You Are Not Alone (ARC)

by Greer Hendricks

  Then she hangs up.

  I hold the phone to my ear, shocked into immobility. It’s hard to breathe.

  Why would Cassandra say those things to me? Could I have done something awful last night—something I don’t remember? I must have, for her to say those harsh words.

  Tears fill my eyes as I reflexively start to call her back, to beg for her forgiveness.

  “What did she say?” Sean asks.

  “Wait a second,” I whisper. My head is beginning to throb painfully again.

  Nothing about the last eighteen hours makes any sense.

  Cassandra sounds like she almost hates me now. She told me to stop pestering her and Jane.

  But they’re the ones who came to my apartment last night and brought champagne. Cassandra said she wished she could cancel their plans and hang out with me.

  The same eerie, dreamlike sense I experienced on the day I followed the woman who looked like Amanda to the subway floods over me.

  How could they have turned on me so quickly?

  My stomach contracts and I run to the bathroom. I dry-heave into the toilet, then stand up and turn on the sink tap with shaking hands. I run cold water over my wrists and rinse out my mouth.

  I stare at my reflection.

  I don’t look like the old me, or the new one either. The expression in my eyes belongs to a stranger.

  Amanda’s eyes looked empty on the day I saw her—as if she had nothing left. No joy, no hope, no one to care about her.

  But the Moore sisters claimed to have loved her.

  They’d acted like they cared about me, too—at least until a few minutes ago, when Cassandra’s words ripped through me.

  Everything is whirling out of control.

  Think, I order myself frantically. I try to remember anything I could have said to Cassandra and Jane that they might have misconstrued, which could explain their animosity.

  But instead, my mind spins back in time, to when I saw the Amanda look-alike shortly after Amanda’s suicide. The Moore sisters just happened to be passing by that subway station as I clung to the post, trembling and hyperventilating. Feeling as terrified and unhinged as I do right now.

  It had seemed like a miracle: What are the chances they’d be in that precise location at that exact time? And that they’d recognize me in an umbrella-carrying crowd, with my hair plastered over my face, after one relatively brief encounter? And that their meeting would be canceled, giving them a free hour to spend with me?

  Almost infinitesimal.

  Once I tried to look up how many people are in New York City during the daytime, when commuters flood in. The numbers are hard to verify, but one estimate put it at 175,000 people per square mile in Manhattan. And there are 472 subway stations in the city.

  My breath comes more quickly as I grip the hard, cold edges of the sink.

  Cassandra told me to stop following them. But they’re the ones who showed up against all odds.

  The Moore sisters said the Amanda look-alike didn’t exist. But now they’ve turned me into one.

  Nothing is adding up.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  AMANDA

  Nine and a half weeks ago

  AMANDA, CALL ME!

  Amanda, are you okay?

  Every few hours, her cell phone erupted with calls and texts from the other women.

  Amanda, please pick up! We’re worried about you!

  She couldn’t stop seeing James thrashing on the park bench as the life drained out of him.

  Amanda, I’m right around the corner—can I pop by?

  That text from Beth finally made her pick up the phone and dial Beth’s number. Maybe Beth—the smart, warm lawyer—was having regrets, too.

  “Hey, what’s going on? Why aren’t you talking to any of us?”

  “I’m freaking out,” Amanda whispered. Her voice was hoarse; it was now Saturday morning and she hadn’t spoken to anyone in the thirty-six hours since James had died.

  “Look, I know things didn’t go exactly how we planned. But we have to stick together.”

  “We killed him, Beth.” Amanda’s voice trembled.

  She could hear Beth slowly exhale. “We didn’t mean to.” Beth’s tone shifted from friendly to authoritative. “And you know what he did to Daphne. He was evil.”

  “So no one else is having regrets?”

  “It’s too late for that.”

  Beth wasn’t an ally; Beth wanted to get her in line.

  “Why don’t we get together and talk about it. We can come over. All of us.”

  Before, it had always been the seven of them aligned. But now it would be her against the other six women.

  Amanda imagined them crowded into her small living room: Jane rubbing her back, Stacey a bit apart from the others with her arms crossed and her jaw tight, Cassandra leaning in close, Daphne and Beth adding their voices to the others—their words blending and overlapping and pressing in on Amanda as they all tried to stamp out what they’d consider her disloyalty. And Valerie, staring at her with flat brown eyes.

  “I’m not feeling well,” Amanda replied.

  Amanda could hear Cassandra in the background, telling Beth, “Let me talk to her. We need to know what she did with the scalpel.”

  Amanda hung up and turned off her phone.

  Sometime later—maybe an hour, maybe three—her buzzer sounded.

  She flinched; now they were in her lobby.

  She crept across the floor in her socks as quietly as possible, wincing when a board creaked, even though she knew they couldn’t hear anything from two floors down. She slipped into the alcove and climbed into her bed, pulling up her rumpled sheets.

  The buzzer sounded again. This time the loud, insistent noise lasted much longer. She covered her ears with her hands, but she could still hear it.

  She lay there, her eyes squeezed shut, until finally the sound died away.

  When she turned her phone back on late that night, it showed twenty-four missed calls.

  The next day, a Sunday, Amanda was scheduled to work. She rose from bed feeling hollow eyed. She hadn’t slept much or eaten anything other than a banana and a slice of toast.

  She walked to her closet, her body aching, as if she really were ill. She reached over her laundry bin, where her tan sundress with rust-colored, streaky stains was crumpled on the bottom. She pulled out her Crocs and pink scrubs as her vow from the Nightingale Pledge ran through her mind again: I will dedicate myself to devoted service to human welfare.

  She found concealer in the bathroom and patted it on the purple shadows beneath her eyes. In the cabinet under the sink, she’d hidden the scalpel and towel. She couldn’t bear to look at the reminders of what they’d done. But she still felt the presence of the objects.

  If she gave the scalpel to the other women, would they let her walk away?

  No, Amanda thought. They never would.

  The city felt different now—hot and angry. Pedestrians jostled her on the sidewalk; a swinging briefcase caught her painfully on the hip. The sun beat down on her relentlessly. She stepped into a crosswalk and a taxi whipped around the corner against the light, blaring its horn. She arrived at work and forced herself to smile at the hospital security guard as she lifted her hand to the wall panel to gain access to the ER.

  Could he tell how different she was?

  For the first hour or so she checked vitals and answered call buttons and helped treat a patient with pneumonia. But when she went to retrieve antibiotics from the cabinet in the medicine room, she froze, staring at the bottles of morphine and seeing herself swirl the liquid into James’s drink.

  “Amanda?”

  Gina was standing in the open doorway to the medicine room. Amanda didn’t know how long she’d been there.

  “The IV for room five,” Gina said. “You didn’t change it.”

  “Oh, no, I—”

  “I already got it,” Gina said crisply. She frowned. “You okay?”

  Amanda nodded
. “Sorry.” She hurried out of the room. Amanda felt Gina’s eyes on her several more times during the day; she’d endangered a patient. If Gina hadn’t changed the IV, the elderly stroke victim could have become dangerously dehydrated.

  Amanda’s shift seemed to stretch twice as long as usual. When she finally arrived home, she couldn’t stop shaking.

  The next day was worse.

  She’d barely been at work for a half hour when someone handed her a message: “Hey, a call just came in for you. She wouldn’t leave her name.”

  Amanda stared at the words on the little pink slip of paper: Glad you’re feeling better. We’ll see you tonight!

  Her knees buckled.

  She managed to get through most of her shift. But shortly before it ended, she was rushing to assist a doctor treating a gunshot victim when she lost her footing—her lack of sleep and food combined with her stress making her clumsy—and she fell against the patient, knocking out the chest tube that was helping his lungs expand properly.

  The doctor swore, plugging the hole with his hands.

  Amanda stared at the red blood covering the doctor’s latex gloves. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t even move for a moment.

  “Damn it, Amanda!” the doctor shouted. “Get a crash team!”

  Gina ran into the room as Amanda backed away from the gurney.

  Instead of helping her patients, she was now a danger to them.

  “I have to go,” she blurted to Gina.

  Gina didn’t answer; all her focus was on the young man whose chest had been torn apart by a bullet.

  Amanda ran down the long hallway, her Crocs squeaking against the linoleum, and exited the building. She stumbled onto the sidewalk, her breathing ragged.

  Then she saw a woman standing directly across the street, her sleek dark hair shining in the sunlight.

  No. Amanda’s pulse skyrocketed. She spun around and hurried back inside.

  She pulled her phone out of the pocket of her scrubs, her fingers trembling, and ordered an Uber. She stood next to the security guard until the vehicle pulled into the circular ER driveway. She ran out and leaped into the car’s backseat. “Hurry, please!” she cried.

  When the Uber pulled up in front of her apartment building eight minutes later, her keys were already out. She raced up the steps and burst through her door, double-locking it and stretching out the chain to further secure it.

  Her buzzer sounded minutes later.

  The next few days bled together. She called in sick to work on the first day, then turned off her phone.

  When she turned it back on, in addition to all the missed calls and messages from the group, there was one from Gina: “Amanda, we need to talk. Call me back.”

  But what could she tell Gina?

  Sleep was impossible now; the other women were relentless. Sometimes she heard gentle knocking on her door. Once, in the middle of the night, a key scraped in her lock. While she stared, her body rigid, her door swung open until the chain stretched to its limit.

  How did they get a key?

  Sometimes the voice that floated through the door crack was kind and cajoling: “Let’s talk this through. Sweetie, we’re trying to help you. C’mon, unlatch the door.”

  Other times it was stern: “You need to snap out of this. We’ll be fine if we stick together, like we promised to do. James would’ve hurt other women. You saved them, just like you save patients in the hospital. You’ve saved so many women you’ve never even met, Amanda. Open the door.”

  The worst were the hisses that seemed to curl through her mind like tendrils of smoke: “You were the one who stole the medicine. You drugged him. You’re the one who will be blamed for all of this. If you don’t start to cooperate, you’ll go to jail for life!”

  Was it real, or were the voices only in her head? She began to wonder.

  She knew what the other women in the group were capable of, and the punishments they had inflicted, even against people they’d never met—like the parents who’d never bothered to visit their teenaged son as he lay in a medically induced coma after they threw him out of their house because he was gay. The women had waited for months, biding their time until late on a Saturday night after the lights in the parents’ house on Long Island were turned off. Then they uncoiled the garden hose in the front yard. They slipped it through the mail slot and twisted the metal knob to turn it on. Thousands of gallons of water pumped into the main level while the parents slept—saturating the wood floors, seeping through rugs, leaking into the basement, and damaging the home’s structure.

  “Let’s see how they like being homeless,” Valerie had whispered to the others as they’d crept away from the house.

  And slipping a bit of syrup of ipecac into the drink of the ex-husband who’d left Beth when she was diagnosed with cancer wasn’t enough of a punishment for him, the group decided, even though they’d enjoyed viewing the footage Stacey had recorded of his disastrous event. He’d rushed off the stage just minutes into his poetry reading—but not quickly enough to make it to the bathroom. They’d also created a GIF of him throwing up on the café floor and uploaded it to YouTube, linked to his name, so it could live on in perpetuity.

  “That GIF will show up anytime his name is googled,” Cassandra had said.

  And they’d gone after the abusive mother who’d lived next door to Stacey, first bribing neighbors to repeatedly call social services on behalf of the little girl. But that was justice, not the revenge they craved. So next they broke into her apartment and planted enough drugs to ensure that even the best lawyer wouldn’t be able to spare her a prison sentence.

  Jane made the anonymous call to the police.

  Amanda had only known the Moore sisters for less than a year. Somehow it seemed as if she’d been swept up into their orbit for much longer. She’d been dazzled by their charisma, their warmth, the place in the close-knit group they’d opened up to her.

  She hadn’t realized how lonely she’d been before the other women had embraced her, filling the void she’d carried around since childhood.

  But she wasn’t truly one of them, after all.

  They must know it now, too.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  SHAY

  Common Law Enforcement Misconceptions

  You can explain your way out of trouble.

  If you cooperate with the police, you won’t be charged.

  You’re safe if an officer didn’t read you your Miranda rights.

  —Date Book, page 67

  SEAN HAD AN AFTERNOON consulting gig that he offered to cancel, but I told him to go ahead.

  I could tell he was still worried about me, but I convinced him I wanted to take a long, hot shower and a nap.

  He got me situated in my old room—the new office—pulling out the futon and setting out a pillow and set of sheets. He also gave me one of his hoodies and a toothbrush still in its plastic packaging.

  “Jody will be home soon,” he said just before he left. “I told her you’d be staying the night.”

  After I shower, I put back on my jeans and Sean’s sweatshirt. I close my eyes briefly as I inhale his scent. Then I head into the study.

  Jody has completely transformed the space. It’s almost unrecognizable. One wall is painted a pale yellow, and a trio of black-and-white prints hang over the narrow desk.

  I sit on the edge of the futon and open my Data Book, rereading all the dangling threads I can remember since meeting the Moore sisters.

  They knew Amanda and I didn’t meet through a veterinarian. They knew what Amanda was wearing on the day she died even though they weren’t there. They appeared right after I spotted the woman in the polka-dot dress going into the subway, but they said she didn’t exist. They made me over to resemble Amanda. They encouraged me to move into Amanda’s apartment. They sent me to shop at Daphne’s boutique, but they never told her I’d be coming. I fell into a strange, hard sleep after they came over and gave me a glass of champagne—which they switch
ed with a different glass.

  I add a few more lines: The Moore sisters left my apartment—the door only needed to be pulled closed to automatically lock, just like the one in the police station—and I woke up the next morning with all those strange things on my floor. And now they’ve abruptly turned on me.…

  I hear the front door of the apartment open and my heart leaps into my throat. Then Jody calls out, “Hello?”

  Before I can get up to greet her, she appears in the doorway.

  I’m shocked when she hurries over and hugs me tightly. “You poor thing.”

  “Thanks,” I murmur. Her words bring me close to tears again.

  “Can I get you anything? Tea? Or something stronger?”

  “No, I’m okay. Thanks for letting me stay here tonight.”

  Jody picks up my blue shirt, which I’ve left at the foot of the futon next to the set of sheets, and smooths it out before folding it into a perfect square.

  “So what happened, exactly? Sean told me a little, but…”

  I start to recount the story again, but a truncated version of the one I’ve relayed to Sean.

  “Here, let me make up the bed for you,” Jody interrupts.

  I stand and walk over to the desk, to set down my Data Book so I can help her stretch the sheets across the futon.

  Then I see it.

  An unusual vase: an upside-down hand with a hollow wrist where the flower stems go, only Jody has filled it with pens and pencils.

  I recognize this vase. I saw it when I house-sat for Cassandra and Jane’s friend.

  I blink hard, unsure if it’s another apparition. Then I reach for it, feeling the cool china in my hand. It’s real.

  I spin around, still holding it: “Where did you get this?” I blurt.

  Jody pauses in fluffing my pillow. “It’s fun, right? A client of mine had one in her kitchen and I loved it, so I found it online. It’s perfect for the room, isn’t it?”

  That vase. It’s another coincidence. There have been too many lately surrounding my relationship with the Moore sisters.