Rosebush (20 page)

What happened to the mom who smelled of Jean Nate powder and shampoo and soap, who rushed to me when I fell and hurt my knee on the jungle gym, who crouched in the dirt next to me and held me against her and said in a voice that meant something, like it mattered to her, like she was really seeing me and feeling me and caring about me, “You’re all right, sweetheart. I have you”?

I wanted my mom. I needed her. Where was she?

“I didn’t make this up.” Tears rolled down my cheeks. “Someone called and threatened me.” I looked toward Pete imploringly. “You must have heard; you walked in right when I hung up.” I needed an ally, just one person on my side.

Pete shook his head. “I heard you talking, but I wasn’t paying attention. I was on my cell.”

Loretta smiled soothingly and laid a warm soft palm on my shoulder. “There’s someone coming up who can help you make sense of this.”

“What kind of someone?”

“Dr. Tan is a psychologist. He specializes in trauma.”

“I don’t need a psychologist, I need a security detail.” What was wrong with everyone? “Someone is trying to kill me. Why would I make that up? Why?” I looked around at all of them, demanding an explanation, but I was met with plastic smiles and blank looks.

“Why are you so sure you didn’t hallucinate this?” my mother asked.

“I held the phone. I heard the voice. I did. I
did
.”

“Whatever happened, no one is denying it felt real to you,” Loretta assured me. It did nothing to make me feel better. But she was dauntless, going on to say, “While we’re waiting for Dr. Tan, why don’t you show everyone how you can open your present?”

Now I was a performing monkey. I started to rip the paper and my mother said, “Jane, that’s wonderful. Your arms, your hands—” Her voice started to tremble. “You can move.”

“It won’t matter when someone kills me,” I said, pulling the paper off a cardboard box. I think her eyes had tears in them, but I ignored it.

Inside the box there was a little ceramic figurine of an angel with bunny ears. A laser-printed gift card nestled next to it said,
Remember, you’re never alone. Somebunny is always watching over you. Love, Your Secret Admirer.

“Isn’t that adorable,” Loretta said, taking the statue and putting it on the table next to my bed.

“I think it’s creepy. And the note. Someone is always watching me?”

“Jane, you’re being a little paranoid,” my mother said. “Please, darling, you need to relax.”

“Now, now, I’ll be the judge of that,” said a man in a lab coat, who had to be Dr. Tan. Beneath the lab coat he wore a tan suit, and I wondered if he did that on purpose to match his name. He had a shiny head barely covered by a wispy comb-over and rimless glasses. He made straight for me. “I’m Dr. Keough Tan.”

We shook hands.

“Its nice to see you surrounded by so many friends and family,” he said. “You’re a lucky girl.”

I gave him a bright, fake smile. “Yes, I am. Except that someone just called to tell me they were planning to kill me.”

He nodded, looking serious. “Tell me about that.”

I described the call for the third time. He listened intently, his head cocked to one side, and I began to think that finally there was someone who believed me. When I was done, he said, “And nothing about the voice sounded familiar to you? Identifiable?”

“No, like I said, I think it was disguised.”

“Have you had any other phone calls?”

“My boyfriend called yesterday.”

“I answered the phone for that one,” Loretta said. “Miss Freeman hadn’t regained use of her hands yet.”

“But you did for this call. You were able to answer it yourself?”

“Yes. So? The doctor said that my motor skills would come back.”

Dr. Tan made a note on a paper. “I see from your file that you regained your voice after a similar incident.”

“What are you talking about?” my mother said, but Dr. Tan ignored her.

“That was different. I was in the shower, I thought I saw some writing on the mirror. That was clearly something I made up. But this—this
happened
. I heard it. You can’t make up an entire phone call.”

“So this felt more real?”

“No, they both felt the same amount real. But the other one—I mean, Loretta said with the medication—” I stopped. I could tell from his face how it sounded. “Maybe they were both real.”

He looked at me for a beat.
Or maybe they were both fake.

My God, had I hallucinated the call? No. It had happened. It had.
It had.

He looked at Loretta. “And you had just administered an additional dose of pain medication?”

“Yes, there was a problem with the IV, so I had to give her a separate shot until we could restore the flow.”

That was true. I had been on extra medication. But—“It felt so real.”

Dr. Tan nodded. “Delusions often do, because they are projections straight from the most powerful part of our minds.” He read my chart for a little and said, “I understand you have no memory of what happened to you?”

“Some pieces are starting to come back, but mostly no. The doctor said that was normal.”

“It’s not uncommon in traumatic situations for there to be selective memory loss. Frequently we repress things we aren’t prepared to remember yet. But when that happens, it leaves gaps and the mind tries to fill them in, often with made-up stories. In this case, probably something happened that night that you aren’t ready to think about, and the strain of keeping it hidden is causing your mind to generate fantasies. It’s like a smoke screen, misdirection.”

“What kind of thing? What would have happened?”

“That’s for us to find out together. The harder something is for you to handle, the more deeply it will be buried. The fact that there’s a link between these incidents and your regaining motor skills is immensely important. For example, I would speculate that the message you imagined seeing on the mirror was you giving voice to something deep in your psyche, which is why seeing it restored your actual voice.”

“The message was ‘You should have died, bitch.’ So you’re saying I wanted to be dead?”

Out of the corner of my eye I saw my mother half rise to her feet, but Joe put a hand on her shoulder and she slowly sat back down.

“It’s not necessary to be so reductive. It could be a fear rather than a wish. All we know is that it is a profound impulse.”

“And the phone call you say I hallucinated. In that the voice said it would come and kill me. So I want to kill myself?”

My mother did the half-rising thing again and now Dr. Tan spoke to her.

“I think Jane’s subconscious has a lot of material to mull over. It may be not herself Jane wanted to kill but some
part
of herself.” He returned to me. “Some part you don’t like?”

“Or the phone call could have been
real
and someone is out to
kill
me. Isn’t that the simpler, more rational explanation?”

“Simpler, yes.
Rational
is a sticky term.” He patted my hand. “Let’s talk about this morning. Did anything especially unusual happen today that could have triggered these episodes?”

“I’m in the hospital recovering from being hit by a car. Everything is unusual.”

“Let me rephrase. Did you have an interaction with anyone that left you—surprised? Uncomfortable? Perhaps if we can locate the catalyst that sparked the delusion this morning, we can understand what it is you’re repressing.”

I didn’t like that word,
delusion
. So I decided not to tell Dr. Tan about how strange David was or how upsetting it was that Nicky said I drugged her or about Langley telling me how I’d apparently wanted to break up with David at the party, none of which I remembered and all of which felt strangely wrong to me, like an itch I couldn’t find the right place to scratch. “No one thing I can think of,” I said, not even lying.

“Okay. Well, keep working on that.” He closed my chart. “And for the time being, relax. I’ll come back and check in with you later. And if you get any more calls, try to remember what time it is.”

“Will Jane have more of these hallucinations? I’d like to know what to expect,” my mother asked.

“It depends on the presence of stressors and how Jane’s mind works.”

“Or if the killer decides to call me again,” I put in.

Dr. Tan patted my hand. “Don’t worry, you’ll be fine.”

How? I wanted to ask. If he was right, I was losing my mind. If
I
was right, someone was at that moment making plans to kill me. Neither of those seemed like scenarios that ended up with me being anything like fine.

When the doctor had gone, Joe cleared his throat. “You know, Rosie, I could get some of my guys to do a rotation, sit outside Jane’s room, make sure no one goes in or out.”

“Joe, you are a darling. As Dr. Tan just said, I should hope that’s really not necessary. In fact”—her voice dropped a little—“it could be detrimental. We don’t want to encourage Jane to have more hallucinations by adding stressors to the situation.” Her phone rang. She looked at me with the smile she gave everyone else, said, “You’ll see, Jane, everything will be fine,” and then into the phone, “Hello, Perry, what can I do for you?”

I
did
see. It was back to work. Business as usual.

“Can you all please go,” I said. In my ears my voice sounded brittle, defeated. “Loretta, would you wheel me into the bathroom. I want to be alone.”

“I’ve got to deal with Mrs. North next door. Can’t you hear that hollering? Pete, please help Miss Freeman into the wheelchair the way I taught you. Won’t be a problem for a big guy like you.”

He linked his fingers together and cracked his knuckles. “I live to please.”

Before he left, Joe came over and patted me on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, Jane. We won’t let anything happen to you.” His big dumb face looked earnest. “I’ve got your back.”

Perfect. Shady Joe Garcetti and his crew had my back. That was just what I needed, I thought. But all I said was, “Thanks.”

Chapter 18

The door closed,
leaving me alone with the guy named Pete. As he walked toward me, I gauged he was probably only a little older than me, with skin a shade past olive and close-cropped brown hair. He looked like he could be Indian or Pakistani, except that his eyes were very, very blue.

He stood by the side of my bed, looked at his watch, and said, “Oh well, it’s over for you. Call the code at 2:03 p.m.”

My eyes widened in shock. “That’s what they say when someone dies.”

“Exactly.” He nodded. “Women have fallen in love with me after staring like that for only thirty seconds and I think you just took a full minute. You’re doomed.”

He said it completely seriously, deadpan, like it was a fact, but his eyes proclaimed he was joking. He was wearing jeans, Adidas, and a white T-shirt stenciled to look like a doctor’s coat, complete with stethoscope and the name tag Dr. Feelgood. Really. I rolled my eyes. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

“No. It’s a curse.”

“You’re
bear
ing up beautifully.”

“Bearing up. Good one.” He pointed to the windowsill of flowers. “Have you considered that maybe you’re OD’ing on all the pollen in here? This place is like a high-end funeral parlor.”

“Wow, is that in poor taste. Besides, it’s nice that people send me these things. Thoughtful.”

Now his eyes got wide. “Sure. It means they really like you. That you’re really popular and adored—” He tilted his head to read the card on the popcorn tin. “By Pontrain Motors.”

“That’s not fair. You don’t know anything about me. There’s a DVD my best friends made over there, right next to the two-dozen long-stemmed roses, and it has everyone from my high school saying how much they miss me. You should watch it and educate yourself.”

“Oh sure. I’ll get right on that,” he said, taking the DVD out of its case and spinning it around on his finger. “But I already know one thing about you.”

“What?”

“You’re a lousy judge of people.”

I turned my head away from him deliberately. “I think I want you and your hipster T-shirt to leave.”

“I
know
I want to leave and my T-shirt thinks the company here stinks. But I can’t go anywhere without violating the terms of my parole, so you’re stuck with us.”

“You’re on
parole
?” Great. Not only did no one believe me but now they were leaving me with a convicted criminal.

“It was a figure of speech.”

“If you’re going to loiter, at least stop insulting me. And put down my DVD.”

“I wasn’t insulting you.
You
insulted
me
. I’m being frank with you. Is that so unusual in your pollen-drenched world that you can’t distinguish between the two?” At least he slid the DVD back into its case.

“What is wrong with you?”

“You mean my unflinching honesty or my uncanny good looks?”