“Because they do not know about it.”
She gave the words no more gravity than anything else she had said, but some intuition made the hairs rise on the back of my neck. I considered her stony face and her trimly tailored jacket. Aside from wardrobe color, she fit the Man in Black profile perfectly, and I didn’t have much to lose by sounding crazy.
“Does this job involve aliens in any way?”
“Not in the way you mean,” she said without asking what I meant. “There are, however, some aspects of the job that strain credulity, and they are better demonstrated than explained. Would you meet me tomorrow for an interview?”
“Sure, why not.”
“You can find me at the corner of Fourth Street and Hollister, in Santa Monica. There is a small park there.”
I felt a cold rush of fear that I quickly paved over with irritation. “I’m supposed to take a cab all the way from Silver Lake to Santa Monica?”
Caryl ignored my tone. “Tomorrow at noon. Pack and proceed as though you will not be returning to the hospital.”
“I beg your pardon?” I gaped at her. “How am I supposed to get a suitcase, a wheelchair, crutches, and a cane in and out of a taxi on my own?”
“The choice is yours. The terms are mine. If you do not attend the meeting, I will move to the next candidate on my list. You are welcome to refuse the opportunity, but you will be the first to do so in the ten years I have been with the Project.”
Ten years. She was definitely older than she looked. “What if you decide you don’t want to hire me?”
“Then you may return to the hospital, or not, as you like. But if I weren’t confident of your character, I would not have gone to the trouble to reach you.”
“How much trouble is it, exactly, to call the—”
Wait a second. No one had introduced her. And shouldn’t she have been wearing a name tag or something?
Carefully I pushed myself to a stand. Caryl remained seated, making no move to stop me. I forced the remaining air out of my AK suspension, then slowly walked to the door.
I called down the hallway toward the nurses’ station, and then glanced back over my shoulder into the room, half expecting to find myself staring down the barrel of a gun. But not even my hyperbolic filmmaker’s imagination could prepare me for what I saw.
Nothing. The woman I had been talking to was gone.
2
Dr. Amanda Davis must have been intelligent to get three degrees, but sometimes in our sessions I felt as though I were talking to a brick wall. Her lack of humor made our conversations halting and awkward; between that and her dogged, persistent faith in me, I’d jumped to the conclusion early on that she didn’t understand me and couldn’t help me. Jumping to conclusions is another thing Borderlines are great at.
At this point I was not very far along in my dialectical behavior therapy, and unmanaged Borderlines have a partially deserved reputation for manipulating others. I knew how to make Dr. Davis feel she was doing well, and I had learned which of my tangents fascinated her enough to keep her off the topics I didn’t want to discuss. On that particular Monday, however, I wished I’d used all that energy to find out if I could really trust her.
“This seems a little sudden,” Dr. Davis said, her chin-length hair slipping forward as she leaned on her knees. She made me think of Snow White at fifty: lips’ faded bloom painted over, alabaster skin mottled by decades of sun damage.
“I’m not sure what you want from me,” I said. “A couple of weeks ago you were on me for staying here so long, and now you’re on me for leaving.”
“I’m just trying to understand what precipitated this,” she said. “Obviously you can leave whenever you want, but given how long you’ve been under hospital care, it might be helpful for you to go to a transitional facility first, at least until you’re more comfortable living on your own.”
I considered bringing up the Arcadia Project and the disappearing lady, but then I quickly thought better of it. I knew Caryl hadn’t been a hallucination, but Dr. Davis hadn’t seen her, and I didn’t have a great theory to counter “Millie’s last marble finally rolled under the fridge somewhere.” Assuming Caryl was real, the woman obviously wanted to stay off the staff’s radar, and I wasn’t sure it would be a good idea to burn my bridges with a potential employer, given how fast my inheritance was dwindling.
“I found someone willing to put me up for a while,” I said.
Dr. Davis failed to conceal her surprise. “Someone from school?”
I tensed at the mention of school, but it wasn’t a bad guess, since she knew I had no living family aside from some creepy rural grandparents I’d met once when I was eight.
“It’s no one you know,” I said.
“I’m sure it isn’t, but you understand I’m curious about your future and concerned that you don’t want to talk about it.”