Rosebush (28 page)

I shook my head out of the memory, but the feeling of being pursued—and watched—stayed with me. The eyes were so familiar. I knew them but couldn’t place them.

My head echoed with a cacophony of voices, one flipping to the next like radio going haywire. Elsa: “They’re listening. They know if you’ve been bad or good so be good for goodness’ sake.” Annie: “Ollie has all these toys that you can use to listen to other people’s conversations.” Officer Rowley: “You have a generous boyfriend.” Me: “They’re not from my boyfriend, they’re from—” Elsa: “They’re listening.”

The wheelchair was next to the bed. If I could get myself into it, maybe I could use it to get me to the window, to get—

Loretta caught me as I was about to fall on the floor. “Sweetheart, what are you doing?”

“I have to get to the flowers,” I said.

“What flowers?”

“The big ones. I have—I need to look at that big bouquet of flowers. It didn’t make sense he sent such big flowers, but now I understand.”

“Okay, you sit in bed and I’ll bring them to you.”

She picked them up and carried them to the table next to my bed. “They are beautif—what are you doing?”

“Hello!” I said into the flowers. “Are you listening?”

“Sweetheart.” Loretta approached me obliquely.

“I hope you’re listening because I want you to hear this, you bastard.” I held the vase over the side of the bed and dropped it onto the floor. It made a glorious smack and shattered, flooding the floor with water and scattering flowers and pieces of glass.

“Happy now?” I yelled into the mess, and started to laugh. “I am!”

Loretta looked at me with horror. She put one hand on my chest, holding me against the bed, and pushed a button on the phone. “I need Dr. Tan up here stat.”

I stared at her. “What are you doing? There was a bug in there. I was just getting rid of the bug.” I was still giggling a little. “God, that felt good.”

“Shhh. It will be okay soon,” she said. “You just hold tight.”

“No, I’m good. I took care of it. I’m better now.”

“Quiet, sweetheart. It’s going to be okay.”

Her tone, the expression on her face, made me realize how what I had just done must look. First I’d talked into a bouquet of flowers like they could hear me. Then I destroyed them.

Insane. That was how it must look.

Oh God. Oh no. “I’m not crazy, Loretta,” I said, the adrenaline of what I’d done beginning to wear off. I started to shiver. “I’m not.”

“Shhh. It’s okay, love.”

“His family is in surveillance,” I said. It was getting hard to breathe enough air. Was I crazy? Everyone thought I was crazy. “It makes sense,” I assured her. “I can explain it. It all makes sense.”

“Breathe, sweetheart,” Loretta said, slipping an oxygen mask over my mouth. “You just breathe now.”

“It does,” I said, but the words were muffled. “I’m not crazy.”

By the time Dr. Tan came in, I was breathing normally. “So, Miss Freeman, you’ve had quite a day,” he said.

Loretta had sent Pete in to clean up the vase, which as far as I could see contained no bug. “Do you want me to leave?” he asked as he removed the oxygen mask.

I shook my head. “I don’t care.”

Dr. Tan settled himself in the chair next to my bed. “Tell me what just happened.”

I told him about Elsa’s phone call suggesting someone was watching me and what Annie had said earlier about Ollie’s surveillance toys and he nodded and made a few notes.

“And what else have you been up to today?”

“I met the head of the hospital.”

“Nice.”

“And I found out my boyfriend cheated on me.”

“Ah.”

I could tell what he was thinking, because it’s what I’d thought before too. When I thought the phone call was made up. It hadn’t been, but learning about David and Sloan could have been a catalyst toward paranoia.

Or I could have been justified.

“But that has nothing to do with me breaking that vase.”

“Tell me what you were thinking when you did it.”

“The guy who gave me those flowers? His family is in security. His hobby is bugging people. And he doesn’t even like me, which means there was no reason for him to send flowers, especially such fancy ones. So you see, what I did wasn’t as crazy as it looked.”

“Most irrational beliefs have their basis in fact. The real question is why you so strongly wanted to believe that someone might have you under surveillance. And why instead of just having the vase removed, you felt you had to destroy it.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Everything that comes out of my mouth sounds crazy.”

“Your mother phoned earlier. When she and I spoke, she said something about a doll?”

I pointed to Robert on the windowsill and Dr. Tan picked it up and brought it back to his seat.

He turned the doll over in his hands. “This was clearly made by someone who cares deeply about you,” he said. “Do you have any idea who it is?”

“No. All the gifts, though, they’re—just a little weird. Like sending me roses when I was found in a rosebush. And then a porcelain figurine with a note saying my secret admirer would always be watching me. This doll. When I took her out of the box, her head rolled off and onto the floor.”

“Probably just broken in transit.”

“Right. I know that. I know that none of it means anything sinister. That I can’t trust my gut and I can’t trust my eyes and I can’t trust my ears. I don’t even know what’s real anymore.”

“This will all get sorted out in time. Admitting that your experiences might not be what you think they are is a good step.”

I’d been looking down at my hands and I saw my ring. “There’s something weird about this ring too,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“I usually wear it on my left hand, but now it’s on my right.”

“Are you sure?”

“About the hand I wear it on? Of course I’m sure.” I was. Wasn’t I?

“You think your ring moved? On its own?”

“Maybe someone in the hospital moved it.”

“Why would they do that?”

“I don’t know. You think I’m being paranoid, don’t you?”

Instead of answering he made another note on my chart.

“What are you writing?” I demanded, straining to see.

“I’m making a note to remind myself to ask the nursing staff about your ring.”

“Oh.”

“You said you’re no longer sure what is real and what isn’t. I can tell you two things that are real. The first is that everyone in this hospital is sincerely concerned with one thing and one thing only: for you to get better. No one is out to get you. All we want to do is help.”

“Thank you. What’s the second?”

“The second is the shattered vase on the floor. This young man is doing a poor job of cleaning it up. If you want to get back into Loretta’s good graces, I suggest you offer to help.”

Chapter 25

Loretta sent Pete
off to do something “he wouldn’t dawdle at” and moved me into the wheelchair with a broom to help with the cleanup. It took me nearly an hour to sort through it and it was just after four thirty when I was ready to admit there was no bug. There were still a half-dozen pieces of vase scattered around when I heard footsteps and looked up to see Ollie himself in the doorway. He was wearing dark-wash jeans, a green-and-white-striped button-down, an aubergine corduroy blazer, and a matching corduroy cap.

“What are you doing here?” I might not have delivered it as nicely as I should have, but I was furious at him, furious because I’d suspected him and furious that I’d been wrong.

He took a step in, paused to look from the shattered glass to me, then said, “Officer Rowley asked me to come. What happened?”

“The vase with your flowers in it broke,” I told him. From her place on the floor with the dustpan, Loretta shot me a look.

“Must have been defective or something. Sorry about the mess it made,” Ollie said.

He didn’t seem unduly concerned that the vase broke. Which he would have been if it had been some sophisticated bugging device, I reasoned. But that still didn’t mean I’d been crazy to think he could be bugging me.

He got on his knees and started helping with the cleanup. It was Sunday, but he was wearing a shirt that required cuff links. The one I could see said LAW. I wondered if the other one said ORDER. Perfect for a surveillance junkie. As he bent over, I found myself checking his rear for panty lines that would indicate he was wearing girls’ underwear.

Maybe I
was
insane.

“Thank you, dear,” Loretta said to him, taking the trash can out when we’d finished the cleanup. She favored me with the evil eye. “I’ll get someone with a mop in here soon to dispose of the remaining water.”

Officer Rowley walked in then and closed the door behind Loretta.

“Mr. Montero, please tell Jane what you told me earlier today. Start with when Jane left the party.”

“I saw Jane stumble out of the house and I followed her.”

I tried to make my mind go back there.

“I called to her,” Ollie was saying to Officer Rowley and me.

In my memory I heard someone yell, “Jane, wait!” behind me. But it didn’t sound like Ollie.

“When I finally caught up to you, you were swaying and you looked funny. I steered you onto the stairs and tried to look in your eyes to see if you had a concussion.”

“From what?”

“Before you ran down the stairs, you got hit on the head by something and passed out for a little while.”

“What hit me?”

“I don’t know, I only saw you slumped against the floor. I checked your eyes and you looked okay to me.”

Ollie shook his head when I told him what I remembered. “You’re missing a part,” he said, almost apologetically. He shifted from one foot to the other, like he was uncomfortable.

“What part?”

“The part where you said, ‘You’re just covering for your asshole friend. There’s nothing wrong with me. I know what I saw.’ And I said, ‘David doesn’t deserve you.’ And—this is embarrassing—I tried to kiss you.”

I had absolutely no memory of this. Nothing about it felt right or made sense. I would remember if someone tried to kiss me, wouldn’t I? But Ollie had no reason to lie.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to know, but I had to ask. “How did that go?”