The Vanishing Year(83)

Someone stage-whispers, “She’s waking up! Hurry!” There is a commotion, a rustling of arms and legs, and I blink. A face appears. A nurse. Round and pink, the kind of no-nonsense demeanor others might call plucky. She chatters on, telling me it’s Tuesday, that I slept through Monday. I want to speak but there is an oxygen mask over my mouth. I tug at it, my arms are connected to tubes and wires, the whoosh-hiss and muffled bleating of hospital sounds. Machines for monitoring heartbeats and blood pressure. I wonder what the side effects of my drug use will be.

She moves the bed to sitting position and takes the mask off my face. She asks me questions I know the answers to—my name, my age—and she bubbles up, Oh, you’ve passed!

I look around the room, which is empty, save for a chair at the foot of the bed. Cash is leaning forward, watching, waiting. When I meet his eyes, he smiles grandly and waves his arms around like a game show host: Look at all this! I smile weakly back.

“Why are you here?” The question comes out unintentionally rude and I flush.

He shrugs. “I was frantic, I can’t even tell you, Zoe. I knew something was wrong when you wouldn’t take my calls, answer any of my texts. I called Yates. We’d been looking for you.”

“How long was I . . .” I don’t know how to finish the sentence. Missing?

“Ah. Two weeks.”

Two weeks. It’s unfathomable. I close my eyes, white negligee, Henry’s hands. My eyes fly open and I grip the nurse’s arm.

“I need a rape kit,” I rasp, urgently.

She leans forward, smelling like lavender. “It’s been done, sweetheart. It was negative.”

Thank God. I fall back against the pillow.

“Henry is dead,” I whisper. It’s not a question. I think of his leg, Penny with that gun.

“Yes,” Cash says softly, almost reverently.

“Penny saved me,” I murmur.

“Yes,” Cash agrees.

“I want to see her. Can I see her?” I struggle to sit up, pinned down by the needles and the tubes. A little pinch. My forehead sweats. I want to cry, I’m so relieved.

“I’ll find her. You can’t go anywhere. Yates is on her way.”

“God, two weeks.” It’s all I can think of to say.

“We were going crazy, Zoe. Yates couldn’t find you, Henry said you left him. It wasn’t until I uncovered who Joanie was married to that Yates agreed to fill out a missing persons report. She was this close to applying for a search warrant. I thought he was going to kill you.”

“You knew? That Joanie was Tara?” I’m incredulous.

“We just put it all together yesterday. I had Yates convinced that something terrible had happened. Remember when you texted me? You asked me to look into who Joanie married?”

I nodded.

“That was the ticket. You knew it, didn’t you? Deep down?”

I shake my head. “I don’t know what I knew. I didn’t think she was married to Henry. I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was all connected. I had no idea how, though.”

I’m just so tired. All I want to do is sleep.

The doctor comes in and Cash gracefully waits in the hall. I’m pushed and prodded, latex gloves examine my mouth, my throat, my eyes. My vitals are monitored, oxygen, heart rate, blood pressure, muscle function.

The doctor pulls a chair up to the bed, tents his fingers under his chin, asks me if I have any questions. I don’t. Then he talks. Through him, I learn all the things that Henry did to me. He’d kept me barely conscious for more than fifteen days on a mixture of Dilaudid and Benadryl, a narcotic injection. They’d found oxycodone and hydrocodone in my blood, as well as a drug called midazolam, a highly potent sedation drug primarily used for its amnesic properties. I wasn’t likely to recover many memories from my two-week ordeal at Fishing Lake.

How did Henry get all these drugs? Don’t hospitals control this kind of thing? I am angry, demanding, slapping the hospital mattress with my palm.

The doctor is kind and apologetic. Men with money, it seems, can obtain almost anything they’d like. I, of all people, know how easy it can be to find narcotics on the street. I shudder to think of the drugs in my veins, cut with God knows what. I think of Henry’s collection of prescription pain medication. Henry, who knew my history, my past.

My only external injuries are the stitches in my foot from running through the woods, and my left wrist where Henry’s handcuffs sheared the skin. I have matching scars now, thin lines on the top of each wrist, a physical reminder of what I’ve been through. Literal scratches on the surface, I suspect.

Yates follows closely on the heels of the doctor and takes her place by my bedside. She tells me about their investigation, a formality because of Henry’s death. They are trying to trace the root of the drugs.

As much as Yates can figure, Henry solved the crime of Tara’s murder when the police could not. He admitted as much to me. He tracked me down, planning to kill me out of revenge. But the idea that he could have Tara back, a stand-in who looked just like her, was too tantalizing. Who cared if we were different people? He could simply turn me into her. He’d nearly succeeded. I remember his relentless pursuit, his almost overwhelming attraction. I question myself, really. Only someone desperate for love wouldn’t recognize the insincerity in it. He’d proposed after four months. He’d never felt love for me. Obsession? Yes. Hatred and blame? Yes. But love? Yates thinks a man like Henry is incapable of love. Sometimes I still dream of his hands. I wake up, disgusted with myself.