Then she turned her back on Patricia and kept dusting Grace’s home.

Something exploded red and black inside Patricia’s brain and the next thing she knew she was storming into her house, standing on the sun porch, seeing Korey slumped in the big chair staring at the TV.

“Would you please turn that off and go downtown or to the beach or somewhere?” Patricia snapped. “It is one o’clock in the afternoon.”

“Dad said I didn’t have to listen to you,” Korey told her. “He said you were going through a phase.”

It touched off a fire inside her, but Patricia had the clarity to see how carefully Carter had built this trap for her. Anything she did would prove him right. She could hear him saying, in his smooth psychiatric tones, It’s a sign of how sick you are, that you can’t see how sick you are.

She took a deep breath. She would not react. She would not participate in this anymore. She went into the dining room and saw the Prozac in its saucer and the bottle of pills next to it. She snatched them up and took them into the kitchen.

Standing by the sink, she ran the water and washed the pill down the drain. She unscrewed the bottle, and looked at it for a moment. Then she got out a glass, filled it, set it down, and began to take the entire bottle of pills, one by one.

CHAPTER 23

The sweet reek of boiled ketchup crawled up Patricia’s nostrils, slid over her sinuses, and coated her throat. She ran her tongue around the inside of her mouth, and tasted a bitter film coating her teeth. Her skull lurched as her upper body jerked forward and she opened her eyes and saw a nurse cranking up her bed. It had white sheets and a beige rail. Carter stood at the end of her hospital bed.

“We don’t need that,” he told the nurse.

Patricia saw a burgundy plastic tray on a rolling table in front of her, and a covered dish stinking of boiled ketchup. The nurse lifted the lid and Patricia saw three gray meatballs sitting on a limp pile of yellow spaghetti covered in ketchup.

“I have to leave the meal,” the nurse said.

“Then put it over there,” Carter said, and the nurse placed it on a chair by the door and left.

“Tell me you mixed up the dosage,” Carter said. “Tell me you made a mistake.”

She didn’t want to have this conversation right now. Patricia turned and stared out her window at the late-afternoon sunlight slashing across the upper floors of the Basic Sciences building and realized she was in the psych unit.

“Do I have brain damage?” she asked.

“Do you know who found you?” Carter asked, resting his hands on the bed rail. “Blue. He’s ten years old and he found his mother having a seizure on the kitchen floor and you probably would have brain damage if he hadn’t been smart enough to call 911. What were you thinking, Patty? Were you thinking?”

Hot tears squirted from her eyes, one at a time, tapping her nose, streaming over her lips.

“Is Blue here?” she asked.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with you, Patty, but I swear we’re going to get to the bottom of it.”

He made her feel like an essay question on one of the children’s tests, but she didn’t have a right to object. Blue must have been terrified when he found her twitching on the kitchen floor. It would haunt him for the rest of his life. The hot, gristly smell of meatballs made her stomach twist itself tight.

“I wasn’t trying to kill myself,” she said, her jaw clenched.

“No one’s listening to you anymore,” Carter said. “You made a serious suicide attempt, however you try to explain it away. They have you on a twenty-four-hour involuntary hold, but I’m going to check you out of here first thing in the morning. There’s nothing wrong with you we can’t solve at home. But before any of that happens, I need to know right now: was this about James Harris?”

“What?” she asked, and turned to look at her husband.

His face was stricken, open, and raw. His hands fidgeted hard on the bed rail.

“You’re my whole life,” he said. “You and the children. You and I have grown up together. And suddenly you’re obsessed with Jim, you can’t stop thinking about him, you can’t stop talking about him, and then you do this. The woman I married would never try to kill herself. It wasn’t in her character.”

“I wasn’t…,” she said, genuinely trying to explain, “I didn’t want to die. I was just so angry. You wanted me to take those pills so badly, so I took them.”

His face instantly closed up, and a steel door came down.

“Don’t you dare put this on me,” he said.

“I’m not. Please.”

“Why are you fixated on Jim?” he asked. “What’s between the two of you?”

“He’s dangerous,” she said, and Carter’s shoulders slumped and he turned away from her bed. “I know you think he hangs the moon but he is a dangerous person, more dangerous than you know.”

And for a moment, she thought about telling him what she’d read all those weeks ago. After she’d read that passage in Dracula about him needing to be invited into a home, she’d sat down and read the entire book again and halfway through she’d come across a sentence that brought her up short and made her hands turn cold.

He can command all the meaner things, Van Helsing told the Harkers, explaining the powers of Dracula. The rat, and the owl, and the bat…

The rat.

In that moment, she knew who was responsible for Miss Mary’s death. Rarely had she known something with such certainty. Patricia thought about what Carter would say if he knew that his friend had put his mother into the hospital, one hand stripped of its skin, the soft tissues torn from her face. She also knew with certainty that if she said that to Carter he would never let her out of this room.

“I wish you were having an affair with him,” Carter said. “It would make your fixation easier to understand. But this is sick.”

“He’s not who you think he is,” she said.

“Do you know what is at stake here?” he asked. “Do you know the toll your obsession is taking on your family? If you continue down this path you will lose everything we have built together. Everything.”

She thought about Blue coming into the kitchen for a snack and seeing her convulsing on the yellow linoleum and all she wanted to do was hold on to her baby and reassure him she was all right. That everything would be all right. But it wasn’t all right, not as long as James Harris lived down the street.

Carter walked to the door. He stopped when he got there and made a big production out of talking to her without turning around.

“I don’t know if you care,” he said. “But they’ve put together a search committee to replace Haley.”

“Oh, Carter,” she croaked, genuinely upset for him.

“Everyone heard you were on a psychiatric hold,” he said. “Haley came down this morning to tell me I need to focus on my family right now and not my career. Your actions affect other people, Patricia. The whole world doesn’t revolve around you.”

He left her alone in the room, and she watched the sun creep across the Basic Sciences building and tried to imagine life ever being normal again. She had ruined everything. Everything anyone knew about her had been destroyed by what she had done. From now on she would be unstable no matter what she did. How would her children ever trust her again? The smell of meatballs made her feel sick.

A clatter at the door and she turned back to see Carter ushering in Korey and Blue. Korey slumped forward, hair hanging in her face, wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt and her white jeans with rips over the knees. Blue wore his navy shorts and a red Iraq-na-phobia T-shirt. He carried a thick library book called Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account. Korey dragged the only chair across the floor and dropped it as far away from Patricia as she could get. Blue leaned against the wall beside her.

Patricia wanted to hold her babies so badly and she reached out to them and something yanked her wrists. She looked down, confused, and saw that her wrists were tied to the bed with thick black Velcro straps.

“Carter?”

“They didn’t know if you were a flight risk,” he said. “I’ll ask to have them taken off when I see the doctor.”

But Patricia knew he had done this on purpose. When she was unconscious, he had told them she was a flight risk, because this was how he wanted the children to see her. Fine, he could play his games, but she was still their mother.

“Blue,” she said. “I’d like a hug if that’s okay with you.”

He opened his book and pretended to read, leaning against the wall.

“I’m sorry you saw me that way,” Patricia said to him in a low, calm voice. “I did a stupid thing and I took too many of my pills and they made me sick. I might have gotten brain damage if you hadn’t been brave enough to call 911. Thank you for doing that, Blue. I love you.”

He opened his book wider, and then wider, pressing its covers toward each other, and from across the room, Patricia heard its spine crack.