The Woman In The Cherry-Red Convertible By The Platinum Sea

by Ilsa J. Bick

His name didn't matter to the type of Chicago people who lived on Lake Shore Drive, or Hawthorne Place. What mattered was he did the jobs the rich folk wouldn't, such as stripping insulation in musty old attics when it was hot enough to melt crayons. He dragged his forearm across what little he could reach of his face above his mask, mopping away sweat. He hated the fucking mask, except there was dust and asbestos and old insulation and Christ knew what shit floating around up here.

He tugged free a long tail of tattered insulation, and then he saw the suitcase wedged between two bare beams. He wasn't surprised. People put all sorts of things in attics that they forgot about: golf clubs, dead televisions, or Aunt Betty-Lou's still life of petunias that looked like Van Gogh on heroin. The black oilcloth case with brown leather trim had been elegant, once. It was the type of case he remembered from old movies when they still knew how to make movies, the kind where stickers showed where a person had been. This case had no stickers, though there were initials he could barely make out: one was N. The second was K. He thought the last initial might be F or E, but he wasn't sure because the oilcloth was cracked and fissured with age. The edges were metal-capped and there were two leather handles, one on the long, horizontal edge and another on the shorter, vertical edge. Rust sprayed over the two plated latches that secured the shorter vertical edge, and he reasoned that the case opened lengthwise instead of horizontally. Judging by the holes riddling the case, there was probably an old mouse nest in there.

He reached for the leather handle on the short, vertical edge. The case was light, but the leather handle had rotted and the plated latches were brittle. So the suitcase tore open as he pulled it free, and the contents tumbled out. Then he couldn't help it. He got a good look and dropped the case as if he'd been scorched.

"Ah, God," he said, his voice muffled by his mask. He felt his gorge rising, and tasted something sour in the back of his throat. "Aw, fuck me, Jesus."

The blanket had once been baby blue. It was white with age now and shredded, courtesy of the mice. The mice had also done a really good job of picking the baby clean.

Retching, he ripped off his mask and splattered vomit, as small brown bones bounced over bare wood, like orphaned buttons.


 

The dream is black and horrible: blood everywhere, and wings rushing, like the headlong flight of a frenzied bat. Rachel is racing down a darkened alley, only she's going so quickly she's flying, and there are the voices, whispery as rat's feet over sand, swirling and echoing off moist brick. She thinks she might be flying away from something, but as the nightmare spirals out, she realizes that there's a shape at the mouth of the alley. Someone earthbound, walking, fast, heels clapping a staccato beat.

Suddenly Rachel understands that she isn't running or flying at all. She is rushing toward Fate, not in the slow-motion way of nightmares but fast, hell-bent, her life collapsing to this moment the way the tube of a spyglass folds in upon itself, and for an instant, she is in two places—two people—at once: the shape that's rushing pell-mell and the smaller, earthbound, frightened person tripping along in heels down the alley. Her heart thunders in her ears, and a clutch of terror has her by the throat so she can't scream.

And then she's caught—not in the one who's trying to get away, but in the other: the shadow, the thing with murder on its mind. And in the last second, as she's swinging something heavy, she feels the emotion surging through her, hot as molten lead: revenge. Rachel lets out a wild animal howl, the heavy weight in her hand propelling her forward as if she's thrown a bolo. The impact jerks the breath from her lungs, and then there is the shiver that runs up her right arm, and hot blood splashes into her face, and her mouth fills with a liquid that tastes like rust as the bells that are louder than the voices ring and ring …


 

And the phone rang again, hacking the dream in two as neatly as if the nightmare had been a neck sliced by the keen edge of a guillotine. My eyelids flew open, and my heart shuddered and then knocked against my ribs, the way the wings of parakeets beat against a cage that is too small. I dragged in a sharp, terrified breath, and then another.

Be calm, you're in your bedroom, you're in Milwaukee. You're not stalking the streets like a crazed vampire.

But my right arm hurt, and at that moment, I remembered the momentum of a huge weight nearly yanking me off my feet. My head throbbed, and my voices, those damn voices, bludgeoned my brain with the insistence of jackhammers pulverizing concrete: Wake up, Rachel, wake up! My sheets were damp, as if I'd had a high fever, and my skin crawled with the slick, slippery feel of sweat. The room stank of fear and wet rust.

The telephone bleated again, and my voices shrilled that, for God's sake, I should answer the fucking phone already. So I did what they said.


 

Something bad's happened, and now Sonia's dying. At least, that's what the voices scream: For God's sake, keep bagging her, I need that atropine now, right now, crank her up to three-twenty! Clear, clear the damned bed! Where the hell's anesthesia?

All this noise. All this fuss. And the burning smell now—Clear!—is so sweet and crisp it's like roast pork left too long in the oven.

So maybe that's why Sonia decides to take a drive in a cherry-red convertible toward a platinum sea through a city she can't quite place. The top's down, so the wind pulls at her long blonde hair, teasing it free of her lemon-yellow scarf. Too late, Sonia snatches, but her scarf suddenly whirls away, spinning high and higher on a column of air, like newspaper caught in a dust devil. The sky is brilliant and china blue, and the streets and buildings flash by. There are no traffic lights, no police, and she heads east toward the lake that she first thought to be the sea because it seemed so endless but isn't. She drives so fast that everything blurs: glass-fronted buildings and sidewalks and green bronze dragons atop red brick that, much later, she will learn is the city library. Driving fast, headlong, like Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant: She can't remember the name of the movie because it was so long ago, back in 1954, she thinks. Four years later, in 1958, she'll marry Frank because she has to. In 1963, she will do something very bad, and there will be a nightmare.

And that's when Sonia knows. She doesn't want to say wrong because the feeling isn't as definite as knowing she's circled B when she meant A, or doesn't say Nick, stop even though she'll go to a hell she doesn't believe in, and she brings the nightmare that much closer. But the city's not right. No people on the sidewalks. No birds in the air. And even her own blonde hair, flailing in the wind, is too perfect: not roiling like a nest of snakes, but straight and flowing like the scarf that caught in the rear wheel of Isadora Duncan's convertible and strangled her to death before snapping her neck in two.

Sonia drives her cherry-red convertible through a deserted city until she comes to the shores of a lake that should be a sea but isn't. The sun is so strong, the lake is mirror-bright and platinum-gold, and the buildings march like glass and steel soldiers to the very edge and look like drawings she's seen of the way the future will be, and she thinks: Chicago. I'm in Chicago.

The platinum sea wavers and breaks.


 

"Rachel? Do you understand what Dr. Fowler's saying?"

Instantly—it was so fast now the action was reflex—I cataloged the voice. Right ear, male, non-accusatory: Dr. Winter, a real-person person. I always made mental calculations to judge how—if—to respond. I'd held so many conversations I could afford a little exclusivity. For example, I could safely say that God was a sucky conversationalist and not nearly as interesting as Satan. But since I'd started the new treatments a few months ago, my voices had subsided, muffled under yards of mental cotton—as distant and formless as the sleepy cries of a tiny baby in a dark room late at night.

That is, until early this morning: until that damned dream. That shadow in the alley. The thing I became.

Even knowing that Winter was there and very real, I didn't turn around but stared at angry whitecaps fracturing the surface of Lake Michigan. I had a good view: an eighth-floor window of the Milwaukee Lakeshore Hospital's ICU. I studied my reflection in the double-paned glass. I'm not pretty. Grim is the word that comes to mind. But that morning I looked awful: pale, square face; murky hazel eyes; greasy brown hair shot through with gray at the temples; and lips that were so white they disappeared.

The police had come and gone: two detectives from Violent Crimes named Priest and Cross—no joke. They'd met me at the hospital, given me business cards that I'd tucked into the back pocket of my jeans. I told them the truth of my life in shorthand: forty-four, single, a freelance journalist with a penchant for architecture (probably on account of all the damn states she'd lived in because her mother would pick up and move at the drop of a hat), and resident crazy woman. The crazy woman hadn't spoken to her mother in seven years because, well, her mother had pretty much disavowed the crazy woman. So the crazy woman had been alone, in bed, dreaming bad dreams and hearing voices.

Winter, again: "Rachel?"

I turned. Winter stood next to a woman named Fowler, who was my mother's doctor, and he held a long sheaf of paper with black squiggles. Winter was in his standard shrink outfit: blue jeans, black shirt, black boots, no white coat. Winter's a bit eccentric. He's thin as a reed, has ears like car doors, and wears rimless glasses, and I expect he chose psychiatry because he was an awkward, geeky kid. Winter's still the most compassionate, best psychiatrist I've ever had.

"I heard you," I said, looking first at Winter then Fowler, and then back to Winter. "But I don't know what you're saying. Is my mother dead or not?"

Winter's voice was matter of fact. "Rachel, the trauma to your mother's brain was severe. After surgery, she arrested in the recovery room, and she remains on life support. That's very bad." He held up the sheaf of paper. The paper rustled. "It's also bad that her EEG doesn't show brainstem or somatosensory evoked potentials. For all intents and purposes, your mother is brain dead … almost."

"What do you mean, almost?"

"Because there is something." This came from Fowler. She wore green surgical scrubs and still had a green surgical mask tied around her neck, and I saw that her ponytail of dark brown hair was coming undone. "Your mother has localized seizure activity in the angular gyrus of the inferior parietal lobe. That means she's got random seizure bursts, deep in the brain. We don't know if they were there before or not. Legally, I can't suggest taking her off life support until we're absolutely sure the damage is irreversible and that the seizure activity is meaningless."

"What do you need to make sure?"

Winter and Fowler glanced at one another. "I'd like to do a few comparison studies, if you don't mind," said Fowler. "There's really no urgency here. There's no reason to get upset."

"Yes, there is," I said, even though I hadn't been getting upset until she said that, a tacit admission on her part: Jesus, you gotta watch those crazy folks. "My mother's pretty much dead. You just said so. Now you want permission to pull the plug. But first I should wait a few more hours until it's more convenient, so you can run tests. What the fuck do you want from me?"

"Rachel, cut the crap," said Winter, not placating me at all but giving back tit for tat. It's what I love about him. "Fowler's doing her job. No one's denying that this is hard, but this is serious stuff. Someone came up behind your mother as she walked home from a restaurant and clobbered her with a hammer. So whoever attacked her wanted her very dead. Despite the fact that there's some rudimentary brain activity and those seizures, I think he succeeded. But there're no second chances here. We turn off life support without making absolutely sure, it's over."

"Oh, Jesus Christ." I felt tears start in my eyes, and that made me mad. I thought I was done crying over my mother. I stared down at the woman I didn't know: a tube, with clotted green junk sucked out of her stomach, snaked out of her nose; clear tape crisscrossed her mouth; a rust-colored blossom of Betadine and old blood bloomed on a bandage wrapped around her head like a white turban.

And now, of all the stupid times for the voices to start up, they did: Fucking cunt, you bitch, you slut whore, this is your fault …

"What do you want me to do?" I said, over the din, being careful not to shout.

"Give us time, Rachel. Let us make sure. Then," Winter's voice was kind, "you do what you have to. What makes sense."


 

Sonia sits on the hood of her cherry-red convertible, staring at the platinum lake that isn't a sea but ought to be. She knows without looking that if she glanced over her shoulder at the Sears Tower—and that's wrong, too, because the tower wasn't built until 1973, and now this is 1959, and I'm married and a mother—the tower might not be there. She's frightened that this is the way it will be with the entire city: that it exists only in the space of time that she thinks it before vanishing, like a heat mirage.

The mind's tricky. She's been reading. The books are at home. And home is Milwaukee now: not Los Angeles or Denver or Cincinnati or the other places I've run to. But Chicago is where memory takes me, where my life began and ended. The books are stacked in a neat pile on an oak night table, next to a photograph that her daughter's never seen because the time was never right, though Sonia knows that she's run out of time. But, as Sonia's gotten older, she's wanted to understand what her daughter's gone through—except she's started too late.

I wish we could say your daughter's got something like schizophrenia, but she doesn't. Her brain's quite unusual, the way it's structured. Think of it like a house that someone hasn't put together quite right.

Freud, Sonia thinks now. Freud said that a house is the dreamer, and the unconscious is a dark attic crammed with suitcases and clothes and boxes. So you swing your flashlight over the attic, and things jump out. Now there's a box, now there's a bicycle: here and then gone as soon as you've pointed the light somewhere else. Now there's a lamp, now there's a radio.

And now there's the suitcase.

In her mind's eye, Sonia sees the suitcase in bold relief, as if the image were a paper cutout pasted on a stark white background: black oilcloth, twin handles, brass plating, and two brass latches. And the initials, in white: N.K.F.

Sonia squints at the platinum sea, bright as a new penny: the same color as the copper pans in the big mansion on Hawthorne Place, the one with a third story and an attic. And Nick.

She realizes she can go there. Just as quickly, she understands that these mind-pictures are the only functions of her body she can control. She thinks back to the sensation of something electric sizzling along her limbs and the stench of charred flesh. With the memory, there is pain: sudden, quick, blinding. Before the pain, there was a feeling that someone followed, and she turned as there was a rush of air, and then a feeling of recognition? resignation? as she recognized who and, more importantly, why just before her face exploded and the world fell away. She knows she won't be going back to that world, either—the one that used to shield her the way a shell armors the soft vulnerable body of a hermit crab. Only her brain is the crab now, and it's scuttled out, searching for somewhere else in some other when.

Sonia slithers off the hood of her cherry-red convertible and turns away from the platinum sea and heads north: toward Nick. Toward the house on Hawthorne Place.


 

I took a cab to my mother's townhouse. She lived on Mequon Road, fifteen minutes south of downtown Milwaukee, and had been there for eight years, the longest I'd ever known her to live anywhere. I'd never been inside, but I saw that the police had beaten me to it.

"Detective Fine," he said. We were standing in a living room that smelled of roses from a Yankee Candle on a low wooden coffee table and had pictures, probably of people I didn't know, scattered on the walls and littering an oak sideboard. Detective Fine was a big man, about my age, and broad in the shoulders, though not Wisconsin-fat. Solid was the word that came to mind. The type of man you'd want to have around to punch out a mugger or open a jar of pickles. I knew before he pulled out his badge case that he was a detective, and I thought, Christ, fuck, not again, I've just had a lot of bad dreams, I didn't do anything.

And a voice, a woman's, right ear: But you're guilty, you slut, bitch, whore.

No way, I thought right back. My mother was always a cipher, and I know she hated me after I got sick. But when she was attacked, I was home, in bed.

Dreaming black, bloody dreams.

And they were just dreams.

But your arm hurt when you woke up. And you smelled of sweat and wet rust. You did it, you know you did. Don't deny that you're guilty of sins against God, you slutbitchcunt, you whore …

I didn't bother answering. Instead, I inspected the gold shield: Milwaukee Police. Detective Fine's number was 3-4-0, and I thought, Cagney and Lacey. Wrong city, though. I handed back the case. "I already talked to the police at the hospital."

"I know that," said Fine, tucking the case into the breast pocket of his coat. His jacket was rumpled like the folds of an accordion, and his tie tack was a tiny pair of silver handcuffs. His hair was a nondescript brown and, like mine, showed a liberal amount of gray and silver. His eyes were blue but very pale, like gray ice. There was a small scar arcing beneath his lower lip that reminded me of Harrison Ford. "I'm from Homicide."

"My mother's not dead yet," I said, stupidly.

"But she's on life support, and they're just waiting on you to …"

"To tell them to pull the damn plug." I knew I was being nasty and vicious but decided I didn't give a damn. "Actually, I'm waiting on them. Then they unplug her, and then she'll be dead-dead. So I guess you're just really eager, huh?"

Fine's voice was mild. "I had a few questions, but when I came by the hospital, you'd already left. The nurse there said you'd gone to your mother's house."

"Yes," I said, feeling my pulse beat in my neck. "I came to get some of her things—to make her look nice."

Fine studied me with those ice-gray cop eyes. "Okay. Mind if we talk?"

Instinctively, I wanted to refuse. I hadn't done anything, but I was feeling defensive and guilty, as if I had. I knew these were the crazy thoughts of a crazy woman. Plus, my voices were there, the air thick with whispers: You can't refuse. He's already suspicious. And that woman, far away now, laughed: an evil sound.

So I said sure, and together we went up the carpeted stairs. My mother's bedroom was to the right and smelled like lilacs. Besides a king-sized bed and a bureau that was painted white with green-checked trim, there was an oak night table with a glass top. There was a telephone on the nightstand, a stack of books, and a photograph in a wooden frame.

I went to the bureau. Fine fingered the photograph, studying it a long moment. Then, still holding the photograph, he surveyed the titles on the nightstand. "Freud, Jung. Your mother into psychology?"

Not when it mattered, I thought. Pulling open a bureau drawer, I riffled through folded underwear and tweezed out a pink panty. "We never talked about it."

"What did you talk about?"

The next drawer held my mother's nightgowns, and I chose one that was sea-foam green with lace and a light blue bow at the throat. "Not much," I said.

The voices: You're guilty, he's got you, you slut.

"We haven't spoken in years," I said.

"Why is that?"

Playing cop games, I thought. He was a cop; he had to know about me, and the fact that he was jerking me around made me mad. "You're a detective. You tell me."

Fine replaced the frame on the night table. The wood clicked against the glass top. "Why are you so angry?"

"Fuck me, Detective, I don't know. Someone made scrambled eggs out of my mother's brain, and now I get to tell some doctor to turn her off." I would've said more, but my voices were shrieking that I should shut the hell up already, and I decided that they were, for once, right on the money.

Fine said, "You're diagnosed with some sort of psychiatric illness, is that correct?"

The shift was a little jarring, but that's how detectives in novels did things. "You read my record."

"I read that you've tried suicide, gotten kind of violent, and ended up in jail a couple of times, yes. Mostly, you got transported to the hospital."

Whore. Bitch fucking slut.

"My old doctor tried tapering my medicine too quickly," I said, ignoring the voices, all male. "I got sicker. Anyway, I'm off antipsychotics now."

Fine dug into his coat pocket, withdrew a tiny spiral-bound notebook and a pencil, and began flipping pages, just like Columbo. "Why is that?"

"They don't work. The doctors say I'm different. Part of my brain's missing. Einstein had the same thing. He was missing a tiny little piece called the parietal operculum. People think that's why Einstein said his ideas came to him in visions, because other parts of his brain had gotten bigger to compensate. Except I don't see pictures, and he did, and he was a genius, and I'm not, and my memory's not so good for some things. So I guess the similarity ends there."

"What type of treatment are you getting now?"

"It's experimental."

"Oh?" asked Fine, the nubbin of a pencil in his right hand. "What is it?"

I pulled in a breath then let it out. "It's called TMS: transcranial magnetic stimulation. They put this big magnet on my scalp over the part of my brain they think is malfunctioning. Then they flip the switch, and this magnetic pulse generates an electric field. It's supposed to target the cells that are hyperactive and firing too much, and that's supposed to keep the voices down."

"Has it?"

"Pretty much." That was true. Until last night, I hadn't heard my voices for two weeks.

"When was the last time you saw your mother?"

"Seven years ago. She came to say good-bye."

Fine's eyebrows met. "Good-bye?"

"That's right," I said, and I was surprised that thinking about that afternoon still made my chest feel as if someone had slipped a rubber band under my breasts and twisted. "I got sick when I was fourteen. I guess thirty-some odd years of me and my problems were enough for her."

"That seems very harsh."

I shrugged with feigned indifference. "There are only so many times you can get phone calls in the middle of the night because your daughter's wigged out."

"Had you stopped trying to get better?'

That pissed me off. "That's a stupid question. Try being me for a while. I'd do anything to feel and stay better."

"Are you better now?"

"Much," I said, and that was true. "I haven't been hospitalized for five years."

Fine was busy writing. "So you haven't seen your mother since then."

"That's right. We didn't exchange Christmas cards, and I sure as hell didn't send her anything for Mother's Day."

"You sound bitter."

"I'm not," I said, crossing to my mother's closet and pulled it open. I dug out a black Eddie Bauer overnight bag. "But if I had a daughter? I don't think I would've done the same thing."

Fine watched me fold the nightgown and panties into the suitcase. "Where were you last night between the hours of nine and two?"

"Home. I live in an apartment off Planktown Road, near the Medical College. I had a lot of work to do. I'm a writer, freelance. I'm working on an article about Frank Lloyd Wright and his influence on the Milwaukee architectural scene in the early part of the twentieth century."

"You like houses?"

"I like buildings. They're like people. They've got lives, histories. I like the way all the elements work together."

"Have you been down to Chicago? To see the Robie House, for example?"

"Sure. And there are some great examples of Prairie schoolhouses in Hyde Park and Beverly."

"When were you last in Chicago?"

"About two months ago. I …"

Fine looked up when I didn't continue. "Yes?"

"Nothing," I lied. But the woman's voice was hovering by my right ear: a house, antebellum Federal style, red brick with black shutters and white columns. Three floors, a widow's walk, and an attic besides. And then I saw the house—a brief flash, as if someone had opened a shuttered window in my mind then slammed it shut again.

"You looked like you heard something," said Fine. "Your eyes flicked right."

Shit, I thought, I hadn't done that crazy lady give-away for years. I made a vague gesture. "Sometimes the voices … you know."

We were silent a moment: Fine staring, me waiting for the voice to settle down. But my brain kept darting back to that house the way a hummingbird flits back and forth at a feeder. Not the Robie House, for sure. The Robie House is in Hyde Park and a signature Wright: Prairie-style, gable roof, overhanging eaves. There's no mistaking that style for anything else. But maybe this other house, this mansion, was one I'd seen around Beverly, where there were lots of mansions, though few were Colonial Revival. There were more in South Shore, three or four in Forest Glen, but most were Georgian, not Federal. I just didn't know.

Breaking the silence, Fine shifted gears again. "Do you know why anyone would hurt your mother?"

"No."

"What about your father?"

I zipped the Eddie Bauer bag shut, the sound of metal slashing against metal helping tear my brain loose from that house. "He's been out of the picture since I was a little kid."

Fine nodded, flipped his notebook closed. "Are you going back to the hospital?"

"No, my apartment. I want to shower, pick up a couple of things."

"I'll drive you," said Fine, reaching for my mother's suitcase.

"Why?"

He stopped, his hand outstretched. "You don't drive, do you?"

"No." Motor vehicle departments don't like giving licenses to crazy ladies with records.

"Well, then," he said.

So I let him drive. I don't know why. We didn't talk. That was okay. My voices took up the slack.


 

The lake's behind her now, that platinum sea, and Sonia's walking up a steep, winding hill. Hawthorne Place is a tree-lined stretch of road between Lake Shore Drive and Broadway. The trees are so tall and broad, their canopies interlace like fingers over the road. She walks through patches of shadow and light, but the light's a sickly yellow, like the color of a boil, or a very old bruise. That's when she notices that the other houses—chalets, mainly, and American Four-Squares—are gone, because there's only one house that's important.

She looks left, and there's the house now: an antebellum mansion with white columns and three stories and four windows - which doesn't make any sense, she knows, but that's all, apparently, her mind requires. Except the house isn't red brick but yellow, and the windows gleam this sickly yellow-brown, so she can't see in.

Then Sonia looks up because there's someone coming, and she sees that it's her daughter, Rachel, all grown up: her brown hair going gray, her hazel eyes bright as coins. Rachel is speaking, her lips are moving, but there's no sound …

Then Rachel looks up because there's someone coming, and she sees her mother in a navy blue dress with white polka dots, and her mother is speaking, her lips are moving, but there are no voices at all. They're a foot away from one another now, and Rachel glances left at the antebellum mansion with the yellow window-eyes, and then back at her mother, who holds out her right arm. Rachel sees that there's a large sore there, a kind of scab, and she reaches to touch it. The scab moves, and runny yellow pus wells up and dribbles down her mother's arm …


 

And I jerked back to my now. My heart was racing, and my ears rang. And my voices were there, stabbing at my brain like birds pecking seeds: Rachel, Rachel, wake up.

My God, I thought, blinking. What the hell was that?

I must have made some sound because Fowler and Winter, who were standing on the opposite side of my mother's bed and studying a ream of paper, looked up.

"What?" said Dr. Winter. Then, as he got a good look at my face: "Rachel?"

"Nothing." I pressed the back of my hand to an upper lip suddenly pearled with sweat. "I'm fine."

"Well, that's crap. Tell me."

So I told Winter about the yellow house with the yellow window-eyes, and then I added what had happened at my mother's townhouse. "It's just a gut feeling, but I think it's the same house. But I've never seen it in my life."

"And you say it happened two hours ago, around noon, and then just now?" asked Winter. He shot a glance at Fowler then back at me. "This instant?"

"Pretty close. Why?"

Both doctors were very quiet. Then Winter turned to Fowler and said, "Well?"

Fowler shrugged. "This is more your department than mine. There's absolutely nothing in the literature."

"But the phenomenon's been described," said Winter. "You can't deny that."

"Dr. Winter, we're talking about a psychiatric patient who …" Fowler stopped abruptly, her cheeks flaming red as a boiled lobster.

"Who hallucinates," I said flatly, ignoring Winter's scowl of disapproval. "Who hears voices, right? First of all, I've never had visual hallucinations, and even a crazy woman knows the difference between a dream and a hallucination." Something else bothered me, but I couldn't put my finger on it. I turned to Winter. "So what does it mean?"

"Well, if I were inclined toward the psychoanalytic, I'd say that you're ruminating about your relationship with your mother. You've often said that you didn't know her. The fact that you've got a house where you can't see in the windows, and then you see your mother with pus running out of her arm, I'd say you're worried about what you might find out about her. That the pus represents something evil in her that you'd rather not see or know about."

It sounded good. It even sounded right, but I didn't buy it. An interpretation didn't explain everything. "What about the treatments?"

Winter made a face as if he'd smelled something bad. "Perhaps. The magnetic stimulation might have activated a previously silent region in your brain."

I remembered Einstein and his visions. Great, I thought, now I've got crazy visions and loopy voices. "But you don't think that's it."

"I don't know. The regions of the brain involved in auditory phenomenon are different from those you use when you dream." Winter thought. "Are the voices the same as you've had before?"

Bingo. He'd hit what bugged me. My mind had automatically made the distinction, though I hadn't realized it: the voices versus my voices. "No, they're not. I mean, I don't recognize all of them, know what I mean? You hear voices for a long time, you understand their patterns, the way they sound. A lot of these voices … they're different. They're all male, except one: a woman, far away. Laughing, mainly, and very evil, like she's enjoying herself. Almost crazy." Actually, I'm sure I sounded crazy to Fowler, but I didn't care. "She's not right. She doesn't belong there. I've never heard a woman before."

Winter's eyes narrowed. "What about the content? What are the voices saying?"

"That's different, too. My voices tell me to do things: pick up the phone, don't talk, things like that. But the others, they're calling me names—slut, whore, that type of shit. They've never done that before. And they keep saying that I'm guilty, but I don't know about what. Is that important?"

Winter looked at Fowler. "Well?"

Fowler's tongue flicked over her upper lip. The skin along her cheekbones was still pink. "It doesn't prove a damn thing."

"But you have to admit: It's too much of a coincidence. Even the times are right."

"What?" I asked.

Fowler's gaze clicked to Winter and then me. "The limbic seizures we're seeing are really micro-seizures: overactive neurons in a particular area of your mother's brain deep in the temporal lobe. They come and go with no regularity, though there was one big burst around noon and another just now. The thing is … Jesus," Fowler gave a breathy false laugh, "I can't believe I'm even entertaining this. Look, this type of seizure activity has been correlated with out-of-body experiences. Patients with temporal lobe epilepsy frequently report that they leave their bodies, look down at themselves from great heights."

"That sounds like near-death experiences."

Fowler nodded. "I don't think anyone denies that the brain, near death, might be firing very chaotically. Things are going to hell in a handbasket in there, no pun intended. What's odd in your mother's case is that, for all intents and purposes, she is dead—except for that one area."

I gave a weak laugh, though nothing was funny. "Maybe she's going to heaven, Dr. Fowler. Maybe that's all this is, and my stuff … it's nothing at all."

"Or maybe heaven, for some people, is someplace in their own minds," said Winter. Shaking his head, he put his hand on his hips the way people do when they just don't understand what the hell's going on. "And here's the thing that's very strange. You just had a … well, let's call it a vision, okay? Of a house, somewhere. You've never seen it before, and you don't know where it is. But, Rachel, have you ever considered that your mother has?"

Even my voices were silent. Maybe they were as shocked as I was. I tried to speak, but my mouth was dry, and my lips wouldn't work. Finally, I said, "Dr. Winter, what are you saying? That I'm seeing what my mother has? Is? That she's … that somehow we're connected?"

"I'm saying precisely that. Rachel, you've always been different. And, with the treatments, for all I know they've activated some other place in your brain that's attuned now to that instant before death when the soul leaves the body, and your mind's snagged onto your mother somehow. I don't know if you're seeing her past, or her vision of heaven. I don't know about what you're hearing, whether they constitute real memories or not. But I do think we need to do another PET scan of your brain and see what lights up."

My knees felt like water. "Now?"

"As soon as possible."

"But what about my mother? You said she's dead." I turned a beseeching look at Fowler. "Even with what you found … she's dead, right?"

Fowler nodded without speaking. I looked back at Winter. "So are you saying now that I shouldn't authorize you to take her off life-support? That I should just leave her so we can do experiments?" I answered my own questions. "Yes, of course, that's what you're saying. Well, I don't know if I can do that. I don't know if that's right."

"You don't have to decide this instant, Rachel."

"Yes, I do. You don't have to live inside my head. I do, and I don't know if I want this because …"

"Because why, Rachel?"

"Because. Early this morning, right before the hospital called, I had a nightmare. The thing is, now I don't think it was a dream." My voice shook, and I knew that tears were tracking down my cheeks. "Dr. Winter, I think that, for an instant, I was my mother."

"Rachel …"

"And," I talked over him, "I was also the man who attacked her. I was both of them at once, and … Jesus Christ, I think I saw what really happened."


 

It was all too much, even for a crazy lady who's heard some pretty amazing things. I had to get out of there.

As I pushed out of the ICU, I saw Detective Fine at the end of the hall. I wasn't surprised. Christ, of course, he'd keep happening by and wanted to be there when we turned off the machines because I was a crazy lady, and all crazy ladies were suspects because everyone knows that crazy people do the damnedest things, like murder their mother. So Fine would play Columbo, with his little notebook and his habit of popping up at the weirdest times: "Just one more thing …" Right up until the point where he read me my rights. Actually, I was more surprised that Priest and Long hadn't shown up again, but novels said that detectives worked in teams, shared cases, and stuff like that.

"You look tired," he said, as I came up.

"I am." Fine must have changed his jacket; his suit coat wasn't wrinkled like an accordion's bellows.

"Have you …?"

"Not yet. I have to think about it. Maybe in the morning."

"Would you like some dinner?" When I hesitated, Fine added, "We won't have to leave the hospital."

My voices weren't pleased, but there was nothing I wanted more than to get out of that place, and I was so focused on that it didn't occur to me until much later to wonder why this detective was being so damned nice to a suspect.

We walked down to a little Vietnamese place off Wisconsin, near the Gesu Church at Marquette. I ordered pho with the works: tripe, meatballs, sliced flank steak. Fine ordered spring rolls, and roast quail over vermicelli. We made small talk until our food arrived. Fine offered a spring roll that I refused then dunked his own roll into vinegary dipping sauce. "Are you hearing voices now?" he asked, crunching fried pastry.

Startled, I looked up. Perhaps I should've learned to stop being surprised about the cop-things he did. There was a grease splotch on his chin, right over his scar, from the spring roll, and I didn't tell him to wipe it off.

Careful …

I squirted lime into my pho then added hot sauce. The soup smelled of anise and fatty beef. Plucking a meatball out with chopsticks, I popped it into my mouth. The taste of scallions and basil exploded along my tongue. I swallowed and said, "Yes."

"What are they saying?"

Cocking my head, crazy-lady style, I listened, then said, "That I shouldn't trust you and need to be careful."

Fine actually smiled. "You don't need a little voice to tell you that."

"I guess not. But I must be a detective's dream come true."

"How do you mean?"

I fished out thick noodles and slurped them down. Pho broth splattered my chin. "I'm crazy," I said, swiping away soup with a paper napkin. "Everyone knows crazy people do crazy things, like try to kill their mother with a hammer."

Fine's face was serious. "You know, you're the only one who keeps bringing that up." He looked at the half of spring roll he still held and put it back on his plate, then wiped his fingers on a napkin. "Why do you do that?"

I hiked a shoulder, dipped up noodles. "Because it's true."

"That you're crazy, or that you tried to kill your mother?"

I put down my chopsticks. "In case you haven't noticed, I am going to kill my mother. And then she's a real homicide, and you can arrest the crazy lady, right?"

And you are guilty …

"Rachel, stop," said Fine. "You don't act crazy. You're the only one saying that."

Tears burned my eyes. The rational part of me that had nothing to do with my voices didn't trust this man. The other part desperately wanted to. He was being nice to me; he hadn't been anything but nice, except I didn't want him to be. Nobody likes crazy ladies for long. I put my hand over my chest. "That's the way I feel, inside."

"I think you're just scared. Even when you're better, you hide behind an illness that may not really be one."

"What do you mean?"

"You said you're different. Hell, maybe the only difference between you and Einstein is that genius is civilized insanity. You're pretty down to earth. To be honest, I've only seen you do the classic crazy stuff once or twice. You know, shifting your eyes to one side like you're listening to something. You're not delusional. You don't talk crazy."

Because I'm not; because craziness isn't what you see in a movie or read in a book: that's what I wanted to say. Instead, I said, "Why are you being so nice to me? I'm a suspect. Why do you even care?"

Fine looked as if he was debating about something. Then he said, "I have some experience. My mother, she was pretty sick for a long time."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah." Fine played with his chopsticks. "I was young, and so I didn't realize how bad she was until I got older. But the long and the short of it is she found out that my father had an affair. The woman was someone who lived in our house—cooking and cleaning and being kind of a nanny—and I remember that I liked her very much. She was married. Her husband worked for us, too. Anyway, this woman, she had her own kid, and we were best friends, used to play with this big orange rubber ball. In fact, that kid gave me this little souvenir." He fingered the scar on his chin. "But then things went to hell. This woman, she started up with my dad, and she got pregnant, and then my mother found out, and she …" Fine tapped his chopsticks on the table like drumsticks.

"What?"

Fine drummed Formica. "Back then, fashionable society, you didn't evict the help. So the woman and her kid stayed on. Her husband left, though. I think the idea was that after the baby was born, my father would set up her and her kids somewhere far away. Except it didn't work out that way. She stayed on. You can guess the rest."

I could: two women in love with the same man, and a little baby in the mix as a reminder of who was loved more. And that nanny's own kid and Fine, not sure where they fit in—that house must have been like an insane asylum, and I should know. I was an authority.

"Anyway, one day, my mother snapped. And then …"

"What?"

Fine looked up. His voice was steady with no trace of a tremor. "She killed the baby, right in front of us. Revenge, I guess. There was no logic to it. My mom was pretty whacked out by then, so who can know how she saw things? But, Christ, it was awful. And here's the hell of it: We never told a soul. And …"

Fine was still talking, but I didn't hear a word because the dream—or was it a vision?—erupted in my brain so quickly it happened in between the space of one breath and the next. The dream was like water, a whirlpool spinning around and around and then I was in it and …

In the blink of an eye, Sonia's in the house, on the second floor. The hall is paneled; there's an ornate Turkish runner on the floor. There are other details—portraits on the walls, flowers in vases—but these things are blurred trappings she doesn't care about. All she cares about is Nick.

In the next instant, she's in his arms. Her clothes are gone; she feels his erection, hard and insistent, the skin amazingly smooth and soft as fine silk; and his lips are on her neck, her breasts. She gasps as he slides inside, and they begin to move, and it's then that she feels eyes and hears voices. She looks right, and there is Rachel. There is Nick's son, and Nick's wife.

You slut, you whore, you bitch! Nick's wife is screaming, screaming. You are guilty, you are a sinner, you whore!

But Sonia aches for Nick, and now there's Nick's baby inside, and they're in love and love can't be a sin, it can't be wrong …

And then Rachel wraps her legs around Nick, and they strive together toward their peak, and then Rachel is the boy who is watching with such hate, and she's the wife who is laughing her cruel evil laugh, and she is Sonia, far away, and she is Nick, losing himself in the body of the woman, and Sonia cries out again and Rachel screams: an endless scream of ecstasy and guilt and sorrow …

Then I was back, in the blink of an eye, and Fine was still talking. My blood roared in my veins, and I looked down at my quivering, restless hands and saw that I'd shredded my napkin to bits of white fluff.

Fine didn't seem to know that I'd been there and gone at the same time. "And then the woman, her kid … they left. I remember being angry and sad because I felt cheated. My parents, the ones I knew, were gone. My mother was put away, and my father just withered. I was all alone."

"Did you ever find out what happened to them? The woman and her kid?" I asked, after a pause—when I could trust myself to speak.

Fine just shook his head, tossed his chopsticks on the table. They bounced and chinked against stoneware, and one rolled off the table and hit the floor, but he didn't bother picking it up.

Afterward, Fine walked me back to the hospital. It had gotten dark, and the streetlamps were lit. We crossed the parking lot in front of the hospital and onto a breezeway that ran beneath an awning where patients were let off. Our footsteps clapped against the concrete, sounding like pistol shots.

I wasn't feeling good. Not sick, but edgy, nervous. The vision, Fine's story, my voices, what to do about my mother—all a jumble in my head. I'd had times like this before when I'd been so stressed, I couldn't think straight. Like now: I wanted to like Fine. Hell, I did like him. He was here, by my side, and it felt natural. He was taking care of me, and that was a good feeling, really good. For once in my life, someone liked me, someone seemed to care, and I didn't want to lose that …

Oh, he'll take care of you, all right.

Stop it, I thought right back. Not everyone's out to hurt me, somebody has to care about me someday because I'm not evil or bad, and someone has to …

If Fine hadn't been there, I'd probably have shouted at my voices because I was that mad—at myself, at everything. The whole damn situation. I was just so tired of fighting all the time.

At the double doors to the lobby, Fine paused.

"What?" I said, turning back. "You're not coming up?"

Fine's skin was sallow and yellow in the glare of the overhead fluorescents. "Not yet. I have some things to do. I want you to have this." He handed over a slim envelope. "Don't open it until your mother's really dead."

I took the envelope, turning it over in my hand. It was sealed, and I thought there was a letter inside. "What is it?"

"Something you'll want to see."

"What if I don't give the doctors permission?"

"But you have to, you know that. And when you do, then I'll be back, and we'll … You'll understand."

In the hall just before the ICU, I saw the two detectives I'd spoken to earlier, Priest and Cross. I just didn't remember who was who. Cross—or it might have been Priest—said, "Where have you been? We've talked to your mother's doctor, and we need to talk with you about what will happen next."

"Oh," I said. "Well, I was with Detective Fine, and he said …"

The other detective—Priest? Cross?—interrupted. "Who?"

"Detective Fine," I said. "From Homicide?"

Priest and Cross looked at one another. Then the first one—Priest, I think, or it might have been Cross—said, "Fine?"


 

Perfect. Now I was hallucinating a detective, too.

"Christ, Dr. Winter," I said, "it all makes sense. I'm the only one who's seen him. I'm having these crazy visions and voices, and …" I broke off, dug my fingers into my scalp. "This can't keep happening."

"Maybe medication …"

"No!" As bad as the voices were, the medicines were worse, like wandering around in a fog. "I need to be able to think. I need my life back."

Winter sighed, took off his glasses, and pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and index finger. It was an hour to dawn. Fowler was standing alongside, her arms folded. None of us had slept. Priest and Cross were in an office, just outside the unit: making calls, or phoning for the paddy wagon, I don't know.

Winter's neck was mottled with red splotches; he was that overwrought. "But, Rachel, if we're right, think of what we could learn. I know it sounds cold, but maybe this is some way for your mother's death to have meaning."

But I was sure. My mother was gone, and whatever was happening now, whether she was trying to reach me, or this was simply my mind inventing a past I didn't remember or never had, I couldn't live like this. So I turned her off.

There wasn't much drama to it. Fowler did the honors; Winter stood by my side. One moment there was the sound of my mother's ventilator forcing air in and out of her lungs, and the high-pitched blip-blip-bleep of her monitor. And, in the next, all I heard was the faint squeal of a nurse's shoes against linoleum and the nasal voice of the page operator over a loudspeaker in the hall outside, calling for some doctor to go to some floor. A blip from the monitor, then another, and then nothing. After a minute or two, Fowler listened with her stethoscope, noted the time on a chart. Winter squeezed my hand. Then they left.

I stood, alone, over the body of a woman I hadn't known, about whose past I couldn't even guess. I cried. Not a lot.

Then I remembered and pulled out the envelope my phantom detective had given me. My fingers fumbled with the paper. Inside was a photograph, and I knew before I tugged it free that it would be the one from my mother's night table, and I thought, crap, I stole it when I was getting her things; I gave it to myself, oh, shit, shit.

Then I looked at it. The blood in my veins got icy. And then I understood.

Cross and Priest were waiting when I bolted from the ICU. I showed them the photo, and we talked for an hour.


 

Well, that finally answers one thing about my crazy life: why we moved so much. And it turns out he is a detective—only not from Milwaukee. He's from Chicago. Only he hasn't shown for work for two weeks. The badge, like his number, is a fake. Cagney and Lacey: a tip-off. I saw it without realizing it.

I've left the hospital now, and I've walked down to the lake, past the white sails of the art museum and down to the yacht club off Veterans Park. It's still ten, fifteen minutes away from true dawn. The whirr of Milwaukee traffic is faint. The clouds are gone, and the sky over the lake is a deep pink and blue. In another few moments, the sun will slide into view. Small waves slap against the wooden slips and breakwater rocks, and sailboats bob like corks. The wind coming from the lake is clean and smells fresh. No salt smell, but then again, the lake isn't a sea, no matter how limitless it seems.

Something else is … absent. I have a vague feeling of disquiet, trying to place what it is, and then I understand: no voices. I listen for a few moments, very hard, but all I hear is the gurgle of water and the soft purr of traffic.

I don't know if the voices will come back. If they were from my mother, then maybe they won't. Or maybe the treatments have turned my brain into some kind of cosmic receiver. I don't know, especially because there was that first dream, where I was Fine, so I don't know what's going to happen. Maybe we're still linked in some way, though I think that my mother was the common denominator, and so I doubt I'll be him again. And I don't think he'll come back for me. I think that when he killed my mother, that was enough revenge for him, and maybe all he wanted was for me to know the hell we'd both lived through but only he remembered. I also think he wanted to spend time with an old friend. I guess I'll just have to wait and see … and listen.

It's all there, in the photograph Fine took from my mother's night table.

We're posed in the front yard because, in the background, I see the house: an antebellum mansion with three floors, and—I know—an attic besides. My mother's hair had been honey-blonde back then, and done in a flip; her red lipstick has faded to a color approaching that of dried blood, and she's wearing a bleached-out housedress that might have been navy blue or black, with white polka dots. There's a light blue blanket tucked in the crook of her left arm. My mother's smiling, her eyes narrow against a sun that's set long ago.

And then there's me. My hair falls past my shoulders and is parted on the left with a plastic barrette. I'm wearing a pink dress bleached by time to the color of bone. My arms are crossed over my chest and my face is compressed into a scowl. I look mad as hell—maybe about the baby, or the whole crazy business, the fact that my mother had destroyed our family. I don't know.

And there's a little boy, about my age, in knee-length trousers and a white button shirt. He has brown hair, and there's a tiny bandage just visible on his chin. And he's holding a big ball the color of an old tangerine.

On the back, in a blocky masculine hand: Rachel, Baby Penny, and Little Nick. Hawthorne Place, 1963. N.K.F.

I don't know what the K stands for. But I'll bet that N is for Nick. And the F is for Fine.

Fine's voice, but it's truly a memory: She killed the baby, right in front of us. His mother killed Baby Penny: my half-sister—and Fine's.

I think about that angry little girl in the photograph, and I think about my voices, and about dreams and memory. Freud said a house is the dreamer, that houses are people. But, if that's true, then memory's a city: buildings are people; roads that represent avenues taken or not; a mental landscape that we continually re-define and re-construct because we are the repository of things past and half-forgotten, including voices that whisper of nightmares in the night, or at odd moments when we least expect them.

There's a sudden flash, and I look east as the golden ball of the sun slides over the horizon. In the next instant, the lake floods with a shimmering liquid platinum light so bright and fierce, it hurts my eyes.

Ilsa J. Bick is a child and forensic psychiatrist, and a latecomer to fiction. Still, she's done okay. Her story "A Ribbon for Rosie" won Grand Prize in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds II, and "Shadows, in the Dark" took Second Prize in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds IV. Her novelette "The Quality of Wetness" (Second Prize) appeared in Writers of the Future, Vol. XVI. Her work has appeared, among other places, in Harpur Palate, Challenging Destiny, and Talebones. Her short story "Strawberry Fields" was recently published in Beyond the Last Star (ed. Sherwood Smith). Her novel The Well of Souls is forthcoming from Pocket Books. She lives in Kohler, WI, with her husband, two children, three cats, and other assorted vermin.