“I don’t know, Darcy,” Rita said quietly.
Darcy searched Rita’s features, her own screwed up in worry. Rita experienced a rush of affection, mixed with shame over her initial annoyance. Darcy was a good person. She always had been. Rita had refused to call her selfish, even when so many others had, because Darcy was immature and confused. Plenty of confused kids were self-focused.
“God. I need a cigarette.” Darcy winced and tugged at her ear.
Her left ear.
Rita’s stomach did a somersault.
Ask your sister about her head, Dr. Wu.
“How’s your ear?”
“Hurts.” She rubbed it. “But less.” She squirmed and scooted to the edge of the chair. “You’re the doctor. You have any idea what’s going on?”
“No.”
Darcy stared at her hard. “Yeah. Okay.”
“Have you noticed, uh, anything else? Any other … uh, symptoms?”
“No.” Darcy had turned her attention to the window. “Popped a few Tylenol, drank some Gatorade, and by lunchtime felt almost good as new.” A bitter laugh. “Then they called me about you.”
Rita felt herself relax a bit.
Thank God.
She hadn’t heard any voices.
She hadn’t heard his voice.
Had Finney been bluffing? If it was the same kind of implant, if Finney really had put something in Darcy’s head, maybe they’d gotten lucky, and the damn thing wasn’t working.
Even so: Why would Finney have put it in Darcy’s head in the first place? Rita remembered the overwhelming impulse to operate on Mrs. Sanchez. Finney must have brainwashed her, somehow, with the thing in her ear. There was no other reasonable explanation.
What else did he have planned for them?
The thought made her stomach churn.
It was raining outside. Hard. The two sat and listened to it beat against the window.
“Raining still,” Darcy mumbled. “Maybe it’ll help the drought.” She hugged herself and shivered. “Shit. Just one smoke. That’s all I need.”
With her pink-laced hair, designer jeans, a faded white HELLO KITTY T-shirt, high-top Converse sneakers with the laces untied, and several gaudy plastic bracelets on each wrist, she looked like a little kid.
So vulnerable.
But different, Rita sensed, than when she’d last left San Diego.
When things with the boy in Seattle had ended, she’d moved to Santa Cruz with another boy, a surfer, who’d blown through Darcy’s meager savings and then disappeared. Before she’d arrived last week from Santa Cruz driving a wheezing Ford Fiesta, Rita suspected there’d been a humiliating denouement at a Planned Parenthood clinic, but hadn’t pressed Darcy on it. She’d parked the Fiesta out front, offering no explanation as to how she’d acquired it, and had since spent her time sleeping and watching TV, shuffling back and forth between her bed and the family-room couch, with occasional forays outside for a cigarette.
Rita had been laser-focused on work. But in their snatches of time together, Darcy had seemed … tougher. Sturdier. For years she’d been groping for something, as a person lying in bed might fumble for eyeglasses on a nightstand in a darkened bedroom. Maybe she’d finally found what she’d been looking for.
Sometimes, Chase had told her in the terrible days after Jenny Finney’s death, the only way out is through. That had been before the review committee had exonerated her, and she’d felt paralyzed with guilt.
Maybe Darcy’s finally made it through and out.
An affectionate smile crept across Rita’s lips. “You and me, Darcy. The two of us. Aren’t we a piece of work?”
Darcy’s head snapped around. “What?” She saw Rita’s smile, and her face relaxed. “Oh. Yeah. I guess.”
“You were a horrible crier when you were a baby. You know that?”
“Jeez, Rita. What the hell has that got to do with anything?”
“You never stopped crying.”
“I know. You’ve told me. Like, a hundred times. I cried when I was a baby. I get it. Lots of babies cry.” She glanced at the door and tapped her feet on the floor. “Do you think they’d notice if I had a quick smoke? I could open a window. Just a crack. You know?”
“I think you actually met the clinical definition of colic.”
“What does that mean?”
“That even your pediatrician took your crying seriously. There was this one night. You were maybe … three months old. Dad was on deployment, his first after Mom died, and you kept on crying. I thought Gram was going to jump off a bridge. She used to drive you around because it was the only time you’d ever shut up. And then the car would stop moving and—bam!—you’d start crying all over again.”
Darcy cocked her head and brushed a pink strand of hair behind her ear. “What about you?”
“I was in eighth grade, Darcy. Mom was dead. God. I had my own problems. What did I care if you cried? I put my headphones on, cranked up the music, and locked myself in my room. You weren’t my problem. Until that night.”
Rita looked out at the rain.