Page 127 of Lock Every Door

I’d embrace it.

I say her name again. A wish repeated. If I keep saying it, maybe it will come true.

“Chloe?”

“No, Jules, it’s me.”

It’s a man, his voice at once familiar and unwanted.

I open my eyes, my vision blurred by whatever it was they gave me. In that watery haze, I see someone in the chair beside the bed. He comes into focus slowly.

Nick.

He wears a new pair of glasses. Basic black instead of tortoiseshell. Beneath the frames, a wicked bruise circles his right eye. The spot where my foot connected with his face. I’d do it again to his other eye if I could. But all I can do now is lie here, a prisoner to his gaze.

“How are you feeling?” he says.

I remain silent and stare at the ceiling.

Nick places a plastic tumbler full of water and a small paper cup on the tray beside the bed. Inside the paper cup are two chalky white pills the size of baby aspirin.

“I brought you something for the pain. We want you to be comfortable. There’s no need to suffer.”

I continue to stay quiet, even though Iamin pain. It burns through my abdomen—a fierce, throbbing agony. I welcome it. That pain is the only thing distracting me from fear and anger and hate. If it goes away, I’ll descend into a dark swamp of emotion from which I might never escape.

Pain equals clarity.

Clarity equals survival.

Which is why I break my silence to ask the question I didn’t have the strength to utter yesterday.

“What did you do to me?”

“Dr. Wagner and I removed your left kidney and transplanted it into a needy recipient,” he says, avoiding using Greta’s name, as if I don’t already know it’s her. “It’s a common procedure. There were no complications. The recipient’s body is responding well to the organ, which is excellent. The older the patient, the more common it is for their body to reject a transplanted organ.”

I muster the strength to ask another question. “Why did you do it?”

Nick gives me a curious look, as if no one has ever asked him that before. I wonder how many people in this same predicament have squandered that opportunity.

“Under normal circumstances, we prefer that donors know as little as possible. It’s better that way. But since these aren’t normalcircumstances, I see no harm in trying to clear up some of yourmisconceptions.”

He hisses the word with clear distaste. As if it’s my fault that he’s being forced to say it.

“In 1918, the Spanish flu came out of nowhere, killing more than fifty million people worldwide,” he says. “To put that in perspective, the Great War going on at the same time killed almost seventeen million. Right here in America, more than half a million people died. As a doctor, Thomas Bartholomew was on the front lines of this particular war. He saw it strike down friends, associates, even family members. The flu didn’t discriminate. It was ruthless. It didn’t care if you were rich or poor.”

I remember that horrible picture I saw. The dead servants lined up on the street. The blankets over their corpses. The dirty soles of their feet.

“What Thomas Bartholomew couldn’t understand was how a millionaire could succumb to the flu as easily as a piece of tenement trash. Shouldn’t the wealthy, by virtue of their superior breeding, be less susceptible than people who have nothing, come from nothing,arenothing? He decided his destiny was to build a facility where important people could live in comfort and splendor while he kept them safe from many of the ailments that afflicted the common class. That’s how the Bartholomew was born. This building was willed into existence by my great-grandfather.”

A memory forces its way into my pain- and drug-clouded mind. Nick and me in his dining room, talking over pizza and beer.

I come from a long line of surgeons, beginning with my great-grandfather.

Another memory quickly follows. The two of us in his kitchen, having my blood pressure checked, Nick distracting me with small talk. After I told him the story behind my name, he shared the obvious fact that Nick was short for Nicholas. What he didn’t tell me—not then, not ever—was his last name.

Now I know it.

Bartholomew.

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