The earthquake named Bruno Picota.
Right now, though, Fran realized with a feeling of helpless misery, the tremors were starting up all over again. Without even looking around her, she could feel it happening. The little glitches, the pockets of turbulence in the way things looked and sounded and even smelled.
She couldn’t hide from it. Hiding from it wouldn’t help. She raised her head and stared around the room.
Yeah, there it was. The middle square of the coverlet, which had always been bright red, was gray. Her little statue of a Chinese guy playing a flute, an unlikely souvenir from a vacation trip to New York, had turned into a lady with a fan. The chess position set up on her chest of drawers had gone from an endgame to a starting lineup.
The smell of honeysuckle coming up from next door’s garden was suddenly a smell of roses.
The traffic sounds had faded, as though Lincoln Avenue had backed away from her house in a hurry when it noticed she was listening in.
Worst of all, when she saw her own reflection in the mirror, her thick black hair was standing up in a glorious, untamed Afro instead of the tight braids she had gone to bed with.
It was a lot, especially coming all at once. Fran, who had closed her teeth on her lower lip at some point, tasted blood in her mouth and realized that she had bitten down harder than she had meant to.
Jinx read her anxiety and jumped up on the bed beside her, instantly solicitous. Fran, tell me what to do. Let me help.
“Sorry, Jinx,” Fran muttered. “I’m on my own on this one.”
But that wasn’t strictly true, was it?
Fran had an uncompromisingly realistic sense of her own abilities. She disliked letting other people do things for her that she could do herself, having found out the hard way that people would do everything if she let them. But by the same token, she didn’t kid herself when the odds were against her.
She went downstairs. Jinx tactfully stayed behind. It fazed Fran a little to have her imaginary friend standing around in the background when she was talking to other people. The times when she needed Jinx the most were the times when she was alone.
She found her dad watching a Steelers game on the TV. Gil Watts had his own way of watching football, which was a kind of radically engaged stillness, leaning forward on the couch with a frown of concentration on his face and his bald head shining with sweat as though he was making all those runs and passes himself. Gil loved the Steelers more than almost anything else in the world. He had a ball signed by James Farrior in the living room cabinet next to the photo of Fran’s mom whose frame was also an urn and contained her ashes. He felt that Farrior deserved to be considered the Steelers’ best linebacker of all time, and part of the passion he brought to that argument came from the fact that Farrior, like him, was an African American man born in Chesterfield County, Virginia.
But the sight of his only daughter with blood trickling down her chin like a vampire disturbed in the middle of a meal made the game instantly irrelevant. Gil hit the remote, jumped up and crossed the room to meet her at a stride that was halfway to a run.
He put his hands on her shoulders and leaned in to inspect the damage. “What happened, Frog?” he asked.
“Changes,” Fran told him, lisping a little because her chewed up lip was starting to swell.
Gil winced visibly at the word.
“When? Just now? Up in your room?”
Fran nodded. “And a nightmare too. I fell asleep over my homework and had a real stinker.”
Gil pursed his lips, and the breath he’d been holding came out in a series of barely voiced pops—a habit he had when he was thinking something through and not committing himself to words until he’d found some.
“You want to go over to the clinic?” he asked Fran at last.
Another nod.
“Tomorrow?”
“Wednesday will do. There won’t be anyone there tomorrow.” There would be plenty of people, of course, but Dr. Southern wouldn’t be there and nobody else would be able to help her. Wednesday was one of the doc’s two days at Carroll Way, the other one being Friday: if Fran was lucky she would be able to tack herself onto the end of his appointments for the day.
“So anyway, do you want to hang out for a while?” her father asked her. “Since you’re here.”
“Sure.” Fran tried for an off-hand tone and missed it by a long, long way.
“Play cards.”
“You think you can afford it?”
Gil laughed out loud. “Oh, that’s fighting talk!”
He washed her face first, wiping the sticky blood away very carefully and tenderly as though she was a little kid again. He also painted the cut with a styptic pencil, a weird thing that looked like a stick of chalk and tasted of mint and raw bleach. It was meant to close and disinfect shaving cuts, but Fran had never met anyone other than her dad who used or had even heard of one.
That done, they got down to some serious gin rummy—with Songs of Leonard Cohen, Gil’s favorite album, playing in the background. Fran had the run of the cards, which was far from unusual. In the space of an hour, the burden of Gil’s debt to her rose from thirteen million dollars to seventeen million and a few odd thousands. They always played for reckless stakes.
“You want to go back on the higher dose?” he asked her at one point as he shuffled the deck for the next hand. His tone was carefully neutral. “You’re sure?”
“I think so,” Fran said. “I’ll see what Dr. Southern has got to say.”
Gil remembered the bad old days, presumably better than Fran did since she had been a smiling dingbat for most of them. He believed Dr. Southern was just waiting for the right moment to dose his daughter all the way back to placid imbecility. Fran let him put the blame on Dr. S because she was ashamed of how scared she was of the nightmares and the hallucinations. Ashamed to still have Picota in her head after all this time—a huge, clotted mass of darkness like the gungy stuff in a blocked drain. So much of it, and so concentrated, that it spilled out of her mind and silted up the world with tiny impossibilities.
If the changes were coming back, then she had to inoculate herself against them. She needed to keep things real, even if that meant packing her head with shit and cotton wool. Even if it meant saying goodbye to Jinx for a while. She couldn’t go back to mistrusting the whole world, watching everything out of the corner of her eye in case it became an enemy. If that happened, she was pretty sure she wouldn’t survive.
Risperidone was a lesser evil. The chemical intervention was something she knew and understood. She didn’t remember any too clearly what it had felt like from the inside to be smiling dingbat Fran. But she would go there if she had to.
As soon as they got to West Penn, before any actual treatment started to happen, Liz’s wounds and the bump on the back of her head were photographed from every angle as evidence in an ongoing case. That was a lot less exciting and TV-movie-forensic than it sounded. Beebee just took the photos with her phone, having activated the time-stamp functions. Then a nurse put seven stitches in the bigger cut and taped a Steroplast strip over the smaller one.
Liz thought they might let her go home after that, but it turned out they were only getting started. They had to X-ray her chest to make sure she didn’t have a pulmonary edema, and they had to take a soft-tissue X-ray of her throat. Then they wheeled her over to another department for an MRI scan. Literally wheeled her: they weren’t going to let her walk anywhere until they’d ruled out concussion and something else called a TBI—an acronym they refused to unpick for her.