Exit (17 page)

CHAPTER 21

Main and Emergency Entrance
.

Rayne held onto Tim’s arm and looked up at the sign. “Seems like every time I look up, I see that sign.”

“This infirmary has become my second home. I should bring a suitcase. I should have my mail forwarded over here.”

They entered the lobby and headed for the elevators.

“I still can’t believe what happened with James Carney.”

She shrugged. “We’ll deal with that later.”

An elevator opened and they stepped inside with a few people. She watched Tim press a button; he looked tired or freaked or who knew what at this point. She could see her blurry reflection in the elevator door, and wondered if she looked like Lizzie Borden after a rampage. How could their lives slip so quickly over the cliff? As if they held hands and jumped.

Geronimo!

They exited on the twelfth floor and headed down a carpeted corridor to Pod C.

“Why do they call it a pod?”

“Rayne…” He started to speak but stopped, shrugged

She smiled faintly. “Look at us.”

“I know. We may as well be two Martians. Two strangers in an extremely strange land. James Carney, EyeSoar, expanding markets.”

“And drones on the bedroom window. Who needs an alarm clock? The Tinker Bells will wake you.”

They went through an open door, stopped at a reception desk and checked in, and stepped into a small waiting area with chairs, a TV, and a basket with magazines and a newspaper. A wide screen was set against one wall, with the local news on. A half dozen patients were seated. They looked like pirates with their eye cups and bandages.

Rayne sat beside Tim, resting the back of her head against the wall. She could easily take another nap. In a low voice, she asked, “How long do you think you’ll be?”

“Not sure. Might not be too long. I’ll probably first see a tech and have my eyes dilated and tested with charts. Then they’ll take me to another room where I’ll wait to see the doctor. He’ll see if I have an infection, and who knows what else.”

Twelve minutes later a blond female technician dressed in black—shirt, jeans, boots— emerged from a hallway and called: “Tim Crowe?”

Tim rose from his chair and whispered to Rayne, “Lady Goth is here. If I’m not back in an hour, means I’ve been murdered to appease the ghost of Vlad the Impaler.”

“Luck.”

“Thanks. See you soon, I hope.”

Rayne sat alone, hearing the TV newscaster. She picked up a copy of
The New Yorker
on the chair beside her, and flipped it open, seeing aspirational ads for upscale cars and expensive lingerie, but was too distracted to concentrate on beauty creams. She set it back down and glanced at a wall clock by the reception desk: 3:17 p.m. She couldn’t read or watch TV, so she again tilted her head against the wall and closed her eyes, hearing the low voices of patients mixed with the TV program.

Oh, to sleep undisturbed for a solid week. Or a month.

She began to nod off, the surrounding sounds softened somewhat as if being dialed down. Her thoughts skimmed along—Tim and Lady Goth shape-shifted into Martina and Major DeZasta and a series of drones. She pictured herself in a dark basement, arms raised, pushing open cold, metal bulkhead doors and seeing the sky open up before her, a sky choked with drones from here to the horizon. But mostly she just wanted to clear her head for a while, reduce tension, relax. So she concentrated on a simple image, a broom with a long, wooden handle. The broom was inside her head, sweeping side to side. Moving like a pendulum, steady as a metronome. The broom was sweeping away all her cares and woes inside her head. Sweeping her skull clean. Spring cleaning in November. Sweep, sweep.

Rayne nodded off.

Sweep…s-w-e-e-p…s-w-e-e-e-e-e-p.

Rayne drifted away from the twelfth floor of Mass Eye and Ear. She magically drifted through the glass pane of the window and floated outside, high above the streets surrounding Mass General. She twirled in the wind, seeing the Charles River in the distance. A subway train appeared, rocking and rolling over the Longfellow Bridge, leaving Boston, entering Cambridge. Clack-clack-clack on the tracks. The wind lifted her higher, swept her toward the river, toward Cambridge. Breezing along, not a care in the world. Until…

The sweeping stopped. The broom broke its rhythm. A sound interrupted the housecleaning. She was swept back into consciousness. From some dark place down under, she shot upward and her eyelids flickered.

A small hand was on her kneecap, gently moving her knee back and forth. Jiggle, jiggle.

Rayne opened her eyes. And saw her little friend, her secret ally.

Wendy Darlington leaned down before her, inches away from her face, and whispered, “Rain.”

Rayne woke up. Wendy’s expression made Rayne stiffen in her seat. “Wendy? When did you…?”

“Me and my mom gotta pick up my dad.”

“Where’s…?”

“She’s in the bathroom.” Wendy pointed her thumb over her shoulder, indicating the restroom in the hallway. “She’s real upset about my dad. I think she’s got you know diarrhea or something.”

“Nice to see you again. Is something…wrong?”

Wendy nodded and leaned closer. Her hair smelled like fresh strawberries. She whispered, “I think maybe you’re in trouble.”

“What?” Rayne watched the little girl’s face darken. The broom in her head was gone, replaced by a fire alarm.

“This.” Wendy moved slightly to her side, from the waist up. That simple movement unblocked Rayne’s view of the room. Straight ahead, she saw the TV set on the opposite wall. She saw herself on TV.

Her stomach dropped.

The TV screen showed a scene from Harvard Square. The slanted sunlight suggested morning. A small crowd was loosely gathered in the street. Near the
Border Café
. On Church Street. A scroll at the bottom of the screen revealed this news update:
Cambridge man James Carney found murdered.

At the center of the crowd was James Carney. And a man with a cup taped over his eye. And a woman who looked exactly like Rayne Moore. Same face, same clothes, same everything.

“Did you do…”

Rayne looked straight into Wendy’s eyes and said, “No.”

“Does this have something to do with last night? That thing that flew out of your purse?”

Rayne nodded her head slowly as if it weighed one hundred pounds.

Wendy pursed her lips and nodded. “I knew it.”

“Honey, I don’t know what’s going on, but this”—her eyes flicked for a second to the TV— “is not good.”

“What’cha gonna do?”

A policeman flashed on the screen, saying,
“We need…identify these two people…persons of interest…call Cambridge police at….”

Rayne felt a sick swirl in her stomach, and hoped she wouldn’t heave in the waiting room.

“Oh, miss?” A woman sat perpendicular to Rayne, wearing white round earrings, and a cup taped over her right eye. Her left eye flicked at the TV set, then back at Rayne. Confusion clouded her eye. “Is that you? It sure looks like you.”

Rayne felt as if she’d been Tasered. She glanced at the concerned citizen, and imagined herself being arraigned in criminal court for first-degree murder—strangulation. Her eyes shifted back to Wendy.

Wendy’s eyebrows rose in half circles. She leaned forward, her breath warm on Rayne’s ear, and whispered top-secret information. “She’s an asshole. They’re all assholes.”

Rayne barely nodded, unsure whether to laugh or scream, tacitly indicating agreement without encouraging coarse language. She squeezed Wendy’s shoulder in a gesture of
just a minute
. Then she relocated to a chair close to her interrogator, and forced a friendly smile.

“I kinda noticed it too,” Rayne said in a low voice.

“What?” the woman said. Her pinched nose wrinkled when she looked at Rayne with distaste. Each round earring now resembled a tiny radar dish picking up signals.

“The woman on the street there, we look a bit alike, but she’s heavier than me.” Rayne clenched her hands in her lap. Two fists. She imagined the nosy woman, unable to secure a job at the CIA, now spent each day spying on her neighbors.

The woman turned to the TV. “Maybe that’s what they mean by TV cameras adding pounds to you. Ever hear that? You appear on TV, you look fatter.”

“Actually,” Rayne said, resisting the urge to put the woman in a headlock, “what’s happening is quite simple. Did you have retinal surgery?”

“Of course, that’s why I’m here. For my checkup.”

“You probably know this. A retina gets tiny wrinkles when it’s reattached. So your vision gets—“

“It gets sort of squeezed.”

“Exactly. When you look at something, it gets…more narrow. If a door is three feet wide, now it looks two feet wide.”

“Well, that’s pretty much…”

“So when you look at the TV, you’re not really seeing…you know…” Rayne knew she was grasping at straws, trying to remember everything Tim had told her regarding his post-op vision.

Suspicion now clouded Radar’s good eye. “But that person looks like you. You’re both fat.”

I’m five-eight and 134, you blind bitch. You need eye surgery.

Rayne’s hands clenched and unclenched. “Actually, she looks like she could be my obese cousin.”

A man with a bandaged eye, sitting beneath the TV, stood up and looked at the footage. Then he turned his gaze at Rayne and shared his unsolicited opinion. “The lady’s right,” he confirmed from across the floor. “The woman on the street looks like your twin. Or maybe…hmm…”

From somewhere behind, Wendy mumbled, “See what I mean?”

Yes, Wendy, they’re all a-holes.

Rayne was an outsider; she wasn’t wearing a cup. What could she possibly know about wrinkled retinas? Worse, she was clearly losing the argument. Any moment now the receptionist nearby would overhear the exchange, glance up from the computer screen. The reception desk included a telephone. This was a famous, first-class hospital. Hospitals had security. This hospital’s security was probably the Navy Seals of security, specially trained to combat terrorist takeovers of waiting areas.

Rayne suppressed the urge to hurl a magazine rack at the TV screen and watch it shatter. She glanced across the injured. The bandaged folks in the waiting room were morphing into a bloodthirsty lynch mob. She returned to her chair.

Holy Jesus.

It was time for Plan B. Rayne grabbed her phone from her pocket and punched a number. She kept her voice down to a whisper.

Tim’s voice: “Can it wait? I’m with the doctor.”

“We’re on TV. I’m
watching us
on TV
. Get out. Now.”

“What?”

“Now.”

Click.

She replaced the phone in her pocket, saw Wendy circle the room, and drift by the interrogator with the radar earrings. Wendy suddenly fell by the woman’s feet, making a loud
oomph
sound as she hit the blue carpet on her hands and knees. Wendy made an internal sound, a grunt as if she’d been hurt.

Radar jerked in her chair, leaned forward. “Oh, sweetie, are you all right?”

Wendy sneaked a glance at Rayne, then raised her head at Radar, and said with a shrill voice, “You tripped me. You tried to hurt me.”

“Oh, sweetie, I didn’t trip you. No, no. Did you trip on my shoes? Did—”

“You
tripped me
, you old bag. I’m telling my mother. You’ll see!”

Wendy Darlington was providing a distraction, momentary cover. And Rayne loved her for it.

“She didn’t trip you,” said the meddler by the TV.

“You shut up,” Wendy said. “Go play with your cup.”

Hurry Tim.

#

Tim was sitting in a chair in a dimly lit room, facing a slit lamp, a black, optical device that suggested binoculars designed by Salvador Dali. A high-intensity light was shining into his eye. The doctor was saying, “Okay, look straight up. Now look to your upper left. Now look to your left. Now look to your lower left…”

His cell phone rang.

Rayne read him the riot act.

He had two seconds to process everything, and figure out a method of escape.

“Oh my God,” Tim blurted, “I have to go to the bathroom.”

“Excuse me,” Doctor Melvin Eng said. He leaned back from his sitting position on a stool.

“I can’t hold it. Be right back.”

Tim slid off the chair, half stumbling in the dark, and rushed through the door.

We’re on…TV?

What did she possibly mean? It sounded like a death sentence. He hustled through the short hallway, passing doors to examination rooms, and emerged into the waiting area. The first thing he spotted was a little girl causing a commotion. Rayne appeared in his limited field of vision, gripped his arm, and guided him past the reception desk. She spotted something at the corner of the desk by a rack of brochures. With the speed of a cobra striking its prey, she grabbed two black objects, and pulled him out of the room.