Eight Days Beside a Coma
1359 Words
Brett's POV
Victoria's funeral was last Thursday.
A few people came. I stood at the front and received their condolences.
Afterwards, I drove to the hospital where Roberta was.
I didn't plan to. I just did.
I sat beside Roberta's bed for an hour and watched the machines keep her alive and drove home and sat in the dark kitchen and looked at the coffee cup by the window.
That became the pattern.
***
Eight days passed.
I have been visiting her for the past eight days.
I told myself the first day that I was coming to check that she was being cared for properly. I told myself the second day that I was coming because no one else was. By the fourth day, I stopped explaining it to myself and just came.
I brought things to read. A book I'd been meaning to finish for six months. I sat in the chair beside her bed and read aloud sometimes, not because I believed she could hear me but because the silence in that room had a weight to it that needed something to push back against.
I talked to her, too.
The nurses noticed.
"You're very dedicated," one of the nurses said one morning, changing the drip while I sat with my book. "Most patients in long-term care are lucky to get one visitor. She gets you every day."
I smiled at her.
She didn't know. None of them knew. They thought I was a good man. A kind one. A friend showing up faithfully for someone who had no one else.
They didn't know what I'd taken from her.
***
On the fifth day, I made some calls.
I have people who find things. Discreet, thorough, expensive people who can pull information from places that aren't supposed to be accessible. I gave them what I had — her first name, Jace Riggs, the late child, the date — and asked them to find out who she was.
The report came back on the seventh day.
Roberta. She was brought into an orphanage home as an infant. There is no record of her birth parents. No family of record. No inheritance. No network.
An orphan.
She was married to Jace Riggs for eight years. Legally, verifiably, married — but so thoroughly hidden that it had taken my people serious digging to surface it. No public appearances together. No photographs. No interviews. Jace Riggs, in eight years of press coverage, had mentioned a wife exactly two times, always obliquely, always as a footnote.
I searched every news outlet I could find for any mention of Jace Riggs losing his daughter. A funeral. Anything.
Nothing.
His company had announced a new development project the day after their daughter died. His social media pages showed him at an industry dinner three days later. Suited and smiling.
A child had died.
His child had died, and the man had gone to an industry dinner.
I closed my laptop.
I sat with that for a long time.
Then I thought about Roberta in the orphanage. Growing up without anyone. Building a life with her own hands. Marrying a man who hid her from the world. Losing a daughter, she had clearly loved with everything she had.
And then I thought about the decision I had made in that bay.
***
On the eighth morning, I came in earlier than usual.
A nurse was already there, adjusting something on the monitor. She looked up and nodded. I settled into the chair and pulled out my phone.
Something changed in the room.
I looked up.
Roberta's eyes were open. She was looking at the ceiling with the specific, effortful focus of someone trying to work out where they were.
I put the phone in my pocket slowly.
"Hey," I said.
Her eyes moved to me.
She stared.
I watched her process it — the room, the machines, the ceiling, me. I watched her try to sit up and wince and stop. I watched her look at her own hands like she was checking they were still hers.
"Take it easy," I said. "You're okay. You're in a hospital. You've been — it's been a while. Just breathe for a second."
Her voice came out rough from disuse. "Why are you here?"
The question landed simply. No hostility in it. Just genuine confusion.
"I wanted to make sure you were alright," I said. Which was true, and nowhere near enough, and all I had right now.
"Why would you—" She was piecing it together slowly.
She looked at the ceiling again. Something moved across her face — the beginning of a memory returning, or the beginning of understanding that the memory was real and not a nightmare she could revise.
"Ziva," she said.
Just the name. Like a question she already knew the answer to.
I held very still.
"She's gone," I said. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."
The sound Roberta made was small. That was the most devastating part. A sound pressed down by eight days of unconsciousness and the weight of already knowing, somewhere underneath everything, that this was the answer.
She turned her face away.
Her shoulders started to shake.
I didn't think about it. I leaned forward and put my hand on her back, and she turned toward me instead of away, which surprised me, and then she was crying against my shoulder, and I held her and said nothing.
She cried for a long time.
I stayed.
When it began to quiet, she pulled back. Wiped her face with the back of her hand. Didn't apologise for it, which I respected.
"How long have I been here?" she said.
"Eight days."
She closed her eyes. "Eight days."
"Yes."
She was quiet for a moment. "You've been here the whole time?"
"Most of it."
She looked at me with an expression I couldn't fully read. "Why?"
I didn't answer that.
She let it go.
"Thank you," she said. "For — I don't know what you did exactly. But thank you."
"You don't need to thank me," I said.
She looked up.
Something in my voice must have been off because she looked at me for a moment with that same expression — like she was reading something in me, she didn't have the translation for yet.
"I'm sorry," I said. "About Ziva. Your child. I'm really sorry."
"It's not your fault," she said it simply like a fact.
The words sat in the room.
I said nothing.
She lay back against the pillow. Stared at the ceiling. Breathed. I watched her chest rise and fall and thought about Victoria and the flat line and the paddles, and I pressed the thought down and away. I wish Victoria finally woke up like Roberta did
After a while, Roberta said: "I want to leave."
"You should rest—"
"I want to leave this hospital." Her voice was quiet, but there was something in it now. Something hardening. "I can't stay here. I can't just lie down here."
"Roberta—"
"I have to pay them back." She said it to the ceiling. Not to me. "I don't care how. I'll find a way to pay it back." She paused. "I have to make them pay."
"Roberta, what are you talking about?" I said.
"Every single one of them." Her voice was very steady now. The voice of someone who has been broken all the way down and found something underneath the breaking. "Irene." The name came out flat. "Jace." A breath. "Millie."
She stopped.
Her hands on the blanket curled slightly.
"And the VIP," she said. "Whoever was at that hospital. Whoever took my daughter's slot." Her jaw tightened. "The hospital gave it to them. Some rich person who walked in after Ziva and decided their life mattered more." She said it quietly. Like she was reading a list she had written in the dark. "Whoever they are. I'll find out."
The monitor beeped.
My hands froze.
"I'll find all of them," she said. "And I will make sure they understand exactly what they did to me. To Ziva.”
- Writer
