“How are you?” he said. I thought about that phrase, how it is often used as an icebreaker, like talking about the weather.
But I knew he really meant the question, and so I said, “Okay, I guess.”
“Just okay?”
“I don’t know. I’m feeling a little shaky.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I found my roommate dead in her bed.”
“The nurses told me about that,” he said. We stared unblinking at each other. He was part of the cover-up. Would he tell me the truth?
“Tell me about what you thought you saw.” So I did.
After I had finished he looked at me thoughtfully and said, “I’m beginning to think that depression isn’t your only problem. You might be suffering from some sort of paranoia, as well.” He started to tell me more, but I wasn’t listening. I was too anxious about Mavis and I interrupted him.
“What’s happened to Mavis?” I blurted out. The need to know was overwhelming. But his answer was underwhelming.
“Cordi, I’m sorry. You know I can’t discuss other patients. I’m just concerned with getting your illness under control.”
“She seemed so happy, you know?” I said. “When she came back from her electroshock treatment, she was so pleased that the nurse had got the stain out of her T-shirt. So happy.”
I glanced up at Osborn just in time to see a strange look on his face, as if what I had said puzzled him, but then he cleared his throat and said, “I don’t think you need another ECT just yet, but it’s something we should keep in mind.”
Another? I was nonplussed and horrified. “What do you mean, ‘another’?” I asked, my voice barely a whisper.
And then the loud and strident ringing of the fire alarm intruded on my fear and confusion.
Osborn looked at me and said, “We’ll finish this later. We need to evacuate.” As if what he had said wasn’t its own ten-alarm fire.
Chapter Nine
Usually a fire alarm in the dead of winter in a hospital is not just a fire drill, so everybody was told to move down the stairwell and stay calm. But we knew that we were seven flights up in a building presumably on fire and could get trapped, for all anyone knew, in that stuffy little stairwell. So the exhortation to remain calm wasn’t all that effective. People were running down the stairs, some pushing past others. I was being jostled from all sides and at one point I stumbled and felt myself falling. I reached out wildly for anything to grab on to, and someone grabbed me, steadied me from behind. I looked around and saw that it was Dr. Osborn.
“Slowly, Cordi, slowly,” he said.
Which royally pissed me off because I had been going more slowly than most, heeding the “be calm” directive. But then I felt uncharitable. He had, after all, just saved me from a fall.
I hadn’t made it to the second floor when the PA system came on to say it had been a false alarm and we could return to our floors. The elevators at the second floor were jammed with people and I knew it would be the same on every floor, so I went back to the stairs and started climbing.
“You too, eh?” a voice said from behind me.
Gravelly. Deep. Exciting. Jacques.
I turned. “Didn’t think a smoker could climb six flights,” I said, and immediately regretted the words. I smiled at him to erase any sting.
“Maybe I can’t. We’re only on the second floor. Ask me when we get to the seventh.”
I was very aware of his footsteps behind me as I started to climb, and was surprised at how light-footed he was for such a large man. When we got to the fourth floor I took pity on him and stopped to take a rest I didn’t need. But he was right there with me, no laboured breathing, no sweaty forehead. I had stopped too soon on the landing and forced him to stop one step below me. Even with the added step he was still taller than I was and it made me feel all warm and fuzzy.
“Any further ahead on how Mavis died?” he asked.
I tried to remember where I had left off with him, what he knew and what he didn’t.
“Are you having second thoughts?” he said, brushing his hand against my shoulder.
“About what?”
“About what happened.”
“Dr. Osborn seems to think I should. Or rather, he insinuated.”
Jacques raised his eyebrows. “Did he threaten you?”
“Why would you think that?”
“Just sayin’.” Jacques had confused me. I wasn’t sure what he meant and then I lost my train of thought. I stepped back and he stepped up onto the landing, making me crane my neck to see the green of his eyes.
“You know, I make a pretty good bodyguard. If anyone should threaten you.”
I was quiet after he said that.
“Has someone threatened you?” Jacques continued.
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Maybe?”
So I told him about the subway.
“Jesus. You could have been killed.”
“That might have been the intent, yes,” I said wryly.
“Do you think you were pushed?”
“Someone barged into me. There’s no question about that, but somebody could have just tripped and fallen against me. I was standing pretty close to the edge.”
“But you said that someone said you were pushed.”
“Yeah, I know. But I could have misheard and he actually said, ‘Maybe she was pushed,’ not ‘she was pushed.’”
“What did the police say when you told them?”
“I didn’t, because I wasn’t sure.” He looked at me in a way that made me feel stupid. And I guess I was. I should have told the police, but surely the security cameras would show what had happened. And maybe someone else had heard what I heard.
I looked at Jacques then and thought of Ella and her missing finger and her calm demeanor and her big, incredibly voluptuous body. He brushed his hand gently across my cheek and pushed a strand of hair out of my eyes. I felt weak in the knees.
“What is it? Do you know who it is?” he said. I couldn’t exactly tell him the effect he was having on me by standing so close and caressing me, so I thought again about Ella and her finger. And then I thought about not telling Jacques, the way I had not told anyone, but I needed to talk and he was the only one who had said he believed me. And I believed he meant it.
“When I was in the morgue I saw the hand of one of the two people I overheard talking,” I said in a rush.
Jacques inclined his head.
“It was missing a finger.”
“Ella,” said Jacques, and let out a long low whistle.
I told him then about what I’d heard her say — that I knew Mavis was dead, that I knew too much, and something had to be done. When I was finished he whistled again.
“Not much doubt that she was talking about you, eh?” he said. “But then you’re easy to talk about.” I must have looked startled because he laughed and pulled me to him. “Relax, that was a compliment.” And then he kissed me, right there on the landing, and my world exploded.
I couldn’t stop thinking about Jacques. Couldn’t stop feeling his lips on mine, his hands running up and down my body. When we left the stairwell and I was back in my room I lay down on my bed and nursed the little piece of happiness that was growing inside me. There wasn’t room for any other thoughts for a long long time, and then suddenly I remembered my meeting with Osborn. I got out my cellphone, checked the battery, and called Ryan, thankful that I was at least allowed to keep the phone in my room, if not the cord. Ryan answered on the first ring. I blurted out what I had to say.
“Dr. Osborn told me I may need to have another electroshock treatment, another ECT sometime. You know, the procedure where you get zapped into a seizure by electricity,” I said, making sure he knew exactly what I was talking about.
I could hear Ryan breathing at
the other end of the line. His silence was telling.
“What did he mean by another?” I asked, my voice insistent and cold.
He didn’t answer me.
“Are you still there?” I asked.
“Yeah. Yeah, I’m still here.”
“Ryan? Did I have an ECT?” I made no attempt to hide the panic in my voice.
“Yes.”
“And you knew?”
“Yes.”
I was too stunned to say anything.
“Cordi, you have to understand. You were so sick. Dr. Osborn said it would help you, because nothing else was. You were too sick to make the decision.”
“So you made it for me.”
“Yes.”
I felt tremendously violated. That something had been done to me without my permission, without my knowledge. And I had no memory of it. I don’t know which was worse. I was desperate to get off the phone, because I was afraid I might say something to Ryan that I would regret.
But he needed something from me, it seemed, and I heard him ask, “Do you still think that woman is dead, Cordi?” His voice was tentative, almost apologetic, defin-itely apprehensive, waiting for an answer that, either way, would not assuage his fears. A yes answer would chill him and a no answer would just have him asking, “Are you lying to make me feel better?” So I changed the subject and we talked about his daughter, Annie, until the battery on my phone died.
I dropped my cellphone onto my bed and began counting the buttons on it. It was a very old phone and I only ever used it for emergencies because I hated being tied to a phone, hated being reachable 24/7. There were so many buttons and they were so small. I had reached twenty-three when Kit sidled into the room and took one look at me and left, but not before she snatched her thigh-length orange sweater from her bed. I idly wondered why a redhead would buy a sweater that clashed so wildly with her hair. Shortly after that, Lucy catapulted into the room, wearing lime-green pants and a leather vest. I barely glanced at her.
“The food in the cafeteria is shitty,” she said briskly, “so I’m going to start a catering business for hospitals and we’ll serve the best damn food there is, you’ll see.” The words all ran into each other, so I wasn’t sure I had taken in all that she’d said.
“You look like the food,” Lucy said next. “Shitty.”
I was still in shock.
“I had an ECT,” I said tentatively, looking up at her. God, was she beautiful.
“I could have told you that,” she said as she paced the room, her energy level higher than a jumping bean, her blonde hair swept back into a jaunty ponytail, her movements lithe and graceful.
“Why didn’t you?”
“You didn’t ask. Why would you, anyway?” She abruptly stopped pacing and stared at me, her sapphire eyes unreadable.
“You don’t remember, do you?”
I shook my head.
“That’s okay. Lots of us don’t remember,” she said sourly, as if she’d just clamped down on a lemon.
“What do you mean?”
“Some patients who have ECT come out afterward with their short-term memories pretty much gone. Even some long-term memories disappear, sometimes for good, although they say they have no real evidence for that. Which is bullshit.”
I detected more than a little bit of bitterness in her voice, even though I wasn’t paying that much attention to her. I could feel my eyes widening and my skin begin to crawl.
Is that why I had forgotten so much? It wasn’t me just losing myself? Someone else had made me lose myself?
I could feel anger surge within me, until another niggling little thought intruded. Maybe the ECT had helped me. After all, I was on the road to recovery. I took a deep breath, amid the cascade of confusing thoughts.
“Have you had one?” I asked Lucy.
“Is the moon far away?” she retorted.
“Did you lose your memory?”
“Some. I didn’t know my name, my family, where I was. I felt like my conscious mind had been torn to shreds and all my thoughts were disconnected from each other. Everything seemed new and yet sort of familiar. It sucked. But it didn’t last long.”
“What do they do to you?”
“You really don’t remember, do you?”
“No.”
“Electroconvulsive therapy. Or electroshock therapy. That says it all. They put you out cold and paralyze you so that the seizures they create don’t end in broken bones. Then they attach electrodes to your head and zap you with electricity. You’d jerk around like a marionette if you weren’t paralyzed.” Lucy sat down on her bed and tried to bounce up and down on it, a futile effort, because there were no springs.
“It’s gross, but at least you’re asleep,” she went on. “I checked on the Internet before they did it to me. They apply the electric current and watch on the machine you’re hooked up to, to see what’s going on with your brain. The seizure lasts one and a half to two minutes.”
It sounded like torture to me.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she said, “but it works for a lot of people and not everybody loses their memory.”
“Did it work for you?”
“A little bit. They want to try again.”
“Will you do it?”
“I don’t know. I don’t like losing my memory. I just wish there was something a little less like a horror movie, you know? I mean, they don’t even really know why it works, when it works. I find that hugely unnerving.”
So did I.
Chapter Ten
It was that lazy time, right after lunch and before any classes started, where everything seemed in limbo. I went to the computer room, a windowless soulless cubby-hole of a room on the men’s side of the floor and spent half an hour researching ECT. It wasn’t pretty and made me feel ill. It tended to be used only when all other avenues had failed. What did that say about me?
On the way back to my room I went to the bathroom thinking I was going to be sick, and was in the farthest of the three stalls when someone came in and took the stall beside me. Long orange sweater. Kit. Shortly thereafter someone else came in and took the third stall, the one closest to the door. I sat on the toilet seat and stared at the door in front of me. It was pockmarked with paint used to wipe out the graffiti, but someone was ahead of the graffiti police and had scrawled:
I am sinking deep in sin, someone come and push me in.
The stuff you read in women’s cubicles would give a psychiatrist a lot of thought and the women who read them no small measure of heartache. I guess that was why there’d been an attempt to white it out here, almost as soon as it was written. And if the person who wrote it was already sinking deep in sin, how could she be pushed in?
“Damn it!”
The voice came from the first stall and startled me, so preoccupied was I about sinking into sin.
“Can someone pass me some toilet paper please?”
“Hang on,” said Kit. There was a rustling beside me and then Kit swore.
“Somebody’s put the roll on the wrong way. The paper should fall forward, not backward.”
“Oh, it’s you,” said the voice in the first stall.
“Yeah, it’s me.”
“Only you would obsess about the toilet paper,” said the voice, dripping sarcasm.
There was a long silence and then Kit said sharply, “Why are you doing this to me?”
I thought maybe the other person was ignoring the proffered toilet paper, because what else could Kit mean? At any rate they obviously got it sorted out because whoever had needed the paper said a brusque “Thank you.”
At that point someone else came into the bathroom to use the shower and my stall mates clammed up. Finally deciding that I wasn’t going to be sick, after all, I exited the stall and went to wash my hands. As I turned to go I saw Lu
cy leaving the first cubicle. Something was definitely going on between her and Kit.
I had chosen to go to the spirituality meeting. The nurses had told me that it was non-denominational and not religious at all. They said it would be soothing for my mind, which definitely needed soothing. So I went.
I should have known better. I should have left the minute I smelled the incense and saw that the lights had been dimmed in the room, trying to hide its ugly utilitarian purpose. Pretty hard to hide the starkness of a windowless conference room, with metal chairs and tables and a bare linoleum floor. I definitely should have left when the group leader introduced herself as a practising Anglican minister, but by then I was curious about how she would keep things non-denominational.
She had arranged the chairs in a circle and had turned on some gentle music. Austin and Bradley were sitting beside each other with Lucy facing them. There were a bunch of others present whose names I didn’t know. Some of them were outpatients, but I recognized several from the floor. As I took a seat Jacques walked in and dropped into the empty chair beside me.
“You okay?” he asked, searching my face. I smiled and nodded and the seminar began. Jacques managed to move his leg alongside mine and I could feel the warmth. It made me feel hopeful. Something I thought I had lost. To have feelings again. The minister asked us each in turn whether we had done something just for ourselves today.
“I ate my breakfast,” said Austin. It was hard to tell if he was serious or joking. “And I think I’ve discovered the meaning of life.” He paused. For effect? “We live on a giant rubber ball and every time it bounces we have a natural disaster of some kind. The kid who owns the ball sometimes just lets us sit around under the sprinkler and we get floods, or in a closet and it’s overcast for days or full of smog and nothing really happens, unless the rats disturb the ball. It’s really scary being on the ball as it’s screaming toward the ground. There’s nowhere to hide and it’s just the luck of the draw whether you live or die.”
Crazy Dead (A Cordi O'Callaghan Mystery) Page 8
