Cold Cold Heart (5 page)

“Survival of the fittest.”

“Evolution is a bitch. And we're all caught in her teeth.”

Nikki could feel the truth of that statement. She felt like she'd been mauled. She could only imagine how Lynda Mercer felt.

“We have to forgive ourselves, Tinks. Nobody else will.”

She nodded and gave him a sorry excuse for a smile. “I guess that means I have to ask
you
for a hug.”

“Oh, Jesus Christ,” he grumbled, even as he took a step toward her and opened his arms.

Tears welled in Nikki's eyes as an overwhelming wave of sadness washed over her. She leaned into him, keeping her head down. She would pretend she wasn't crying. And he would pretend he didn't know that she was.

“Let's get you home, Tinker Bell,” he said. “You need to hug your kids.”

Dana drifted in
and out of the shallowest depths of sleep. The sounds of the hospital had gone soft and hushed. The only light in the room was a soft blue-white glow that came from somewhere behind the bed and drifted across the room like fog to reveal the shadowed shapes of furniture.

She liked this time of day best. No one was poking or prodding her. She could relax without the pressure of her mother's eyes and expectations on her.

But even now there was a level of anxiety humming like an idling motor in the pit of her stomach. She didn't know why. No one wanted to tell her why. Everyone became anxious when she asked. They turned their eyes away when they answered. She didn't need to know now, they told her. She needed to heal. She needed to get stronger.

Her conclusion was that someone had died in the accident and no one wanted to tell her.

What if it was me?

What if she was dead? What if this was how a person passed from one life to the next? Maybe this was purgatory. Maybe she was in this painful state of limbo because she had caused someone else to die. If only she could remember.

She felt like her skull was a bucket full of holes, with memories running out like water, and she had nothing to catch them in. It seemed what remained in her memory was a collection of weird, random things, and she trusted none of them.

She knew Lynda was her mother. She had been told so. But the memories of family were dreamlike things concealed in shadow. Her childhood was just a jumble of scenes tangled together like a snarl of yarn.

She had had a career. People she worked with came to the hospital to see her. She knew them but she didn't. It was like meeting an acquaintance in an unexpected place. Her frame of reference was gone. The face seemed familiar, but she didn't quite understand why. She couldn't quite grab their names from her memory, just like she couldn't always find the words she needed to convey a thought.

The frustration of that was enormous and exhausting. She had no patience for her fumbling brain. She had no patience for anything. Every day in physical therapy she lost her temper for being clumsy and slow.

Everyone excused her. Everyone told her it was all right to fail. Everyone told her it would all come back to her, everything—her memory, her coordination, her personality, her sense of self. She hoped so, because not knowing the people who came to visit her was nothing compared to not knowing who she really was.

She had only pieces of an incomplete puzzle and couldn't yet see what the finished picture should look like. And every day, every moment of trying to put those pieces together, left every cell of her being drained and exhausted.

And yet now she couldn't sleep. Something had happened earlier. She remembered the police detectives. That memory stuck with her because she hadn't understood why they had been there. She remembered Lynda getting upset. She could still feel the residual vibrations of her own anger with her mother, though the cause of that anger eluded her. Then nothing.

She had lost time. She lay awake now in her hospital bed with mesh netting on either side of it reaching to the ceiling to catch her if she tried to climb out or fell in the night.

Her mother had fallen asleep in the reclining chair beside the bed. Dana stared at her, wondering if she would ever fully remember the life they had shared.

The lack of memory left her feeling alone and adrift on a dark sea of nothingness. The void's gentle waves finally lulled her to sleep. And as she slept, she dreamed of delicate pieces of jewelry floating in the air. And beyond the glittering objects she saw the faces of dead girls she had never known.

October

The Weidman Recovery Center

Indianapolis, Indiana

Dana woke as
she always did: panting, drenched in sweat, her heart pounding in her chest; confused, and afraid of something she couldn't remember—a dream, a nightmare, a memory of the ordeal she had been through months earlier? She didn't know. All that remained was the emotional waste—fear, anxiety, apprehension. Without moving, she looked to one side and then the other of the dimly lit room to see if she was alone. She saw no one.

The world was dark beyond her window, but forty watts of amber security glowed on an end table in the corner, next to her chair. Beside the lamp was the book she had been trying to read for the past three weeks. She tried to read it before she went to bed at night when she was exhausted and her brain was full of fog, and she had to reread and reread to get the words to penetrate and make sense.

Had she tried to read the book last night? She wondered as she sat up and propped herself against the headboard. Had she slept a few hours or a few weeks? Was it a bad dream that chased her from her sleep, or a memory forever shrouded in a black shadow?

The questions and all the possible answers brought a flood of emotions. Fear, panic, grief, and anger came all at once, like a rushing wave inside her head.

That was in fact what the doctors called it: flooding. A tsunami of emotions that crashed through the injured brain, short-circuiting logic and the careful strategies the brain-injured person worked on every day in the attempt to put her life back on some kind of simple track.

Dana knew she had to stem the tide. She grabbed her four-by-six note cards off the nightstand and fumbled through them for the right one. As she found it, she called to mind Dr. Dewar's soothing voice:

1. Breathe slowly, in through the nose and out through the mouth.
   
2. Concentrate on the mechanics of filling your lungs. Hold the breath for two beats, then exhale slowly. Four beats in, four beats out.
   
3. Work to find the connection between the mind and the body. Feel the energy in your toes, slowly moving up your legs. Move your fingers. Feel the energy slowly move up through your arms . . .
   

If she could stay focused on the exercise, she could keep at bay the flood and all the debris that came with it. Sometimes she succeeded in this. Sometimes she didn't. Sometimes the flood crashed over her, and she panicked and froze, couldn't breathe, couldn't think, couldn't move. This time the flood receded slowly, leaving her feeling weak from the effort of fighting it.

She had been told time and again during her stay here that the key to success in dealing with her issues was all a matter of routine. If she could consistently repeat the routines of each day, the thoughts and actions would become automatic and she wouldn't feel so fatigued from having to remember every detail of every task.

She looked at the digital clock on the nightstand: 3:17
A.M.
Shuffling through her note cards, she found the one she wanted, and she read through the same list of questions she asked herself every morning to establish her routine.

Where am I?

In my room.

Where is my room?

The Weidman Recovery Center.

Where is the Weidman Center?

Indianapolis.

Why am I here?

Because I have a traumatic brain injury.

Who am I?

Dana Nolan.

Who is Dana Nolan?

The last question wasn't on the card, but she asked it anyway. She wished she could answer with something other than the adjectives other people had given to her—sweet, bubbly, friendly, kind, helpful, sunny, always smiling, always laughing, perky, pretty.

Those words might have applied to her former self—“Before” Dana—but she felt none of them applied to her present self—“After” Dana. Her memories of the Dana Nolan other people described seemed like clips from a movie passing through her mind. In them, Dana Nolan was a character played by an actress, and Dana herself was just an observer watching the show, wondering if that actress was anything like what the tabloids wrote about her.

There was a strange disconnection between the person in the memories and the person she was now that was impossible to explain to anyone who hadn't experienced it. She couldn't describe it to the friends and family of that former self, the people who had come to visit during her months here at the center—some of whom she didn't remember from her past life at all. She could remember them now because she had their photographs in her iPhone along with a description of who they were and how she had known them, the last time she had seen them, key subjects they had spoken about.

They seemed hurt by her lack of ability to recognize them, as if she had a choice in the matter, as if she was deliberately snubbing them just to be a bitch.

Several of the people she had known and worked with in Minneapolis had come to visit once, then never again. They had come with a cheery, party attitude, bringing DVDs of their days in the newsroom with footage of Dana doing her job, of the staff at parties, things they wanted her to remember. But seeing her former self on television served only to upset her. She didn't remember being that girl. She didn't remember being happy and sweet. And she certainly didn't feel any connection to the pretty face with the sunny smile.

The pressure of her coworkers' expectations and their disappointment in her reaction to them had been too much for her. The emotional tidal wave had rolled over her, and she had become panic-stricken and violent, throwing things and shouting at them to leave.

They hadn't returned. Her mother, ever the diplomat trying to smooth over the jagged edges, had told her it was the distance that deterred them. Minneapolis was a long way away from Indianapolis. When Dana countered with the fact that airplanes regularly flew between the two places, her mother changed tacks to the fact that people in the news business were very busy and couldn't get away as much as they liked.

“We hardly saw you after you moved to Minneapolis,” she pointed out. “You were so busy! Remember?”

No. She didn't remember. And that was the whole point, wasn't it? If she didn't remember those people, why should they remember her? They would rather stay in Minneapolis with the memories of Before Dana, the Dana Nolan they had known, than deal with the reality of After Dana, the Dana Nolan she was now.

Dana wished she had that choice. Or, if not that choice, then at least the ability to make them understand what it was like to live inside her head. But not even the doctors who worked with brain-injured people every day could truly get what that was like.

Tired of thinking about it, Dana pushed the covers back and got out of bed. Stiffness and aches growled and barked through her body like a pack of angry dogs. The fractures and lacerations and contusions had all healed, but their aftereffects remained. In particular her right knee and the once-mangled fingers of her left hand remembered what had been done to them even if Dana's brain didn't.

She went into the bathroom, turned on the shower, and climbed in under the hot water, remembering too late that she was supposed to take her clothes off first. She peeled off her now-sodden T-shirt and flannel boxer shorts and dropped them in a heap that immediately acted as a plug over the drain. The water began pooling around her feet as she shampooed her short hair, then washed herself, then shampooed her hair again, then washed herself. She rinsed and repeated not because the shampoo bottle said to, but because she didn't remember she had already done it.

Her thoughts were elsewhere. She was going home today.

The wet clothes were forgotten as she left the shower stall and went to the sink. The notes on the mirror told her to towel herself off, reminded her to brush her teeth, to comb her hair. Dana didn't look at the notes. Her attention was on the dripping-wet stranger staring back at her.

The first time she had been allowed to look at herself in a mirror after waking up from the coma, she had not been able to
comprehend that she was seeing an image of herself. She didn't remember knowing anyone who looked like this. The face staring back at her was something from a nightmare or a zombie movie.

The right side of the bald skull was flat and pitched like the angle of a roof, a huge section of bone having been temporarily removed to alleviate the pressure on her swelling brain. The face was bruised and cut and stitched back together like an abused rag doll. The features seemed misshapen and asymmetrical. The right eye was covered with a patch.

Confused, Dana had stared at the creature in the mirror for a long while without saying anything. She looked from the unrecognizable face to her mother's worried reflection peering over its shoulder. But her mother was standing behind
her
with her hands on Dana's shoulders. It didn't make any sense. How could she be behind two people at once?

Slowly Dana had reached up and touched her mother's hand, felt the brush of fingers over fingers, skin on skin. She stared at the mirror, watching the image in the mirror mimic her movements exactly. Just as slowly, she lifted her hand away from her shoulder and reached toward the mirror. The monster in the mirror reached out toward her. Her fingertips touched the cold glass and the fingertips of the image at the same time.

Panic grasped her by the throat as realization dawned. She was looking at herself. The horror-movie image in the mirror was her own reflection. And she began to scream and scream and scream.

She didn't scream now as she stared at herself in the glass. She just stood there stiffly, staring as water dripped from the ends of her boy-short blond hair. This was what she looked like now. Just as her friends had been unable to recognize the personality that now occupied her brain, she was still unable to recognize the face that now masked the front of that brain.

The doctors, the nurses, the friends, the family—all told her not to be too upset, that there was still much healing to be done, that the
plastic surgeons still had work to do. She would be as good as new, eventually, they told her. They said it so frequently and so emphatically, Dana knew it had to be a lie. The truth was never that hard to sell.

She reached out and swiped the gathering fog off the mirror with her hand, clearing a swatch of harsh reality.

Her right orbital had been shattered, and the cheekbone along with it. An implant had restored the cheek in order to give a foundation for the damaged eye area, but the eye drooped slightly, nevertheless, pulling from the brow bone down, making it look like that part of her face might have started to melt from the inside out. A madman's knife had carved a curved outline around the apple of her left cheek, gouging deep below the cheekbone, slicing flesh and muscle. A marionette line hooked downward from the right corner of her mouth.

Picasso couldn't have done a better job of distorting the female countenance.

Masterpiece.
A voice whispered the word through her mind every time she stared at this reflection.
Masterpiece.
And every time she heard it, a fist of fear squeezed her heart.

She swiped a hand across the mirror again, wiping too low to again reveal the reflection of her face. Instead, in the spotlighted area of glass, framed by obscuring fog, was what she had come to call the Mark of the Devil. No matter how many times she looked at it, her heart's immediate reaction was always one big thump.

The number 9 had been carved in the center of her chest, from the base of her collarbone to the midpoint between her breasts. The number had a quality as sinister as the dark voice that drifted through her mind. Coiled like a snake at the top, the number's tail appeared to flick and twitch when she moved.

It must have looked shocking when she had been brought to the emergency room, a garish open wound, dripping blood. From a distance it had probably looked as if it had been hastily painted on her pale, delicate skin by a messy graffiti artist. Healed, the scar was
raised and deep red and weirdly smooth to the touch. She touched it now, traced it with her fingertips.

Masterpiece.

She should have been dead. She should have been the ninth victim of a serial killer. But she had survived.

Why? For what?

To start her life all over again as someone she didn't know.

The mirror had fogged over again, and Dana realized the air in the bathroom had become a suffocating cloud of moisture. Water pooled around her feet. She looked down, confused, then turned toward the shower stall. She had left the water running. Suddenly she was aware of the sound of it like a pounding-hard rain. She had left her wet clothes to plug the drain. The room was flooding.

She knew the feeling.

*   *   *

“S
O TODAY'S THE DAY.
You're going home,” Dr. Dewar said. “How are you feeling about that, Dana?”

“Great,” Dana said without emotion, knowing her neuropsychologist would not be satisfied with her answer.

“Would you like to elaborate on that?”

“No.”

Janelle Dewar sighed. She was a woman on the downside of middle age with a softly rounded figure always draped in flowing skirts and tunic tops and adorned with chunky art-fair jewelry. Her shoulder-length brown hair was thick and liberally threaded with gray. She was a kind, practical woman with the patience of a saint.

She had been working with brain-injured people her entire medical career. Nothing surprised her. Nothing threw her for a loop. She never judged. She never told patients they shouldn't feel one way or another. She was a rock, an anchor for people whose brains were pulling and pushing their emotions in all directions.

The idea of leaving Dr. Dewar and not having her steadying
influence day in and day out terrified Dana. But what good would it do her to elaborate on that? It was time for her to leave the Weidman Center. That was that.