I try to object but she won’t hear it.
“The good thing about being my age is I can do whatever the hell I want,” she adds, “I am on call for emergencies. But that is all. And right now, you are my biggest emergency, Kay.”
“I’m not an emergency.” I get up from the table.
Anna helps me with my luggage and takes me down a long hallway that leads to the west wing of her majestic home. The guest room where I am to stay for an undetermined period of time is dominated by a large yew wood bed that, like much of the furniture in her house, is pale gold Biedermeier. Her decor is restrained, with straight and simple lines, but cumulus down-filled duvets and pillows and heavy draperies that flow in champagne silk waterfalls to the hardwood floor hint at her true nature. Anna’s motivation in life is the comfort of others, to heal and to banish pain and celebrate pure beauty.
“What else do you need?” She hangs up my clothes.
I help put away other items in dresser drawers and realize I am trembling again.
“Do you need something to sleep?” She lines up my shoes on the closet floor.
Taking an Ativan or some other sedative is a tempting proposition that I resist. “I’ve always been afraid to make it a habit,” I vaguely respond. “You can see how I am with cigarettes. I can’t be trusted.”
Anna looks at me. “It is very important you get sleep, Kay. No better friend to depression.”
I am not sure what she is saying, but I know what she means. I am depressed. I am probably going to be depressed, and sleep deprivation makes everything so much worse. Throughout my life, insomnia has flared up like arthritis, and when I became a physician I had to resist the easy habit of indulging in one’s own candy store. Prescription drugs have always been there. I have always stayed away from them.
Anna leaves me and I sit up in bed with the lights off, staring into the dark, halfway believing that when morning comes, I will find what has happened is just another one of my bad dreams, another horror that crept out from my deeper layers when I was not quite conscious. My rational voice probes my interior like a flashlight but dispels nothing. I can’t illuminate any meaning to my almost being mutilated and killed and how that fact will affect the rest of my life. I can’t feel it. I can’t make sense of it. God, help me. I turn over on my side and shut my eyes. Now I lay me down to sleep, my mother used to pray with me, but I always thought the words were really more for my father in his sickbed down the hall. Sometimes when my mother would leave my room I would insert masculine pronouns into the verses. If he should die before he wakes, I pray the Lord his soul to take, and I would cry myself to sleep.[“_Toc37098905”]
CHAPTER 3
I WAKE UP THE FOLLOWING MORNING TO VOICES IN the house and have the unsettling sensation that the telephone rang all night. I am not sure if I dreamed it. For an awful moment I have no idea where I am, then it comes to me in a sick, fearful wave. I work my way up against pillows and am still for a moment. I can tell through drawn curtains that the sun is aloof again, offering nothing but gray.
I help myself to a thick terry-cloth robe hanging on the back of the bathroom door and put on a pair of socks before venturing out to see who else is in the house. I hope the visitor is Lucy, and it is. She and Anna are in the kitchen. Small snowflakes sprinkle down past expansive windows overlooking the backyard and the flat pewter river. Bare trees etched darkly against the day move slightly in the wind, and wood smoke rises from the house of the nearest neighbor. Lucy has on a faded warm-up suit left over from when she took computer and robotics courses at MIT. It appears she has styled her short auburn hair with her fingers, and she seems unusually grim and has a glassy-eyed, bloodshot look that I associate with too much booze the night before,