Page 90 of Midnight Valentine
Images come back to haunt me with sickening clarity: the anguish in Theo’s eyes almost every time he’s looked at me; him so wrecked, standing wet and crying outside my front door; the email that brought him to me in the middle of the night, all the things I wrote about losing your mind to follow your heart, and not asking about each other’s crazy, and being each other’s hammers and glue.
“Oh God,” I say, shaking and sick. “Did I do this?”
Coop sits beside me and takes my hand. “Listen to me now. After his accident, Theo changed. It was like he became a different person. He never got the help he needed, because he was just too goddamn stubborn.”
Dr. Singer would say Theo and I have a lot in common. I laugh, and it sounds deranged.
“This is a good thing, Megan. He’s finally doing something to help himself. He wouldn’t admit it to me when he first left, but I got it out of him. And I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, but…yeah. It’s because of you. You’ve inspired him to try to get better. He wants to get rid of his demons once and for all.”
Demons.
Theo wants to get rid of his demons.
My blood runs Arctic cold.
A theory blooms to life inside the cracked and shadowed corridors of my brain and quickly spirals out of control. It’s a theory that explains everything, start to finish, from the first moment I laid eyes on Theo and he reacted so strangely to my presence, all the way to his voluntary stay in a sanitarium.
It’s a theory that would have Dr. Singer in fits.
It’s Magical Thinking with capital letters, in blinking neon lights.
It’s a theory that goes like this:
Maybe I’m not the only one who thinks my dead husband has returned to me in the body of another man.
24
“Megan? Your face is all funny. You need some water or somethin’?”
Coop is concerned. He should be, because I’m about two seconds away from a full-blown meltdown. The words Theo wrote me appear in my mind like vapor, as if breathed there by a ghost.
What I’d have to say if we talked about the problem wouldn’t be romantic, or funny. It would be scary as hell.
And let’s not forget this award-winning mind fuck: How can you remember someone you’ve never met?
My mental illness supplies a smug answer: Because you knew them in another life.
“I have to go now.” I rise unsteadily to my feet.
Coop stands too, still holding on to my hand. “Go? Where you goin’?”
“I have to…pick up…the pharmacy.”
If Coop was hoping for a more coherent explanation, he won’t get one. My mind is a jumble of fractured thoughts and memories, each more disturbing than the last. I’m tumbling down a rabbit hole, one I’m afraid I’ll never climb out of. I’m Alice, only this isn’t Wonderland.
This is Crazyville, and I’ve just elected myself mayor.
I grab my purse and keys and head to my car, stumbling over my feet in my rush. As soon as I get my prescription from the pharmacy, I’ll call Dr. Anders to make an emergency appointment.
My brain can no longer be trusted at the wheel. It’s driving erratically on a narrow mountain road, taking corners too fast, swerving dangerously close to the edge.
I tear through town like a bat out of hell, screeching to a stop in front of the pharmacy and running inside in a panic. The register is all the way in the back of the store, so I have to hazard aisle after aisle of greeting cards and pain relievers, vitamins and suppositories, little old ladies squinting at dusty bottles on shelves. When I find the prescription pickup window, I throw myself at it like a Titanic passenger going for the last life raft.
“Megan Dunn hello I’m Megan Dunn you should have a prescription ready for me?” I blurt it out in one long, breathless rush, impatiently drumming my fingers on the counter.
The pharmacist is a thin bald man about a hundred years old who moves at the speed of cold molasses. He looks at me, blinks slowly, then pulls his glasses down the bridge of his nose. “You’ll have to get in line, ma’am.”
This is when I realize there’s a row of people standing behind me, staring at me with varying degrees of annoyance.
