framed photographs of Ethan posed with an array of the network’s most important stars. He jumped.
Roger walked deliberately into the room with an unlit cigar clenched in his teeth. His massive frame cast a shadow over Ethan like the flaming Hindenburg on the panicked rescue workers on the ground. He stopped at the edge of Ethan’s desk and looked directly into his eyes. Ethan was inexplicably immobilized.
“Overbee,” Roger began, “I just got off the phone with the CEOs of McDonald’s and Apple.” Ethan worked hard to keep the panic off his face as he waited for Roger to continue. “Do you know what they told me?”
“Listen, Roger,” Ethan began. “I know about that video. The kid has been working with other people. But she wasn’t even in it. She really has been neutrali—”
“They told me,” Roger interrupted, ignoring Ethan completely, “that they’re pulling their support for the show, effective immediately.”
“They can’t do that,” Ethan said. “They signed contracts.”
Roger heaved a heavy sigh and shook his head. “Right,” he said. “Let’s tell two of the biggest sponsors we have across all our shows that we’re going to take them to court. Good think-ing. It took every last cent of political capital I had to stop Apple from suing us.”
“Suing us? For what?”
“For infringing on that brat’s First Amendment rights by confiscating her goddam iPhone. Did you even run any of this by legal?”
Ethan had not. “Let me call my contacts at both companies, Roger. Maybe I can find a way to—”
“It’s too late. Variety and Entertainment Weekly have already blogged about it. PR will spin it that advertisers come and go from television shows all the time, but the damage is done.”
“Okay, so what do you want me to do?” Ethan asked.
“Do? I want you to get that house and that family in order. I don’t care how you do it. I want to see a grieving, cohesive family unit gathered around their father’s bed, and I want to see them talking to your producers again in twenty-four hours. Or else.”
With that, Roger pushed himself back to an upright position and turned to leave the room.
Ethan, perhaps surprised that his boss had given voice to the threat, and in one of the greatest miscalculations of his nearly perfectly calculated career, asked, “Or else what?”
Roger paused for a beat without turning around. Then he kept on walking.
***
From the moment Life and Death first aired and Deirdre saw the volume of fan mail arriving at her house—including no dearth of mail from perverts and pedophiles addressed to her daughters—she shielded her girls from the outside world. She or one of the producers took Jackie and Megan to and from school, and to any other destination beyond the borders of the house. The longer the show ran, the fewer extracurricular trips they made.
Since all the madness started, Deirdre, Jackie, and Megan hadn’t been to the mall, to the post office, to the supermarket, or even out to lunch.
But the scales had tipped. The danger inside the house was now greater than the danger outside.
When Deirdre pulled out of her driveway, three cars—one also in the driveway and two parked across the street—pulled out and followed her.
“Girls,” she said, “are your seat belts on?” Both answered that they were. “Okay, good. Then hold on tight.”
“Mom?” Jackie asked, wondering just what her mother was going to do.
“We’re being followed, Jackie. And I’m tired of it.”
“What does it matter,” Jackie asked, her voice flat and resigned. “They’re listening to us right now, anyway.”
“Right, I forgot. Look around until you see the camera.”
“What?”
“You heard me. Start looking.”
Jackie, who was in the front seat, checked everywhere. She looked in the glove box and on the visors; she felt around the gearshift and radio; she even felt under her seat and all around her mother’s seat. She was just about to give up when she noticed something.
“Mom, did your rearview mirror always have this thing on it?” Jackie pointed to a small sliding switch that moved the mirror from day to night mode. Deirdre, who was driving, did a double and then triple take. The line of her mouth, which for weeks had formed a taut, straight shot across her face, inched up at the corners. She reached up to pull the mirror, but it was glued on tight.
“Can you help, Jax?”
Jackie reached up and pulled hard, but it was stuck. “I can’t get a good grip with my seat belt on.”
“Then take it off.” Jackie looked at her mother, disbelieving. “It’s okay, sweetheart, you’ll be safe.”
Jackie did as she was told and put her full weight onto the mirror, but still it wouldn’t budge. She tried banging it with her fist.
“Use your shoe,” Deirdre offered. Jackie nodded and then took off her hiking boot. On the third hit, the mirror came free and landed on the dashboard with a thud. Jackie pitched forward, hitting her head against the windshield, but not hard.
“Are you okay?” Deirdre asked.
“I think so.”
“Good girl. Now put your seat belt back on.”
Deirdre used her side-view mirror to take stock of the cars following her—all three were still there. She was just coming up on a shopping mall whose garage had entrances and exits on four sides. She figured it was her best shot.
“Hold on tight, girls,” she said, lowering the driver’s side window.
Waiting until the last possible second, and then one second more, Deirdre made an abrupt hairpin left turn into the parking lot. As she made the turn, she tossed the rearview mirror out the window and up into the air.
Only one of the three cars managed to make the turn with Deirdre, and the windshield of that car caught the full force of the impact of the flying mirror. While the mirror made a crack that ran from the top to the bottom of the glass, the real damage was done when the driver, a tabloid paparazzo assigned to cover the Stone family, slammed on the brakes. His sudden stop started a small chain reaction of crashing cars that allowed Deirdre time to slip through the mall and escape.
Twenty minutes later, Deirdre and the girls were seated in a sleepy diner on the outskirts of Portland. There were only two other patrons, and neither looked up when the three Stone women entered. Even the waitress didn’t pay them any special attention as she came to the table.
“Can I get you something to drink?” she asked in the monotone of an actor condemned to perform the same soliloquy every day and night for the rest of her life.
Deirdre was taken aback that there were no mobs of people, no grotesque intrusion into her and her daughters’ privacy. They had lived so long in the bubble of the television show that she had forgotten life outside went on as it always had. Yes, a lot of people watched the show, but more people didn’t. Many more.
It was a sobering reminder that the world had become a fractured place. In her parents’ day, everyone watched Johnny Carson and Walter Cronkite. And if they didn’t, they at least knew who they were. Today, the long tail of culture pulled three hundred million Americans in one million different directions.
Deirdre regained her composure and said, “I’ll have a coffee. And an omelet with green pepper.” The girls each asked for a grilled cheese sandwich and a chocolate milkshake.
After they ordered and the waitress had left them alone, no one said anything for a very long time.
Deirdre sipped her coffee and savored the bitter taste. It was the first time in weeks that she allowed herself to enjoy a simple pleasure like a cup of coffee. This might be, she thought, the best cup of coffee I’ve ever had.
But then she thought of that first cup of coffee on that first date with Jared. She could still smell the latte, the aroma encircling them, pulling them together. Deirdre realized that since this whole nightmare began, she had not been afforded a moment to grieve. Her Jared was dying. He was already dead.
She started to weep.
Jackie and Megan looked at each other alarmed.
“Mom,” Megan asked, “are you okay?”
Deirdre nodded, but couldn’t stop the tears. “It’s your dad, girls. I’m just sad is all.”
Before long, the three of them were crying quietly in the booth of that diner. The waitress looked over once or twice, but let the family be. By the time the food came, the tears had run their course. They ate in silence.
“So what do we do now?” Jackie asked when the meal was over.
Deirdre sized her daughters up for a moment before answering.
“I made a promise to your father, and I need to help him.” Deirdre could see that Jackie understood right away. They both, Deirdre and Jackie, looked at Megan, hoping she would sort it out for herself. She didn’t.
“Help Daddy how?” she asked.
Deirdre was about to speak when Jackie said, “End his suffering, Meg.”
Deirdre looked at Jackie. She was reminded how children never fail to surprise their parents. As soon as you get to know them, understand who they are, they change. She wondered if it ever stopped.
“That’s right, honey,” she said in a calm and even voice.
“But what if Daddy wakes up?” Megan asked. “Sister Benedict said it could happen.”
“There is nothing I want more in this world than for Sister Benedict to be right,” Deirdre answered, “but doctors know more than nuns. Daddy is very, very sick, sweetheart, and he’s never going to get better. The worst thing for him, the worst thing for us, is to watch him waste away to nothing.” Deirdre reached across the table to hold each of her daughters’ hands. “It was his final wish that we not let that happen.”
“I’ll help you, Mom,” Jackie said.
“Me too,” Megan whispered.
Deirdre sat back and exhaled.
“But, Mom,” Jackie added, “there’s one thing I need to do first.”
“Anything, sweetheart,” Deirdre answered.
“I need to get to a computer. Can we go to a library?”
***
Glio was basking in the glow of a brand-new “snow boat.” Unmarked, shiny, and red, like a mid-life crisis convertible, the sled was a thing of beauty.
He, Glio, was a baby again. He did his baby dance, running in place and laughing, as he held the sled’s yellow string. He didn’t even really know that it was meant to be used in the snow, but it didn’t matter. It was, according to his scale of the world, huge, and it was his. He felt pure, unadulterated joy.
But wait, this wasn’t right. He’d seen this exact thing before. He’d felt this exact feeling before. Something was wrong.
Glio probed his surroundings. He saw his first date with Deirdre; he sang to baby Jackie in the hospital OR; he won Twiggy the giraffe at the Greek festival. He had been there, gone there, and done that. What was going on?
He felt around to every corner of Jared’s brain and found nothing but dead, useless tissue. Glio was entombed in a sarcophagus of carbon-based hell. The memories he was eating were now his own.
Glio was consuming himself.
***
Sister Benedict Joan hated the women of the Stone family. She hated them a lot.
The Sister, along with the crew in the control truck, watched Deirdre, Jackie, and Megan’s private moment with Jared. She saw how they could barely muster the emotion to grieve for the man who had provided for them, nurtured them, from whose loins they had sprung.
And then, to hear that woman say, “Girls, let’s go out to lunch”? Disgusting. Even if they felt nothing, didn’t they know the cameras were watching? Didn’t they care what America and the world would think?
The Sister, who had at first objected to the ever-watchful eyes of the ATN cameras, had come to cherish them. There was no room for sin when you were watched twenty-four hours a day. She made a mental note to petition the Cardinal for funds to install cameras in the convent.
She supposed she shouldn’t blame the Stone girls; they were just children after all. But as much as she tried, she couldn’t find forgiveness in her heart. Jacquelyn in particular was a wretched beast. So full of hate, so full of bile. It made her wonder what kind of man Jared Stone was—what kind of man Jared Stone is, she corrected herself—that he could raise such loathsome little brats. It didn’t matter, though. Most of the blame, the Sister was certain, rested with the mother. And now those poor girls will be left alone in that woman’s care, she thought. Tragic.
Maybe, if she tried, she could help the younger one see the way of the Lord, maybe someday entice her to join the convent. It would make for such great television.
She let the idea roll around her mind as she used a cool sponge to mop Jared’s forehead. I wonder, she thought, looking up at the camera, which side is my good side?
***
Hazel was so relieved at seeing Jackie’s name pop up on the Facebook instant messenger that she let all the air out of her lungs at once and giggled nervously.
Hazel
Jackie! OMG! Are you okay? Where are you?
Jackie
Hi, Hazel. Yeah, I’m okay. My mom managed to sneak us out of the house. I’m at a library. My dad’s in a coma.
Hazel
I know. They’re already airing promos for tonight’s episode saying that something big is happening, and one of the blogs that covers the show got a crew member to talk. I’m really sorry, Jax.
They were both silent for a moment.
Hazel
Did you see the latest episode of the “Real Family Stone”?
Jackie
I did!! Was that your voice?
Hazel
Jackie
It was so great. The network is going to totally freak out.
Hazel
They already have.
Jackie
Huh?
Hazel
Oh! You don’t know! It’s all over the Internet. Apple and McDonald’s have pulled their sponsorship from the show.
Jackie
!!!!
Hazel
Can you meet me and Max in WoW later?
Jackie
I can’t. We’re going back to be with my dad, and they’ve taken away my computer. I can’t go online.
Hazel
Okay, you may not need to. I think we have a plan for you to get some footage for the next “Real Family Stone.” It’s going to get you in a lot of trouble, though.
Jackie
The more the better.
Hazel typed furiously as she shared the plan she and Max had hatched. It was far-fetched, she knew, but if nothing else, at least it would give Jackie hope.
***
“What do you mean you lost them?” Ethan asked. He had been back at the Stone house only five minutes and already things were unraveling.
“That bitch and her two little bitches,” Andersona spat. “She pulled some crazy cop movie stunt in a mall parking lot and lost the trail car.” She was overstating the facts for effect, though only a little, mostly to cover her own ass.
“What about the journalists?”
“She lost them, too.”
“Pull up the feed from the car,” Ethan said, nodding toward the array of screens in the control truck. Andersona didn’t say anything; the other three crew members in the room looked at the floor.
“Well?”
“Phil,” Andersona said, motioning to the technical director seated in the well-cushioned and ergonomically perfect chair. Phil swiveled around and tapped a few buttons. The largest monitor on the wall came to life. It showed an extreme close-up of Jackie, her tongue hanging out of the edge of her mouth, her eyes focused dead center. Something was jolting the camera every second or two, as if it was being hit.
“This is from inside the car?” Ethan asked.
“Just watch,” Andersona answered.
The banging stopped, and Ethan heard a voice—Deirdre’s: “Use your shoe.”
Jackie disappeared from view for a moment. With her face gone, the rest of the car’s interior was visible. Ethan could just barely make out Megan in the backseat.
Jackie’s face popped back into the frame. She was so close, and it was so abrupt, that Ethan flinched.
More jolts to the camera, this time much more severe. On the third jolt, the camera tumbled from the sky. There was a jumble of swirling images as the rearview mirror, surreptitious home to ATN’s secret eye, was manhandled and eventually thrown out the window. It landed with a crack on another car. The final image was of a journalist Ethan knew—a flack, really—cursing loudly enough to be heard through the thick pane of his windshield’s glass.
“That was more than an hour ago. It’s the last we saw of them.”
“Are you telling me that three-fourths of the family starring in the highest-rated show in the history of this network, the only three-fourths not currently in a coma, have gone AWOL?”
No one said anything because there was nothing to say.
Then Ethan did something he never did. He lost control.
“Holy fuck!” he screamed, the sound of his voice a kind of whiny shriek. He punched the wall next to him and screamed again.
“Holy fuck!” This time it was with the agony of a sprained wrist and broken finger. He went down on one knee and clutched his hand.
No one in the control room moved a muscle.
“Don’t just stand there,” Ethan whimpered. “Call the staff doctor.”
While Andersona was on the phone to the medical team, Phil said, “Look.”
Ethan turned his attention to the wall of cameras and saw Deirdre’s car pulling into the driveway.
***
Megan was humiliated that ATN had aired her betrayal of Jackie. It would have been bad enough if the network had shown what really happened—that Megan had been drawn into the conspiracy by Ethan, that he had exploited her vanity—but to see it twisted into something an order of magnitude worse left Megan shaken.
When she tried to apologize to Jackie and Deirdre in the car, after the library, she broke down and cried. She was hysterical enough that Deirdre pulled the car over and climbed into the backseat to hug her. For a brief moment, Megan was a little girl again and burrowed her face into her mother’s bosom. She had never felt so safe.
“If you’re really sorry,” Jackie said from the front seat, after Megan’s sobs had subsided and her mother started driving again, “I know of a way you can help.”
“Anything,” Megan said, and she meant it.
Jackie laid out Hazel’s plan. It was, on first blush, so replete with points of failure that one of her online friends had code-named it Chernobyl. It involved theft, misdirection, and a bold kind of escape. Megan listened intently as Jackie explained.
“A team of video editors has been reviewing footage from Life and Death, as well as the raw footage I shot for the YouTube series.”
“A team of video editors?” Deirdre asked. “How many people have been involved in this thing?”
“A lot, Mom. I could never have done this all by myself. But the most important has been my Facebook friend in Russia, Max.”
“You have friends in Russia?” Megan asked.
“Just the one,” Jackie answered. “But he’s the only one I need. Well, him and my friend Hazel in Alabama. The three of us are the core team. But there’s a much bigger group working on it, too.”
Megan looked at Jackie, then at her mom, and then paused a beat. As sometimes happens with close friends and relatives, the three of them burst out laughing all at once.
“I guess it is a little hard to believe,” Jackie offered. “It’s just how the Internet works. People, if they look hard enough, can find other people who are like them.”
“Okay,” Deirdre said, “there’s a team of editors.”
“Right. This team of editors was reviewing the footage of our house, of the set”—Jackie made quotation marks with her fingers—“looking for any sort of weakness, any advantage we could have over Ethan and the crew. It took them a long time, but they think they found something. A guy named Harrison, a segment news producer from Biscayne Bay, Florida, or someplace like that, found it.”
Deirdre, who was zigzagging streets to kill time on the ride home from the library, shook her head in disbelief, muttering, “Biscayne Bay.”
“In the footage I shot,” Jackie continued, “he noticed that Andersona puts her iPhone on the catering table, just off camera, before conducting interviews.”
“That’s right,” Megan said. “She did that for my interviews, too.”
“The cell signal,” Jackie explained, “can interfere with the wireless mics, so you’re not allowed to have cell phones on the set.”
Megan waited for more, but Jackie was silent. “And?” she asked.
“Don’t you see?”
“No.”
“We steal Andersona’s phone and shoot footage for The Real Family Stone of Portland, Oregon with that.”
No one responded, at first.
“Honey,” Deirdre said gently, “I’m not sure what good that would do.” Jackie didn’t respond, so her mom continued. “First, Andersona isn’t going to let you anywhere near that interview room. And even if she does want to interview you, honey, I don’t think you should talk on camera. They’ll just use it against you. And what if you do get her phone? The cameras all over the house will track the phone’s movement, won’t they?”
All her mom’s questions made sense, so Megan was surprised to hear Jackie laugh. “What’s so funny?” she asked.
Jackie explained how she had asked Hazel those same questions and more. And Hazel had answers for all of them. The team in Azeroth had been through every last detail. It would be like hitting the four-meter-wide hole in the exhaust system of the Death Star, but it was doable. The three of them would need to be Luke Skywalker, R2-D2, and Han Solo, but the plan could work.
“Pull over, Mom,” Jackie said. “I’m going to need your full attention.”
Deirdre did as instructed, and Jackie walked them through each and every detail. The more Jackie talked, the more enthralled Megan became.
The three of them committed the plan to memory, adapted it as they saw fit, and walked through it again.
After they got home, after they and the car were searched like they were terrorists plotting to blow up Seattle’s Space Needle, after Ethan yelled at them like they were his children and told them never to leave like that again, Megan looked at her watch and put Plan Chernobyl into action.
***
Jared lay in his makeshift hospital bed; he was utterly still. The only motion came from his chest as it rose and fell in time with the machine filling his lungs with a super oxygenated mixture of air.
His thoughts and memories all but gone, the only flicker of life was a small pilot light buried deep at the center of his brain. It was a still image, a photograph, of Deirdre, Jackie, Megan, and Trebuchet on the beach at Seaside, Oregon. It was a day filled with sunlight, and it was a moment filled with laughter. Jared, who had taken the photo, had told everyone to smile and “say Gruyère.” It was a silly joke, but it always made his daughters laugh. Deirdre usually groaned through her smile, but on this one day, she was laughing, too. As Jared’s life seeped away, this one happy moment was the last remaining thread connecting him to the world he had known.
The Seaside image was all that was left of Jared Stone.
Glio, not knowing what else to do, ate that, too.
***
Megan found Andersona sitting in the kitchen smoking a cigarette and staring blankly into a cup of coffee. The crew was forbidden from smoking in the house, but Andersona looked too far gone to care.
Megan was delighted to see that something was upsetting Andersona; it could only help their cause.
As Jackie had laid out in the plan, Megan was carrying a magazine.
“It doesn’t matter which magazine,” Jackie had answered when Megan asked. “Just something that Andersona and Ethan would believe you’d be reading.”
She chose Entertainment Weekly. Megan was smart enough to know how people saw her, and she knew this fit with their image. Plus, she liked looking at the pictures of the celebrities, especially the women. Sometimes, after carefully studying their every detail, she adjusted her own fashion choices to be more “Hollywood.”
“Andersona,” she asked, “are you okay?”
Andersona looked up. It took her a moment to comprehend that Megan was standing there.
“What do you want?”
“You just look sad is all.”
“Sad?” Andersona barked. “Why would I be sad? You, your mother, and your sister disappear, and I get blamed. I’m going to lose my job. Just like Jo Garvin. Just like lots of people.” She turned back to her coffee.
“I’m sorry,” Megan said, even though she really wasn’t. “But I think maybe I have something that can make you feel better.”
Andersona glanced at Megan. “I doubt it.”
“Well”—Megan paused, like she had rehearsed in the car—“what if I told you that my mom and sister had kidnapped me and forced me to leave the house with them?”
“I’m sorry,” Andersona said, the fog of self-pity starting to lift. “Can you say that again?”
“I can do better. I can say it on camera.”
***
Jackie waited for Megan in one of the blind spots identified by the team in Azeroth. It was a corner of the dining room that lay adjacent to the kitchen. Her palms were sweaty and her teeth were starting to chatter with anticipation. She didn’t have a good reason to be just standing there against the wall; someone was bound to walk by sooner or later and ask what she was doing. She would either have to make up an excuse on the fly, or go back to her room.
She was holding a book in her hand, Moby-Dick, with the insides partially hollowed out. She had used a different blind spot, one in the unfinished basement where hardly anyone ever went, to carve out the pages. It was a receptacle waiting for a hidden treasure.
Finally, after what felt like a week and a half, Jackie heard Megan approaching. She listened as her sister stopped and exchanged a pleasantry with some member of the crew.
C’mon, Jackie thought, just hurry up and get here.
Her wish was granted a moment later when Megan rounded the corner with methodical and deliberate purpose. She casually held her magazine out, like she had practiced, and let the iPhone slide into Jackie’s outstretched hand. If they’d done it right, the camera would have missed the entire thing. Jackie waited a full two minutes before stepping back into the frame, clutching the book to her chest.
She had to force her feet to move, one after the other, toward her father’s office. She couldn’t believe their luck. Stealing Andersona’s phone was by far the riskiest part of the entire scheme, and Megan had executed it perfectly.
The plan was pretty straightforward. Lay the magazine on top of the phone before the interview, and take both the magazine and the phone on the way out of the room. They all knew that Andersona would spend another few minutes filming reaction shots to edit into the interview later, leaving plenty of time to give Megan a head start.
Jackie entered Jared’s office/hospital room, nodding at Sister Benedict and one of the nurses as she did.
“Okay if I read to my father?” she asked.
Jackie did a double take when she saw the Sister talk into her wrist as if she were a Secret Service agent. The nun was also, Jackie noticed, wearing an earpiece. The Sister spoke again and held her finger to her ear, listening to a response. She nodded to herself and then turned her attention back to Jackie.
“It would be better if you read him the Bible,” the Sister answered.
“This was his favorite book,” Jackie said, holding it up for inspection. Hiding the contraband in plain sight was a specific suggestion from the Azeroth guild. No one ever thinks that they can be harmed by what they can easily see, they had told her.
The Sister squinted at the title and grunted. She turned back to a conversation she was having with the nurse, only now they spoke in hushed tones so Jackie couldn’t hear. Jackie tuned them out and set her mind to the task at hand.
After she had been there reading for a couple of minutes—she had preserved the first few pages of the book when hollowing it out so she could actually read to her father— she waited until no one was looking, slipped the phone out of the book, and tucked it under her father’s mattress. There was some risk in this part of the plan, but Jackie was confident that once everyone back in the control room saw she was only there to read to her comatose dad, she would fade into the background. Again, she was hiding her actions in plain view. It took nerve, but that was something Jackie was developing in abundance.
She couldn’t help but think that her father would be proud of her. She squeezed his hand, kissed his cheek, closed her book, and left the room.
As she was heading back to her own bedroom, she saw Andersona rush by, a production assistant in tow. She was barking at him in a whispered frenzy. The only words Jackie caught were: “Find it!”
It look all of Jackie’s willpower not to laugh out loud.
***
Ethan needed to regain control. His outburst in the truck was a misstep, and he knew it. After his conversation with Roger, he was starting to think he’d been playing everything wrong. It was this uncertainty, this lack of confidence that caused him to become unhinged.
Bending people to his way of thinking, getting them to unwittingly do his bidding, was Ethan’s signature move. He rarely accomplished this through bluster and force. He got what he wanted through charm and guile. It was time to go back to his playbook and stop calling audibles.
The linchpin, he knew, was Deirdre. He should never have tried to deal directly with the younger daughter. With Jared out of commission, Deirdre was the head of this household, and he’d undermined her authority by going behind her back. Both daughters, he had to believe, would follow their mother’s lead. Ethan needed to coax Deirdre back into his confidence, make her feel like part of the team.
That wasn’t going to be easy. Ethan had dressed the family down—yet one more mistake—when they’d returned from their excursion. He was pretty rough and now he needed to fix it.
There was only one place to begin: with an apology.
He knew from the control truck that Deirdre was lying down in her bedroom. It seemed like too intimate a place to start to heal wounds, but time was of the essence. He needed to get back on course now, before it all fell apart.
Ethan knocked on the door. There was no answer. He had seen on the monitor that Deirdre wasn’t asleep. She was reading. He even knew what she was reading. Ethan couldn’t figure out why people wasted their time with books. Weren’t there enough good movies and television shows?
He knocked again. “Deirdre, it’s Ethan,” he called out. “Listen, I want to apologize.”
After a moment he heard movement, and then the door opened.
Deirdre stood there, her body language and facial expression a cross between tired and agitated.
“Do you have a minute?” he asked.
“Does it matter if I say no?” she responded.
“Look,” he began, “I know what you must think of me, and I don’t blame you. I’ve been a jerk, and I’m sorry.”
“Thank you,” Deirdre said and started to close the door on him.
“Wait. Please, just hear me out for one minute.”
Deirdre stopped, the door half open, and leaned her shoulder against its edge.
“I know this isn’t going to matter to you, especially with Jared so, so …”
“Dying,” she interrupted.
“Yes,” he said, “dying.” This was when Ethan was at his best; confronting difficult truths and somehow making himself share in the pain of others. “Anyway, I know it must seem silly to you with everything your family is going through, but I’m under immense pressure to try to hold this television show together. A lot of people at the network are depending on me, depending on us, to make this successful.”
He had Deirdre’s attention, but she didn’t respond.
“Listen, I could tell you how much America needs to see you and your family, how they’ve become invested in your lives—”
“You have told me that.”
“And it’s true. Or maybe it’s true on some level. But if I’m being honest, I’m here trying to save my own skin.” Ethan paused and looked at his shoes. “Anyway,” he said without looking up, “that’s why I’ve been so hard on you and the girls. Hell, that’s why I did this.” He held up his bandaged hand.
“You told me someone slammed a car door on it.”
“I lied about that, Deirdre. I punched a wall in the control truck. I didn’t want you to know because I was embarrassed.” This was another arrow in the Overbee quiver, own up to everything. “I lost control with you, and I lost control with my crew. I’m going to apologize to them, too.”
“Okay, Ethan,” Deirdre said, now more tired and less agitated, which he knew was progress, “thank you.” Again, she started to close the door.
“Wait,” he said, “one more thing.”
Deirdre held the door and waited. Ethan was now talking to her through the smallest sliver of daylight.
“I’d like to sit with you and the girls and figure out how we can come to some sort of détente. You want to live your life, and I have a contract with the family to produce a television show. And I have advertisers to keep happy. You tell me what you need, I’ll tell you what I need, and maybe we can put the hatchets down, if not bury them. You don’t have to like me, Deirdre, but maybe there’s some way we can work together. It would be best for all of us, don’t you think?” Always end with a question, he thought. Don’t let them just walk away; make them respond.
Deirdre waited for a long moment. He could feel her searching his eyes.
“Okay, Ethan,” she answered. “First thing tomorrow. The four of us will meet over breakfast and see what we can figure out. Would that be okay?”
“That would be more than okay. I really appreciate it. And I’m really sorry to have disturbed you. Thanks, and have a good night.” When the sale is done, stop selling, he thought.
“You too,” Deirdre said, and closed the door.
Ethan heaved a sigh of relief. He could feel his mojo coming back.
***
Deirdre knew the cameras were on her, so she was careful not to show emotion, but when she closed the door after talking to Ethan, she wanted to laugh. It was partly from the release of stress, and partly from the joy of knowing she had bought herself valuable time to do what she needed to do.
Ethan was going to back down until the morning. Yes, the control truck would be watching, and yes, she and the girls had to dance a very careful dance, but Ethan’s visit was both unexpected and good news.
There was less than two hours to air, and Deirdre was full of adrenaline. It was this spike in nervous energy that made it all the more remarkable that she was able to muster the discipline to lie on the bed and close her eyes. She recounted what had transpired in the past twenty-four hours and drifted into an uneasy sleep.
***
Sister Benedict was enamored of the technology she now wore. She thought of the earpiece and microphone as accessories. Vain women wore lipstick and high heels. Sister Benedict wore sophisticated communication devices, all, of course, in the service of the Lord.
While the Sister didn’t watch much television beyond Duke Hamblin, she thought she knew enough about it to dismiss it as ephemera. She was wrong. I’ve been wasting my time, she thought, with that blog. This is still where America’s heart beats.
The Sister had received nearly fifty pieces of fan mail. A few were not unlike the misanthropic messages posted to christscadets.blogspot.com—mean and nasty people with disdain for God and too much time on their hands—but some were simply wonderful.
A senior citizen in Boston sent her a blessing, thanking her for helping to prepare Jared’s soul for the next world. A married couple in Idaho encouraged her to impart some religion to the Stone daughters (a goal with which the Sister heartily agreed). A teenage girl in Indiana called her an inspiration.
Me, she thought, inspiring young girls all over the country. It was overwhelming.
She had even been contacted by an agent. Her immediate reaction was to scoff at the idea. She, the Mother Superior of the Sisters of the Perpetual Adoration, should have an agent? Ridiculous.
Or was it?
Yes, an agent, she thought. I can bring the message of the Lord to people everywhere. It can be my voice that lifts them up.
“All clear, Sister?” the voice from the control truck buzzed in her ear.
“All clear,” she said to her wrist, almost giggling as she did. Young Jacquelyn had left the room a few minutes earlier, and she and Jared were alone. Or as alone as two people can be when someone else is watching their every move.
The Sister thought that maybe she would use the opportunity to change Jared’s sheets, but the more she thought about television and her role in it, the more intrigued she became. The sheets could wait. She went to the kitchen to write a letter to that agent.
Sister Benedict Joan had stars in her eyes.
***
The moment had come.
Jackie and her mother and sister filed into Jared’s room and arranged themselves around his bed to watch that night’s episode of Life and Death. Sister Benedict, as she had done each night since she joined the Stone household, sat in a corner of the room, not giving the family privacy, but trying to be as unobtrusive as possible. No one said a word.
The episode began with Megan’s interview.
Jackie had to stop herself from chuckling as she watched. Megan had really laid it on thick.
“It was so awful,” she said, her face showing the emotion of a silent film star. “My mother said that if I didn’t leave with them, they would ship me to an all-girls private school and that I couldn’t be with my dad anymore. Now that he’s so close to the end, I didn’t know what to do, so I went.”
“What were your mother and sister hoping to accomplish?” Andersona asked from off camera.
“I-I can’t say,” Megan answered, each word a thick cloud of breath.
“It’s okay, Megan,” Andersona prodded, “you can talk to me.”
“Well,” she said, “they wanted to buy Jackie a new phone, this time an even better one, the new Samsung Galaxy phone.” The screen showed an inducement to learn more about the phone online.
“Did they succeed?”
“No. The man at the store had seen the show and didn’t want anything to do with us. I felt sorry for my mother and sister, really.”
The interview went on for a while longer, ending with Andersona telling Megan how brave she had been to come forward.
“I’m only doing this for my father, so that he may rest in peace.”
The opening credits rolled.
Jackie reached over and squeezed her sister’s hand. Megan permitted herself a fraction of a smile.
The first commercial break was Jackie’s cue. She reached over, hugged her father, said, “I love you, Daddy,” kissed his cheek, and got up to leave the room. Her voice cracked when she told Sister Benedict, “I need to use the bathroom.”
Sister Benedict listened in her earpiece and then nodded.
Jackie, with the iPhone successfully palmed from under her father’s mattress, walked into the hall knowing she would never see her father alive again.
***
Ethan watched the show from the truck and passed out compliments and kudos to the crew like they were PEZ. It was his effort to get back in their good graces. Andersona, who had been in a foul mood all day—Probably on the rag, he thought—sat huddled in a corner reviewing dailies.
“Loosen up, Andy,” he said. “You can worry about tomorrow’s footage tomorrow. Enjoy the fruits of your labor tonight.”
Andersona didn’t answer. Instead, her jaw hung lower and lower from her face, and her cheeks were turning the red of a royal flush, all hearts. Something was wrong.
“Fuck!” she yelled. It was one curt but penetrating bark.
“What?” Ethan asked, both startled and annoyed.
Andersona paused for a moment, but she was too upset to obfuscate the truth. “That little bitch has my iPhone,” she said flatly.
“I’m sorry?” Ethan said. The temperature in the room fell twenty degrees. “What did you just say?”
“Today, after Megan’s interview, I couldn’t find my cell phone. That little bitch took it and gave it to her sister.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes!” she shrieked. “I’ve been looking at this footage until I’m blue in the face. You can’t see her actually take it, but the clues are all there. I’m pretty sure Jackie just took it from under her father’s pillow or something.”
“Okay, let’s stay calm. Phil, tell Sister Benedict to excuse herself quietly from the room and go stall Jackie until I get there. Where is she?”
“The kid just went into the bathroom near the office.”
“Just have the Sister stand outside the door and tell her not to let Jackie out. I’ll be there in a minute.”
“Got it, boss.”
Ethan turned to leave the room. As he did, he looked over his shoulder. “Oh, and Andersona?”
She knew what was coming next before he said it.
“You’re fired.”
***
Deirdre watched Sister Benedict hold a finger to her ear, listen intently to someone on the other end of her earpiece, and then leave the room. Deirdre couldn’t believe her luck.
Sister Benedict was the wild card in all of this. Deirdre was going to ask for a private moment with Jared but wasn’t sure the Sister would comply. If that didn’t work, she had planned to use brute force. Deirdre had sized up the nun and was pretty sure she could take her.
Now there was no need. The Sister’s overlords—that was the word that popped into Deirdre’s head to describe Ethan and his minions—had called her away. The time to act was now.
“Meg,” Deirdre said with as gentle a tone as she could muster, “I don’t think you should stay here for this. You can take a moment if you want to tell Daddy good-bye, but it has to be quick. We probably don’t have a lot of time.”
Megan looked at her father, but she couldn’t go over to him. She started bawling. “Good-bye, Daddy.” She choked the words out.
“Okay, sweetheart,” Deirdre said, pulling her daughter into an embrace. “It’s going to be okay, I promise.” Deirdre’s nerves were rock solid. She didn’t know where her resolve was coming from. Love, she figured, can make us weak-kneed and wobbly, but when it needs to, it can make us stronger than steel.
Megan was still crying but managed to get herself under control. “You wait outside the room,” Deirdre told her. “I’m going to lock the door. I’m pretty sure they’ll try to break it down, but you do your best to stall them. Just get out of the way before they can do anything to hurt you. Okay?”
Megan nodded and hugged her mother. She left the room without looking back. Deirdre was alone.
She locked the door, went over to her husband, took his hands, and kissed his lips.
“This is for you, Jare. I love you.”
Deirdre reached across Jared’s body, her finger poised on the ventilator, and paused. She had come to the precipice, but she couldn’t go through with it. She couldn’t stop her husband, the father of her children, from living.
She looked at Jared’s face and so many memories came flooding back, as if his life was flashing before her eyes.
She remembered the night they sat on a stone wall high on a hill in some park near where Jared grew up, watching the moon rise. It was fall, and Deirdre was nestled into Jared to keep warm. Ninety minutes passed as the moon traced its arc from the horizon to the sky. Neither one spoke and neither one moved. It was a perfect evening.
She remembered the day Jared took Megan, when she was three, to her first movie. Jackie was in kindergarten, and the legislature wasn’t in session. The two of them, Jared and Megan, came home covered in popcorn butter and cotton candy, singing, dancing, and hugging. Until that day, Jared hadn’t really seemed to connect with Megan, and Deirdre was beginning to worry. She thought maybe there wasn’t enough love in his heart for two children, but Megan, who was persistent, won him over.
She could still see in her mind’s eye the day they buried Deirdre’s mother. Jared was so full of compassion and so full of strength that Deirdre just let her entire being collapse into him. He was stronger than anyone she’d ever known.
And now, now he was this.
Deirdre took a deep breath and closed her eyes, looking for the courage to do what her Jared wanted, but it wasn’t there. She drew her hand back.
Then she opened her eyes and looked up.
The lens of a camera—the crew not bothering to hide the cameras in the sick room—was trained directly on her face. The convex curve of the glass distorted her features, stretched them like a funhouse mirror. On the other side of that glass, she knew, was the rest of the world. They sat there, gawkers at a zoo. It disgusted her. It made her angry.
It gave her all the strength she needed.
Deirdre removed the pillow from under Jared’s head, took the pillowcase off, and tossed it over the camera. Then she leaned forward, turned off the ventilator, and put the pillow over her husband’s face. A throbbing pain exploded behind her eyelids, but she didn’t flinch. Deirdre was prepared to stay there until the end of time.
***
“Young lady.” Jackie heard Sister Benedict’s voice through the door. “We know you have Andersona’s phone. Mr. Overbee is coming here now. You would be a smart girl to just give it back to us.”
Jackie panicked. They knew. They knew before her mother had a chance to do what she had to do. Maybe they knew about that, too. Maybe it was already over. She looked at the bathroom window, trying to figure out if she could wriggle through and escape, but she was pretty sure it was too small.
“Is she still in there?” It was Ethan’s voice. There was no answer from the Sister, which Jackie thought was strange. Not sure what else to do, Jackie started the video recording on Andersona’s phone.
“This is Jackie Stone,” she whispered with urgency, pointing the camera at her face. “I’m trapped in my own bathroom with a stolen iPhone. The Life and Death producer, Ethan Overbee, and that nun, Sister Benedict, are outside the door demanding I—”
“Sister?” Ethan asked, alarm in his voice. “What is it?”
“NOOOOO!!!!” the Sister wailed. “The control truck … they’re saying … it’s Deirdre! She’s, she’s …”
“Fuck, no!” Ethan yelled in response.
Jackie heard them both running down the hall away from the bathroom. With the phone still recording, she opened the door to see what was going on.
***
Megan was overwhelmed. Sister Benedict made it to the door first, with Ethan hot on her heels. The doctors arrived only seconds later. All of them were shouting at Megan to move.
“Out of our way!” the Sister bellowed.
“Megan, please!” Ethan implored.
“We need to get in,” one of the doctors said, panic in his voice.
Only they were all talking at once, creating a wall of sound that was indecipherable. The Sister’s piercing scream cut through it all.
“Enough!” she shouted. The hallway went silent. “Move, you insolent brat. Your mother is in there committing murder! Move! Now!”
When Megan didn’t budge, Sister Benedict slapped her across the face. It was a hard slap, and it stung.
In the wake of the startled silence created by that slap, the echo of hand on cheek reverberating through the house, a noise of movement from down the hall drew everyone’s attention. All the heads turned as one, just in time to see Jackie holding the phone out in front of her and pointing it at the assembled crowd. She left the bathroom, ran down the stairs, and raced out of the house.
Ethan ran down the hall in pursuit, faster than Megan thought possible.
When the Sister turned her attention back to the office door, Megan was ready. She landed her right fist on the very end of the nun’s nose, making blood splatter and making the woman shriek in pain.
“That,” she said, “is for, is for everything.” Megan, overwrought with a tidal wave of emotions, started to cry. A nurse pulled her aside and hugged her while the doctors tried to open the locked door.
Megan buried her face in the nurse’s shoulder and let it all out.
***
Jackie held the phone behind her as she ran, filming her pursuer while she tried to narrate.
“My mother is trying to end my father’s suffering,” she said through heaving breaths. “Sister Benedict attacked my sister, and Ethan Overbee is chasing me. I think he wants to hurt me or kill me.”
Jackie was across the yard in a heartbeat. She stopped at the edge of the seven-foot fence they called The Wall.
“Give me the phone, Jackie,” Ethan said. He was panting, too. “There’s nowhere else for you to go. It’s all over.”
Jackie looked straight into his eyes. “Almost,” she said. She saw the perplexed look on his face, then turned around and threw the phone over the fence. They both watched it tumble end over end against the night sky.
A second later, there was an exclamation of joy from the other side of The Wall. “I got it!” It was Jason Sanderson’s voice. He was exactly where Hazel said he would be. What Jackie didn’t expect to hear was the cheer that went up from the crowd that had gathered around him.
Jackie turned back to Ethan. “Now,” she said, “it’s over.”
Ethan dropped to his knees, then to his butt, and sat down on the grass as if he’d been shot.
Jackie stepped around him and went back into the house.
***
Deirdre held the pillow over Jared’s face for what felt like an eternity, but what the clock on the wall revealed to be only about ninety seconds. That’s when he flatlined. Jared never moved, never twitched. Deirdre was still holding the pillow there when the doctors broke down the door nearly four minutes later.
She stepped out of the way knowing she had succeeded. Jared was dead.
Deirdre, understanding the gravity of what she had done, staggered backward and fell into a chair, where she started to cry, and then she cried some more.
***
Glio’s life ended a few seconds after that of Jared Stone. But to a high-grade glioblastoma multiforme, a few seconds is an eternity. With no memories to eat, with no external stimuli to occupy its attention, Glio fell into a black hole of nothingness.
Some would say it was just deserts, that it was what a brain tumor had coming, and they would probably be right. But Glio had been transformed. He had become the sum total of Jared Stone’s memories. He had grown to love Jared Stone’s wife and daughters; he had come to love Jared Stone.
The Glio wasn’t sorry to die, only sorry he hadn’t lived more.