PUBLISHED 8/08 Sounds Of The Night
Greta Roberts used to have breasts, nice ones. Now she didn’t even need a bra and the very idea of wearing one seemed ridiculous.
She remembered well the night it began. It was one year ago to the day that she received her EBay purchase in the mail.
How cold it was going to be that night didn’t matter to Greta when she tossed another log on the fire. What did matter is that she was home alone for the first time in months and she had the evening all planned out.
She poured herself a glass of wine and snuggled down on the sofa with her laptop and a list of wants she was determined to scout out online. New sheets, a couple of best sellers, and a golden unicorn rosebush she wanted to plant next to the mission style bench she bought that summer.
www.Ebay.com. Category - household, subcategory - linens. She waited for the page to display. 25 per page from highest to lowest price. Her color of choice, burgundy. She glanced quickly down the page until something unusual caught her eye. “One slightly used soul looking for good home. Hundreds of lifetime’s worth of experience. Somewhat eccentric and cynical, but well educated. Grand sense of humor. Can be moody and has a tendency for excess, but very attractive. Any reasonable offer will be considered.”
It was amusing for a moment and Greta smiled thinking about who might have posted such a whimsical advertisement in the linen section. In fact, Greta felt moved in a way she had almost forgotten she could be. It was a long moment before she remembered why she was on the page to begin with, and she swallowed the remainder of the wine in her glass before continuing her search.
The evening progressed and she went from sheets, to roses, to best sellers. With each new item she found the same “Soul for Sale” listing, and with each new page it inched its way higher up on the list. As it did, Greta was evermore consumed with thoughts about the responsible party. She brought the bottle of wine from the kitchen to the sofa and changed out of her jeans into a nightgown. She loaded two more logs onto the fire, and then for no reason at all fixed her makeup. Finally, feeling a bit silly, Greta decided to call a friend and have her take a look.
“I don’t see it,” her friend said. “What page? What product?”
“It’s on every page, every product,” Greta answered. “Do a search.”
“It’s not here, Greta. Not on anything I bring up.”
“It has to be.”
“Well, it’s not. I gotta’ go. I have to be at work early tomorrow. It’s probably just a glitch. I’ll talk to you later.”
Greta stared at the posting. Her fingers danced on the keyboard. She finished the bottle of wine and then as quickly as she could hit the “Place Bid” button and entered $10.00. At that instant the bidding time ran out and she found herself typing her address and credit card information. Her purchase would arrive in 5 to 7 working days.
6:45 AM. The radio on Greta’s bedside table blared to life. She turned her head to eye the hour. The sudden motion sent a bolt of white-hot pain up the side of her neck, and like an aging fullback in a fourth quarter huddle a pair of matching dark circles framed her eyes, marking the numerous night’s sleep eluded her.
“We can’t be late for your test, remember?” Her husband’s voice echoed from the bathroom. Greta didn’t need Dan or the alarm to wake her up. Six hours, twelve minutes and 18 seconds of prickly tension counting the ceiling fan’s rotation and seeking a comfortable position for her aching body had put her near hysteria.
She stared at the small black Sony next to her head. The local “traffic sergeant” reported a motorcycle over the side on the 405 and a “car-b-que” on the 110. What else was new? At that moment, she didn’t care if there was an eighty-car pileup on her front lawn. She slammed her fist down on the power button knocking the radio and several empty glasses to the floor. A stinking beer can full of cigarettes butts leaked a foul charcoal liquid onto to the carpet. From around the corner the squeal of pipes as Dan cranked on the shower. Before he got in, he again yelled for her to get up.
“I know,” she snapped back. “My test, shit, more like my one-hundredth test.” She rubbed her face and immediately noticed stubble on her chin. She was growing a beard. It horrified her the first time she felt it, but by now it was the least of Greta’s troubles.
This morning a fourth MRI was supposed to supply answers three psychiatrists and a virtual horde of MD’s had thus far been unable to provide. “Perhaps a Catholic colonic of holy water would help,” she mused.
Greta was changing, morphing into a sideshow freak, a regular Twilight Zone character. She told herself she wanted answers, but she was equally weary of the pursuit. The fact was Greta had nearly given up believing a physical malady was the source of her woes. She fought the idea for awhile, telling herself it was stress, but as her appearance continued to change that particular logic lost favor. What Greta really thought was plain crazy and she knew it.
It was only a small blue envelope with no return address. In fact, the envelope didn’t contain a thing except the vague scent of musk. It captured her the instant she slit open the seal. Like the day she purchased it, it seduced her and she touched it to her face and breathed in deep.
That it was otherwise completely empty ultimately irritated her and she threw it away and told herself she was a fool and deserved the swindle. But later that night she could think of nothing else and she crept out of bed and dug through the kitchen trash to retrieve it. She smoothed it out carefully and looked at the postmark. Wet coffee grounds had dampened it and the red postmark was smeared, but it looked to be from Venice California, dated March 18, 1971 with an eight-cent stamp.
“What the hell?” She whispered. She sniffed it again. The scent was gone, but the allure was not and she examined the handwriting. Her heart lost its rhythm and her knees their ability to keep her standing. “This is my old address and you’ve been dead for decades,” she said on her way to the floor.”
She pushed the envelope into the back of her desk drawer and slammed it shut, all the while trying to rationalize its existence. A lost postman’s bag just recovered perhaps, or a relative who found it in some long forgotten inherited box of mementos. An exhaustive search of EBay rendered no clues, and there was no record of her purchase either online or on the credit card.
4:38 A.M. the following day, a strange sensation woke her. Her ears felt plugged by a low steady hum, and like a tuning fork her entire body began to vibrate. She clawed at the sheets, twisting them into damp minarets and her heart elbowed its way up her narrowing throat. The green glow of the clock on the bedside bureau pulsated like a beating heart. The hour put a chill in her spine; a cold blade that snaked down her back. The taste of blood and the smell of vomit clogged her senses. “Time to die,” A voice, not her own, came from her lips.
When it was over, her trembling fingers searched for the book-light above the headboard. The small silver spotlight lent comfort enough for her to see that she had neither been sick nor bleeding. Dan remained undisturbed beside her. With all seemingly peaceful she sloughed it off as a nightmare, but that morning she noticed a small raised mole on her left cheek beside her nose; a mole that had never been there before, or had it. There was something familiar about it. She grabbed a recent Christmas photo off the mantle and looked at herself. “No mole.”
Time and again it would happen the same way. She would wake up, glance at the clock, and within seconds the hum and the tremor would commence. It was sporadic at first, maybe every other week, but the frequency increased and with each episode a small change. Often she would see things. A freakish slideshow of stark colorless images flashed through her brain like a strangers vacation photos. At other times it got physical.
In appeared deliberate for it was always in the morning just after Dan left for work. The morning was her favorite time. It had been his favorite time. Like always, it started with the hum, and then she would wait for what became an ethereal and erotic tug of war her with her body. Chilling and seductive, it grew to be the welcome payoff for the other burdens she bore and she felt jilted when too much time passed without a visit from her invisible trespasser.
Beneath the fear lie that special something she recognized. That indescribable thrill she discovered so many years ago. She had never really left it behind. She kept that slice of her past locked away in an X-rated niche of her brain. It wasn’t long however before Greta’s reality began to blur and she couldn’t tell the difference between her real life and the lascivious visions.
One afternoon while talking to a friend on the phone, she realized that her old high school confidant was viciously berating her.
“Shut up, Greta. You’re freaking me out with that voice. This isn’t funny anymore. Don’t call me with this crap again. This stupid charade of yours is absurd. Why don’t you just tell Dan you want to leave him instead of pretending your crazy, or gay, or whatever the hell you’re doing? You’re pathetic.”
“What are you talking about? I don’t want to end my marriage. I love Dan. I never said that.”
“Greta, you say shit all the time you don’t remember. The last time you were at my house you were flirting with my sister.”
“What?”
“Stay away from me Greta, I’m done.”
There was silence on the other end of the line and then the cold buzz of the dial tone. “Bitch,” She whispered under her breath before yanking the cord out of the wall. That old friend was one of several that had not spoken to Greta for many months, and in spite of what was all too obvious to others, Greta struggled to understand why.
One afternoon she found herself curled up on the floor of the closet. The weight of something unfamiliar pressed against her shoulder. The bones in her hands, wrists, and forearms throbbed. Pressed against the inside of her tennis shoes, her toes were near numb. Dizzy from the panic that timed her breath, she was afraid to open her eyes to find out where she was.
It was the scent that brought her around, the vague aroma of Dan’s cologne and her perfume. She opened one eye and waited. A worn leather sandal tightly clutched in a man’s hand came into focus. The large lean fist with the pronounced veins and sprouting hair belonged to her and she knew it. Afraid to discover anything further, she remained crouched beneath the rack of Dan’s slacks for nearly an hour.
Her last blackout was by far the worst. With a half-empty bottle of scotch tucked in her robe pocket, she ended up wandering the streets in her nightgown cursing at passing cars. Dan found her sitting on a neighbor’s curb, a retired couple they had known for years. He was furious, humiliated.
“Why do I have to be married to Dr. Jekyll?” He snarled, dragging her into the house kicking and screaming. “You’re not the woman I wed.” He grabbed her wrists and shook her. “Look at you, Greta. I’ve known you for over twenty years. You’re not the same, and it’s not just your appearance. Look at our house. It’s a pigsty and you’re drinking and smoking, a lot. I feel like I’m married to one of my old frat house roommates. You used to be so…”
“Compliant?” She barked.
“Why are you doing this, Greta?”
“Doing what?” She twisted out of his grip.
“Everybody knows it’s you. What the hell are you doing? I want my wife back. Our son deserves a mother.”
At that moment, she felt something in her loins, a kind of rage that made her lightheaded. A dark primitive anger rose from her liquor soaked gut. She stepped back and took a swing at Dan like a dragoon going fisticuffs with a Spaniard. “I don’t know who I am,” she screamed, “and I’m sick of you picking on me. I live like a naked adolescent under your scrutiny,” she spat, inches from his face.
“You’re drunk.” Dan shoved her.
“You’re damn right I’m drunk!” She shoved him back.
That was three weeks ago and since then Dan insisted she wear a bell around her ankle when she went to bed. Humiliated by his recounting of her behavior, she agreed.
Dr. Taylor, her current psychiatrist confirmed Dan’s accusations, telling her she was confused, and in a roundabout psychobabble way accused Greta of taking testosterone or injecting steroids. She was bulking up fast and her facial features were acquiring an angular sharpness. The voices she heard suggested something different. The doctor prescribed Clozapine, a drug for schizophrenics. Greta never got it filled. Her previous shrink, a Dr. Robbins told her she might be experiencing latent homosexual tendencies because of her new look, a partiality for leather pants and cowboy boots.
“Oh right,” she grumbled. “You and my stupid friends are full of it.” She pounded her fist on the table aside the doctor’s sofa. “Even if it were true it wouldn’t do this to me.” She lifted up her shirt revealing a decidedly male abdomen. “This hurts,” she screamed at the doctor.
“Greta, this kind of gender modification is not that uncommon for homosexuals.”
“I am not gay, doctor. I’m not doing this to myself. I assure you, if I wanted to sleep with women, I would.” That was the end of her sessions with Dr. Robbins.
Initially it was the dreams and the addictive morning wake-up calls, but it was progressing fast and she knew she needed help. Help she was not getting from the likes of Dr. Robbins. Greta was changing inch by inch and she needed more than a prescription. She looked younger, her teeth were moving, her lips were fuller, her eyebrows thicker. The MD’s and the PhD’s, they all nodded, took notes, ordered tests. She could sense the suspicion even when she resorted to before and after photos.
Dan’s shower was still running and she pressed her size ten feet on the cool carpet alongside the fallen cups and bear soaked ashes. She kicked a tumbler aside and headed toward the kitchen and the coffee pot. She used to like her caffeine with cream, but as of a year ago, it was just black with a keg of sugar.
Greta paced back and forth in the lackluster waiting room of the lab, a critical eye on the faded peach wallpaper and flesh-tone linoleum floor. She paused to study a painting of a nameless marina on the wall. There were no people in the picture, only sailboats, gulls, and the illusion of wind, sun, and surf. On a small table in the corner, an off-brand television hummed. Poor reception from a severely bent antennae and garbled sound were making her nuts, but nobody else seemed to mind.
“Sit down,” Dan snapped. “You’re making a spectacle of yourself. Besides, Dr. Taylor will be here soon.”
“A spectacle, Dan? Gee thanks, I hadn’t noticed.” She eyed the other hapless victims of medical exploration seated patiently in their chairs. She had hoped to capture a little sympathy from kind eyes, but not one hazarded a glance to impart even a modicum of pity her way. Were they just a bunch of cold bastards or simply afraid to make eye contact with the big freak in the middle of the room? She grabbed her purse and retreated to the bathroom for the third time.
Inside the shelter of the small restroom, she plucked off a floppy leather hat she wore to hide her face and gawked at her new reflection in the small vanity mirror. Someone was there, someone familiar.
“This is impossible,” she whispered, her forefinger tracing her reflection in the mirror.
“Impossible, Greta?”
The voice snared her. It was a bedroom baritone that sent a weakness and a promise of pleasure to her loins. She backed up against the tile and closed her eyes.
“You remember, don’t you Greta?”
She caught a glimpse of her lips moving in the mirror. “Stop.” She took a quick breath and stepped forward. “Please.” She dropped the toilet seat and sat down. “God help me.”
The only person who Greta now believed knew the truth was a Bulgarian psychic. Six weeks ago with a referral from an old friend, Greta went to see the aging fortuneteller in a World War II period loft in the Fairfax district of Los Angeles. It was a small apartment nestled above a Jewish bakery.
A faded green door at the top of the hot dark stairwell loomed before her. Consumed by second thoughts and feeling desperately stupid, she turned to run more than once, but the comforting smell of fresh rye lulled her into forgetting the heat and her stifling apprehension. She had concealed her new look well that day and decided she would confess nothing and see what happened. “What do I have to loose.”
She rang the bell. The door opened and a butter-smooth voice coated with a heavy accent greeted her. An old woman, not more than five feet tall, stepped back and beckoned Greta in with a backward sweep of her hand. She directed her to take a seat at a small table in the center of the parlor.
Dozens of crystals and hand blown glass figurines hung in the street-side window. They twirled lazily in the warm breeze refracting the smog drenched sunlight. Each tiny movement sent a kaleidoscope of rainbow colors in an endless chase around the walls.
Greta sat quiet, her heart drumming in her chest. The tiny Slav circled her three times. She hummed and took what sounded to Greta like startled breaths. Several minutes later she came around and settled herself into a worn red-velvet chair, complete with white doilies on the arms and backrest. The way the woman stared had Greta squirming. She fidgeted, fighting the urge to touch her face if only to make sure nothing was grossly out of place or offensive. She sought to engage the woman by purposely clearing her throat. In the end, in an effort to avoid the psychic’s unsettling stare, she concentrated on the thick white hair crowning the seer’s head. The petite woman wore it in a bun, but even so it formed a kind of luminous halo around her face. As the seconds ticked by, Greta swore she felt the fortuneteller’s eyes darting about inside her chest, digging for the dirt that had brought her to her door.
Her cool smooth palms stroked Greta’s warm perspiring mitts. “I am Charna,” she said. “You have acquired some unusual attributes recently haven’t you?”
Her question was vague enough not to really mean anything, but it hit home nevertheless. Greta watched the rainbow-derby rush past in the background as a sudden gust sent the figurines into a spin. It brought to mind a particularly unnerving event. It was a few days after her thirteenth episode. She awoke in a cold sweat. She was nauseous and had a hacking cough. Later that afternoon while taking a hot shower to ease the pain in her limbs, she launched into a version of John Lee Hooker’s “Boogie Chillen.” Her voice could only be described as, not her own. Her sixteen-year-old son, Jack, banged on the door wondering whom she was ‘soapin-up with.’ He went so far as to check outside to see if someone had crawled out the bathroom window. He was afraid of her from that day on, never allowing less than three feet of space between them. It ripped a mammoth size hole in Greta’s heart, and nothing she said eased his anxiety.
“I’m scared,” Greta admitted. She cleared her throat remembering the sound of her voice in the shower.
“You are going on a long journey,” Charna said.
Greta slouched in her seat and tried not to vocalize her opinion of the absurd remark. Had she not read that fortune cookie a hundred times?
“No,” Charna said, “listen to me. You are changing. You are going away and you will never come back unless you buy yourself back.”
Her chest constricted like a ruptured balloon. “Buy myself back? What are you talking about?”
“With your purchase you have given yourself over Greta Roberts, and unless you do as I tell you, you will know this intruder better than you ever dared dream.”
“What do you mean?” She choked on what little breath she had left. “You’re crazy,” she shouted in a hoarse male voice.
“You know what I mean, Greta Roberts.”
She jerked her clammy hands from Charna’s grip and headed for the door. A dull pain in her head accompanied a burning sensation that coursed over her flesh.
“He is no stranger, Greta Roberts. He gave you something.” Charna shouted after her, but Greta flew down the stairs. The private roar in her head shut her off from the outside world. She burst out of the dim stairwell into a near violent heat of a September afternoon. The blinding white sidewalk knocked her backwards into the bakery window and she stumbled off in a humiliated stupor.
“It’s my own fault.” She stomped back and forth in front of a boarded up newsstand. “What was I thinking going to see that woman? Of course she was going to use a pack of vague metaphors. That’s her trade. Any crazy thing she said would make sense at this point. But how did she know I was changing? I’ve hid it well. Nobody can tell.” Greta raked her fingers through her hair and the searched for a mirror in her purse. She eyed herself carefully. “Nobody can tell.”
For an hour she wandered around trying to remember where she parked her car. When she did, she snatched a parking ticket off her windshield and then sat in the sweltering seat for fifteen minutes cursing her ignorant folly.
“What’s wrong, Greta?” The voice quieted the roar in her head. She whirled around, but then realized it was her who spoke.
That was before she could no longer hide the obvious. Things larger clothes or makeup could not conceal. Back then, Dr. Taylor told her the minor alterations were expressions of her anger toward her father and now Dan.
“You fear being controlled, Greta, and this little makeover is your way of dealing with it.”
That’s preposterous, she thought, leaving Dr. Taylor’s office that afternoon. “You’re a quack,” She told her. “If this only were about Dan, I could stop it,” She shouted to the doctor before leaving.
She was alone in the elevator on her way to her car, when it came to an abrupt halt between floors.
“Are you alright, misses?” A voice accompanied a clatter and the smell of ammonia. It was a maintenance man wheeling a large container of mops and brooms into the lift.
Greta was on the floor in the corner, her blouse unbuttoned to the waist. She scrambled to her feet, and turned to the wall.
“Yes, thank you. I tripped when the elevator stopped.” Greta clutched her blouse and pushed past him. She raced down the stairs. “This isn’t happening.”
“Don’t you want me to touch you anymore?”
“No.”
“You really want me to stop?” The voice spread its seductive talons down her neck, over her shoulders, and beyond. “It’s my turn now, Greta. That was our deal.”
“Stop! We have no deal.”
“You don’t remember our deal, our nights together when I said I wanted to posses you body and soul?”
“You’re not him. He’s dead.”
“Ahh yes, he is dead. He couldn’t handle my appetites. But you know I’m telling the truth. You know that I was him, like I was so many others before.”
“This is crazy.” Greta slammed her car door and sped out of the parking lot.
She hit her head hard on the steering wheel of her old blue Mustang that day. She struck an Oak tree in front of the post office. Not knowing how it happened and too ashamed to call Dan, she had the car towed and called a cab.
“Look at you,” she lamented, staring in the bathroom mirror. Not one person could explain away her new height, 5’10”, or her brown wavy locks where there used to be blond. Of course good Dr. Taylor didn’t know her before. She insisted on a hair dye analysis, telling her she needed to face facts. Greta told her she didn’t dye her hair, and consented to prove it. The test confirmed she was telling the truth, but the doctor wanted more. Greta had the heart rate of a twenty-five year old man, and her skin looked brand new compared to a year ago.
“I have an Adams apple for crīssake,” she tilted her head back and adjusted her collar. Still, nobody believed it was anything more than a sad attempt on her part to escape her life, or an obscure medical condition that thus far had no name. Why should they believe? They weren’t voodoo doctors. Even she had been through every medical textbook she could get her hands on, combing through pictures of bearded women and people with rare genetic disorders. And it wasn’t wholly ridiculous, the idea of her being insane. She read about that too. One day when she was alone in the house, she ransacked every drawer, cupboard, and closet looking for drugs or hair dye, anything that she might have hidden in a Mr. Hyde state of mind. There was nothing except for the liquor and cigarettes, which she suspected Dan of hiding. She even burned the little blue envelope, but it didn’t change a thing.
“Stop it, Greta. You’re not insane and you’re not turning into someone else.” She pressed her palms against the wall on either side of the mirror and bowed her head. Her tears spilled into the sink. “They will find something today. You will be okay.”
There was someone knocking on the door.
“I’ll be right out,” she said. “Damn, I gotta’ pee again.” Her deep voice made her jump thinking the knocker was entering the room. She struggled with the buttons on her jeans. They were too tight but she refused to buy another pair. They were the third she had outgrown in two months. “Shit, I can’t go out like this. Look at my hands. I’ve got hair on my knuckles.”
“Greta, it’s me, Dr. Taylor. Are you all right? They’re paging you.”
“Pockets, Greta. Stick your hands in your pockets.” She flushed the toilet, shook her hair down over her face and unlocked the stall door. Her heart was rocking her body like an old engine in need of a tune-up. She washed her hands, slid some lipstick over her mouth, tropical coral, and reached for the door.
“Medical equipment seems to prefer wintry conditions,” she said to the technician fiddling with the machines controls. Cold and anxiety were not a good combination. As a result Greta had no chance of stopping her teeth from doing a solo castanet performance. Wearing only a paper gown and her socks, she noticed she should have shaved her legs. Hair had not been a problem she dealt with in the past, but that was before the blue envelope arrived. Dan and Dr. Taylor were waiting inside. The good doctor promised Greta she would stand by her. Greta wasn’t sure why. Her guess was professional curiosity. No doubt, she was one for the textbooks.
“I don’t know what they expect to find, I’ve had x-rays by the dozens,” she told the tech.
“The scan is concentrating on your pituitary gland and bones. The doctor will compare them with recent blood tests to see if perhaps hormone therapy is in order.”
“Perhaps?” She mumbled, glancing at her legs again.
Her ungainly hands caressed Dan’s face and she kissed him on the cheek before lying down at the entrance of the tube. He touched his chin. She assumed it was because he felt the stubble of her beard, but the look he gave her was not about that. He could see, she thought; see the face behind her eyes. “You saw him,” she whispered. She lost her balance as the impact of that hit her.
He steadied her with his arm around her waist. “What? Saw who?”
“Nothing.”
Greta had never confided her suspicions to Dan. How could she? She hadn’t even told the psychiatrists. What she did say only served to get her a prescription for some psychotropic drugs. She couldn’t bring herself to tell anyone she thought she was turning into a man she had a brief affair with when she was just a teenager. While she had nearly come to accept it, she knew entertaining such ideas was the very definition of insanity.
From the moment she first heard his dark sultry voice at that rundown club near the beach, she was mesmerized, drawn like the proverbial moth to the flame. His songs were for her and her alone and she could not get enough. For hours in the gloom of that smoky hangout, she would take note of every word, every fine nuance in his voice. Their barbed claws would tease her mind and flesh. He was larger than life, his charisma unrivaled and he had wanted her. His appetite for liquor, drugs, and women, became legendary and Greta reflected on her newly acquired tastes. Had he too succumbed to the lure of this powerful entity?
It was all very clear to her as she stood looking into Dan’s puzzled eyes.
“It’s my fault,” She sighed.
Lying alone at the mouth of the goliath machine, she could see Dan through the viewing room window engaged in an animated discussion with Dr. Taylor. It was then that she began to shake in earnest. Dread overwhelmed her making the cold climate a minor inconvenience. She could hardly catch her breath.
The procedure was loud as she moved slowly through the tunnel, a fierce clanging that seemed to be shouting at her, reminding her of just how gravely ill or psychotic she was. Then it began to fade into a soft ping and the urge for a cold beer came to the forefront of her mind. I am insane, she thought. In spite of the fact that she had been consuming a great deal of it of late, Greta hated beer, and she was lying in a gigantic machine that was photographing her body slice by slice like a butcher carves lunch-meat. Nevertheless, she wondered if a particular bar in Hollywood still existed. She didn’t recall the name. She had never been there but she was sure she wanted to be there again. She wanted to be sitting in one of the red-leather booths, her hand caressing a glass of golden-brown escape. She wanted to be in that dimly lit smoky shelter taking in the odor of decades of drinking and carousing that permeated the walls.
Was everyone looking up her gown from that little window, she wondered. What were they seeing, those smug bastards. She was afraid to touch herself to find out. All she could think about was getting out of that claustrophobic tube and into a hazy refuge somewhere in a past she didn’t own.
Back in the dressing room, she pulled up her jeans and yanked on her boots. Every minor physical activity burned and she could actually hear her bones creak. She had to go to the bathroom again and she couldn’t stop looking at her hands. They were not hers, nor were her forearms, shoulders, or breasts. “What breasts?” She left her bra on the hook, held her breath and zipped up her fly. She didn’t want to look in the mirror; instead she grabbed her purse and ran toward the restroom with her hat pulled tight over her head.
As she trotted past the open door, she eyed the lobby where her entourage awaited the results of the scan. They would be looking for her soon.
She slid the lock shut and then reached around to hang up her bag. Her stomach hurt. In fact, her whole body screamed pain and she stared at the toilet not sure what to do, sit or stand.
“Oh God,” she cried. “It’s happening. Right here in the bathroom.” The noise filled Greta’s head and she gripped her ears. The pain was crippling and she slammed her back against the wall and sank to the floor. Her son’s face, his smell, his sweet smile was all she could think of. He wouldn’t even be a memory soon; she knew that much and she fought hard to keep his name in her head. She wanted to run into the lobby so everyone could see, see that she had been telling the truth all along, but the pain kept her pinned to the floor.
“Why me,” she shrieked. A searing pain around her neck and she reached for a chain she wore and yanked it free. In her palm, she held a braided silver ring that had hung on that chain since she was sixteen.
“He gave you something.” Charna’s words were clear for the first time. The pattern of the ring burned into her flesh and she remembered the same faded mark on his hand. She crumpled forward striking her forehead on the rim of the toilet and then gripped her inner thighs and dry-heaved until she thought she would lose consciousness. “Who are you?” She whispered. She tried to open her fingers, but it was too late. Her hand was uncooperative and then everything went white.
Greta stared at the base of the toilet. Her head rested against the floor. The pain was leaving her and the feel of the cold floor soothed the aching.
“Greta, Greta, are you in there?”
“Dan?” She whispered. “Who’s Dan?” She sucked on her blistered palm. “Come on, you know who Dan is.” She racked her brain for the connection.
“Greta, it’s me, Dan. They have your results.”
This Dan character was outside addressing her. What was his deal? Greta stood up, faced the toilet, unzipped her pants, urinated, then kicked the handle with the toe of her shoe. After adjusting herself in her trousers, she turned around and opened the door only to come face to face with Dan.
“Oh God,” he said, stepping back. “I’m sorry, I thought you were my wife.” His words came in small bursts.
“Right,” Greta pushed past him.
He grabbed her arm. “Greta, please, I know it’s you. I didn’t believe you.” He pulled her closer and looked into her eyes. How could I? What will I do without you?”
“I don’t know, man.” She pulled away from him.
“What about Jack? What will I tell him?”
“Jack?”
“Your son.”
“Tell him anything you like, man. What do you want from me?”
Dan looked like he was going to cry. “Greta, they have your results. They can help you.”
“What are you talking about? Where are we anyway, a hospital? This place stinks like disease.”
Dan merely stared at her.
There was something about the guy that made her want to comfort him but she had other plans. She patted him on the shoulder and then headed toward the exit.
Behind her, the excited voice of a woman slowed her pace.
“Oh my God, Greta?” The woman started after her, but Greta did not slow her pace. “Greta, it’s me, Dr. Taylor. Wait.”
Dan was standing in front of the bathroom holding a purse, shaking his head and whimpering.
The elevator was closing rapidly and Greta raced in just before the steel doors slid shut. She eyed her reflection in the polished metal. A budding young girl in a tight pink sweater stood beside her.
“Hey, are you a model or something?” the girl asked.
“A model?”
“Yeah. You’re hot.”
“You’re pretty hot yourself. How old are you?
“15.”
“What’s your name?
“Peggy.”
“Here Peggy, I have something for you.” Greta opened her hand and plucked the ring from her palm. “Give me your finger,” she said, slipping the ring on Peggy. “Perfect fit. Now, don’t ever lose it, and we will always be friends.
A fierce blush ripened Peggy’s cheeks. “Wow, really?”
From beyond the heavy doors, Greta could just make out the PA. “Greta Roberts, please report to the reception desk. Greta Roberts.”
“Yes Peggy, we will always be friends as long as you have that ring.” He touched the girls red curls. “Very pretty, Peggy. I like redheads, a lot.”
