Familiar. I turned to get a better look.
Sharon. Definitely Sharon. In a tailored linen suit, matching purse and shoes.
She saw me, waved as if we'd had an appointment.
"Alex!"
All at once she was at my side. Soap and water, fresh grass...
She sat down on the stool next to mine, crossed her legs, and pulled her skirt down over her knees.
The bartender winked at me. "Drink, ma'am?"
"Seven-Up, please."
"Yes, ma'am."
After he handed her the drink and moved down, she said, "You look great, Alex. I like the beard."
"Saves time in the morning."
"Well, I think it's handsome." She sipped, toyed with
her stirrer. "I keep hearing good things about you, Alex. Early tenure, all those publications. I've read quite a few of your articles. Learned a lot from them."
"Glad to hear it."
Silence.
"I finally graduated," she said. "Last month."
"Congratulations, Doctor."
"Thanks. It took me longer than I thought it would. But I got involved in clinical work and didn't apply myself to writing the dissertation as diligently as I should have."
We sat in silence. A few feet away, the bartender was whistling "La Bamba" and tinkering with the ice crusher.
"It's good to see you," she said.
I didn't answer.
She touched my sleeve. I stared at her fingers until she removed them.
"I wanted to see you," she said.
"What about?"
"I wanted to explain—"
"There's no need to explain anything, Sharon. Ancient history."
"Not to me."
"Difference of opinion."
She moved closer, said, "I know I blew it," in a choked whisper. "Believe me, I know it. But that doesn't change the fact that after all these years, you're still with me. Good memories, special memories. Positive energy."
"Selective perception," I said.
"No." She inched closer, touched my sleeve again. "We did have some wonderful times, Alex. I'll never let go of that."
I said nothing.
"Alex, the way we... it ended. I was horrible. You had to think I was psychotic—what happened was psychotic. If you only knew how many times I've wanted to call you, to explain—"
"Then why didn't you?"
"Because I'm a coward. I run away from things. It's my style—you saw that the first time we met, in practicum."
Her shoulders drooped. "Some things never change."
"Forget it. Like I said, ancient history."
"What we had was special, Alex, and I allowed it to be destroyed."
Her voice stayed soft but got tighter. The bartender glanced over. My expression sent his eyes back to his work.
"Allowed' it?" I said. "That sounds pretty passive."
She recoiled as if I'd spit in her face. "All right," she said. "I destroyed it. I was crazy. It was a crazy time in my life—don't think I haven't regretted it a thousand times."
She tugged at her earlobe. Her hands were smooth and white. "Alex, meeting you here today was no accident. I never attend conventions, had no intention of going to this one. But when I got the brochure in the mail I happened to notice your name on the program and wanted suddenly to see you again. I attended your lecture, stood at the back of the room. The way you spoke—your humanity. I thought I might have a chance."
"A chance for what?"
"To be friends, bury the hard feelings."
"Consider them buried. Mission accomplished."
She leaned forward so that our lips were almost touching, clutched my shoulder, whispered. "Please, Alex, don't be vindictive. Let me show you."
There were tears in her eyes.
"Show me what?" I said.
"A different side of me. Something I've never shown anyone."
We walked to the front of the hotel, waited for the parking valets.
"Separate cars," she said, smiling. "So you can escape any time you want."
The address she gave me was on the south side of Glen-dale, the down side of town, filled with used-car lots, splintering, by-the-day rooming houses, thrift shops, and greasy spoons. Half a mile north on Brand, the Glendale
Galleria was under construction—a polished brick tribute to gentrification—but down here, boutique was still a French word.
She arrived before me, was sitting in the little red Alfa in front of a one-story brown stucco building. The place had a jaillike quality—narrow, silvered windows bolted and barred, the front door a slab of brushed steel, no landscaping other than a single thirsty liquidambar tree which cast spindly shadows on the tar-paper roof.
She met me at the door, thanked me for coming, then pushed the buzzer in the center of the steel door. Several moments later it was opened by a stocky, coal-black man with short hair and a corkscrew chin beard. He wore a diamond stud in one ear, a light-blue uniform jacket over a black T-shirt and jeans. When he saw Sharon he flashed a gold-jacketed smile.
"Afternoon, Dr. Ransom." His voice was high-pitched, gentle.
"Afternoon, Elmo. This is Dr. Delaware, a friend of
mine.
"Pleased to meet you, sir." To Sharon: "She's all prettied up and ready for you."
"That's great, Elmo."
He stood aside and we entered a waiting room floored with oxblood linoleum and furnished with orange plastic chairs and green tables. To one side was an office labeled RECEPTION and windowed with a square of yellowed Lucite. We walked past it and up to another steel door, marked NO ENTRY, Elmo selected a key from a heavy ring and sprung the latch.
We stepped into brightness and pandemonium: a long, high room with steel-shuttered windows and a fluorescent ceiling that radiated a cold, flat imitation daylight. The walls were covered with sheets of emerald-green vinyl; the air was hot and rancid.
And everywhere, movement. A random ballet.
Scores of bodies, twitching, rocking, stumbling, brutalized by Nature and the luck of the draw. Limbs frozen or trapped in endless, athetoid spasm. Slack, drooling
mouths. Hunched backs, shattered spines, nubbed and missing limbs. Contortions and grimaces born of ravaged chromosomes and derailed neural pathways and made all the more cruel by the fact that these patients were young—teenagers and young adults who'd never know the pleasures of youth's false immortality.
Some of them clutched walkers and measured their progress in millimeters. Others, contracted stiff as plaster statues, bucked and fought the confines of wheelchairs. The saddest among them slumped, flaccid as invertebrates in high-sided wagons and metal carts that resembled oversized baby strollers.
We made our way past a sea of glazed eyes as inert as plastic buttons. Past witless faces gazing up from the leather sanctuary of protective headgear, an audience of blank faces unperturbed by the merest flicker of consciousness.
A gallery of deformity—a cruel display of all that could go wrong with the box that humans come in.
In a corner of the room a rabbit-eared console TV blasted a game show at top volume, the shrieks of contestants competing with the wordless jabber and inchoate howls of the patients. The only ones watching were half a dozen blue-jacketed attendants. They ignored us as we passed.
But the patients noticed. As if magnetized, they swarmed toward Sharon, began flocking around her, wheeling and hobbling. Soon we were surrounded. The attendants didn't budge.
She reached into her purse, took out a box of gumdrops, and began distributing candy. One box emptied, another appeared. Then another.
She dispensed another kind of sweetness, too, kissing misshapen heads, hugging stunted bodies. Calling patients by name, telling them how good they looked. They competed for her favors, begged for gumdrops, cried out in ecstasy, touched her as if she were magic.
She looked happier than I'd ever seen her—complete. A storybook princess reigning over a kingdom of the misshapen.
Finally,
gumdrops depleted, she said, "That's all, people. Gotta go."
Grumbles, whines, a few more minutes of pats and squeezes. A couple of the attendants came forward and began corraling the patients. Finally we managed to pull away. Resumption of chaos.
Elmo said, "They sure love you." Sharon didn't seem to hear.
The three of us walked to the end of the big room, up to a door marked INPATIENT UNIT and shielded by an iron accordion grille, which Elmo unlocked. Another key twist, the door opened and closed behind us, and all was quiet.
We walked through a corridor' covered in the same lurid green vinyl, passed a couple of empty wards reeking of illness and despair, a door with a mesh glass window that afforded a view of several stout Mexican women laboring in a steamy industrial kitchen, another green hallway, and finally a steel slab marked PRIVATE.
On the other side a new ambience: plush carpeting, soft lighting, papered walls, perfumed air, and music—the Beatles, as interpreted by a somnolent string orchestra.
Four rooms marked PRIVATE. Four oak doors, fitted with brass peepholes. Elmo unlocked one and said, "Okay."
The room was beige and hung with French Impressionist lithos. More plush carpeting and soft lighting. Oak wainscotting and oak crown molding rimmed the ceiling. Good furniture: an antique chiffonier, a pair of sturdy oak chairs. Two generous, arched windows, barred and filled with opaque glass block, but curtained with chintz pull-backs and lace. Vases of fresh-cut flowers strategically placed. The place smelled like a meadow. But I wasn't paying attention to decorator touches.
In the center of the room was a hospital bed covered by a pearly pink quilt, which had been pulled to the neck of a dark-haired woman.
Her skin was gray-white, her eyes huge and deep-blue—the same color as Sharon's, but filmed and immobile, aimed straight up at the ceiling. Her hair was
black and thick, spread over a plump, lace-trimmed pillow. The face it framed was emaciated, dust-dry, still as a plaster cast. Her mouth gaped—a black hole studded with peg teeth.
Faint movement nudged the quilt. Shallow breathing, then nothing, then re-ignition heralded by a squeeze-toy squeak.
I studied her face. Less a face than a sketch of one-anatomic scaffolding, stripped of the adornment of flesh.
And somewhere amid the ruins, resemblance. A hint of Sharon.
Sharon was holding her, cradling her, kissing her face.
Squeak.
A swivel table next to the bed held a pitcher and glasses, a tortoise-shell comb and brush set with matching manicure tools. Lipstick, tissues, makeup, nail polish.
Sharon pointed to the pitcher. Elmo filled the glass with water and handed it to her, then left.
Sharon tipped the rim of the glass to the woman's mouth. Some of the water dribbled down. Sharon wiped the pale flesh, kissed it.
"It's so good to see you, darling," she said. "Elmo says you're doing just fine."
The woman remained blank as eggshell. Sharon cooed to her and rocked her. The covers slipped down, revealing a limp wisp of a body wrapped in a pink flannel nightgown, contracted, pathetic—too fragile to be viable. But the breathing continued___
"Shirlee, we have a visitor. His name is Dr. Alex Delaware. He's a nice man. Alex, meet Miss Shirlee Ransom. My sister. My twin. My silent partner."
I just stood there.
She stroked the woman's hair. "Clinically, she's deaf and blind—minimal cortical functioning. But I know she senses people, has some subliminal awareness of her surroundings. I can feel it—she gives off small vibrations. You have to be tuned in to them, have to be actually making contact with her to feel them."
She took my hand, put it on a cold, dry brow.
Turning to Shirlee: "Isn't that true, darling? You do know what's going on, don't you? You're fairly humming today.
"Say something to her, Alex."
"Hello, Shirlee."
Nothing.
"There," said Sharon. "She's humming."
She hadn't stopped smiling, but there were tears in her eyes. She let go of my hand, spoke to her sister: "Alex Delaware, darling. The one I've told you about, Shirl. So handsome, isn't he? Handsome and good."
I waited as she talked to a woman who couldn't hear. Sang, prattled on about fashion, music, recipes, current events.
Then she folded back the covers, rolled up the pink nightgown, exposing chicken-carcass ribs, stick legs, spiky knees, loose, putty-gray skin—the remnants of a female form so pathetically wasted I had to look away.
Sharon turned her sister gently, searching for bed sores. Kneading and stroking and massaging, flexing and unflexing arms and legs, rotating the jaw, examining behind the ears before covering her up again.
After tucking her back under the quilt and propping the pillow, she gave Shirlee's hair a hundred strokes with the tortoise-shell brush, wiped her face with a damp washcloth, dusted the collapsed cheeks with makeup and blush.
"I want her to be as ladylike as possible. For her morale. Her feminine self-image."
She lifted one limp hand, inspected nails that were surprisingly long and healthy. "These are looking beautiful, Shirl." Turning to me: "Hers are so healthy! They grow faster than mine do, Alex. Isn't that funny?"
Later, we sat in the Alfa and Sharon cried for a while. Then she started to speak, in those same flat tones she'd used years ago to tell me about her parents' deaths:
"We were born absolutely identical. Carbon copies of each other—I mean, no one could tell us apart." She
laughed. "Sometimes we couldn't tell ourselves apart."
Remembering the photograph of the two little girls, I said, "One difference: mirror-image identical."
That seemed to jolt her. "Yes. That—she's a lefty, I'm a righty. And our hair whirls go in opposite directions."
She looked away from me, tapped the Alfa's wooden steering wheel. "Strange phenomenon, mirror-image monozygotes—from a scientific point of view. Biochemically, it makes no sense at all. Given an identical genetic structure in two individuals, there should be no differences at all, right? Let alone reversal of the cerebral hemispheres."
She got a dreamy look in her eyes and closed them.
"Thank you so much for coming, Alex. It really means a lot to me."
"I'm glad."
She took my hand. Hers was shaking.
I said, "Go on. You were talking about how similar the two of you were."
"Carbon copies," she said. "And inseparable. We loved each other with a gut intensity. Lived for each other, did everything together, cried hysterically when anyone tried to separate us, until finally no one tried. We were more than sisters—more than twins. Partners. Psychic partners—sharing a consciousness. As if each of us could only be whole in the presence of the other. We had our own languages, two of them: a spoken one, and one based on gestures and secret looks. We never stopped communicating—even in our sleep we'd reach out and touch each other. And we shared the same intuitions, the same perceptions."
She stopped. "This probably sounds strange to you. It's hard to explain to someone who's never had a twin, Alex, but believe me, all those stories you hear about synchrony of sensation are true. They were certainly true for us. Even now, sometimes I'll wake in the middle of the night with an ache in my belly or a cramp in my arm. I'll call Elmo and find out Shirlee had a rough night.
"It doesn't sound strange. I've heard it before."
"Thanks for saying that." She kissed my cheek. Tugged her earlobe. "When we were little, we had a wonderful life together. Mummy and Daddy, the big apartment on Park Avenue—all those rooms and cupboards and walk-in closets. We loved to hide—loved to hide from the world. But our favorite place was the summer house in Southampton; The property had been in our family for generations. Acres of grass and sand. A big old white-shingled monstrosity with creaky floors, wicker furniture that was coming apart, dusty old hooked rugs, a stone fireplace. It sat on top of a bluff that overlooked the ocean and sloped down to the water in a couple of places. Nothing
elegant—just a few tortured old pines and tarry dunes. The beach hooked around in a crescent shape, all wide and wet and full of clam spouts. There was a dock with rowboats moored to it—it danced in the waves, slapped against all that warped wood. It scared us, but in a nice way—we loved to be scared, Shirl and me.
Jonathan Kellerman - Alex 04 - Silent Partner Page 22