The Girl from Widow Hills, page 4
By this point, it sort of was.
“You planning to stay for more than one drink this time?” I asked.
“Just found out my ex is in town, I could use the reinforcements.”
And with that—the spark of curiosity making my back straighten, a grin of his own at my reaction—he knew he had me.
“An ex, huh?” I said, looking down at my computer. “I’ll be there if I can.” An echo of his usual answer. But I was serious. “I’m wiped.”
“Please don’t leave me alone with Elyse,” he said.
Elyse was new, and she leaned extra close when she spoke, hand on my arm and eyes wide, even just to say something benign, like The drinks are half-price. I had liked her immediately. She reminded me of those girls I watched in high school and college, asking each other Are we going out? and What do we want for lunch?, automatically including herself—and therefore me—in a partnership.
She’d started at the hospital back in the spring, had established this Friday-night meetup between us in her very first week—a routine I’d unsuccessfully attempted to loop Bennett into as well. Until, apparently, tonight.
I took a sip of Bennett’s coffee, dark and bitter. “This is terrible. Are you sure it isn’t a punishment?”
He took the cup from my hand, removed the lid, took a sip himself before wincing. “Okay, so, the coffeemaker in the lounge was empty, and I don’t actually know how to make it.”
“You’re going to start a revolt. People have quit over less.”
Just a few months ago, a bleary-eyed woman I barely knew had come into my office and quit out of nowhere. When I asked why, she said, It’s the scent, like something’s burning. But no one else seems to notice.
I’d asked her to show me. Hospital safety fell under my jurisdiction, after all.
No, no. At Mapleview.
The same apartment complex I’d once lived in myself. As soon as she said it, a whiff of a memory—singed plastic; the burned remnants in a toaster—and then it was gone.
I got it. There was always something about the apartment buildings that felt slightly off. Luxury amenities but sterile and void of personality. Everything was temporary there.
The Mapleview apartments were occupied mostly by nurses and doctors testing out the location, so everyone was respectful of the long working hours, the round-the-clock shifts. We’d grown accustomed to speaking in whispers. To catching doors with our feet before they slammed shut behind us. To standing too close when we spoke.
Working in health care consulting meant we were acutely aware that the state of our health and survival depended on the ability of the care providers to rest between shifts.
But the silence, and the constant schedule changes, they did something to our circadian rhythm. Some people adapted, and some didn’t.
Can’t you try a different building? I’d asked.
But she’d simply frowned like it was all too late. I gave it a shot, she’d said. But it’s time to go back. Looking around my office like she could sense it even there. Waiting for it to reemerge. Like a thought that had taken over everything else, impossible to escape.
All for the best, really. Elyse had been her replacement.
But it reminded me that all of us were really only one degree from the start of a slide. Something that worms its way inside and refuses to release you. A simple thing at first, that you can’t ignore and can’t shake. Until it permeates everything. Until you can think only in terms of this one simple thing—its presence or its absence—driving you slowly mad.
TRANSCRIPT FROM LIVE REPORT WITH GARY SIMON, CHANNEL 9 METEOROLOGIST, COOKE COUNTY
OCTOBER 18, 2000
What we had here was a perfect combination of factors.
The ground has been saturated from the record-breaking rainfall in September. The ground is like a sponge, to an extent. But at some point, it just won’t absorb any more.
Monday night into the early hours of Tuesday, we had a very slow-moving storm, and the system just sat on top of us for hours. We had more than two inches of rain come down between two and four a.m. It doesn’t sound like much, but six inches of rushing water can lift a car. How much do you think it would take for a small child?
CHAPTER 5
Friday, 5:30 p.m.
DR. CAL’S RECEPTIONIST LEFT a message that he would stick around after hours to fit me in. This was after she’d first tried to schedule me in two weeks’ time and I’d told her it was urgent. The magic word, especially from a colleague at the hospital.
By the time I left my office, the administrative wing was as empty as it had been when I’d arrived that morning.
Dr. Cal’s office was two floors up, on the fifth floor, and I took the stairs. The hallway lights were off. Only a strip of light filtered from under one doorway—the rest of the offices appeared closed up for the day.
I knocked before turning the handle, poked my head in. The receptionist was in the process of gathering up her things, eyes on the clock behind her.
She spun at my entrance. “Oh,” she said, hand to heart. “Olivia?” Her red lips pulled into a practiced smile. “We’ve been waiting for you. Go on in, he’s expecting you.” Her purse was already packed, sitting on top of the desk, a pair of heels sticking out.
“Thanks for squeezing me in,” I said, heading toward the door.
Dr. Cal was facing away when I pushed the door to his office open, though I assumed he’d heard us chatting—there wasn’t much distance between us.
But maybe I was wrong. Because he turned around with an expression that went from neutral to beaming smile within the span of a second, like I’d really surprised him. I guessed he was one of those people who lost contact with reality as they sank deeper into their work.
He rose to a full six feet, hand extended, as I shut the door behind me. And then there was just a steady hum of white noise, like a ceiling fan, dulling everything, and faint classical music.
I almost smiled. That’s it, that’s his trick, I decided. Lull you to sleep in his office. You’re cured.
“Olivia Meyer, so nice to meet you,” he said as his hand met mine. “Seems we have some friends in common.”
I didn’t know Bennett considered him a friend, or whether Dr. Cal had asked around before agreeing to see me. I looked away first, scanning the room for a place to sit. I took the only other spot, a cushioned love seat across from his office chair. There were three pillows in varying shades of blue softening any possible edge. Even his furniture was designed to inspire sleep.
He settled back into his chair, rolling a little closer, hands clasped together over a pad of paper in his lap.
“Now,” he said, “why don’t you tell me what’s brought you to my office today.”
He tilted his head, eyes focused on me. I cleared my throat, looking anywhere but directly at him, as Bennett had jokingly suggested. The degrees on the wall, the certification, the articles printed out and framed—they were too small to read closely. I couldn’t tell whether he was displaying general advice or showcasing his own work.
Probably the latter.
Everything about this room, and him, was deliberate. To judge from the way he was sitting, body angled and waiting, Dr. Calvin Royce was someone who knew exactly what he looked like. He had probably perfected the angle and smile in the mirror. Slept with a teeth-whitening tray, or an eye mask, at the very least. When he crossed his leg over his knee, the bottom of his pants rose up to reveal a quirky neon green sock with dog bones, probably designed for disarming. A conversation starting point. A way in.
I decided point-blank he was a sociopath.
It was easier to avoid someone’s charm when you could see behind it from the start.
“Last night, I was sleepwalking,” I said. The truth, then. The reason I was here. An urgent sleep issue was what I’d told his receptionist, after all.
A slow nod, his face giving away nothing. He didn’t blink. “Has this happened before?”
“Not since I was a kid. Almost twenty years ago. I thought I outgrew it. Or it was fixed. Either way, it stopped happening.”
Another nod. “Were you seen by a doctor back then?”
Everything about that time was a blur. There had been so many doctors. Checkups and follow-ups; pre-ops and post-ops and physical therapy, before my mother decided they were doing more harm than good, perpetuating the trauma.
“Yes, I was given medicine, and the sleepwalking stopped,” I said, so he would know that I was aware of my own history and how best to address the issue at hand. All I needed was his signature.
“You were given medication as a child?” he asked, head tilted slightly in the other direction now. A better angle of the jawline.
“Yes,” I said.
“What kind?” He twirled his pen in his fingers, ready to make some notes.
A rattle in an amber bottle. The scent of hot chocolate. “I’m not sure.”
The pen stilled. He looked unsure, like maybe I was pulling this out of thin air. “That would be unusual,” he said.
But I didn’t want to tell him—it wasn’t a usual case. I had wandered away from home while asleep, without regard to the storm that was raging through. Gotten swept away by the flash flood that came through the valley with a vengeance.
This was why I trusted myself and my instincts. More even than my conscious thoughts. Because I knew, underneath, there was something stronger. Something that understood how to survive. That there was a person I could not remember who had endured something unimaginable for three full days before someone found me.
It was how I knew I was right to change my name. To break it off with Jonah. To stay here.
It was why I had picked that house but hadn’t changed the locks yet. And why I had bought that hook and eye at the store. Why I was sitting here right now.
The less I actively dissected a situation, the clearer the answer became.
“Are you on any medications currently?” he asked, pen hovering over the yellow notepad once more. “Sleepwalking can, unfortunately, be a side effect of other sleep aids. Even over-the-counter ones.”
“No. Though I guess there goes my hope for a sleep aid.”
He gave me a small smile. “Walk me through the night,” he said. “Before you went to sleep.”
It had been a night like so many others. I had run into Bennett heading out at the same time, and we’d grabbed a burger at the grill across the street before going our separate ways. “Nothing out of the ordinary,” I said. “I ate dinner out with a friend, finished some paperwork at home, watched TV, had a drink, went to bed.” I shrugged. It all sounded so mundane when reduced to a sentence.
“What was the drink?” he asked.
“A glass of wine.” The bottle had partially turned, but it unwound me at the end of the day.
“Alcohol can contribute to sleepwalking,” he said.
“It hasn’t in the past,” I said. “And it was only half a glass.” I never drank a lot at once. I’d gone out with my roommates in college at the end of sophomore year, let myself get to the point where the night had leaps and gaps, and then I’d never done it again.
We had been at a party in another dorm, and from what I could gather, a senior I liked had pulled me into the storage area under the stairs. I couldn’t be certain how long I’d been in there, but the story ended with me barging out in a fury, the guy following a moment later, bent over, hands held to his bloody nose.
By the next day, the story had taken on a life of its own: my roommates high-fiving me, announcing to anyone who would hear, Don’t fuck with the girls in 423! But I couldn’t say for sure. Couldn’t say whether I was protecting myself or reacting to the small, dark space—needing, above all, to escape.
They couldn’t really know the girl in 423.
I knew better now—fearing, most of all, that disconnect between my mind and body, when I was no longer the one in control.
The therapist I had to see briefly in high school was the one who explained that my need to always know my exits, to calculate my steps, was probably a symptom of the PTSD that manifested alongside my primal need to escape—a coping mechanism to feel in control.
This was just routine: that half-glass at the end of the day while I watched television; a bottle of wine that usually managed to turn before I could finish it. There had been nothing unusual about last night.
Dr. Cal tilted his head back, assessing me. “Tell me about yourself,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
Then he shook his foot, like maybe I hadn’t noticed the dog bones. Waiting for me to make conversation, give something away. Eventually, he gave up and put his feet solidly on the floor.
“Anything stressful in your life?”
“Yes.” I didn’t elaborate. He wasn’t a therapist.
“I know how it is here,” he said with a tight smile. “After hours is when the work really begins, am I right?”
“Partly.” But I had managed to keep up just fine to this point. That was the work culture at a place like this. Each of us putting in the extra hours, here and at home—a shared exhaustion that bound us together. Even though I was in a different department, it permeated everything. They had their patient appointments, I had the administrative meetings; and after, we did the paperwork or the research or the list of obligations that had to be fulfilled one way or another. We were in it together, and it kept us all afloat.
“The older I get, the harder it is to sustain,” he added, though I was guessing he was somewhere in his thirties, and he seemed to be holding everything together just fine. “You’ve got to make sure you’re putting yourself first. Carve out rest. Stick to healthy patterns. Eat well. Exercise.”
I let out a small laugh, and he genuinely smiled, like he was pleased with himself for successfully cracking through my surface. But the truth was, I hadn’t noticed the creeping exhaustion, the lack of nutrition or energy, until he started tallying it off. I felt the inadequacies all rising to the surface under his gaze. All the things I wasn’t doing to keep myself healthy. The caffeine in place of calcium, potential weak spots in my bones. The quick meals on the go. The bags of chips I grabbed from the cafeteria instead of the apple. Layers of stress piling on top of one another, my body rebelling. The simplest things.
Still. “I was hoping for something a little more concrete and attainable,” I said. Not a change yourself, change your life mantra.
He sighed, leaning back in the chair, getting comfortable. “Usually, I’d like to run some tests before prescribing something. Especially since you’re not sure of your medical history. We could try to track down your old records to get a better idea of a previous diagnosis, but even then…”
I was already shaking my head, and he stopped talking. “It was so long ago,” I said. Twenty years since the sleepwalking; ten years since the last therapist.
He blinked slowly. “Well,” he continued, “either way, it’s not as simple as taking a pill. We’d want to get to the root of things, the underlying cause. Find any stressors, make lifestyle adjustments. See if we can’t manage this without pharmaceutical intervention, which can have its own list of side effects. Make sure you really are sleepwalking and not, say, having a seizure.” He scanned the paper in his lap, as if looking for answers hidden under my words.
“I woke up outside,” I snapped. “My neighbor found me.”
He looked up from the pad of paper on his lap, eyes wide and jaw tensed. The first true sign of emotion. Of excitement. A peek behind the curtain.
“You live alone?” he asked.
This was more information than I generally liked to disclose to a sociopath. “Would that change the diagnosis?”
“It’s important to educate the people around you.” He clicked the top of his pen, once, twice. “I’d like to do a sleep study.”
“You want to watch me sleep.”
“Not just me.”
“That’s not better.”
“You’re funny.” He didn’t laugh.
“Thing is, I don’t really have time for that,” I said, deflecting. “As I’m sure you can relate.” I also worried I would be a guinea pig. Something to pad his bottom line. Prove his worth at a new place.
He leaned forward again, clasped his hands together, then placed them on his knees. “All right,” he said. “Let’s talk again after the weekend.” Then he pushed himself to standing, strode past me, cracked the door. The receptionist looked up from her desk, where she’d been waiting for us to finish so she could finally leave for the day. “Jessie?” he called. “Let’s get Olivia on the schedule for later next week.”
I stood, effectively being dismissed. “And in the meantime?”
“In the meantime, I want you to document your sleep. When you go to bed each night, when you wake. Any incidents. And if so, what you were doing in the lead-up to them. What time of night they’re occurring. Don’t worry,” he said, “we’ll figure it out.”
He put a hand on my shoulder, caught my eye, smiled reassuringly.
Up close, I noticed a nick on the underside of his jaw. A crumb on his collar. I started a tally, smiling back.
TRANSCRIPT FROM SPECIAL REPORT WITH SALLY HOLMES AND GUEST LOU JORDAN, CIVIL ENGINEER
OCTOBER 19, 2000
SALLY HOLMES: Tell us about the drainage pipes that everyone’s been talking about.
LOU JORDAN: Right. Well, the county drainage system all flows south. If she entered, as they believe, where there was a missing grate at the northern access point below the town center, there are four different forks farther south, depending on the water flow.
SH: It’s my understanding that they found her shoe near the access point. If she got swept down into the pipes, would there be any air down there?
