by G. H. Ephron
I leaped up to grab her but not before her head connected one final time, accompanied by the sound of splintering glass. When I pulled her away, there was a small empty circle in the windowpane with a spiderweb of cracks radiating from it.
“Everything is not fine. And I think you know it.”
Maria struggled to get back to the window. Then she turned on me, her face white with rage, and shrieked, “You don’t know anything, you bastard!” She scraped her stubby fingers harmlessly across my cheek. “You sonofabitch!” She kicked me in the leg.
Pain radiated up and down my shinbone. I backed away. “Calm down and sit down, Ms. Whitson,” I ordered sternly. “If you don’t, I’m going to call Security to restrain you.”
“What do you know about me?” Maria said, still yelling, taking a step toward me. “You don’t understand the first thing about who I am. You think you do, but you don’t get it at all.”
“Okay. Then help me. Help me to understand. You want to get on with your life. And I want you to. Let’s help each other.”
Bright red blood oozed down Maria’s forehead. She swiped her hand across her face and stared at the scarlet smear on her palm. “Oh God,” she sobbed. Maria put her hands onto her temples and sank down onto the floor. Crying and rocking, she whispered, “I’m such a mess. A fat, ugly, useless slug.”
I said nothing. The wound was bloody but it didn’t look serious. I went back to my desk. I waited until the rocking stopped and she’d subsided into a heap. “This can’t happen again, you know,” I said then. “I can’t allow it. You could hurt yourself or someone else.” Maria stared down into her lap. “Let’s talk about what you want.”
I waited.
Maria sniffed and looked at me defiantly. “I want to get out of this snake pit. That what’s I want.”
“That makes two of us. Let’s talk about the things you need to do to make that happen.”
I wouldn’t continue until she agreed. Silence wasn’t enough.
Finally, Maria muttered, “So?” I waited. “So, what do I have to do?”
“We’re going to make a contract. I’m going to write down what you have to do, and you’re going to agree. Then we’re both going to sign. All right?”
Maria nodded and struggled to stand. Grudgingly, she took the hand I offered.
When she was seated again, I crouched beside her to check her forehead. There didn’t appear to be any glass in the wound. I took a tissue from my desk and pressed it over the gash. “Hold this until the bleeding stops.” Maria held the tissue in place. “And when you go back downstairs, have one of the nurses check it.”
I returned to my chair and started to write. “First, you have to eat, really eat, three meals a day. No more dropping it on the floor. We’ll be noticing.” Maria snuffled and watched as I wrote. “And second, no more throwing up after you’re finished. We’ll be checking your electrolytes and your weight every day to be sure you’re not cheating. We’ll have to put you on a fortified liquid or an IV if your weight doesn’t stabilize.” Worried that she might retreat to her room after this, I added, “And I want you to participate in activities on the unit.”
I turned the paper around to face her and handed her a pen. While she stared at the three items I’d listed, I rubbed my shin where a tender lump was growing. It could as easily have been a knee to the groin. I was grateful for small favors.
As Maria signed her name, I wondered about that cell phone. She could make any calls she wanted. Keeping it hidden didn’t make sense. On the other hand, one of the things that institutions like hospitals do is rob patients of their privacy. Maybe keeping the cell phone made Maria feel she still had something that was private, her own. And it seemed harmless enough.
24
THAT NIGHT, I dreamed that my phone was ringing. I picked it up but it kept ringing. I ran downstairs and tried picking up the extension in the living room, then the one in the kitchen. Then, with a logic that makes perfect sense in dreams, I found myself by the phone in the nurses’ station on the unit. I picked up the phone there and the ringing stopped. I held the receiver to my ear and heard the muffled sound of a teapot whistling. I tried, but I couldn’t pull the receiver away from the side of my face, the whistling growing louder and louder. I screamed, “Stop!” and was awakened by the sound of my own voice.
A moment later, my beeper went off. It was weird. The number flashing at me was the phone on the unit at the Pearce — the phone in the nurses’ station.
I called. Kwan answered.
“There’s been an accident,” he said.
“What happened?”
“Gloria’s been hurt. She slipped and fell in Maria Whitson’s room. An ambulance is on the way.”
“How’s Maria?”
“Hysterical. She keeps insisting that it’s her fault.”
I checked the clock. It was after three. “I’m coming in,” I said.
I got up, threw some cold water on my face, and pulled on a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt. I was out on the porch locking my front door when my mother’s door cracked open. “You’re going out?” she asked. She seemed tinier than usual inside her pink quilted bathrobe.
“They beeped me. What are you doing up? You okay.”
“I’m up! That’s how my nights are. I sleep a little. I’m up a little.”
“Go back to bed. You look very tired. Sure you’re okay?”
“You get to be my age, you’ll look tired, too.”
When I got to the Pearce, an ambulance, lights flashing and back doors flung open, was sitting at the back entrance to the unit. I parked on the access road and sprinted the rest of the way. The EMTs were carrying Gloria out on a stretcher. I trotted alongside. I wouldn’t have admitted it but I was completely freaked out. Gloria looked ghastly. Her eyes were shut and her skin was white. Her forehead was loosely bandaged. Her beige cotton shirt was spattered with blood. I took her hand. It felt cool and clammy. Her eyelids fluttered. “Peter …” she said.
“You okay?”
She got in a half nod before freezing, grimacing with pain. The terror I felt must have shown because she squeezed my hand and whispered, “I’m okay. Really, Peter. I’m going to be fine. Don’t worry.”
“How did it happen?” I asked.
“Maria screamed. I went in. Must have slipped.” It looked like every word hurt.
“I get the picture,” I said.
Gloria closed her eyes and seemed to relax. I watched as they hoisted her into the ambulance and closed the doors. Silently, the ambulance pulled away and wound its way out of the complex.
I hurried inside, past the common area and down the hall to Maria Whitson’s room. One of the night nurses was standing just outside the door. Inside, Kwan was crouched alongside Maria. She was on her hands and knees, rubbing at the floor with a wad of towels. What must have been blood had turned into pink smears. I started toward her but I couldn’t go there. I gagged and backed away. I caught hold of the doorjamb and managed to keep my knees from buckling. The bloody scene in Kate’s studio, a memory which I usually kept far in the recesses of my consciousness, came rushing forward.
I watched from what seemed like miles away. Maria was muttering the same thing, over and over. It sounded like her uncle’s name — Nino. Then, “My fault. It’s all my fault.” Tears were streaming down her face.
“Ms. Whitson,” Kwan said, taking hold of her hands gently, “you don’t have to do this. We have a staff who can clean this up.”
She gave him a wide-eyed stare. Then she looked past him and saw me sagging against the door frame. She seemed to pull herself up. She held her hands up in front of her face and stared at her palms. “I must have had a nightmare. I woke up, scared, on the floor. I screamed. The blood …”
She seemed overwrought. In fact, over-overwrought. The strong smell of Lady Macbeth in the air brought me back to the present like a whiff of smelling salts.
“Head wounds can make a mess,” Kwan told her. “Gloria didn’t lo
se consciousness, that’s what counts.”
“I was so angry with her. She said I was faking it. You don’t think I’m faking, do you?” She was talking to me.
I swallowed and got my voice. “She meant you were faking your weight. And pretending to eat when you were really throwing away your food. And you were, weren’t you?” Maria looked down at the floor.
“Ms. Whitson, being angry with someone doesn’t make them get hurt,” Kwan said.
I wondered if Maria believed him. For her, the line between feeling and reality was transparent and exceedingly permeable.
An orderly carrying a pail and mop squeezed past me into the room.
Kwan said to Maria, “Why don’t you let Andrew here do this job and clean up.” He helped her to her feet. “Jane?” he said. The night nurse came over. “Can you help Ms. Whitson?”
I managed to follow Kwan out of the room.
“You okay?” he asked.
I nodded wearily. Of course I wasn’t okay. That wasn’t new. What was new was that for the first time, not being okay had affected my work. I closed my eyes and opened them again, but not before my mind played back the pool of blood on the floor of Kate’s studio, the blood that was all that remained after they’d taken her body to the morgue.
“Go back to bed,” Kwan said. “Everything’s under control here. Accidents happen.”
“You think Gloria’s going to be okay?”
“Just a nasty bump. The hospital’s a precaution. They’ll probably keep her for twenty-four hours and then send her home.”
“Where were they taking her? Maybe I’ll go —” I looked at my watch.
“Peter, there’s not a thing you can do there but get in the way. Go home.”
I didn’t want to go home. I wanted to stay and hit my morning routine with a vengeance. But it was quarter past four. Such a stupid time. Too early to stay at work. Too late to go back to sleep. And the days were getting shorter so fast that it wouldn’t be light enough to row for hours.
I trudged back out to my car and drove home, trying not to let any more pictures replay themselves in my head. At home, I lay down on the couch in the living room. After an hour, I got up and made a pot of coffee.
At six-thirty, I called in. Maria was sound asleep. I made another call and found out that Gloria’s condition was “good.”
I breathed a sigh of relief. I could manage without my boat. I could fix the car. But the Pearce without Gloria was a prospect I didn’t want to contemplate.
25
TWO DAYS later, Sylvia Jackson’s picture was on the front page of the Globe. The prosecution’s star witness was on the stand, listening intently, her mouth drooping ever so slightly on one side. In grainy black-and-white, she was an ordinary middle-aged woman. The photograph did nothing to convey her sensuality and quirky appeal.
According to the article, when the D.A. asked her, “And who did this to you?” she hesitated only a moment before pointing to the defendant and pronouncing his name, “Stuart Jackson.”
I wondered how the jury imagined that this man, whom Annie so aptly described as “a hundred twenty pounds dripping wet,” forced two-hundred-forty-pound Tony Ruggiero to submit as he strapped a pillowcase over his head and then inflicted forty-six bruises and fifteen stab wounds before shooting him. It was a beating so severe that the pathologist speculated it might have been administered by two assailants.
Chip had to be pleased with his cross-examination. He’d questioned Sylvia about the days before the murder. He asked her what she’d done, whom she’d talked to. She could remember very little. She couldn’t remember what gift she’d given to Stuart the day before the killing — those paper butterflies that kept showing up in the inkblots.
Chip hammered at the contradictions between her testimony and her earlier statements. Had she driven to the cemetery or had her assailant? Had she watched the beating from the stairs or from the living room? Hadn’t she said at first that Tony was in the trunk of the car? When Chip pressed her to explain why she changed her mind, she’d snapped at him, “I know he wasn’t in the trunk.” When he asked her how she knew, her reply was all he could have hoped for: “I’ve read enough articles in the paper to find out what happened to him.”
Chip must have let the remark hang there, hoping the point was not lost on the jury. If one memory had been shaped by information she’d picked up from the newspaper, then how many others had been molded the same way?
Chip walked Sylvia Jackson painstakingly through the interviews she’d had with Sergeant MacRae in the weeks after she woke up. He quoted the questions that had become more and more specific, more and more leading each day, tracing the shift from “Who did this to you?” to “Stuart did this to you, didn’t he?”
He asked her if it was true that she’d wondered why Stuart didn’t visit her in the hospital. Hadn’t she confided her concerns to a nurse at the hospital? Chip put the question directly: “Did that nurse suggest a reason why Stuart wasn’t coming to visit you at the hospital?”
“She told me why he wasn’t coming to visit me at the hospital,” she answered. “It was because he was a suspect.”
And yet, despite all of the discrepancies that Chip exposed, despite the evidence that Sylvia Jackson had been reading the newspapers and talking to friends, gathering information that could then be incorporated into her memories, she’d been the star witness the prosecution had hoped she’d be. The newspaper described jurors in rapt attention, straining in their seats to catch her words, weeping openly when she described the murder. Could any amount of memory theory and test results offset the emotional power of her testimony?
I was so absorbed in the news of the trial, I nearly forgot we’d scheduled Maria’s family meeting for nine that morning. Gloria was still out. I was parking my wounded Beemer in the lot down the hill from the unit when a black Lexus pulled up beside me. I introduced myself to the distinguished-looking couple who got out. “You must be Maria Whitson’s parents. I’m Dr. Peter Zak.”
“My daughter — how is she?” Mrs. Whitson asked. She was a tall, handsome woman with shoulder-length, white-blond hair. Her face was wrinkle-free and her eyebrows arched in an expression of surprise. Her eyes radiated anxiety.
“She’s better,” I said cautiously. “Let’s go inside and talk.”
I led the Whitsons up the hill and into the unit. They hung back, checking out the place like a couple deciding whether to take a room in a fleabag motel.
When we reached the conference room, Mrs. Whitson removed her black cape. Underneath, she wore a skinny black dress that buttoned up the front. When she sat and crossed her legs, the bottom slit rode up to reveal a shapely leg. With her long neck, prominent nose, and full mouth painted a brilliant scarlet, she was like some great exotic bird beside the pale, colorless Mr. Whitson. He sat down stiffly beside her, resting his hands uneasily in his lap. He was tall and lean, with a head of thinning, gray hair. A peacock and Ichabod Crane. They were an odd pair. And Maria seemed nothing like either one of them. She must have grown up feeling like a chick whose mother had left her in a stranger’s nest.
Despite his colorless appearance, it was Mr. Whitson who asked the forthright question, “When can we see Maria?”
“I wanted to spend some more time talking to you first. Then, if everything works out, Maria will join us.”
Reddening, Maria’s father straightened in his seat and said, “If what works out? We’re her parents. We have every right to see her.” There was a pause that filled the room. “It’s that incest crap again, isn’t it?”
Mrs. Whitson had placed her hand on her husband’s arm and was whispering, “Shhh.”
The hostility didn’t surprise me. And after what they’d been through, it seemed entirely appropriate. “I know you’re concerned about your daughter. I can tell you how she’s doing now. We’ve gotten her off most of her medications. As you know, she came in here in a state of delirium.”
“Delirium? What exactly do y
ou mean?” Mr. Whitson asked.
“That’s when a person looks confused, has fluctuating moods. One minute she’s elated and the next she’s crying. She has trouble remembering.” By now Maria’s mother and father had exchanged knowing nods. “Often she doesn’t know where she is, when she is. Most often, delirium is either drug-induced or caused by some kind of physical condition.”
“Drug-induced,” Mr. Whitson repeated the words.
“That’s right. Your daughter was on a variety of prescription drugs, the combination of which could have caused that kind of altered state.”
“I knew that asshole doctor was no good,” Maria’s father muttered as his wife gently squeezed his arm.
“She’s doing much better, now that the drugs are nearly out of her system. She’s settling into the routine of the unit. I was hoping to get some background information from you so that we can plan the best course of treatment for Maria.” I hurried ahead into the relatively uncharged territory of medical history. “You’re both how old?”
Mrs. Whitson answered, “My husband is sixty-eight. I’m fifty.” I didn’t argue, though I suspected that Mrs. Whitson was in her sixties, too. Her plastic surgeon hadn’t touched the backs of her hands where the skin was loose and speckled with age spots.
“And Maria is your only child?”
She nodded
I continued asking the standard questions about birth, development, childhood illnesses. According to Maria’s parents, she’d had an idyllic childhood. She’d been a tomboy, very athletic. No bumps in the road until she started school.
“Tantrums,” Mr. Whitson explained. “She had tantrums at school. Then she starting having them at home, too. When she didn’t get what she wanted, she’d lie on the floor, screaming and crying.”
“We tried ignoring her,” Mrs. Whitson said, “but how can you ignore a six-year-old banging her head against a hard floor? As you might imagine, we went through a lot of nannies. My little brother Nino was the only one who could control her. She was his pet.”
