The Iron Bangle: He Owns The City That Betrayed Him

Chapter 4: The Miller Wing.

Lily’s hand was so small under the sheet that it barely made a shape.

Jace found it anyway. He slid his fingers under the thin blanket and closed them around hers. Her skin was cold and dry, like paper left out overnight.

The clock above the door said 5:12. The monitor beeped softly. In the corner chair Clara slept curled under her white coat, and Jace had his hood still up from the walk past the nurses’ station.

An oxygen tube ran under Lily’s nose. The blue scarf had slipped off her head, and without it she looked like a baby bird fallen out of a nest.

He lifted her hand to his lips. Faint white lines ran across each of her fingernails, thin and straight, like chalk marks. When he bent close, her breath smelled of garlic.

Hospital food, he had told her last month, pinching his nose to make her giggle.

“I’m here, Lily-bug,” he whispered. “I came.”

Her eyelids fluttered and stayed shut.

“Who let him in?”

A doctor stood in the doorway with a tablet under his arm. He had silver hair and a golf tan. His badge read DR. PAUL REARDON, PEDIATRIC ONCOLOGY.

Clara jerked awake. She saw Jace, and her face went from white to red.

“Mrs. Whitmore warned us about you.” Reardon looked from Jace’s split eyebrow to his wet shoes. “The trailer-park husband.”

“Last month you said remission.” Jace did not let go of Lily’s hand. “You stood right there and said she was getting better.”

“Last month was last month. Her organs are failing.” Reardon tapped the tablet against his palm. “She’s terminal. The family wants her last days to be peaceful. Without you.”

Terminal.

Jace gripped the bed rail with his free hand until the metal bit into his palm. The monitor, the doctor and the room all went far away. There was only Lily’s cold hand in his, and a roaring in his ears like the sea.

“She ate dinner,” he heard himself say. “Ten hours ago she ate dinner. She gave me her strawberry.”

“Security,” Reardon said into the hall.

Two guards came in. The gray-haired one took Jace’s arm.

“Come on, son. Don’t make this hard.”

Jace held on.

“Jace?”

It was a thread of a voice. Lily’s eyes had opened a crack. She found his face and smiled with cracked lips.

“You came,” she breathed.

The younger guard pulled. Jace’s fingers slid out of hers one at a time.

“Jace?” Her voice climbed and shook. “Don’t go. Where are you going? Jace!”

He twisted. He dug his heels into the tile. He grabbed the doorframe, and the young guard peeled his fingers off it one by one.

“I’ll come back!” He was shouting now, his voice cracking, over the guard’s shoulder. “Lily, I’ll come back, I promise, I promise...”

In the corner, Clara pressed both hands over her mouth and did not move.

The ward doors swung shut on Lily’s voice. A lock clicked.

At the elevator, the gray-haired guard let go.

“Mrs. Whitmore said call the cops if you showed up.” He kept his voice low. “I’m not going to. This time.”

The elevator doors opened on a floor Jace had not chosen. He walked. The white tile turned to scuffed green linoleum. Half the ceiling lights were dead, and the other half buzzed. In an empty corridor, a vending machine hummed beside a row of plastic chairs.

He sat down and pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes until he saw red. His shoulders shook. He kept his mouth shut against the sound trying to come out of it.

Terminal.

When he lowered his hands, he was looking at a brass plaque on the opposite wall, tarnished green at the edges.

THE MILLER WING

Donated 2009 by Elias and Mara Miller

“Every child deserves a tomorrow.”

Jace stood up slowly. He crossed the corridor and laid his palm against the cold brass. He traced the E of Elias, then the M of Mara.

Down the hall behind him was the waiting room with the orange chairs, the one where he had sat every second Tuesday for two years with Lily’s head in his lap.

A tear ran down beside his nose and dropped onto his mother’s name.

The bangle grew warm.

It was not the jolt of the motel. It was a slow warmth, like a hand closing over his wrist. Blue light moved in the seam. The warmth climbed into his head, and the corridor was gone.

He stood in an emergency room at night.

He was looking through someone else’s eyes. Small, steady hands in blue gloves pressed on a man’s chest. A woman’s voice gave orders, calm and clear, and people ran to obey. Then the gloves came off, and he felt bone-deep tiredness at the end of a shift. He walked to the black window of a break room, and in the glass he saw a face.

Dark hair tied back. Gray eyes. His eyes.

Someone behind her said something. She smiled, a wide smile that climbed all the way into her tired eyes, and then she laughed.

It was bright and warm and a little too loud.

Jace slid down the wall under the plaque with both hands over his mouth. He was laughing and sobbing at once, and he could not stop either. He did not want to stop. He wanted to stay inside that laugh forever.

Then her knowledge came.

He looked at a crash cart parked down the hall, and the name of every drug in its drawers rose in his mind in her voice. He looked at his own wrist and knew the name of every bone under the skin.

Then, out of all of it, five words came, quiet and firm.

Always look at the nails.

Jace went still.

White lines across a little girl’s fingernails, thin and straight as chalk.

Mees’ lines, his mother’s voice said. Heavy metal. One line for each large dose. They show up weeks later and grow out with the nail.

Garlic on the breath.

Arsenic.

He was running before he knew he had stood up.

He took the stairs three at a time. The pediatric ward doors were still locked, but the nurses’ station faced the hall behind a long glass window. The night nurse’s chair was empty. The computer screen behind the glass was still lit.

WHITMORE, LILY. AGE 9. DX: ACUTE LYMPHOBLASTIC LEUKEMIA.

Jace pressed his forehead to the glass.

Low red cells. Low white cells. Liver numbers climbing. Patient reports pins and needles in both feet.

He read one line further.

BONE MARROW BIOPSY: NOT PERFORMED.

No marrow, no diagnosis, his mother’s voice said, and it had gone hard. You never call it leukemia without the marrow. Never.

Lily, bent over a plastic bucket in the back seat of Ray’s car, while Jace held her scarf away from her face. Lily, crying in the bathroom mirror while her brown hair came out in his hands in soft clumps. Lily, asleep across two orange chairs with the chemo line taped to her arm.

Two years.

Horror spread through his chest slowly, like frost creeping across a window, until he could not feel his hands on the glass.

He shut his eyes and saw her small hand in his again. He saw her thumbnail, and he counted the chalk lines across it, slowly, one at a time, the way she counted at the kitchen table.

One. Two. Three. Four.

Four doses in the last few months. The fourth line sat right at the base of the nail, so close to the skin it had barely begun to grow.

Someone had been poisoning Lily for two years, and the newest line said they had never stopped.