Illuminate (48 page)

His eyes fluttered and just before passing out he gasped: “Under the floorboards, my bed, a box . . . find . . . Please. So much to tell you.” And then he was out.

Two paramedics slid him onto a stretcher and wheeled him out the front doors, causing something of a scene. Lance and I followed; I held Dante’s limp hand as we rushed to the awaiting ambulance. After they loaded him in, the brusque male paramedic barked at Lance and me, “No room in here, gotta go.”

“Please. I can’t leave him.”

“It’s okay,” said his female partner. “One of you can come.”

“You go,” Lance said kindly. “Call me with updates, okay?”

I nodded. I couldn’t speak.

I climbed in to join the EMTs in back. As soon as the siren came on, rousing me, I piped up: “How is he?”

The man took a blood sample while the woman hooked up an IV.

“Stable,” she said. “We’ll get some fluids into him. They’ll run some tests.”

“Do you think he would last okay if, I mean, I know it’s out of the way but could you possibly take us to Evanston General?” I pleaded with them. “I know it’s a longer way but my mom is there . . . she’s a nurse, please, can you, please?” I felt the tears welling up.

“I don’t think it’s prudent,” the man said.

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” said the woman. She yelled to the driver, “Hey, Lou, any chance we can hit Evanston GH?”

I looked to the front and saw the man’s eyes in the rearview mirror; he must’ve caught my tears.

“Sure, if you say it’s okay!”

“Thank you so much, thank you!” I called out to him.

***

I had the attendants at the ER front desk page Joan the minute we got there. I was seated at Dante’s bedside—he was still out cold—when Joan came in.

“Honey, what happened? What’s going on?” She was frantic. She’s never like that at work. I stood up and she grabbed me into a hug, but kept her eyes on Dante.

“It’s hopefully nothing. Dr. Joe said he’s stable, but I just wanted you to check him out, make sure he’s okay.” What could I tell her? I couldn’t tell her what I wanted to.

“But, Haven, what
happened?
”

“I don’t know.” It was the truth at least. “He’s just . . . he’s been working hard and I think it’s just exhaustion. He passed out.”

She gave me a skeptical look but she nodded anyway and kissed me on the forehead.

“I’ll check everything out.”

“I’ll wait out here.” I squeezed Dante’s hand as I left. And then I had to ask, fear rising anew: “Hey, is Michelle working tonight? Thought I might say hi.”

Joan was looking over Dante’s chart, barely paying attention. “Oh honey, I thought I told you—she just got a position with a hospital in Oregon. She’s got family out there or something and had been waiting for it to come through. Happened so fast. She said she’d e-mail you to say goodbye. Poor thing was so overworked at the end, she was like a zombie or something.”

“Thanks.” That was all I could muster. As I walked away, Joan was speaking to Dante, as if he were awake.

“Now, Mr. Dennis, I just saw your mother the other day. She’s not going to like this at all.” She whipped the curtain closed around them.

I had a few minutes and went up to pediatrics. There, I scanned that bulletin board and found it easily. It had been layered underneath so many other faces. She was just on the edge of the picture of Jenny. Michelle’s arm was around her, a hint of her face in the frame, but I could see it had indeed started to change. Her skin had grown scaly and taken on a greenish tint, her features all tugged downward as though in a few days’ time they would slip off her face. I snapped it off the wall where it had been pinned, folded it, and tucked it in my dress pocket.

“So he’s going to be okay?” It was now after three in the morn- ing and Dante had been given the green light to go home as soon as he woke up from his deep slumber. Ruthie had arrived to sit with him. Joan sat beside me in the waiting area—coffee in her hands, cocoa in mine.

“He’ll be fine, honey. I’m so glad you came here, that was good thinking.” I leaned my head on her shoulder and yawned. “He’s very weak. He really hasn’t been sick or anything that you’ve noticed? His levels are just all out of whack.”

I wanted to tell her everything but I couldn’t. It would probably just put her in danger too, and I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t live with myself if any harm came to her.

“Not that I know of, but you know, Dante’s tough and doesn’t like to complain so maybe he just didn’t say anything.” That, at least, sounded plausible.

“Honey, are you okay? Are you working too hard? I know how you can get about things. Even though it’s such an exciting place, and I do love it there, I have to ask.”

“No, I’m fine, I’m great.” I nodded and smiled. “It’s really . . . great. I’m just worn out from today, that’s all.”

She kissed my forehead. “Of course, dear.”

I dozed off in the lounge with Joan and when Dante finally awoke, around seven in the morning, I went in to say hello and goodbye before heading back to the Lexington. The minute Dante saw me, his heavy eyes did their best to light up, but he was still groggy: “Happy birthday, Haven,” he said, smiling. I looked at Ruthie, confused.

“He doesn’t seem to remember that he’s spent the past several months interning,” she said shaking her head. “They say it’s temporary, I just don’t know. We’ll get him home. You’ll visit, Haven? Maybe that’ll help?”

“I’ll come by tomorrow. Promise.”

She gave me a hug.

Joan drove me all the way back to the Lexington. When I arrived, I asked around and found “Evangeline” in the spa folding towels. It was still early enough that there wasn’t anyone in the waiting area yet, but I wouldn’t have cared if there had been.

“Hey,” I called out as I neared. She looked up, blankly. “If you did ANYTHING to Joan or any of those kids at the hospital—or if you ever do—” I couldn’t quite finish. “Stay away from my friends and stay away from my family.” I couldn’t control myself. I swung my arm out and knocked over the stack of towels she’d just folded and stomped away. She didn’t say a word.

I headed for Lance’s room next. He answered the door, it seemed, even before I knocked. He had followed Dante’s directions and pried open the floorboards beneath their bunk beds. Nestled in among the wood beams, he’d found one of the chocolate boxes we always delivered and opened the lid. Inside it was empty except for a handful of brittle crimson quarter-size stars that had the texture of cinnamon, a handful of dried black bell-shaped flowers, and turquoise pods resembling vanilla beans. A recipe printed in Dante’s script on a sheet of Lexington Hotel stationery urged “In case of emergency, take one of each of these herbs, crush to fine powder, dissolve in water, and drink.”

The next day, Lance and I smuggled Dante’s box out of the hotel on our usual chocolate delivery run. After making our rounds, we took the L all the way out to the end of the line, Evanston, to pay Dante a visit. He smiled warmly at us and was his typical friendly self, but he was far from recovered.

“How are you feeling?” I had nestled myself onto the bed next to him. Lance sat nearby at his desk chair.

He shook his head. “I feel like I’ve been run over. I mean, I’ve never actually been run over but I imagine this is how it would feel. Just like all achy and I’m beat.”

I felt his forehead with the back of my hand. “You’re still feverish, Dan. I don’t like that.”

“Yeah, neither do I. And I’m exhausted, like, all the time. I’ve just been sitting here and watching reruns of the trashiest TV I can find.”

“Well at least you’re back to normal in that respect.” I smiled and he elbowed me in the arm. But I could see him thinking.

“So, tell me again,” he tried. “I was a chef at the Lexington Hotel?” He still didn’t remember anything that had happened since the morning of my birthday.

We tried to tell him again all that we had witnessed and come to learn about the hotel, hoping it would jog his memory, but it was too much—he couldn’t even remember who Etan was. And really, it was so wild, who could blame him? Finally Lance pulled the chocolate box from his bag. “You probably don’t remember, but you told us to find this.” Lance held it out to him and Dante took it in unsteady hands. He opened the lid and touched each of those odd items as though it was the first time he’d seen them, holding them up and studying them. Lance and I traded concerned glances. I’m sure he wondered, like me, whether our friend would ever be returned to us.

I pulled out the sheet of paper inside the box.

“Dan, do you remember writing this recipe out?” He took it from my hands and read it, shaking his head. He looked defeated.

“This sucks, guys. It feels like this stuff belongs to someone else. I know that’s my handwriting, but I’m just drawing a giant blank.”

Lance fidgeted with the mousepad on Dante’s desk. “Well, it says ‘In case of emergency,’” he proceeded gingerly. “I’m not an advocate of totally blind trial and error with these strange herbs or whatever, but it kinda seems like this might qualify as an emergency. What do you guys think?”

“Gotta say, I think you just might be right,” Dante agreed.

“Really, D?” I wasn’t sure I was entirely onboard.

“The man’s got a point, Hav. I mean, I have no memories of months of my life. I still don’t have any idea what they gave to me that knocked me out. There isn’t much I trust anymore, but I do trust myself. And if I wrote this out and collected these things, then maybe it was for a reason like this.”

“I’ll grab some water,” Lance said, already up from his seat.

“Are you sure?” I asked after he’d left the room.

“I promise, Hav, I am. I’m just sick of feeling this way. I know there’s stuff locked up in my mind somewhere that can help us. I just have to get to it.”

Lance returned and Dante followed his own instructions, taking each of the odd ingredients, crushing them to dust between his hands, and sprinkling the powdery remains into his glass of water. “Cheers!” He hoisted the glass in the air and downed it in one long gulp. Seconds later, we watched silently as his eyes registered confusion. “Whoa,” he said finally, slowly. “Okay, so I’m gonna sleep now, but it’s fine, it’s all good. I’ll be back. I bet I will. We’ll see . . .” He trailed off as sleep overtook him. I checked his pulse and found it perfectly normal. We stayed with him until Ruthie came home and then asked her to please call us as soon as he woke up.

On our way to the L, we noticed a stunning creature—a young man with a model’s bone structure and an athlete’s physique— following us those few blocks, boarding our train and then trailing us back to the hotel. We kept our conversation dull and we overexaggerated certain points—“What a shame he has no memory at all,” “doesn’t even know who we are”—but despite our fairly smooth performance, we were chilled to the bone. Our stalker was in the Outfit, and he was obviously there to remind us there really was no escape.

30. You’re Next

Back at the hotel, Lance was eager to show me the work he’d done on that assignment I’d given him. Just as I suspected, he not only had a far nicer cell phone than I did—very slim and full of tricks—but he also happened to know a thing or two about how to take it apart and put it back together again. First, he had me change into the cowl-neck short-sleeved sweater (which I had never liked anyway, but Joan had forced on me) and jeans I had sacrificed for our experiment. He had made a few key alterations to both. For one, he had anchored his cell phone on the inside of the extra material at the sweater’s neckline, sewing a little flap made from one of his old T-shirts as a pocket for it.

“See, so the phone is in place here.” All business, he dug his hand into the neck of my sweater. “And the camera’s eye is lined up through this tiny hole I cut in your sweater—sorry.”

“No, please. This is the most I’ve ever worn this sweater.”

“And so the wire runs from the inside of the sweater down to your jeans and inside your right jean pocket. If you’ll kindly feel inside there—”

I did as I was told: “Wow!” Inside my fingers found a remote control the size of a stick of gum with a doorbell-size pushbutton.

“That’s your remote control.”

“But how—”

“They took the camera away from our office but they left the accessories,” he explained. “So from there, all you have to do is start snapping.”

“Really?” I hit the button a couple times. “That’s so cool.”

“Yeah. And then I’ll e-mail them to myself, print them out, and scrub them off the hard drive of the gallery computer.”

“That’s totally amazing, Lance. Seriously, you’re some kind of genius.”

“Thanks,” he said, proudly. “I try.”

“So, should we test it out?”

In less than half an hour skulking around the Vault, looking like we were just there to hang out, I managed to snap group shots of a slew of the newer Outfit members. We finished up with a stroll through the lobby so I could get a couple of the new girls at the front desk. We would amass a collection of these photos and then, when the time came, I would destroy them.

The next two days we checked in with Ruthie so often, we succeeded in making her more worried than she had already been about Dante. The first two times we called, he was still asleep. It was going on sixteen hours now. The third time we called he showed signs of stirring—a relief. And the fourth time we had her ask him what day it was: “Is it Haven’s birthday?” we heard on the other end of the phone. Our hearts sank. The following day brought no better news: “He still doesn’t seem to have any idea what the Lexington Hotel is,” she said. “And he’s sleeping all the time. It’s just not normal at all. I don’t know what to do.” We didn’t either. Lance and I debated endlessly at what point Dante should be taken back to the hospital, not that we imagined there was much they could do for him there.

Prom was now only two days away, but we had seen shockingly little of Lucian and Aurelia, besides our nighttime spying rituals. But when we keyed into our gallery office, we found a note waiting on our desk in Aurelia’s delicate hand. Just seeing it sent a chill.