Chapter Six
On Annie’s last day in the hospital, Dr. Ganz reverted to her communication method of the first day. She typed on a tablet and swiveled it around for Annie to read. Annie was glad for the reversion, which meant the two had to sit close together. She liked Dr. Ganz, and she knew—because there was no fooling Annie these days, not about emotions—that the feeling was mutual.
“Keep the arm in a sling,” Dr. Ganz wrote. “See me or your own doctor once a week for the next month, then at least once a month for the following two months. We’ll let you know when the sling can come off, but at a guess you’ll be able to do without it in another two or three weeks. As long as you’re very careful. No strenuous activity, no heavy lifting. Got it?”
“I got it,” Annie said. Over the past ten days, she had been working with nurse Helen, Nanci Keller, and some others, and she thought she had a fairly good handle on her voice’s volume now. Tone was still questionable, but she tried.
Dr. Ganz deleted the last note and wrote more. When she turned the screen toward Annie, it said, “As for your hearing, the surgery went fine, as you know. There’s no repairing or replacing damaged hair cells, so I wish I could promise you that your hearing would return completely, but I can’t. I think it’ll come back at least partially, when the ruptured membrane heals more. Let’s give it a little more time, but if it doesn’t come back to your satisfaction, there are lots of alternatives you can explore.”
“Like lip reading?”
“Like implants,” Dr. Ganz wrote, “or other hearing-assistance devices. Hearing aids. Lip reading wouldn’t be a bad skill to master as well. Your hearing will never be what it was, Annie. Even if it comes back, I expect you will continue to have trouble telling direction from sound, for instance. In a noisy restaurant, you might have a hard time picking out your date’s conversation from the background noise.”
“Like anyone’s going to want to date the deaf chick.” Annie said.
Dr. Ganz wagged her finger at Annie. Annie laughed. She’d been celibate for more than two weeks, and fine with it. Her hair was growing longer than she had ever allowed it to when she’d been on the job, and she had decided to let that continue. She had gained a couple of pounds, from eating hospital food and getting virtually no exercise. As long as her clavicle was healing, that would continue as well, like it or not. But physically, except for the collarbone and the ears, the continued ringing and frequent headaches, she was mostly happy with herself. It shouldn’t be long before men were hitting on her again.
And if they approached her from the front, she might even know it was happening.
“You’re a good patient, Annie. Strong and motivated. Even with partial hearing, you’ll be fine.”
“Thanks for all your help, Dr. Ganz.”
“You’re welcome,” Dr. Ganz said, speaking the words with studied deliberation. Watching the doctor’s lips, Annie knew what she had said.
She had kept the clairsentience to herself, once she had identified it as such. She tested it by intentionally spending time in the ER or oncology or obstetrics, picking up on the powerful emotions roiling through all those places. She couldn’t avoid testing it further whenever anyone came to visit her. Annie might have been a self-identified empath, but the supernatural still had negative connotations for her, so she chose not to share that identification with other people. Instead, she did her best to pretend she was herself, even when she had to fight back someone else’s emotions and play-act what they expected to see from her.
She wondered how that would go outside the hospital’s confines. Out in the real world. She couldn’t go back to work—not only did the collarbone and the deafness argue against that, but the emotional upheavals a cop had to deal with on a daily basis would drive her over the edge. The first homicidal person she encountered would wind up dead, and her career would be over anyway. Better to end it herself, before it was ended by a prison term.
“You have friends waiting,” Dr. Ganz wrote. “You ready?”
“I think so,” Annie said.
“I’ll get you a wheelchair,” Dr. Ganz might have said. At any rate, she accompanied the words with pantomime, and Annie got the idea. She didn’t want to use a wheelchair, was perfectly able to walk under her own steam. But like junk mail and telemarketers’ calls at dinnertime, there was no avoiding it, so she settled on the edge of the bed and waited.
An orderly wheeled the chair in. Annie sat down in it and he wheeled her out of the room to the sitting area where Dale Carson and Nanci Keller waited. Both hugged her gingerly, cautious of her left arm in its sling. After some brief discussion with the orderly, Carson took over the chair duties.
Nanci walked beside the chair, carrying Annie’s suitcase. Tall and slender, with thick black hair that refused all attempts to tame it, she wore a red western-style shirt with gold and green accents, blue jeans, and boots. Low-key for Nanci, since the shirt was snapped all the way up. As they went down the elevator and toward the front door, she kept a smile pasted on her face. But the smile was phony, Annie knew—Nanci was terrified that Annie would want to hang out with her outside the hospital, and she didn’t have the slightest idea how to socialize with a deaf person. Annie was tempted to tell her not to worry about it, but Carson didn’t know about the clairsentience, and she wanted to keep it that way.
Outside, free of the wheelchair and the smell of the hospital, Annie delighted in a fresh breeze blowing through her hair. She walked to Carson’s car and sat in the front seat. On the way to her condo in South Phoenix, just across the line from Tempe, Carson and Nanci chatted. Every now and then Carson tossed her a smile or Nanci rubbed her shoulders (gently on the left side, of course). At her place, they came in and brought her suitcase from the car, but before long Annie feigned exhaustion and sent them on their way, just to be rid of them.
The condo felt stale. Annie opened windows and let cool January air wash in. Her place was on the second floor, with a garage underneath in which someone from the department had stowed her Ford Taurus (white, like so many cars in Phoenix, the better to deflect summer sun) after it had sat in the PD parking lot for a few days. A big front bay window looked out over the bare branches of a mesquite tree; the condo complex’s grounds, like most of the Valley of the Sun these days, were xeriscaped to favor the desert’s low-rainfall conditions.
Nanci had watered the few houseplants Annie had managed to keep alive, Annie’s lack of maternal instinct extending to plants and pets. The place looked like she just had left it that morning—neat, organized, barely inhabited. Annie had never mastered the art of making a home her own. The condo might have been a rental unit, except for a handful of personal objects: some books, a couple of framed photos of her father in uniform, knickknacks she had picked up on various vacation trips to Mexico, Hawaii, California, and New York. She had bought all the furniture at once, telling the salesperson how many rooms she had to fill (two bedrooms, living room, dining room, kitchen, two baths) and two days later a truck had delivered it all. It was vaguely southwestern, mostly blond wood with fabric that reminded her of Arizona sunsets, and if it wasn’t what she would have chosen for herself if she had picked out each item separately, it was good enough. For Annie, a chair was something she sat on, not something that declared her personality to the world.
Which, she supposed, said something about her personality right there.
Maybe later she could get in touch with them and put them at ease about spending time with her. She shouldn’t have reacted so strongly in the first place, sending them away like that. Nobody loved everything about their friends all the time. She should have been willing to accept that they were uncomfortable and tried to relax them. But she had been so tired, and the tinnitus had been giving her a headache, and she had just run out of patience.
Besides, she had known they wanted to get out of there. The thing about being an empath, she was learning, was that she always sensed what other people were feeling, good or bad. She would have to learn to deal with that if the condition didn’t go away.
On the other hand, although she couldn’t remain a cop, she believed she’d make one hell of a poker player.
Alone in the apartment, Annie went into the bathroom and regarded herself in her familiar mirror, with familiar surroundings reflected around her. Everything, in fact, was familiar—her hair, only a little darker than an orange peel, her face with its high, prominent cheekbones and straight nose, full lips and even teeth, her large, curious green eyes—but that familiarity didn’t disguise the fact that a stranger stared back at her from the glass. That person had an ability that the Annie O’Brien she had grown up as, lived her whole life as, could never have imagined. Every time she thought she was getting used to it, she brushed up against someone and caught a thrill of fear or lust or anxiety or contentment or something else. Each time she was snatched out of herself and thrown into that other person’s secret heart. While it was happening, of course, she was wrapped up in it, but once it faded and she came into herself again, all she knew was terror.
Would this be her life from now on? And if it was, how could she go on? Why had this happened to her? What perverse mechanism made a person have to live inside the emotions of others?
Questions without answers annoyed the hell out of her, which was one of the reasons she had wanted to move up to detective. Answers, facts, solid information, those were the things she liked. This was squishy and uncertain.
She looked at the stranger in the mirror until she couldn’t stand it anymore, and then she walked out of the bathroom and shut the door.