False Memory

serial killer.”
    “You can hide a lot of weapons under a habit.”
    “Mystery novels have changed since we read them in junior high.”
    “Not always for the better,” Susan said, closing the book.
    They had been best friends since they were ten: eighteen years of sharing more than mystery novels—hopes, fears, happiness, sorrow, laughter, tears, gossip, adolescent enthusiasms, hard-won insights. During the past sixteen months, since the inexplicable onset of Susan’s agoraphobia, they had shared more pain than pleasure.
    “I should have called you,” Susan said. “I’m sorry, but I can’t go to the session today.”
    This was ritual, and Martie played her part: “Of course, you can, Susan. And you will.”
    Putting the paperback aside, shaking her head, Susan said, “No, I’ll call Dr. Ahriman and tell him I’m just too ill. I’m coming down with a cold, maybe the flu.”
    “You don’t sound congested.”
    Susan grimaced. “It’s more a stomach flu.”
    “Where’s your thermometer? We’d better take your temperature.”
    “Oh, Martie, just look at me. I look like hell. Pasty-faced and red-eyed and my hair like straw. I can’t go out like this.”
    “Get real, Sooz. You look like you always look.”
    “I’m a mess.”
    “Julia Roberts, Sandra Bullock, Cameron Diaz—they’d all kill to look as good as you, even when you’re sick as a dog and projectile vomiting, which you aren’t.”
    “I’m a freak.”
    “Oh, yeah, right, you’re the Elephant Woman. We’ll have to put a sack over your head and warn away small children.”
    If beauty had been a burden, Susan would have been crushed flat. Ash-blond, green-eyed, petite, with exquisitely sculptured features, with skin as flawless as that of a peach on a tree in Eden, she had turned more heads than a coven of chiropractors.
    “I’m bursting out of this skirt. I’m gross.”
    “A virtual blimp,” Martie said sarcastically. “A dirigible. A giant balloon of a woman.”
    Although Susan’s self-imprisonment allowed her no exercise except housecleaning and long walks on a treadmill in the bedroom, she remained svelte.
    “I’ve gained more than a pound,” Susan insisted.
    “My God, it’s a liposuction emergency,” Martie said, bolting up from the sofa. “I’ll get your raincoat. We can call the plastic surgeon from the car, tell him to get an industrial-size sump pump to suck out all the fat.”
    In the short hall that led to the bedroom, the coat closet featured a pair of sliding, mirrored doors. As Martie approached it, she tensed and hesitated, concerned that she would be overcome by the same irrational fear that had seized her earlier.
    She had to keep a grip on herself. Susan needed her. If she leaped into looniness again, her anxiety would feed Susan’s fear, and perhaps vice versa.
    When she confronted the full-length mirror, nothing in it made her heart race. She forced a smile, but it looked strained. She met her eyes in the reflection, and then quickly looked away, sliding one of the doors aside.
    As she slipped the raincoat off the hanger, Martie considered, for the first time, that her recent peculiar bouts of fear might be related to the time that she’d spent with Susan during the past year. Maybe you should expect to absorb a little overspill of anxiety if you hung out a lot with a woman suffering from an extreme phobia.
    A faint heat of shame flushed Martie’s face. Even to consider such a possibility seemed superstitious, uncharitable, and unfair to poor Susan. Phobic disorders and panic attacks weren’t contagious.
    Turning away from the closet door and then reaching back to slide it shut, she wondered what term psychologists used to describe a fear of one’s shadow. A disabling fear of open spaces, which afflicted Susan, was called agoraphobia. But shadows? Mirrors?
    Martie stepped out of the hail and into the living room before she realized that she had reached behind her back to pull shut the sliding door in order to avoid glancing in the mirror again. Startled that she had acted with such unconscious aversion, she considered returning to the closet and confronting the mirror.
    From the armchair, Susan was watching her.
    The mirror could wait.
    Holding the raincoat open, Martie approached her friend. “Get up, get in this, and get moving.”
    Susan gripped the arms of the chair, miserable at the prospect of leaving her sanctuary. “I can’t.”
    “If you don’t cancel a session forty-eight hours ahead, you have to pay for it.”
    “I can afford to.”
    “No, you can’t. You