You Are Not Alone(33)
I hear Jody’s voice as I take off my shoes. She and Sean are in his bedroom with the door shut, but the walls are thin.
“It’s called the one-minute rule.” Jody’s voice sounds a little higher and shriller than usual. “If it takes less than sixty seconds, then you should do it immediately. That’s why there are dishes in the sink and clothes flung over your chair.”
I can picture Sean running his hands through his gingery hair. He’s not a messy guy, but he sometimes lets the recycling pile up or he leaves nonperishables in grocery bags on the counter for a few hours.
His voice is deeper and softer, but I think I can detect annoyance: “… work … want to relax…”
If it only takes a minute, why don’t you just do it, Jody? I think.
“Well, I can’t relax when things are so messy!” She’s definitely snippy now.
A tingle of excitement runs through me. This is the first time I’ve heard them fight. If they break up, then I won’t have to move.
There’s the rumble of Sean’s voice again. Then Jody laughs. And just like that, the moment’s gone.
He’s so good with quick quips.
It’s one of my favorite things about him.
I change out of the pants and top I wore to work and put on running shoes and tights and an old T-shirt. I love to jog along the East River when the weather’s on the cusp of fall.
I grab my headphones and tie a light jacket around my wait. Before I head out, I do one more thing. I phone Detective Williams.
She hasn’t responded to the note I left. I called a couple times yesterday, but she was out in the field and I was embarrassed to leave my name again. She’s probably dealing with murders and burglaries. Returning my message is on the bottom of her to-do list.
This time, she answers.
I’ve got my little speech all planned. It comes more rushed than I want because just hearing her voice makes me nervous. “Hi, it’s Shay Miller. I’m just calling because the necklace I gave you wasn’t actually Amanda’s. Another friend lent it to her. So could I just swing by and pick it up?”
She doesn’t reply and I can only imagine what Detective Williams thinks of me. She told me to let all this go and suggested I could use professional help.
The silence is so heavy I begin babbling. “I—I know this all sounds strange, but I ran into a couple of friends of hers, and we got to talking, and they told me the necklace didn’t belong to Amanda.… I really need to get it back to them.… I promised I would—”
“Wait a second.” Her voice is so commanding I flinch. “You’re talking to Amanda’s friends?”
“I just bumped into them on the street.… We recognized each other from the memorial service.”
Detective Williams sounds annoyed. “Look, Shay, stop talking to Amanda’s friends. I already mailed the necklace back to Amanda’s mother. You need to let all this go.”
Her tone has a finality to it.
I’ve run into a dead end. I think about Jane’s delighted expression when I told her I’d get back the necklace. I remember Cassandra saying, Fate must have brought us together.
“I’m sorry,” I say to Detective Williams just before she hangs up.
I’m not apologizing for bothering her.
I’m apologizing because I’m not going to let this go.
* * *
“Hi, I’m Melissa Downing,” I say to the woman behind the ER desk at City Hospital. “I was hoping to speak to Amanda, that nice ER nurse.”
The woman’s eyes widen. “Oh.” She hesitates and I can almost see her thoughts scrambling. “May I ask what this is in reference to?”
I stretch my lips into a smile. Keep the lie believable. “I was brought here a few weeks ago. She was the nurse on duty. She took care of me, and she was just so wonderful. I wanted to come back and thank her.”
In my hand is a bouquet of flowers. Yellow zinnias again.
I avoid covering my mouth, chest, or stomach—all clues that someone isn’t telling the truth.
“I see. Can you give me a moment?”
“Sure.” I step back and take one of the plastic bucket seats, making sure my movements are nonchalant.
It’s more than a moment. I stay in that chair for at least fifteen minutes while the woman at the front desk first murmurs into the phone, then goes back to working on her computer, her eyes avoiding mine.
The TV in one corner is silently tuned to CNN, with captions scrolling below. A few others are waiting, but nobody appears to be in terrible distress. Still, I can hear someone’s faint moans from not too far away, then a man shouting.
It must take an extraordinarily compassionate person to work in this sort of environment—not to mention a highly competent one. I looked into stats on nurses before I came here and found a study that showed 98 percent of hospital nurses describe their work as mentally and physically demanding.
I wonder if Amanda was one of them. Witnessing near-constant suffering and death must be overwhelming. Another article I read showed nurses are 23 percent more likely to commit suicide than women in general—perhaps because many nurses have easy access to lethal doses of medicines.
Amanda must have had such access: fentanyl, OxyContin, Valium, Percocet, and Vicodin. Yet she chose to leap in front of a subway train.