Crazy for Cornelia (38 page)

Kevin watched Tucker punch up a new screen with one line, “Scholarship: $100,000.”

“They don’t have dorms at this school,” Tucker continued, a little more slowly, polishing up every word. “So you get a furnished
apartment near the Spanish Steps on a little street where they do art shows. I’ve been there. I don’t know much about art,
but I can tell you about the women.”

Kevin said nothing.

“Just sharing that information,” Tucker said.

“Thanks,” Kevin said. “You know, you had Corny right there, no obstacles or anything. All you had to do was care about her.
If you were a half-decent guy, I might let her go for her sake. Just sharing.”

He studied the mogul, whose jaw looked so pink he must carry an electric razor around and shave three times a day. Tucker
said nothing to contradict him. He smiled like it was a joke on everybody else.

“So how’re you going to do it?” Kevin asked him.

“Do what?”

“Make thirty by thirty. Chester won’t give it to you.”

Tucker looked startled, a rat with a twitchy nose caught in a flashlight’s glare.

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m just thinking, thirty million’s a lot for Chester Lord to give
you. So you’ve got to be getting it from somewhere else. The Kois, I think Corny said, trying to take over Lord & Company.”

Tucker closed his laptop with a sharp click like a cricket.

“You seem like a guy who looks out for number one, Tucker. I figure maybe they’ve got you covered.”

But now Tucker Fisk moved like a lion, all lazy power. He flung his blond head back and stood up.

“I remember when I played football, liking the pain a little,” Tucker told him man-to-man with a hint of pity. “But the game
you just decided to play, Doyle, it’s going to hurt all the time.”

White Doves Falling

T
he small plaque on the door read only “ECT.”

She forgot more and more lately, but never the ice in her stomach whenever that plaque appeared. She tensed as her aide escort,
a powerful woman, steered her inside.

“Hello, Cornelia.” Two unfamiliar nurses greeted her, one stout, the other with a knobby chin. They moved efficiently about
the small room, bare except for a single hospital bed. The bed was surrounded by stacks of electronic equipment, piled up
like hi-fi components, with lots of multicolored wires dangling down.

The stout nurse helped her to take off her clothes and helped her slip on a flimsy hospital gown. The other gave her pills
and a paper cup of water.

“What are these for?” She obediently gulped them down. They left a bitter taste.

“To make you feel a little dreamy,” the nurse recited, as though she had to repeat it too often. “You’ll be more comfortable
during the procedure.”

“Thank you. What procedure?”

“ECT, Cornelia.” They helped her onto the hospital bed.

A pretty black doctor entered the room.

“Good morning, Cornelia.”

“Hi. Who are you?”

“I’m your anesthesiologist, Dr. Love.” Like the nurses, the doctor sounded mechanically patient in her response. Was she the
only one missing something here? The doctor rested her hand on Cornelia’s arm in a familiar way. “I’m going to give you a
short-acting anesthetic after the nurses prepare you.”

“Prepare me for what?” Now the nurses secured her to the bed, fastening some sort of restraints onto her limbs. “Is this a
gynecological exam? I don’t see any stirrups.”

“No, dear,” the stout nurse explained again. “This is ECT.”

The confusion reigned, an awful feeling of living in an eternal present where she couldn’t recall events from even moments
before.

“Haven’t I done this already?”

“Several times, Cornelia. Now we need to do it again.” The nurse with the chin touched her bare flesh with a sticky goo, and
attached the ends of several red and white wires.

“Lie on your side, dear. Good. We’re going to monitor your blood pressure and heart.”

She felt her scalp being cleaned. Wires dangled in front of her eyes. She felt something attached to both sides of her skull.

“That’s not my heart up there.”

“No, the wires are for the procedure, dear.”

“Cornelia, I’m giving you something to relax you now,” said the pretty black woman in the white coat and blue nameplate. Hadn’t
she just introduced herself?

“What is it?”

“It’s a combination. Part anesthesia and part muscle relaxant.”

The machine that looked like hi-fi components came to life now. She heard beeping and bleating, saw red and green numerals,
a line that made sharp peaks and valleys on a monitor.

“ECG and pulse-oximeter leads are in,” she heard. “Methohexital… midazolam…”

Her body in the thin gown slipped away from her. She felt naked and out of control.

“Why?” Cornelia asked her, trying to blink back tears. “Why are you doing this?”

“Doctor will explain, dear,” the nurse told her.

A young man with curly hair entered the room. He looked quite familiar, but not at all comfortably so.

“Good morning, Cornelia. Do you know who I am?”

She saw the white coat. “Dr. somebody.”

“Dr. Loblitz. What’s your home address?”

“Eight-forty Fifth Avenue.” That remained clear to her. She had lived there all her life. More recent memories—the past days,
months, even minutes—could not be summoned so easily.

“Cornelia,” the doctor asked her, “who invented electricity?”

She thought it over. She had been asked and answered that same question more than once, she believed.

“I’m sorry. What did you say?”

“Who invented electricity?”

“Nikola Tesla,” she told him.

“Prepare her,” the doctor instructed the nurses. “Run a monitor strip.”

A nurse checked the goo and wires on both sides of her head.

The chin-nurse told her. “Open.” She opened her mouth and the nurse stuck in a piece of very hard rubber.

“Mmmrumph?”

“This is so you don’t bite your tongue.” The nurse pulled the bedside rails on either side of her into the upright position.

“Give her thirty seconds,” the black-haired doctor said curtly.

A clear mask came over her nose.

“This is just oxygen.” The woman doctor’s voice.

She closed her eyes, and felt the shock. A wavy one, oscillating, lifting her up, then dropping her as her muscles contracted.

Black. And a terrible dryness.

When she awoke, a clammy sweat enveloped her and saliva trickled out of her mouth. Her head ached horribly. Her thoughts were
jumbled. When she tried to organize a question, her thoughts flew hopelessly out of her control. She made a waterfall sound
in her head to protect herself. Through that rumble, she heard snippets of hushed disagreement.

“Again? But Doctor…”

“Just do it.”

“It’s awfully high, Doctor.”

“Airway… suction…”

Blackness again.

The waves ended, crashing. She believed someone spoke to her. But she couldn’t talk. She labored just to breathe. A heavy,
prickly heat fell over her as someone wrapped her in blankets and removed the flat, stiff object from her mouth.

Several minutes passed before she heard a man speak.

“Cornelia, who invented electricity?”

She squeezed her eyes shut. Such an odd time for a quiz. She thought she was lying in the school nurse’s office, with a god-awful
headache.

Her mouth felt woolly and full of a funny odor, like animals lived inside. “Alexander Graham Bell?”

“Electricity. Who invented electricity?”

“Oh. Thomas Alva Edison, wasn’t it?”

“Good, Cornelia. I’d say we just achieved a major breakthrough.”

“Break through what?” She slurred her words. She felt ashamed, afraid that she must be drooling.

“Let us worry about that.” The voice sounded so arrogant and smug. It came from the male doctor with curly hair who scribbled
notes on a chart. “You just concentrate on getting better.”

She felt so weary and hopeless. As though her whole being collapsed into herself and she was left alone in a black void.

When she opened her eyes, she was sitting on a couch, dressed in a robe. She was in a room surrounded by strange women. A
few of them greeted her by her name, Cornelia. How did they know her?

So tired. She slouched down into the folds of the green sofa, studying the terry cloth bathrobe she wore with a T-shirt underneath.
Three girls sat around her, dressed just as oddly. She would really like to leave. Immediately.

“Creamcheese,” one of the girls whispered to another so she could just hear her. “Give it to her.”

A porcelain-pale girl with inky black hair leaned over.

“Corny, I have a note for you.” She pressed a folded pink napkin into her hand.

She tried to smile. At least she could be polite in her disarray, until she sorted this out. Slowly, she unwrapped the napkin.
Someone
had written on it with a pen in black letters. She moved her lips over the words, four times, before folding it and handing
it back to the pale girl.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know anyone named Kevin.”

He waited in the therapy room of Astor I for Dr. Lester.

Now his notes to Cornelia went one way and vanished. Since he had been transferred to this maximum-security wing, the only
information about her came from hospital gossip. That shaky grapevine told him that Corny’s doctor gave her shock treatments
regularly, and she wasn’t remembering a lot.

The door opened. A young doctor with a half-bored, clinical look and curly black hair plopped down in the chair across from
him.

“Where’s Dr. Lester?” Kevin asked him.

“Dr. Burns took her off your case because she wasn’t tough enough with you. It’s time for a new regime, Sebastian. I’m Dr.
Loblitz. I’ll be your therapist from now on.”

Now Kevin recognized him from Cornelia’s description. He crossed his leg in a sprawling way so that his ankle rested on his
knee. He had a nervous tic. His heavy brown shoe shook up and down.

“I have good news for you, Kevin. I’ve cured your friend Ms. Lord. She’s made a complete recovery.”

Kevin felt the hairs rise. “A recovery?”

“Yes,” the young doctor worked his unpleasant, wet lips. “I helped her forget all her disturbances. Her delusions about Tesla.
Her irrational reluctance to marry Mr. Fisk. And her flirtation with you.”

The doctor sat back. Maybe he wasn’t exactly enjoying this, but he sure wasn’t hating it either. “I’m discharging Cornelia
Lord tomorrow. But I’m afraid your prognosis isn’t so clear.”

“Meaning?”

“You’re still manifestly disturbed, suffering from—”

“Code Green,” Kevin guessed. “I’m covered by my health plan, as long as you want to keep me.”

The doctor looked surprised. “Very good, Kevin, but even the best medical plans come to an end sometime. We have about a year
left to work together. Let’s make it count.”

He actually smiled now, a mean little “gotcha” smile that made
him look more like a prosecutor than a psychiatrist. No, more like a torturer warming up. Kevin scorched his brain searching
for what could work to change the doctor’s mind.

“Look, aren’t you supposed to ‘first do no harm’?”

“Kevin, am I harming you? I’m here to help.”

“I faked my way in here. You can kick me out for malingering, do whatever you want. But you can’t keep me in here when you
know I’m okay.”

He was very nervous about this doctor’s smile now, the way his blubbery lips curled.

“It’s not just me you’re up against, Kevin. We have your referring doctor’s diagnosis. We have test batteries. You can’t fake
those.”

“I was only
acting
crazy for Cornelia.”

Dr. Loblitz chuckled. “And you did a fine job, Kevin. Why don’t you just settle back and enjoy it. Working people like you
never get to stay at the Sanctuary.”

A growl began deep in Kevin’s stomach and worked up through his throat. He leapt up from his seat, lunging at the doctor’s
stringy neck.

“Aides!” Dr. Loblitz yelled.

Then he could recall only a noisy red fury. He almost lost consciousness with one beefy aide’s arm around his neck, the other
twisting his own arm behind his back. They wrestled him into the most feared room in the entire hospital. The one with no
plaque on the door.

The staff called it “Seclusion.”

The patients knew it as “The Rubber Room” or “The Wet Room,” depending on their doctor’s orders.

The floor and walls were padded with foam rubber. They had been smeared with something unsavory by the last patient. It smelled
like a monkey cage treated with disinfectant. One foam mattress was placed against the wall. It was there to be walloped like
a punching bag to work off anger. Another mattress lay on the rubber-padded floor for resting. There was no other furniture.

“Cold-pack him,” Dr. Loblitz snarled, straightening his tie. Kevin’s wild efforts to strangle this doctor hadn’t even mussed
his curly hair.

The aides stripped Kevin’s clothes off. They wrapped him in pink bedsheets soaked in ice-cold water, and secured them tightly
around his body with fabric belts. Kevin pressed his face against the mattress on the floor. He began to shiver, his teeth
clattering together.

He lay there for what seemed like hours yelling into the mattress. He couldn’t stop thinking of Cornelia standing politely
at the big oak front doors of the Sanctuary, ready to go home.

C
hester swung the door open.

“Where are my bridesmaids, Monsieur? Bring them to me.” The woman’s voice cut though the elliptical foyer of Penthouse A like
a haughty foghorn.

“Good afternoon, Madame.”

“
Eh, bien
. “Madame honked, then sneezed in Chester’s face without apologizing.

Chester swallowed his dislike. He greeted the frail woman heartily and took her by her brittle arm. Carefully, he escorted
Madame Marie-Claude, Manhattan’s oldest wedding planner, across the foyer under his glittering chandelier. She shook off Chester’s
arm and hobbled away, stabbing her walking cane with a top ornament like a Fabergé egg into his floor.