Whittaker 02 The One We Love

by Donna White Glaser

  “Crafts are an integral part of the community here. It gives the women something to do with their hands and builds a sense of accomplishment and pride in their work. We talk, too, while we work. Sometimes it’s more therapeutic than the regular groups.” Joyce spoke in a bright, chirpy voice. It was the longest speech I’d heard from her.

  The new girl was across from me, fumbling with the shiny knitting needles. It took me a minute to realize her awkwardness with the tools was because she was shaking hard enough to rattle the metal chair she perched on. She was a skinny little thing, fresh bruises adding the only color to her face.

  “My name is Letty,” I told her. “I’ve been helping out here the last couple of weeks. I’m kind of new, too.”

  Her eyes darted away from me, circling the group and landing on Joyce as though waiting for a cue. Joyce, looking only slightly less strained than she, nodded grudging permission.

  “I’m Maureen.”

  “Nice to meet you, Maureen. I’m going to have a new form for you to fill out. In fact,” I included the group in my glance, “We’re putting together a questionnaire to help us keep track of our performance. Hopefully, that will get some more grant money rolling in here. That would be a good thing, wouldn’t it? I’m going to be passing it around for everyone here.”

  Dead silence.

  Joyce cleared her throat. “Everyone?”

  “Not staff. I’m looking to get current and past residents’ opinions on how helpful they found the services here. It’s called an efficacy study. Then we can use those results as evidence of need when we apply for grant money.”

  “Well, I am a former resident,” Joyce said. She looked at Maureen. “That’s why I stayed. Even though the memories of what I lived through are awful, I won’t let myself forget. I’m on disability, but I don’t like the idea of not contributing to society. I’d go crazy if I had to sit around and do nothing. Working here keeps me safe. I know what to look for now, and I know what to do if I’m in danger. I’d be dead if it weren’t for this place.” At the last statement she looked directly at me. Her eyes, a curiously flat shade of muddy brown, stared deeply, almost challengingly into my own.

  “Right,” I finally said. “It’s always important to, um, stay alert. Regina taught me that. Some of you knew her, right? She used to work here?” Well, duh. Of course, they knew that. I pressed on. “By the way, did she knit?

  Joyce gasped. She, at least, was aware of how Regina had died. The others just looked confused. And scared. No one answered me. Maybe it was time to go.

  “Okay, well, it’s been nice sitting and chatting with you all. I guess I’d better be scooting for home. I’ll, um, let you know when I have those questionnaires ready.” I babbled my way across the floor, heaving a whooshing sigh of relief as the door shut behind me.

  The hallway was dark.

  I’ve never been a big fan of dark hallways, which have been a frequent feature in many of my more vivid nightmares. Anybody versed in dream analysis will start prattling on about “life paths” or “transitional phase,” but I wasn’t worried about symbolism at the moment. Regina had died a very real death at the other end of this hall. To get to my car, I either had to grope my way past that very spot—in the dark, may I repeat—or go outside—and walk around the outside of the building.

  Outside, it was.

  October is the right month for Halloween. Even though we were weeks away, the night felt eerie, laced with menace. Or maybe it was the company I’d just left. Since the shelter was situated on a corner lot, the sidewalk ran perpendicular along two sides. The smart thing would have been to use it, but that would mean taking the long way. I wasn’t in a long-way mood.

  Instead, I cut across the lawn, skirting the edge of the house, keeping a wary toe out for the writhing root system of the overhanging fir trees. As I passed behind the sign for the shelter, I realized I was treading on the same spot where Lachlyn, Clotilde, and Astrid had stood on opening day for the shelter so many years ago.

  Creepy.

  The whole night felt creepy. I froze as the feeling of being watched swept over me. The fear didn’t grow. It was just there—a thin, hot liquid eating away at rational thought.

  Holding my breath, I strained to listen, analyzing each sound of the night for clues. I could almost feel my pupils dilating: eyes lemur-wide, scanning the different shades of darkness, searching for the danger. A slight breeze rattled the leaves.

  Time felt wonky, too, both racing and leaden. Or maybe that was my heart. I stood still a few moments, then took a tentative, shaky step forward. If anything had rushed me at that moment, I’d have wet myself. Not an especially effective deterrent against crazed attackers, but you use what you got.

  When I appeared to be both safe and dry, I took another step. And then another. And then I ran my ass off.

  Which unfortunately activated the run-your-ass-off floodlights, illuminating the entire property.

  Light exploded, slamming into my eyeballs like a sledge hammer. I skidded to a stop, one foot sliding wildly on the fallen leaves. For one fleeting, tantalizing moment I managed the Warrior pose that had so eluded me in my one brief attempt at yoga. Then I landed on my butt, one leg stretched forward and the other twisted underneath, as a particular knobby tree root introduced itself to my tailbone. Pain zinged up my spine.

  I slowly rolled to my knees, forcing myself to stand. I hurt so bad, if anyone wanted to kill me they were welcome to it.

  When I finally made it to the car, I cranked the heater up to seventy-eight and told myself that I was shivering from the chilly air, not from post-hysterical stupidity.

  I decided to stop off at Gordy’s Market for a fresh carton of Epsom salts and some groceries. Woman could not live by chips alone. Besides, I’d eaten them all. As I hobbled up to the deli counter, I noticed a guy setting up a ladder under one of those purple-black domes that hide security cameras.

  Duh. I had been watched. Astrid’s fancy, state-of-the-art security system included exterior cameras in addition to the floodlights. Darting through the side yard and lurking behind the sign now seemed especially stupid choices.

  My stomach dropped as a new kind of fear welled up. Had I set off the alarm? It would be just my luck to have triggered a full-scale safety drill, with the residents panicking, thinking they were under attack, and the staff shifting into protection mode. Clotilde would kill me.

  And what about the police? Would they have been called? I grabbed my purchases and scooted through the checkout line as quickly as I could. All the way home, I kept glancing in my mirror for cop cars.

  Ten minutes later, I pulled into my apartment’s parking lot, relieved I hadn’t been pulled over. Even though taking a shortcut across the yard seemed a perfectly reasonable thing to do, it didn’t feel like that anymore.

  I slammed the car door and scurried up the sidewalk toward the front entrance of the apartment unit. Just as I passed the smelly garbage dumpster, the shadows shifted and the floodlights—this time in my head—exploded again.

  CHAPTER FORTY THREE

  How did the ground get here? The sidewalk had shifted from under my feet to under my back. A worried, vaguely familiar face loomed over me, blocking most of the dark sky, which was also strangely misplaced. Instead of hanging over my head, I seemed to be facing it. The woman above looked so concerned that I wanted to reassure her.

  “The walk did a wrong thing,” I said.

  She looked even more scared, but my head hurt, so I closed my eyes.

  Light squeezed past my clenched eyelids, daggering into my brain, which had its own problems going on. I forced myself to open my eyes, a poor choice, but necessary. Everything was white or horribly reflective stainless steel, and blurry from the tears streaming down my face. My head ached so badly that my stomach heaved in. I turned my head to vomit, which triggered more blinding pain, starting a pain-puke, pain-puke cycle that threatened to never end. It did, though, just in time for the inquisition.

&n
bsp; “What’s your name?” a guy asked. His green smock was repulsive so I puked again.

  “Do you know your name?” he asked again.

  Of course I knew my name. Duh. I knew it. I was pretty sure I knew it.

  “What day is it?”

  Now, that was just stupid. I had enough going on without some ding-a-ling using me for his day planner. “Get a thing,” I said. “One of those cucumbers.” OK, “cucumbers” was a mistake; I knew it, and it pissed me off even more.

  “OK, one more,” he said. “How about where you are? Do you know where you are?”

  “The hospital, you moron.” Ha! Got him there.

  “Well, Ms. Whittaker, I’m sorry to say you flunked our little test. How about we take some pictures of your brain and see what’s going on in there?”

  Anger flooded me, spiking my headache up a few notches. I never flunk tests.

  My world morphed to a softly humming, white tube, encircling me. It moved me along and for a moment I was convinced I was in a car wash. Only that would make me the car, and I wasn’t quite that confused. A teeny red light above my head flashed and a spinning thing whirled next to it. The car wash slid me out. A nurse smiled down at me.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  I was lying on a bed. A hospital bed. A wave of relief washed over me as things started to make sense. “Calendar,” I said, which scared me all over again, because it made no sense to say that. Thankfully, the nurse, swooshing the curtain back, didn’t appear to have heard me. The curtains made an unforgivably loud ratchety sound as they slid along the U-shaped pole ringing my bed. I was still in the ER, it appeared.

  “Dr. Billingsley will be right back,” she said. “He’s got some things to go over with you. Do you know when your ride will get here?”

  “My ride?”

  “You gave us the phone number. Don’t remember that, do you?” She smiled sympathetically. “Don’t worry. That’ll get better. You’re going to have quite a headache for a while though. Kind of like a long-term hangover.”

  “That is so unfair,” I mumbled.

  “Hmm?” She’d crossed over to a cabinet and was removing a blanket from it. Tossing it over me, she twitched it in place and gave my knee a pat. “Hit that button if you need anything. Oh, and try to stay awake. Rest is the most important thing, but you’ll need to be awakened every few hours for tonight and maybe tomorrow.”

  “How am I going to rest if I keep getting woken up?” And who is going to wake me? I would have asked her who was coming for me, but she’d already trotted away.

  I might have slept. Or maybe my brain did one of those skip things again. The doctor was sitting next to me on his little round rolling stool. I’d never seen a nurse use one of those and wondered if they were reserved: Physicians Only.

  “You’ve got a whopper of a concussion, Ms. Whittaker. What we like to call a Grade Two concussion, although I’m on the fence about bumping you up to a Grade Three. And trust me: this is not an area where you will want to overachieve. We’ll see how this week goes. If your symptoms persist or worsen, we’ll want you to get right back in here. The good news is the CT scan shows no bleeding or serious injury to your noggin. At least not yet.”

  “What’s the difference between Grade Two and Three?” I asked.

  “It used to be whether you were unconscious. Grade Two meant no loss of consciousness; getting KO’d meant automatic upgrade to Three. Nowadays, we recognize there are more individualized responses to head trauma. We’re more concerned about the degree of injury and the length of post-injury symptoms.

  “You can think about the brain as being the consistency of gelatin,” he continued. “When you receive a knock on the head, it sloshes around, bangs up against your skull.”

  Ugh.

  “When we’re talking about Grade Three, there’s the danger of bleeding in or around the brain and possibly tearing of the nerve fibers.”

  Eek!

  He produced a handout with all kinds of instructions and things to watch for. The text was blurry and I started seeing double so I just pretended to read it. He ended up repeating what the nurse had said about rest being the only real treatment, and suggested I take some time off work. He also suggested not getting hit on the head again anytime soon.

  No shit.

  At least I wouldn’t have to stay in the hospital. All I wanted was to be home, curled up in bed with Siggy purring in my ear. Unfortunately they wouldn’t release me until someone showed up to drive me home. I’d given them somebody’s number apparently, although I had no recollection of it. I didn’t want to admit the lapse in case they rescinded my release.

  I knew who I was hoping for, but would I have given them Marshall’s number? I’d called him for help before, one night when I was, let’s say … incapacitated. Not that I wanted to see him, I told myself. Except I’d just admitted that I did.

  I closed my eyes. My head hurt too much to lie to myself.

  What if it was Sue? I could just as easily have given them Sue’s number, and frankly, I didn’t think I could survive her abrasive attitude in the shape I was in. I loved her like a sister, but I had not picked her to be my sponsor for her gentle and endearing nature. Staying sober, for me, meant needing someone who would call me on my own shit, and Sue fit the bill.

  Sue was like a rabid porcupine.

  I didn’t have long to wait. Within ten minutes, the double doors in the main room opened and my ride walked in.

  Made me wish for Sue.

  CHAPTER FORTY FOUR

  “Ma, I don’t know why somebody hit me. They didn’t leave a note.”

  “Don’t be a smart aleck. Of course, they didn’t leave a note. I’m not stupid even if I didn’t go to a fancy college. But if someone is sneaking up behind you and bamming you on the head, you must have some idea. If it was Kris, I’d just think it was …”

  “Was what? What’s going on with Kris?” The mere mention of my sister’s name was enough to set me off. She was the baby in the family and, for a long time, was the only person in it that I felt close to. Then I got sober and she hated me for it.

  “Never mind Kris. I don’t want to get into it. Isn’t having another psycho killer come after you enough to worry about? How do you do this? Are you like a freak magnet? You’re just lucky that neighbor lady found you. Be sure to send her a thank-you note. How come you didn’t go to school for computers like I told you? I mean, what do you expect when you work with crazy people? They’re gonna—”

  “Ma. I do not work with crazy people. I work with people …” I trailed off.

  “With people what?”

  “What?”

  “You work with people, you said. Then you stopped.”

  “Ma, I can’t do this now. I have a headache.” I pressed my hands to my head. If she didn’t stop talking my head was going to explode. And then I’d have to listen to her bitch about getting gelatinous brain goo all over her car seat. She still hadn’t forgiven me for a red Kool-Aid incident when I was twelve.

  I slid against the window, resting my face against the cool glass. She kept yakking, but by then I’d resorted to the quasi-fugue state I’d learned to employ as a teen. A parental nagging OFF button.

  Even blackouts can be useful.

  Back home, it took nearly two hours to convince my mother that the doctor had overreacted when he suggested I have someone stay with me all night. She was distracted by her self-appointed inspection—and subsequent reorganization—of the contents of my kitchen cabinets, refrigerator, freezer, and closets. All accompanied by a running commentary on the undesirability of having a cat as a pet. I finally pointed out the cat-behaired couch would be her bed. I telepathied an apology to Siggy, but he’d already fled to the dark space under my bed.

  Siggy was a survivor.

  The next day, Wednesday, I called Lisa and asked her to cancel my clients for the next week, explaining only that I’d been involved in a crash. I didn’t specify that the crash had involved a blunt
instrument and the back of my head and not an automobile, but she wasn’t picky about details. She even offered to run over at lunch and bring me some soup. I almost cried.

  In fact, I divided most of the morning between feeling sorry for myself, panic at the thought that someone had actually tried to kill me, and a rising fury that someone had actually tried to kill me. Again.

  It didn’t help that in order to “rest,” I had to practically lay on my face because the back of my skull hurt so bad. This confused and frustrated Siggy, who was used to sleeping in the nook created by the curve of my legs, not on the twin—and ever growing—hillocks of my ass.

  We were both cranky by midafternoon.

  It wasn’t until I was brushing my teeth that I saw the thin, red welt on the side of my neck. I patted myself, groping for the chain my eyes had already told me was missing. Along with Regina’s cow charm. Ripped off my neck.

  I decided to use the down time for strategizing. Unfortunately, my brain was working at “See Spot run?” level. My “plan” was reduced to showing up at the shelter’s team meeting tomorrow and watching peoples’ faces to see if anyone looked killer-esque.

  Around 4:00, Pete Durrant called. He’d somehow found out that I’d been injured. It was possible that Sue, his girlfriend-my sponsor, had told him, but then how had she known? I hadn’t called her yet. Through her years spent teaching and her underground networking in A.A., she had a lot of resources, but this was an amazing feat even for her mighty gossip skills. Speculating made my head hurt worse, so I finally just asked Durrant for an explanation.

  “Sue? What are you talking about?” he asked. “Sue wasn’t there. You told me not to call her.”

  “I did? When?”

  Long pause. “Last night. In the hospital. Don’t remember, huh?”

  I tried so hard to remember that I felt my brain split in two and start to leak out my orifices. A closer inspection revealed I was crying. Shit.