“This patient was remanded to treatment here under Doctor Frey’s care before a trial. What you are doing is against the law.”
“I have a court order,” one officer said, producing a few sheets of paper and waving it under her nose. “Take it up with the judge.”
“We’ll see what the doctor has to say about this.”
The head nurse rushed down the hall to her desk and fumbled for the phone, pushing angrily at the dial pad. The men were not bothered by her threat.
Cecilia closed her eyes and smiled. She looked badass and beautiful. She looked ready.
The door was unlocked and opened.
“Miss Trent.”
“The one and only.”
“Please come with us.”
“From the crazy house to the big house?”
Cecilia was ushered out of her room. She stopped briefly at Agnes’s door and planted a kiss on her window. Agnes jumped up and ran to her door, meeting Cecilia’s lips with her own through the glass barrier. Cecilia continued down the hall past the front desk to angry stares. She returned them. As she waited for the elevator to take her down from the penthouse, she looked repeatedly over her shoulder to make sure this wasn’t some sort of set-up. She caught Jude’s eye and blew him a kiss, mouthed it’s cool, and waved good-bye as the elevator doors opened.
He nodded but did not smile.
The elevator ride seemed to take forever, and as grateful as she was to the hunky escorts riding down with her, she felt uneasy. A feeling confirmed by the sweat beading suddenly on her brow and the droplets of blood pooling in her hands. The elevator car bounced to an uncertain halt and the doors opened. Cecilia was grabbed by both arms and whisked through the Perpetual Help lobby and out the front doors. The crowd that had gathered in her honor, to keep her name in the news, on the lips of the neighborhood gossips, to free her from Frey’s loony bin–slash–penthouse dungeon, seemed to need a minute to process that their mission, or at least half of it, had been accomplished. Her apostles were screaming, waving signs, crying and chanting her name with joy at the sight of her, even as the bodyguards shoved past them, scattering them like bowling pins. A single voice stood out from the melee. “Cecilia!”
“Catherine,” she called back, reaching for her friend.
Their outstretched fingers almost touching like live wires separated in a bundle of old ones.
“I tried to come see you,” Catherine yelled, “but they wouldn’t let me.”
“It’s okay,” CeCe said, smiling at her, their eyes meeting though their hands could not. “I’ll find you.”
“C’mon,” one of the handlers ordered, nearly dragging Cecilia to the curb. “The car is here.”
All Cecilia could see was a black roof approaching, like a lifeguard eyeing a shark near the surface of the water. The crowd parted. The rear door of the limousine was pushed open from the inside and Cecilia was pushed in, head first, like a perp in police cruiser. The cool clean smell of treated leather flooded her nostrils, forcing out the stench of piss and puke that had filled them since she’d arrived in the psych ward. She breathed in like a deep-sea diver coming up for air, oblivious to the man sitting directly across from her in the jump seat.
“Hello Cecilia.”
“Mr. Less?”
“How are you?”
“You did this? You got me out? How?”
“Frey is not the only man in this city with friends in law enforcement.”
“Apparently not.”
Cecilia was suddenly very aware of her appearance and began fussing with her hair, staring at her pale skin, licking her chapped lips, and wiping at her bloodshot eyes. She felt her body tense up reflexively. Being in the backseat of a limo was a circumstance she was far too experienced with.
“Don’t bother, you look great,” Less complimented.
“I look like death, and not in a good way,” Cecilia all but snarled.
“No, really, you look naturally beautiful.”
“For a mental patient.”
“You’re not buying into that nonsense, are you?” Less asked, his lips curling into an uncommon smile. “You’re no crazier than the rest of the artists on my roster.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that if I were you,” Cecilia warned, looking once again over her shoulder at the acolytes that had gathered for her.
“You’re the real thing, Cecilia,” Less opined. “What you have money can’t buy. All the publicists, marketing experts, and A&R people couldn’t manufacture it if they tried. And believe me they try. Every waking hour, they try.”
“You pay them a lot of money to try, don’t you?”
“You see those people standing out there. Waiting for you. They are dedicated. Not purchased.”
“They are,” Cecilia mused.
“If they’ll go to those lengths to get you out, imagine how many albums, tickets, and T-shirts they’ll be willing to buy.”
“I don’t want to seem ungrateful, but I’m really not interested in any of that,” Cecilia explained. “The only thing I want is the chance to play my music, to sing my songs to as many people as I can.”
“I can make that happen for you,” Less said, reaching into the breast pocket of his suit jacket. “If I’m not mistaken, we still have some business to conclude.”
“Yeah, we do,” Cecilia agreed, changing the subject. “My friend Agnes is still in there.”
“From what I understand, she was committed by her mother,” Less explained. “There is nothing I can do. I wish there was.”
The record man handed over the pages of a contract. Cecilia felt his approach was a little insensitive but not insincere. She knew he was right in both the case of Agnes’s confinement and her own record deal.
“You don’t fuck around, do you?”
“No time like the present.” Less smiled and handed her a pen. “Welcome to Tritone Records.”
Cecilia didn’t bother to look it over. She grabbed the pen from his hand, signed her name, and handed the contract back.
“Congratulations,” he said. “You’re mine now.”
“I’m not sure I like how that sounds.”
“On the contrary, now that you’re one of my artists, it’s more important that I like how you sound.”
The banter was playful, but Cecilia sensed a seriousness in his tone that was all business, even when he was kidding around.
“I’ll do my best,” she said.
“Just a little warning, Cecilia. The contact is standard, for seven years, but most artists don’t make it that long. Maybe you’ll be the exception.”
“Probably not,” she said matter-of-factly. “I’m gonna use the time I have to maximum effect.”
As he folded the paperwork, she noticed him noticing a blotch on the contract. It was a bloodstain. She looked at her palms and saw her blood seeping out from them.
“Sorry,” she said. “My hands have been bleeding since they took me to the hospital.”
“I wouldn’t be the first executive to ask for a contract signed in blood,” he smiled, stashing the contract in his pocket with one hand and giving her a fresh, clean white handkerchief with the other. Cecilia balled it up and clasped her hands together.
“You haven’t asked me anything about the charges or about myself. Why?”
“I know all I need to know, Cecilia.”
Less nodded and reached into his jacket pocket once again and produced a brand new smartphone.
“For you,” he said. “Sixty-four gigs. Apps loaded. Paid for. ”
“Thanks but I’m not big on technology.”
“Well I am. It’s completely private. Only I will have the number.”
Cecilia accepted the phone. There was something exciting about it to her. An older, rich, and powerful man pursuing her, rescuing her, courting her. She’d been in this position before, but never with anyone so respectable.
“Keeping tabs on me, Mr. Less?” she said, the flirtatiousness in her voice a throwback to her old
self.
“I always keep a close eye on my investments, Ms. Trent.”
There was a long silence as the car sped over the bridge and worked its way up the Lower East Side into Alphabet City.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“Home.”
“Whose home?”
“Yours.”
The limousine stopped near the corner of Avenue A and 2nd Street in front of a loft building. Less reached into his pocket and produced a set of keys.
“Apartment thirteen-C,” he said. “Make yourself comfortable.”
“Is this a joke?”
“No,” he said. “It’s a corporate apartment. A place where you can live and work. Where you will feel safe.”
As she stepped out of the car, she looked back at the mogul and then muttered, “I’d give anything to see Frey’s face right now.”
“Doctor Frey!”
The nurse’s shouts startled the doctor, who’d been carefully reviewing Cecilia’s release order at his desk.
“What is it?” he called back.
“Come here, you need to see this.”
Frey strolled calmly down the hall to the room Cecilia had been in. The nurse was standing in the doorway nervously, seemingly afraid to walk in.
“What?”
The nurse pointed inside. At the wall over the cot where Cecilia had been sleeping. Frey stepped in.
Another man might have been stunned, aghast even at what he saw, but Frey was not.
“What is that?” the nurse said, a shiver in her voice.
Frey studied the image on the wall. It was drawn vertically in blood. Like some odd mash-up of graffiti and fresco. Three icons. A burning heart. A sword with a bow. A pair of eyes. Cecilia had been gone for hours but the blood was still bright red, not brown and dried, as he would have expected. The doctor imagined Cecilia dipping her fingers into her bloody palm like an artist swiping paint from a palette.
He stared long and hard at the images, especially the eyes. The longer he stared, the wetter the blood on the wall became, until it began to drip like tears. The deeper he looked, the more they appeared to him to look back. Unblinking. Accusing. Mocking. Defiant.
“Madness,” he said quietly, as much to himself as the nurse.
13 Cecilia’s limo sped off with a screech while Catherine stayed behind, not so much mingling with the crowd as observing it. The smell of fumes from the limo exhaust still lingered in the air at the curbside in front of the Perpetual Help entrance. It was a noxious mixture of burning fuel and burning rubber, but the artist in Catherine experienced it differently. It was the byproduct, what was left behind of something combustible. And if nothing else, Cecilia and the reaction to her, both on and off stage, was always fiery. Which is exactly what this crowd was, milling around with their signs and their chants now that Cecilia was gone.
She noticed a few of Cecilia’s most rabid followers, the ones who were always closest to the stage at her gigs and had gotten closest to her just now, waving away the petrol gases frantically, covering their mouths. Catherine sucked it in. Let it burn her throat. Make her eyes water. It might have literally been the tail end of the experience, but it was still a part of it. A reminder that you had to take the bad with the good. Sometimes even the most beautiful things leave a stink, she thought. Like a decaying flower or a dead body.
Signs and placards rose over the throng like umbrellas on a rainy day, fighting for airspace, sporting words and phrases and symbols drawn out in bold letters in black, blue, purple, and red markers.
Some traditional and uplifting.
Some not so much.
FREE OUR EVERYDAY SAINTS
NOT YOUR GRANDMOTHER’S SAINTS
[email protected] 4 US
SUBWAY SAINTS
HAVE MERCY ON THEM
JUSTICE FOR THE BLESSED
FAITH WILL SET YOU FREE!
ST. CECILIA IS MY HOMEGIRL
HELL NO WE WON’T GO!
DON’T LET THEM FREY!
Catherine shook her head and continued to wander through the protest, rubbing shoulders with all types from true believers to rubberneckers. Some on their knees in prayer, some shouting in the direction of Frey’s penthouse office and the psych ward, others preoccupied with their smartphones, posting pics of their own or photobombing someone else’s, busily updating their statuses and Instagramming whatever shots they could get of the fleeing saint. It was a twenty-first-century crowd and whatever their attention span, their motivation or depth of commitment, they were there and this was the thing that impressed Catherine the most. And the fact that the crowd had not dispersed; in fact, it had only grown, as if Cecilia’s release had given them a collective shot in the arm. A shot of confidence. They’d taken time from their day, their lives, called off work, skipped school, put aside their chores to do something they felt was important. Cecilia, Agnes, Sebastian, and Lucy meant something to them, even if it was unclear exactly what.
Someone had obviously tipped off the news media about Cecilia’s release. News teams had been dispatched from throughout the city. Print and broadcast. Bloggers. Network, local, and cable. Everyone. Catherine stopped to listen to some of the interviews under way. First to the musings of an older white-haired couple, and from the crosses dangling from their necks, obviously religious.
“I just think it’s a sign from God,” the elderly woman said, her gentle voice catching with emotion. “A reminder that there is good all around us. The world is becoming such an awful, dangerous place.”
“You can’t deny it. The miracles and everything,” her husband added. “Restores your faith.”
“In humanity?”
“In God,” he replied with both hope and cynicism. “Humanity has a lot more work to do.”
Catherine smiled at their sincerity. If they really knew Cecilia and Lucy and Agnes, she mused, they might not approve of them one bit, but in the abstract, from a distance, they were on the same page. Her attention quickly turned to a crowd of young girls sporting TEAM SEBASTIAN shirts, sacred heart chaplets stacked by the dozen on their wrists, and milagro rosary necklaces. Saints of Sackett Street fangirls for lack of a better description, decked out in dollar store accoutrements that seemed to be springing up in every bodega and gift shop window in the city. It wasn’t so much their spiritual appeal, the empowerment message that inspired such devotion from the kids, Catherine thought, but their celebrity, the virally fueled fame that powered this part of the movement. And it wasn’t just Cecilia either; for better or worse, they were all rock stars now.
“This isn’t gonna go well,” Catherine mumbled.
A reporter jutted the microphone into the girls’ faces and started peppering them with questions.
“Why are you here?” the correspondent quizzed predictably.
“To show, like, our support,” one said overenthusiastically.
It could have been an Earth Day or animal rights or breast cancer event or a football game, Cat thought, and the answer would have been the same. The total flip side of the earnest elderly couple she’d heard interviewed a few moments earlier. But then a facile question deserved a facile answer. She could tell the newswoman was barely listening, waiting for the next question from the producer in the satellite truck to come into her earpiece. “What do you say to people who think she’s a murderer?”
“I think they’re jealous,” one girl said, wearing an embellished sacred heart hoodie.
“She’s totally being thrown under the bus,” another girl said, already copying Cecilia’s look—writing S-A-I-N-T in black lipstick across her arms and chest.
“By who?” the reporter asked.
Silence and then a collective group shrug.
“Do you believe these girls are really saints?”
“I don’t know,” said another girl, the arrow piercing in her eyebrow changing directions as her facial expression tightened. “But I saw one of Cecilia’s concerts online and I really love her music.”
“And Luc
y is and will always be a style icon.”
“They’re just like me and my friends. Especially Agnes. All my friends say she’s my twinnie!” a third girl blurted, fixing the fresh flower crown atop her gorgeous red locks.
“So you’re fans more than anything?”
“Yeah, we’re fans. Of course we’re fans.”
Each had a reason.
“I can’t wait for Cecilia’s album.”
“I was hoping to get a picture with her but they moved her along so fast.”
“She dresses so badass.”
“Are you happy that she was released?” the reporter probed.
“Soooo excited,” one replied, cheesing hard at the camera through her pricey orthodontia.
“I see you’re wearing Sebastian on your T-shirts. Why?”
“He’s hot!” they screamed, jumping up and down.
Catherine just smiled and moved along as the reporter ended the interview. There was a lesson in this for her, she thought. You don’t really have a say in who your fans or followers are. But then, who was she to judge. Without much of a following of her own.
This was inevitable, this change in the sorts of followers they attracted as the crowds grew larger and garnered more and more attention, but just as inevitable was the fact that a less benign element would begin to infiltrate. Catherine could feel the menacing presence, like a serpent silently winding its way through tall grass, surreptitiously seeking a victim.
A muffled cry and loud shouts rose unexpectedly from behind her, the space she’d just left.
“Oh my God!”
“Jesus Christ!”
Catherine turned back toward the direction of the anguished voices but could barely move. Panic had already set in and the stampede began. She was knocked to the ground, kicked, and trampled. An avalanche of arms and legs pelting her. She couldn’t tell whether any of it was intentional or not. The sounds of fear and fighting were all around. Sirens began to wail in the distance and bullhorns crackled with official commands. She felt her forehead, which was cut and streaming blood.