J.R. Ward the Black Dagger Brotherhood Novels 1-4 - J. R. Ward [171]
She waited. The phone went dead.
“Another one of yours?” Rhonda asked, taking a sip from a mug of herbal tea.
Mary hung up. “How did you know?”
The woman nodded across her shoulder. “I heard a lot of rings out there, but no one got farther than the greeting. Then all of a sudden you were hunched over your phone.”
“Yeah, well—”
“Listen, the cops got back to me today. There’s nothing they can do short of assigning details to every pay phone in town, and they’re not willing to go that far at this point.”
“I told you. I don’t feel like I’m in danger.”
“You don’t know that you’re not.”
“Come on, Rhonda, this has been going on for nine months now, right? If they were going to jump me, they would have already. And I really want to help—”
“That’s another thing I’m concerned about. You clearly feel like protecting whoever the caller is. You’re getting too personal.”
“No, I’m not. They’re calling here for a reason, and I know I can take care of them.”
“Mary, stop. Listen to yourself.” Rhonda pulled a chair over and lowered her voice as she sat down. “This is…hard for me to say. But I think you need a break.”
Mary recoiled. “From what?”
“You’re here too much.”
“I work the same number of days as everyone else.”
“But you stay here for hours after your shift is through, and you cover for people all the time. You’re too involved. I know you’re substituting for Bill right now, but when he comes I want you to leave. And I don’t want you back here for a couple of weeks. You need some perspective. This is hard, draining work, and you have to have a proper distance from it.”
“Not now, Rhonda. Please, not now. I need to be here now more than ever.”
Rhonda gently squeezed Mary’s tense hand. “This isn’t an appropriate place for you to work out your own issues, and you know that. You’re one of the best volunteers I’ve got, and I want you to come back. But only after you’ve had some time to clear your head.”
“I may not have that kind of time,” Mary whispered under her breath.
“What?”
Mary shook herself and forced a smile. “Nothing. Of course, you’re right. I’ll leave as soon as Bill comes in.”
Bill arrived about an hour later, and Mary was out of the building in two minutes. When she got home, she shut her door and leaned back against the wood panels, listening to all the silence. The horrible, crushing silence.
God, she wanted to go back to the hotline’s offices. She needed to hear the soft voices of the other volunteers. And the phones ringing. And the drone of the fluorescent lights in the ceiling…
Because with no distractions, her mind flushed up terrible images: Hospital beds. Needles. Bags of drugs hanging next to her. In an awful mental snapshot, she saw her head bald and her skin gray and her eyes sunken until she didn’t look like herself, until she wasn’t herself.
And she remembered what it felt like to cease being a person. After the doctors started treating her with chemo, she’d quickly sunk into the fragile underclass of the sick, the dying, becoming nothing more than a pitiful, scary reminder of other people’s mortality, a poster child for the terminal nature of life.
Mary darted across the living room, shot through the kitchen, and threw open the slider. As she burst out into the night, fear had her gasping for breath, but the shock of frosty air slowed her lungs down.
You don’t know that anything’s wrong. You don’t know what it is….
She repeated the mantra, trying to pitch a net on the thrashing panic as she headed for the pool.
The Lucite in-ground was no more than a big hot tub, and its water, thickened and slowed by the cold, looked like black oil in the moonlight. She sat down, took off her shoes and socks, and dangled her feet in the icy depths. She kept them submerged even when they numbed, wishing she had the gumption to jump in and swim down to the grate at the bottom. If she held on to the thing for long enough, she might be able to anesthetize herself completely.
She