An Anonymous Girl (43 page)

I lean back and cross my legs. Thomas is staring at me quizzically, probably wondering why I seem so composed all of a sudden.

“Yes, well, you gave Subject 5 far more than a single dose,” I say, locking eyes with her. “You gave April enough to kill her.”

Thomas inhales sharply. He moves another step closer to me; he’s still trying to protect
me.

Dr. Shields is frozen; she doesn’t even appear to be breathing. But I can sense her brain whirling, composing a new narrative to offset my accusation.

Finally, she walks across the room to take the chair opposite mine.

“Jessica, I have no idea what you are talking about,” she says. “You think I wrote April a prescription for Vicodin?”

“You’re a psychiatrist—you’re allowed to
prescribe medicine,” I challenge.

“True, but there would be a record if I ever wrote her a prescription,” she says, spreading out her hands. “And I didn’t.”

“I can ask Mrs. Voss,” I say.

“Go right ahead,” Dr. Shields responds.

“I know you gave her the pills,” I say. But I’m losing ground; she’s blocking everything I throw at her.

Thomas reaches up and touches his left shoulder.
The gesture appears reflexive.

“How could I give Vicodin to someone else, when I’ve never even taken it myself?” Dr. Shields asks in a reasonable tone, the one that tried to convince me she hadn’t gotten to Noah or made me lose my job.

My watch is recording everything, but Dr. Shields hasn’t incriminated herself. Worse, I’ve enraged her. I can see it in the glint in her narrowed eyes;
I can hear it in her steely tone.

I’m losing.

“You’ve never taken it,” Thomas says. He’s speaking in an odd-sounding monotone.

We both turn to look at him. His hand is still on his left shoulder—the one with the recent scar from his rotator cuff surgery. “But I have.”

The slight smile drops from her face.

“Thomas,” Dr. Shields whispers.

“I didn’t need more than a few,”
he says slowly. “But I never threw out the rest of the bottle. April was in this house the night she died, Lydia. You told me she came to see you and that she was upset. Did you give her my old pills?”

He turns, as if he is going upstairs to check.

“Wait,” Dr. Shields says.

She remains perfectly still for a moment, then her face crumbles. “I did it for you!” she cries.

Thomas staggers,
then collapses onto the love seat. “You killed her? Because I slept with her?”

“Thomas, I didn’t do anything wrong. April made her own choice to swallow those pills!”

“Is it murder if you only provide the weapon?” I ask.

They both whip around to face me. For once, Dr. Shields doesn’t have a response.

“But you did more than that,” I continue. “What did you say to April to drive
her to the edge? You must have known she was suicidal in high school.”

“What did you say to her?” Thomas echoes hoarsely.

“I told her that my husband had a one-night stand and he regretted it!” The words burst out of Dr. Shields in a torrent. “I said he called her a nothing. He said it was the biggest mistake of his life and he would give anything to undo it.”

Thomas shakes his head,
looking dazed.

“Don’t you see?” Dr. Shields pleads. “She was such a foolish girl! She would have told somebody about you!”

“You knew how fragile she was,” Thomas says. “How could you?”

Dr. shields’s face tightens. “She was disposable. Even her own father didn’t want to be around her.” Dr. Shields reaches out for Thomas, but he roughly pulls his hand away. “We can say April took those
pills from our medicine cabinet; we knew nothing about it.”

“I don’t think the police will see it that way,” I say.

Dr. Shields doesn’t even look at me; she’s staring at Thomas beseechingly.

“The authorities won’t believe Jessica. She broke in here, she stalked you, she was obsessed with me,” she says. “Did you know she was accused of stealing before? There’s a respected director who
fired her because of it. She sleeps around and she lies to her family. Jessica is a very disturbed young woman. I have all her survey answers to prove it.”

He briefly slides down his glasses and rubs the bridge of his nose.

When he speaks, his voice booms through the room: “No.”

Thomas finally has the courage to confront Dr. Shields directly. He is no longer trying to escape from her
with fake texts and fabricated stories.

“If our stories match, we’ll be okay,” she says desperately. “It’s two respected professionals against one unstable girl.”

He looks at her for a long moment.

“Thomas, I love you so much,” she whispers. “Please.”

Her eyes are glassy with tears.

He shakes his head and stands up. “Jess, I’m going to make sure you get safely home,” he says.

“Lydia, I’ll come back tomorrow morning. We can call the police together then.” He pauses. “If you bring up the video, I’ll tell them I gave Jess the key to our house and she was picking up something for me.”

I stand, leaving the present by my chair, at the precise moment Dr. Shields crumples to the floor.

She is splayed on the carpet, looking up at Thomas, the white fabric of her dress
bunched around her legs. Tears stained black by mascara run down her cheeks.

“Good-bye, Lydia,” I say.

Then I turn and walk out of the room.

Tuesday, December 25

Of all the losses incurred tonight, the only one that matters is Thomas.

Your job was to test him so that he could be returned to me. Instead, you took him away forever.

Everything is gone now.

Except for the present you left behind.

It is the size of a book, but too thin and light to contain one. The shiny silver wrapping paper
is like a carnival mirror, contorting my reflection before tossing it back at me.

A single tug unfurls the red bow. The paper yields to reveal a flat white box.

Inside is a framed photograph.

Even when pain seems to have crescendoed, there can be yet another peak. Seeing this picture pushes me onto that jagged edge.

Thomas is asleep on his stomach, a floral comforter rumpled around
his bare torso. But the setting is unfamiliar; he is not in the bed we shared.

Was he in yours, Jessica? Or April’s? Or yet another woman’s?

It no longer matters.

Whenever insomnia gripped me throughout our marriage, his presence always provided comfort. His solid warmth and steady exhalations were a balm to the ceaseless churning of my mind. He never knew how many times I whispered,
“I love you,” as he slept on peacefully.

A final question:
If you truly loved someone, would you sacrifice your life for theirs?

The answer is simple.

A last note is recorded in the legal pad: a full, detailed, and accurate confession. All of the questions Mrs. Voss sought will finally be answered. Thomas’s involvement with April is left out of the note. It may be enough to save him.

The sheets from the legal pad are left on the table in the foyer, where they will be easily found.

Not too many blocks away from here is a pharmacy that remains open twenty-four hours a day. Even on Christmas.

Thomas’s prescription pad is retrieved from his top dresser drawer; he kept one at home in case of an after-hours patient emergency.

It is completely dark out now; the endless
sky is devoid of a single star.

Without Thomas, there will be no light tomorrow.

I write myself a prescription for thirty Vicodin pills, more than enough.

Friday, March 30

It seems as though the young woman staring back at me in the reflective glass should look different.

But my curly hair, black leather jacket, and heavy makeup case haven’t changed over the course of the last few months.

Dr. Shields would probably say you can’t judge someone’s internal state by their external attributes, and I know she’s right.

True change isn’t always visible, even when it happens to you.

I shift my makeup case into my left hand, even though my arm doesn’t ache like it used to when I worked for BeautyBuzz. Now that I’ve been hired as a makeup artist for an off-off-Broadway show, I only have to lug it to and from the theater on West Forty-third Street. Lizzie was the one who got me the interview for it; she’s
the assistant costume designer.

It isn’t a Gene French production. His career is over. I was never forced to make the moral choice of whether to tell his wife that he was a predator. Katrina and two other women went to the media with their own stories of how he’d abused them. His downfall was swift; behavior like his is no longer allowed to slide by without repercussions.

I think on some
level I knew why Katrina was reaching out to me, but I wasn’t ready to stand up to Gene then. There’s not much I’m grateful to Dr. shields for, but at least because of her, I’ll never be anyone’s prey again.

I lean closer to the glass, pressing my forehead against the cool window, so I can see inside.

Breakfast All Day is crowded, with nearly every red-leather upholstered booth and counter
stool claimed, even though it’s nearly midnight. Turns out Noah was right; a lot of people crave French toast and eggs Benedict after a Friday evening out.

I don’t see Noah, but I picture him in the kitchen, measuring almond extract into a mixing bowl, a dish towel tucked into his waistband.

I close my eyes and silently wish him well, then keep walking.

He called me the day after Christmas,
when I was in Florida with my family. I hadn’t learned about Dr. Shields’s suicide yet; Thomas didn’t give me the news until later that night.

We talked for nearly two hours. Noah confirmed that Dr. Shields had gotten to him outside of Thomas’s office. I answered all of his questions, too. Although Noah believed me, I knew even before we hung up that I wouldn’t hear from him again. Who could
blame him? It wasn’t just that I’d slept with Thomas; too much had happened for us to have a fresh start.

Still, I find myself thinking about Noah more than I’d expected.

Guys like him don’t come around all that often, but maybe I’ll get lucky again someday.

In the meantime, I’m making my own luck.

I glance down at the time on my phone. It’s 11:58
P.M.
on the last Friday of the
month, which means the payment should have landed in my checking account by now.

Money is vitally important to you. It appears to be an underpinning of your ethical code,
Dr. Shields wrote about me during my first computerized session.
When money and morality intersect, the results can illuminate intriguing truths about human character.

It was easy for Dr. Shields to sit back and form
judgments and assumptions about my relationship with money. She had more than enough; she lived in a multimillion-dollar town house and wore expensive designer clothes and grew up on an estate in Litchfield. I saw a picture of her on a horse in her library; she drank fine wine and described her father as “influential,” which is code for wealthy.

The academic exercise she engaged in was completely
removed from the reality of an existence spent living from paycheck to paycheck, where a veterinarian’s bill or an unexpected rent hike can cause a financial domino effect, threatening to demolish the life you’ve built.

People are motivated to break their moral compasses for a variety of primal reasons
—
survival, hate, love, envy, passion,
Dr. Shields wrote in her notes.
And money.

Her
study has been terminated. There will be no more experiments. The file on Subject 52 is complete.

Yet I still feel linked to Dr. Shields.

She seemed omniscient; as if she could see inside of me. She appeared to know things before I told her, and she drew thoughts and feelings out of me that I didn’t realize I possessed. Maybe that’s why I keep trying to envision how she would record my
final encounter with Thomas, the one that occurred several weeks after her fatal overdose.

Sometimes at night, when my eyes are closed and Leo is snuggled up next to me, I can almost picture her graceful cursive, forming the sentences on her yellow legal pad, as her silvery voice floods my head, flowing along with the arcs and loops of the words.

If she had been alive to create a record
of that meeting, here’s what I imagine her notes might contain:

Wednesday, January 17

You call Thomas at 4:55
P.M.

“Can we meet for a drink?” you ask.

He agrees swiftly. Perhaps he is eager to talk about all that transpired with the only other person who knows the real story.

He arrives at O’Malley’s Pub in jeans and a blazer and orders a Scotch. You are already seated at a
small wooden table with a Sam Adams in front of you.

“How are you holding up?” you ask as he eases into his chair.

He exhales and shakes his head. He looks as if he has lost weight, and his glasses don’t hide the dark crescents under his eyes. “I don’t know, Jess. It’s still hard to believe all of it.”

He was the one to summon the police to the town house after finding the written
confession in the foyer.

“Yeah, for me, too,” you say. You take a sip of beer and let the silence stretch out. “Since I lost my job, I’ve got all this time to think.”

Thomas frowns. Perhaps he is remembering sitting across from you in his office, hearing you whisper,
She got me fired.

“I’m really sorry about that,” he finally says.

You reach into your purse for a pale pink document
and put it on the table, covering it with your palm as you flatten out the creases.

His eyes land on it. He hasn’t seen it before; there is no reason he would have.

“I’m not so worried about a job for myself,” you say. “I’ll find one. The thing is, Dr. Shields promised to help my father get one, too. My family has a lot of medical expenses.”

You smooth the paper again, and slide your
hand down so the sketch of the dove at the top is visible.