She paused. “And she knows.” The silence on the other end lasted 4 seconds. “Don’t leave the estate tonight,” he said.
“I wasn’t planning to,” she said. She sat in the staff room and waited. Outside, Chicago moved on in its indifferent, enormous way.
The city that had taught her over 25 years that no door stayed locked forever if you were patient enough and smart enough and willing to find the corridor behind the wall.
She’d found the corridor. Now she needed to make sure no one sealed it back up before it could matter.
The call from Northwestern Memorial came at 6:14 the next morning. Imani was already awake.
She’d spent the night in the estate staff room on a narrow couch that DeMarco had pulled from a storage closet without commentary and she’d slept in the particular shallow way of someone whose brain refuses to fully disengage.
She’d heard every shift in the house, every creak of the settling structure, every car that moved on the private drive.
When her phone lit up with the hospital’s number, she was sitting upright before she’d consciously decided to move.
“Ms. Osai?” The voice on the other end belonged to a nurse she recognized. A woman named Bernadine who had been managing Reuben’s dialysis schedule for 18 months and who only called this early when the news was the kind that couldn’t wait for business hours.
“I’m calling about your brother. He was brought in by ambulance about 2 hours ago.
There were complications with last night’s session. His blood pressure dropped significantly and he lost consciousness before the EMTs arrived.
He’s stable now, but we’ve moved him to the ICU for observation.” Imani stood. She was already looking for her jacket.
“Is he conscious?” “He came around about 40 minutes ago. He’s asking for you.” “I’ll be there in 45 minutes.”
She left DeMarco a note on the staff room table, three lines, her brother’s name, the hospital, her cell, and she walked out of the estate in the gray 6:00 a.m.
Light and took the first ride share she could get, watching Chicago unscroll past the window as the driver moved south and then west, the city transitioning from the wide stone wealth of the north side to the denser, more particular streets of the neighborhoods that didn’t make the travel guides.
Reuben was on the fourth floor of the ICU wing in a room that was small and very white and full of the specific quiet of medical equipment doing its patient, impersonal work.
He was propped up slightly in the bed, eyes open, wearing the expression of someone who was embarrassed about what had happened to them.
He was 22. He looked in the hospital bed younger than that. “Hey,” he said.
