Angel of Mercy (28 page)

“The Susie side,” Frankie said shaking his head.

“There are def?“nite, clear personalities in her mind, Frankie, and you’re alive because those two personalities are so sharply delineated.

That’s what the doctors say.”

“Come again?”

“Don’t you know? No one told you?”

“What?”

“Faye Sullivan saved your life. She was a perfect nurse, giving you the right emergency treatment. As Faye, she couldn’t be a murderess. She had to become Susie to do anyone in.”

“The killer saves the life of the policeman who’s coming to arrest her?”

“You’ve got to understand… she wasn’t the killer.

Not in the sense you mean.”

“But what about this Ratner guy?”

“We’re not sure if he came to blackmail them or what.”

“Them?”

Rosina laughed.

“I can’t help it. Does that make me nuts, too? Anyway, Susie says she had to kill him in order for them to continue their good work. She reverted to a medical analogy, comparing him to a cancer. They merely had to cut him out and go on helping loved ones reunite.”

“Lovely young women. I mean…”

“Even the doctors have trouble thinking of Faye as only one person.

They talk about Susie and Faye the way you would talk about two different people. It’s as if her brain split in two distinct parts and those two parts communicate with each other,” Rosina said.

“Anyway, they’re calling you the instinctive detective. You should see Nolan talking to the press with his chest out, describing how unhappy he is that he is losing his best man, a man of age and wisdom who can smell out a crime. I feel like puking at his feet,” she said.

“You’re just jealous.”

“You’ know what he asked me this morning?”

Frankie shook his head. “Can’t imagine.”

“He wondered if your doctor would permit you to be something of a consultant for the department.”

“No shit? Nolan said that?”

She shrugged and leaned oven

“Who knows, maybe he’s a multiple personality, too.”

Frankie laughed and the nurse came over.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “But time is up.”

Frankie smiled.

“You’d better listen to her, Rosina.” He lowered his voice to sound ominous. “She’s a nurse.”

“All right,” Rosina said. “Get better.”

“Get a life, Flores. Don’t end up like me. Say yes to that accountant from Palm Desert and raise a herd of niKos and ni?“as,” Frankie advised.

“I might. We’ve got a date tonight,” she said, and she flashed an impish smile at him before turning to go.

Frankie lay back and closed his eyes. He was alive; he had survived.

He would live to become a different sort of man. Maybe, in a sense, we’re all multiple personalities, he thought. There’s someone else living within us, just waiting for his or her time to emerge.

There’s no sense fighting it, he thought. I’m too tired to resist.

Come on, Frankie Samuels the Second, whoever you are. Come get me.

He drifted off and dreamt about Jennie and him walking toward the famed Palm Springs Indian Canyons, just down from their house. In his dream there was a nearly cloudless sky with a turquoise tint.

The sun had created pockets of shadow and strips of darkness along the brown San Jacinto Mountains.

Here and there along the range, he could see a clump or two of bushes and palm trees, suggesting a mountain spring.

As he walked with Jennie, the vista seemed to come alive. The shadows shifted, presenting the illusion of the mountains moving and turning.

It was magical.

The farther into the valley they walked, the younger Jennie and he became, until he turned to look at her and saw her as she was when they first met. It filled his heart with joy and made him feel they would be together… forever.

Faye yawned. It seemed to her she had been sitting in this office for hours and hours, explaining it repeatedly to Dr. Clark, chief of the psychiatric staff. He sat there taking notes and nodding stupidly, occasionally asking what she considered the most obvious questions:

“How did your sister know these people were waiting for their loved ones? How did she know the people she helped off wanted to go off?

Tell me again why you thought she saw this as her private duty.”

It amazed her, truly amazed her, how incompetent some doctors were, especially psychiatrists. When would the malpractice lawyers turn their money-hungry eyes to this segment of health care and haunt and pursue them with as much vigilance and tenacity as they did medical doctors?

“You’ve been a great help, Faye,” the doctor said.

“I’d like to talk to Susie now. Can you get her for me?

Please.”

Faye stared at him, shook her head and then rose from the chair. She walked down the corridor and turned to go down another corridor, stopping at Susie’s room. She knocked on the door and waited until she heard her say, “Come in.”

“He wants to see you,” she said. Susie was sitting on the bed, her hands in her lap, twirling her fingers nervously. She looked up at Faye.

“They’re all angry at me, aren’t they?”

“They’re not angry. They’re just confused. You have to explain, make them understand. I tried, but it needs to come from you.”

“You’re not going to leave me here, are you?”

“I told you I wouldn’t, didn’t I?”

“Because it wouldn’t be fain”

“I said I wouldn’t. Now, are you going to go to the doctor on your own or do I have to drag you down the corridor?”

“I’m going,” Susie said and stood up. She smoothed down her dress.

“How do I look?”

“What possible difference does that make?”

“I care about my appearance, even though you don’t care about yours.”

“Will you stop that? Will you finally, once and for all, stop that?”

“Stop what?”

“Making comparisons. You’re who you are and I’m who I am. We just happen to look a lot alike.”

“Of course we do. We’re twins.”

“But we’re two different people, and when you finally accept that…”

“What?”

“I’ll be free, that’s what,” Faye said, a little harder than she had intended. Susie’s eyes revealed her pain, but she didn’t cry.

“Okay,” she said in a tired voice. “I’ll try. I’ll try to be a separate person.”

Faye stepped back to let her hobble by.

Down the corridor she limped. Now that she had her back to Faye, she could permit a tear or two to escape and flow over her cheeks.

It seemed to her that she sat with the doctor for hours and hours before he looked up from his notepad to ask his final questions of the day.

“So how do you feel about this now?” he finally asked. “Considering what’s happening to you, where

” you are…

“I feel terrible. I’m locked up here, unable to help the countless others out there who are depending on me.”

“If you were released, you w6uld go back to Palm Springs and continue your work?” he asked.

“No, not Palm Springs. Faye and I are ready to move on,” she said.

“I see. Well now, next time I’d like to talk about your parents more.

Is that all right with you?”

“Of course,” she said.

“You look fidgety today.”

“I happen to be hungry. It’s after twelve,” she said nodding toward the clock. Dr. Clark smiled.

“So it is. All right. Why don’t you go to the cafeteria. We’ve had a good session today.”

“Good for whom? It’s wasting precious time,” Susie said. “There are people in pain.”

“I understand,” he said.

She smirked and got up.

“Let me ask you a question, Doctor.”

“Sure.”

“Are your parents alive?”

“No. My mother died two years ago and my father died last year.”

“See,” she said. “He couldn’t live on much longer without him”

She spun on her heels before he could reply and left the office. She got her food quickly and sat at the same table she had been sitting at since she had first arrived.

The gentleman across from her, Mr. Keach, stared ahead blankly and chewed mechanically. He had yet to say his first word to hen She looked behind her at the attendants chatting by the door and then turned to Mr.

Keach, just as she had every single time before.

“You miss your wife, don’t you? That’s why you won’t say anything to anyone. I know. I’m probably the only one here who knows.”

He continued to chew and to stare.

“I’m going to help you,” she said. “I figured it out last night.

That’s why I’ve been sent here. That’s why all this has happened.”

He turned slowly toward her. She was heartened.

Her words were finally getting through. He was beginning to understand.

She widened her smile.

And then she looked across the cafeteria and brightened even more. All of her couples, including her parents, were seated at the various tables looking her way, holding hands and smiling gloriously.

She had been given the gift of bringing them all together. What more could she ask for?