Constance (Constance #1)(2)
Picking out clothes from a mountain of dirty laundry—a pair of black jeans and her vintage Rihanna T-shirt from the Anti World Tour (2016, the year of Con’s birth)—Con gave each a forensic sniff and deemed them passable. Keeping it classy, Miss D’Arcy. From the corner, the purple tree watched her silently, speculatively, as if wondering how it had been dragged into this janky scene. That was alright. Con wondered the same thing all the time.
“Who are you here to see?” the nurse at the front desk asked. He was a tall, Nordic-looking man with shaggy alpine hair and eyes too small for his face that gave him a perpetually suspicious squint.
“Zhi Duan,” Con replied.
It spoke volumes that the nurse didn’t recognize her. The first year after the accident, Con had rarely left Zhi’s side. She’d been on a first-name basis with the entire staff, who’d taken pity on her and let her sleep on the chair in the corner of his room. She didn’t remember the exact moment she’d become a disloyal piece of shit. At first, visits had been every other day, then once a week, and now she dreaded even the thought of seeing him.
The nurse asked Con for her name and entered it into the system. He informed her that she was not family. Con would argue that point. Rock band might not be a legally recognized family unit, but it sure as hell should be. Zhi Duan, Stephie Martz, Hugh Balzan, Tommy Diop—they were her family. The family she chose. Bound in love and music and shared tragedy. Now and forever. Even if they were all gone, one way or another.
“Check the exception list. I should be on there,” Con suggested. She’d been on it the last time she’d visited, but when had that been? The summer? The spring? Zhi’s parents lived in Dallas and had always been grateful that someone who cared about their son still visited. Had they found out that she’d stopped coming and revoked her permission?
To Con’s relief, the nurse found her name. “I’ll need your ID and three biometrics.”
“Have as many as you like.” She dutifully submitted a handprint, eye scan, and speech sample, which the nurse compared against the data stored on her ID as well as the facility’s records. The facility had long-running issues with fans sneaking in to take pictures and steal mementos from Zhi’s room. One sixteen-year-old had been caught shaving Zhi’s head, planning to sell locks of his hair online.
Since the accident, a romantic mythology had sprung up about Zhi like weeds around an untended headstone. How his band, Awaken the Ghosts, had been heading into the studio to record its debut album once the tour wrapped up. How their van had jumped the median after a show, killing keyboardist Tommy Diop and bassist Hugh Balzan, and leaving their lead singer, Zhi Duan, in a coma. How they’d been on the verge of stardom and greatness. Con didn’t know about that, but the obsession with Zhi was real. Bootlegs of the band’s shows and demos were shared back and forth online among the fervent. Thousands of posts had been written in fan forums, especially about Zhi, who had been transformed into a tragic poet-musician god. A generational talent cruelly taken before his time.
Fans of the band—cult members when Con wasn’t feeling generous—pilgrimaged from all over to pay their respects. The site of the crash had become a graffiti-stained shrine. The uber-creepy ones with boundary issues even tracked Con down to ask intimate, presumptuous questions about Zhi. They talked about him like they’d known him, which made her vaguely ill. Her memories weren’t roadside curios, three for a dollar, to be pawed through by grubby-fingered tourists. When confronted, she always kept her answers vague and extracted herself quickly, aware that some of the more hard-core fans resented her and Stephie for not having the decency to die in the crash.
The nurse handed over a visitor’s pass. “Lucky timing. He’s been up at Johns Hopkins for the past few weeks. Only just got back a few days ago. Looks like his parents enrolled him in some study the university is running on long-term-care patients.”
In the elevator, she tried to talk herself into leaving. She’d signed in at the front desk. Didn’t that count as visiting? No one would know if she didn’t actually see him. Least of all Zhi himself. When the elevator opened, she meant to get off, but her feet refused to move. It wasn’t until the doors began to close that her hand shot out to hold them open. With a sigh, she got off and went down the long hall.
Zhi’s room was silent apart from the machine that breathed for him and the rhythmic beeping of the monitors. Seeing him like this always broke her heart all over again. She hurried to the window and opened the curtains. Why did they keep it so dark in here? There was a tree in the courtyard, tall and sinewy, that Zhi would have loved. Con made a circuit of the room, straightening up. Not that it was necessary—the staff did an excellent job—but this was her routine to make herself feel like she still played a part in his life. When she had finished tidying, she pulled up a chair beside the bed and took Zhi’s hand. Once, they’d been the calloused hands of a guitarist, but now they were as soft as a newborn’s. She squeezed. He didn’t squeeze back. He never would again.
Persistent vegetative state.
She didn’t think she’d ever heard three uglier words. The first year, she’d clung to the fantasy that if she kept talking and singing to him, her devotion would be rewarded. The more doctors tried to convince her that Zhi’s brain damage was irreversible, that he would never regain consciousness, the more radicalized in her certainty she became. He was special. He had a destiny. They didn’t know him, know his strength. Not like she did. So it would be up to her to help him find his way back. She’d made herself his lighthouse, resolved to keep watch until he came back to her. One day his eyes would flicker open. He would look over to her and smile and ask when they could blow this place. Like in a fucking fairy tale. Could you imagine anyone being so na?ve? But here was the thing, she still was. A pathetically stubborn woman who refused to listen to reason.