False Memory

arpeggios of terror from her harp-string nerves.
    Embers of anxiety remained aglow in her, but right now she was more afraid of another crippling panic attack than of her potential to do violence.
    Although she recounted the attack in all its gaudy detail, she couldn’t convey how it felt. Indeed, she had difficulty remembering the full intensity of her terror, which seemed to have happened to another Martie Rhodes, to a troubled persona that had briefly risen from the muck of her psyche and had now submerged again.
    From time to time, Dusty noisily rattled the ice in his Scotch to get her attention. When she looked at him, he raised his drink, reminding her to sample her serving. She’d been reluctant to accept the Scotch, fearful of losing control of herself again. Ounce by ounce, however, Johnny Walker Red Label was proving to be effective therapy.
    Good Valet lay by her chair, rising now and then to rest his chin on her bent legs, submitting to a smoothing hand on his head, commiseration in his soulful eyes.
    Twice she gave the dog small cubes of ice from her drink. He crunched them with a strangely solemn pleasure.
    When Martie finished her account, Dusty said, “What now?”
    “Dr. Closterman, in the morning. I made an appointment today, coming back from Susan’s, even before things got really bad for me.”
    “I’ll go with you.”
    “I want a full physical. Complete blood workup. A brain scan, in case maybe there’s a tumor.”
    “There’s no tumor,” Dusty said with a conviction based solely on hope. “There’s nothing serious wrong with you.”
    “There’s something.”
    “No.” The thought of her being ill, perhaps terminal, caused Dusty such dread that he could not conceal it.
    Martie treasured every line of anguish in his face, because more than all the love talk in the world, it revealed how much he cherished her.
    “I’d accept a brain tumor,” she said.
    “Accept?”
    “If the alternative is mental illness. They can cut out the tumor, and there’s a chance of being what you were.”
    “It’s not that, either,” he said, and the lines in his face grew deeper. “It’s not mental.”
    “It’s something,” she insisted.

     
     
    Sitting in bed, Susan ate pepperoni pizza and drank Merlot. This was the most delicious dinner she had ever known.
    She was sufficiently perceptive and self-aware to realize that the ingredients of the simple meal had little or nothing to do with its special succulence and flavor. Sausage, cheese, and well-browned crust were not as tasty as the prospect of justice.
    Freed from her peculiar spell of timidness and helplessness, she was in fact less hungry for justice than for a thick cold slice of vengeance. She had no illusions about her primitive capacity to take delight in retribution. After all, her teeth, like those of every human being, included four canines and four incisors, the better to rip and tear.
    Remembering how she’d defended Eric to Martie, Susan bit off a mouthful of pizza and chewed it with fierce pleasure.
    If she had developed agoraphobia as an insulating response to the pain of Eric’s adultery, then perhaps he deserved some payback for that. But if he were her phantom visitor, mercilessly screwing with her mind and her body, he was a far different man from the one she’d thought he’d been when she married him. Not a man at all, in fact, but a creature, a hateful thing. A serpent. With evidence, she would use the law to chop him, as a woodsman might use an ax on a rattlesnake.
    As she ate, Susan studied the bedroom, seeking the best place in which to secrete the camcorder.

     
     
    Martie sat at the kitchen table, watching as Dusty cleaned up the mess that she had made.
    When he dragged the trash can off the porch, into the kitchen, the contents rattled and chimed like the tools in a knacker’s bag.
    Martie held her second glass of Scotch with both hands as she raised it to her lips.
    After closing the door, Dusty loaded the knives, forks, and other eating utensils into the dishwasher.
    The sight of the sharp blades and pointed tines, the clink and steely scrape of them against one another, did not alarm Martie. Her throat thickened, however, and the warm Scotch trickled slowly down, as though melting through a clog in her esophagus.
    Dusty returned the Chardonnay and Chablis to the refrigerator. Those bottles would still make effective bludgeons, lacerating scalp and cracking skull bone, but Martie’s mind was no longer acrawl with the temptation to heft them,