Chapter Text
The salesman smiled too widely.
His teeth sat perfectly in his mouth, white and unstained, but he moved like a kid with new braces. Uncomfortable with the reality of himself. Bryan used to do the same thing. Lips always torn to shreds because he’d never worked out how to be still and not feel like he was dying. He’d grown up puny and weird - at least, that was how he’d always said it - and it had stuck with him long into adulthood. In a way, Michelle understood. She’d walked with a limp for the first eight years of her life, and she still found herself doing it even now. Old habits burned into the essence of their beings.
He said that he wasn’t a salesman.
Which, in her experience, was what most salesmen said. Saying that he wasn’t was part of the pitch. It was the same play they’d taught her to make at the call centre. Lull someone into a false sense of camaraderie and then the sale felt like a favour. ‘We’re friends,’ you’d say. ‘And what sort of friend would I be if I didn’t help you out?’ At least she’d only been selling shitty internet packages. He was selling a ghost. Or, at least, the promise of one. As if Michelle wasn’t haunted enough every time she tucked her daughter into bed.
“I don’t understand,” she said, hands fidgeting in her lap. “Bryan’s…” Dead? Buried? Lost to a part of her life that she would never be able to claw herself back to? “You told me he was gone.”
When she thought about it, this guy wasn’t all that different from the guy they sent six years ago. Nice suit. Fancy badge. A list of credentials so long that she’d immediately decided he was an asshole. Representatives of the Umbrella Corporation. Last time, he’d turned up with a check and an NDA the size of her forearm. She hadn’t even read it before signing. There were too many bills to pay and too few things in her refrigerator.
Her uncle, the one who stuck layer after layer of aluminium foil over his windows, spent every day posting about them on Facebook. Bio-terrorists, he called them. Murderers. Evil.
All that Michelle knew was that they’d paid for Bryan’s funeral and her daughter’s medical bills and every awful thing that had gone wrong in that first year after he’d died. They were the only ones to apologise for what happened. The only people who treated him like he mattered.
The morning after, when Michelle woke up to an empty bed and the sound of his panicked voice playing over and over in her head, she had to sit there and find out the news with the rest of the fucking country. And the worst part? He was so unimportant to everyone else that she’d had to go searching for answers. She’d spent a week calling number after number. His boss. His boss’s boss. The company that owned the courier service. The hospital that last saw him. What little was left of the Racoon City Police Department. She’d spent hours listening to hold music and praying that, eventually, someone would tell her that he was OK.
They didn’t even care enough to declare him dead.
So, yeah, she’d taken the money and kept her mouth shut.
No matter what people said, they would never make her regret that.
“We were surprised to find that he wasn’t.” The salesman said, reaching into his bag for a plastic folder. Inside were two photos printed on glossy A4 paper. “I wish that I could tell you more. There are things about this that even I’m not authorised to know.” He slid the papers across the table. “But it’s him, Michelle. It’s definitely him.”
She looked anywhere but the table.
“It’s not.”
It looked a lot like him.
Michelle had known Bryan for so long that, sometimes, when she tried to remember him, she got the versions of him mixed up. The awkward smile of the kid she’d met in homeroom. Bashful at the idea of a girl looking at him, let alone caring what he had to say. The round cheeks of the kid kept safe in his nanna’s photo albums. The sunken, grey bags under the eyes of the young man who kissed her for the first time under the fire escape of her first apartment. A soggy pizza box wedged in the crook of his arm. The sleep in his eyes when he’d kissed her goodbye that morning. The exasperation in his voice when she’d spoken to him on the phone that night. The peacefulness of the man he’d never gotten to be.
She’d ended up with all of his childhood photos when his nanna died. Spent night after night scouring through them for things she might have forgotten. Comparing him to their daughter. He’d left so much of himself behind without meaning to.
It was obsessive, really. Three years of healing ripped apart in a week. In the end, she’d had to lock them away. Had to lock him away.
“I know this is hard to process.”
No.
Losing Bryan had been hard to process. Giving birth alone had been hard to process. Raising a kid he didn’t even want in the shitty apartment he’d picked out for them had been hard to process.
She blinked hard and swallowed the lump in her throat.
“I think you should leave.”
The man’s smile faltered. “Wait, Michelle…”
She shook her head. “This is cruel.”
“Would you like to see him?”
He didn’t wait for her to respond. He dug around in his bag for a long moment before pulling out a tablet and tapping at the screen. It was frantic. The way she’d tapped her fingers against her desk when a sale was escaping her.
When he held it out to her, it was playing a live feed from a security camera. Resolution so clear that she could see every detail of the hospital room. The sterile white walls. The reflection on the glass that surrounded the bed. The machine, beeping softly, and all of the wires draped over the white sheets on the bed. So many wires that it made her chest tight.
There was a man in the bed.
Broken and bruised and looking closer to death than he had even in those terrible years at the start of their relationship, but undeniably him.
“Would you like to talk to him?”
When she was a kid, Michelle’s dad used to take her fishing. He’d always wanted a son, and she’d always wanted to make him happy, so it worked out well enough. But she’d never been able to understand why the fish fell for the bait over and over again. Surely nothing looked so good that you’d impale yourself for it.
Nodding wordlessly, Michelle watched as the salesman fished a phone out of his pocket and dialled a number. Seconds later, a nurse appeared on the feed. Cheerful as she smiled at the camera and said Bryan’s name. He stirred a little. Groggy from whatever they’d given him. Fuck. She needed to check what they’d given him. He couldn’t have the strong stuff. No matter how much he asked for it. She needed to…
The thoughts died down as the nurse placed the phone on the bed by Bryan’s head and Michelle heard the sound of his laboured breathing. The salesman held the phone out to her, and she cradled it between her hands. Briony had come early. So small that they’d kept her in the NICU for almost three months. It had been hard to learn how to hold something so precious without hurting it, but Michelle had done it.
“Bryan?” Her voice was shaking. “Baby?”
The glimpses of his face visible between the bandages twitched. Lips parting as if he was trying to speak. But he didn’t. Maybe couldn’t.
What do you say to a ghost? Michelle had spent years summoning him in her dreams, but it hadn't prepared her for the reality of it. “It’s OK, baby, you’re OK.” The machine beeped louder. Its pace quickened until the nurse finally glanced up at the camera. “What’s happening?” Michelle asked, pained. “What’s she doing?”
The feed cut out moments before the scream. So raw that it made her flinch. Then the line followed suit, leaving a silence so deafening it made her ears ring. The man didn’t move. Not even when she let the phone fall from her hands. It bounced twice on her wooden floor. She wanted to dive after it. To crawl through the screen and hold Bryan the way she did Briony when she had nightmares.
“Where is he?” She asked after a long moment.
“One of our secure facilities.
“Where?”
Her mom would watch Briony if she asked. Or Katie. She was always desperate to hang out with her best niece. Work would understand. She was good at her job. An asset to the company. She could go and figure the rest of it out later. She needed to go. Had to see him.
“Michelle,” the man said softly. “He’s very sick at the moment.”
And? She’d seen him sick before. Through withdrawal and fevers and the fucking flu he managed to catch every year without fail. She’d seen him miserable and grieving and exhausted. She’d seen him angry and petulant. Seen every fucking side of him. She’d planned to marry him once upon a time. In sickness and health. Didn’t they understand that?
“I want to see him.”
The man nodded, a pitying smile on his face.
It suited him better.
"Then we'll make that happen."