He heads for Manhattan. Dana’s a suspect. He needs to question her, find out why she was on the bridge, if her suicide attempt is related to the neighbor’s murder. Was she so furious about her husband’s affair that she struck out? Shot the messenger? Or did Celia pick that day to tell her she and Peter had been lovers, sleeping together four doors down from where his unsuspecting wife peeled potatoes for his dinner? Was Dana drunk enough herself that afternoon—drunk or unhinged enough—to bash her yard-sale companion in the head and then go home to sleep it off, awakening hours later with no memory of what she’d done? Was that the catalyst for her breakdown, the conduit for this demon that’s taken over Dana’s body, this frightened, hopeless entity that’s slipped inside her skin and walked her to the edge of the GW Bridge—the same madness he saw all those years before, inside the girl fidgeting in a faded hospital gown with broken, fraying laces? She’d raised her arm at him, showing him a long, deep slit along her wrist, the ugly black crisscross of stitches. She’d laughed at him, an angry, mocking laugh as he stood dumbstruck at the opening of the curtained cubicle in Bellevue. “What’s your name?” he’d asked the girl. “Virginia Woolf,” she told him in a British accent. “Only this time they’ve fished me out and emptied all the stones from my pockets.”
He shows his badge and walks across the airy lobby with its high ceilings, its plants, its open, tiled floors closing behind him. He extends his card, says he’s working on a murder case, that Dana’s a person of interest; if she’s lucid, it’s imperative he see her.
A nurse on the ward leads him down a hall. Voices shout at him—or maybe not at him—loud, impatient voices. Demanding voices. Pleading voices. Heartbreaking. Raw—the voices of those stripped naked by disease or circumstance. Jack keeps his eyes on the perfunctory white heels of the nurse in front of him. He avoids looking to either side, avoids the anguished faces, the prone bodies strapped to gurneys, the agitated patients pacing in their temporary rooms. He glances at his watch and wonders if Ann’s hotel is somewhere nearby—a subway stop or two farther uptown, a cheap cab ride from where he strides, officious and intrusive, through the yellow-walled corridors.
“She is here,” the psych nurse tells him. Her voice is soft in the clamor of unsoft, undisguised emotion. She’s Irish, he thinks, or Scottish. Her voice is lilting. He wants her to stay, wants her voice to fill his ears and blot out all the others.
Dana doesn’t see him standing at the entrance to the cubicle; she doesn’t look up. She sits, still wearing her jeans, far too baggy. She still has on the sleeveless shirt from earlier that day. Purple. The color suits her. Her light hair is a tangle, dripping from a clip that clings to the side of her head. Her face is hidden. She stares down at her hands, plays with the edges of a sheet tucked in at the end of a makeshift bed.
“Dana?”
She looks up then, but it seems an enormous effort. She sighs, pulls her eyes away from her hands and raises them to the doorway, to Jack, standing there. “It’s you,” she says. “I thought you’d never come.” Is this how it works, this madness? Does it blur the things that came before—eclipse the days and nights and hours, the pain, the dreams, the memories she can’t contain? Does it allow her to forget?
He clears his throat. “Are you all right?” He takes a step inside the room—a tiny step, a baby step, they used to say, that childhood game—Mother May I, was it? Mother, may I take two baby steps?
She stares at him; she smiles. She raises her eyebrows as if he’s asked the strangest thing. “No,” she says.
“I’m sorry.” He stands dead still in the doorway, as if he might spook her by moving, as if she might run away, as if she might slip over the George Washington Bridge.
“Make them let me stay,” she says. “Tell them I want to stay here. With you.”
Jack nods. He wonders who she sees. He wonders who she’s talking to, what ghost she’s plucked from her past and stuck there in his body. “I’m glad you didn’t jump,” he says. “I’m glad you’re safe.”
“I’ve done a terrible thing.” Her eyes are wide and blue. She reaches forward, grabbing at him, grabbing at the air. “An awful thing.”
The doctor brushes past Jack in the doorway. “I’m sorry,” he says. “Whatever it is you need from this woman will have to wait. We have to get her stabilized.”
“Can I stay?”
“No,” he says. “Not here. You can either wait in the lobby or come back later.”
“When?” Jack steps backward, out into the hall. He doesn’t want to leave, even though the place makes him crazy, claustrophobic—even though he feels trapped in this room of horrors. He wonders what it is Dana wants to tell him, but more than this he wants to stay with her. She looks so helpless and hopeless, so alone.
The doctor shrugs—the doctor or the intern from NYU—the one in charge for the moment, the one whose job it is to protect people like Dana from people like him. The person with the kind of badge that matters here. “This afternoon? This evening? Tomorrow, maybe? We’ll just have to see.”
“Wait!” Dana reaches out again. Her hand stretches toward him—open this time—a supplicating gesture, pleading. Her eyes are huge in her thin face. “St. Christopher! I left him on the bridge!”
CHAPTER 29
Jack arrives late to the station the next morning. He’s nearly always prompt, no matter how late he’s out working on a case, but the night before has really thrown him off his game.
Even when he got back from Bellevue—and by then it was well after two—he couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t get it out of his head, Dana in the ER, reaching out her hands the way she did, the fear in her eyes blurring with that other time all those years ago, in the same hospital, the girl who couldn’t have been more than nineteen. And then there was Margie’s phone call on his answering machine—the likelihood that by now he has a grandchild. He’s already left five messages for her, but so far she hasn’t answered any of them, which doesn’t really surprise him. On the way home from Bellevue, he made a few calls, threw his weight around and found out Maryanne was in St. Joseph’s. He leans back in his chair and sticks his feet up on the desk. He’s the only one there. Everyone’s either out on the streets or not in yet. He closes his eyes, and he’s almost asleep when his cell phone rings, jarring him awake.
“Moss?” a shaky male voice says. “Jack? It’s Ronald. Steinhauser. It’s Celia’s husband. Widower.”
“Ronald.” Jack glances at his watch. “You on your way in?”
“No,” Ronald says. “I’m . . . I’m late. I was up all night. It’s terrible. If it hadn’t been for her car, I’d never have known.”
“Known?”
“The Toyota. Hard to miss with all those . . . with her political bumper stickers. Could be a problem, I always thought, in traffic. Dangerous, even. You never know what kind of idiot might be behind you and suddenly go into road rage. Anyway, I knew it was Dana.”
“Knew what was Dana?”
“On the news. On last night’s news. ‘Oh, my God!’ I thought. ‘This is all my fault.’ Unintentional, of course, but I should have been more thorough. I should have looked harder. All that doesn’t matter in the end, though, does it? I’m as bad as a thug with an Uzi or a drunk driver mowing down a crowd inside a crosswalk.” Ronald belches, and Jack suspects he’s still a little drunk from the night before. “She and Celia . . . the way they trudged together in search of chairs and other pieces of interest if not actual . . . um, usefulness . . .”
“You’ve got fifteen minutes, Ronald. I’ll be waiting for you in my office.”
When, sixteen minutes later, Ronald Steinhauser puffs and pants up the hall and throws himself, red-faced, into a chair, Jack is toying with things on top of the table in the interrogation room. He stacks a little bunch of pencils in a pile against his steno pad. “Tell me about the photo in Celia’s phone, Ronald.”
“I was coming down here last night to show you,” Ronald says, surprising him, “but then there was that
shot of Dana’s car on the news, and I . . . God, I was so . . . I closed my eyes for just a second, and the next thing I knew, it was morning.”
Jack fiddles with the pencils, knocking the pile over.
“So I got up and grabbed the phone and headed for the train. I was on my way down here—at the entrance to the subway, and I took out my wallet to find your card . . . to verify your . . . with Celia dead and then with Dana— I felt like a piece of gum on a cosmic sneaker, invisible with all the hordes, all the crowds. When there are so many people, there is no one person, I was thinking, and just then someone bumped into me, and the next thing I knew, it was gone. ‘Help!’ I yelled. ‘Somebody help!’ and a jogger took off, came back with a traffic cop, but it was too late. He was gone. It was gone.”
“Your wallet?”
“No. The cell phone.”
“He took your cell phone and left your wallet?”
“Celia’s cell phone, actually. The one with the picture.”
“Of Peter Catrell and his . . . work wife or whatever? Thought you said it wasn’t in the phone. You looked, remember? I even looked.”
“Right. This was another phone. One I didn’t know about. But then I didn’t know about the bank account either. Anyway, the picture was in it. It was . . . at least it looked like the one Dana was so anxious to find.”
“Could you describe the photo, Ronald?” Jack weighs his words carefully.
“Yeah. Sure. It was a picture of a man leaning over, talking to a woman with blond hair down to her shoulders. A very busty woman, not that it matters. They were sitting at a table in a restaurant. It was difficult to tell much—the photo wasn’t very good.”
“As you pointed out before you saw it.”
Ronald clears his throat. “Did I? I don’t really remem—”
“Did you recognize them?”
“It looked like Dana’s husband,” Ronald says, “but to be honest, it was hard to tell.”
“Well, listen, Ronald. Thanks. Too bad you can’t bring in the phone.”
“I know. I was devastated. ‘Take my wallet!’ I wanted to yell after the guy—in fact, I think I did. ‘Take my wallet!’ I yelled at him. ‘But bring me back the phone! Bring me back this picture, whose disappearance has caused a friend to go over the edge. Literally.’”
“Well, that’s a shame, Ronald. Where’d you find it anyhow?”
“In my car. Under the . . . you know, mat in the backseat. I stopped at a light yesterday, jammed my foot down on the brake, and the thing flew out. It must’ve gotten mixed up with my stuff when I moved into the hotel.”
“Yeah? Flew under the front seat, you mean?”
“No. Well, sort of. I heard it bounce out back there, so I fished around when I stopped, and there it was. Weird, huh?”
“Yeah,” Jack says. “Weird.” He tries not to smile. This guy is such a liar. And he’s so bad at it. Jack was a little surprised that his alibi for the night of Celia’s death checked out. The bartender remembered him vividly, though, so it was definitely Dana who went back to their house.
“Heart-wrenching about Dana. Will there be a memorial service? I know a funeral isn’t possible at this point.”
“Not until she dies, probably.”
“Wait. I thought— Last night, on the news, they showed her—”
“She didn’t jump,” Jack says. “Somebody stopped her.”
“Oh, my God! That’s wonderful! That is so totally wonder—”
“I agree. Thanks for coming down, Ronald. Glad you found the photo.”
“Can she . . . can Dana have visitors?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “Probably not yet.”
“Well, could you see that she gets the message?”
“About the picture?”
“Yes,” Ronald says. “It might help her.”
“I’ll see she gets it,” Jack says. He knows that Ronald’s story doesn’t hold water, but the important thing is that he did at some point see the photo and obviously deleted it to cover his own ass. And in light of all the lies he’s handed over, Ronald’s making himself a prime suspect—jealous husband, first one on the scene, wife threatening to take off with another man. He doesn’t seem the type, but people like Ronald have been known to go off the deep end, do a one-eighty on a lifetime of placid with one crazy, violent act. Peter’s still in the running, too, with his prints all over the bedroom and his obvious lack of regard for women, including his own wife. And although Dana will be relieved to hear what Ronald’s got to say about the photo, this minor revelation does nothing for her case. Too late now for it to make her feel she hasn’t lost her mind. That ship has clearly sailed.
Meanwhile there are still Kyle’s prints in Celia’s car, the missing five grand, the glass elephant he found in the Steinhausers’ overgrown yard—still the knowledge that his son knows more than he’s saying about the murder on Ashby Lane. Jack stretches, locking his fingers over his head. He’s listened to everyone who’s streamed through the office since Celia’s death. He’s noted the shifting eyes, the skirted questions, the suave and not-so-suave responses, the dilated pupils, the tapping feet and babbled, rambling answers. Now it’s time to figure out what matters and what doesn’t. It’s time to sort the truth from the lies and see what kind of picture comes to light.
CHAPTER 30
Dana opens her eyes and closes them again. She doesn’t move. She doesn’t want to be here. She doesn’t want to be anywhere. She wants to be gone, and she would be if they had left her alone, if they had let her fly. “Do you remember?” the doctors asked her when she first arrived here, in this new place outside the city, the move from Bellevue orchestrated by Peter. “Do you remember what happened to you on the bridge?” As if her interrupted flight were someone else’s doing, as if it were a perpetration and not her own idea, her own last-minute plan, her own longing to escape the loose and flapping sashes of her life.
It’s the colors she remembers most—the blue-black of the sky, the gray of the bridge, the spots of silver where the light hit, the white tips of the waves beneath her, the pink umbrella someone held above her head, the dark blue print of a skirt, a brown arm forcing her away from the bridge’s edge, holding her firmly while the ambulance bulldozed its way through traffic. She remembers a collage of light and dark, of color and white, unlike this world of gray, where everything is muted. Her mind is a muddle, a puddle, a murk. The chaos and confusion are still there, but the bright, sharp sparks are gone, the volume turned down on her madness.
The door opens. “How are you today?” a voice says, and Dana’s eyes fly open in spite of her resolve to keep them closed.
“Fine,” she says, but it is such a tiny sound. “I’m fine,” she says, and again it’s like a scratch, a bird’s wing on a window. She closes her eyes.
“Is there anything you need?” With her eyes shut, the voice could be anyone’s. It could be the Poet’s voice or God’s. It could be St. Christopher.
She shakes her head.
“Rest. I’ll check on you later,” the voice says, and this time the door stays open.
Dana rolls onto her side and stares at the shiny wall. Ocher, she thinks, semigloss. The whole room is shiny; the whole ward is shiny. It’s been recently painted. If she concentrates, she can even smell the paint.
This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whisper. No, she thinks, it wasn’t whisper; it was something else. She’ll ask Jamie to Google Eliot when he comes back. “The Hollow Men.” She won’t ask Peter, even though the poem fits him to a tee.
She misses the clamor of Bellevue. She misses the yellow walls, the temporary cubicle that told her she was only passing through. She misses the Poet. He was there. She remembers him there, but she knows he couldn’t be. “Was he there?” she says, but her voice is a sliver, falling on the rough whiteness of the sheet. Not with a bang . . .
CHAPTER 31
When the door opens this time, there is no attempt to drown sound. Sneakers squeak
across the linoleum and stop at the bed where Dana lies, pretending to sleep. “Hello there,” a new voice says. Jamaican, Dana thinks. “Time to get up.”
“No,” she says.
“Can’t hear you.”
“No,” she says again.
“Sorry. Still can’t hear you.”
“NO!”
“That’s right,” the voice says, a little pleasanter, a little softer. “That’s right, honey. You have to speak up!”
“NO!” Dana yells again, “I’m not getting up!”
“It’s good to be heard,” the voice says, and Dana opens her eyes to a large, dark-skinned woman appraising her from the side of the bed. “But you still have to get up out of that bed.”
“Why?”
“Time for group,” the woman says—a doctor, Dana sees from her name tag. Dr. Ghea.
“I’m not ready for a group discussion,” Dana says, but her words are garbled and wrong, circling her head like mosquitoes that need swatting.
“I’m sorry?”
“What’s wrong with my voice?” Dana feels as if she’s somehow landed on another planet where her words are meaningless. Maybe she took off after all. Maybe she did fly away.
“It’s the medication,” Dr. Ghea says. “It slurs your words. Jumbles things a bit. We’ll fine-tune your prescription, and soon you won’t even be taking it.”
“No?”
“No,” she says. “You’ll be on Depakote only. It just takes a while for it to kick in.”
“Oh.” Dana closes her eyes again. “I thought . . .”
“I know what you thought.” Dr. Ghea slips a blood-pressure cup around Dana’s arm, and it compresses like a boa constrictor. “But you need to stay on your meds, Dana. No more of this trying to fly off the George Washington Bridge. You’ve got too much going for you.”
The Pocket Wife Page 20
