Norton’s gaze tightened on his face. ‘You call me if anything—’
‘Yeah. I’ll call you. Go get some rest.’
For just a moment, something indefinable passed between the two of them in the dimly lit width of the corridor. Then Norton nodded, clamped his mouth tight and headed away down the corridor.
Carl watched him go with folded arms.
Later, sitting by her bed in the bluish gloom of the night lights, flanked by the quiet machines, he thought he felt Elena Aguirre slip silently into the room behind him. He didn’t turn around. He went on watching Sevgi’s sallow, washed-out face on the pillow, the barely perceptible rise and fall of her breathing beneath the sheet. Now he thought Aguirre was probably close enough to put a cool hand on the back of his neck.
‘Wondered when you’d show up,’ he said quietly.
Sevgi washed awake, alone, left beached by the receding tide of the endorphins, and she knew with an odd clarity that it was time. The once vertiginous terror was gone, had collapsed in on itself for lack of energy to sustain it. She was, finally, more weary, more miserably angry and more in pain than she was scared.
It was what she’d been waiting for.
Time to go.
Outside the window of her room, morning was trying to get in. Soft slant of sunlight through the gap in the quaint hand-pull curtains. Waiting between endorphin surges for night to drag itself out the door had seemed like an aching, gritty forever. She lay there for a while longer, watching the hot patch of light creep onto the bed at her feet and thinking, because she wanted to be sure.
When the door opened and Carl Marsalis stepped into the room, the decision was as solid in her head as it had been when she woke.
‘Hi there,’ he said softly. ‘Just been up the hall for a shower.’
‘Lucky fucking bastard,’ she said throatily, and was dismayed at how deep, how bitter her envy of that simple pleasure really was. It made her feelings over Rovayo look trivial by comparison.
Time to go.
He smiled at her, maybe hadn’t caught the edge in her voice, maybe had and let it go.
‘Can I get you anything?’ he asked.
The same question he asked every time. She held his gaze and mustered a firm nod.
‘Yeah, you can. Call my father and Tom in here, will you?’
The smile flickered and blew out on his face. He stood absolutely still for a moment, looking down at her. Then he nodded and slipped out.
As soon as he was gone, her pulse began to pound, up through her throat and in her temples. It felt like the first couple of times she ever had to draw her weapon as a patrol officer, the sudden, tilting comprehension that came with a street situation about to go bad. The terror of the last decaying seconds, the taste of irrevocable commitment.
But by the time he came back with the other two, she had it locked down.
‘I’ve had enough,’ she told them, voice a dried-up whisper scarcely louder in the room than it was in her own head. ‘This is it.’
None of them spoke. It wasn’t like this was a surprise.
‘Baba, I know you’d do this for me if you could. Tom, I know you would too. I chose Carl because he can, that’s all.’
She swallowed painfully. Waited for the ache it made to subside. Hiss/click of the machines around her across the silence. Outside in the corridor, the hospital’s working day was just getting underway.
‘They’ve told me they can keep me going like this for at least another month. Baba, is that true?’
Murat bowed his head. He made a trapped sound, somewhere between throat and chest. He jerked a nod. Tears fell off his eyes onto the sheets. She found suddenly, oddly, that she felt worse for him than she did for herself. Abruptly, she realised that the fear in her was almost gone, squeezed out of the frame with pain and tiredness and straightforward irritation with it all.
Time to go.
‘I’m not going to go on like this for another month,’ she husked. ‘I’m bored, I’m sick and I’m tired. Carl, I told you this felt like a wall rushing at me?’
Carl nodded.
‘Well, it isn’t rushing any more. It’s all slowed down to sludge. I’m sitting here looking at where I’ve got to go, and it looks like fucking kilometres of hard ground to crawl on my hands and fucking knees. I won’t do that. I don’t want to play this fucking game any more.’
‘Sev, are you—’ Norton stalled out.
She smiled for him. ‘Yeah, I’m sure. Been thinking it through for long enough. I’m tired, Tom. I’m tired of spending half my time stoned, and the other half waking up in pain to realise I’m still not fucking dead, that I’ve still got that part to go. It’s time to just get on with it, just get it done.’
She turned to Carl again.
‘Have you got it?’
He took out the slippery white packet and held it out to her. Light from the brightening morning outside came in and glimmered on the slick plastic covering. Letting go of the light was going to be the hardest thing. Sunlight broke in and danced about the room when they pulled the curtains each morning, and it was almost worth not quite being dead each morning because of it. It was what she clung to as she rode the long troughs and swells of dreaming and back-to-real every night. She’d hung on this long because of it. Might even have hung on a little longer, a few more mornings, if she wasn’t so fucking weary.
‘Baba.’ Her voice was tiny, she had to struggle to keep it even. ‘Is this going to hurt me?’
Murat cleared his throat wetly. He shook his head.
‘No, canim. It’ll be like…’ He gritted his teeth to keep from sobbing. ‘Like going to sleep.’
‘That’s good,’ she whispered breathlessly. ‘I could use some decent sleep.’
She found Carl with her eyes. She nodded, and watched him tear open the package. His hands moved efficiently, laying out the component parts of the kit. He barely seemed aware of the actions – she guessed he’d done similar on enough battlefields in the past. She glanced across to Tom Norton, found him weeping.
‘Tom,’ she said gently. ‘Come here and hold my hand. Baba, you come round here. Don’t cry, Baba. Please don’t cry, any of you. You’ve got to be happy I’m not going to hurt any more.’
She looked at Carl. No tears. His face was black stone as he prepped the spike, held it up one-handed to the light, while his other hand touched warm and callus-fingered on the crook of her arm. He met her eyes and nodded.
‘You just tell me when,’ he said.
She looked around at their faces once more. Made them a smile each, squeezed their hands. Then she found his face again, and clung to it.
‘I’m ready,’ she whispered.
He bent over her. Tiny, cold spike into her arm, held there a moment by the overlaying warmth of his fingers, and then gone. He swabbed, applied something cool and pressed down. She arched her neck to get closer to him, brushed her paper dry lips across the rasp of his unshaven cheek. Breathed in his scent and lay back as the beautiful, aching warmth spread through her body, inking out the pain.
Waited for what came next
Sunlight outside.
She wanted to look sideways at the slanting angle it made, but she was just too sleepy now to make the effort. Like her eyes just wouldn’t move in their sockets any more. It felt like a weekend from her youth in Queens, crawling into bed Sunday morning just past dawn, weary from the long night out clubbing across the river. Taxi home, girlish hilarity leaching out to a reflective comedown quiet as they cruised through silent streets, dropping off along the way. Creeping up to the house, scrape of the recog fob across the lock and of course there’s Murat in pyjamas, already up and in the kitchen, trying to look scandalised and failing dismally. She grins her impish grin, steals white cheese crumbs and an olive off his plate, a sip of tea from his glass. His hand cuffs through her hair, tousles it and tugs her head gently into an embrace. Bear-hug squeeze, and his smell, the rasp of his stubble across her cheek. Then, climbing the stairs to her room, yawning cavernously, almost tripping over her own feet. She pauses at the top, looks back and he’s standing there at the foot of the stairs, watching her go with so much pride and love in his face that out of nowhere it shunts aside the comedown weariness and makes her heart ache like a fresh cut.