Because my boyfriend was jealous of a seventy-year-old homosexual.
An ambulance whizzed by on Jane’s right. She followed it up the exit. She saw the Northwestern Memorial Hospital sign glowing in the distance.
“Jane?” The ambulance siren had woken Andrew. “What are you doing?”
“Nick told me to take you to the hospital.” She pushed up the turn signal, waited for the light.
“Jane—” Andrew started coughing. He covered his mouth with both hands.
“I’m just doing what Nick told me to do,” she lied. Her voice was shaking. She had to keep strong. They were so close. “He made me promise, Andrew. Do you want me to break my promise to Nick?”
“You don’t—” he had to stop to catch his breath. “I know what you’re—that Nick didn’t—”
Jane looked at her brother. He reached out, his fingers gently touching her neck.
She glanced into the mirror, saw the bruises from Nick’s hands strangling her. Andrew knew what had happened in the bathroom, that Jane had chosen to stay with him.
She realized now that Nick must have given Andrew the same ultimatum. Andrew had not driven to New York with Nick. He had stayed at the farmhouse with Jane.
She told her brother, “We’re quite a pair, aren’t we?”
He closed his eyes. “We can’t,” he said. “Our faces—on the news—the police.”
“It doesn’t matter.” Jane mumbled a curse at the red light, then another at herself. The van was the only vehicle in sight. It was the middle of the night and she was obeying traffic laws.
She pressed the gas and blew through the light.
“Jane—” Andrew broke off for another coughing fit. “Y-you can’t do this. They’ll catch you.”
Jane took another right, followed another blue sign with a white H on it.
“Please.” He rubbed his face with his hands, something he used to do when he was a boy and things got too frustrating for him to handle.
Jane coasted through another red light. She was on autopilot now. Everything inside of her was numb again. She was a machine as much as the van, a mode of conveyance that would take her brother to the hospital so he could die peacefully in his sleep.
Andrew tried, “Please. Listen to—” Another coughing fit took hold. There was no rattle, just a straining noise, as if he was trying to suck air through a reed.
She said, “Try to save your breath.”
“Jane,” he repeated, his voice no more than a whisper. “If you leave me, you have to leave me. You can’t let them catch you. You have to—” His words broke off into more coughing. He looked down at his hand. There was blood.
Jane swallowed back her grief. She was taking him to the hospital. They would put a tube down his throat to help him breathe. They would give him drugs to help him sleep. This was likely the last conversation they would ever have.
She told him, “I’m sorry, Andy. I love you.”
His eyes were watering. Tears slid down his face. “I know that you love me. Even when you hated me, I know that you loved me.”
“I never hated you.”
“I forgive you, but—” He coughed. “Forgive me, too. Okay?”
Jane pushed the van to go faster. “There’s nothing to forgive you for.”
“I knew, Janey. I knew who he was. What he was. It’s my—” he wheezed. “Fault. My fault. I’m so...”
Jane looked at him, but his eyes were closed. His head tilted back and forth with the motion of the van.
“Andrew?”