You Are Not Alone(80)
Amanda stared at the words on the little pink slip of paper: Glad you’re feeling better. We’ll see you tonight!
Her knees buckled.
She managed to get through most of her shift. But shortly before it ended, she was rushing to assist a doctor treating a gunshot victim when she lost her footing—her lack of sleep and food combined with her stress making her clumsy—and she fell against the patient, knocking out the chest tube that was helping his lungs expand properly.
The doctor swore, plugging the hole with his hands.
Amanda stared at the red blood covering the doctor’s latex gloves. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t even move for a moment.
“Damn it, Amanda!” the doctor shouted. “Get a crash team!”
Gina ran into the room as Amanda backed away from the gurney.
Instead of helping her patients, she was now a danger to them.
“I have to go,” she blurted to Gina.
Gina didn’t answer; all her focus was on the young man whose chest had been torn apart by a bullet.
Amanda ran down the long hallway, her Crocs squeaking against the linoleum, and exited the building. She stumbled onto the sidewalk, her breathing ragged.
Then she saw a woman standing directly across the street, her sleek dark hair shining in the sunlight.
No. Amanda’s pulse skyrocketed. She spun around and hurried back inside.
She pulled her phone out of the pocket of her scrubs, her fingers trembling, and ordered an Uber. She stood next to the security guard until the vehicle pulled into the circular ER driveway. She ran out and leaped into the car’s backseat. “Hurry, please!” she cried.
When the Uber pulled up in front of her apartment building eight minutes later, her keys were already out. She raced up the steps and burst through her door, double-locking it and stretching out the chain to further secure it.
Her buzzer sounded minutes later.
* * *
The next few days bled together. She called in sick to work on the first day, then turned off her phone.
When she turned it back on, in addition to all the missed calls and messages from the group, there was one from Gina: “Amanda, we need to talk. Call me back.”
But what could she tell Gina?
Sleep was impossible now; the other women were relentless. Sometimes she heard gentle knocking on her door. Once, in the middle of the night, a key scraped in her lock. While she stared, her body rigid, her door swung open until the chain stretched to its limit.
How did they get a key?
Sometimes the voice that floated through the door crack was kind and cajoling: “Let’s talk this through. Sweetie, we’re trying to help you. C’mon, unlatch the door.”
Other times it was stern: “You need to snap out of this. We’ll be fine if we stick together, like we promised to do. James would’ve hurt other women. You saved them, just like you save patients in the hospital. You’ve saved so many women you’ve never even met, Amanda. Open the door.”
The worst were the hisses that seemed to curl through her mind like tendrils of smoke: “You were the one who stole the medicine. You drugged him. You’re the one who will be blamed for all of this. If you don’t start to cooperate, you’ll go to jail for life!”
Was it real, or were the voices only in her head? she began to wonder.
She knew what the other women in the group were capable of, and the punishments they had inflicted, even against people they’d never met—like the parents who’d never bothered to visit their teenaged son as he lay in a medically induced coma after they threw him out of their house because he was gay. The women had waited for months, biding their time until late on a Saturday night after the lights in the parents’ house on Long Island were turned off. Then they uncoiled the garden hose in the front yard. They slipped it through the mail slot and twisted the metal knob to turn it on. Thousands of gallons of water pumped into the main level while the parents slept—saturating the wood floors, seeping through rugs, leaking into the basement, and damaging the home’s structure.
“Let’s see how they like being homeless,” Valerie had whispered to the others as they’d crept away from the house.
And slipping a bit of syrup of ipecac into the drink of the ex-husband who’d left Beth when she was diagnosed with cancer wasn’t enough of a punishment for him, the group decided, even though they’d enjoyed viewing the footage Stacey had recorded of his disastrous event. He’d rushed off the stage just minutes into his poetry reading—but not quickly enough to make it to the bathroom. They’d also created a GIF of him throwing up on the café floor and uploaded it to YouTube, linked to his name, so it could live on in perpetuity.
“That GIF will show up anytime his name is googled,” Cassandra had said.
And they’d gone after the abusive mother who’d lived next door to Stacey, first bribing neighbors to repeatedly call social services on behalf of the little girl. But that was justice, not the revenge they craved. So next they broke into her apartment and planted enough drugs to ensure that even the best lawyer wouldn’t be able to spare her a prison sentence.
Jane made the anonymous call to the police.
Amanda had only known the Moore sisters for less than a year. Somehow it seemed as if she’d been swept up into their orbit for much longer. She’d been dazzled by their charisma, their warmth, the place in the close-knit group they’d opened up to her.