Rosebush

  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.

  The hallway is undulating, the carpet moving. I have my hands out, like a sleepwalker. If I could just get downstairs, I think. If I can get outside, I’ll be safe.

  Why?

  Faces blur past me, faces that are familiar but now stretched, distorted with laughing mouths. I’m afraid to look in their eyes, afraid to see the hate I know will be there.

  Keep going!

  I make it down the stairs, into the living room. It’s packed with sweaty bodies. People sway against me, but I have to keep moving, like a salmon going upstream for survival. I push and wriggle and—

  I’m out.

  I expect the air outside to be cool, but it isn’t. It’s hot and heavy like a blanket.

  “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.”

  I feel the warm stone of the steps through the fairy skirt and on my bare thighs. I’m sitting there, stunned, thinking about—

  Suddenly Ollie is there, leaning into my face. He seems concerned, and sober. He grips my chin, turning my head from side to side.

  “What are you doing?” I ask, pulling away.

  “You hit your head.”

  “I’m fine,” I say. “Leave me alone.”

  “Wait here and I’ll drive you home.”

  “No.”

  “I’ll be right back.” He goes inside. I struggle to my feet.

  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?”

  “You pushed me away and said, ‘What are you doing?’ and I said, ‘I thought t
his was what you wanted.’ And you said, ‘No. Not with you. Never.’”

  I didn’t remember any of that either, and although that probably would have been my reaction, I like to think I would have been nicer about it. “Harsh,” I told him now. “Sorry.”

  He held up a hand to stop my apology. “You were just speaking your mind. Then you told me to go away and leave you alone. And I did.” He put his hands in his pockets and jingled his keys nervously. “I was a little angry as I went back into the party. But then I felt bad. So I called your cell phone and apologized and tried to convince you to let me come get you. I asked where you were and you said, ‘I’m on Dove Street.’ And then—”

  He paused and made a small circuit around the room, stopping in front of the windowsill with the flowers and presents on it, shifting them around, touching each of them in turn. With his back to me he said, “I was talking to you and I heard tires squealing and—and your phone went dead.”

  “You heard me get hit?”

  “I didn’t know what I heard. But that’s what it sounded like.”

  He paused and turned around.

  His face was bleak, his eyes haunted. “I’m sorry, Jane. I am truly sorry.” The way he said it was different from anything else he’d said. This, alone, sounded true.

  I stared at him hard. Not because he’d heard me get hit. But because so much of what he’d said didn’t make sense.

  “I’m on Dove Street.” I said the words, testing them out in my mouth. That was the street I’d been found on, but the statement felt wrong. The bird part, that touched a chord, but Dove Street—

  I’m holding on to the metal support of a street sign, leaning back to read it. It’s dark, it’s streaked in rain. It reads—

  “Are you sure I didn’t say Peregrine Road?”

  “Positive. Weren’t you found on Dove Street?”

  “Yes. But that—it’s not right. It doesn’t feel right.” How could I explain this?

  “Peregrine Road is just around the corner from Dove Street,” Officer Rowley said.

  “You told me Dove Street,” Ollie insisted, his voice rising and his face getting slightly flushed.

  “Okay. I’ll have to take your word for it.” But how would I have come up with Peregrine Road if I hadn’t seen it? Even though I’d been there the previous summer with Kate, I never paid any attention to the street names. Why would I imagine saying the wrong street name? And forget the right one?

  “Your cell phone records confirm that Mr. Montero was the last person you spoke to,” Officer Rowley said. “I was hoping this would jog your memory.”

  “It didn’t.” Now I’d gone from hearing phone calls no one else believed happened to not believing in phone calls that absolutely took place.

  I stared at Ollie. Why didn’t I remember?

  “Are we done here?” Ollie asked Officer Rowley. “Can I go?”

  She nodded.

  “Take care of yourself, Jane,” he said. “If I were you, I’d stop trying to remember and just concentrate on getting better.”

  “Thanks.”

  I was so distracted I forgot to look for panty lines again when he left.

  “Did you call me earlier, Miss Freeman?” Officer Rowley jolted my attention back

  “Yes. I got a very strange phone call.” She sighed and put her hand on her hip. “A real one,” I continued. “You can ask Loretta. It was from a girl in my class named Elsa. She had an accident the same night as mine.”

  “Elsa Blanchard. She phoned you? I was under the impression she was in the psych ward, and there are no phones in the rooms there.”

  “I don’t know, she was very weird about it, talking about hiding and how she wasn’t supposed to be on the phone. But she said something—odd.”

  I could tell that Officer Rowley was only barely believing me. “Yes.”

  “She said that she was only trying to help me make the pain go away. And there was something about the way she said it, and the fact that her car was then crashed, that made me wonder—I mean, could she have been the one to hit me? And then crashed into a post to cover it up?”

  “We explored that idea two days ago, Miss Freeman. There’s no question that all the damage on Elsa Blanchard’s vehicle came from the impact with the post. And even if it hadn’t, her car was of too low a profile to have caused your injuries. You were hit with something like a sedan.”

  If Elsa hadn’t been confessing to hitting me, what the hell had she meant?

  Officer Rowley left.

  I was in the wheelchair still mulling that over, and searching every corner of my mind for some memory of Ollie trying to kiss me, when Sloan walked in half an hour later looking for my mother. Part of me wanted to be mad at her, hate her, but I couldn’t. Her dark hair was glossy and she wore almost no makeup on her oval face with the wide-spaced eyes. Her outfit looked like something I would have worn.

  When she saw I was alone, she tried to back out, but I stopped her.

  “Hey. Can I ask you a question?”

  She swallowed hard and stayed near the door. “I should really find your mom. She wanted me here at five fifteen and it’s almost five thirty.”

  “Yeah, of course, I’ll make it fast. I was just wondering, the night of the party, were you with someone?”

  Her chin went up and she squared her shoulders. “I’m not sure that’s really any of your business.” God, she was already becoming a mini-my mother. And yet that answer kind of made me like her even more.

  I smiled to let her know I wasn’t the enemy. “Sorry, I did that wrong. I just want to know if you were with David.”

  “David?” she repeated, and although she was tense, she also seemed slightly relieved. “He drove me home.”

  I’d had all the hedges, evasions, shadowy half-truths I could take. I forced myself to ask what I really wanted to know. “Did you have sex with him?”

  I was ready to hear anything. But I was still surprised by her answer.

  Chapter 26

  Sloan said, “I don’t know.”

  She drew closer to my bed now, her eyes apprehensive and scared but kind, like an animal being tamed. “I don’t know if you remember, but at the party you walked into me.”

  “I remember. My stuff dropped and you helped me pick it up.”

  “Right. Well, you put your drink down and you just left it there when you took off. So I drank it.”

  “And?”

  “I think it must have had something in it because after that, everything kind of gets weird. I went looking for my friend and then I don’t really remember what happened until David was on top of me waking me up and saying we had to get out of there.”

  “You woke up with David on top of you?” Her words took a moment to fully penetrate. “Oh, Sloan, are you okay? I mean, do you think something happened you didn’t want to happen? Do you want to talk to a nurse?”

  Her face registered surprise and gratitude. “You’re so—That is really, really nice of you to ask. But I’m okay.” She leaned toward me. “Plus—I have my period, so—”

  I knew how David was about periods so I figured she was right. Nothing had happened. Not that I really thought David was capable of taking advantage of someone like that—when they were drugged—but then, I wasn’t really sure of anything anymore.

  “That still must have been upsetting. What happened after he woke you up?”

  “He drove me home. I probably shouldn’t have gone with him because I think he was pretty wasted, but I didn’t realize that then. The next day he tried to talk to me, something about his car, but I ignored him. And I haven’t seen him since…Well, except here.”

  At least David wasn’t lying about that.

  “And I solemnly swear I won’t, ever,” she added.

  “If you want him, he’s all yours.”

  “He’s, um, not my type.” Her pocket buzzed. “Oops, that’s your mom. I’ve got to run.”

  She was at the door when she stopped and turned around.
“There’s one other thing. Remember how you couldn’t find your lip gloss? And you told me if I found it, I could keep it?” She blushed and looked nervous. “This is kind of lame, but I’ve had, um, people say I look like you, and I thought maybe it would look good on me too.” So I kept looking for it. I found it. The lip gloss, I mean. But you can totally have it back.”

  “No thanks.” The last thing I was interested in at the moment was lip gloss. Which was a very new development for me. “I hope that, um, people like it on you.”

  She smiled and blushed. “Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help.”

  I wished there were something she could have done to help. That anyone could. I fought back through the darkness to the party, to try to put this piece into place. If what Sloan said was true, then the red plastic cup had actually been drugged. But it wasn’t how I got dosed.

  I open the door and see Sloan and David together.

  And someone else. There’s someone else there. Someone—pushing me in? But why would someone push me into the room?

  I’m confused and furious. “Why are you doing this?”

  Langley? No, Langley was in front of the bathroom door, not the bedroom door, and she was trying to keep me from getting out, not pushing me in.

  But—

  I’m outside and it’s raining.

  I have to get Langley’s shoes off. I’d promised her I wouldn’t get them wet and it’s pouring. Already they’re getting drenched. Ruined. I lean over to undo the clasps and nearly fall over.

  You don’t have time for this! a voice in my head says. Keep moving.

  I stagger back to my feet, giving up on saving the shoes. I’ll buy her a new pair. I’ve got to keep going, get away.

  The phone rings. It’s dark and pouring and I have to squint at the screen to see the caller ID.

  Ollie M.

  Is that what it said? Or do I only think that because it’s what people have told me?

  I heard Nicky’s voice from two weeks ago: “Maybe you should try thinking for yourself once in awhile”