by Joy Fielding
“My pleasure.” I opened the back door and took a quick glance around.
There was no one waiting, no one watching.
I breathed a sigh of relief and waited until Alison was safely inside the cottage before closing the kitchen door. My hand brushed against the spot on my cheek where Alison’s lips had grazed, as I pictured her walking through the small living area to the bedroom at the back. In my mind’s eye, I watched her kneel to look under the bed, then check the closet for any stray monsters who might be lurking. I thought absently of the man I’d seen standing in front of the house. Had there been anyone there? And had he been watching me—or Alison?
Such a sweet girl, I remember thinking. So childlike. So innocent.
Not so innocent, I reminded myself as I painstakingly made my way up the stairs to my bedroom. A teenage hellion. Married at eighteen. Divorced soon after. Not to mention she could hold her liquor with the best of them.
I vaguely remember getting undressed and into my nightgown. Actually, I remember this only because I put the nightgown on backward the first time and had to take it off and put it on again. I don’t remember washing my face or brushing my teeth, although I’m sure I did. I do remember the way my bare toes sank into the ivory broadloom as I walked toward my bed, as if I were wading through thick clumps of mud. I remember the heaviness in my thighs, as if my legs had been anchored to the floor. The queen-size bed that sat in the middle of the room seemed miles away. It took forever to reach it. A colossal effort was required for my arms to pull down the bulky white comforter. I remember watching it billow around me like a collapsing parachute as I climbed underneath the covers. I remember the pillow reaching up to catch my head before it fell.
I expected to fall asleep immediately. That’s the way it always is in the movies. People drink too much, they get dizzy and disoriented, they pass out. Sometimes they get sick first. But I didn’t get sick and I didn’t pass out. I just lay there, my head spinning in the darkness, knowing I had to get up in a matter of hours, desperate for a sleep that stubbornly refused to come. I flipped from my left side to my right, tried lying on my back, and even my stomach, before I gave up and returned to my original position. I brought my knees to my chest, threw one leg atop the other, twisted my body into shapes that would have made a contortionist proud. Nothing worked. I thought of taking a sleeping pill and was almost half out of bed before I remembered it was a mistake to mix pills and alcohol. In any event, it was too late for sedatives. By the time they took effect, my alarm clock would be shaking me awake, and I’d spend most of the next day in a dreary fog, like the worst kind of rainy day.
I thought of reading, but I’d been struggling with the book on my night table for weeks and still hadn’t made it past the fourth chapter. Besides, my brain was as tired as my eyes, and trying to digest anything at this hour would be an exercise in frustration and futility. No, I decided, I had no choice but to lie there in bed and wait patiently for sleep to come.
It didn’t.
Half an hour later, I was still waiting. I took several long, deep breaths and improvised a half dozen yoga exercises I’d seen illustrated in a magazine, although I had no idea if I was doing them correctly. The hospital offered yoga classes, but I’d never quite gotten around to signing up. Just as I’d never quite gotten around to trying Pilates or transcendental meditation, or sending away for the AB-DOer I saw regularly advertised on TV. I made a silent vow to do all those things first thing in the morning, if only I could fall asleep right now.
No deal.
I thought of turning on the television across from my bed—undoubtedly there was a rerun of Law & Order on somewhere, but decided against it, choosing to replay Alison’s visit instead. What on earth had possessed me to tell her the things I had, information I’d never shared with anyone before? Roger Stillman, for God’s sake! Where had that come from? I hadn’t even thought of him since I’d left Baltimore.
And what had she really told me?
That she’d lost her virginity at fifteen.
What else?
Not much, I realized. Alison may have opened memory’s floodgates, but she’d remained resolutely outside them. No, I was the one who’d rushed eagerly inside, throwing caution and good sense to the wind. That was one of the more interesting things about Alison, I decided, as a low buzz settled behind my ears. She only seemed to be confiding in you. What she was really doing was getting you to confide in her.
That’s what I was thinking when I finally fell asleep. I don’t remember drifting off. I do remember dreaming. Nothing substantial or particularly meaningful. Silly little vignettes: Roger Stillman imitating James Bond in the backseat of his car; Josh Wylie’s mother smiling at me from her hospital bed, asking me to put the bouquet of yellow and orange roses her son had brought with him from Miami into a vase; my mother warning me I hadn’t set my alarm clock.
It was this realization that I hadn’t, in fact, remembered to set my alarm that woke me up at two minutes past four in the morning, sent me stretching toward the night table at the side of my bed. My hands reached out in the semidarkness, my eyes opening only with the greatest reluctance as my fingers searched for the clock radio.
It was at that moment that I saw the tall figure at the foot of my bed.
At first I thought it must be some sort of apparition, a trick my wine-saturated brain was playing on my senses, perhaps a dream that had failed to disperse upon waking, a haunting mixture of moonlight and shadows. It was only when the figure moved that I understood it was real.
And I screamed.
The scream sliced through the darkness like a blade through flesh, scraping at the surrounding air, leaving it tattered and bleeding. That this insane, inhuman sound could emanate from my body scared me almost as much as the figure moving slowly toward me, and I screamed again.
“I’m so sorry,” a voice was whimpering. “I’m so sorry.”
I’m not sure exactly when I realized the stranger in my room was Alison, whether it was the sound of her voice or the glint of the small gold heart at her throat. She was holding her head, as if she’d been struck, and swaying from side to side, as if she were a tree being buffeted by the wind. “I’m so sorry,” she kept repeating. “I’m so sorry.”
“What are you doing here?” I finally managed to get out, swallowing another scream that was rising in my throat, and stretching toward the lamp at the side of my bed.
“No!” she cried. “Please don’t turn it on.”
I froze, not sure what to do next. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you up.”
“What are you doing here?” I repeated over the loud pounding of my heart.
“My head …” She started pulling at her hair as if trying to pull it out by the roots. “I’m having a migraine.”
I climbed out of bed, took several tentative steps toward her. “A migraine?”
“I guess all that red wine must have triggered something—” She stopped, as if unable to continue.
I reached her side, put my arm around her, lowered her to the side of my bed. She was wearing a long, white cotton nightgown not unlike my own, and her hair hung loose and free around a face wet with tears. “How did you get in the house?” I asked.
“The door wasn’t locked.”
“That’s impossible. I always lock it.” Although I’d been pretty woozy, I reminded myself. It was possible I’d forgotten to lock the door, just as I’d forgotten to set the alarm clock.
“It was open. I knocked first. You didn’t answer. That’s when I tried the door. I was hoping I could find something in your medicine cabinet without waking you up. I’m so sorry.”
I glanced toward the bathroom. “The strongest thing I have is extra-strength Tylenol.”
Alison nodded, as if to say anything was better than nothing.
I left her sitting on the edge of my bed while I ran into the bathroom and ferreted through the mostly useless items on th
e shelves of the medicine cabinet until I found the small bottle of pills. I shook four into the palm of my hand, filled a glass full of water, and returned with them to my bedroom.
“Take these,” I instructed. “I’ll try to get you something stronger in the morning.”
“I’ll be dead by morning,” she said, and tried to laugh. But the laugh detoured into a moan as she swallowed the pills and buried her head against my shoulder, trying to block out what little light there was in the room.
“That’ll teach both of us,” I heard myself say in my mother’s voice as I stroked her arm, rocked her gently back and forth, like a baby. “You’ll sleep here tonight.”
Alison offered no resistance as I led her around the side of the bed, pulled the covers around her. “What about you?” she asked, her eyes closed, the question an obvious afterthought.
“I’ll sleep in the other room,” I said.
But already Alison had pulled the comforter up over her head, and the only signs I had that she was there were a few strands of strawberry-blond hair that curled over the top of my pillow like a question mark.
FOUR
Alison was still sleeping when I left the house the next morning.
I thought of waking her up, ushering her back to her own bed, but she looked so peaceful lying there, so vulnerable, her soft blush of strawberry-blond hair in marked contrast to her skin’s still ghostly pallor, that I hated to disturb her. My experience with migraine sufferers was that, like most drunks, they needed twenty-four hours to sleep it off. I did the math, decided there was a good chance Alison would still be sleeping when I arrived back home at four o’clock that afternoon. What was the point in waking her?
Looking back, this was undoubtedly a mistake, although not my first mistake where Alison was concerned, and certainly not my last. No, it was only one of many errors in judgment I made about the girl who called herself Alison Simms. But hindsight is easy. Of course it was stupid to allow a virtual stranger to stay unattended in my house. Of course I was asking for trouble. All I can say in my defense is that it didn’t feel that way at the time. At barely 6 A.M., with maybe a total of four hours of sleep, leaving Alison alone in the house that morning felt natural and right. What was there to worry about after all? That she’d abscond with my ancient nineteen-inch TV? That she’d commandeer a wheelbarrow to cart away my mother’s collection of china head vases, perhaps hold a garage sale on my front lawn? That I’d come back to find the house and cottage burned to the ground?
Maybe I should have been more careful, more circumspect, less trusting.
But I wasn’t.
Besides, what is it they say about letting sleeping dogs lie?
Anyway, I left Alison sleeping in my bed, like Goldilocks, I remember thinking, chuckling as I tiptoed down the stairs in my clunky white nurse’s shoes, opening and closing the front door as silently as possible. My car, a five-year-old, black Nissan, was parked in the driveway beside the house. I cast a desultory glance down the empty street, hearing the faint hum of traffic several blocks away. The city was waking up, I thought, wishing I could trade my polyester white uniform for my white cotton nightgown and crawl back into bed. Luckily, I wasn’t as tired as I’d feared I might be. In fact, I was feeling surprisingly well.
I backed the car onto the street, opening the windows to let in the cool morning air. November is a lovely time of year in South Florida. The temperature usually stays on the comfortable side of eighty; the oppressive humidity of the summer months is pretty much gone; the threat of extreme weather is over. Instead, the sky provides a continually shifting combination of sun and clouds, along with the occasional burst of welcome rain. And we get more than our fair share of absolutely flawless afternoons, days when the sun sits high in a borderless panorama of shiny Kodacolor blue. Today looked as if it might be that kind of day. Maybe when I got home, I’d see if Alison was feeling well enough to go for a walk on the beach. There’s nothing like the ocean to heal the spirit and calm the troubled soul. Maybe it could work its magic on a migraine headache, I thought, glancing up at my bedroom window.
For a minute, I thought I saw the curtains move, and I hit the brake, inched my face closer to the glass of the car’s front window. But on closer inspection, it appeared I’d been mistaken, that it was only the outside shadows of nearby trees that were dancing against my bedroom window, creating the illusion of movement from inside the house. I sat watching the window for several seconds, listening to the whispering of the palm fronds in the breeze. The curtains at my bedroom window hung undisturbed.
My foot transferred from brake to gas pedal, and I proceeded slowly for several blocks along Seventh Avenue until I reached Atlantic, where I turned left. The normally congested main thoroughfare of Delray is largely empty at this hour of the morning, one of the few perks of having to be at work so early, and I had an unencumbered view of the many smart shops, galleries, and restaurants that had redefined the city in recent years. To the surprise of many, myself included, Delray had become something of a “hot spot,” a destination as opposed to a drive-through. I loved the unexpected changes, the aura of excitement, even if I was rarely part of it. Alison, I knew instinctively, would love it here.
I passed the tennis center on the north side of Atlantic, where every spring they hold the Citrix Open, past the Old School Square on the northwest corner of Atlantic and Swinton, continued on past the South County Courthouse and the Delray Beach Fire Station on my left. I took the underpass at I-95 to Jog Road, then headed south. Five minutes later I was at the hospital.
Mission Care is a small, private health facility housed in a five-story building, painted bubblegum pink, that specializes in chronic care. The majority of patients are elderly and in considerable distress, and as a result, they’re often angry and upset. Who can blame them? They know they aren’t going to get better, that they’re never going home, that this is, in fact, their final resting place. Some have been here for years, lying in their narrow beds, blank eyes staring at blank ceilings, waiting for the nurse to bathe them or adjust their position, longing for visitors who rarely come, silently praying for death while stubbornly clinging to life.
It must be so depressing, people are always saying to me, to be constantly surrounded by the sick and the dying. And sometimes, I admit, it is. It’s never easy to watch people suffer, to comfort a young woman stricken by MS in the prime of her life, to tend to a comatose child who will never wake up, to try calming an old man with Alzheimer’s as he shouts obscenities at the son he no longer remembers.
And yet, some moments make it all worthwhile. Moments when the most banal act of kindness is rewarded by a smile so blinding it brings tears to your eyes, or by a whispered thank-you so sincere it makes you go weak at the knees. This is why I became a nurse, I understand in moments like these, and if that makes me a hopeless romantic or a silly sentimentalist, so be it.
Probably it is this quality that makes me such an easy target. I suffer from Anne Frank’s delusion that people are basically good at heart.
I parked my car in the staff parking lot at the front of the hospital and made my way through the lobby, past the gift shop and pharmacy that wouldn’t be open for another few hours, to the coffee shop that was already busy. I waited in line for a cup of tasteless black coffee and a fat-free, cranberry-studded muffin. I thought of Alison, how much she loved cranberries. I had a recipe at the back of one of my drawers for banana-cranberry muffins. I decided to make a batch when I got home.
The administration offices were closed till nine, and I made a mental note to stop by later to inquire about Alison’s friend, Rita Bishop. Even though Alison had told me not to bother, I thought it might be worth a try. Rita might have left a forwarding address. One of the secretaries might know where she’d gone.
I’d already finished my coffee and was halfway through my muffin when the doors of the excruciatingly slow-moving elevator finally opened onto the fourth floor. The nurses’ station was already buzzing.
“What’s up?” I asked Margot King, a heavyset woman with copper-orange hair and blue contact lenses. Margot had been a nurse at Mission Care for more than ten years, and during that decade the color of her eyes had changed almost as often as the color of her hair. The only constant was the color of her uniform, which was a crisp Alpine white, and the color of her skin, which was a wondrous ebony black.
“Rape victim,” Margot said, her voice a whisper.
“A rape victim? Why’d they bring her here?”
“The rape was three months ago. Guy beat her with a baseball bat, left her for dead. She’s been in a coma ever since. Doesn’t look like she’s going home anytime soon. Her family decided to bring her here when Delray Medical Center needed the bed.”
“How old?” I asked, bracing myself.
“Nineteen.”
I sighed, my shoulders collapsing, as if someone had jumped on them from a great height. “Any more pleasant surprises?”
“Same old, same old. Mrs. Wylie’s been asking for you.”
“Already?”
“Since five o’clock. ‘Where’s my Terry? Where’s my Terry?’ ” Margot repeated in Myra Wylie’s frail voice.
“I’ll look in on her.” I started down the hall, stopped. “Is Caroline here yet?”
“Not till eleven.”
“She gets migraines, doesn’t she?”
“Oh, yeah. She suffers real bad from those damn things.”
“When she gets in, will you tell her I need to see her?”
“Problems?”
“A friend,” I said, continuing down the peach-colored hall toward Myra Wylie’s room.
I slowly pushed open the door and peeked my head through, in case the frail, eighty-seven-year-old woman fighting both chronic leukemia and congenital heart disease might have drifted back to sleep.
“Terry!” Myra Wylie’s voice wafted up from the center of her hospital bed, quivering into the air like smoke from a cigarette. “There’s my Terry.”
I approached the bed, patted the bony hand beneath the sterile white sheets, smiled at the graying face with the watery blue eyes. “How are you today, Myra?”