“Well. That’s good.”
“Yes,” the doctor said. “That’s all very good news. However, there are other issues of concern. Your husband believes there’s been a decline in your cognition since the birth of your son.”
“If he says so.”
“You don’t agree?”
She shrugged, glancing at Leigh for guidance. The bloodstain on the front of his scrubs, which she remembered as being about the size of a nickel, had grown to several inches in diameter.
“Eve?” Dr. Jeffries said.
“Sorry. What?” She turned back to the doctor, who watched her with a mixture of interest and concern.
“Your husband tells us that you’re having increasing moments of forgetfulness, and you’re also experiencing some aural hallucinations.” Dr. Jeffries leaned forward, giving her an earnest look. “This is not uncommon after a significant head injury. It’s also fairly common for this to start happening years after the initial injury. However, this level of psychosis —”
“Psychosis.”
The doctor held up her hand, smiling. “It’s a term that’s bandied about very liberally in popular culture, with negative connotations, but in medical terms all it means is a break from reality.”
“A break from reality. Uh-huh.”
“This woman who visits you while you’re painting —”
“I don’t want to talk about her.”
“I’m afraid we must. If we’re to get to the bottom of this problem, we’ll need to have some open and honest communication.”
“Not about her.”
“Hmm,” the doctor said. “Are you afraid of her?”
“Of course I am.”
“Is she telling you to do things you don’t want to do?”
“Like what?”
“Like hurt yourself? Or hurt others?”
She shook her head. “No. Nothing like that.”
“Then what?” Leigh asked, reaching out to stroke her hair. “What is she saying?”
“I don’t remember.” She was on the verge of tears, her body quaking with pent-up tension.
The doctor leaned back in her chair, watching her. “What?”
“Well, how can we know if it’s safe for you to be around your child, or your grandmother and husband, if we don’t know what she’s telling you to do?”
“You’re saying I’m not leaving here.”
“I’m saying it’s hard to treat something when we don’t know exactly what it is. However, I suspect that the presence of this woman is a symptom of your poorly functioning hypothalamus. And that’s good news.”
“How?”
“Because with the right treatment, we should be able to eliminate this symptom and many others.”
Eve grew suspicious. “And how do we do that?”
“Science is a marvellous thing.” For the first time since entering the room, the doctor’s smile seemed genuine. “By isolating the areas in your brain that have been damaged, we can go in and fix them.”
“You’re going to shock me again.”
“Again?” Leigh asked.
She turned to him and froze. The stain on his shirt had grown to the size of a dinner plate. It was perfectly round, bright red, and glistening wet.
“Oh my God, Leigh. You’re bleeding.”
He looked down. “Where?”
“Your chest.”
He pulled the shirt away from his chest, craning his neck to examine it, and then looked at her with raised eyebrows. The doctor gave her the same look. They couldn’t see the blood.
“Never mind. Just a trick of the light, I guess.” It was thick and gelatinous, oozing down the front of his shirt and glopping onto his pants.
Leigh turned to the doctor. “Do you really think an ECT is the best way to go?”
“I understand the concern,” Dr. Jeffries said. “But much of the stigma still associated with this kind of treatment stems from a time when it was used in high doses, without any specific targeting, and without general anaesthetic. It’s a completely different procedure now.”
“I’ve heard that before.”
Dr. Jeffries went on as though Eve hadn’t spoken. “I’m talking about targeting a precise location in the brain with electrical current, which triggers a brief seizure. There is minimal risk, and potentially a lot to gain.”
Drips of blood hit the linoleum floor by Leigh’s feet — plop-plop-plop — and oozed toward Dr. Jeffries’s pointed shoes.
“How quickly do you usually see results?” Leigh asked.
“It’s cumulative,” the doctor said. “Sometimes we see results almost immediately, but usually things really begin to improve after the third or fourth procedure. Every time the brain has a seizure it releases hormones, and this is where the work really happens.”
“No fucking way,” Eve tried to say, but her voice didn’t make it past her throat.
“Quite frankly, this is the only possible solution I see,” Dr. Jeffries said to Leigh. “If the results are good, I expect Eve will be able to go home to you and your son.”
“And if not?” Leigh asked.
Dr. Jeffries shrugged. “I’ll give you two some time to talk. Dr. Adler, if you’d like to arrange a meeting, I’m happy to go over the procedure in detail with you.”
“Thank you for your time, Dr. Jeffries.” Leigh stepped forward to shake her hand and his shoes made a squelching sound.
“Of course.” When the doctor departed, she left a trail of bloody shoeprints in her wake.
“Well,” Leigh said.
Eve raised a hand to stop him from getting any closer.
“Get out.”
“I understand if you’re scared. But we really need to talk about this.”
Holding grimly to the last of her self-control, she said, “I need some time alone. Okay?”
“We need to talk about this.”
“Tomorrow.”
“Well.” Leigh looked at his watch. “If I leave now I’ll be home in time to tuck Gabriel into bed.”
“Yes. Do that.”
He leaned over to kiss her, and a clot of blood splatted onto the blanket. Eve pulled back, her gorge rising. With a sigh, he moved away.
“Eve,” he said at the door. “We’ll get through this together, like we always do. Just you and me, right?”
Plop.
She bit down on her tongue, unsure if she was going to scream or vomit.
The door clicked closed behind him. She managed to hold on until his footsteps had faded down the hall, then she gave in to her horror. Retching, she kicked the soiled blanket off the end of the bed.
She grabbed the pillow and rammed it against her face, blocking her view of the room. But as clearly as if her eyes were still open, she could see Leigh’s footprints smearing gelatinous clots of blood.
The flowers looked like daisies, but they had blood at their roots.
She screamed into the pillow until she wore herself out. Eventually, she slept. Her dreams were full of silver things soon forgotten, and she awoke to the sun shining through the blinds and birds chirping outside the window.
Wrapping her wool sweater around her shoulders, she climbed out of bed and stumbled groggily to the bathroom to relieve herself. Her head felt stuffed and thick, her eyes bleary from tears and sleep.
The sound of her urine hitting the water reminded her of the previous day’s blood. Stretching out one pale foot, she pushed the bathroom door open. From what she could see, the floor was clean.
“Motherfucker.”
She wiped, flushed, washed her hands and face with water as warm as she could get from the tap, and then brushed her teeth. Feeling slightly more human, she moved back into the bedroom. She examined the floor carefully, even getting down on all fours to look beneath the chair Dr. Jeffries had been sitting in. There was nothing but faded linoleum.
Relieved, she sat back on her haunches, a smile spreading across her lips. And then she saw it: a small smear on the metal leg of the chair, dark
red like old ketchup.
TWENTY-SIX
Sara’s Eighth Birthday
“CAREFUL, YOU CAN’T pull them out like that. Here.” Sara broke the flower off at the stem and slipped it into Eve’s hair. “They look like daisies, but they’re not.”
“What are they?”
“Bloodroot flowers. They don’t normally grow around here.”
“How do you know that?” The flowers were pretty. They had yellow at the centre and delicate white petals.
“Duh. It’s called a library.”
“Oh. Yeah.” She tucked a flower behind Sara’s ear. “Donna always says you’re too smart for your own good.”
“How can you be too smart for anything?” Sara asked.
“I don’t know. She’s always saying things that don’t make sense.”
They sat with their backs pressed against the fence in the Adlers’ yard, sipping glasses of iced tea and pretending to do their homework. Their books were spread around them in a fan, but spelling lists and times tables were far from their minds.
The day was unusually warm, and it made both girls feel lazy and slow. Indian summer, her mom had called it. She didn’t know what Indians had to do with the weather, but the air was hot and sweet, a reminder of the long sticky days of freedom just past.
On the other side of the yard, Margie and Danielle lay sunning themselves on towels. Though there was a two-year age difference between them, most people couldn’t tell them apart. They were everything Sara was not: skinny, bitchy, and stupid.
Today they wore matching red bikinis, and their bony bodies were greasy with suntan oil. They each had one ear plugged into Danielle’s iPod, and their heads bopped side to side with the music.
In the driveway, Leigh bounced a basketball and threw it with such perfect precision it barely ever touched the metal ring on its way through the hoop. Eve didn’t think she could get the ball through the hoop even once, but sports weren’t really her thing.
If Sara hadn’t been sitting next to her, she would have pulled out her sketchbook and done a couple hasty drawings of him. She already had a stack of them tucked between her mattress and box spring, to look at on nights she couldn’t sleep.
“Want to know why they’re called bloodroot?”
“What?”
“Stop staring at my brother like that. It creeps me out.”
“I wasn’t staring.”
“Sure.”
“Why are they called bloodroot?”
“Because their roots are as red as your face is right now.”
Eve stuck out her tongue.
“Look.” Sara dug in with a stick and flipped up a clump of dirt and roots. Red goop oozed out.
“Eew.”
“It looks like blood, right? But thicker.”
“You’re going to get it on your pants.”
Sara scooted over. “You don’t want to drink it.”
“Why would I even think of doing that?”
“Seriously. This sap is really poisonous.”
“Oh, yeah?” Eve eyed the goop with interest.
“Yeah. You shouldn’t touch it, either. It’ll burn your skin.”
“Shouldn’t you tell your mom about it?”
“No way,” Sara said. “She’d rip them out.”
“Well, yeah, that’s the point.”
Sara gave her a devilish smile. “But what if I need to poison someone?”
“Ha-ha.”
“Seriously. I read all about it. Because it doesn’t normally grow here, no one would even guess where the poison came from.”
“Sara, that’s creepy.”
“Don’t you ever think about things like that?” Sara asked.
“No.”
“Not even when Canton Forsythe pulled down your pants in the gym?”
“Maybe you should write a story about it instead?”
“That would be like a confession. I’d totally get caught.”
“You’re not, like, serious? Right, Sara?” She was starting to feel distinctly uncomfortable.
Sara narrowed her eyes and gave her a villainous look, and then she giggled. “Gotcha!”
“Jerk.”
“But it really is poisonous, so be careful,” Sara said.
“I wonder what it tastes like.”
“Gawd, Leee-eigh!” Sara turned his name into four syllables of sisterly condemnation. “Don’t sneak up on us like that!”
He stood above them, dripping sweat, with the basketball tucked under one arm. From her vantage point he was about a million miles high, and she had to crane her neck to see him. The sun was behind him, creating a golden glow around his head.
“Hey, Doodlebug.”
“And don’t call her that,” Sara said.
“Whatever you say, Gumdrop.”
Sara’s face turned red. “Those names are secret.”
“Wanna see a trick?” he asked Eve.
“Sure.”
“No,” Sara said at the same time, but Leigh ignored his youngest sister. He threw the ball up into the air and caught it on his index finger, setting it to spin.
“Cool,” she said, trying to act like she wasn’t that impressed.
He threw the ball so it sailed high up into the air, and then caught it with the index finger of his other hand and set it spinning.
“Wow!”
He tucked the ball back under his arm and gave her that slanted smile that always made her stomach flip over. “Thanks. I’ve been practising that trick for months. Why don’t you ever come watch me play?”
Eve shrugged, grinning up at him.
Sara rolled her eyes. “Uh, because your games are at night? She has a bedtime, dummy.”
“No, I don’t. I can come sometime.”
Leigh pushed golden hair out of his eyes. “Rad.”
“What are you talking about? You mom would kill you,” Sara said.
“Donna doesn’t have to know.”
Leigh gave her an approving nod. “I always knew you were cool.”
The heat started in her chest and rose up into her cheeks. “Yeah.”
“Oh my God, would you guys just stop it?”
“Next game is on Friday. Maybe I’ll see you there?”
She burned like one of those firecrackers that fizzed along the ground, spitting and spinning sparks of colour and heat. “Cool.”
Leigh turned and strutted off to the house, basketball tucked into the crook of his arm.
Sara made a gagging noise. “I’m going to use that bloodroot on myself.”
“Hey, Sara!” he called from the porch. “Catch!”
The ball flew so quickly Sara barely had time to lift her hands before it hit her face. Danielle and Margie laughed.
“Leee-eigh!” Sara bellowed, jumping up to chase him.
“Happy birthday, doofus!” Leigh turned and waggled his backside, then slipped into the house.
TWENTY-SEVEN
IN SPITE OF EVE’S PROTESTS, the first ECT was scheduled for Monday morning.
“You’ll be groggy and possibly confused from the anaesthetic,” Leigh said as they waited for the nurse to return to wheel her wherever they were going to do the procedure. He shifted nervously in his chair, his hand sweaty against hers. “And it may impair your memory. But just remember, that part’s temporary —”
Although terror churned her insides into a stew, she laughed.
“What?”
“How am I supposed to remember that it’s temporary, if my memory is impaired?”
The side of his mouth curled up in a half smile. “I guess I’ll remind you again in the recovery room.”
“You’ll stay with me the whole time?”
“Dr. Jeffries is letting me observe the procedure, and I’ll come with you to recovery. I promise I won’t leave your side today.”
“You love me, don’t you?”
“I love your boobs,” he said.
She smacked him in the arm, and he laughed.
“That’
s what you get for asking such a ridiculous question.”
“I’m just scared. You really think I’ll be okay?”
“I know it.”
“I guess I can’t get any more messed up than I already am.”
He squeezed her hand, but didn’t bother to respond. They stayed that way until the nurse came back with her IV.
“We’re starting the drip now. Just lay back and relax.”
She shook all over, like a puppy at the veterinarian.
“Leigh …” Her words sounded slow and sluggish in her ears, like a record winding down.
“Right here,” he said, and then she was gone.
Quicksilver rattled and hissed around her, dripping with fog. Eve moved downhill toward the river. Branches snagged and tore at her clothing, and iridescent leaves left icy slug-trails on her cheeks and arms. Somewhere below was a pile of clothing and bones.
The woman moved beside her, a dark shadow barely seen through the branches.
“You were never a good listener.”
“That’s true,” Eve said.
“When will you end this charade?”
“This is no charade. It’s my life, and I want it back.”
“You think that’s possible?”
“If I can get rid of you, then maybe.”
“Don’t you get it? I’m the only thing that’s real.” She probably wanted to say more, but she didn’t get the chance.
The field of quicksilver exploded with excruciating blue shock-light. Eve both heard and felt a sizzling snap, and then she smelled her own flesh burning.
For just a moment she remembered everything. She remembered the accident, and shaking loose from the centre of her brain to whip around her skull like a pea lost in a tornado. She remembered every other moment of her life; all the bad things she’d done and the people she’d hurt.
She screamed into the light. She screamed and screamed and screamed — until the darkness smothered her in welcome annihilation. Seconds or eons later, she began once again to rebuild.
The Day She Died Page 16
