In Case of Emergency

by E. G. Scott

  “Annie, please don’t hurt me!” I’m trying not to stare at the sharp end of the leucotome.

  She looks at it and frowns. “You know, you’re right. This is all wrong.” She lowers her hand. I feel a glimmer of hope. She moves to the area behind me and I hear metal on metal. “I think I’d prefer to go with something a little more modern, in honor of your extensive appreciation for the art of surgery.” She brandishes a stainless steel Walter Freeman orbitoclast, which to most people looks like an artistically rendered ice-pick, but I only see the beautiful streamlined update of the leucotome. Along with it, she holds its companion, a steel mallet, and hovers the pair over my face. “Beautiful couple, aren’t they?”

  “Annie, why do all of this? I don’t understand.”

  “I’m so glad you asked,” she purrs. “Because I had a lot of time on my hands, thanks to all of you. After Brooke dismantled my life, I wanted to make some big changes. I’d always needed a makeover but had never had the motivation or the means. Like you, I was all about my career. All of a sudden I had endless hours in my day, money in the bank, and a handful of people whom I needed to teach a lesson. My job was my life, Charlotte. When that all got stolen, I had to reinvent myself. I had to become someone completely new.

  “I’d always been unhappy with all of my extra weight but never had the time or a good enough reason to do something about it. I got gastric bypass from a doctor out here on the island that I knew from my residency days. I bought myself a little house, got the surgery, and spent the next six months recovering and deciding how I could take my power back.”

  I’m happy she is monologing instead of cutting into me. I silently scan through my body as she rambles. Each detail is more disturbing than the one before. She pauses and looks at me for a second, and my heart halts. She continues.

  “Since I had so many more hours in the day without my career, I decided to learn a new skill. Remember when I told you that I could barely turn a computer on?” she crows loudly. “Oh, I can definitely turn one on, and much more. It turns out that I’m a natural coder. I didn’t understand why I was moved to learn it at the time; I just thought it was a smart thing to know how to do in this day and age, and it was fun. And then it hit me that it was the perfect entré into connecting you and Brooke, something I thought would be a fascinating social experiment. But I didn’t want to feel excluded again. Friends are vital to sanity, Charlotte,” she asides creepily, and I get a wave of chills. “I wanted to be close to other people in the way that I had in the dog park days with Brooke, before she found out who I was. I hadn’t realized how much I needed the support of other women about the traumas I’ve experienced in my life.” She stops to walk behind me and I hold my breath, thinking she’s getting her surgical itch again, but I hear her open a bottle and take a sip of something. The sound of it makes me realize how unbelievably parched I am.

  “Annie? I’ll do anything. Please call 911,” I beg. My body has taken on a numb sensation, which is better than the unbearably ill feeling but decidedly not a good sign of the course of the poisoning.

  “Are you out of your mind? I’ve done way too much to get us here. Why would I undo all of it now by doing something stupid like that?” There is anger emerging in her voice again.

  I decide indulging her is far safer than inciting her any further. I begin to pray silently for someone to help me, steadily losing hope the longer I lie here. “Annie, why did you get me into the chat room? Why even pretend to be Peter and frame me?”

  “I wanted to get back at you in a way that could give me something to do. I needed a sense of purpose after everything in my life was burned to the ground by all of you. Once I started it all, it became a game. And it was too much fun not to stop.”

  “Wouldn’t it have been easier to just kill me?” I hear the defeat in my words as much as I feel it in my will to keep fighting.

  “It didn’t feel like just killing you would be satisfying enough.” She has begun to pace and I can see she’s becoming angry. I need to try to calm her.

  Paresthesia has set in, and rounds of burning and prickling are alternately moving from my torso through my extremities. “I’m sorry you got fired, Annie. I didn’t know that you were going to lose your job. And I would have done anything not to have let that happen—”

  “But you didn’t do anything, did you! You just cosigned that bullshit statement with Thornton, letting me take the hit. I lost my reputation and my career of thirty years, Charlotte!” she spits furiously. “Do you know how much that job meant to me? It was all that I had next to Thor. And you all treated me like I was invisible. You people were the closest I had to a fucking family!” It dawns on me that her estranged daughter must have been a fiction, and this saddens me deeply, and oddly, given the current events of the moment. Making up a daughter who doesn’t speak to you feels even worse than actually having one who isn’t speaking to you.

  She rails on. “And you threw me under the fucking bus to save yourselves. And you were going to get away with it.” She is tapping the hammer against her palm furiously.

  “Annie. I completely understand. You should not have taken the fall. It was my fault what happened. I wanted to tell everyone that. But Henry . . . he had me hospitalized when the investigation was going on to keep me out of the process.”

  She stops pacing and looks at me. “So you let him take the credit and the blame for everything, huh? At least you are consistent.”

  “I lost my career too, Annie.”

  “It’s not the same, Charlotte. You were a fucking child, not a fiftysomething-year-old woman trying to get back into the workforce with a high-profile malpractice smear on her résumé. Especially once Brooke Harmon got involved.”

  “We got the settlement money. What about that?”

  “You are missing the point, you self-important little bitch. This is not about money. I have plenty of money. This is about the fact that while Henry Thornton failed up, you helped him, and you both let me suffer for your mistakes. Where is the fucking solidarity? I was kind to you. I would have been a mentor to you and helped you navigate all the sexist politics that I had to deal with coming up as a woman in medicine. But you barely registered anyone else’s existence in favor of him. You sided with him. I showed up one day to do my job well, as I always have, and in a flash, lost everything. And none of you thought twice about me.”

  I’m fading. “I am so sorry, Annie. Henry screwed me over as much as he did you. I would have stopped him if I could have. Michelle’s death ruined my life too.”

  “Oh, I know it.” Her face twists into an expression of bitterness. “I know everything about you, Char. You shared so much in the chat room and on the phone. For the last year, I have listened to you talk about yourself. I probably know more about you than Rachel did. Or your own mother.” She twists the virtual knife and enjoys it.

  I wither but take a different approach. “I thought you cared about me. I thought you all did. Was that all pretend?”

  “It is a funny thing, Charlotte. When I found out that you’d been committed to Bellevue and then moved home with your mother, I almost felt satisfied that you’d adequately suffered. But when I heard from one of my old friends at Stony Brook Memorial Hospital that you’d reemerged and were practicing medicine again, I got pissed. But it seemed like total kismet that you, Brooke, and I had all ended up out here, and I took it as sign that there was an opportunity to balance the scales.

  “Like I said, I was craving the camaraderie and the support I’d had with Brooke and the dog park crew, but I didn’t want the rejection from either of you again. I’ve never had an easy time making and keeping friends, on account of my being very straightforward.”

  And on account of you being a psycho, I say to myself.

  “I also wanted to know how you were feeling about everything that happened, and that gave me the idea to connect all the dots. I knew Brooke had
been harassing Henry, which made me endlessly happy, but I felt like you’d unfairly gotten off the hook—”

  “But Brooke did attack me. She went after my business,” I counter.

  “Not in a significant way, in my opinion. She’d lost her steam with you after Henry put a restraining order on her, it seemed. It enraged me how you always seemed to land on your feet no matter what you did. You know, I was nice to you when we worked together, and you barely acknowledged my existence. You are unbelievably entitled, Charlotte, and now, thanks to our candid relationship, I know all the reasons why,” she says meanly.

  “Were any of them actually you?” I ask feebly.

  “All of the members of the chat room are aspects of me. Peter, not so much; he was very real once. I had fun becoming him. I kept pushing it further and you ate it all up.”

  “I’m trusting, Annie. I trusted you.” My breathing is strangled.

  “We had fun, though, didn’t we? All of our thousands of texts. Checking in all the time. It felt good to know Peter would be on the other end of the phone when you picked it up every single time.”

  “Except when he wasn’t,” I say unexpectedly. “Except when he disappeared.” I feel myself dissociating from the reality of Annie being Peter, and my feeling of being angry and heartbroken by the man I fell in love with without ever meeting.

  “It was essential to the story to have Peter be elusive. It kept you hooked,” she says.

  “I was hooked because I was lonely. Peter was just a stand-in,” I drop, curious if my self-awareness does anything to her.

  I can see the whites of her knuckles around the orbitoclast. I feel myself flinching ever so slightly and am surprised that there is some faint movement in my right hand if I focus on it.

  “Oh bullshit, Charlotte. I know you loved Peter. I was there, remember? All of his flattery and endless attention. The nauseating soul-bearing confessions. The fantasies.”

  I feel tears running down the sides of my face. This pleases her.

  “But it really is all fake, even when both people meet in person and know who they are with. The initial spell of obsessive love will burn off and there will inevitably be disapointment. It just isn’t sustainable, which is why I never bothered with it. At least you got to think you had someone who loved you and cared about what you were doing every day, for the time that you did.” Her pupils have dilated so significantly, it looks like she has empty, black, sharklike eyes.

  “I think of something Rachel once said to me: ‘Most people are afraid of dying, but they shouldn’t be. It is much worse for the people left behind. When you die, you go somewhere better. I truly believe that.’” I cry harder at the possibility of seeing my friend again. My body surges with pain and a tremor shoots me into a convulsion.

  “This is a lot to take in, I know.” She puts the steel pick down on the table and moves behind me. As long as I keep her talking, I am keeping myself conscious and her distracted from sticking anything into my brain. When she returns to my sight line she is snapping surgical gloves on.

  “Now shhh. Too much talking. I want to make sure you are conscious for the main event, and from the looks of it, you are not long for this world.”

  SILVESTRI

  “We can’t get in!” Smith yells into the phone. “There’s something blocking the front door!”

  Fuck. “Hold tight,” I say. “Almost there.” I hang up, then call for backup and a bus.

  CHARLOTTE

  The next time she moves out of the frame, I focus every last bit of energy into my right hand and am surprised to find that I am able to open and close it. Now I just need to somehow conjure enough momentum to move my arm from my side up to my face and pull any number of the needles out without her noticing.

  “Did you know that as far as Western medicine has come, scientists don’t actually know how anesthesia works? I always loved that fact. Like I was the most important person in the OR because I kept people from feeling fear and pain, but no one could actually identify what it was about anesthesia that made it work. I was a magician.” She whistles as she futzes around nearby, but the twilight state I’m flipping in and out of is making it hard to focus on any one thing for long.

  The tiny needles are hardly a formidable opponent to her heavy steel weapons, but it is the only defensive strike that I can think of, and I can’t let her into my brain more than I already have, without at least putting up a fight.

  “Annie?” I croak.

  “Yes?” She’s impatient. I can see stabby eagerness pouring out of her.

  “There are police officers in the parking lot. If I don’t walk out of this office in the next five minutes, they are going to know something is wrong and come looking for me. And Detective Silvestri is outside too.” I say it with all the hope in the world that somehow this is true.

  She cocks her head and gives me a once-over before spreading a sickeningly toothy grin across her plain face. “You are so sweet to be worrying about me.” Just as quickly as it spread, the smile is gone, and her voice drops into a deepness that chills me. Peter’s voice. “I’ve got it covered.”

  My heart drops into my gut in between its sporadic bursts of arrhythmia.

  “You very helpfully double-locked the front door, and then I pushed that surprisingly heavy desk in front of it, so it is going to be a bitch for your dick in shining armor to get through it in a hurry without a battering ram. I have plenty of time to spend with you uninterrupted.”

  “And how are you going to get out of here once you’ve killed me? You are trapped.” I am finding a new, deeper reserve of energy in me. The poison is destroying my body’s enzymes one organ system at a time, but I am grateful for the faculties that are still hanging on. I still have my brain, barely. But keeping it intact is highly motivating.

  “Oh, don’t you worry about me, honey. And you forget. Your good guys are looking for your bad guy. Not me. When they are finally able to get in, I will be barely coherent enough to describe the horrible man who was waiting for us both before he knocked me out, locked me in Rachel’s office, and had his way with your brain. I will tell them that I became worried about you because of the threatening calls I’ve been getting from Henry. They know he is unhinged and has been trying to shut us all up. And when they see the brain surgery he’s done on you, they’ll see he’s finally lost his damn mind over not being allowed to operate any longer. I was very happy to learn that while they didn’t fire him, they took his toys away. That’s for the best anyway; you were always the competent one in that partnership. The only thing he was truly good at was stealing the spotlight.”

  “Why me? Why not Henry?” I ask weakly. “He was the one who orchestrated the settlement. It was Henry who bullied you and maybe killed Thor.”

  “He’s going to get his, don’t you worry.” She savors my terror in her pausing. “But I guess I got more creative with your punishment because his behavior was typical. Predictable white-man-privilege bullshit. But you were totally mystified by him, and completely took for granted the fact that I would have supported you, would have been on your side in solidarity. I could have been a mother to you.”

  “We barely knew each other,” I say.

  I see a flicker of something in her eyes beyond the sharklike blackness I’ve been staring into. Pain. “I guess I looked at our relationship differently than you did. I thought we were kindred spirits. Especially after that time you confided in me.” Her eyes return to their darkened state and her expression is stone. “Of course you don’t remember.” She shakes her head. “You were crying in the bathroom. I thought it was because all the residents were talking shit about you.”

  I’m conjuring a vague memory of Annie catching me after a particularly stressful thirty-hours-straight shift and a frustrating conversation with my mother, who showed up at the hospital tipsy and disruptive to say “hello.” I’d burst into tears and lamented to
her that I wished I had a normal mother. But it had been so offhand and I’d completely forgotten about it until this moment. Her experience had clearly been something entirely different. The loneliness of this woman is becoming painfully evident.

  I change my approach. “How are you going to explain you being here and Henry not?”

  “He will be long gone by the time they get in, but I have plenty of his DNA, thanks to his penchant for afternoon delight sessions with his girlfriend at the same time and place every week. It is unbelievable how easy it is to pose as housekeeping, just by dressing the part and hanging around a hotel hallway. I got plenty of the good doctor’s spunk to spackle this soon-to-be crime scene. Then he can take the credit for something else he didn’t do. I will have to play the part of ‘nearly victim number two’ but be the one who miraculously lives to tell about it. I bet you I’ll get a book deal and a TV option. I’ll dose myself with some aconite, but not nearly as much as I gave you,” she confidently asides, “and I’ll be fixed up right as rain with a charcoal smoothie. I mean, is there anything that stuff can’t do?” She is very pleased with herself.

  My semi-conciousness has rendered me in a dreamlike state. I am not ready to leave this world today. I think about my very limited resources and wish that the dim mak Kiss of the Dragon fatal-pressure-point move really worked outside of kung fu movies. But it gives me an idea.

  SILVESTRI

  I whip into the lot, throw the car into park, and hop out. I sprint past the uniforms toward the entrance to the China Panda, pulling off my jacket as I go.

  CHARLOTTE

  Her back is turned while she sets up something on the shelf behind her.

  “Annie?” I sputter. “Peter was your brother’s name, right? You’ve talked about him in the chat room?”