Finn is less rattled. “It was just a cut or something, M. Don’t worry so much. It’ll give you wrinkles.”
“Maybe you should worry a little more,” I snap. “I know this is hard for you to grasp, Finn, but some of us actually care about things and can’t just mock everything—”
“Hey.” Finn’s eyes flare. “I care about things. You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
He brushes past me to sit at the lunch table and leaves me standing in his wake. Agent Armison gestures for Vivianne and me to sit, draws a fancy fountain pen from his breast pocket that looks out of place in his big square hands, and flips open a small notebook.
He takes down our names and basic information, and then says, “Okay, Miss Marchetti. Now, tell me again what you saw.”
The gentleness in his voice sets my teeth on edge. It’s the way you talk to children or mental patients.
“I was watching James out of the window.” I bite off each word. “I heard a shot and looked into the parking lot. There was a boy and a girl running away, and when they turned back, I saw their faces. They looked just like Finn and me. Same build, same hair, same faces.”
Armison turns to Finn and Vivianne. “Did either of you see anything?”
They both shake their heads. They were right there, but I was the only one at the window. I’d give anything for one of them to have been standing with me so they could back me up.
“Have you seen anything else strange today, Miss Marchetti?” Agent Armison asks gently, like a wrong word might break me.
“No!” I bang my fist against the table. “I know it sounds crazy, but it’s true! You have to believe me!”
Vivianne puts a hand on my knee. “It’s okay, Marina.”
“I believe you’re sincere, Miss Marchetti,” the agent says, “but you’re under a tremendous amount of stress. The mind reacts to that in funny ways sometimes.”
“Fine.” I press my lips together to stop the sob of frustration I feel rising in my throat. “But they’re out there, and they’re getting away because you won’t listen to me.”
Agent Armison looks down at his notepad, unable to meet my eyes, and I feel Finn shift in the chair beside me. Good. I hope I’m making them uncomfortable.
“Now, what about earlier, when the congressman was shot?” Agent Armison says. “You were both there, correct? What did you see?”
I cross my arms over my chest and don’t say anything. I don’t have any useful information, anyway, since all I saw was what everyone else did: Nate falling to the floor, people scattering. Of course, I could have gotten the shooter’s fingerprints and Social Security number and it wouldn’t make a difference to this guy.
Finn’s more inclined to be helpful than I am. “I already spoke to one of the agents at the hotel about this,” he says, “but I’m positive the gunman shot from inside the fire exit in the back right corner of the room.”
Vivianne bends her head and closes her eyes. I wonder if what she’s imagining is even worse than what we saw.
“A few other people and I tried to run after him,” Finn continues. “The door led to a service hallway, but it was already empty by the time I got in there, and there were probably a dozen doors going off to different parts of the hotel. We checked a few that weren’t locked, but the shooter was long gone.”
Surprise clouds my anger for a moment. Finn told me he ran after the gunman, but I guess the reality of that didn’t hit me until this moment. While I was cowering in my chair, unable to do any good for anyone, Finn was chasing after a would-be killer.
“Did you see the gunman?” Armison asks.
Finn shakes his head. “Another guy said he got a glimpse of him. Dark clothes, baseball cap over his face. That was it. How was the shooter able to get through the Secret Service?”
“We’re investigating that,” Armison says as he makes a note on his pad. “Do you know of anyone who’d have a reason to want to hurt the Shaws?”
“Of course not,” I say.
Vivianne shakes her head. “No one.”
“Well . . .” Finn says.
I gape at him. “You have got to be kidding me.”
“Maybe Nate,” Finn says. “Just because he’s a congressman.”
“Fine. Some right-wing loony maybe, but—”
“But not James. No one could have a grudge against James.”
I forgive him, just a little.
“It is possible the second shooting was only a coincidence,” Armison says.
“That’s a hell of a coincidence, isn’t it?” Finn says.
“I know it seems that way, but it would have been extremely difficult for someone from that distance to recognize Mr. Shaw in the dark, wearing hospital scrubs. I’m inclined to think it was a mentally unbalanced person looking for attention, or possibly some gang activity. We’ll check out the security cameras from the parking lot, and until we have whoever it was in custody, the Capitol Police will assign a protection detail to stay with Mr. Shaw and make sure he’s safe.”
“Are those all your questions?” Vivianne asks.
“Can we see James?” I add.
“We’re done for now. You’ll have to check with the doctors.”
Finn and Vivianne shake the agent’s hand across the table, but I’m already at the door. The same agent who’d been guarding the waiting room upstairs is now standing in front of Exam Room A, and he nods at me and waves me in when I approach.
Inside, James is sitting on one of the beds, his feet dangling off the edge like a little boy. He’s pale but beautifully whole, and my stomach unclenches. Luz is patting his hand, and a doctor is bandaging his scalp above the left ear.
James gives me a wan smile. “Looks like I got hit by a shard of brick. Not very dramatic.”
“That’s okay,” Finn says, coming up behind me. “Boring suits you.”
“We gave him a couple of sutures just to be safe,” the doctor tells Vivianne, stripping her gloves. “You’re all set, James.”
“Can I see my brother now?” he asks.
“Let me call upstairs to check.”
The doctor gets on a phone attached to the wall, and I take a step closer to James. I touch his head lightly. “Does it hurt?”
“They numbed it up before the stitches. How does it look?”
They cut the hair away from the wound, leaving him a bald patch above his ear. “Ridiculous,” I say, all of the residual fear pumping through my veins turning into a totally inappropriate urge to laugh. He’s still here, still safe. And only slightly less gorgeous with a divot of hair cut out of his head.
The doctor hangs up the phone. “You can see the congressman now.”
Ten
Marina
My momentary relief disappears. Luz says she has to go home and check on her grandkids before heading to work, so she hugs me tight, and then Finn and I follow James and Vivianne to Nate’s room in the ICU. All I can think about is the way that lamp shattered when James slammed his fist into it when we were kids. I knew from that day on that there was a hairline crack running through him. I’ve only ever seen glimpses of it in the years since, but I’m afraid the sight of Nate might put enough pressure on him that he finally shatters.
One of Nate’s doctors pulls Vivianne aside to talk with her, so it’s just the three of us who enter his hospital room. James stops inside the doorway so abruptly that I bump into him. His shoulders are rigid, and I crane my head to look around him.
Nate is barely recognizable in the bed, he’s so obscured by wires and IVs and bandages. He’s hooked up to a ventilator, the thick tube taped into place, disappearing into his open mouth and down his throat. The machine hisses softly as it pumps air into his lungs and lets it out again, its robotic rhythm creating a syncopated beat with the heart monitor beside it. Nate is bare to the waist, his chest covered in bandages. What little skin shows through is stained with either disinfectant or blood. His face is a chalky gray color, except for his eyelids, which are suc
h a dark purple that they look bruised. He’s like a battered and discarded shell, no spark of animation to show that anything of Nate is still inside there.
He looks dead.
He looks, somehow, worse than dead.
The nurse who led us here goes right to his side and checks one of his IV bags and then looks back at us, clustered in the doorway. “It’s okay. You can touch him if you want.”
I take James’s hand and squeeze it. Neither of us moves. I don’t want this image of Nate in my mind; if he dies, I don’t want to remember him this way. I wish I’d never followed James here.
Finn is the one who steps forward. He leaves us cowering in the door like children, sits in one of the chairs at Nate’s bedside, and takes his hand gently.
“Hi, Congressman,” he says. “It’s Finn. James and Marina are with me.”
“Can he hear him?” James asks the nurse.
“No harm in trying, right?” Finn interjects. “The doctors fixed you up nice, Congressman. You’ll be kicking my ass at basketball again in no time, sir.”
James takes a small step forward, and then another. Eventually he makes his way to the second chair by Nate’s bed. I watch from the doorway, hating myself for the way my feet are cemented to the floor. Finn didn’t even want to come here. He would have left James to deal with this on his own, because he hates hospitals, but now he seems . . . he seems . . .
I realize with a shock that Finn has done this before.
“James is looking pretty rough,” he continues. “I think he could use his brother right now, so you’ve got to hang on, okay, Congressman?”
I pray for Nate’s eyes to open. I can imagine exactly how it will go. His eyelids will flutter. We’ll gasp, and the nurse will whisper that it’s a miracle. Nate will turn to Finn, and in a quiet, raspy voice he’ll say, “I told you to call me Nate.” And we’ll all know everything will be okay.
But he doesn’t. Aside from his chest rising and falling in time with the hiss of the ventilator, he’s still.
“Don’t worry, though,” Finn continues. “We’re taking care of him. Marina hasn’t let him out of her sight. She’s like a very protective, terrifying little dog.”
James reaches forward and slowly takes his brother’s hand.
Finn gets up and takes my arm. “Let’s go.”
For once I don’t argue, and I leave James alone with his brother.
Finn and I sit in the hallway to wait while Vivianne joins James inside. I pull out my phone and check the text messages I’ve been ignoring. I’m up to forty-three now.
Tamsin: OMG are you okay?
Tamsin: What’s happening? Are u w/ James?
Sophie: I just heard! Text me back and let me know how you are, k, bb?
202-555-9054: Hi Marina, it’s Alex Trevino from your bio class. I heard you were there tonight, what happened?
Tamsin: MARINA! TEXT ME BACK, I’M GOING CRAZY HERE!!1!
Sophie: Watching the news. This is the biggest thing ever, and you’re actually there! What’s going on??
I turn my phone back off.
Now that I’m off my feet, exhaustion crashes over me. I didn’t realize how tired I was until this moment. I lean my head back against the wall, and soon I can’t keep my eyes open anymore. I let them fall shut, telling myself I’ll just rest for a minute.
“Marina.” A hand touches my knee. “Marina, hey.”
I drag my gritty eyes open and lift my head from Finn’s shoulder. God, I fell asleep on him.
“Sorry,” I murmur.
“Don’t worry about it.” He nods toward Nate’s room, where James and Vivianne are standing in the doorway speaking with one of the doctors. “While you were out, Viv asked me if we could try to get James to leave for a little while. She’s worried he’s going to make himself sick.”
I look at James, who’s wearing my father’s rumpled clothes from Luz’s bag and stitches in his head. “He’ll never go.”
“He might if we both ask him to,” Finn says. “He’s got to get some sleep, or . . .”
The hairline crack. Maybe Vivianne and Finn see it, too.
“Okay,” I say. “Worth a shot.”
We stand and meet James and Vivianne in the middle of the hallway. His eyes are red, but I can’t tell if it’s from crying or being awake for almost twenty-four hours. He looks ready to drop.
“The doctor says we should leave him alone for a while,” he says. “His immune system is depressed because of the trauma, and they don’t want him catching anything while he’s still in critical condition.”
“In that case, I think you should go home and get some sleep,” I say.
“Yeah, man,” Finn says. “You can’t stay here.”
James shakes his head, but Vivianne doesn’t let him start. “I think they’re right, sweetheart. I’ll stay right here, and I’ll call you if anything changes.”
James’s eyes darken as he realizes we’re ganging up on him. “I can’t leave you alone here, Viv.”
“I won’t be alone long,” she says. “Alice should be here any minute.”
James grimaces. His cousin Alice is probably the most overbearing woman I’ve ever met—and I live with my mother—and she has a particular fondness for interrogating James.
“Better run while you still can,” Vivianne says.
“We’ll come back in a few hours,” Finn says, “once you’ve gotten some sleep and a shower.”
“Please, James,” I add.
James leans against the wall, letting it take his weight. “You two agree on this?”
“I know, it’s weird,” Finn says. “I feel dirty.”
James sighs. “Fine. But just for a couple of hours.”
Finn goes to the waiting room to collect our things, and James and Vivianne go back into Nate’s room so he can say good-bye. I hover in the hallway, waiting.
“Excuse me, miss?” one of the nurses at the station says.
I turn. “Yes?”
“We found this in the waiting room,” she says, extending a yellow legal pad toward me. “I think it’s your friend’s?”
I take the pad; it’s the one James was scribbling on with such intensity for hours. There are half a dozen pages littered with mathematical formulas and notes. There’s only one bit that makes any sense to me at all. At the top, he’s scribbled, Is this what’s been missing? Whatever these symbols mean, they’re important. I rip the sheets from the pad and put them in my pocket, thanking the nurse, and imagine the hug James will give me when he remembers they’re gone and finds out I saved them for him.
Eleven
Em
Finn and I split up when we head back to the hospital. He joins the candlelight vigil and swarm of press at the front entrance, and I make my way around to the back. I stand across the street from the parking lot and keep an eye on the ambulance bay. The area is being kept clear of press and mourners so that emergency vehicles can still move through, so my view is relatively clear, but I’m far enough away that I shouldn’t attract any unwanted attention.
A couple of reporters are back here, doing stand-ups about the second shooting, but most are in the prime real estate in front, where Finn is. I pretend to watch them as I keep an eye on the back of the hospital. It’s important that we keep track of where our younger selves are, because things are different now. Once I took that shot at James, I changed the future, so I now no longer know what Marina is going to do or where she’s going to go. My old memories are useless.
In the pocket of the hoodie I borrowed from Connor is a protein bar and one of the prepaid cell phones Finn and I bought as soon as we arrived in D.C. Finn has the rest of our supplies in his backpack: the gun and extra ammunition, some food and a couple of spare T-shirts. I hope we won’t need the clothes or the food; I hope we won’t be here that long.
I watch the glass doors at the back of the hospital slide open and shut from across the street and rip into the protein bar. I’m not hungry, but I’ve got to do something
with my hands. I thought watching James slowly become hard and merciless was the worst thing I’d ever experience, but I was wrong. This is worse. Maybe I was naive to think I could do this. Somehow I’m still finding ways in which I’m just a child.
Looking at his face, remembering the boy he’d been and how much I’d loved him, had instantly turned me back into that sixteen-year-old who thought the sun rose and set with James Shaw. I miss that girl, and that boy. I’ve missed them for years, even if I haven’t been able to admit it. And now I have to end one’s life and devastate the other.
It’s unbearable.
The phone in my pocket buzzes, and I jump. I fish it out and press the button with unsteady fingers. “They leaving?”
“No,” Finn says on the other end. “Just wanted to say hi.”
I smile. “You checking up on me?”
“Please, like I care. I’m just bored.”
“I’m fine, okay?”
“Well, that makes one of us.”
The ambulance bay doors slide open, and a guy in a suit with “dignitary protection” written all over him steps out. I edge behind one of the news vans as I watch him walk to the car—a black, unmarked Crown Victoria—and pull it up to the side of the hospital, right in front of an emergency exit.
“I think they’re coming out,” I whisper.
The emergency exit opens, and someone whose face is covered with a coat dashes out, flanked by a uniformed officer and another agent, and slips into the back of the car. Even without seeing his face, I know it’s James. The two television crews still back here must think so, too, because they start rolling.
“I’m on my way,” Finn says in my ear as I watch the other Finn—God, he looks so young—climb into the car after James. “What are they doing?”
“Getting into a car with a couple of agents.”
He swears.
“Finn, if they’re taking him into protective custody, we’ll never—”
“I know.” I can hear the exertion in his breath as he runs toward me. “I’m coming.”