The Stranger Next Door Page 4

  “What are you doing here?” I finally managed to get out, swallowing another scream that was rising in my throat, and stretching toward the lamp at the side of my bed.

  “No!” she cried. “Please don’t turn it on.”

  I froze, not sure what to do next. “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you up.”

  “What are you doing here?” I repeated over the loud pounding of my heart.

  “My head . . .” She started pulling at her hair as if trying to pull it out by the roots. “I’m having a migraine.”

  I climbed out of bed, took several tentative steps toward her. “A migraine?”

  “I guess all that red wine must have triggered something—” She stopped, as if unable to continue.

  I reached her side, put my arm around her, lowered her to the side of my bed. She was wearing a long, white cotton nightgown not unlike my own, and her hair hung loose and free around a face wet with tears. “How did you get in the house?” I asked.

  “The door wasn’t locked.”

  “That’s impossible. I always lock it.” Although I’d been pretty woozy, I reminded myself. It was possible I’d forgotten to lock the door, just as I’d forgotten to set the alarm clock.

  “It was open. I knocked first. You didn’t answer. That’s when I tried the door. I was hoping I could find something in your medicine cabinet without waking you up. I’m so sorry.”

  I glanced toward the bathroom. “The strongest thing I have is extra-strength Tylenol.”

  Alison nodded, as if to say anything was better than nothing.

  I left her sitting on the edge of my bed while I ran into the bathroom and ferreted through the mostly useless items on the shelves of the medicine cabinet until I found the small bottle of pills. I shook four into the palm of my hand, filled a glass full of water, and returned with them to my bedroom.

  “Take these,” I instructed. “I’ll try to get you something stronger in the morning.”

  “I’ll be dead by morning,” she said, and tried to laugh. But the laugh detoured into a moan as she swallowed the pills and buried her head against my shoulder, trying to block out what little light there was in the room.

  “That’ll teach both of us,” I heard myself say in my mother’s voice as I stroked her arm, rocked her gently back and forth, like a baby. “You’ll sleep here tonight.”

  Alison offered no resistance as I led her around the side of the bed, pulled the covers around her. “What about you?” she asked, her eyes closed, the question an obvious afterthought.

  “I’ll sleep in the other room,” I said.

  But already Alison had pulled the comforter up over her head, and the only signs I had that she was there were a few strands of strawberry-blond hair that curled over the top of my pillow like a question mark.

  FOUR

  Alison was still sleeping when I left the house the next morning.

  I thought of waking her up, ushering her back to her own bed, but she looked so peaceful lying there, so vulnerable, her soft blush of strawberry-blond hair in marked contrast to her skin’s still ghostly pallor, that I hated to disturb her. My experience with migraine sufferers was that, like most drunks, they needed twenty-four hours to sleep it off. I did the math, decided there was a good chance Alison would still be sleeping when I arrived back home at four o’clock that afternoon. What was the point in waking her?

  Looking back, this was undoubtedly a mistake, although not my first mistake where Alison was concerned, and certainly not my last. No, it was only one of many errors in judgment I made about the girl who called herself Alison Simms. But hindsight is easy. Of course it was stupid to allow a virtual stranger to stay unattended in my house. Of course I was asking for trouble. All I can say in my defense is that it didn’t feel that way at the time. At barely 6 A.M., with maybe a total of four hours of sleep, leaving Alison alone in the house that morning felt natural and right. What was there to worry about after all? That she’d abscond with my ancient nineteen-inch TV? That she’d commandeer a wheelbarrow to cart away my mother’s collection of china head vases, perhaps hold a garage sale on my front lawn? That I’d come back to find the house and cottage burned to the ground?

  Maybe I should have been more careful, more circumspect, less trusting.

  But I wasn’t.

  Besides, what is it they say about letting sleeping dogs lie?

  Anyway, I left Alison sleeping in my bed, like Goldilocks, I remember thinking, chuckling as I tiptoed down the stairs in my clunky white nurse’s shoes, opening and closing the front door as silently as possible. My car, a five-year-old, black Nissan, was parked in the driveway beside the house. I cast a desultory glance down the empty street, hearing the faint hum of traffic several blocks away. The city was waking up, I thought, wishing I could trade my polyester white uniform for my white cotton nightgown and crawl back into bed. Luckily, I wasn’t as tired as I’d feared I might be. In fact, I was feeling surprisingly well.

  I backed the car onto the street, opening the windows to let in the cool morning air. November is a lovely time of year in South Florida. The temperature usually stays on the comfortable side of eighty; the oppressive humidity of the summer months is pretty much gone; the threat of extreme weather is over. Instead, the sky provides a continually shifting combination of sun and clouds, along with the occasional burst of welcome rain. And we get more than our fair share of absolutely flawless afternoons, days when the sun sits high in a borderless panorama of shiny Kodacolor blue. Today looked as if it might be that kind of day. Maybe when I got home, I’d see if Alison was feeling well enough to go for a walk on the beach. There’s nothing like the ocean to heal the spirit and calm the troubled soul. Maybe it could work its magic on a migraine headache, I thought, glancing up at my bedroom window.

  For a minute, I thought I saw the curtains move, and I hit the brake, inched my face closer to the glass of the car’s front window. But on closer inspection, it appeared I’d been mistaken, that it was only the outside shadows of nearby trees that were dancing against my bedroom window, creating the illusion of movement from inside the house. I sat watching the window for several seconds, listening to the whispering of the palm fronds in the breeze. The curtains at my bedroom window hung undisturbed.

  My foot transferred from brake to gas pedal, and I proceeded slowly for several blocks along Seventh Avenue until I reached Atlantic, where I turned left. The normally congested main thoroughfare of Delray is largely empty at this hour of the morning, one of the few perks of having to be at work so early, and I had an unencumbered view of the many smart shops, galleries, and restaurants that had redefined the city in recent years. To the surprise of many, myself included, Delray had become something of a “hot spot,” a destination as opposed to a drivethrough. I loved the unexpected changes, the aura of excitement, even if I was rarely part of it. Alison, I knew instinctively, would love it here.

  I passed the tennis center on the north side of Atlantic, where every spring they hold the Citrix Open, past the Old School Square on the northwest corner of Atlantic and Swinton, continued on past the South County Courthouse and the Delray Beach Fire Station on my left. I took the underpass at I-95 to Jog Road, then headed south. Five minutes later I was at the hospital.

  Mission Care is a small, private health facility housed in a five-story building, painted bubblegum pink, that specializes in chronic care. The majority of patients are elderly and in considerable distress, and as a result, they’re often angry and upset. Who can blame them? They know they aren’t going to get better, that they’re never going home, that this is, in fact, their final resting place. Some have been here for years, lying in their narrow beds, blank eyes staring at blank ceilings, waiting for the nurse to bathe them or adjust their position, longing for visitors who rarely come, silently praying for death while stubbornly clinging to life.

  It must be so depressing, people are always saying to me, to be constantl
y surrounded by the sick and the dying. And sometimes, I admit, it is. It’s never easy to watch people suffer, to comfort a young woman stricken by MS in the prime of her life, to tend to a comatose child who will never wake up, to try calming an old man with Alzheimer’s as he shouts obscenities at the son he no longer remembers.

  And yet, some moments make it all worthwhile. Moments when the most banal act of kindness is rewarded by a smile so blinding it brings tears to your eyes, or by a whispered thank-you so sincere it makes you go weak at the knees. This is why I became a nurse, I understand in moments like these, and if that makes me a hopeless romantic or a silly sentimentalist, so be it.

  Probably it is this quality that makes me such an easy target. I suffer from Anne Frank’s delusion that people are basically good at heart.

  I parked my car in the staff parking lot at the front of the hospital and made my way through the lobby, past the gift shop and pharmacy that wouldn’t be open for another few hours, to the coffee shop that was already busy. I waited in line for a cup of tasteless black coffee and a fat-free, cranberry-studded muffin. I thought of Alison, how much she loved cranberries. I had a recipe at the back of one of my drawers for banana-cranberry muffins. I decided to make a batch when I got home.

  The administration offices were closed till nine, and I made a mental note to stop by later to inquire about Alison’s friend, Rita Bishop. Even though Alison had told me not to bother, I thought it might be worth a try. Rita might have left a forwarding address. One of the secretaries might know where she’d gone.

  I’d already finished my coffee and was halfway through my muffin when the doors of the excruciatingly slow-moving elevator finally opened onto the fourth floor. The nurses’ station was already buzzing. “What’s up?” I asked Margot King, a heavyset woman with copper-orange hair and blue contact lenses. Margot had been a nurse at Mission Care for more than ten years, and during that decade the color of her eyes had changed almost as often as the color of her hair. The only constant was the color of her uniform, which was a crisp Alpine white, and the color of her skin, which was a wondrous ebony black.

  “Rape victim,” Margot said, her voice a whisper.

  “A rape victim? Why’d they bring her here?”

  “The rape was three months ago. Guy beat her with a baseball bat, left her for dead. She’s been in a coma ever since. Doesn’t look like she’s going home anytime soon. Her family decided to bring her here when Delray Medical Center needed the bed.”

  “How old?” I asked, bracing myself.

  “Nineteen.”

  I sighed, my shoulders collapsing, as if someone had jumped on them from a great height. “Any more pleasant surprises?”

  “Same old, same old. Mrs. Wylie’s been asking for you.”

  “Already?”

  “Since five o’clock. ‘Where’s my Terry? Where’s my Terry?’ ” Margot repeated in Myra Wylie’s frail voice.

  “I’ll look in on her.” I started down the hall, stopped. “Is Caroline here yet?”

  “Not till eleven.”

  “She gets migraines, doesn’t she?”

  “Oh, yeah. She suffers real bad from those damn things.”

  “When she gets in, will you tell her I need to see her?”

  “Problems?”

  “A friend,” I said, continuing down the peach-colored hall toward Myra Wylie’s room.

  I slowly pushed open the door and peeked my head through, in case the frail, eighty-seven-year-old woman fighting both chronic leukemia and congenital heart disease might have drifted back to sleep.

  “Terry!” Myra Wylie’s voice wafted up from the center of her hospital bed, quivering into the air like smoke from a cigarette. “There’s my Terry.”

  I approached the bed, patted the bony hand beneath the sterile white sheets, smiled at the graying face with the watery blue eyes. “How are you today, Myra?”

  “Wonderful,” she said, the same thing she said every time I asked, and I laughed. She laughed too, although the sound was weak and segued quickly into a cough.

  Still, in those few seconds, I saw traces of the beautiful, vibrant woman Myra Wylie had been before her body began its slow, insidious betrayal. I could also make out the face of her son Josh in the sculpted lines of her cheekbones, the soft bow of her lips. Josh Wylie would be a very handsome old man, I couldn’t help but think as I pulled up a chair and sat down beside his mother. “I understand you’ve been asking for me.”

  “I was thinking maybe we could do something different with my hair next time we wash it.”

  I smoothed the fine gray hair away from her face with my fingers. “What style do you think you’d like?”

  “I don’t know. Something more with it.”

  “With it?”

  “Maybe a bob.”

  “A bob?” I fluffed out the fragile wisps of hair that framed Myra’s face. Her skin was sinking, the heavy lines around her eyes and mouth becoming folds, caving in around her. Slowly, the living tissue was morphing into a death mask. How much longer did she have? “A bob,” I repeated. “Sure. Why not?”

  Myra smiled. “That cute little nurse with all the freckles was in last night. The young one, what’s her name?”

  “Sally?”

  “Yes, Sally. She brought me my medicine and we got to talking, and she asked me how old I was. You should have seen the look on her face when I told her I’m seventy-seven.”

  I searched Myra’s eyes for signs she was teasing, saw none. “Myra,” I told her gently. “You’re not seventy-seven.”

  “I’m not?”

  “You’re eighty-seven.”

  “Eighty-seven?” There was a long pause as Myra’s trembling hand reached for her heart. “That’s a shock!”

  I laughed, stroked her shoulder.

  “Are you sure?”

  “That’s what it says on your chart. But we can check with your son next time he visits.”

  “I think that’s a good idea.” Myra’s eyes fluttered to a close, her voice growing faint. “Because I think there has to be some mistake.”

  “We’ll ask Josh on Friday.” I eased out of my chair and walked to the door. When I turned back to check on her, she was sound asleep.

  The rest of the morning was uneventful. I tended to patients, fed them their breakfast and lunch, changed soiled sheets, helped those who could still walk to the bathroom. I looked in on Sheena O’Connor, the nineteen-year-old rape victim who’d been transferred from Delray Medical Center, filling the room with idle chatter as I surveyed the scars and bruises that made a mockery of her once innocent face, but if she heard me, she gave no sign.

  Normally, I eat lunch in the hospital cafeteria—the food is surprisingly good and you can’t beat the price—but today I was anxious to check on Alison. I thought of phoning, but I didn’t want to wake her in case she was still sleeping, and besides, I didn’t think she’d answer my phone. So armed with two Imitrex tablets I’d bought from Caroline—”I’d give them to you, but they’re so damned expensive!”—and the names of several doctors in the area I thought Alison should contact, I used my lunch hour to drive home and see how she was doing.

  Pulling into my driveway, I saw a young man with a baseball cap pulled low on his forehead lurking behind a corner tree, in almost the same spot where I’d seen the man yesterday, but by the time I parked my car and came back to look, he was gone. I looked down the street in time to see him disappear around the corner and thought momentarily of going after him. Luckily I was distracted by the sound of barking dogs, and I turned back toward my house. Bettye McCoy was standing beside a neighbor’s prized rosebush, pretending not to notice that one of her dogs was peeing all over it. I thought of asking her if she’d noticed any suspicious strangers in the area, but decided against it. Bettye McCoy had barely acknowledged my existence ever since I’d chased one of her precious Bichons out of my yard with a broomstick.

  I slipped my shoes off at the front door, silently cursing the slight creakin
g noise the door made as I closed it, determining to oil it when I got home at the end of my shift. The house was eerily quiet except for the gentle hum of the air conditioner. A quick look around told me everything was in its correct place. Nothing had been disturbed.

  I tiptoed up the stairs to my bedroom, coughed quietly so as not to scare Alison if she was awake, then opened the door.

  The curtains were still pulled, so it took me a few seconds to determine that the room was empty and the bed neatly made. Goldilocks was no longer sleeping in my bed. “Alison?” I called out, checking the bathroom and the second bedroom before heading back downstairs. “Alison?” She was gone.

  “Alison?” I called out again at the door to her cottage, knocking gently. No one answered. I tried peering in the windows, but I saw nothing. Nor could I hear anyone moving around inside. Was it possible Alison had felt well enough to go out? Or was she lying on her bathroom floor, her head pressed against the cold tiles for relief, too sick and weak to respond to my knock? Despite common sense telling me I was overreacting, I returned to the front door and knocked more forcefully. “Alison,” I called loudly. “Alison, it’s Terry. Are you all right?”

  I waited only thirty more seconds before letting myself in. “Alison?” I called again once inside.

  I knew the cottage was empty the minute I crossed the threshold, but still I persisted, repeatedly calling out Alison’s name as I inched toward the bedroom. The clothes she’d worn last night lay in a careless diagonal across the bedroom floor, discarded and abandoned where they fell. The bed was unmade and redolent with her scent, a potent mix of strawberries and baby powder still clinging to the rumpled sheets and crumpled pillows, but Alison herself was nowhere to be seen. I’m embarrassed to say I actually checked underneath the bed. Did I think the dreaded bogeyman had surfaced, snatched Alison while she lay sleeping? I don’t know what I thought. Nor do I know what possessed me to check the small, walk-in closet. Did I think she was hiding inside? Truth to tell, I don’t know what I was thinking. Probably I wasn’t thinking at all.