difference. She knows Keisha’s mother was just being polite pretending to know who she is.
“Hey,” Keisha says in slow recognition. “Hey…how you doing? Wow, how’s it going?”
“Fine. I’m fine. I heard the news about you, though—you must be doing great. Congratulations!”
“Thanks. Blew my mind, I’ll tell you what.”
“I bet. I bet.”
“What about you? Where you calling from?” Keisha asks.
“Huh? Oh. I’m still here—at the hospital.”
“Oh,” Keisha says awkwardly. “How’s it going there? Kristen still there?”
“No. No, she’s not here. I’m probably getting ready to leave soon, too.”
“Great!” Keisha sounds relieved to have something to congratulate Isabel for.
“Well,” Isabel says in a tone that signals the end of the conversation. “I just wanted to call and say congratulations. I’m really glad for you.”
Theirs had been a friendship forged in anguish, suspended in time. In real life it would be impossible to sustain.
“Thanks. And thanks for calling.”
Keisha hangs up immediately. Isabel knows they will never speak again.
“Isabel, before we start I have something I want to tell you,” Dr. Seidler says gingerly. “You talked to me about Kristen and what’s happened to her since she left Three Breezes.”
“Yes?”
“I want you to know that, as I told you I would, I have followed up with Dr. Flagg—her therapist here. He told me he had indeed been in contact with Kristen. In fact, he has arranged for her to be transferred back here from Bellevue. She told him to be sure to get that message to you so he asked that I speak with you.”
“Wow.” Isabel does not know what to make of this news.
“How does that make you feel, hearing she will be returning?”
“When? When is she coming back?”
“That I’m not sure about,” Dr. Seidler answers. “I doubt Dr. Flagg knows for sure. There is a lot of paperwork to be completed before she can come back, that and consultations. It could be as early as tomorrow. But the bottom line is she will be coming back. You have an odd look on your face.”
Isabel is hypnotized by the raindrops beading on the office window. She watches as one trickles down and melts into another—the two forming a miniature river winding its way down the pane of glass.
“I can’t believe she pulled it off,” she says, still watching nature draw pictures.
“Pulled what off?”
“Everything.” Isabel brings her doctor into focus. “First that whole concoction about her brother. Then getting transferred back here. I don’t know. I thought I knew her but I guess not.”
“Is that difficult for you? To find out someone isn’t who you thought they were?”
“Yeah. It’s some kind of weird pattern with me,” Isabel says. “Alex wasn’t who I thought he was. All that time we had all these problems: with anger, with communication. Maybe it’s like you said last time: I took in what I felt about myself at the time. I think that’s true.
“Kristen comes along and, at least in the beginning, I think we have so much in common. We’re from similar backgrounds, we both had bad luck with our first loves and with guys in general. But then she has this freaky thing happen to her with the limo driver—I still don’t know what went on there. It’s like her paranoia has totally taken over….”
She trails off and looks back out the window at the rain.
“What about you? You aren’t what you first thought you were, either.” “Huh?”
“You told me about the conversation with your mother—she thought you were this perfect daughter and you told her you weren’t. But maybe that was you telling
“Is it going to be difficult for you to be face-to-face with Kristen when she gets back here?”
“Kristen? No. I think I’ve put enough distance there. But Alex…coming face-to-face with him is going to be the toughest thing. I feel if I can just do that I will have conquered the biggest obstacle of all.”
“To come face-to-face with someone who betrayed your trust?”
“To come face-to-face with reality.”
Sixty-Five
The rain has left the air thick with humidity, and inside the unit it feels more like the middle of August than the end of September. The central air is working overtime and Isabel begins counting the seconds between its blasts in order to bring on sleep. She makes it to one hundred and loses interest.
Outside her room, over the hum of white noise artificially produced by her Hammacher Schlemmer, Isabel hears a series of doors opening and closing. She strains to understand the muffled urgency of a distant conversation that gets louder and then stops altogether.
Out of boredom and the certainty that sleep is futile, Isabel gets up and turns the noisemaker off. She opens her door and peeks down the empty hallway.
She follows the voices until she can vaguely make out a word or two. Isabel recognizes the raspy intonations of her favorite night nurse. Connie is involved in the dispute, evidently taking place in the soft room.
“No!” she hears a male voice say.
“Wait until the count of three,” Connie orders.
“If we…” Another voice trails off before Isabel can identify it.
Around the corner, light from inside the soft room falls in a triangle across the linoleum floor. Shadows slice into it from time to time as figures pass from one side of the room to another. The ebb and flow of agitated voices continues.
“You aren’t listening to me!”
“Okay, here’s what we’re going to do,” Connie is saying over the din. “On the count of three we’re going to lift the top part off simultaneously. The restraints are in place so this shouldn’t be a problem. Fred, you stand on the right and get ready to grab her if you need to.”
“She looks pretty sedated,” the male voice replies. “Maybe that shot’s finally kicking in.”
Isabel inches forward and looks over her shoulder. The hall is still empty. Whoever is in the soft room is commanding the attention of all of the night staff.
“Okay, ready?” Connie asks. “One!”
Isabel inches forward.
“Two!”
Isabel takes two more steps toward the room.
“Three!”
As she moves to the edge of the doorway she hears the sounds of metal hitting the ground and the muffled sound of a woman groaning.
Isabel takes a deep breath for courage and forces herself to look into the room. Strapped into a stretcher with a square of duct tape angrily slapped across her mouth, is Kristen. Her eyes are wildly darting from side to side and sweat is beading on her forehead. She looks petrified, like a trapped animal moments before it tries to gnaw its own leg off in order to escape.
Connie and several orderlies have peeled another stretcher off the top of her. While the others are busy cleaning up a mess of medical equipment, Connie crouches at Kristen’s forehead and is whispering something to her, trying to calm her down. Isabel feels physically ill and turns away.
It is as if a flash of lightning has illuminated a photo negative of her nightmare and in that one moment, the
