Chapter Six
Diana pushed away from her desk. Talking to Jake always reminded her of Daniel. Again she drew Daniel’s driftwood walking stick from the stand by her desk and cradled it in her arms, letting the tang of pine surround her. God, she missed him. Missed his touch. The sound of his voice. His face. That edge-of-a-cliff feeling of being around him, not knowing what he was going to do next.
She remembered the first moment she’d laid eyes on him. She’d been a junior at UMass Dartmouth with a work-study job in the office of the dean of students. Her boss was the dean’s administrative assistant, Margaret Brown, a woman who reminded Diana of a lemon with all the juice squeezed out.
Diana had been alone in the office, answering the phones, when Jake—she’d met him at a frat party a year earlier—dropped by. With him was a guy in a biker jacket and torn Levi’s. He was hot, with dark and heavy-lidded eyes, and so tall that he’d had to stoop coming through the door to the office. His hair was long and wild. He hadn’t yet gone punk and shaved the sides of his head.
The three of them had gone out drinking that night, and ended up on the edge of a granite quarry in Quincy, about twenty miles from school. They’d sat smoking a joint, their legs dangling over a stone ledge, moonlight shining silver on the still black water that filled the pit before them. Daniel and Jake had stripped off their clothing and dived in.
“Come on!” Daniel shouted when he surfaced, splashing his arms in the water, the drops sparkling, ripples shimmering all around him. Even as stoned as Diana was, there was no way she could do it.
They’d returned to that quarry many times, but it wasn’t until months later, in the middle of one of New England’s hottest summers, that she’d gotten wasted enough to strip off her clothes and reckless enough to dive off the ledge. By then, she and Daniel were lovers.
It was Daniel who’d installed a program on Margaret Brown’s computer so that it sounded like an old-fashioned typewriter every time she hit a key, and ratcheted and dinged when the return key was pressed. A built-in time delay guaranteed that the program didn’t kick in until the middle of a day Diana called in sick so she wouldn’t be suspected.
Diana’s artistic talent had been recruited to forge Miss Brown’s signature on a requisition for a massage table and portable Jacuzzi to be delivered to President McCafferty’s office.
Then, a few months before the end of that year, there’d been an uproar when college administrators noticed that a bunch of the student names on transcripts had been altered. Elvis Pretzel and Wile E. Coyote were not students at the college. Diana’s name had been changed to Mary Jane Watson, Spider-Man’s girlfriend.
No one took Miss Brown seriously when she voiced her suspicion that Diana and her oddball friends had something to do with it.
Diana began her senior year but she never graduated. That October her mother was diagnosed with cancer. Ashley was still in high school and their father was long gone. So Diana had cleaned out her dorm room and loaded boxes into a borrowed Dodge van and headed home. She hadn’t known whether to pack her books or throw them away. A brutal regimen of chemo and radiation therapy lay ahead, and Diana had no inkling of just how tough and resilient her mother would turn out to be.
The van’s driver’s seat was so high above the road and so close to the front bumper that Diana felt unnerved behind the wheel. On the drive home, sometime after midnight on Route 24, somewhere in the middle of Bridgewater thirty miles south of home, she’d started to feel as if the car was driving itself.
Her heart surged, and there was a sharp pain in her chest. She felt smothered, as if the air in the car had no oxygen. She gripped the wheel, trying to keep the van steady and gasping for breath. It was all she could do to keep the steering wheel from veering right and, as she could see clearly in her mind’s eye, the van careening into the woods.
Was this a heart attack? It couldn’t be. She wasn’t allowed to be sick. Her mother needed her. Ashley needed her.
Finally she managed to pull the car over into the breakdown lane and stop. She clawed at the window and cranked it open. The air rushing in didn’t help. Instead, impenetrable darkness seemed to fold in around her.
For what felt like hours, she sat hunched over the steering wheel, gasping and sweating, unable to move, unable to get out of the car and find the cell phone she’d stupidly packed in a satchel and thrown in the trunk.
Had that been her first panic attack? Probably. But when she was in therapy later, she remembered some earlier moments, like tremors foreshadowing an earthquake. There was the time when she was fifteen supposedly watching Ashley swimming at Wollaston Beach. She’d turned her attention away as a couple of cute boys from her high school sauntered by, and when she looked back, she could no longer see Ashley’s head bobbing in the waves. That moment was frozen in time, but she had no memory of throwing herself into the water, of swimming out to where she’d last seen her sister, only to hear Ashley calling to her from the shore and waving Popsicles that by then were dripping down her arms.
The panic attacks had increased through her mother’s illness. After her mother’s recovery, they’d abated so completely that at times Diana was convinced that she’d only imagined them. After Daniel’s death, they’d returned full force.
Her house, and in particular her office, where she now sat, had become her refuge. As long as she stayed inside and took her medication, she was safe from ambush. Just in case, she had Daniel’s driftwood to calm her. She slid it back into the stand by her desk. Along with his ashes, it was the only thing of his that she had left.
Diana returned to the living room. Ashley had done what she’d threatened: picked up all the stray bits of garbage, straightened piles, and carried away dirty dishes. Only the UPS box remained in the middle of the floor. The minute Diana picked it up she realized it was empty. Inside there was only tissue paper, a whiff of licorice, and a note.
Just borrowing them for tonight.
Promise.
xx oo
Diana lifted the shade and looked out the window. Ashley was standing by her car talking on her cell phone. Squeezing the phone between chin and shoulder, she unlocked the hatchback and dropped the pile of clothing into the car. Then she stood there, hip thrown out. As Diana watched, Ashley ran her fingers through her hair, shot a few heated words into the phone, and snapped it shut. Then gave the world at large the finger. A few moments later, she drove off.
Sure, Ashley would return the new outfit. Just like she’d returned the snakeskin miniskirt Diana had picked up at a secondhand store when she was living with Daniel in New Hampshire. By the time Diana discovered it in Ashley’s closet, Ashley had “forgotten” that it wasn’t hers.
Too late, Diana noticed that Ashley had left her laptop, half hidden behind the base of the coatrack. At least that guaranteed she would be back sooner rather than later.
Diana returned to her desk. There was a new message from her in-world friend PWNED. This one was marked with a little red flag.
PWNED: nu doc—2G2B tru
She had no idea what the person behind PWNED—a term that computer gamers used to mean beaten—looked like, but the avatar was a sexy platinum blonde who moved with the grace of a gazelle and liked to end her messages with God is just an abbreviation for goddess. From asides PWNED had dropped, Diana gathered that she lived near Boston. Her QuackPatrol blog was infamous for outing so-called doctors and health-care gurus who preyed on the desperate.
Diana opened the attachment. Results within 7 days, it began. Apparently Dr. Grande in Sedona, Arizona, assessed patients through a telephone consult and a questionnaire. His revolutionary regimen to cure autism involved a weeklong liquid diet combined with six weeks of chelation therapy. Certainly sounded too good to be true.
Diana shot back a response.
Let’s nail him.
She spent the next hour researching chelation therapy. There were boatloads of patient “testimonials” but no hard science. She checked Dr. Grande’s financial ties and found that all of his clinics were owned by a corporation with headquarters in Ukraine.
When she finished up, she e-mailed PWNED a summary of what she’d discovered. A message came back less than a minute later.
PWNED: ^5
Diana high-fived the monitor back. She realized, as she glanced at the time in the corner of her screen, that it had been over two hours since she last checked her security systems. That was progress in her quest to hold paranoia at bay.
Video from the camera anchored over her front door showed nothing more than a cardinal perched on her white picket fence. Her firewall had only logged the usual pinging from drones in the outside world.
She remembered the messages from GROB. She scrolled down to find them. The first one that had come hours earlier began:
GROB: Got time to talk?