You Are Not Alone(79)
Two months ago
AMANDA, CALL ME!
Amanda, are you okay?
Every few hours, her cell phone erupted with calls and texts from the other women.
Amanda, please pick up! We’re worried about you!
She couldn’t stop seeing James thrashing on the park bench as the life drained out of him.
Amanda, I’m right around the corner—can I pop by?
That text from Beth finally made her pick up the phone and dial Beth’s number. Maybe Beth—the smart, warm lawyer—was having regrets, too.
“Hey, what’s going on? Why aren’t you talking to any of us?”
“I’m freaking out,” Amanda whispered. Her voice was hoarse; it was now Saturday morning and she hadn’t spoken to anyone in the thirty-six hours since James had died.
“Look, I know things didn’t go exactly how we planned. But we have to stick together.”
“We killed him, Beth.” Amanda’s voice trembled.
She could hear Beth slowly exhale. “We didn’t mean to.” Beth’s tone shifted from friendly to authoritative. “And you know what he did to Daphne. He was evil.”
“So no one else is having regrets?”
“It’s too late for that.”
Beth wasn’t an ally; Beth wanted to get her in line.
“Why don’t we get together and talk about it. We can come over. All of us.”
Before, it had always been the seven of them aligned. But now it would be her against the other six women.
Amanda imagined them crowded into her small living room: Jane rubbing her back, Stacey a bit apart from the others with her arms crossed and her jaw tight, Cassandra leaning in close, Daphne and Beth adding their voices to the others—their words blending and overlapping and pressing in on Amanda as they all tried to stamp out what they’d consider her disloyalty. And Valerie, staring at her with flat brown eyes.
“I’m not feeling well,” Amanda replied.
Amanda could hear Cassandra in the background, telling Beth, “Let me talk to her. We need to know what she did with the scalpel.”
Amanda hung up and turned off her phone.
Sometime later—maybe an hour, maybe three—her buzzer sounded.
She flinched; now they were in her lobby.
She crept across the floor in her socks as quietly as possible, wincing when a board creaked, even though she knew they couldn’t hear anything from two floors down. She slipped into the alcove and climbed into her bed, pulling up her rumpled sheets.
The buzzer sounded again. This time the loud, insistent noise lasted much longer. She covered her ears with her hands, but she could still hear it.
She lay there, her eyes squeezed shut, until finally the sound died away.
When she turned her phone back on late that night, it showed twenty-four missed calls.
* * *
The next day, a Sunday, Amanda was scheduled to work. She rose from bed feeling hollow eyed. She hadn’t slept much or eaten anything other than a banana and a slice of toast.
She walked to her closet, her body aching, as if she really were ill. She reached over her laundry bin, where her tan sundress with rust-colored, streaky stains was crumpled on the bottom. She pulled out her Crocs and pink scrubs as her vow from the Nightingale Pledge ran through her mind again: I will dedicate myself to devoted service to human welfare.
She found concealer in the bathroom and patted it on the purple shadows beneath her eyes. In the cabinet under the sink, she’d hidden the scalpel and towel. She couldn’t bear to look at the reminders of what they’d done. But she still felt the presence of the objects.
If she gave the scalpel to the other women, would they let her walk away?
No, Amanda thought. They never would.
The city felt different now—hot and angry. Pedestrians jostled her on the sidewalk; a swinging briefcase caught her painfully on the hip. The sun beat down on her relentlessly. She stepped into a crosswalk and a taxi whipped around the corner against the light, blaring its horn. She arrived at work and forced herself to smile at the hospital security guard as she lifted her hand to the wall panel to gain access to the ER.
Could he tell how different she was?
For the first hour or so she checked vitals and answered call buttons and helped treat a patient with pneumonia. But when she went to retrieve antibiotics from the cabinet in the medicine room, she froze, staring at the bottles of morphine and seeing herself swirl the liquid into James’s drink.
“Amanda?”
Gina was standing in the open doorway to the medicine room. Amanda didn’t know how long she’d been there.
“The IV for room five,” Gina said. “You didn’t change it.”
“Oh, no, I—”
“I already got it,” Gina said crisply. She frowned. “You okay?”
Amanda nodded. “Sorry.” She hurried out of the room. Amanda felt Gina’s eyes on her several more times during the day; she’d endangered a patient. If Gina hadn’t changed the IV, the elderly stroke victim could have become dangerously dehydrated.
Amanda’s shift seemed to stretch twice as long as usual. When she finally arrived home, she couldn’t stop shaking.
* * *
The next day was worse.
She’d barely been at work for a half hour when someone handed her a message: “Hey, a call just came in for you. She wouldn’t leave her name.”