Chapter 17

Chapter Seventeen

Esme

Unable to sleep after my second disturbance of the night, Sagan sits up with me and reads to me from one of his Zen philosophy books.

It’s oddly comforting.

Later, we move on to Shakespeare.

“Which is your favorite play?” Sagan asks, pulling down an omnibus the size of a college textbook.

“Don’t care. You pick.”

“Winter’s Tale sounds about right,” he says.

He settles on the bed, his back against the wall, and I curl up beside him.

Something seems to shift inside him as he flips through the thin pages of text.

“Wait a damn minute,” he says.

“I don’t think that’s Shakespeare.”

“Listen to this,” Sagan replies. “I have heard but not believed the spirits of the dead may walk again: if such thing be, thy mother appeared to me last night; for ne’er was a dream so like a waking.’”

I sit up and put about a foot of distance between us. “Is this a prank? That’s fucked up, Sagan.”

“No,” he says, pointing at the book. “That’s what the voices I heard were saying.”

I try to breathe and try to think. Based on what I know of Sagan, would he try to prank me? It would be deeply cruel.

The niggling voice, which I now know is only the memory of my grandmother, says, “You are so lazy you let an ex-con into my house!”

I shake my head, “No. I’m sorry. I know it wasn’t you. I’m sorry.”

He’s not listening to my apology or responding to it. He flips through the pages.

“Shit. There’s more,” he says, reading on. “‘The night has been unruly: where we lay, our chimneys were blown down…”

That’s about enough. I rip the book from his hands and chuck it across the room, where it knocks over the little Christmas tree.

I cover my mouth with my hands and apologize again.

To my awe and confusion, Sagan laughs. “I know you hate my tree, but come on.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. Stay here while I make breakfast.”

But I feel so bad about the tree that I insist on making him the one recipe I learned from my grandmother before she died.

She didn’t cook much, but every Christmas morning, she made buttermilk biscuits from scratch, and they are little buttery clouds from heaven.

I have to pass the time somehow.

Dr. Daisy Allen is a 40-something blonde bombshell with a come-hither stare and an efficient, bossy demeanor that I admire.

If I was at all insecure about Sagan’s feelings about me, I would feel threatened by how attractive she is. Hell, she smells good enough that I could question what I think I know about myself right now.

“How long have you been experiencing these hallucinations?” Dr. Allen asks.

“It happens every year around Halloween and goes until Christmas.”

She shines a light in my left eye, then the right. “And what were you doing just before October 31 this year?”

I tell her, “I always travel during the summer. I typically come home in September. This year, I had planned an extended stay in Switzerland, through Christmas. But I was asked to leave the spa because I was scaring the other guests.”

The doctor doesn’t seem fazed. Sagan is on high alert next to me. Dr. Allen shines the light in my ear and then the other. “Scaring them how?”

“I couldn’t sleep, so I would walk the halls, walk the grounds. At one point, I was so desperately out of it from lack of sleep that I walked out of a formal group dinner in nothing but a strapless gown. They found me shivering in the woods about twenty minutes later, lost and cold and disoriented.”

My eyes cut over to Sagan, who says nothing but squeezes my hand.

“Told you. I’m a handful.”

“What kind of medication is Dr. White giving you?” Dr. Allen asks.

To my surprise, Sagan produces three green prescription bottles from his pocket and hands them to Dr. Allen.

“Beta blockers… You should stay on these and we’ll do some tests,” she says. “If you don’t actually have heart disease, we’ll taper you off the blockers. In the meantime, get rid of all these herbal medications. Some of these are super contra-indicated and whoever gave them to you should know better. All of these, combined with the beta blockers, are causing you to see hallucinations.”

She asks for Dr. White’s contact information, and I provide her with everything I know, which is basically just his name and cell number.

Just then, Sagan’s phone lights up. I glance at the screen where he’s received a text from someone with a bunch of numbers for a name.

It reads, “Costco. One hour.”

I gasp. “There it is again. Dammit, what is Costco?”

This, of all things, gives Dr. Allen pause. “Really?’

Sagan laughs and kisses me on the forehead.

“That’s where we’re going to get some new Christmas ornaments for my tree, baby.”

I clap my hands. “Yay!”

Dr. Allen promises to be in touch, but I’m too excited for our next adventure.