Costars (New York City Bad Boy Romance) (41 page)

I look back over the waiting room, but
immediately turn back to Yuri.

“Where’s Grace?” I ask.

“She left when Brian started screaming,”
she answers.

“Do
me
a favor
and see if you can get her on the phone, will you?” I ask. “I’ve got to stay
here until-”

“Yeah,” Yuri says. “I’ll call her.” She
picks up the phone and dials the number.

Brian comes out of the office, his eyes
red from crying.

“I’m very sorry, Brian,” I tell him, but
he just walks past me and out the door.

Mr. Probst died a few years ago, so
Brian’s the next of kin. There are some things he needs to sign, but I feel
okay giving him some time.

“Boss?”

“Yeah?” I respond, turning back to Yuri.

“She’s not answering her phone,” she says.
“I can keep trying.”

“Please do,” I tell her and look to the
doctor and nurses still in the waiting room with me. “We should get her down to
the morgue,” I tell them and that’s what we do.

It’s about twenty minutes before I’m back
in my office and Yuri’s quick to tell me that she still hasn’t been able to
reach Grace.

I have another appointment in about ten
minutes. I’d planned to use my lunch break to take Grace down for her first day
in the trial, but with the situation being what it is, that’s just not going to
happen.

“Has anyone been in to take the chair?” I
ask Yuri.

“It’s still in there,” she says. “Do you
want me to call someone?”

“Yeah,” I tell her. “Let’s see if we can
get it out of here before my next appointment comes in.”

“Sure thing,” she says and picks up the
phone.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” I ask.

“Yeah,” she says. “I’ll be fine. I’m just
a little shaken, I guess.”

“Okay. When you’re done, you can take a
break if you need it.”

“That’s okay,” Yuri says. “I’ll stay.”

“All right. I’ll be in my office. Let me
know if someone can get up here in the next few minutes.”

The sheer impracticality of getting the
electric wheelchair out of my office without climbing in and driving it — more
than a little insensitive, I think — is something I’m going to have to deal
with if Yuri can’t get someone to come in and take care of it.

I’ve never given much thought to that sort
of thing, but it can’t be a new situation to the hospital.

I pull out my phone and dial Grace’s
number. It rings a couple of times and then goes to voicemail. She’s ignoring
my call.

If I knew she was still in the building,
I’d risk being a little late for my next appointment to talk to her.

There’s no telling where she is, though.

After something like that, she might
already be in for her first day of the trial or she might have left the
hospital entirely.

Yuri pops her head into the room and says,
“Nurse Travis is on her way.”

“Thanks, Yuri,” I say. “Let me know when
Mr. Farrer gets here. And if Brian Probst comes back in, let him know where
Nurse Travis took the chair and call Benedict so Brian can fill out the
paperwork.”

“Okay,” she says and leaves the room.

Nurse Travis comes in a minute later and
removes the chair from the office, leaning over the back and using the joystick
to propel the chair forward.

I guess I could have thought of that.

I’m still trying to get my head back
together when Yuri comes back into the office.

“A couple of things,” she says. “First
off, Brian Probst came back in and he’s waiting for Benedict to get here. Nurse
Travis left the chair out here, so that’s all taken care of, and I don’t know
if you’ve gotten ahold of her or not, but Grace still isn’t answering her
phone.”

“Thanks, Yuri,” I answer and rub my eyes.

“Oh,” she says, “and Mr. Farrer just
called to cancel his appointment. I got him rescheduled for next Tuesday.”

“When’s my next appointment?”

“You’ve got about twenty minutes,” she
says. “It’ll be Mrs. Frost at twelve forty. After that-”

“Thanks, Yuri,” I interrupt.

After Mrs. Frost’s appointment in the
office, I check up on my admitted patients. It’s a full day.

I just wish I knew where Grace is.

Chapter
Thirteen

The Wrong Side of
Intervention

Grace

I missed my first day with the trial, but
I couldn’t stand to be in that hospital another minute.

That woman died in
Jace’s
office. I get that she was a lot worse off than I am now, but that hardly makes
any difference.

As terrified as I’ve been, I guess I
haven’t really allowed myself to let the harder truth sink in: I am going to
die.

Yeah, it’s not going to happen as soon as
it did with that woman earlier today, but I’ve seen the statistics. I’ll be
lucky if I see forty.

Jace has been calling off and on all day,
but I can’t bear to talk to him right now.

He’s an oncologist. He’s used to death.
Me? I wasn’t in the room, but just hearing that man screaming at Jace to do
something…

My phone rings again and I look at the
number. It’s Jace again.

I could turn off my ringer, but I’m
waiting to hear back from John on whether he’s going to stop being a pussy and
take my plan for the Midwest to the board.

If I don’t answer the phone now, Jace is
just going to keep calling.

“Hello?” I answer.

“Grace,” he says, “thank God. I’ve been
worried about you. Where’d you go today?”

“I went home,” I tell him.

“Do you want me to come over?”

“I don’t know.”

“Okay,” he says. “If you want, we can talk
about what happened today. I know it was a bit of a shock, but maybe I can help
talk you through it.”

If anyone could, it would probably be an
oncologist. Still, I’m not really in the mood to think about what happened,
much less talk about it.

“I’m good,” I tell him. “I could use
something to take my mind off of it, though.”

“I can come over,” he says.

I sigh.

“Or not,” he says hesitantly. “I don’t want
to crowd you. I’m just trying to help.”

“I appreciate that,” I answer, deadpan.

“Are you backing out of the trial?”

“I have no idea,” I tell him. “I’d rather
not talk about it right now.”

“Well, if you need anything, just let me
know,” he says.

“Hold on.”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t know,” I tell him. “Could we
maybe just talk for a little bit?”

“Sure,” he says. “I know that it’s hard
being there when something like-”

“Yeah,” I interrupt, “still not wanting to
talk about that.”

“Okay, what do you want to talk about?”

“What are you wearing?” I ask.

Yeah, it’s stupid and right now I couldn’t
be any less interested in getting laid, but it’s about the furthest thing from
that other conversation I can think of at the moment.

“You know what I’m wearing,” he answers
idiotically. “You just saw me a few hours ago.”

“You’re really bad at this,” I tell him.

“Oh,” he says. “Geez, uh…”

“Really bad.”

“I’m sorry. I’ve never really done this
before.”

“Oh, so you’re a phone sex virgin, huh?”

“I guess you could say that,” he answers.
“Maybe you could teach me a few things.”

“I’m really not in the mood to be a tutor
right now,” I tell him. “If you can think of something for us to do that has no
connection whatever to doctors or patients or cancer or tumors, you go ahead
and give me a call back, though.”

He’s quiet.

“All right then,” I say. “I’ll talk to you
later.”

I hang up the phone and flip on the
television.

There’s nothing on that’s of the slightest
interest to me right now, but I keep flipping through the channels anyway. I
lie down on the couch and settle on an old movie with David Bowie as a prisoner
of war and I set the remote on the coffee table.

It’s not long before my eyes close and I’m
drifting off into sleep.

My dreams are a circuitous nightmare where
I’m in a long, brightly lit hallway, looking for the door I’m supposed to go
through. I don’t know why I’m there or what’s on the other side of the door, I
only know that I need to find it as fast as I can. The lights flicker from time
to time, but it’s just a mild annoyance as I continue walking down the hallway.
There are signs next to each door, just like how the hospital has the room
numbers on those bluish-gray plaques, but none of them are in a language I’m
remotely familiar with, much less read.

Still, I keep walking down the endless
hallway.

I get that feeling there’s something
behind me, but when I look back, all I see is the white, sterile passage. Maybe
I’m going in the wrong direction.

I turn around and start walking the other
way, but the lights flick off completely and stay that way until I turn back
around once more and resume my original path. My every footstep is echoing
against the walls, a quarter of a second after each foot hits the floor. Off in
the distance, I can’t be sure, but it almost looks like there’s an end to the
hall. I keep looking at the signs next to each door, but the language written
on them is becoming less akin to writing and more like scribbles and chicken
scratches.

“Hello?” I call out, but my voice doesn’t
even echo.

I take a step and I hear the
reverberation.

“Hello?” I call out again, but my voice is
lost in the enormous tunnel.

A moderate dose of fear enters me, so I
start walking again, looking behind me every once in a while to check for
anyone or anything following me, but there’s just the bright, empty hall. I
walk a little faster and the signs next to the door are changing color and
shape before my eyes.

What I’m looking for must be the other
way, but when I turn back again, the lights go out just as they had before.

So, I just keep walking farther toward the
white slab about a quarter mile down the way.

Maybe if I get to the end, I can turn
around without being left in the dark.

With that thought, the lights begin to
flicker with greater frequency. They’re only out for a second or two at a time,
but it’s not long before they’re off longer than they are on.

Making my way through the dawdling strobe,
even the echo of my footsteps begins taking more and more time until, like my
voice, the sound simply vanishes and I’m stuck in a soundless tunnel where the
doors are visibly welded shut. The lights go off again and this time, they
don’t come back on. My heart is racing and I feel for the wall to guide me to
the end of the hall.

The feeling I’m being followed returns,
only this time when I turn around to see if anything’s there, I’m greeted only
by the same complete darkness that’s ahead of me.

My hand grazes a door handle and, not
knowing what else to do, I turn the knob. The door won’t open and, as I feel
along the frame, it seems that there’s no door at all; the knob is just
sticking out of the wall.

I keep walking and the lights come on for
a moment, but the hallway ahead of me has changed. There’s color now, but it’s
dark and washed out.

The end of the hallway is still there, so
I just keep walking until even the handles attached with equal spacing along
the walls vanish and I’m left with nothing but the smooth, darkened path.

“Is anyone there?” I shout. “I need help!”

I can’t even hear the sound of my own
voice. Even my heart has stopped thumping in my ears.

Out of nowhere, the lights on the ceiling
blaze into such a brightness that I have to shield my eyes, though that hardly
does any good at all.

Eventually, I have to cover my eyes with
my hands just to block out the blinding light.

What’s surprising, though, is that I can
see the hallway standing before me. I’m not sure if
it’s
hallucination or reality, but I can even see my own body. I stretch a leg out
and place my foot where it looks like the wall should be and, just when it’s
supposed to, I can feel my foot making contact with the wall. The hallway
starts to brighten again and so I start running, more afraid of the brightness
than I was of the dark.

At the end of the hallway is a large door,
the same color as the walls, but the silver handle is catching the growing
light.

I’m running faster now, hands still over
my eyes, my eyes still forced shut. The walls start to quiver and breathe, and
in my head I know that it’s not going to be long until the whole structure
above me collapses.

One hundred feet now from the door at the
end of the hallway, I’m slowing down. My mind is pushing my body as hard as
ever, but it’s getting harder to move with the increasing gravity.

Fifty feet now, and I’m slowed to a walk,
using every bit of focus in my possession to keep putting one foot slowly in
front of the other.

Twenty five feet, and I’m barely moving
forward. If I were to crawl anywhere else, I’d be going faster than I am now.
Still, that door lies ahead of me and no matter where it leads, I know I have
to walk through it.

Twenty feet left and I’m almost frozen in
place. With a concerted effort, I can inch my feet, one at a time, forward, but
it’s so difficult to even move that I’m beginning to lose hope entirely.

The walls haven’t yet cracked around me,
but they can’t stand up to much more of this. They’re rippling like water and
the only sound I can hear at all is the dull groan of wood and metal straining
against a force that won’t be much longer tearing them apart.

I take my hands from my eyes but, even
with my eyes still closed, the brightness of the hallway burns my retinas to
the point there’s an afterimage across the entirety of my field of vision.

It takes countless minutes before the
hallway comes back into view.

I’m only ten feet away now, but I’m forced
to my knees. My legs can’t support the growing weight of the air around me, and
I’m having trouble breathing.

Flat on my stomach now, I’m forced to take
my hands from my eyes in a last ditch attempt to keep working my way forward.
I’m so close, though the intensity of the brightness of the hall has scarred me
from the inside so all I can see now is blackness. I open my eyes and close
them again. It doesn’t make any difference. I’m not sure how, but I can still
feel the proximity of the door even though I’ve all but ceased my forward
motion.

The words come into my head saying I’m
going to die, but the words are not my own.

For what feels like hours piled upon days
piled upon weeks, months, and years, I strain to move forward, but as I reach
forward again and again, I feel nothing but the floor beneath me.

The sound of the walls dies down, but
something tells me that’s hardly an indication of safety.

“There’s nothing here,” I utter.

“There’s nothing here,” my voice echoes
back at me.

“What the hell?” I ask.

“What the hell?” my voice returns.

With substantial effort, I pat the ground
with my hand, but no sound comes off of the walls.

“Where am I?” I ask.

“Where are you?” my voice comes back.

“That’s not what I said,” I tell the
nothing around me.

“That’s what I said,” my voice speaks.

“Open the door,” I tell the walls.

“The door is open,” my voice informs me.

“Help me through,” I command.

“I can’t see you,” my voice says.

“I’m right here,” I say, certain now that
I’ve simply lost my mind.

“I’m right here,” my voice repeats.

A moment later, something is grabbing me
by the shirt collar, dragging me forward across the floor. I’m still held down
by the overwhelming force of nothing, but whatever has a hold of me doesn’t
seem to be affected.

“Thank you,” I say to whomever or whatever
is pulling me through, and I can hear a door closing behind me.

That’s when I wake up.

My apartment is quiet except for the
television, which is still playing that same movie. I look at the clock on the
wall. I couldn’t have been asleep for more than half an hour.

I’m relieved to be awake and I get to my
feet just to prove to myself that I still can, but when I hear the hard knock
on my door, I climb back onto the couch.

“Who is it?” I call.

The only answer I get is the sound of my
apartment door opening.

“Hey, you home?” that familiar voice calls
out and I’m on my feet.

“You scared the shit out of me!” I tell
Jace as he closes the door behind him.

“You know,” he says, “you should really
start locking your door, you never know what kind of creep’s just going to let
himself in.”

“There’s a joke there,” I tell him, “but
it’s
way too obvious. What are you doing here?”