36

The crackle of an overstarched pillowcase.

Footfalls nearby.

Then quiet—but a strange quiet, a different quality of quiet.

My eyes spring open.

I’m on my side, looking at a radiator.

And above the radiator, a window.

And outside the window, brickwork, the zigzag of a fire escape, the boxy rumps of AC units.

Another building.

I’m in a twin bed, sheathed in tucked-tight sheets. I twist, sit up.

I back into the pillow, telescope the room. It’s small, plainly furnished—barely furnished, really: a plastic chair against one wall, a walnut table beside the bed, a pale-pink tissue box on the table. A table lamp. A slim vase, empty. Dull linoleum floor. A door across from me, closed, frosted panel. Overhead, a quilt of stucco and fluorescents—

My fingers crumple the bedding.

Now it begins.

The far wall slides away, receding; the door within it shrinks. I look to the walls on either side of me, watch them ebb from each other. The ceiling shudders, creaks, peels off like a sardine tin, like a roof rent by a hurricane. The air goes with it, whipping from my lungs. The floor rumbles. The bed trembles.

Here I lie, on this heaving mattress, in this scalped room, with nothing to breathe. I’m drowning in the bed, dying in the bed.

“Help,” I shout, only it’s a whisper, creeping through my throat on tiptoe, smearing itself across my tongue. “He-elp,” I try again; this time my teeth bite into it, sparks raining from my mouth as though I’ve chewed a live wire, and my voice catches like a fuse, explodes.

I scream.

I hear voices rumble, watch as a scrimmage of shadows crowds through that distant door, lunges toward me, bounding in impossible strides across the endless, endless room.

I scream again. The shadows scatter in a flock, flare around my bed.

“Help,” I plead, with the last gasp of air in my body.

Then a needle slips into my arm. It’s deftly done—I hardly feel a thing.

A wave rolls above me, soundless and smooth. I’m floating, suspended, in some radiant abyss, deep, cool. Words dart around me like fish.

“Coming back now,” someone murmurs.

“. . . stable,” says someone else.

And then, clearly, as though I’ve just surfaced, just drained water from my ear: “Just in time.”

I swivel my head. It bobs lazily against the pillow.

“I was about to leave.”

Now I see him, or most of him—it takes me a moment to scan him from one side to the other, because I’m high on drugs (I know enough to know that) and because he’s holy-shit vast, a mountain of a man: blue-black skin, boulder shoulders, a broad range of chest, a scrub of thick dark hair. His suit clings to him with a sort of desperation, unequal to the task but trying its damnedest.

“Hello there,” he says, his voice sweet and low. “I’m Detective Little.”

I blink. At his elbow—practically on his elbow—hovers a pigeon of a woman in a yellow nurse’s smock.

“Can you understand what we’re saying?” she asks.

I blink again, then nod. I feel the air shift around me, like it’s almost viscous, like I’m still underwater.

“This is Morningside,” the nurse explains. “The police have been waiting for you to come around all morning.” The way you’d chide someone for failing to answer the doorbell.

“What’s your name? Can you tell us your name?” asks Detective Little.

I open my mouth, squeak. My throat has gone dry. I feel as if I’ve just coughed up a puff of dust.

The nurse rounds the bed, zeroes in on the side table. I follow her, my head slowly revolving, and watch as she places a cup in my hands. I sip. Tepid water. “You’re under sedation,” she tells me, almost apologetic now. “You were fussing a little bit earlier.”

The detective’s question hangs in the air, unanswered. I turn my eyes back to Mount Little.

“Anna,” I say, the syllables stumbling in my mouth, as though my tongue is a speed bump. What the hell did they pump into me?

“You got a last name, Anna?” he asks.

I take another sip. “Fox.” It sounds elongated in my ears.

“Uh-huh.” He tugs a notepad from his breast pocket, eyes it. “And can you tell me where you live?”

I recite my address.

Little, nodding: “Do you know where you were picked up last night, Ms. Fox?”

“Doctor,” I say.

The nurse twitches beside me. “The doctor will be here soon.”

“No.” Shaking my head. “I’m a doctor.”

Little stares at me.

“I’m Dr. Fox.”

A smile breaks like dawn across his face. His teeth are almost phosphorescently white. “Doctor Fox,” he continues, tapping the pad with his finger. “Do you know where they picked you up last night?”

I sip my water, study him. The nurse flutters near me. “Who?” I say. That’s right: I’ll ask questions, too. I’ll slur them, at any rate.

“The EMTs.” Then, before I can reply: “They picked you up in Hanover Park. You were unconscious.”

“Unconscious,” echoes the nurse, in case I missed it the first time.

“You’d placed a phone call a little after ten thirty. They found you in your bathrobe with this in your pocket.” He unfolds one massive hand, and I see the house key glinting in his palm. “And this beside you.” Across his knees he lays my umbrella, its body cinched.

It starts somewhere in my gut, then rushes past my lungs, across my heart, into my throat, shreds itself against my teeth:

Jane.

“What’s that?” Little is frowning at me.

“Jane,” I repeat.

The nurse looks at Little. “She said ‘Jane,’” she translates, ever helpful.

“My neighbor. I saw her get stabbed.” It takes an ice age, the words thawing in my mouth before I can spit them out.

“Yes. I heard the 911 call,” Little tells me.

911. That’s right: that southern dispatcher. And then the trek out the side door, into the park, the branches shifting overhead, the lights swirling like some unholy potion in the bowl of the umbrella. My vision swims. I breathe hard.

“Try to stay calm,” the nurse orders me.

I breathe again, choke.

“Easy,” frets the nurse. I lock eyes with Little.

“She’s okay,” he says.

I bleat at him, wheeze at him, lift my head from the pillow, neck straining, drag shallow breaths through my mouth. And with my lungs shrinking, I bristle—how would he know how I am? He’s a cop I’ve just met. A cop—have I ever even met a cop before? The odd traffic ticket, I suppose.

The light strobes before my eyes, faintly, tiger stripes of dark clawed across my vision. His own eyes never leave mine, even as my gaze climbs his face and slips, like a struggling hiker. His pupils are almost absurdly huge. His lips are full, kind.

And as I stare at Little, as my fingers rake the blankets, I find my body relaxing, my chest expanding, my vision clearing. Whatever they put into me has won. I am indeed okay.

“She’s okay,” Little says again. The nurse pats my knuckles. Good girl.

I roll my head back, close my eyes. I feel exhausted. I feel embalmed.

“My neighbor was stabbed,” I whisper. “Her name is Jane Russell.”

I hear Little’s chair complain as he leans toward me. “Did you see who attacked her?”

“No.” I work my eyelids open, like rusty garage doors. Little is hunched over his notepad, his brow grooved with wrinkles. He frowns and nods at the same time. Mixed messages.

“But you saw her bleeding?”

“Yes.” I wish I’d stop slurring. I wish he’d stop interrogating me.

“Had you been drinking?”

A lot. “A little,” I admit. “But that’s…” I inhale, and now I feel fresh panic volt through me. “You need to help her. She’s—she could be dead.”

“I’ll get the doctor,” says the nurse, moving toward the door.

As she leaves, Little nods again. “Do you know who would want to hurt your neighbor?”

I swallow. “Her husband.”

He nods some more, frowns some more, shakes his wrist, flips the notepad shut. “Here’s the thing, Anna Fox,” he says, suddenly brisk, all business. “I went to visit the Russells this morning.”

“Is she okay?”

“I’d like you to go back with me to make a statement.”

The doctor is a youngish Hispanic woman so beautiful that I lose my breath again, although that isn’t why she injects me with lorazepam.

“Is there anyone we should contact for you?” she asks.

I’m about to give Ed’s name, then check myself. No point. “No point,” I say.

“What’s that?”

“No one,” I tell her. “I don’t have— I’m fine.” Carefully sculpting each word, as though it’s origami. “But—”

“No family member?” She looks at my wedding ring.

“No,” I say, my right hand stealing over my left. “My husband—I’m not—we’re not together. Anymore.”

“A friend?” I shake my head. Whom could she possibly call? Not David, certainly not Wesley; Bina, maybe, except I really am fine. Jane isn’t.

“What about a doctor?”

“Julian Fielding,” I answer automatically, before I interrupt myself. “No. Not him.”

I watch her exchange glances with the nurse, who then exchanges glances with Little, who forwards the glance to the doctor. It’s a Mexican standoff. I want to giggle. I don’t. Jane.

“As you know, you were unconscious in a park,” the doctor continues, “and the EMTs couldn’t identify you, so they brought you to Morningside. When you came around, you had a panic attack.”

“A big one,” pipes up the nurse.

The doctor nods. “A big one.” She inspects her clipboard. “And it happened again this morning. I understand you’re a doctor?”

“Not a medical doctor,” I tell her.

“What sort of doctor?”

“A psychologist. I work with children.”

“Do you have—”

“A woman’s been stabbed,” I say, my voice surging. The nurse steps back as though I’ve swung a fist. “Why isn’t anyone doing anything?”

The doctor snaps a glance at Little. “Do you have a history of panic attacks?” she asks me.

And so, with Little attending amiably from his chair and the nurse trembling like a hummingbird, I tell the doctor—tell all of them—about my agoraphobia, my depression, and, yes, my panic disorder; I tell them about my drug regimen, about my ten months indoors, about Dr. Fielding and his aversion therapy. It takes a while, with my voice still swathed in wool; every minute I tip more water down my throat, trickling past my words as they bubble up from within, spill over my lips.

Once I’ve finished, once I’ve sagged back into the pillow, the doctor consults her clipboard for a moment. Nods slowly. “All right,” she says. A brisker nod. “All right.” She looks up. “Let me speak with the detective. Detective, would you—” She gestures toward the door.

Little rises, the chair creaking as he stands. He smiles at me, follows the doctor from the room.

His absence leaves a void. It’s just me and the nurse now. “Have some more water,” she suggests.

They return some minutes later. Or maybe it’s longer than that; there’s no clock in here.

“The detective has offered to escort you back home,” says the doctor. I look at Little; he beams back. “And I’m giving you some Ativan to take later. But we need to make sure that you don’t have an attack before you get there. So the fastest way to do this…”

I know the fastest way to do this. And the nurse is already brandishing her needle.