I Died the Day My Husband's Girlfriend Did a Magic Trick novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Eleven Minutes

Abel forces the ambulance while Imogen sells the rescue as part of the act, backstage Keegan and Linus see the body and their smiles drop, and at the hospital Keegan asks the doctor not to keep her alive.

The man in the black jacket lifted my body out of the box as if it weighed nothing.

Blood ran down his sleeves and onto the boards.

He laid me flat on the stage, tipped my head back, and started pushing on my chest.

"One, two, three, four," he counted, loud enough for the back row.

Every push dragged me an inch closer to the floor.

Imogen stepped up to the microphone and put on her brightest voice. "And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a volunteer from the audience! Give him a hand!"

The applause was loud and warm.

Someone whistled.

"Call 911," the man said between compressions, without looking up. "Now, or I'll take your phone and do it myself."

"Abel," said the old woman in the silver braid.

She had climbed the steps without anyone noticing, and she was holding her own phone to her ear.

"It's ringing, honey. Keep going."

Imogen leaned down to her, still smiling for the crowd. "Hattie, dear, you'll frighten the children."

"Imogen, I've buried the mothers of half this audience," Hattie said. "Go and stand somewhere else."

Imogen straightened.

For the first time since I'd known her, she didn't have an answer.

The curtain came across with a long, tired rattle, and the laughing finally stopped, because the people in the seats could no longer see.

I heard feet on the steps.

"Cora, enough," Keegan said.

He walked through the gap in the curtain with his jaw set, already tired of me.

Then he saw the stage.

The smile slid off his face.

He looked at the blood, and then at my open eyes, and then at the man kneeling over me.

"What are you doing to my wife?"

"Keeping her heart going," Abel said. "Be quiet, or go and stand with her friend."

"She's acting," Keegan said. His voice cracked in the middle of the word. "She does this. She always does this."

Nobody answered him.

Linus came through the curtain behind him.

Imogen caught him by the shoulders before he took a second step.

"Don't look, sweetheart. Look at me."

She turned his face into her jacket and held his head there with one hand.

"Is it ketchup?" Linus asked, muffled.

"Yes," Imogen said. "It's ketchup."

I was at the ceiling again, screaming his name, and he didn't look up once.

Abel counted into the fifth minute, the seventh, the ninth.

Sweat ran down his face. Hattie held a folded coat under my head and hummed something under her breath, and I realized she was keeping time for him.

At the eleventh minute, the paramedics burst in through the stage door with a stretcher and a heavy orange bag.

"Abel?" the first one said. "Abel Quincy?"

"No pulse since I got to her," Abel said. "Eleven minutes. Penetrating wounds, left side, thigh. Get a line in, I'll keep compressing."

"You're not on the squad anymore."

"Then arrest me later."

They shocked me twice.

The second time, my body jumped against the boards, and something in my chest knocked once.

"We've got a rhythm!" the paramedic yelled.

They lifted me onto the stretcher, and the pull on my ribs went hard and sudden.

I felt myself fly off the ceiling in a long, sick rush and slam down against the man in the black jacket.

I didn't hit him. There was nothing of me to hit with.

I was just there, stuck to his shoulder.

He was walking beside the stretcher with one hand on my body, and he glanced sideways, right at the empty air where I was.

"Ma'am," he said under his breath. "I can see you. You're all right. Stay close to me."

The paramedic frowned at him. "Who are you talking to?"

"No one. Move."

In the ambulance I tried to float to the back, to my husband, to my son.

The farther I got from Abel, the worse the pull behind my ribs became.

About twenty steps was all I got before something yanked me back into his lap.

At Harlan County Hospital, doctors ran with the stretcher down a white hallway.

Keegan arrived ten minutes later with Imogen and Linus, and I watched from the corner of the ceiling as the glass doors of the emergency room swung shut on my body.

A doctor came out, still pulling off his gloves.

"Mr. Winslow? Your wife's heart is beating, but she's in a coma. The next few days will tell us a lot."

Keegan nodded and rubbed his forehead.

Imogen put her arm around his waist, and he leaned into her.

"Doctor," Keegan said. "If she doesn't wake up, don't keep her alive like a plant."

The doctor blinked. "Mr. Winslow, it's far too soon to..."

"Imogen says it's what she'd want," Keegan said.

Beside me, very quietly, Abel breathed in through his teeth.

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