by Kate Aeon
The last number that had called her was the psychic hotline — exactly what she would find if the call had come through the system. No help there until she logged off, then. She marked the time the call came through on her log sheet and wrote “prank caller” in the place where the name should have gone. She would call the service once she logged off to see if she could find out where the call came from.
“My name’s Charlene. I’m psychic, and I’m looking for a job. How can I get on the network?” Phoebe told her. Phoebe got a little kickback for any referrals that PSN actually hired. But if Charlene had been much of a psychic at all, she would have picked up Phoebe’s panic, her terror at being tied to the phone in a room with windows in it, with doors. He was watching her, whoever he was. Phoebe could feel him watching. In the cramping of her belly, in the cold sweat on her skin, in the white fire in her knee, she could feel his presence. His slow, patient hatred.
She could feel Michael.
Not a stranger playing with her, not a father of one of the kids who had died out for vengeance against the only target left, not one of Michael’s brothers distraught at what she’d done.
Michael.
Phoebe could almost feel his finger trailing down the back of her neck. She shivered. One way or the other, she was going to have to get information out of the nursing home people. Any means necessary, she told herself.
Logging off took her a dozen tries.
When she finally succeeded, she worked herself into a tearful state and called the nursing home. It didn’t take much; she was already right at the edge of panic. “This is Laine Schaeffer,” she said between hiccuping sobs. “I just got a call from someone who said that Michael was dead, and I can’t get anybody back home to pick up the phone. I don’t know who called, I can’t trace the number. Is it true?” Perhaps it was the genuine fear in her voice; perhaps it was the fact that at three thirty in the morning the on-duty nurse was less inclined to be suspicious; perhaps the nurse was simply sloppy. She said, “Oh, Ms. Schaeffer, I’m so sorry about whoever told you that. I was in there not fifteen minutes ago changing his tube feeding and turning him, and he’s the same as he has been for the past few days.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure. The ventilator is breathing for him now, and he’s running a bad fever, but we’re working on it.”
“Any sign that he’s waking up?”
A soft sigh. “I’m going to sound so mean saying this, but he isn’t going to wake up, Ms. Schaeffer. It’s been too long. He doesn’t respond to painful stimuli, he doesn’t follow with his eyes, he doesn’t move. People always hope for miracles, and I know you will too, no matter what I say. But I’ve never seen a miracle after this long. I don’t think anybody has.” She paused and sighed deeply. “And he isn’t doing well. I know he’s pulled through before, but I really think you should prepare yourself for the worst.”
“Well. Then. Well... thank you,” Phoebe said and hung up.
The call ought to have reassured her. She should be relieved. Michael was still in a coma, still in a nursing home bed all the way up in Cleveland, Ohio. Not doing well. She was safe from him. He would never hurt her again.
But in the back of her mind she could hear Michael laughing.
Then, from the corner of her eye, movement again. The little girl. The ghost, or the hallucination, or the physical manifestation of her guilt. The child stood staring at Phoebe for the longest time, while the room got colder and colder, until Phoebe’s skin felt like ice and she wanted to scream to the apparition just to go away. But Phoebe couldn’t scream. She couldn’t move. She sat there frozen, with her heart pounding in her throat and her hands clenched into fists, and she couldn’t do anything but blink.
Go see my daddy, the child’s voice whispered inside Phoebe’s head. An image flashed through Phoebe’s thoughts — the doctor next door. Alan Mac-something. That was the little girl’s daddy? Oh, Christ.
And then the kid vanished.
At three in the morning, Phoebe couldn’t imagine Dr. Alan Mac-whatever being happy to see her on his doorstep — assuming he was home — but she didn’t want to spend another minute alone in her house with that telephone, either. With Michael’s voice inside her head, with that feeling of knowing her that had always oozed from Michael. She didn’t know how he could be in a coma in the nursing home in Ohio and on the phone with her. At that moment she wasn’t going to try to figure it out. The child had come to her and had told her what she needed to do. Just like Nana had. This time, she was going to listen.
Phoebe got her cane and her backpack and hobbled to her front door. She had no idea what she was going to say to her neighbor when he opened his door. If he opened it. She knew she had to look like a crazy woman, and she knew when she opened her mouth she was going to sound like a crazy woman. But she hadn’t listened to the voice that had tried to warn her when she’d had the chance before. She hadn’t trusted whatever it had been — whether it was her grandmother or simply her own instincts manifesting in an unexpected form — and people had died. People she could have saved if she had just believed.
Go see my daddy.
Phoebe stepped out into the muggy, jasmine-laden Florida night air, hobbled the few steps between her front door and the doctor’s, and before she could think about what she was doing — about how completely crazy her actions were — she rang his doorbell.
It took him only a second to open the door, and he looked wide awake. So he’d already been up. She didn’t remember him being quite so tall, or quite so... solid. He looked like hell — unshaven, with swollen red eyes and a red nose, and Phoebe thought, Oh, shit, he’s drunk.
But he didn’t look drunk. He didn’t smell drunk.
Honestly, he looked like he’d been crying.
What the hell?
He said, “You.”
“Me,” she agreed.
“The knee?”
“No.”
They stared at each other for a long moment, and then he said, “I hate to be blunt, then, but what in God’s name do you want at this hour?”
“I wish I knew,” she said. “Things have been — strange — at my house.”
He narrowed his eyes. Studied her warily, and came to a decision. “Look, I was up anyway, and I could use some company right now. Turns out being alone in this place tonight hasn’t worked out too well for me. If you tell me your name, I’ll let you come in.”
Which seemed reasonable. Phoebe looked through the door behind him, eyes scanning for chains, body parts, animals nailed to walls — if the child she’d seen and heard had been real, and not an omen of impending madness, then Phoebe didn’t know how the little girl had died. And there was a big difference between Go see my daddy (because he needs to know I’m all right) and Go see my daddy (and see that he goes to jail for what he did to me).
But the unit had a surprising amount of very nice furniture, tastefully arranged. No heads on spikes. No naked women in dog collars or black leather straps.
“Phoebe. Phoebe Rain,” she told him. “Bad day for me, too. Worse night.” She took a deep breath and stepped inside. Looked around. “Pretty.”
“A colleague — friend — of mine dropped by about a year ago, saw the place, and told me that sleeping on the floor in a sleeping bag and eating off an unpacked cardboard box four years after I bought the place did not look good and if I didn’t get some furniture, he was going to take pictures and pin them to the wall in the doctors’ overnight room. Morrie’s the kind of guy who would do that. And he was right. So I paid a decorator.” He looked around at the place, shrugged, and turned back to Phoebe.
“I don’t have the talent or the money to decorate,” Phoebe said, and laughed just a little. “What furniture I have is the kind that comes in a box that you put together yourself, with dowels and glue and parts labeled A, B, and C.”
Alan pulled an ottoman up to one of the armchairs for her and said, “Have a seat, put your leg up. Want some coffee?”
“Just water,” Phoebe said. “I’m a bit sensitive to caffeine.”
“I live on it,” Alan told her. “Though today I’m wondering what I am sensitive to.” He went over to the kitchen that was a flipped image of hers and poured coffee from a pot. Then rummaged around in his cabinets and found a nice, heavy glass, filled it with ice and filtered water. Carried both drinks back. Cleared away a couple of cartons of Chinese takeout and put the glass in front of her. He glanced at her. “Want some? Or some cookies?”
“I mostly eat raw,” Phoebe said. “Lots of cantaloupe, lots of carrot juice. Tofu. Steamed stuff occasionally.”
“Vegetarian?”
She nodded. “Vegan. Keeps me healthy and keeps my weight down. With the leg pain, not carrying any extra weight has become critical for me.”
“I imagine.” Alan looked thoughtful. She saw him start to say something, then stop himself, shake his head, and sigh. “Who shot you?”
She arched an eyebrow. Direct, wasn’t he? “My ex-husband.”
Alan winced and stared at her. “I’m... Fuck. Is he in jail, at least?”
“In a coma,” Phoebe said. She didn’t add anything about that being better than jail. Because Michael had called her twice in one day. Had talked to her. Had threatened her. She couldn’t rejoice over his coma anymore, over the fact that she’d beat him, stopped him from killing anyone else, including her — she couldn’t rejoice in anything again until she knew how he’d called her.
“Good,” Alan said. He watched her.
And she watched him. “I thought it was. He’s in a coma because of me.”
“Want to talk about it?”
“Maybe if I do, I’ll be able to make sense of what’s happening with me today.” Phoebe settled into the chair. It was wonderfully comfortable, and just sitting in it soothed her frazzled nerves.
“Your family not being much help?”
She exhaled slowly. “They’re all dead.”
He looked stricken. “God. I’m so sorry.”
She nodded. “They were driving home from visiting me in college, my last year there. My dad, my mom, my sister. They had a bad, wet, hilly road, bad brakes, old car. And an eighteen-wheeler coming the other way.”
He closed his eyes. “How did you get through it?”
“Badly,” she told him. “I fell to pieces. I turned to the first comfort offered. And I married the biggest mistake of my life.”
“Your ex.”
“Yes.”
Alan rose and walked around the small front room. For a while he didn’t say anything at all. Then, with his back to her, he said, “What about your friends? Whatever support system you have?”
“I have me,” Phoebe said. She shrugged. “I see myself as a woman who has someone who wants to kill me. I’m not willing to put friends in the line of fire. So I don’t have any.”
“Line of fire. I thought you said your ex was in a coma.”
“He’s been in a coma for almost two years,” Phoebe said. “But my... gut, intuition... nightmares... whatever... insisted that even though he was in a coma, he wasn’t going to stay that way. That he was going to come after me again someday. And that he would be perfectly happy to have an excuse to hurt anyone I cared about on the way to me.”
“If he’s been in a coma for two years, the odds of him coming out of it now are almost astronomically bad.”
“So I’ve been told. But I have very good reason to never want to take any chances where he’s concerned.”
Alan settled back into his chair and took a sip of his coffee, clearly waiting for her to go on.
Phoebe took a little drink of water. “We’d been married for eight years when I finally got up the nerve to run. It took Michael three years to find me; just long enough that I was finally pretty sure I’d successfully gotten away from him. He came into the school where I was teaching. Had a shotgun with him, and a pistol, and a lot of ammunition, and I don’t know how he got into the school with it. No one does.” Phoebe closed her eyes, trying to blank out the pain that came from talking about it. She’d been over the story so many times — with police, with counselors, with nurses and physical therapists — that she thought she’d gotten numb to the whole nightmare.
But she was discovering that all the numbness wore off the second the danger came back.
“He walked into the classroom, smiled at me, and said, ‘Hello again, Phoebe. I told you you’d never leave me. Time to go home,’ ” Phoebe said. “Then he pulled out the pistol and shot one of my students through the head. Twelve years old...” Phoebe couldn’t speak for a moment.
Alan’s lips thinned, and his body tensed. She could see his hands knot into fists, could see the knuckles go white.
“I saw him aim at another one of my students and I charged him. He pulled the trigger, hit the boy, and had the shotgun in his other hand part of the way up to shoot me when I landed on him.”
“You jumped a man who was trying to shoot you?” Alan asked, studying her.
“Yeah.”
“Shit. Little guy?”
“He was six four and about two hundred thirty pounds. I’ve been told that now he’s rolled into a fetal ball with a gastric tube through a port in his stomach, and last I heard he was down about a hundred pounds.”
“You attacked a guy that size?” Alan looked like he didn’t quite believe her.
“At that moment I would have jumped King Kong. What were my other options? Stand there and die? Watch him kill all my students in front of me, then kill me — which was, I think, his plan?”
“Run, maybe?” Alan suggested.
“That option didn’t even occur to me. My students were in there with him; all I could think was that I had to stop him. Something inside me snapped when he brought up the gun. I was scared, but just too furious to think.”
Alan nodded. “Adrenaline rush. It hits people different ways. We get some strange things through the ER — people who have done impossible things.”
“That was me,” Phoebe said. “All adrenaline. I hit him, the shotgun went off and took most of my knee with it, but I went for his eyes with my thumbs and his throat with my teeth and his groin with my good knee. We fell. I jammed an elbow into his throat. I remember hearing the crunch. That took him out of the fight — he was too busy trying to breathe.”
“Could have killed him right there, actually.”
“I wish I had,” she whispered. “But I didn’t hit the cartilage hard enough to completely crush it.” She stared down at the glass of water in her hands, realizing that it was shaking. She tightened her grip on it. “I grabbed his hair with both hands,” she continued, “and started smashing his head up and down on the floor. He couldn’t fight me off. I’d crushed his windpipe. I just kept thinking of all the times he’d hurt me, tortured me, and I kept thinking if I’d had the guts to fight back just once then, two kids wouldn’t be on the floor dying...”
Her voice flattened and her pulse galloped. She was back in the nightmare again, back in the endless recitations to police about what had happened, and all of a sudden her voice sounded tinny and far away to her, as if she were listening to someone else talking. “I remember my hands clutching his hair and the sound of his head hitting the industrial carpet and, under it, the concrete floor — the sound it made. And how the sound changed.”
Phoebe looked up to see Alan staring away, a look of sick horror on his face.
It was horrible. The whole ordeal was still with her on the bad days, and though she hadn’t suffered from so many of those of late, the events of the day had just made it all sharp and clear and brand-new again.
“In the back of my mind, I could hear the screaming, and I could see blood,” she said, barely able to force out the words. “Lots of blood. And I realized that my right leg hurt a lot. But I was inside a dark tunnel and the only people in it were Michael and me. And Michael’s head slamming and slamming and slamming. Then that tunnel narrowed down to a pinpoint, and then to noth
ing. I woke up in the hospital. He never woke up at all. At least that’s what the hospital says.”
“The kids?”
“Both died.”
He reached over and took her hand and held it, not saying anything. That single human touch undid her. Tears filled her eyes, and she closed them tightly, swallowing hard until she knew she could keep going without crying. She didn’t let herself cry anymore.
“You don’t have anybody?”
“I learned something from my last meeting with Michael — keep innocents out of the line of fire. You don’t know what it’s like, having people murdered because of you.”
Alan was quiet for a moment. “You’re right. I don’t. But I know what it’s like to feel guilty.” He didn’t look at her when he said it. “Still.” He took a long sip of coffee. “Two years. You could surely at least risk a phone call to a friend after two years.”
“A friend who would come running to help me? And then what if Michael showed up?” Phoebe considered her next words carefully. “Which of the people that you love would you intentionally put between you and a bullet if you only had to do one simple thing to prevent any of them from being there?”
Alan didn’t say anything.
“It’s not a rhetorical question. Which of them?”
“None of them, of course.”
“Me either,” Phoebe said. “And I only have to do one simple thing to keep them out of harm’s way. I have to stay away from everyone I’ve ever known.”
Alan nodded. “I truly understand that.” He put his coffee on the table and leaned forward, elbows on knees, hands clasped together. “But if I can offer an opinion as a doctor, if he’s been in a coma for two years, you can probably stop worrying.”
Phoebe shook her head.
