Once More With Feeling (14 page)

"Do you have permission to visit?"

Gypsy had missed the figure in a chair near
the window. She swung her way closer and peered into the darkness.
"I'm sorry, I didn't see you there." Gypsy was as close to
Elisabeth as she ever had imagined, but she couldn't make herself
look at Elisabeth's face.

The figure rose and started toward her. It
materialized into a woman, tall and broad, with a Prince Valiant
haircut and suspicious eyes. "We keep the room dark. We don't want
to startle her if she wakes up."

The woman was a stranger. Gypsy wasn't sure
whether she should feel relieved or disappointed. "Are you a
friend?"

The woman looked perturbed, as if she knew
she should be asking the questions, but she answered politely. "No,
I'm a special duty nurse, hired by Mr. Whitfield."

"Oh yes, Owen told me he'd hired special
nurses," Gypsy lied.

"Then you have permission to be here?"

"Absolutely. It's just taken me awhile to
get here. I injured my ankle . . . jogging. How is she?"

"I'm sorry, I'll have to check your name on
my list. This is my first day."

Gypsy clamped her lips together. The nurse
had moved between her and the woman lying in the bed, and now she
couldn't see Elisabeth's face if she wanted to. She would either
have to push the nurse aside or answer something.

"Marguerite O'Keefe," she said, before she'd
thought twice. The name slid off her tongue like sun-warmed
honey.

"Just a moment." The nurse moved toward the
dresser where several stacks of papers lay.

Gypsy moved closer to Elisabeth. It was now
or never. She made herself look down.

"Oh, God." She closed her eyes. It was like
looking in a mirror. But the face looking back at her was a face
she had only imagined. Or so she'd thought.

"It's all right, Mrs. O'Keefe. It's always a
shock at first." The nurse's voice was solicitous now, no longer
suspicious. Gypsy knew that she had found Marguerite O'Keefe's name
on the list. A Marguerite O'Keefe who until this moment had only
been a figment of Gypsy's imagination. Or so she'd thought.

"She looks dead!"

"She's certainly not dead, or I'd be out of
a job." The woman put her hand on Gypsy's shoulder. "She's resting
comfortably. For all we know the place where she's resting is a lot
pleasanter than this one."

"What are they saying about her chances. You
know. . ."

"No one knows anything for certain, dear.
All we can do is wait and see. Go ahead and talk to her, if you
want. You can take her hand. We don't know exactly what she hears
or feels, if anything, but it's worth a try."

Take her own hand. Talk to herself. Gypsy
bit her trembling lip.

"I think I'll take a little break," the
nurse said, understanding in her voice. "I'll be back in a few
minutes."

The familiar hiss signaled the woman's
retreat. Gypsy didn't move. "Elisabeth?" Her voice cracked.

She was talking to herself. The woman in the
bed was her, or the person she'd been. Every hair, every inch of
pale skin was absolutely familiar. This was her. Once upon a
time.

Elisabeth looked like she was asleep. She
didn't look as if she were in pain, although she seemed smaller,
shrunken somehow. Her blond hair was neatly brushed and fanned
across the pillow, and she wore a dark green silk kimono that had
always been one of her favorites.

Her favorites. . .

Gypsy edged a little closer. "Elisabeth."
She took Elisabeth's hand, then dropped it when she realized what
she was doing. She was holding her own hand.

"Oh Lord! Who am I?"

"I can tell you who in the hell you aren't.
You aren't Marguerite O'Keefe!"

She had been so unnerved that she hadn't
heard the door open again. She turned at the familiar voice and
stared at Owen. Standing by his side was Anna Jacquard.

"Gypsy Dugan." Owen said the name like a
curse.

And what could she answer? Hello, dearest.
Look who's here? She stood as tall as her crutches would allow and
stared back at him. For a moment she just drank in the sight. He
was wearing a dark suit, one she had chosen for him, but the tie
was unfamiliar. He'd had a haircut recently, an expensive, time-
consuming haircut. She wondered just how many hours he had spent in
the last weeks sitting by his wife's bedside.

"Wasn't it enough to nearly kill her?" Owen
said. "Did you have to lie your way in here to see your
handiwork?"

"Owen. . ." Anna put her hand on his arm, as
if it belonged there. "Don't make a scene."

He covered her hand, as if to quiet her. But
his hand stayed on top of hers for a long moment, as if the feel of
it was pleasurable.

Gypsy watched the two of them and the joy
she'd felt at first sight of him curled and died inside her. "I . .
." Nothing seemed appropriate.

Owen moved closer. Anna, moved with him, her
hand still resting intimately on his arm. Her hips brushed his, and
neither of them moved away.

He looked thinner. The few extra pounds he'd
gained over the years had melted away. His face looked gaunt, but
his body was the body of a younger man, as if he'd survived some
life-altering crucible, and was better for the experience.

"Are you looking for a story, Miss
Dugan?"

His voice dripped sarcasm. Owen was only
rarely sarcastic. Like creative people everywhere, he lived deep
inside himself, where the vicissitudes of life scarcely touched
him. He was oblivious to much of what happened around him.

He wasn't oblivious to Gypsy Dugan.

"Do you see a camera?" she asked. "Or do you
see a woman on crutches?"

See me, a voice inside her pleaded. You know
me better than anyone. Look at me and see who I really am.

"I see the woman who nearly killed my wife.
Or did kill her, if you look at it objectively. Because the woman I
was married to for twenty-five years may never come out of that
coma."

The woman he was married to. Not the woman
he loved. Not a word about love.

"I've been told we were both at fault in the
accident," she said. "But you have no idea how sorry I am that this
happened." No one could possibly have any idea.

"I know enough about you to doubt anything
you say!"

"You're upset. Naturally you would be." She
looked him straight in the eye. "I know you must love your wife
very much."

"What would you know about my feelings? This
is the real world, not some absurd reenactment on your show.
There's no tragic love story here for you to exploit with old home
movies and interviews with our neighbors. What I feel for Elisabeth
is nobody's business but my own!"

"Owen!" Anna tightened her grip, her
possessive, intimate grip, on his arm. "This isn't the time."

Gypsy felt an overwhelming need to hurt him.
Owen talked easily about blame, but that was all. He had always
been a terrible liar. Now he couldn't even find it in himself to
pretend out loud that he still loved his wife. And although she had
no doubt he was truly sorry that Elisabeth was in a coma, he was
still accepting solace from Anna Jacquard, as if he was used to
accepting a great many things from her.

"Is this your daughter?" she asked. She
turned her head and pretended sympathy. "I really don't know what
to say to you, either."

"I'm an associate of Mr. Whitfield's," Anna
said with dignity.

"Oh, I'm sorry. . ." Gypsy's eyes dropped to
Anna's hand. "I just assumed. . ."

"What point are you trying to make, Miss
Dugan?" Owen said. He moved closer.

"I came to see your wife, to make peace with
her if I could." And with myself, she added silently. But there was
no peace here. Her throat closed around her next words, and she
could hardly utter them. "I never meant for this to happen. And
neither did she. We were both victims of fate."

"You and your kind never accepts
responsibility for anything, do you?"

"Me and my kind?"

"You newspeople have hounded me since the
accident, tearing my life and my privacy to shreds. And now you've
violated the sanctuary of this hospital room so you can whine about
fate!"

"I haven't hounded anyone, Mr. Whitfield.
I've been in a hospital bed recovering. God willing, your wife will
recover, too."

God willing. . . That's exactly what she had
been hoping for all along. Somehow Elisabeth would wake up, and
Gypsy Dugan and her whole crazy life would disappear in a puff of
smoke. For the first time she wondered if that's what she wanted
after all.

Did she want the life of the woman lying in
that bed? Did she want this man, and all that came with him now?
The expectations, the deceits?

She looked at Anna, who was gazing adoringly
up at Owen as if he were the Old Testament Jehovah spewing a
wrathful justice at an erring world.

Did she want Anna Jacquard in her life? And
eventually, perhaps, a messy, scandalous divorce?

"My wife has very little chance of
recovery," he said.

She looked at Anna's hand, tucked
reassuringly into the crook of his arm. Then she let her gaze
travel back to his face. Slowly. This man had held her in his arms
and made love to her a thousand times or more. He had been with her
at the birth of her only child, commiserated with her when no other
children were conceived, laughed with her when times were good,
cried with her when times were hard.

There were no tears in Owen's eyes now.

"Perhaps your wife doesn't feel any reason
to return," she said softly. Tears hovered just out of reach, but
she heard them in her voice. Gypsy's husky, sexy voice. "Perhaps
wherever she is now is a better place than this."

"Get out of here."

"Owen!" Anna dropped his arm and extended
her hands to Gypsy. "I'm sorry. You can't know what he's been
through. He's not himself."

"No?" Gypsy gathered her crutches closer.
"He seems very much himself. His real self. But then I couldn't
know that, could I? Because he's a stranger to me."

She turned her head and took one last look
at the woman lying in the bed. When she looked back at Owen, Casey
stood behind him in the doorway, with Perry beside him.

"Have you come to take me home?" She looked
past Owen and addressed Casey.

"Gypsy . . ." He shook his head. "You
shouldn't have come here."

"Maybe not." But she didn't mean it. Because
she had needed to come. Now she knew what she had only suspected.
She knew exactly who she was.

And she knew exactly who she had to
become.

"Take me home, Casey," she said. She moved
cautiously past Owen and Anna, but she didn't spare either of them
another look.

She was finished here.

She was finished with Elisabeth's life.

Just in front of Casey, she paused. She
turned and looked at the woman in the bed one more time. "Good bye
Elisabeth," she said softly. "God speed your journey wherever you
were meant to go."

"I still don't understand why you'd pull a
stunt like that. Did you think the Whitfield family would welcome
you with open arms?" Casey picked up a particularly hideous stone
fertility symbol that graced a brass and ebony side table in
Gypsy's apartment and turned it around and around in his hands. He
looked like a shaman performing some ancient religious ritual.

Gypsy turned away from him to stump around
her living room one more time. She couldn't tell Casey the truth
about why she'd gone to Elisabeth's room. Who would believe it?
There was no one she could share this with. For the rest of her
days she would be locked into a stranger's body, and no one would
ever know.

She tried to think of something else, but
there was nothing else. Everywhere she looked she was assaulted by
the truth. The apartment was an ice-water-in-the-face kind of
reminder.

She couldn't believe she actually lived here
now. There was nothing hideously wrong with the building. Clustered
among similar buildings on Central Park South in midtown Manhattan,
it was oppressively bland but solid. Built in the thirties or
later--she had been Owen's wife for too long not to immediately
evaluate the architectural style and period--the building had few
flourishes to compete with the treescape of the park.

She had been satisfied enough until she
stepped through the door of the apartment itself. Perry's purloined
issue of
New York Magazine
had obviously seen a few tough
years in radiology. Sometime since then Gypsy had transformed what
the magazine had portrayed as a spare, modern space into an African
brothel.

"Casey, my memory isn't what it used to be."
Gypsy stopped in front of an elephant tusk phallic symbol that
projected like a great white erection from a bamboo planter. She
averted her eyes.

"I had that part figured out." He reclined
on her sofa, an insubstantial piece of leather furniture that
looked like a cross between a slingshot and a hammock.

"I can't remember when "--or why-- "I had it
decorated this way."

"Close to a year ago."

"Do I like it?"

"You did." His brows converged. "But you
don't like it now?"

"Is this your . . . taste?"

"You don't remember my place, do you?"

"Not well."

"Not at all. Come on, Gyps, you don't have
to play games with me. We've all been told about your
condition."

"Have you? Why don't you tell me?"

"It's going to take time for you to regain
everything you lost."

"I hope I don't regain whatever made me
decorate this place in Early Safari."

"If you've changed your mind, all those
weeks in the hospital were worth it."

She was encouraged. "This is hideous."

"We've been warned not to let you make any
big decisions for a while. Not until you're feeling like yourself
again. You could clear out this place and redecorate, and next week
you might wake up and mourn inconsolably for all your lost zebra
skins and leopard throw pillows."