You Don't Own Me: A Bad Boy Mafia Romance (The Russian Don Book 2) (16 page)

Time passes by slowly, tearing us to pieces. The event is unredeemable,

almost like an ancient and cursed action.

-Giancarlo Signorini

Zane

A
fter Daisy and her mother leave I spiral into something akin to madness. I become highly-strung, restless, prone to fits of violent rages, and lose all interest in business. When I undertake it, it is without pleasure and reluctantly. I don’t even know why I do it any more. Money is wasted on me. I have no real use for it as I have no desire to do anything. I stay away from society, hiding from everyone, and hating everything.

I haven’t even played the piano.

I jump when the phone rings and answer it with my heart banging in my chest until I find out the reason for the call has nothing to do with her. When I go to visit her I pause, every nerve in my body trembling, before I enter her hospital room. I’m terrified I might find that she has stopped breathing.

I am shit scared I will lose my little fish.

My home has become a prison, and some nights while I am wandering alone in this vast house I feel like Michelangelo’s envelope of skin. Tortured, empty and suffering endlessly.

Once I went to confession.

The priest had an easy answer.

Repent.

‘Will that bring her back?’ I asked.

‘Well, no, but it will save your soul.’

I don’t care about my fucking soul. That’s irretrievably damned. Everything that is still sane in my body tells me it can’t be that easy. Say I’m sorry and wipe out all the pain and suffering I’ve caused? No, no, no. That’s a fool’s game. Her sister is right. This is my punishment. A living hell. I walked out of God’s house even more desperate than when I entered it.

In the end it is Noah who holds out a rope for me to climb out of my deep darkness. He arranges for me to go to Nimes in France to meet with a very brave Frenchwoman called Bernadette. She lives in a house she custom built, and named
Mas du bel
athlét
e dormant
— the House of the Beautiful Sleeping Athlete
.

Her story started when her husband, Jean-Pierre Adams, a famous footballer, went for routine knee surgery to repair a sports-related injury. He never woke up from the anesthesia. He was thirty-four years old and that happened thirty-three years ago.

A part of me doesn’t want to meet her. I refuse to believe that Dahlia won’t wake up in the next few days or weeks, but another part of me knows that I can learn a lot from her. Dahlia has just been moved out of ICU and I don’t want to keep her in hospital a day longer than necessary. I know I can get a better and a more dedicated staff to care for her at home, and I am terrified she will succumb to one of these virulent strains of antibiotic resistant bacteria that exist in hospitals. Dr. Medhi’s warning about pneumonia still sends shivers down my back.

Bernadette is seventy-two years old, but her nails are painted red, her make-up is immaculate, and her blonde hair beautifully coiffured. If I saw her in the street I would not have picked her out to be the extraordinary woman who has dedicated her thirty-three years of taking care of her vegetative husband in the hope that he will eventually wake up.

She tells me they met at a dance in the 1960s. The memory makes her smile. ‘He was
joie de vivre
in human form’ she says wistfully.

Now her husband feels, smells, hears and jumps when a dog barks, but he cannot see, crack a joke, laugh, or dance.

Her day starts before seven. After a solitary breakfast it becomes a mix of changing clothes, shaving, preparing and blending food, feeding him, helping him go to the toilet. Sometimes when he has a bad night she spends the night with him too.

She takes me to his room and something inside me dies. He has hardly aged but for a few white hairs. However, he is a shell of the vibrant
joie de vivre
man in the photographs she showed me. He lies there as still as a breathing corpse. I simply cannot imagine this life for Dahlia and me.

‘He can recognize the sound of my voice,’ she says looking at my aghast face.

I turn towards her in surprise. ‘Really?’

‘Yes,’ she confirms.

‘How can you tell?’

‘When you love someone you can tell,’ she says with conviction.

‘I see,’ I say politely.

‘Yes, that is why you must keep talking to her. It is love that heals beyond all else.’

At the end of my visit I take her hand in mine to thank her for agreeing to see me, and she grasps my hand with both of hers and says, ‘It is worth keeping her alive, Zane. Medical science evolves. If one day they know what to do with her, you will be ready. One day she will come out of it.’

In two hours I am back in England and I go straight to the hospital. I walk in on a nurse washing Dahlia and it is almost too painful to watch. To see those beautiful limbs that had been so full of life and vitality handled as if they belonged to an inert puppet. The nurse looks up at me and smiles in an encouraging fashion.

‘I’m going to clean her face now. Often it will stimulate them to open their eyes when we perform intimate things like brushing their teeth or shaving for the men.’

I move closer and stare at the nurse as she squeezes water out of a piece of yellow sponge and gently starts to clean around the life support machine tube. I hold my breath as she lays her thumb on Dahlia’s temple and wipes her closed eyes. My heart clenches with hope.

This is it. She is going to open her eyes.

But of course, she does not.

The nurse looks at me, her expression both disappointed and reassuring. ‘It can happen anytime. You know, the best thing you can do by the bedside of a loved one in a coma is to talk to them. They can hear you. Tell them you love them. Let them know you’re going to stay with them. You’re not giving up on them. Offer them hope.’

The next day I begin to make the necessary arrangements to move Dahlia back to the house.

I hire two twenty-four hour nurses to take turns to watch her and to move her every hour so she doesn’t have bedsore or skin problems. I also contact a kinesiologist recommended by Dr. Medhi to ensure her lungs are clear and her muscles exercised to avoid choking and atrophying.  

I also hire a professional to come to the house and make a list of everything that needs to be done before a patient with Dahlia’s needs can be catered to. He gives us a long list. It runs from a bathroom for the nurses with hot and cold water to a reputable back-up generator for the life support machine in the event there is any kind of disruption to the electrical supply, to the best carbon based air filters on the market.

Going on his recommendation I decide to house Dahlia on the ground floor in the living room with the French doors. Once the location is decided, my secretary organizes a team of workers to come in and build a bathroom in there. They are also told to move the piano from its present location to Dahlia’s new room. She wanted to hear me play. She’s going to hear me play.

Because I am prepared to pay whatever it takes for quicker service and fly in everything that is needed from any part of the world, the house is ready for Dahlia in five days’ time.

Tomorrow my little fox comes home.

Stella

F
or a long second I stand outside the door to Dahlia’s new living quarters, close my eyes, and take a deep breath. Then I open the door and sail into the room.

‘Hello, Sleepyhead,’ I call cheerfully.

The nurse stands and smiles. I return the smile. ‘You must be Corrine,’ I say.

‘And you must be Stella,’ she says pleasantly.

‘At your service.’

‘I’ll be outside,’ she says, and heads for the door.

‘You might as well take a break and go to the gym or something. I’ll be at least an hour,’ I tell her.

‘Thank you. I might have a quick swim.’

She leaves and I go up to the bed and give a loud smack on Dahlia’s cheek. I run my eyes over her face. Her hair is starting to grow and it has been neatly combed. I pick up her hand and her fingernails are short and nicely filed, but bare, like a child’s. The sight stirs me. She used to love her nail polish.

My chin trembles.

I still can’t believe this terrible fate has befallen her. If only I had not forced her to go in my place that evening. I feel the tears sting at the back of my eyes, but I grit my teeth and plaster a smile on my face even though she can’t see it.

‘You’ll never guess what I brought for you. Perfume and makeup. Yes, yes, I know what you’re going to say, nobody is going to see you etc., etc., but honestly you really shouldn’t let yourself go like this,’ I say chattily.

Opening my bag, I take out a brand new container of eye shadow.

‘All of this is dermatologically tested so it is kosher for sleepyheads.’ Carefully I apply a very subtle amount of brown eye shadow, blend it with a bit of highlighter, and stand back to look at the effect.

‘Oh wow. You won’t believe how good I am at this.’

I dig into my bag.

‘Now this is raspberry pink lip gloss. It’s raspberry flavored, just in case you want to have a little lick, or … Zane does,’ I say, and apply a coat on her lips, working carefully around the tube in her mouth. I stand back.

‘Oh yes. Ten times better.’

Then I open a box of blusher and rub a tiny amount on each pale cheek. Amazing how quickly she lost her lovely color. I take my hand away and regard my handiwork critically.

‘You look amazing. I really am in the wrong profession. I should be a beautician. I thought about getting you nail varnish, but decided maybe that’s not such a good idea. You know, the fumes and stuff. If you want to have nice nails, I suggest you get your American ass out of that bed quick.’

She says nothing, just the steady whoosh of her ventilator, so I reach again into my bag. ‘Look what else I got you.’

I slip a bracelet made out of organic cotton with little pink love hearts on it that reads HUG ME.

‘Hmmm … it really suits you, Dahlia. I’m really glad I got it now. I found it at a new shop that opened around the corner from us. It was so pretty I got us each one. I’m wearing mine now too.’  I hold my wrist out, turning it, as though she is watching.

I put all the cosmetics back into my bag and sit down next to her.

‘Mark came around. He’s really cut up about what happened to you. He even cried. I was livid with him and I had planned to punch him in the throat when he walked through the door, but I took one look at his face and all my anger died away. He looked terrible.’

I stare at her fingers. For a second I am sure her middle finger moved. I stand and watch it carefully while I speak

‘I started to feel sorry for him. I saw how destroyed he is by it all and he did mean well. It must be awful to know you caused the person you love so much damage. Anyway, we went out for coffee, and we talked about you the whole time. It’s like we’re connected. We’re both survivors of a tornado called Dahlia. Both of us connected by our guilt. I keep thinking what if I had insisted you switch off your phone when I switched mine off.’

I am babbling nonsense and staring so hard at her finger I don’t even blink.

‘He told me everything. How he was part of a police force investigating some guy called Lenny, and while they had him under surveillance they found out that he was plotting to get rid of Zane, and how he happened to see you coming out of Zane’s house that time you went in my place. It was a bit creepy but he had such a thing for you, he followed you home, and then, pretended to bump into you at the supermarket the next day. I know how it sounds, but at heart, he’s a really nice guy. He is dying to come and visit you, but of course, Zane won’t ever allow it.’

I never take my eyes off her fingers, but they never move again. It must have been my imagination. Disappointed, I resume my seat.

‘Not that I blame Zane for holding him responsible. I did too. You should know that I’ve changed my mind about Zane, too. I believe he really loves you. He’s like all cold and distant, but I can feel how much he loves you. From what I have seen of Zane, I know now that you’re never coming back to stay with me. It’s obvious as hell both of you are going to get married and play happy families so I’ve got myself a flat mate. She’s from this unpronounceable little village in Ghana.’

I sigh unconsciously and quickly make my voice bright and peppy again.

‘She’s all right, I guess. I took her to Jamie’s the other night, but she doesn’t really drink. She had one glass of white wine all night, and she doesn’t like the music there either. So really, I desperately need you to wake up and come for a girls’ night out with me.’

Zane

I come into the room and the nurse stands up, smiles politely and leaves. I wait until she closes the door before I approach the bed. I see instantly that Dahlia is wearing makeup. I can only imagine that Stella must have dolled her up. I go up to her. The sight is bittersweet:  she looks so beautiful, like Snow White lying in her glass box, but I can’t wake her up, take her in my arms.

I go really close so I can feel the heat of her skin, and watch the tiny pulse in her throat beating. She’s not gone yet. She’s still alive. I just have to reach in and find her.

‘You look beautiful tonight,’ I tell her. ‘Want to listen to some music?’

Of course, she doesn’t answer. I go to the piano, open the lid and begin to play for her.