Page 11 of The Drowned Woman
Leah’s concern overcame her sense of politeness. All those medications—clearly whatever they were meant to treat, it had to be quite serious. “Can I ask, what’s your diagnosis?”
“They don’t know what I have,” Risa scoffed. “Two years and the doctors have pretty much given up on me. I think they think I’m faking, that it’s all in my head. Functional disorder, they call it.”
Functional disorder? Leah hadn’t been expecting that. She’d thought Risa would tell her she had end stage cancer or a neurodegenerative disease. Functional disorder was often the diagnosis of last resort, when physicians threw up their hands in frustration but had to give a patient a label, if only for insurance purposes. She’d always hated that about modern-day medicine. It forced doctors to never admit that sometimes they just didn’t know all the answers. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
Risa turned tear-filled eyes toward Leah. “Days like this, I worry they might be right. That my own mind is doing this to me.” She glanced away, raising a shaky hand to wipe her eyes. “Sorry.”
“Let me reheat your tea.” Leah took the mug, allowing Risa to compose herself. The layout was a mirror image of the Orlys’ apartment. An assortment of herbal teas was arranged on the kitchen counter, some in tea bags, some loose in colorful glass jars. Leah took a mug from the shelf above and selected a peppermint tea for herself and put both mugs in the microwave. As she waited for the tea to heat, she looked around. A pharmacy’s worth of medication and supplements were lined up on a shelf above the sink. She couldn’t help but glance at a few—medications usually used to treat chronic pain, Crohn’s, inflammation, arthritis, anxiety, seizures, migraines, asthma, and even Parkinson’s. If Risa had half the symptoms these drugs were meant to treat, then she was one very sick woman.
The microwave dinged. Leah returned to the living room, this time taking in the decor. A tufted couch faced the chair that Risa obviously called home along with a second, matching chair beside it. A thick, handwoven Persian rug filled the space between them with bright colors. But what really caught her eye was a wall of photos. Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Alaska, and locales Leah wasn’t certain of. But it wasn’t the exotic locations that were so striking. It was the people in them. Normal people. Young, old, very old. Happy, sad, terrified, angry. The spectrum of human experience captured in a wall’s worth of photos.
“These are amazing.” Leah handed Risa her tea.
Risa sipped it gratefully. Her color was better, her breathing back to normal. “Thank you. And thank you for coming. I wanted to talk with you.”
“Right.” Leah sat down on the chair beside Risa and dug out one of her new business cards to hand to Risa. This was where she had to be careful. Make sure that the people she spoke to understood she wasn’t acting as their physician. “I’m a doctor at Good Samaritan’s ER. But I’m here this morning helping the police.”
“I’m glad. They might have shot Walt. And you were so good with him. Have you done that before? Talked someone away from a violent confrontation with the police?” Risa leaned forward, eyes fixed on Leah as if her new job was the most fascinating thing in the world. Again, Leah had that strange sense of familiarity even though she was certain she’d never met Risa before.
“It’s a new program. Good Sam’s Crisis Intervention Center is working with Cambria City police when they have—” She searched for the right word to use with a civilian. Emotionally disturbed sounded far too clinical. “Fragile witnesses.”
Risa considered that as she took another sip of tea, her trembling easing. “I’ve never seen Walt like that. He frightened me. It was very brave of you to go in to talk with him.”
“Was it? You went in as well.”
“But that was before he got so violent.”
“I didn’t feel brave. I just knew what he needed and concentrated on that. I mean, I’ve been more afraid in the ER. Usually right before a trauma arrives, when I’m imagining the worst. But then, during a trauma? It’s like standing in the eye of a hurricane, everything moving around me at lightning speed, but I’m calm and focused.” Leah felt like she was rambling; maybe she was more nervous than she’d thought.
“In the zone. That’s what I used to call it when I was in the field. I’d focus on my subject, on getting the story, bombs would be going off—I mean literally going off around me, and I barely noticed. Like being in my own world, just me and the story I needed to tell.” She sighed, her gaze passing Leah to look out the rain-streaked window. “Out there, everything seemed so clear…”
“Story—” Leah glanced over at the wall of photos, took in the small items she hadn’t noticed before aligned on the mantle: a large bullet encased in a Lucite box sitting on a charred scrap of bright blue fabric. An ornamental knife displayed on a stand beside the desiccated cervical vertebrae of what had to be a giraffe, it was so elongated. “Risa Saliba. I knew I’d heard your name. My husband is a huge fan. We’ve watched you on Nat Geo and PBS and the BBC and—you’ve been everywhere.” Leah realized she was gushing. Ian would love— The thought brought her up short and she blinked, refocused, before tears could ambush her.
Risa glanced toward her walker. “My traveling days are over.” She sat up straighter. “Temporarily.”
“What are you doing here in Cambria City?” Leah grew up here, which was why she’d returned when her great-aunt got sick, but she’d also fought like hell to escape when she was young. What did a downtrodden rustbelt city have to offer a sophisticated journalist like Risa Saliba?
It was the first time Risa had smiled since Leah met her. “My boyfriend. We tried the long-distance thing, but after I got sick, he insisted I move in with him so he could take care of me.” Her smile widened at the memory. “I refused. Refused to move in, refused to get engaged, refused to get married immediately.”
“Because you were sick?”
“Because I refuse to be a burden to anyone I love. I admit, I sometimes pushed the line, was more reckless than I needed to be when I was chasing a story. But it was only myself I was hurting. I live my life on my terms…” Her gaze settled on a small framed photo beside her computer: Risa and a handsome man, arms around each other on a beach, the sunset silhouetting them as if they shared one body. “But then Jack came along and—”
“Suddenly there’s a huge complicated emotional calculus to solve.”
“Yes, exactly.”
Leah chuckled. “Wait until you have kids. That equation turns into quantum physics, a search for a unified field theory.”
“I just want to get healthy enough to be with Jack. He’s been so patient through all this.” She gestured down the length of her body. “Since I can’t work in the field and he’s based here, last year I moved here to be closer to him.”
Leah glanced at the wide variety of photos and mementos. “What are you doing? Writing a book? I mean, since you aren’t traveling anymore…”
Risa’s expression fell as Leah’s words trailed off.Way to say the wrong thing, Leah thought. “I am trying to write a book, but it’s hard going between doctor visits and my bad days. And it doesn’t pay the bills, so I actually work as a fact checker for several media outlets.”
“Fact checker?”
“For features and opinion pieces, to make sure no one’s twisting the facts. Obituaries, as well.”
