Rosebush (9 page)

“That’s enough for now,” Joe said heartily. “We’ll just be patient and you’ll be good as new in no time.”

I couldn’t move, but I could still feel anger rising inside of me. “How do you know? Did you get a medical degree while I was in the shower?”

“Jane!” my mother said warningly. “There is no cause for rudeness.”

A quiet tapping on the door spared me the rest of whatever she would have said and woman with dark hair in a navy-blue police uniform stepped into the room. “I’m sorry to bother you so soon into your recovery,” she said, “but I have a few questions that could help us find who did this to you.” She gave the impression of being competent and tidy, from the neat bun of her hair to the clear polish on her short fingernails.

My mother assumed her best authoritative manner. “Officer—”

“Rowley, ma’am.”

“Officer Rowley, my daughter only just came out of a coma.” I had this feeling like she said the word as though she was savoring it. I could already hear her spinning it for cocktail parties, using the anecdote to highlight how brave and capable she was. “This is hardly the time for her to be grilled.”

“I know, ma’am, but your daughter is the only one who can help us figure out what happened to her. It’s imperative that we get as much information as we can, as quickly as we can, and Dr. Connolly says if she can speak, your daughter is up to answering questions.” She turned to me. “Do you remember why you were walking alone on the street so late at night?”

Walking? Alone? I didn’t remember anything. My mind was completely blank. “No.”

“Was there a particular reason you went to Dove Street?”

Dove Street? I’d never heard of it. “No. Where is that? Is that near here?”

My mother’s lips got tight and she swallowed. “Dr. Connolly says that this forgetfulness is normal but that she’ll probably recover her memory soon. He’s one of the best in the country.”

That did it. “Stop saying I’m normal, that I’m going to be fine,” I said, raising my voice. It shook. “You don’t know that. You just want to make yourself feel better. I’m paralyzed, Mother.
Paralyzed.
For once look at me. See
me
for what I really am.”

My mother’s lip trembled. “Jane. Don’t say that. This isn’t you, this is just temporary.”

“You don’t know that. You
don’t
know what’s going to happen. No one knows. I could be like this forever.” I tasted tears on my tongue.

“Jane, please. Not now.”

“Why does the time matter? Why not at”—my eyes went to the clock—“three ten? Will it be better at four fifteen? Five twenty-seven? Anyone can see that I’m a mess. That we all are.”

Now tears quivered in my mother’s eyes. “Why are you doing this?”

“Why are you?” I demanded back.

It sounded like the beginning of a hundred fights we’d had over the last two years. “I’m just trying to do my best for us, Jane. For all of us. Why are you so angry at me?” she’d say, and I’d shoot back, “Why are you so angry at
me
?”

And we’d look at each other the way you do when you see someone on the street you think you recognize, but not quite. Someone you wish with all your heart were there but who is actually just a stranger. And you feel a kind of deep longing that hurts like a huge gash and your inability to fix it leaves you frustrated and angry and bone-deep lonely.

Now my mother shifted her eyes to the policewoman and when she spoke, her voice was even, but I could see her knuckles were white and clenched. “I apologize for interrupting,” she said to the officer. “We’re all under a lot of stress. Please go on.”

The policewoman gave her a benign smile and returned her focus to me. “The night of the party. You stepped outside. Maybe you were just getting some fresh air? Or meeting someone?”

Meeting someone? Had I been? I have a sudden flash of memory, of being on a street talking on the phone. “Where’s my cell phone?”

“No cell phone was found with you. Could you have left it at the party?”

“I just—I have this idea that I was talking to someone on it. When I was walking around.”

“It hasn’t been recovered, and there was no sign of one around the scene of the accident. Do you remember anything else? Anything about the car that hit you?”

“No.”

“Wouldn’t there be marks on the car?” Joe said with an air of importance, like he just discovered nuclear fusion. “Shouldn’t you be looking into that?”

“There is very often damage to the car in question, and certainly that’s something we’ll look at when we have a suspect.” The policewoman returned her focus to me. “Do you know of anyone who might want to harm you?”

Before I could answer, my mother said, “No one would want to hurt Jane; she is very popular.”

“I have to ask, ma’am.” The policewoman focused on my mother now. “What about you? Do you or your husband—”

“I don’t have the honor of that title
yet
,” Joe said, with a proprietary grin. I wished I could slug him.

“Fiancé, then. Do either of you have enemies?”

My mother rolled her eyes. “I am a political consultant, of course I have enemies, but none that would cause physical injury, especially to a child.”

“Are you sure?”

“Quite sure.”

“It would be bad for business,” I said.

My mother’s mouth tightened with the effort to resist reprimanding me.

I was interested to hear what Joe had to say about having enemies, but he just said, “That’s irrelevant.” Cop-out. Then he went on the offensive. “Is this just a fishing expedition or do you have any leads, officer?”

“We are exploring a variety of possibilities.”

“Meaning?” Joe challenged.

The policewoman didn’t seem to like him any more than I did. “Meaning we are doing our job.”

Joe stood up. “Can I talk to you outside, officer?”

“Yes, when I’m done here, I’d be happy—”

“You’re done here,” Joe told the woman, tilting his head toward the door.

Their eyes locked. “I would like to have a word with Jane alone.”

“She’s a minor,” my mother said. “I have a legal right to be present.”

“Jane isn’t a suspect, she’s a victim, and I have some questions that she might be more comfortable answering without anyone else present.”

“I demand—”

“It’s okay, Mom,” I said. “I’ll talk to Officer Rowley alone.”

My mother got the thin-lipped look again, but she went, taking Joe and Annie with her.

Officer Rowley pulled a chair up next to the bed and sat down. Close up, I could see that her nails weren’t just short, she’d bitten them. Maybe she wasn’t so perfect after all. “Now, Jane, when I asked if you had any enemies, I felt like you had something to say before your mother stepped in. What was on your mind?”

What had been on my mind was a feeling of someone watching me, someone who hated me. It was like a feathery flick of a memory from the party, more of a sensation than a fact. How would I explain it? “I thought someone was staring at me”? That, coupled with hallucinating a threatening message on the mirror, wouldn’t make me seem insane at all.

No, I was going to stick with things that were concrete and I actually remembered. “I don’t know,” I said finally. “Maybe it was something that happened at the party.”

There was a knock on the door and Loretta came in, three quarters concealed by a huge bouquet of flowers. “I’m going to have to take up weight lifting if you’re sticking around,” she said. “These are the biggest ones—” She stopped, seeing Officer Rowley for the first time. “I beg your pardon, am I interrupting?”

“Yes, I’m afraid so.”

She set the flowers on the windowsill next to the others. “Apologies. I’ll get right out of your way.” She stopped at my bed to say, “They’re from Oliver Montero, in case you were wondering. Your mother already wrote it down.”

“Thanks, Loretta.”

“You okay in here alone?” she asked.

“Yes.”

When the door closed, Officer Rowley resumed. “You said you think maybe something happened at the party. Could it have been something bad enough to make you want to commit suicide?”

I’d been looking at Ollie’s flowers, but my eyes zoomed back to the policewoman. “What? I didn’t want to commit suicide. Why would you ask that?” Just because I hallucinated the writing on the mirror did not mean I wanted to die. A chill was starting to creep through my body, as though tendrils were wrapping around my limbs, pulling me down into a deep dark place.

“Based on your injuries and the angle of impact needed to make them, this wasn’t a normal hit-and-run. It looks like you were kneeling in the middle of the street, waiting for the car to hit you.” She leaned back in her chair, her ankles crossed, pad on her knee like she was relaxed, but I could tell she was watching me closely.

“Kneeling? In the street?”

“Yes. Do you have any idea why you would have been doing that?”

I was stunned. “No. I have—no.”

“There are generally only two explanations for that kind of behavior. Either the person is trying to kill themselves—”

“I told you I wasn’t trying to kill myself.”

“—or the person’s on drugs.” She let that sink in for a moment, then leaned forward, inviting confidences. “Did you take anything?”

“No.”

She studied me as though assessing whether I was telling the truth or not and gave a small nod. “Did you eat or drink anything at the party that could have been drugged?”

I had to think about that longer.

But where did it come from? I’ve got nothing. No memory.

“I don’t know. Maybe. I don’t remember.”

This time she looked at me like she wasn’t sure she believed me. She closed her notebook and stood up, sliding a business card on the table next to my bed. “Here’s how to reach me if you recall anything else.”

The full impact of what she was getting at suddenly hit me. “Do you really think that someone might have drugged me on purpose? To—to hurt me? That this wasn’t an accident but someone out to get me?”

“I don’t think anything yet. We’re investigating. Your being drugged could be unrelated to what happened,” she said. She was watching me closely. Something distrustful, maybe mocking, in her expression reminded me of my friend Bonnie from Illinois.

“But if that’s true, then it was someone at the party,” I said. “One of my friends. Why would one of my friends want to hurt me?”

“Only you can answer that question, Jane.” Her gaze moved toward the new bouquet. “Lilies, tulips, hydrangeas. Lovely and expensive. You have a generous boyfriend.”

“They’re not from my boyfriend, they’re from his best friend,” I corrected.

“Ah.” She tapped her card with a ragged fingernail and went to the door. “Call me if anything occurs to you.”

Chapter 8

Her words, that
mocking glance seemed to linger in the air like the heavy perfume of Ollie’s flowers even after the door clicked closed. Friends didn’t try to hurt you, I wanted to shout after her. Friends protected you from being hurt. If you had friends, you were never alone. And I had friends. Dozens of them. I tried to look at all the flowers on the windowsill, but my eyes drifted beyond them to the sliver of sky above. It was bright blue with a lone cloud floating through it. Perfect weather for a ditch day.

Langley and Kate and I had planned to spend it at the Livingston Country Club working on our base tans. I closed my eyes now and the whirring of the machines around me became the humming of cicadas in the flowering bushes that surrounded the pool. It was punctuated by the soft thwack of tennis balls and the tinkling of glasses as the staff conveyed carts filled with tableware from the dining room to the pool pavilion to set up for the annual Memorial Day dinner dance that night.

I should have been there, stretched out on a lounge, critiquing everyone’s new bikinis, drinking iced tea, and picking on a Cobb salad. I should have been there with them and not here, alone, surrounded by machines, unable to move, my body bruised, my face not my face.

I didn’t have any answers. Just unanswered questions and huge blank spaces in my mind, blank spaces so big I felt like I could drown in them. I was alone, and lost, and free falling. Once, developing negatives during photography camp the past summer, I’d had the feeling that my world was slipping away from me, like I didn’t know which way was up. I felt that way now so strongly I could almost smell the pine trees. I closed my eyes and the memory came flooding back.

The photography camp had been a special intensive program for high school yearbook and newspaper photographers from around New Jersey. It took place out in the woods, under an enamel-blue sky with evergreens marshaled like sentinels around a series of real log cabins. But despite the rich natural palette, I’d signed up for an old-school black-and-white photography elective where we were working on real film, doing everything from taking the pictures to printing the negatives and the photos. When you develop the actual pictures, you can use red lights in the darkroom so even though it’s dark, you can still see. But when you’re developing the negatives you make the pictures from, it has to be pitch black.