Part 3: Final Boss / Chapter 31

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Being that we were in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night, it took a while for our rideshare to show up.

I busied myself for a few minutes processing the XP Nancy’s mom had left with Darla. The rewards were, as usual, incongruous. But for once, the cockamamie game dynamics were cockamamie in my favor, rewarding me more for the mobs I’d just beaten than I’d earned for any of my boss battles. While I was still well short of level 9, my Life-O-Meter was at seventy, my Muscles stat was at fifty, my Skin Thickness stat was at twenty-eight, and my Twinkle Toes stat was at seventeen—until I bumped it to twenty with the three new Freebies I’d earned.

During the trip to the hospital, neither Darla nor I said much. I think she was feeling the sting of my reaction to her theory. And I ran out of words as soon as I’d told her all there was to tell about Robbie’s condition. No one knew exactly why, but he’d gone into cardiac arrest, then slipped into a coma after the hospital staff got him stabilized. Margaret had talked to every doctor in the hospital about everything that could be done, but in the end, there was nothing to do but wait.

We arrived after midnight and when we reached Robbie’s room, we found Margaret camped out beside his bed, staring off into space with tear tracks dried on her cheeks.

The nurse on duty was the same one who’d repeatedly informed us that there was a two-visitor limit after-hours. But I think she could see from the look on my face that the rules needed bending.

As Darla and I pulled up a couple of chairs to set up vigil around Robbie’s bed, Margaret gave Darla a leery look. She’d been all-in on my resurrected dating life earlier, but with the way things had played out, she had to be debating whether Darla’s “emergency” could really have been important enough to pull me away from Robbie’s bedside.

As her eyes cut to me, her silent question was loud and clear: is whatever you have with this woman serious enough for her to be in this room right now?

I wasn’t sure what to say. But as it turned out, I didn’t need to say anything. Her face softened as she saw the truth in my eyes: there was a new member in the family. But the sharp contrast of that news with the reality that we were on the verge of losing Robbie was too much, and fresh tears began running down Margaret’s cheeks.

“When we lost dad, I was wrecked,” she said weakly. “But, I held on. Then mom . . . ”

She didn’t know how to finish. Our mother hadn’t died. She’d just had a nervous breakdown after our dad had died. Then abandoned us. To go club-hopping in Guatemala. So . . . arguably worse.

“But I was okay, you know?” Margaret went on. “I held it together. Even after Aunt Maxine.”

I caught the look on Darla’s face. I hadn’t walked her through my full catalog of family tragedy, and I could see the disbelief in her expression. I thought she might be thinking I was a murder house after all. I wondered if she was considering taking a few steps away from us, to get clear of the flaming meteorite destined to take out the rest of the bloodline. But I couldn’t worry about that right now.

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“I could handle the rest,” Margaret went on. “I could get past it. But this . . . I can’t . . . ”

Of course she couldn’t. And neither could I. I don’t think I’d grasped quite how much Robbie had given purpose and meaning to both our lives until that moment. He was the hope, the guiding light. Whatever slim chance there was that he’d defy the various doctors’ predictions was what kept us going every day. But with his precipitous decline, the predictions had pulled ahead.

“I’m sorry,” Margaret said, wiping her eyes. Justified as her breakdown was, I think she was feeling a little self-conscious that it was happening in front of Darla.

Then I noticed Darla had not in fact taken a step back to avoid the inevitable meteorite speeding towards us from the heavens. In fact, she’d taken my hand. Again. This time, the gesture was so comfortable and familiar that I hadn’t even registered it.

“He called me a floozy,” she blurted out, a few tears pooling in her eyes. “This kid is . . . ”

“Yeah,” Margaret whispered, nodding emphatically to keep a crying jag at bay.

There was no mistaking Darla’s words for reproach. They were pure admiration. The quirky, old-timey flavor of the word “floozy”—and the audacity to use it—was a snap shot of the singular light Robbie brought into the world. And by all accounts, that light was fading fast. Had the periodic pains he’d downplayed been precursors? Had I failed him by not raising the alarm? I didn’t know, and I couldn’t bear to think about it.

The doctors had told Margaret that patients who lapse into prolonged comas after cardiac arrests rarely recover. And even if Robbie came out of the coma sooner rather than later, he likely wouldn’t survive the month.

But then I remembered.

He didn’t need to survive the month. All he needed was to make it . . .

I looked down at my watch. 4:03 a.m.

All he needed was to make it an hour or two more. My next bout—barring any surprise additions to my Quest Summary—would be the final boss, who would drop the big prize.

I made eye contact with Darla and gestured to the hallway. As we rose and stepped toward the door, Margaret looked up inquisitively.

“Give us a minute,” I said.

She nodded, too emotionally drained to ask where we were going or why.

As Darla and I stepped out into the hall, she looked at me with concern.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

She frowned, as if she had no idea what I was talking about.

“About what I said at the warehouse,” I clarified.

“Oh,” she said, shaking it off. “I know you didn’t mean it. But with my history, I understand if you—”

“I believe you,” I cut her off. “It’s all a simulation. Everything. Everywhere.”

She raised both eyebrows in surprise.

“RIP couldn’t happen in what we thought was the world,” I went on. “Peoples’ brains don’t get re-written. Marty Malomar can’t outrun a car. Third grade classrooms don’t get conjured from nothing.”

“But I thought you said that that was all just a . . . a delusion. None of it is really happening.”

“No,” I refuted myself. My brain had been churning through everything for the last hour, finally drawing the obvious conclusion.

“It’s happening,” I said. “It’s real. It has to be real.”

“Why?”

She got her answer as she followed my gaze back to Robbie’s room. If the crazy stuff that was happening wasn’t real, then Lazarus’ Kool-Aid wasn’t real. And Lazarus’ Kool-Aid had to be real.

Darla smiled in understanding and I knew the feelings I’d had toward her when we’d met at the GetGet were the same feelings I’d had in some other reality—the feelings I’d have for her in any reality. My jealousy of her seeming interest in Merrick, my inclination to trust her despite my deeply ingrained tendencies to the contrary . . . it all made sense now. But I had to keep my focus on the business at hand.

“Tell Margaret that I’ll be back soon,” I said. “Tell her everything is going to be okay.”

“Alright, but . . . where are you going?”

“To work.”