“I can give you a little something for the headache if you like,” the nurse offered. “It might help you rest.”
Lorna shook her head in denial. “I think I’d rather be clearheaded right now.”
The nurse nodded in understanding. “Everything is looking very good considering where you were yesterday. The doctor will be around in the morning to do her assessment. But the fact that you no longer see evil spirits will go a long way to getting you out of here. I also noticed the intake paperwork we have on you says you live alone. If they release you, they’ll want to know you will have someone around to keep an eye on you. So if there are arrangements you need to make, you should think about it.”
“She’s coming home with me,” Vivien stated. “I have a guest room. She can stay there. I promise we’ll keep an eye on her.”
“Sounds good. You all try to get some rest. Someone will be back in four hours.” The nurse smiled as she grabbed her clipboard. “Use the call button to let us know if we can get you anything, or if you change your mind about that headache medicine.”
“I don’t suppose you can accidentally delete this hospital bill for me?” Lorna tried to make a joke, even if she was kind of serious. Between the ambulance ride, the medicines, the specialist consultations, CAT scans, x-rays, and whatever else she didn’t remember, she didn’t even want to think of how much this was going to cost.
“Sorry, I wish I could.” The nurse closed the door behind her as she left.
“Technically you were at work. I’ll see what the workers’ compensation insurance will cover,” Heather said. “And I know our health insurance plan isn’t the best, but I gave them your card number. We’ll figure that out later. I don’t want you worrying about it.”
It was hard not to. Lorna felt a little teary and rubbed her eyes before they saw.
“And I was serious about you staying with me as my guest,” Vivien added, “for as long as you need.”
“I would say you don’t have to do that,” Lorna answered, “but I don’t think I can sleep another night alone in that apartment.”
“Your legs don’t move. There’s no way you could have jumped back that far.” William still held the phone and had evidently been continually rewatching the video.
“Seriously, William,” Vivien muttered. “You’re a Warrick. How much evidence do you need?”
Heather placed her hand over the phone to block the video from him. Quietly, she said, “You know. You’ve always known.”
William let his sister take her phone. He looked shaken as he glanced around the room.
“I think I’m going to…” His words trailed off as if he couldn’t think of an excuse. “I’m glad you’re feeling better, Lorna.”
“Thank you for coming,” she answered.
He nodded at her, appeared as if he wanted to say more, but then left.
Vivien sighed. “What is it going to take with that man? Grandma Julia coming up to him, holding out her arms and saying, ‘Hey, there, grandson, miss me?’”
“He’ll get there if he needs to. You didn’t grow up in our household with the nagging and anger,” Heather said. “Anything supernatural was a punishable offense to my mother. He’s spent a lifetime hearing how crazy that side of the family was. Even for Halloween we had to go as something practical—a dentist or nurse or lawyer or garbage man.”
With William gone, Lorna felt like she could talk freely. “I thought it was Glenn. Maybe it was. I was in bed, awake, and I started hearing noises in the dark—just weird cricks and creaks. So I went to the bathroom to turn on the light. They flashed on but the bulb instantly went dead. In that second of light, though, I saw a figure in the room. I managed to get to the nightstand and grabbed my phone for a flashlight. The figure was gone but as I was hurrying to go downstairs, I became cold, the phone battery drained of power and died, and I heard someone whisper my name.”
“I swear I didn’t see or feel any danger,” Heather said. She sat on the end of the bed by Lorna’s feet. “I would never have left you alone there if I had.”
“We should have insisted you stay with one of us.” Vivien took the chair William had left behind. She started to reach for Lorna’s hand but pulled back before making contact. “Or we should have stayed with you. This wouldn’t have happened if we’d been together.”
“You don’t know that. We could have all ended up in matching gowns,” Lorna countered. “We all agreed that we needed to separate to clear our heads. I’m as much to blame as anyone in this situation. I’m a grown woman with three kids. No part of me wanted to think I needed another person to stay with me for protection. Half my marriage I slept alone while Glenn was away. I’m not normally scared of being alone, or the dark, or the sound of an old building settling.”
“So, after that what happened?” Heather prompted.
“I made it to the lobby doors. I almost ran outside in my pajama shorts, but then it occurred to me that it wouldn’t be ideal to be locked out of my home with a dead cell phone in the middle of the night on Main Street. Plus, I just got pissed off that he was trying to scare me out of my own home. So, as you saw, I yelled at Glenn demanding answers. The radio in the office started playing some song that came out around the time we began dating. I thought he was trying to mollify me. It only made me angrier. I went to confront him, and I guess he didn’t like that much. He never was one for taking criticism.”
“Had he ever hit you before?” Vivien asked.
Lorna shook her head. “He was more of a people pleaser. He wouldn’t have dared. His deal was more guilt trips and subtle digs to make me feel bad about myself. Like the time he bought me an exercise bike for Christmas after the twins were born when I didn’t ask for one. Or he would make snide comments. Or come up with any excuse he could think of to disappear from the conversation.”
“Jerk,” Vivien swore under her breath. “I hate passive aggressive people who do shit like that.”
“It might have been the only way he could communicate to get you to be quiet,” Heather explained. “If he didn’t like being criticized and yelled at, the confrontational approach you took could have set him off. If he was yelling back, or talking, or trying to placate you and you couldn’t hear him… I don’t know. He might have been confused and not in control of his supernatural strength. If it was him.”
“Who else would it be?” Vivien leaned back in the chair and lifted her arms over her head to stretch. “Sam wouldn’t have attacked her. He’d have no reason to.”
“Have you felt Sam?” Lorna asked.
Vivien dropped her arms and shook her head in denial. “No.”
“I’m not a professional ghost hunter, but I’ve had enough conversations with them to know the confrontational approach of yelling and threats normally isn’t advised unless you understand what you’re doing and never when you are alone. Normally, questions are asked in a calm tone with a recorder and they play back the answers later. Or they use special scanners that flick through radio stations to pick up signals the spirits can use to choose words and form sentences. I never, personally, needed the tape recorder or scanner so I never tried but that’s how they do it.”
“So you think Glenn was trying to answer me and I just couldn’t hear him? Then he overcompensated with that rush of cold air and knocked me down.” Lorna felt a little bit better about that explanation. It beat being attacked by a demon any day. The motions that happened after she fell could have been his attempts to wake her up.
“Intentional or not,” Vivien stated with a firm stare, “he could have killed you.”
“She’s right,” Heather agreed. “When you first came in here, they were sure they were going to have to take you up to surgery. If William hadn’t agreed to help me check the stage, you might not have been found for hours. They said you would have died if left untreated.”
“I guess becoming a ghost myself is one way to make Glenn face me and give me answers,” Lorna muttered wryly.
“Not f
unny.” Vivien furrowed her brow. “No dying jokes allowed.”
“Your self-healing mojo must have kicked in, thank goodness, because about an hour before you were scheduled to go into surgery, the swelling started to improve,” Heather said.
“Oh, and if they ask, I told them Heather had your health proxy. You seemed adamant you didn’t want us calling your kids, and everyone in town loves her,” Vivien said. “That’s how we were able to stay with you and talk to the doctors.”
“Yeah, of course, thank you.” Lorna nodded. “I’m grateful you were both here. I love my children, but they’re not exactly who I’d call in an emergency.”
“That reminds me.” Heather dug into her pant pocket. She pulled out Lorna’s ring. She set it on the bed. “They gave me this to hold for you.”
Lorna slipped the ring back onto her forefinger. She’d not realized it was gone before then, but as it settled into place a shiver of electrical current work through her body and she felt better.
“How is your head now?” Vivien asked.
“Little achy, but barely worth mentioning.” Lorna ran her fingers over her scalp, searching for lesions or bumps. “I’m more concerned about what that nurse mentioned about the mysterious injuries. I swear I heard people talking about it when I was coming in and out of consciousness. I don’t think I’m a healer. I think I accidentally transferred the injuries to someone else. So if I self-healed, does that mean another person has my intracranial swelling and might die?”
Vivien and Heather shared a look.
“What?” Lorna carefully watched their expressions. “Tell me.”
“When we went to look for coffee in the cafeteria downstairs, you were still pretty out of it. We heard several people complaining about headaches they couldn’t shake,” Vivien said. “It was supposed that a flu virus was going around the hospital.”
“The only reason we noted it was because we had headaches too but decided none of us knew what head pain was compared to what you were going through,” Heather added. “So maybe you did heal yourself, but you spread it around this time.”
“You think I crowdsourced an injury?” Lorna frowned.
“I’ll ask the nurses in the morning,” Vivien said. “I’ll see if anyone else has come in with similar injuries.”
“Please do.” Lorna didn’t want her brain to swell up again, but that didn’t mean someone else should suffer in her place. She glanced at the door. “Do you think William is all right? Should we call him to check? He seemed pretty upset.”
“I’ll text him,” Heather said. “He won’t answer me right away. He’ll want time to think. It’s best we just give him space to do that.”
“You should try to sleep.” Vivien pulled the covers up on the bed to lightly tuck Lorna in. “Hopefully the doctor will let you out of here tomorrow. You can come home with me and when you’re up for it, we’ll go back to the theater and get whatever you need.”
Chapter Twelve
Vivien’s home was not the bohemian paradise Lorna expected. Why she thought it would be filled with lingering hints of patchouli, mismatched shabby-chic fabrics, and oversized pillows, she wasn’t sure. Instead of matching Vivien’s personality, the home matched the way she dressed—two things that varied greatly on close reflection.
Like her clothes, the walls of Vivien’s home were carefully considered and decorated. Art prints were spaced as if measured into place. Though there were paintings of women, stretched into alluring Renaissance poses, they were merely decorative like the displays of a museum. There were no photographs or personal tokens, no peeks into the human soul. Vases stood empty, beautiful and of the perfect height and color to match their surroundings.
This was not a home that looked like people lived there. It was a magazine ad awaiting its inky two-page spread. If emotions were felt in this house, they were hidden behind the protective shell of the walls.
“You have a lovely home,” Lorna said, standing in the living room beside the cream-colored couches that looked as if they’d never been used. The statement was true. Everything about the home could be classified as lovely.
“I hate it,” Vivien said. “I left everything the way it was after my divorce to remind me of how close I was to being trapped in a loveless marriage with a boring cheat of a man, and that no relationship is better than a relationship that includes the life that was lived behind these walls. Plus, I’m too lazy to change it.”
“Now that I doubt,” Lorna said. In fact, Lorna would go so far as to say the home was a shield to hide behind, like the tailored clothing Vivien wore. “You don’t strike me as too lazy for anything.”
Vivien chuckled.
“May I ask you something personal?” Lorna’s head felt delicate from her ordeal, and she had to be careful not to turn too quickly or she’d get dizzy.
“Always,” Vivien said. “I may choose not to answer, but you may ask.”
“Your second husband. If you sense things about people…?”
“With all my psychic powers, why didn’t I know he was a boring cheat before I agreed to marry him?” Vivien smiled, though it contradicted the sadness in her eyes. “I think it was because I didn’t want to see all his flaws, or maybe I didn’t care. On some level, I knew I wouldn’t lose myself when I was with him. I had that kind of mad, passionate love with Sam. Rex offered support, money, and travel. I offered a decorated home, a pretty face, and company at business dinners. For a time the arrangement worked, and then it didn’t. I’m sure I sound like a nut.”
“Life is complicated. People are complicated. They never tell you that when you’re young and in love, do they?” Lorna rubbed her temple.
“Enough serious talk.” Vivien smiled. “You look beat and doctor’s orders are to make you rest so you continue to recover. The guest room is this way. Snoop in any drawer you want and raid the kitchen as often as you like.”
Lorna followed Vivien down a long hallway. She opened one of the doors and stepped inside.
A king-sized bed dominated the room. The dark wood headboard stood tall against the wall and matched a shorter footboard. It centered before a flat screen television mounted on the wall.
“Your bathroom is there. Like I said if you need anything feel free to raid the linen closet or the kitchen. My home is your home. If you need it, use it.” Vivien glanced over Lorna’s gray yoga pants and green V-neck t-shirt. Heather had brought them to the hospital so she could have something to wear home. “I’d offer to let you raid my closet, but that looks comfy.”
“You’re not giving me the master suite, are you?” Lorna frowned. “I don’t want to take your bedroom.”
“This is the guest suite. My room is the door across the hallway.” Vivien glanced around the room as if she barely recognized it. She crossed to the window and opened the blinds. “We’re close to the beach if you want to go for a walk.” She closed the blinds, making the room darker for rest. “I haven’t had a guest in the house for a long time. It’ll be nice to have you here. Heather is coming by in a few hours. If you’re up to it, we’ll go to the theater together.”
Lorna nodded. The prospect of the theater didn’t frighten her, at least not as much as it should have considering her injuries. If she could accept her fall was, if not an accident then a byproduct from being too forceful with Glenn, then it was possible she had nothing to fear once they sent him on his way. She had never feared Glenn in life. It seemed strange that she should fear him in his afterlife.
Then again, she’d never suspected he was a consummate liar and bigamist. What other secrets had he hidden?
She studied her hand and thought of her missing wedding ring. If she were honest with herself, the betrayal was only one sliver of her hurt. No part of her wanted that life back, even without the lies. As Glenn’s wife, she’d been drifting. She knew that now. Yes, she’d loved him when she married him, but the years had eaten away at that love like the waves of an ocean dragging at the sands of the shore. Each undulation pulle
d her down until she drowned in the expectations—wife, mother, PTO president, hostess. For that, she could not blame Glenn. It was something she’d done to herself, with each decision, even those made out of and for love. Being a mother would never be a regret, but the act of setting aside herself during the course of motherhood was unfortunate.
Lorna kicked off her sneakers and walked toward the bathroom. She glanced inside the room but did not see any of the details beyond the impression of a large shower and garden tub. She went to the mirror and pulled at the neckline of her shirt. The two misshapen bruises on her chest had discolored to a sickly yellow which meant they were beginning to heal. She didn’t touch them or will them to get better, not wanting to pass them on to someone else.
She again focused on her bare ring finger. William had held her hand while she slept in the hospital. He was nothing like Glenn. When William spoke, it didn’t feel like he was trying to pull things out of her for himself. If anything, he kept apologizing for the things his sister might have told her. That was until he’d seen the video on Heather’s phone. She hadn’t seen him since. It was possible that ended all hope of him wanting to date her.
A cold rush of air crawled down her skin, and she automatically glanced up to see if there was an air conditioning vent in the ceiling. Not finding a source, she backed out of the bathroom. Her apartment had been cold when Glenn came to her. Was this a sign that he was back?
“Glenn?” Lorna whispered. “Is that you?”
The cold followed her, wrapping around her like an embrace. Her limbs became heavy and she felt as if she couldn’t move. Her feet became frozen to the floor. Silence surrounded her. A fluttering image along the corner of her peripheral vision caught her attention and she turned to the television. The power was off, and it was angled downward so she could see the reflection of the room on the black screen. She watched it intently, looking for movement.
Second Chance Magic Page 13
