Oh, how she was growing more and more attracted to him!
“Alright, here goes. What is 'recall?'”
She inspected his face, his eyes, the corners of his lips, looking for confusion or a slight hesitation. If she were a cop, she'd have to do this all the time. Look for lies.
“You mean during general anesthesia?”
Gretchen nodded, but wasn't really sure if that's what she meant of not.
“Tom Yum. It means accidentally waking up during a surgical procedure. It almost never happens. Recall, I mean.”
She made a notation in her notebook. Inwardly, she smiled. One question right. He ate some curry.
“And what is 'twilight sleep?'
“Well...during regional anesthesia, you can choose how awake or asleep you want to be. Yam Wunsen Kung. Some people choose in between, and they can talk during the procedure, but when it's over and the medicine has worn off, they have no recollection of the event. That's twilight sleep. It's also called conscious sedation.”
“Can an epidural paralyze me?”
“If you mean for life, no. Well, it's about as likely as being killed in a car crash, one in hundreds of thousands of cases. Khao Kha Mu. So, extremely rare. Are you sure you want to continue talking about this?”
“Just one more question. And then I think you've passed. Please tell me the five things you measure during an operation.”
“Nam Pla Phrik. Your breathing, your cardiac function, blood pressure, how much carbon dioxide you exhale and, of course, your oxygen levels.”
Either he was a damn fine actor, or he really was an anesthesiologist.
“A +!” Gretchen said with a squeal, leaping up and wrapping her arms around him. Tom Yum spattered on his scrubs. “Oh, I'm such a klutz!”
She attacked the light blue material with a napkin, and his phone pinged with a text. He looked down at it over her head.
“Hey!” he said, pulling her off. “The surgery has been postponed! We've got another half hour!”
“Fantastic!”
She beamed at him. He beamed at her. It was if God had intervened, allowing them more time to get to know each other.
“So now that you've grilled me,” David said, picking up her hands in his own and holding them tight, “it's my turn. I don't even know your last name.”
“Barnett.”
“And, Miss Gretchen Barnett, what do you do?”
“I work for the airlines. I've just flown in from...São Paulo.” Gretchen hoped her face didn't reveal the shame she felt, and a peculiar something she felt gnawing away at some especially fragile, delicate cells of her brain, some outer cells of the cerebellum that held the genomes of decency and truth.
Why, why, why am I lying to him? she wondered to herself. But, again, she couldn't reveal the sad truth to this man. It was bad, though it was just the same was what she did to herself late at night when she thought about her life: making it better, more exotic than the harsh, cold truth was.
“Wow, great! What airlines do you work for? I guess you travel all over the world?”
Or... No! It was time to come clean. She couldn't go through this charade again. Gretchen put her hands up in the air, as if a white flag were waving behind her.
“No, no, forgive me! Please, David! I don't know why I just said what I did. I don't travel all over the world. I haven't just flown in from São Paulo. I was in Ypsilanti. Michigan. I work for Nickel and Dime. But that's all soon to be in the past. I've seen most of the USA, and now I'm joining the NYPD. As I told you.”
In the past, she had never known whether to tell people this or not. She didn't know why she was still saying it now to him, if truth be told. Some people like the police, some people didn't. She didn't want to risk alienating someone on a first date. But David was an anesthesiologist, after all. How could someone who worked in a hospital hate the police? And was this a date? And now it was looking increasingly more likely that she would be arrested by the NYPD than employed by them.
But Gretchen had finally revealed the truth about Nickel and Dime to somebody. Well, not that it mattered, because she was still lying. She'd been fired from Nickle and Dime. But if she had had this conversation with David twenty-four hours earlier, she wouldn't have been lying. So that was good. She felt as if a huge weight had been lifted from her shoulders. Soft thrills of anticipation rippled through her.
Someone as educated as David Lee Roth, a man who knew the world, a man who helped people in their time of need, was intoxicating to her. In the future, Gretchen felt, he would make her feel safe and protected. Time was knocking on her womb and announcing it was ripe to have those babies. Now, she smiled vaguely, at those babies of the future, maybe she was even smiling happily, her heart sunny. Today, she was thinking of the babies, her womb tingling in anticipation of the little lives that might soon be growing there, little mini-thems.
She was adding one more thing to the list the new, improved Gretchen had to do. She had to love again. And have children. With someone she loved. Did she dare?
She looked into David's eyes and wondered about dessert.
TWO HOURS LATER
GRETCHEN ARRIVED HOME, and still there was no sign of Roz. Well, yes, there was a sign: her bras and panties and stockings had appeared on the shower curtain rod to dry. Gretchen tugged them down, folded them as much as they could be folded, and placed them on Roz's bed. She wrinkled her nose at the stale smell in Roz's room. Gretchen hadn't glimpsed her roommate since two days before, when she had been surrounded by the NYU jocks. There was no cause for alarm yet; their schedules were different, and it was common for them to not see each other for days on end. There were always household things noticed, detective-like, to let them know the other was still alive and living there, a whiff of perfume, a wet drain, less milk in the fridge, the remote control in a different location. Though Gretchen had yet to detect any of these.
She had to have a nap; she was exhausted from the two men who had just entered her life, bad and good, Darko and David. She pushed David to the back of her mind, though it was difficult for her to do that after what they had done after lunch. She had to think about the Darko thing. She hoped today's drop-off was a one-off. What had been in that package? Drugs? A gun? A liver?
She sniffed the air, and was dismayed to detect a rank smell in her own room. Once, a mouse or a rat or some other small creature must have died behind the wall of her closet. At first, the smell had been a slight irritation, but then, as the body had decayed, the stench had blossomed. A few nights she had even slept on the sofa in the living room. It had taken weeks for the body of whatever it was to go through all the apparently many complicated stages of decomposition, and Gretchen had used scented candles—Clean Linen and Hawaiian Beach—and lots of Febreze. And then the smell had disappeared as mysteriously as it had come. She was too tired to deal with the smell now. A half hour nap. Maybe an hour. Maybe until she woke up, whenever that might be.
She didn't bother changing. She slipped between the covers, feeling safe and warm and comfortable, her head hitting the plushness of the pillow—and then she screamed as the door flew open and Roz barged into the room. Typical!
“Ohhh, it was fabulous!” Roz wailed. Her face was pink, her hair a mess. She was wearing a frat shirt three sizes too big for her. Her lipstick was the color of an avocado skin. “It was like I was their sex slave in that dorm room! They've had me captive for the past two days, and I loved every minute of it!” She went to sit on the edge of the mattress, yelped in pain, perched on one butt cheek, then continued babbling into Gretchen's face, which was startled at both the pornographic outburst and the stench of her breath. “They had me everywhere! Sure, they've got a lot to learn, but what they didn't have in technique, and staying power, if I must be honest, they more than made up for with their young jock bodies, their eagerness, their passion. Have you ever had five at once? It certainly wasn't the quality that had me explode with orgasm after orgasm, but sheer quantity! How can I feel
like a cougar at 28? But I do! It's marvelous!”
Gretchen wasn't about to bring up restraint, self-respect or dignity. She didn't want to be kicked out. Instead, as she hauled herself up onto the pillow, she said, “I thought you said that after, after—”
“Yeah, yeah,” Roz waved her away. “And, oh! That asshole! The dump-and-runner! I guess somehow he had my number. We must've exchanged them at some point that night, who knows. But, anyway, he had the bold-faced balls to call me this morning and tell me, you're never going to believe this,” she pressed her hand onto the shape of Gretchen's thigh visible in the blankets and clutched it tight as Gretchen wondered what bold-faced balls might be, “...he told me he didn't do it! Ha ha ha ha ha ha!!” She wiped tears from her bleary eyes. “Of course he would say that! Who would want to admit doing something so vulgar, so heinous, drunk or not?”
“Yes, it was vulgar, heinous. Drunk is no excuse,” Gretchen agreed, still shuddering at the image she had conjured up in her mind of what the kitchen floor must've looked like before Roz took the scrubber to it.
“Seriously, you should've heard me screaming down the line at him. People were scattering on the sidewalk in front of me. A little child cried. He must've gone and pulled down all the posters we put up. I don't see many of them left anywhere. And those damn posters weren't cheap! But I've got another plan. I've decided I should start a Facebook page. Like a fan page, but in reverse. Thank God I have that photo! And now I know his name as well. Brian Stoppard. Brian Stop-N-Shit, more like. It's time to take the campaign online. It's the obvious thing to do, more bang for less effort, but I got such a great kick out of seeing those old-school posters everywhere. In real life. And not only Facebook, I've decided, but Twitter, Instagram, everything. And, hey! I've been thinking, if you ever run into those guys again, you know, the ones who tried to rape you, maybe I can hire them to scare the shit out of him? Oh, ha ha ha! He'll be shitting his pants instead of our kitchen floor. I'm so witty! Ha ha ha ha ha! Oh! And whatever happened to your interview with the NYPD? When are you going to hear back from them? When are you going to be out patrolling the streets? I'm only asking because I wouldn't mind dressing up in your uniform once in a while. Some guys find it hot. And I want to borrow your handcuffs, of course. Yeah, I know I've got my own, those fluffy pink ones, but I want to try some real ones! And your baton! The things I could do, the places I could put that... And when you're on the beat, can't you guys look up all the information for anyone? You can look in the database and find Brian Stop-N-Shit's address and...well, a lot of things! When are they going to let you know?”
“I'm still waiting to hear b—”
“They're certainly taking their sweet-ass time! You know, I was a bit disgusted when you told me you wanted to be a cop, but now I see all the benefits. I'm sure if you were already on the force, we'd have this Brian asshole already in Riker's, down on his knees doing more than shi— Okay, I've said it enough, and it's something I want to forget, rather than dredge up every ten minutes. I didn't think of it once when those frat boys were pawing and slurping at every orifice I possess. Now I can't wait for you to join the boys in blue! And girls, of course, as you'll be one of them. Hmm, okay, I see you've had a bad day. Not up for chatting. Are you wearing your clothes to bed?”
“I just wanted a short—”
“And what's that's smell? Dear God, is it me?” Roz sniffed herself, then looked relieved. Now she eyed Gretchen suspiciously, as if she were the cause of the stench. “No worries. I'm sure it'll clear up. It's all good. I'll let you rest. Oh! And did you leave the check for the bills?”
“On the refrigerator.”
Under a magnet that said All Fancy Women And Gamblers Enter Here For The Boat To New Orleans. Gretchen had deposited the majority of Darko's money in the bank, so she had the money, thankfully. She had written the check. Now she had $15.27 in her account.
“Great. Toodles.”
As the door slammed and she heard Roz stomping through the living room towards her bedroom or, Gretchen hoped, the bathroom for some mouthwash, a stringent water floss and ten minutes with a toothbrush, she realized she was too awake now to take a nap. Leaving her feeling, as she usually did after an encounter with Roz, slightly soiled. Where was virtue, restraint, class? And where was the cause of the smell in the room? It was disturbing her.
She had been wondering if, hoping, it might be only Roz's vagina. And then, stricken, her own. She walked around the room, sniffing the air. Was she getting hotter or colder? With a sinking heart, she realized it was coming from the closet. If it really were another mouse, she'd have three weeks of stench to deal with.
She opened the door to her closet. She flinched and squealed. A swarm of tiny flies, enough for a two-week old murder scene, flew into her face. They escaped into the room. She peered fearfully inside the darkness. Her coats were hanging before her. She sniffed around the shoulders of her jackets. The stench seemed to be coming from below, where her high heels, boots, and sneakers were jumbled as if in a bargain bin at a sample sale. She poked among the straps and laces and...there, balled up in the corner, behind the Bleeding Heart of Jesus portrait her mother had sent her from Ireland and Roz had refused to let her hang up over the sofa, was her—
So that's where it had gotten to! Gretchen reached down and tugged it out across the dusty top of the frame. She had been looking for it for days! It was like that time she found her purse in the refrigerator next to the jar of pickles.
Gretchen held it up before her, rolling her eyes at her own sometimes scattered brain. Years of Nickel and Dime-related stress, the constant time-changes, Dennis breathing down her neck in the tiny galley, racing to get the subway to the train to the bus to the airport every working day, seemed to have done some permanent damage.
But—what was that at the bottom of it? Was it...? Her eyes squinted, though there was really no need. Horror filled her. She knew exactly what it was. The walls of the closet seemed to recede from her. She threw it to the floor with a squeal. She spun around and, heaving huge gasps, her head reeling, stared at the blinds, the wall, the lamp, anything but what was behind her on the floor.
She was gripped by a formless yet growing premonition of dread.
How...how was this possible? Had she...? She must have! But when? How? Why? Somewhere in the dark corners of her mind, she knew the sad truth. She had only had a few shots of tequila to help her get to sleep that night. And somehow, from the depths of the forgotten drunken haze, she saw herself as if she were having an out of body experience, saw herself...
She shuddered. She bit off a scream with her fist lodged in her mouth. And tears began to flow.
“Dear God, help me!”
PART TWO
LIKE A PASSENGER IN 2A
Excerpt from Gretchen Barnett's MPPI-3 Psychological Assessment Exam, completed for admission to the New York Police Department:
340. I HAVE SEEN SATAN. False
341. My neighbor's dog tells me to kill people. False
342. I like tall women. True
343. If I could be invisible when I wanted to, I would go to the movies for free. False
344. I am troubled by discomfort in the pit of my stomach every few days or more often. True
345. I wish I could be as happy as others seem to be. True
346. I wake up fresh and rested most mornings. False
347. I enjoy eating peaches and plums. True
348. I work under a great deal of pressure and tension. True
349. Sometimes I think God has abandoned me. True
350. Once in a while I think about things too bad to talk about. True
351. I am sure I've gotten a raw deal from life. True
352. I have nightmares every few nights. True
353. I have had very peculiar and strange experiences. True
354. No one seems to understand me. True
355. At times I have fits of laughing and crying that I cannot control. True
356. If
people had not had it in for me, I would have been much more successful. True
357. Sometimes I think God is punishing me. True
358. Horror movies are great. False
CHAPTER TEN SIX MONTHS AGO
HOW MANY WONDERFUL, friendly people, young and old, teens even, are there in the world? Gretchen had wondered when she woke up the seventh day after the 'guests' had been foisted into her world. Many.
So why did she have to suffer the misfortune of the least wonderful foisted upon her at all angles? She didn't know who was worse: Louise, Carly Rae, Mike, of course, or the damn dog with the stupid name. Every morning when she staggered home from work, there the four of them lounged, the people taping on phones and keyboards, smoking joints and drinking beer, unemployed and, what grated most on Gretchen's increasingly raw nerves, eminently employable but just too damn lazy. Not only too lazy to walk the 'housebroken' dog, but also too lazy to change its pad. The amount of times she had walked through the front door, exhausted, and seen a huge, steaming pile of something unmentionable on the pee pad, the pet indoor restroom that was never flushed. People too lazy to flush the toilet.
She knew, or she hoped, in any event, that the itchy sensation she felt whenever she walked into the apartment was only psychosomatic; she didn't think Louise and Carly Rae and Nebuchadnezzar could have brought along the bedbugs with them. Though one never knew. Gretchen was always scratching. But Nebuchadnezzar made her eyes rheumy, her nose runny. The day after the new arrivals, Mike had given her some allergy medication, had given it to her as if he were bestowing upon her the kingly gifts of frankincense and myrrh, and every time thereafter she asked when the dog might leave, and its owners with it, he said, “But I got you the medication!” How he had gotten it, she didn't want to know. Probably slipped a fiver out of her purse when she wasn't looking. Or shoplifted it.
Emergency Exit (The Irish Lottery Series Book 6) Page 15
