4: 4
After betrayal upon betrayal from my own family, my heart had gone dead.
The doctor came in on his rounds.
He finished my exams, looked satisfied, and started for the door.
"Wait. Why is the blanket damp?"
He came back, folded the blanket open, and nearly jumped out of his skin. He fired a few questions at my mother, and her face went white too.
Only after he'd cleaned and redressed my wounds did he let out a breath and leave.
The next afternoon.
Peter and Marina walked in, fingers laced together.
Marina was glowing, like someone had drenched her in something sweet.
"Bryan, I came to see you."
Peter took a chair. Marina wiped me down.
When he saw my leg had been redressed, his brow tightened at once.
"Marina, if you keep wiping him down like that, I'm going to get jealous."
Marina let out a giggle. "He's my husband. Be good, I'll stay with you again tonight."
When she finished, the call bell at the head of the bed rang. A nurse wanted Marina to go pick up a test report.
Once she was gone, Peter saw no one else was around, so he leaned in close to my face and said, "Bryan, big brother, tell me. If someone were to accidentally unplug your ventilator, what do you think would happen?"
As he spoke, he pulled the ventilator plug out of the wall socket.
In an instant I couldn't draw in air. Suffocation closed over me.
My face went from pale to a bruised blue-purple.
"Go in peace, Bryan. Your mother and Marina don't love you anyway. All of their love is going to be mine."
"I'm off to find Marina. I'll buy her an iced coffee."
With that, Peter walked out whistling.
My mind went hazy fast.
The dark in front of me thickened.
My chest felt like it had hundreds of tons of stone pressing down on it. The pain was terrible.
The place Marina had gone for the report was in another building; the round trip took over ten minutes. That was long enough for me to suffocate to death.
"Mom, Marina, if I die, will you two ever regret what you did to me?"
Just as I was on the edge of death, someone burst in.
"Bryan, I've come back to see you."
It was my father's voice, so warm, so familiar.
More than half an hour later, Marina and Peter came strolling back, drinking their iced coffees.
"Huh?"
They stared at the empty bed, stunned.
"Where's my husband?" Marina went to the doorway and asked a nurse in pink walking past.
"Your husband... isn't he in the room...? Huh, he's gone?"
The nurse was shocked too. "He hasn't been discharged. I'll go pull the surveillance right now."
Marina was uneasy now. She quickly called my mother. "Bianca, Bryan's gone. Did you take him?"
My mother froze. "No. I'm at the store buying groceries. I haven't even been to the hospital today."
At that, Marina panicked and hurried to the nurses' station. "Any luck with the surveillance?"
The nurse in pink called out from inside. "Ms. James, I've got it, come take a look."
Marina went in.
The nurse worked the computer as she talked. "I just got the security captain in the monitor room to pull the footage from the sixth floor of the inpatient ward for the last hour. He packaged the video and sent it over."
As she spoke, she opened the video.
The surveillance feed came up. It showed my room and the hallway outside the door.
The nurse ran it at four times speed.
Before long, the door opened, and Marina walked out of the room toward the elevator.
Then Peter came out, whistling.
The footage kept fast-forwarding.
About fifty minutes after Marina left the room, she and Peter appeared on the video, arm in arm.
Seeing that, the nurse shot them a strange look and muttered, "That vegetative patient is her husband?"
The video ended.
"That's strange. No one went in or out of the room this whole time, so where did my husband go?"
The three of them looked at one another, because from the moment Marina and Peter walked out, no one had entered the room.
"Play it again. You don't need it that fast. And if anyone walks through the hallway, switch it to normal speed."
The nurse played it back the way Marina asked.
During that window, medical staff or patients' family members passed in front of the room a dozen or so times, but none of them went inside.
"Is this some kind of ghost thing?"
The three of them were badly rattled.
"I want to go look at the room."
They went back to the room, but there was nowhere to hide a person in there. The window had a security grille and hadn't been opened.
"Where... where did he go?"
Marina's mind was in a total panic.
The nurse's eyes went wide, and she looked around, terrified. "It doesn't make sense. He's a vegetative patient, he can't do anything for himself. How could he just vanish into thin air?"
Marina paced back and forth and found the plug that had been pulled out. "This plug connects to the ventilator. Why is it lying on the floor here?"
"Peter, you were the last one out. Did you notice anything with Bryan?"
