Lizzie
JULY 11, SATURDAY
I drove from St. Colomb Falls straight to Weill-Cornell Hospital on the Upper East Side. Nestled behind a gate and between dozens of trees, the hospital looked, in the setting sun, more like a leafy college campus than home to Millie’s cancer ward.
When I got off the elevator on Millie’s floor, patients were shuffling about, dragging IVs behind them like stubborn dogs. I hadn’t been in a hospital since my mother’s untimely death, and I’d forgotten how instantly claustrophobic the misery could be.
But then, my lungs had felt caged ever since I’d pulled away from Xavier Lynch’s house, haunted by the thought of Amanda running for all those months from someone who wasn’t even there. Or so Xavier’s story would suggest. It wasn’t as if I planned just to take his word for it. He’d seemed credible, sure, but also definitely threatening. For all I knew, he’d made up the entire thing and really was Amanda’s dad, after all.
Xavier’s story was certainly hard to process, too: Amanda had clearly thought her dad and Carolyn were very much alive. She’d written about both of them in her most recent journal. In one entry, Amanda had even described, in great detail, Carolyn visiting her house in Park Slope. Was that just how deep her commitment to her imagined world had gone? How badly she’d needed to believe? By the time I’d pulled into the St. Colomb Falls County Clerk’s cracked, weed-filled parking lot, I felt nauseous thinking about it.
After some back-and-forth and lots of polite chitchat, the tiny old woman inside the small, brick clerk’s office—mercifully open on a Saturday—had finally confirmed that William Lynch had indeed been killed twelve years earlier, after having murdered a teenage girl named Carolyn Thompson—his daughter’s best friend. No one had gone to jail because the perpetrator—Amanda Lynch, the clerk told me in a loud stage whisper presumably meant to preserve confidentiality—was deemed to have been acting in defense of her best friend.
And so Amanda’s dad reallywasdead. And so was her best friend Carolyn.
Afterward, I’d sat there in the blazing sun, trying to google my way to an understanding of how Amanda might have completely erased such a traumatic episode from her memory, and what her hallucinations might mean about her mental state. One of Amanda’s older journals had talked about Carolyn always getting herself in the middle of things. Was that what had happened that awful night all those years ago? Had Carolyn put herself in harm’s way to protect Amanda and ended up dead herself?
According to the ever-unreliable internet, there were many possible causes for Amanda’s hallucinations: schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, psychotic depression. Some illnesses were more serious than others. Some were episodic, others would have disrupted Amanda’s thinking so completely it was hard to imagine she’d have been as high-functioning as she was. But I did come upon one that seemed to click: delusional disorder. According to the Harvard Medical School website I ended up on, a person with delusional disorder “holds a false belief firmly, despite clear evidence or proof to the contrary … Unlike people with schizophrenia, they tend not to have major problems with day-to-day functioning. Other than behaviors related to delusional content, they do not appear odd.”
Fucking Zach. Could I say for sure that a better husband would have been paying close enough attention to see that Amanda neededhelp? That they might have even saved her from whatever terrible thing had happened to her the night she died? No. I, of all people, could not say that. I could not even say for sure that Amanda had delusional disorder, much less that it was directly tied to her death. But thinking of how tragically isolated Amanda had been was making my chest ache.
“I’m looking for Millie Faber,” I said once I’d made my way to the nurse’s station.
The nurse scanned a list of names. “Room six oh three. Down the hall and to the left.” She pointed without looking up.
I made my way down the hushed hallway, the stillness back there even worse than the sick, shuffling crowd up front. At least those patients had been able to move. In the back, everyone seemed confined to their beds. How could Millie have seemed okay yesterday, only to be staying on the extra sick hallway today? Of course, my mother had gone from completely fine to absolutely dead in seconds. Also, Millie hadn’t actually seemed fine.
I knocked gently as I pushed open the door to 603, relieved to see Millie sitting upright in a corner chair, laptop on her knees, papers spread out across the dirty linoleum floor. She was in a well-fitting navy-blue sweat suit, not a hospital gown, and she had not lost her hair overnight or shed any more pounds.
“Are you supposed to be doing that?” I asked.
“Doing what?” Millie’s tone was gruff, her eyes still on her computer screen. But her face had brightened for a second when she heard my voice.
“Working,” I said.
She shrugged. “It’s work or worry. Better to keep busy.”
The longer I stared at Millie, the worse she looked, though. “It’s more serious than you said, isn’t it?” I asked.
Millie frowned, eyes locked on her computer. She was quiet for a moment more. Finally, she looked up at me. “It had already metastasized by the time they found it—lung, bones,andliver.The trifecta. Apparently, it’s very unique. Lucky me.”
“Millie, holy shit.” I dropped myself down hard on the nearby windowsill. “I’m so—”
Millie held up a hand. “You know I don’t want pity. What Idowant to talk about is how goddamn stupid it was for you to go up there. I thought we had an agreement?”
“Go up where?”
She scowled. “Let’s not lie right to my face. Sam told me.”
“Sam?” I asked. “You don’t even have his number.”
“I went by your house this morning, on my way here,” she said flatly. “Had a feeling you’d gone AWOL. I am a detective, remember?”
Sam had known I was headed to St. Colomb Falls. I’d thrown it at him like a threat:If something happens to me, it will be all your fault.Everything was Sam’s fault now.
“And what did Sam have to say, exactly?”
Millie put the folder down on her lap and rested her hands on top of it. They looked old, bony. “That you’d gone upstate to talk to the dead woman’s father. Who, if I’m not mistaken, you suspect of killing her.” She raised an eyebrow at me. “But Sam didn’t seem to know that part. He seemed confused why you were helping some random guy charged with murder in the first place. There was a lot he didn’t seem to know. Nice guy, though. Chatty.”
