The Collective(80)
Epilogue
One month later
A hospital isn’t the place you want to be these days, what with all this talk of the virus. They’re floating the idea of shutting down production on Protect and Serve as soon as a week from now, and if a TV set isn’t safe, a New York City hospital certainly isn’t. Luke still feels he should be here, though. He was requested, after all.
As he walks through the lobby at New York–Presbyterian, Luke is wearing latex gloves and one of those N95 masks Nora has been hoarding. It still feels extreme to him, all this protective gear just to take the subway. But the whole germaphobe thing is getting to be more and more normal—just this morning he saw a couple of guys on the street, hocking hand sanitizer of all things.
Maybe normal isn’t the word.
“Do it for the baby,” Nora had said this morning as she pressed the mask into his hand. And of course, he’d relented. A father-to-be can’t just think of his own vanity. Luke smiles whenever he thinks of that phrase—father-to-be. He never believed it would refer to him, but that’s the way life is—unpredictable, unplannable, for better or for worse. You have to smile on those rare times when it’s for better.
A month ago he and Nora had planned to go up to Camille’s and tell her about the baby. Luke had pictured the three of them toasting with champagne and sparkling cider, the previous episode of The Bachelor playing on Camille’s DVR. He’d envisioned them getting together in the future, Camille helping them choose a name, eating cake at Nora’s baby shower. . . . Once the baby was born, Luke had thought, it might pull Camille out of the dark cloud she’d wrapped herself in. It might bring back some of her old self, the Camille who Luke had never fully known.
But that’s not what had happened. Camille had killed herself. Luke had been in the same house with her when it happened, passed out from accidentally drinking some of the fentanyl cocktail she prepared. That’s what destroyed him most. He hadn’t left, like her friend Wendy. He could have saved her had he been awake when she came home. But he wasn’t. From what police put together, Camille went upstairs, drank the rest of the suicide mixture, and then, as she was starting to slip out of consciousness, she lost her footing, tumbled downstairs, and died almost instantly. The fall killed her before the drugs could. And he’d been powerless to save her, either way. . . .
“I hope you’re happier now, Cam.” As Luke takes the elevator up to the wing where Tamara Dorsey is recovering, he says it out loud. He often speaks out loud to Camille these days. Nora’s caught him doing it a few times, though she’s been kind enough not to say anything.
There’s a crowded waiting room down the hall from where Tamara is staying, and Luke heads over there, sits down on a vinyl couch, and picks up a two-day-old newspaper, a headline about the still-missing Gary Kimball. “I think he escaped,” says the woman next to him. “They were totally going to arrest him, you know.”
When Luke looks up at the woman, she peers around his mask. “Oh my gosh, you’re Luke Charlebois.” She gives him a shy smile. “I’m Billie Dorsey. Tamara’s mother.”
Tamara Dorsey is a lung transplant recipient. Luke often visits patients like her as an Organ Donor Awareness (ODA) spokesperson. But Tamara specifically requested him, which makes this visit more important. Luke takes Billie’s hand in both of his. Screw elbow-bumping.
“Your organization saved my daughter’s life,” Billie says.
Tears spring into Luke’s eyes—something that never happened to him in the past, but has been close to constant since Camille’s death, his emotions churning so close to the surface. He swats the tears away and hopes Billie doesn’t notice. He’s always prided himself on being the calm in the storm, the strong shoulder to cry on. As insipid as his lines often are on the show, he was cast as stoic Sarge for a reason. But now he’s a mess half the time, his “chill” gone to hell. Billie doesn’t seem to mind, though. Her eyes aren’t exactly dry either.
“Both of her lungs were punctured in the accident.” Her jaw tenses. “Drunk driver. I’m so grateful Tamara made it, but my son . . . He was in the car with her. They couldn’t save him.”
“Oh . . .”
She takes a breath. “It’s really awful to feel this powerless.”
Luke watches her face, how it changes and darkens, that crumbling behind her eyes. It’s as though he’s looking at Camille, and he wants to pull her to him, to hug the pain away.
A nurse steps into the waiting room. “Ms. Dorsey?” she says.
Billie pats Luke’s shoulder. “Are you ready to come with me and meet Tamara?”
“Absolutely.”
Luke follows the nurse out of the waiting room. He turns to thank Billie, but she’s still back there, talking to someone—a silver-haired woman with a telegenic look. The woman presses something into Billie’s hand—a business card, he thinks, and Luke feels the most powerful sense of déjà vu. He’s seen that woman before, somewhere. Maybe on TV.
Acknowledgments
My enduring gratitude goes out to my agent of fifteen years (How can that be true?!), Deborah Schneider, and of course to everyone at William Morrow, particularly Liate Stehlik, Maureen Cole, Kaitlin Harri, Mireya Chiriboga, and my absolutely wonderful editor, Lyssa Keusch. Big thanks from across the pond to the great Francesca Pathak at Orion and to my fabulous UK agent, Alice Lutyens.