Tonya Hurley_Ghostgirl_02 (14 page)

That Scarlet didn’t like Maddy, and vice versa, was a massive understatement, Scarlet thought, and it was clearly making Charlotte uncomfortable. In her own defense, Scarlet reasoned, it wasn’t really that she didn’t like her, it was just that Maddy’s even being with them felt intrusive.

This was the only time she might ever have with Charlotte again, and she didn’t want to share it with some pushy stranger. As far as Scarlet was concerned, Maddy had totally earjacked their most private conversations and hacked into their friendship. How, Scarlet thought, after all they’d been through, could Charlotte let that happen?

Just as things were at their grimmest, between the travelers, and the foliage, and their nerve endings, Scarlet spied a clearing.

A few steps farther and they emerged from the thicket, right at the fork of two clearly marked roads, one overgrown and little-trod, the other manicured and worn.

“Here we are,” Scarlet observed sarcastically, “at the proverbial fork in the road.” She walked up to the fork and closed her eyes, trying desperately to channel her gut. She was waiting for her intuition to kick in, but it must have been on a coffee break, because all she felt was paralyzed.

“I have no idea,” Scarlet admitted, in a rare show of insecurity. “You guys make the decision.”

“We need to go left,” Maddy chirped decisively, signaling the direction.

“I agree,” Charlotte said just as self-assuredly. She really had no idea and simply mustered whatever faith remained in her own judgment to support Maddy’s choice.

“How do you know?” Scarlet asked Charlotte, questioning not just Maddy’s suggestion but Charlotte’s deference as well.

This kind of confrontation was new territory for them both. Trust had always been the strongest bond between them.

“I just do,” Charlotte trumpeted suspiciously. “I feel it.”

Scarlet tried to keep her cool, but with Petula’s life, and her own, at stake, it was getting harder by the second. Doubt was flooding her mind like water in a sinking ship. She had nothing to base a decision on but her faith in Charlotte, and that was being sorely tested right now. She walked over to Charlotte and took it up a notch.

“When was the last time you were right about your instinct?” Scarlet asked.

“I was right about you,” Charlotte said calmly. “I knew you were special, and I knew you belonged with Damen.” It still hurt her just a little to speak those words. But Scarlet heard something entirely different in her head. Scarlet heard, “You owe me.”

“Yeah, well, looks like you just might have been wrong on both accounts,” Scarlet said.

Charlotte was stung but tried hard to let it slide. The two of them bickering was unnatural, sort of like a comedian heckling himself. She got that Scarlet needed, and deserved, a more independent opinion from her right now, but she was at a loss. Maddy seemed much more certain than she was, Charlotte thought, and the path to the left definitely seemed the easier and more popular route.

“I guess there’s no way to know until we actually make the choice,” Charlotte said, acquiescing. “I think we should go left.”

“You think?” Scarlet said dryly.

Scarlet saw the hurt look on Charlotte’s face and wondered if she was just being unreasonable. None of them knew which road to take. How could they? Wasn’t her resistance simply due to the fact that Maddy had suggested it? Regardless, she thought, Charlotte’s uncertainty was not very much help to her at this critical time, and she was more than a little disappointed that her friend seemed so easily bullied by her and influenced by Maddy.

“What are we waiting for?” Maddy asked, challenging Scarlet for a decision.

“Follow me,” Maddy instructed, grabbing Charlotte’s arm and heading left.

Scarlet went right. Alone.

Chapter 14

Magical Thinking

A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what’s going on.

—William S. Burroughs

What doesn’t kill you makes you paranoid.

Trapped in your own head, without an exit strategy, conflicted by doubt and with only your obsessions to guide you, reality takes a backseat to anxiety, changing shape faster than a Coney Island contortionist. Charlotte and Scarlet both were realizing that the worst place to be lost was in your own head.

Phones were ringing off the hook at the call center and everyone was pretty distracted by the fact that Charlotte hadn’t shown up. They tried to keep it down so that Mr. Markov wouldn’t hear.

“Did she really try to call in sick?” Pam asked, astonished.

“Yep,” Prue signaled, covering the receiver on her conversation.

“Is Maddy with her?” Suzy Scratcher mouthed to Kim.

“She’s not here,” Kim said hurriedly, working two phone lines at once.

As the expression on Prue’s face changed from disbelief to worry all the chatter in the room quieted. She hung up the phone and looked over at Pam.

“We have to go.”

Charlotte watched helplessly as Scarlet’s bouncing black bob disappeared down the right-hand path and back into the forest.

“Scarlet,” Charlotte called several times without a response.

Maddy held Charlotte’s arm tightly, stopping her from chasing after Scarlet.

“I wanted to go right,” Charlotte mumbled apologetically. “But I hesitated. I just couldn’t be sure.”

“Don’t stress. She’ll be all right.”

“You don’t know that,” Charlotte agonized. “She’s out there by herself. Probably scared half to death.”

“She’s more than half dead already.”

“That’s not funny,” Charlotte said. “I think we should go after her before she gets in too deep.”

“If we really want to help Scarlet, we should get to that hospital.”

Charlotte knew that leaving Scarlet on her own was not something a best friend would do, but not leaving might mean an even worse fate for Petula. Scarlet was tough, Charlotte thought, and street smart. She’d find her way if anyone could.

Charlotte nodded at Maddy, looked down the right side of the path, made a wish for Scarlet to travel safely, and walked to the left to find Petula.

“Someone is coming!” Virginia shrieked as if they were game show castaways waiting to be whisked off the island to a five-star hotel where they could bathe and eat to their hearts’ content.

“No, there isn’t,” Petula said, peering through the glass windows of the office and down the hallway.

She didn’t see anyone. Not a discharge nurse, doctor, or orderly. No one. Still, having no reason to doubt Virginia, she put her ear to the ground and began to hear the faint echo of footsteps as well.

“I didn’t say I heard buffalo.”

“Shhh … ,” Petula said, hushing Virginia and backing her into a little closet nook. “I have a weird feeling.”

Blazing a rough path through the trees and bushes that surrounded her, Scarlet felt as if she were in a modern art museum with impressionist portraits all around her. She could tell the subject from a distance, but up close, it all just looked like spilled, splattered paint.

She couldn’t be sure if it was fear in her mind or if her eyes were playing tricks on her, but it didn’t really matter. She was all alone and totally unsure of anything: where she was, where she was going, and how she was going to get there.

This wasn’t the old Scarlet, and she knew it. She hadn’t been since she’d become so insecure about Damen, and those doubts had infected her thoughts, her decisions, and her other relationships.

“Make decisions for yourself, not because of a guy,” her mother had warned her over and over again.

Petula would never listen, not that it mattered. When she looked into a guy’s eyes, she was only looking for her own reflection anyway. But Scarlet had listened. At least until recently. There was no point in kidding herself any longer though. Saving Petula was important, but that was really the doctors’ job. Saving her relationship was what she was after, and she was ashamed by the realization. Had all this drama just been her way of getting his attention after all or …keeping it?

She thought about how she stormed away from her one true friend, and how she was not only lost now but had been lost for quite some time. She was alienating the people that she loved, consumed with the insecurities that came a la carte with her relationship with Damen.

She could only trust his word that he wanted to be with one person and one person alone — her. He never gave her reason to believe otherwise, but considering he left Petula for her, she could never really be sure. He would argue that he never loved Petula, but to Scarlet, that might have even been worse.

“How are they doing, doctor?” Damen asked hopefully.

“No change,” Dr. Patrick responded.

It was getting a little old, but Damen took this neutral evaluation as confirmation that both girls were still stable. Cranial X-rays, PET scans, and MRI films were hanging on light boxes like subway ads, all negative as far as he’d been told. There hadn’t been any major episodes all day. No need to intubate, inject, or resuscitate either of them.

They both looked peaceful, as if they might be resting comfortably, except for the drain attached to Petula’s infected toe and the ankle cuffs preventing blood clots in both their legs, which didn’t look like fun. The metronomic inflation and deflation of the cuffs had become a source of comfort to Damen, who played a little game with himself, synching their breathing, and marking time to their airflow in and out.

Damen walked over to Scarlet’s bedside and knocked accidentally into the moveable table on which rested a small bouquet of flowers he’d purchased at the hospital gift shop and a pitcher of unused water. He noticed that the spilled water was pooling and was just about to hit a penlight that Dr. Patrick must have left behind during her examination. Damen rescued the gadget, sat down next to Scarlet, and began fidgeting with the light, clicking it on and off, trying desperately to think of a way to bring her back.

It was getting to be too much for even him. All this speculating, observing, worrying, and waiting. It was all so passive. His head was getting tired and he needed to clear it. Damen walked over to the nearby nurses’ station and asked about the little girl he’d seen earlier.

“What happened?” he asked quietly, so as not to disturb her family.

“Car accident,” the nurse said, looking up from her paperwork. “On the way back from some contest or something … the poor little thing.”

A million thoughts raced through Damen’s mind. He imagined how happy the girl must have been, all dressed up, and how proud her parents must have been. And then in a second, without warning, it was all taken away. He couldn’t stop himself from thinking something trivial at the same time. He hoped she’d won.

“How is she doing?” Damen asked, fearing he already knew the answer.

“Nothing more we can do now,” the nurse advised kindly, “except pray.”

Damen let that last bit sink in, especially in terms of his own situation. He stopped outside the little girl’s room, said a silent prayer for her, and walked back to the Kensington girls’ room, intent on leaving his passive self behind.

Chapter 15

Pretty Vacant

A narcissist is someone better looking than you.

—Gore Vidal

A little vanity goes a long way.

Some people think everything they do is great and that they always look fabulous, even if they don’t. They have this ability to be a cheerleader for themselves, even if they’re on a losing team. Narcissists trade reality for fantasy. Rather than displaying a dysfunctional personality disorder, however, they are the ones who have it all figured out. The only world that matters is the one you create, the one you choose to live in. Petula had worked that out a long time ago.

I have a question… ,” Virginia said as she watched Petula twisting her long, faux-blond hair into a perfectly messy knot.

“They’re real.”

“Why are we in hospital gowns?” Virginia asked, completely ignoring Petula’s arrogance.

“I don’t really know. But less really is more, isn’t it?”

“I’m being serious.”

“Okay, seriously, then,” Petula enunciated sarcastically. “We are wearing hospital gowns because we are in a hospital!”

“Duh!” Virginia mocked. “My point is, why. I don’t remember being sick.”

Come to think of it, neither did Petula. In fact, the only thing she remembered was collapsing on her driveway, but that was not something she planned to discuss with the kid. She assumed that Scarlet had probably dragged her, disgustedly, to bed, but she couldn’t be sure of that either, and she didn’t remember being taken to the hospital to get her stomach pumped or anything.

“It doesn’t matter how I got here,” Petula said, avoiding the question entirely. “I have health insurance.”

“But why are we alone here?”

“We’re not alone,” Petula said emphatically. “The nurse will be here to discharge us any minute.”

“How do you know? We’ve been waiting a long time.”

Virginia’s questions were making Petula increasingly uneasy. Not just because she didn’t have answers but because they were questions she’d been asking herself since she arrived.

“We heard footsteps, didn’t we?”

“Yeah,” Virginia acknowledged, the façade of fierceness she’d been wearing giving way to a trembling lip. “But what if they weren’t the nurses’ footsteps?”

Petula hadn’t fully entertained that possibility until now, and the suddenly fearful expression on her face gave her away to Virginia.

Petula wasn’t very touchy-feely or very good in the eye-contact department. One could even argue, and some therapists had, that she was afflicted with Asperger’s Syndrome, a mild form of autism that made any kind of social interaction for her … challenging.

But the truth was her issues weren’t anything near as interesting or deep as that. She was just self-absorbed. This was proven when, as a five-year-old, mistakenly diagnosed with A.D.D., she spent three hours at the mall debating between coral or burnt orange shoes to wear for the first day of kindergarten.