The Happiness Thief

by Nicole Bokat

  Isabel’s eyelashes fluttered as she stepped back with a cold smile. Everything had changed. “I have a few more things to take care of here. But you go ahead.”

  Natalie rushed out of the conference room and ducked around the corner towards the stairwell. It was dimly lit but a short distance to the street, quicker this way. At the landing to the second floor, she heard the stairwell to the door close, footsteps behind her. There was no doubt who it was; she didn’t need to turn around to check. The metal tip of Isabel’s spiky heels clicked as she ran after her. There was heavy breathing, her own and her pursuer’s, as if in tandem.

  Firm hands grabbing her shoulders stopped Natalie from moving forward. “Careful,” Isabel whispered into her ear from behind. “You don’t want another accident.”

  Natalie whirled around, her whipping motion throwing her stepsister off balance. A heel snapped off from one of Isabel’s shoes; she reached for the handrail, but it was beyond her grasp. As she lunged forward, Natalie attempted to catch her but missed. She saw her stepsister’s expression, the “O” of her mouth, the surprise in her eyes.

  It was quick: the flailing limbs, then the loud, dull crack as Isabel struck the bottom step. Her arms hit first, covering her face. There was blood in her hair, bright and copious. Natalie stared as it spilled into the yellow strands, like dye. Isabel groaned, a pitiful sound that ripped through Natalie, the sheer animal intimacy of it. She wanted it to stop. She glimpsed at the door, far enough from Isabel that she could squeeze through, run away. Let someone else deal with this, while she rushed through the lobby in a blur of freedom, right into the drizzling snow. But she wasn’t that person, someone who could kill. That was Isabel.

  For a few seconds, Natalie waited for a resolution, for the noise to abate. There was no reason to take Laura’s pulse. She was dead.

  But Isabel didn’t quiet.

  She reached inside her bag for her phone and dialed.

  The operator answered, “911. What’s your emergency?”

  twenty-four

  —

  ISABEL WAS FACE DOWN ON THE CEMENT FLOOR, NO LONGER conscious.

  The paramedic asked if Natalie wanted to accompany them in the ambulance. But she declined; she needed to call her stepsister’s husband and would drive herself. The hotel lobby swelled with spectators as the EMS workers carried Isabel up from the stairwell on the stretcher. A large woman wedged herself next to Natalie. “Poor thing,” she said, her elbow jutting into Natalie’s hip. “Do you know what happened?”

  Natalie shook her head. “Excuse me.”

  She ducked into the ladies’ room and, from a locked stall, texted Jeremy with a cryptic explanation, asking if he’d meet her at the hospital. He wrote back immediately: On my way. She stared at the marble white and gray tiles, as she called George. She considered confiding in him about the monster he was married to. No, at least not now. She would not hurt this man, whom she was so fond of, more than was necessary.

  George didn’t pick up, so she left a short message.

  Natalie drove without awareness of road signs or changing lights or other cars. But, even dazed, she managed to find her way.

  At the hospital, Natalie didn’t inquire about Isabel’s whereabouts or her condition. She sat alone in the waiting room, beneath the yellow glare of the fluorescent light, waiting for George to arrive. With the doors shut, the air was stagnant. There were muffin crumbs on the floor and a Styrofoam cup, with the last dregs of coffee in it, on the table in front of her. A few seats away, an emaciated teenager sat hunched over, her head bent forward, a heavy ball attached by a string.

  An elderly man was arguing with a nurse behind the partition. He had thick eyebrows and a bushy mustache reaching up into his nostrils. Natalie could see he wanted entrance into the ER, which the nurse was denying him. She imagined the desk as a barrier between the land-dwelling rational beings and the panicked victims out at sea.

  She unbuttoned her jacket, untied her scarf, but was uncertain how long she could bear to stay. Finally, George rushed through the doors in his tweed overcoat, without hat or gloves, his hair un-combed, winged on either side.

  “For God’s sake,” George said, when he reached her side. “What happened?”

  He had the look of a person beckoned to the morgue to identify a loved one, the grayish complexion, the darting eyes.

  She reached out, hugged George quickly before he drew away. “We were at the hotel, where she had the conference. She tripped down the stairs.”

  “How far?” The skin around George’s mouth pleated. “How far did she fall?”

  “I’m not sure,” she said softly. “Almost a flight maybe.”

  George’s eyes lit up like flares. He knew the possible outcomes better than anyone, certainly better than she did. He was clutching the back of a chair. He released it and dashed towards Admitting. Natalie watched as he zigzagged his way to the front of the line, flashing his medical credentials. A moment later, he was ushered through.

  Once she heard the prognosis, Natalie would be gone. Free.

  Isabel had groaned in the stairwell, a creaking sound like an old garden door. She could be dead by now. Or the doctors could be trying to resuscitate her, paddles pressed to her chest. She might end up paralyzed or worse. At dinner a few years ago, George had described for Hadley the famous nineteenth-century case of a railroad worker who’d survived a thirteen-pound iron rod impaled into his head. “Gage is a celebrity in the neuroscience world,” George said, “the first case linking brain trauma and personality change.”

  “Cool!” Hadley had laughed.

  Isabel’s essential self, like Gage’s, might vanish. Isabel could wake from a coma, buttressed by a mound of pillows, misty-eyed, gesturing for Natalie to come close. Natalie would lean forward, attentive, so that her stepsister would stutter her avalanche of regret.

  Don’t be an idiot.

  Natalie needed to remain leery of her own hopeful heart.

  She fiddled with her phone, tapping the home button. She entered her password, then wrote to Marc: Tell Hadley I might be late tomorrow. Isabel is hurt, at Boston Memorial. More later.

  She wondered how long this day would last, how far into the night she’d have to stay in this place. It was a particular kind of purgatory, filled with moans and gasps and snores. For Natalie, the reckoning would come but not yet, not in this in-between place. She rubbed the back of her neck where it ached. A headache had started, a tiny woodpecker drilling into her temple.

  “How you holding up?” Jeremy said, his hand on her shoulder.

  “You’re here.” She glimpsed up at him. He was wearing his rancher’s jacket and faded jeans. He seemed so familiar, more so than the people she had counted on for decades.

  “Of course.” He sat down by her side. His thigh touched hers. “What’s going on?”

  “George is in there with her. I don’t know anything.”

  “Shit. How?”

  “Isabel slipped,” she said. She looked in his eyes, the eyes that made her want to photograph him.

  He took her hand out of her hair and held it. “Let’s leave this between us. Do you know how she is?”

  “No one has said anything.”

  “Would you like me to ask?”

  “I don’t think they’ll tell you. They only speak to immediate family.” That might include her. Yet here she sat without apology.

  Jeremy sprang up. “Let’s see what I can do.”

  He sprinted into what was now a throng. Her ringing phone startled her. When Marc’s number appeared, she pressed “Decline.” She texted: Can’t talk now. And he responded, So sorry. Hope Isabel will be ok.

  There was nothing else she wanted to share with him.

  A moment later, a young Asian nurse holding a clipboard against her chest approached, smiling with small white teeth and a steely gaze. Bad news. But the nurse walked past her.

  Natalie glanced at the magazines. A lifestyle monthly promised: “Ten Tips for a Happier,
Healthier You.” Of course. She thought of her stepsister’s website, the shot of the Greek island Natalie had taken on her honeymoon with Marc, the words “Happiness Doctor” in golden yellow superimposed across the mouth of the Aegean Sea. That would need to be replaced. She turned the page to a stock photo of a tropical beach scene with a hammock. Suggestions were in bold: Get High on Nature. Catch your ZZZs. Stress Less with Yoga. Donate your Dollars. Turn Off the News. Splurge—a Little. Lean on your Loved Ones.

  A small laugh escaped, and she stopped reading. The man, sitting across from her, glared. An angry purplish patch was visible on his exposed calf. “Sorry,” she said.

  Jeremy hurried back in her direction. “They’re operating on her now.”

  “Wow, they told you.”

  Jeremy sat on the adjoining chair and inched it closer to hers. “I met George. Nice guy.”

  She nodded. “He is. Why are they operating?”

  “I introduced myself. He explained what’s going on. They did a CAT scan.” Jeremy clasped her hand. “She has a bleed, but they’re draining it. He told me to let you know it’s not a complicated procedure. It only takes about twenty-minutes.”

  “Thank you.”

  At that moment, Isabel was laid out on a stretcher under the glare of lights, as if she was posing in a photography studio. Only instead of having her picture taken, she’d have a tube sticking out of her shaved and bleeding skull. Could they suck the evil out of her?

  “How did George seem?” she asked.

  Jeremy cracked the knuckle of his index finger. “Focused.”

  “Did he say anything else?”

  “Just that it will be a while before she wakes up. You can see her for a few minutes once she’s in intensive care.”

  “I should wait to see what happens.”

  “Of course.”

  “Listen. This was so nice of you. But you don’t have to stay.”

  He pulled her towards him. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  THE NEUROLOGY-ICU was in another wing, through an L-shaped hallway, and twelve flights up the elevator. It was white and clean, and the waiting area was smaller than the ER’s. Watercolors of pink flowers hung on the walls. George led the way. He must have walked these corridors hundreds of times. He was on staff here, even if surgery wasn’t his department.

  George stopped at room four and tilted his head. “This is it.”

  He pulled Natalie close and in a hushed voice said, “Isabel told me what’s going on. You’ve been furious over Marc and his new girlfriend, acting erratically.”

  “What?”

  “With all the stress you’ve been under, maybe you acted impulsively again. I was hoping the money would help.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  Although she did: once again, Isabel had lied. But what good would it do to explain to George that his wife had deceived him, now, when she might be dying?

  “Let’s drop this for now,” George said, sternly.

  A wiry man with deep-set eyes and gaunt cheeks exited the room, easing the door closed behind him. He was wearing the usual white jacket and extended his hand towards George. Jeremy hung back.

  “This is Dr. Hahn,” George said. The doctors locked eyes for a moment and exchanged a solemn nod.

  Dr. Hahn patted George on the shoulder. “Isabel came through fine. No complications.”

  Natalie’s whimper surprised her. She studied how George’s expression didn’t change, didn’t convey relief. This was a language she didn’t speak. “No complications” didn’t translate into: “she’s out of the woods.”

  Jeremy smiled. “That’s great news.”

  “What about contusions?” George asked.

  “You know we can’t—”

  George’s eyes widened. “How bad?”

  “We’ll have to wait for the Glasgow score. No signs of bruising on the frontal lobe or medial temporal.”

  “Thank God.” George bowed forward and whistled.

  “What does that mean?” Natalie asked.

  “Your brother-in-law can explain,” Dr. Hahn said briskly. “Let’s talk more tomorrow, once we lighten Isabel’s sedation. For now, you can visit briefly. And George, of course, take as long as you need.”

  “Thank you, Richard.” George gripped the doctor’s hand and shook it firmly.

  “Is that good, what he told you?” Natalie asked once Dr. Hahn had left.

  “Those areas affect memory and executive function.”

  Natalie pictured an avatar in a business suit, briefcase in hand. “And they weren’t impaired?”

  “No signs of contusions.” George’s tone was hard: the whack of a pool ball. “Doesn’t give us a definitive prognosis.”

  “Can I see her?” she asked, “Alone.”

  “This will be hard for you.” This more tenderly.

  He was addressing her old self, the person she’d been that morning: sensitive and scared, quick to panic. “I want to. I promise to be quick, not cause a problem.”

  George turned the handle, pushed open the door.

  “I’ll wait here,” Jeremy said, rubbing her arm.

  Inside, the blinds to the window weren’t drawn. The evening sky was an enormous black and blue mark pressing down on the glass. Isabel was alone in the room on a narrow slice of a bed. She seemed shrunken, a husk of herself, eyes closed, face ashy, lips colorless. A patch of her head was shaved and partially covered by a gauzy bandage. Sprouting from under the wrapping was a tube bobbled with dark blood.

  On the side of the bed was a monitor, keeping track of her heart and respiration, recorded in green, red, and blue wavy lines. A cuff gripped Isabel’s upper arm. Both hands were tucked under the tan blanket.

  Natalie tasted tears as they fell into her mouth. Once, long ago, Isabel had hovered over her hospital bed, made a hushed threat. “Don’t say anything if you want a happy life.”

  Natalie thought of repeating it now. But that wasn’t who she was.

  She got up close to the very rosy tip of Isabel’s ear and kissed it. “Goodbye, Belle.”

  twenty-five

  —

  THE FIRST FEW EVENINGS, GEORGE CALLED WITH UPDATES ON Isabel’s condition, and every time he did, Natalie felt the weight of his disapproval. In the last conversation, he asked, a tremor in his voice, “Why haven’t you been to visit?”

  She pressed the phone to her head, shutting her eyes as he repeated what Isabel had relayed to him many times. Natalie hated hospitals. It was true that she’d avoided them since her concussion when she catapulted awake, only to submerge back into darkness, as if someone were dunking her head in and out of a bucket. Those first moments of consciousness waking up in the hospital room had been terrifying for Natalie, the doctor clicking his penlight, the clench of the blood pressure cuff, Garrick’s anemic face, the news about her mother.

  “You can’t desert someone because of fear,” George reprimanded. “You owe her for all she’s done. And what about me? I sold those stocks for you—against my broker’s advice.”

  “That wasn’t for me.” A chill ran through Natalie’s skin; when she touched her face, it felt clammy. “Ask Isabel when she’s well enough.”

  She hung up the phone, turning the volume low.

  It was an existential crisis, this grieving for a phantom. Natalie felt as if she were hanging onto the walls of an elevator whose bottom was unhinged, leaving her dangling hundreds of feet above the ground. She pretended, for her child’s sake, that her shock was a result of Isabel’s fall, nothing more. The fractured relationship would have to be dealt with delicately, to keep her daughter and stepsister apart without spooking Hadley. When Hadley inquired about her aunt and uncle, Natalie said, “She doesn’t want you to see her this way. And George is overwhelmed.”

  She followed a strict routine of parenting, photographing food, and spending time with Jeremy, whose patience brought her to tears. He stayed over frequently, arriving with Reed, the Retriever, whom Hadley adored. The th
ree of them binge-watched several Netflix series. When alone, Natalie couldn’t stop herself from obsessively checking Isabel’s website. There were no future Happiness seminars listed, and the publication date of her book was changed to: “Pending.”

  A month passed, and the tight grip on Natalie’s lungs lessened; the gray cast of the sky lifted. The colorful raspberry compotes and florid Mediterranean salads no longer felt like an assault to her eyes under the studio lights—which meant she was sleeping well.

  “If you want to include what Isabel did in your book,” she told Jeremy, “go ahead.”

  Jeremy smiled shyly. They sat together on her couch, his feet resting on her coffee table. “Nah. I’ve put that on the back burner for now.”

  “But it meant so much to you! Is this because of me?”

  “Partially, sure. But it’s for my sake, too. Slamming the Happiness Industry would reflect badly on me, now that we’re together. And especially after what happened to Isabel.”

  “Shit,” she said, massaging the nub of her neck where it ached. “So being with me ruined your project.”

  “I could still justify it. But, at what cost? Hurting Hadley and George or the other relatives of these self-marketing gurus? Not worth it to me.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” he said, drawing her close. “That’s the irony. I don’t care anymore because I’m happy. I love you.”

  George reached out again. He recited the name and address of the rehabilitation center in Boston, which Natalie’s mind brushed over like sand in a Zen garden.

  His tone changed, beseeching, “I don’t know what happened between the two of you, but Isabel asks for you every day. She wants to see you.”

  The old yearning rose in her: Belle. But just as quickly: there is no Belle. There was only the impostor who’d stolen Natalie’s past and left, in its place, the never-ending “what ifs.” This thief, her stepsister, probably only wanted to make certain that Natalie didn’t go to the police with Garrick’s letter.