No weakness.
She shrugged. “You guys know me. I like to come in and prep for the big cases the night before. Our auto-surgeon case this morning is as big as they get. I worked a little later than I planned last night, and I got tired. That’s all.”
There. That sounded okay. Rita knew she had a reputation for working late hours in the OR, and her involvement with the auto-surgeon was common knowledge. She must have dozed off. It was plausible.
Wasn’t it?
“So you decided to … sleep here?” Lisa said.
“Yes.”
“On—the OR table?”
Rita hesitated, then said: “Yes. I must have—I mean, I put my head down for a second, but I guess I drifted off.”
“Naked?” Wendy tittered. She appeared to be enjoying herself. What an interesting way for her to kick off a Monday morning.
“I sleep naked at home,” Rita said.
No, I don’t.
At least, not when alone in bed; and she’d been alone in bed since ending things with Spencer last year.
Spencer.
She found herself wishing he were here.
No weakness, lovely Rita.
“Sometimes, I sleepwalk,” she ventured. That was true. It didn’t happen often—once every few years since high school. She’d gotten used to it: waking up in the middle of the night in odd places throughout the house. One time last year she’d found herself in the kitchen at three in the morning with the refrigerator door wide open and a plate of leftover pasta sitting on the counter.
She forced a laugh, which sounded to her like a braying donkey. “I must have undressed myself without realizing it. God, how embarrassing.”
Lisa and Wendy looked unconvinced. Rita admitted to herself that her story strained credulity. But she’d heard of sleepwalkers doing crazier things—even drive a car—so why couldn’t she have undressed herself?
Hell, she even started to believe the story herself, a little.
What do the psychiatrists call that? Believing in imagined memories? Confabulation.
“How did you strap yourself down?” said Wendy.
Rita blinked. “What?”
“You were strapped to the table, with your arms underneath the straps. How did you tighten the straps? After you were lying down? With your arms, like—trapped?”
“Well.” She nibbled on her lower lip. No weakness. “The buckle for the strap was near my right hand. I’m right-handed. You only need one hand to tighten these buckles. Right?”
“But why would you strap yourself down in the first place?”
Rita shrugged, hoping it looked nonchalant. “Who knows? People do strange things while they’re sleepwalking, then, uh, have absolutely no memory of it. Strapping patients to these tables is something we do just about every day. It makes sense that my brain is, um, hardwired for it, and that I might go through the motions even when I’m asleep.”
She laughed (brayed) again. “Haven’t either one of you guys ever done something weird in your sleep?”
At first, neither said anything. But after a few moments—long enough for Rita to wonder if the two of them were buying it, or at least feigning belief for politeness’ sake—Wendy decided to try her luck one more time.
“But, then, how did you—” she began.
When Rita was a girl, there’d been this boy her age who’d lived down the street: a lumbering, sullen kid who’d tag along after the older boys as they’d skateboarded and smoked cigarettes in back of the local Circle K minimart. She and her friends had avoided him; he’d, in turn, ignored them.
Until one summer afternoon when they were nine, and she’d been playing with a few neighborhood girls on the small patch of browned grass that had served as her family’s front yard. She’d been standing next to her bike when the boy had appeared and, without explanation, knocked her down and tried to make off with her bike.
Her reaction had surprised herself as much as anyone else. To this day, she remembered her fury, her little-girl righteous indignation that someone, even this bigger boy, would try to take away her bike, with the flowered Barbie basket hanging on the front panel—still remembered the frightened screams of her friends as she’d launched herself at him, and pinned him in the spiky brown grass.
She’d flailed at him with her small fists until her father had come out and dragged her away. The boy, stunned but unhurt, had run home crying and never bothered her again. Her father had carried her inside, cleaned her up, and placed her on his lap.
You’re a little spitfire, lovely Rita. You don’t let people walk all over you. That’s good. Just like your mom. But you’ve got to learn to control that temper.
She’d burst into tears. The injustice of it! She’d wanted to tell him that she didn’t have a temper, whatever that was. It had been the boy’s fault, not hers: If he’d just left her alone, she wouldn’t have had to hit him. She buried her face in her father’s chest (his dog tag, his metal dog tag underneath his T-shirt, she felt it press against her cheek) and promised she wouldn’t do it again.