Crimes by Moonlight

Madeeda by Harley Jane Kozak

The August air was hot and heavy with the scent of jasmine the morning my children toddled downstairs and told me a lady was sleeping in my bed.

It was 9:30 a.m. I remember that prosaic detail because I was telling myself it wasn’t an hour for the heebie-jeebies. Nor the season for cold dread. Even in a remote California canyon with no neighbors within screaming distance, no humans but the twins tugging at my hands and the baby in my belly. And there were chickens outside, left by the previous owner, hardly the trappings of a haunted house. It was a faux-rustic house, 1970s casual chic. Very unscary. Chickens. Don’t be one, I told myself and let the children pull me toward the staircase. Our overfed dog, Tooth, lumbered behind.

If someone were in the house, I’d have heard. That’s the beauty of old, ratty, creaky, in-need-of-renovation, soft pine floors. And an old, ratty, paranoid spaniel. I climbed thirteen steps from the landing to the second floor, each one a warning system, the boys ahead of me, Tooth’s toenails clattering alongside me.

The bed was in disarray. The comforter, all bunched up on my husband’s side of the bed, could hide a couple of bodies. I moved closer, telling Tooth to stop whining. The twins were there already, standing on tiptoe to look under the covers.

“She’s not here,” Charlie said, at the same moment Paco said, “Where did she go?”

“She went back to twelvey twenty-one-y,” Charlie added.

One down pillow still bore the imprint of a head. I tossed it aside and yanked the sheet toward the wrought-iron headboard, smoothing it down and tucking it in. A faint scent-Shalimar?-seemed to waft upward, but that had to be my imagination. Pregnant nose. “What did the lady look like?” I asked, adopting a cheery, sitcom-mom voice.

“She has purple hair,” Charlie said. “Curly.”

“All of her is purple,” added Paco.

The boys’ consonants, like their numbers, were still works in progress, so the words came out “coolly” and “poople.” I found the description reassuring.

“Part of her is green,” Charlie said. “She has a fancy dress. A blue dress.”

“A ugly dress,” Paco said. “She’s a mean lady.”

Charlie nodded. “A mean witch.”

That night, when I told Richard, my husband, that the boys had seen a green and purple witch in our bed, he did not express concern. He did not, in fact, look up from the Dow Jones Industrials. “Hm. What’d you do?”

“I made the bed.”

I did not mention to him that I’d already made the bed earlier that morning.

NOT that the boys couldn’t drag a chair across the room in order to climb onto the bed and undo the sheets. This is what I told myself the next afternoon at the farmers’ market, two freeway stops away. Except the chair had been in its usual place by the closet, and the boys, at age two plus, were not in the habit of covering their tracks. It wasn’t age-appropriate behavior. Even now Paco, in the double stroller, was brazenly throwing grapes at a sparrow while telling me he wasn’t throwing grapes at a sparrow. But I couldn’t think of another explanation, except for pregnant brain. Could I swear that I had made the bed? Not absolutely, but beyond a reasonable doubt. You made your bed and now you have to lie in it, my grandma would say, but in fact, I made my bed every morning precisely so I wouldn’t be tempted to lie in it, minutes later, for a quick two-hour nap. Sleep was a siren song these days, my drug, my crack cocaine. Sleep was more seductive than sex, food, or True Love. The only thing stronger was the biological imperative to answer the cry of “Mommy!”

“Mommy, Charlie see Madeeda,” Paco said.

“Who’s Madeeda?” I glanced down at my son’s upturned face. Charlie was slumped next to him, asleep, mouth open.

“The bad witch.”

“The one who was sleeping in Mommy and Daddy’s bed?”

Paco nodded. A stand of irises distracted me, sending an odor my way. And something else-vanilla? Jasmine? “Where did you see her?” I asked.

“Not me. Charlie.”

“Where did Charlie see her?”

“Here.”

I stopped instantly, looking around. Another shopper bumped into me from behind. He apologized. I counter-apologized. He maneuvered past me. I moved the stroller over to a grassy area and squatted. “Paco. When did Charlie see the lady? Back near the car?”

“Right now,” Paco said. “In the clouds. Twelvey twenty-one-y.” And before I could stop him, he was rousing his brother by squeezing his hair.

Charlie woke up hot and cranky, and it took several ounces of apple juice and some string cheese to restore equilibrium. He had, as it turned out, seen the witch fly across the sky. And “twelvey twenty-one-y” did indeed figure into it; Charlie was very clear about that, but whether it described a particular cloud, time, or latitude was hard to say.

That night when I told Richard that the boys could apparently eavesdrop on each other’s dreams, he was so engrossed in the Somdahl & Associates prospectus he was reading, he could only manage a “Huh.” I decided it wasn’t the time to announce we had a recurring witch in our midst.

OVER the next few days Madeeda’s presence in our conversation was pervasive, and I found myself ascribing to her a voice, deep and foreign-accented, whispering numbers in my ear. Which was odd. I, unlike the men in my life, found numbers uninteresting. I formed a picture of Madeeda, too, a lithe creature with a concave belly. Of course, most people seemed lithe to me, as the baby in my belly grew heavier and my pregnancy shorts grew tighter. It was too hot for clothes, and I let the boys run around wearing only Pull-Ups, but my own choices were limited. I wasn’t Californian enough to be less than fully dressed, given my figure. I cranked up the AC in the house, but it produced more noise than cold air, the creaks and thuds emanating from the vents like captives in a dungeon. I needed to stay out of the sun and off my feet, Dr. Iqbal had said. So I plopped the boys at the kitchen table, pointed a desk fan at them, and brought out crayons. “Draw Madeeda for me,” I said.

My attention was drawn to the bay window, where the afternoon light streamed through, showing the dirt on the outside, the dust inside, and a crack up in one corner. I needed a professional window washer, but even a walk through the Yellow Pages sounded exhausting, and they’d probably be prohibitively expensive, like everything else in L.A. Richard had loved the look of this imitation farmhouse, snapped up in a short sale, but we’d been unprepared for how expensive quaint can be. Maintenance had not been high on the previous owner’s agenda in his steady march toward bankruptcy.

As I watched, the crack in the window seemed to grow. Which was impossible, of course, but-

“Mommy. Look.” Charlie tugged at my sleeve to show me his Madeeda, a stick figure without arms, which is to say, an inverted V. Paco’s was a close-up, a large, torsoless head with vacant eyes.

“Very nice, guys,” I said, and turned back to the window. The crack was halfway down now. Surely that wasn’t normal window behavior. A windshield hit with a flying pebble might do that, but could a regular window just fracture for no reason? I was scaring myself. I forced my attention back to the table and picked up a crayon. I would sketch. I liked sketching.

“That’s Madeeda,” Charlie said, after a moment.

“This?” I’d drawn a gaunt woman with a green face and long purple hair flowing in cascades around her head. She had a flat chest and ballerina-skinny arms. Because I can’t do credible feet, hers appeared to be en pointe, a few inches above the ground, giving her a floaty, untethered quality. “This is what Madeeda looks like?” I asked.

Charlie nodded. Paco nodded.

“Twelvy twenty-one-y,” Charlie said. “Madeeda.”

“And Madeeda says if we don’t listen we are going to hell,” Paco added.

THAT night while chopping vegetables, I phoned Karen, my cousin in Denver. “Is it normal for twins to share an imaginary playmate?”

Karen snorted. “I can’t even get my twins to share breakfast cereal. I need two of everything, on separate shelves. It’s like keeping kosher. What’s that noise?”

“I’m chopping carrots.”

“You’re cooking at-what, ten p.m.?”

“Only nine here. It’s for tomorrow. Crock-Pot beef bourguignon. I’m doing a lot of night cooking now. It’s the weirdest thing; I can’t sleep. I can always sleep.” I glanced at the window, illuminated by the back porch light. It now sported two full-length vertical cracks.

“How’s Richard’s new job?”

“Like his old job, but without the friends. Long hours. Lots of stress.”

“So what’s going on?”

“The boys are seeing a witch.”

There was a pause. The chop chop of my carrots sounded preternaturally loud. Would it be more shocking, or less, if I’d said, “the boys are seeing a psychiatrist”?

“A nice witch?” Karen asked finally.

“Well, they say she’s a mean witch. But I’m a mean mommy half the time, so take that with a grain of salt. I don’t get a bad feeling from her so much as a sad one.”

“So, wait. You see her, too?”

“No, not at all. Ouch.” The serrated knife edge sliced across my finger, leaving in its wake drops of blood. They dripped onto the carrot rounds.

“Aunt Pauline saw ghosts, you know,” Karen said.

“Madeeda’s a witch, not a ghost.”

“The witch has a name?”

“Mmm.” I found a SpongeBob Band-Aid in the junk drawer and ripped it open with my teeth. “What kind of ghosts did Aunt Pauline see?”

“Apparently Grandpa stopped by the night he died. Stood at the foot of her bed in his uniform, told her to take care of Grandma. She saw a few other people on their way out, too. It was sort of her specialty.”

“I didn’t know it worked like that. What about the tunnel and the white light and all the relatives waiting on the other side?” Tooth, crabby about something, started to whine. I pointed with my toe to his dog food bowl, indicating untouched kibble.

“Some people,” Karen said, “apparently need to make a pit stop before hitting the road.”

THE plants were dying. I noticed this the next afternoon as the sun reached the picture window in the living room. My African violets, survivors of a five-day cross-country move, were all failing at the same rate, velvety leaves turning dry and brittle, pink and purple blossoms curling inward at the edges, like the stocking feet of the Wicked Witch of the East. I touched the rock-hard soil. It wasn’t possible. I’d watered them yesterday. I had. I knew I had. And they’d been okay. My mother had given them to me, for luck. “Bloom where you’re planted,” she’d said. I leaned over and whispered encouragement and apology to each of them in turn, my voice cracking. It seemed to me that a faint scent of Shalimar arose from them.

“Mommy’s crying,” Paco told Charlie.

“Mommy’s flowers are sick,” I said, wiping my eyes. “Maybe they don’t like it here. Maybe they want to go back to Pennsylvania.”

Tooth ambled over to me. I expected him to lick my tears but instead, he threw up at my feet.

“Oh, poor doggie-” I held his shoulders, as his body heaved convulsively. When he was still again, I told the boys to stay back, then went to the kitchen for a towel.

“Tooth throw up,” Paco pointed out, as I made my awkward way to my knees to wipe up the viscous substance. The old floorboards were cracked, and I imagined the vomit seeping into it and settling, like rot.

“Madeeda make Tooth throw up,” Charlie added. “Madeeda sick.”

“Madeeda make everything sick.”

I sat back on my heels and looked at my sons. They nodded in unison.

I called the vet, and then I called Richard. The vet got back to me right away.

“YOU’RE not making sense.” It was close to midnight when Richard came through the front door and collapsed into the recliner, still holding his briefcase. “First you tell me Tooth was poisoned, then you say he ate a plastic bag. What’d the vet say?”

I moved aside a toy cell phone and perched on the sofa opposite him. “He barfed up the plastic bag in the car on the way to the vet. So the vet said it was probably the plastic bag, and I could leave him overnight, but I didn’t. I brought him home.” And saved us a couple hundred dollars, I thought, but didn’t say, because Richard would find that irritating, would respond with “Money’s no object,” as if saying it would make it so. And anyway, it hadn’t been about money; Tooth would hate to be away from us.

“He looks okay now.” Richard snapped his fingers, and Tooth shuffled over to him, heavy tail doing a slow wag. “Is there anything to eat, by the way?”

“Beef bourguignon. And yeah, he’s okay at the moment, but…” I looked across the room. The African violets were doing better, too. No, not just better. They looked completely fine. Thriving, in fact. Robust.

“So why are you going on about him being poisoned?”

“I’m not,” I said, unnerved now, staring at the African violets. “The boys are. And they didn’t use the word poison.”

Richard loosened his tie. “What word did they use?”

“ ‘The witch make Toof fwowe up.’ ”

He half smiled. “What witch?”

“Madeeda.”

The smile died. “What?”

I blinked. “Madeeda. That’s her name. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” He bent over to untie his shoes. The hair on top of his head was thinning; how had I never seen this before? “Where’d they come up with that?”

“The name? I have no idea. I’ve asked the neighbors if it sounds like anyone who lives around here, and I’ve Googled her, using different spellings. Among other things, I found a South African soccer player and a dessert recipe from Sudan.”

Richard eased off his shoes. “Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why are you Googling her?”

“Because… I think, you know… she’s haunting us.”

Richard rubbed his eyes, then opened his briefcase. “I think your next call should be to Dr. Iqbal.”

“Why? I feel fine. The baby feels fine.”

He brought out a folder of papers and closed his briefcase. “Sweetheart, you think a soccer player is poisoning the dog and the plants. You call me at work, expecting me to do something about it. I want Dr. Iqbal to say it’s some hormonal thing. I’d feel better.”

And I hadn’t even told him about the cracked kitchen window. “You can’t be that worried,” I said. “You never returned my call.”

“It was a bad day. Big meetings. If you’d said it was an emergency, Jillian would’ve put you through.”

“The meetings just now finished, at eleven p.m.?” I hated the edge in my voice.

“I’m sorry, I should’ve called.” He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes, briefcase and papers still on his lap. “We’re on a triage system at the office. Life-and-death matters get handled. Everything else waits, and…” There was a pause. Was he asleep?

“Wake up!” I screamed. “This is a life-and-death matter.”

Richard’s eyes flew open, and he looked as shocked as I felt. This wasn’t me. I wasn’t a screamer. I was a happy camper, a team player. And why was I screaming, anyway? Tooth was better. My African violets were positively hearty. I made my voice calm. “Do you want dinner?”

“Uh-” He was at a loss now, not knowing which comment to respond to.

I sighed. “Okay, never mind all that. What’s with work? Why was it a bad day?”

He closed his eyes again. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“I don’t care if you want to talk about it. I want to know.”

“I don’t want to worry you.”

“Well, there’s a wrong answer. Now you have to tell me.”

He shook his head.

“Richard,” I said. “Don’t make me come over there and sit on you. I’ve been tiptoeing around this for days, around you, and I’m not in the mood anymore.”

With an agonized squeak, the recliner flattened out, moving my husband backward until his feet dangled off the floor. He looked like he was waiting for a root canal. Just as I was about to yell again, his eyes opened and contemplated the water-stained ceiling. “A few weeks ago I was working on an account. I had a question about the California tax code, so I looked at the books of another account, just as a reference. A big client. Somdahl’s biggest.”

“Who?” I asked.

“Clarien Industries. Pharmaceuticals. Anyhow, I looked through the Clarien profit and loss statements and compared it to their tax returns and came across… irregularities.”

“ ‘Irregularities.’ Like, math errors?”

“That would be one interpretation.” Tooth’s tail thumped on the wood floor. We both looked at him. Fast asleep. Dog dreaming. “I brought it to Werner’s attention.”

“And?”

“He said he’d look into it. Mention it to Somdahl.”

“And?”

“I didn’t hear anything, so I brought it up again. With Werner. Then Somdahl himself summons me into his office. Offers me coffee, tea, fucking cappuccino, like I’m his best friend, like a prospective client. Then he blames the whole Clarien thing on Fenwick. The guy I replaced. Says Fenwick had a substance abuse problem and was unreliable, and that’s why he was let go. But now Somdahl is stuck with this Clarien problem, and what are we going to do about it? If we come clean, we’re talking millions in penalties, for them, maybe for us. We don’t just lose the client, we get sued for malpractice, other clients think ‘sinking ship,’ and they jump. The firm wouldn’t survive it. We’re already down 46 percent from last year. Layoffs up another 7 percent last month. I’m doing the work of four people. We all are. Probably what drove Fenwick to drugs.”

My body was shaking. How had Richard kept this to himself? The clues had been lying around for weeks, like dust bunnies under the furniture, too troublesome for me to seek out. Somdahl & Associates, the job we’d left the East Coast for, the dream partnership, the hot corporation, the write-up in Fortune magazine, the big break. The opportunity of a lifetime, the one that, when it knocks, you throw open the door so fast the glass shatters. Richard hadn’t needed to think twice. That was my job, the second-guessing, but I’d packed up our life, sold our house, walked away from family, friends, history, a neighborhood filled with other kids. Other moms.

“Richard.”

“What?”

“You can’t be part of a cover-up.”

He was silent for a moment. Then, “I don’t have to. I just forget I saw it. Then Somdahl’s secretary misfiles Clarien.”

“That’s the definition of a cover-up. You don’t have to be running the paper shredder to be part of it.”

“Who do I tell? The SEC? And what if they don’t respond? Nothing comes of it. But there goes my career.”

“Somdahl seems to think they’ll respond-”

“Somdahl can’t take the chance.” Richard rubbed his face. “And what if it happens like he says? The firm goes under. Everyone you met last month at the picnic, all those people unemployed. Stocks worthless, pensions gone. Because of me.”

“Not because of you, because of stuff that happened before you got there. Don’t let them guilt you into a conspiracy-”

“Nobody likes a whistle-blower-”

“I like you, I’ll-”

“There’s no profit in it, no percentage-”

“Goddamn it, Richie, you’re sounding like them.” I felt the edges of hysteria closing in on me. “And isn’t it illegal, by the way? What they’re hiding? What you’re hiding now? Because the thought of you behind bars is frankly scarier than who likes you or doesn’t like you at fucking Somdahl & Associates.”

Richard was staring at me now openly. I hadn’t used the F word since the birth of the boys. “I don’t need you coming unglued,” he said. “That’s not helping. And I’m not making any decisions tonight.”

Yes, you are, I wanted to scream. But I saw myself reflected behind him, in the mirror over the fireplace mantel. Big-bellied and wild-eyed. Paranoid. Hormonal. Hysterical. Sees witches.

I took a deep breath, as deep as the baby pushing against my diaphragm would allow. Enforced calm. “Want some beef bourguignon?”

Richard shook his head, still staring at me. “I’m not hungry anymore.”

I went into the kitchen, Tooth trailing me. I unplugged the Crock-Pot, dumped its contents into a colander, turned the faucet on it full blast, picked out the beef, and threw the rest in the compost bin. I fed the meat to Tooth, a piece at a time. He rewarded me by licking my fingers clean and not throwing up.

I felt ill. I wanted to rewind the clock, go back an hour to when my biggest problem was witches. I wanted to know less, or I needed to know more. I needed sleep. I looked at the bay window, and all thoughts of sleep fled.

The window was perfect. Uncracked.

I walked, shaking, back to the living room. Richard was snoring now. I bent to put an afghan over him, then read, through his splayed fingers, the cover page of the report on his lap. “Somdahl & Associates Internal Memo-do not photocopy or distribute.” I began to ease it out of his hands, but he stirred, so I let it go. I covered him with the afghan and climbed the creaking stairs.

I lay a long time with Tooth up against my belly in the king-sized bed. I didn’t think I could sleep, but suddenly I was dreaming, haunted by a series of numbers that I struggled to focus on. They were important numbers, I knew, like the gestational age of a baby, or a dosage of medicine, so I tried to memorize them. But there were ten of them, much harder to keep track of than twelvey twenty-one-y. I realized I’d been dreaming of the numbers each night, over and over, like the fairy tale of the Twelve Dancing Princesses, and that each morning the numbers were gone.

And by morning they were gone.

I woke to the sound of a door closing. Richard going for a run, maybe. It was just after five, still dark outside. My mind felt fuzzy, like bits of brain had been left behind in my dreams. I lay there drowsy, heart-sick, anxious. I tried to focus on what we’d do if-when?-Richard lost his job, how we’d live, but instead my mind came up with an alternate spelling of Madeeda: Matita. Paco and Charlie didn’t distinguish between Ds and Ts. I sat up, determined to Google this. It was a pointless impulse, as relevant as Madame Defarge knitting by the guillotine, but I couldn’t help myself.

On the kitchen table was a note: “Gone in to work early. I’ll call. Don’t worry.” Early? It was practically the middle of the night. And was there ever a command as unenforceable as “Don’t worry”?

I woke the computer and typed in “matita” and clicked on the first of a few hundred thousand hyperlinks.

Matita Pereira, an elusive bird known for its melancholic song. The bird is one form taken by the Saci, a one-legged mulatto child, legendary character in Brazilian folklore, who wears a magical red cap that makes him disappear and reappear, and requires him to grant wishes to anyone who steals it.

What was I to make of this? Brazilian folklore was no more meaningful than South African soccer players and Sudanese desserts. Although I did have a red baseball cap, left in the trunk of my car by someone from Richard’s office. Not stolen, of course, but not mine either. I kept forgetting to return it, and it often came in handy when I got caught bare-headed in the merciless California sun.

I slumped in the desk chair. What did it matter? My Madeeda obsession was a distraction from the real problem, Richard’s ethical dilemma, now my dilemma. Could we, as Richard proposed, forget it? Was doing nothing the wisest course, financially? Almost certainly. Morally? No. But was this my decision to make? What about everyone else at Somdahl & Associates? What about our own three children? Didn’t we owe them a roof over their heads?

Tooth came into the room and stretched, wanting to be let outside. “I wish,” I said to him, “that I knew what to do.”

Something shifted inside me, something palpable, physical, and I realized I was sitting in something wet. As though my bladder had gone out of control, or my water had broken. But it wasn’t amniotic fluid or urine. The brown leather chair was darkening rapidly, and when I touched it, my fingers came away red with blood.

“BLEEDING in early pregnancy can often be insignificant.” Dr. Iqbal sat on a swivel stool at the foot of the exam table. The wand in his hand made little circular motions on my bare stomach, now wet with gel. His eyes were on the black-and-white TV screen, which showed a grainy image of my unborn daughter. “However-”

“However-?” I looked at his face, trying to find reassurance. The hospital lighting did not become him. “She’s okay, though?” I persisted. “You can tell, right? You’d know, right?”

“There’s movement, her heart rate’s normal, cord’s not wrapped around her.”

“But-?”

“But bleeding in the last trimester’s never good.” He glanced at me. “This one’s a head-scratcher. It could be placenta previa, but it’s not. It’s not placental abruption. And it’s not labor. Also, you’re not bleeding now. You’re sure it was actual bleeding? Not just spotting?”

“It was flowing. Gushing. All over the chair I was sitting in.” Which was leather, at least. I’d cleaned it as well as I could, waiting for the ambulance. Cleaned myself, too, although traces of blood remained on my inner thighs.

“And the color? True red? Or brownish? Pinkish?”

“Red. Ketchup red.” It was a relief to say it, with no equivocation. A relief to be here in the hospital, all antiseptic and stainless steel and charm-free linoleum. No creaky floors. No personality. No rustic appeal.

Dr. Iqbal switched off the monitor, then grabbed a paper towel and wiped the gel from his wand and from my stomach. “Richard still here?”

“He just left. Went home to take care of the kids. A friend’s been watching them since five thirty a.m., but she has to get to work.” She wasn’t really a friend; she was a woman I’d met exactly twice at a Mommy and Me class. But I had her phone number, and she’d come over at once, without hesitation. She was a friend now, I realized.

“Well, let’s take a wait-and-see attitude. The baby’s thirty-six weeks, so if she had to come out now, she could. But she’s better off staying in, and without a clear reason to induce… I’ll keep you here a day or two for observation.”

I nodded, suddenly dead tired. If the baby was safe, that was all that mattered. Somdahl & Associates seemed very far away at the moment, and as I lapsed into a half sleep, I thought how absurd it was, in this overlit hospital room, to believe in witches.

And once more I dreamed of numbers.

“DON’T squish your mommy,” Richard said.

“They’re okay,” I said. Charlie and Paco were in the hospital bed with me, Charlie holding the TV remote and Paco pressing the buttons that raised and lowered the mattress. I’d missed them. I was never away from them.

“I’m gonna use the bathroom, and then we’ll go. The sitter’s coming at noon.” Richard had called a babysitting agency so he could go back to work. This was a good thing; I’d need backup help when I went into labor.

“Is that your bathroom?” Paco asked, pointing to the door that Richard closed behind him. I nodded.

“Madeeda has a bathroom, too,” Charlie said. “And Madeeda has a curtain in her room.” He pointed to the curtain separating me from the empty bed across the room. “Madeeda has a TV on the ceiling.”

“Just like Mommy.” I smiled, playing along. “So Madeeda lives in a hospital now?”

Charlie nodded. “In this hospital.”

My smile faltered. “Really?”

“Upstairs,” Paco said.

I felt cold suddenly. “Do you know where upstairs?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You could take me there?” I asked.

Paco shook his head. “Paco and Charlie can’t go there. Only Mommy.”

“Why?”

“Madeeda telled us.”

“How would I find it, though? Her room?”

Charlie said, “The numbers!” Paco laughed and bounced on the bed. “Twelvey twenty-one-y.”

I waited until Richard and the boys left, then got out of bed. A nurse had just checked my vital signs and done fetal monitoring, so I was unhooked from everything and free to move around. I didn’t hesitate. I wrapped a second hospital gown over the first, backward, so that the gap in the back was covered, then padded out to the elevator banks in my socks and loafers. Once inside, I pressed the button marked 12.

IT was quiet on the twelfth floor. Compared to Admissions and the bustle of Labor & Delivery, it was a graveyard. I followed the signs for the east corridor. E.

The nurses’ station was empty. I walked past it, down a hallway with a flickering fluorescent light. This was an old section of the hospital, unrenovated. I found myself shivering as I walked.

Some of the doors with the 12E prefix were closed, some of the rooms unoccupied, and the few patients I saw through open doorways were asleep. It seemed like a place people came to die.

I was whispering as I walked. “… twelve E nineteen, twelve E twenty. Twelvie twenty-one.” I paused before the open door. There were nameplates for the two patients, e and w. The bed on the west side of the room was empty. It was the patient in 12E21e that I’d come to see. M. Quadros, according to the nameplate.

Even in her sleep I recognized her. She was younger than me, but not much. Long, curly hair, a reddish purple that could only come out of a bottle. Memorable hair, even if you’ve only seen it once, even though it now had an inch of black roots showing at the scalp. Her face was pale and showed the remnants of bruises. Her long, lovely arms were bruised, too, purple and green around the sites where blood had been drawn or tubes inserted. She was skinny, the sad little blue gown and blanket not thick enough to hide the bones jutting through. She no longer smelled like Shalimar.

“Hello,” I said to her, but she didn’t respond. I touched her face, very gently, but she didn’t respond to that either.

I wondered how long she’d lain there. I’d seen her only a month before.

WE’D met at the Somdahl & Associates Fourth of July barbecue. Even with the hair she wouldn’t have stood out among the crowd of strangers, and I, as a company spouse, wouldn’t have made an impression on her either, but for a clumsy gesture. A drunken partner had spilled a pitcher of beer on her T-shirt, and instead of apologizing made lewd remarks about how good some women look wet. Another man tried to intervene, no doubt thinking “sexual harassment lawsuit” but the drunk wouldn’t give way gracefully. While the two men worked it out, I’d walked over to the beer-soaked woman and touched her shoulder. I had an extra shirt in my car, I told her. When she hesitated, I put an arm around her, and she let me lead her away.

“Thanks,” she said. “Asshole. All week I work for him. Now I must eat and drink with him.” She had an accent that I couldn’t identify. Some Romance language.

“Who is he?” I asked.

She’d looked at me with a raised eyebrow. “Albert Werner. The CFO. You must be new.”

“My husband is,” I’d said. “I’m just the spouse. Jane England.”

“You’re married to-”

“Richard England.”

Her eyelashes fluttered, a butterfly’s gesture. “Your husband is Richard England.”

“Yes, do you know him?”

There was a pause. “Yes.”

We were at the car now and she was waiting, so I opened the trunk and she added, “You are the Good Samaritan.”

“No problem.” I pulled a pink T-shirt out of the emergency diaper bag. Clipped to the bag was a plastic-framed photo of Paco and Charlie with Tooth. “I have twin toddlers, so someone’s always spilling something on me, or my breasts used to leak, when I was nursing. I’m just in the habit of carrying around a change of clothes.”

“I didn’t realize Richard England had children,” she said, touching the photo. Staring at it.

It was one of those remarks-actually, it was the third remark in two minutes-that sent a shiver of sexual jealousy down my spine. But she looked at me then, intently, and said, “Your husband. He’s tall, yes? Large nose.”

I nodded.

“Yes,” she said. “Last week, I carried heavy boxes into the conference room, for the meeting. Eight men around the table, and only your husband, he jumps up to hold the door and then he takes all the boxes from me, to help me. All the boxes.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, but she turned her back to me and pulled off her beer-soaked shirt. I looked at her flawless skin, her narrow ribs, her spine, her lacy little bra straps, and I was relieved that I didn’t need to feel jealousy.

She turned around, dressed once more. “Jane. Thank you. It really is kind of you to give me the shirt off your back. I can’t think of many people at this picnic who would do this. I won’t forget it.”

I reached out to pluck from her wild hair a tiny piece of paper caught there. A Band-Aid wrapper, escaped from the diaper bag.

“And you have twins,” she said, smiling for the first time. “This is very lucky. A blessing. Boys, yes? And a dog.”

“Yes.” I smiled back at her. “I’m sorry, I don’t know your name.”

“Matilda,” she said. At least, that’s the name I guessed at, but it was hard to know, because it came out quickly, except for the middle syllable, drawn out so musically. Mateelda…

Later I noticed that she’d left her red baseball cap in the trunk of my car.

THE nurse’s shoes were silent, and I only saw her when I turned. I gasped. She jumped.

“Jesus!” she said, a hand to her heart. “Wasn’t expecting anyone.” She wore turquoise scrubs and Nike running shoes.

“Is it not visiting hours?” I asked.

“No, it’s just you’re her first visitor. On my shift, anyway.” The nurse checked her watch and made a note on the chart held in a binder.

“I just now found out she was in the hospital,” I said. The nurse was reading the chart and didn’t reply. “How long has she been here?”

“This floor? Five days.”

“And how long in the hospital?”

She flipped a page. “Admitted ten days ago to the ER, then surgery, then intensive care, and then up here.”

“What is ‘up here,’ exactly?”

The nurse looked up at me, glanced down at my stomach, and turned back to the chart. Patient confidentiality rules, I imagined her thinking. “This is a hospice room. She’s a DNR. Do Not Resuscitate.”

Madeeda was dying. I took a deep breath. “What happened to her?”

She looked up again, and her eyes narrowed. “You okay to be up and walking around?”

I nodded. “I’m fine. I’m just… Sorry, she was a friend, but I only just now heard about her.”

“Why don’t you sit down?”

“Okay.” I perched on the leatherette chair next to the bed. Thinking, We’re dressed alike, Madeeda and I. Sharing clothes again. “What happened to her? Can you tell me?”

“Assaulted,” she said. “And left for dead. It was in the paper.”

“Oh, God.” My chest heaved at the thought. “Do they know who did it?”

She checked a catheter and made a note on the chart. “All I know is they had cops outside ICU. But once her brain functioning stopped, they pulled the security.”

Since she was no use to the cops anymore. And no danger to anyone else. “But no one’s visited her?” I looked at the elaborate tropical arrangement on the bedside table, not quite fresh. A Somdahl & Associates business card peeked out from among the calla lilies. “No one from her office?”

The nurse wrapped a blood pressure cuff around Madeeda’s bruised arm. Her movements were gentle but efficient. “Where’d she work? We figured she was with the government.”

My throat went dry. “Why would you think that?”

“Her ICU nurse. She said the people in the waiting room looked like they were gathered for a tax audit. Short hair, sensible shoes, no flowers.”

“No, she was a secretary,” I said. “Somdahl & Associates. No one there wears sensible shoes.” How could you work in a place and not have coworkers come visit? Even in a coma, I’d like to think someone might keep me company. “Can I ask you,” I said, “what will happen when she dies? I mean, will you call people and notify them?”

“People in general? No.” She looked again at the chart, and flipped a page. Her eyebrows lifted, a spark of surprise, quickly masked.

A buzzer sounded, and a disembodied voice asked for a Nurse Shayne to please come to room 12E13w stat. “Excuse me,” she said and left quickly, taking the chart with her.

I had to follow her. Taciturn as she was, I had to make her tell me more, tell me something, anything. I stood shakily, clumsy with the weight of the baby, gave a last look to Madeeda, then left the room.

The nurse was already moving around the corner, out of sight. But there, next to the door, in a tiny alcove, was a cart on wheels. In the cart were binders. Patients’ charts. A dozen or more. Clearly labeled. I grabbed “M. Quadros. 12E21e.”

I read the binder tabs and flipped to “patient information.” I was terrified to be caught by the nurse, and half afraid, too, that Labor & Delivery would have sent out a search party by now. But there it was. Under “notes” was an arrow, pointing to a business card stuck in the tab page’s plastic sleeve.

On the card was a number. Familiar, like something I’d seen in a dream.

Important, like the gestational age of a baby or a dosage of medicine, but more common: a phone number. It belonged to someone named Bruce Schoenbrod, who worked in the office of the United States Attorney.

YOU could argue that telling the truth once you’re pretty sure the jig is up is less virtuous than telling the truth because it’s the right thing to do. I didn’t really care about virtue that day. I just wanted to keep Richard out of federal prison.

I talked to Richard from the phone next to my bed in Labor & Delivery. I gave him the number and told him to call it and tell Bruce Schoenbrod everything. I told him that if he didn’t make the call, I would. There wasn’t any doubt in my mind; Madeeda had already given information to the U.S. Attorney. The U.S. Attorney had listened. Somdahl & Associates was going down, with or without my husband’s statement, but unless he came clean before the feds moved in, he’d go down, too.

I don’t know why I understood these things with such clarity. I don’t know why Richard listened to me. I don’t know why Bruce Schoenbrod had picked the week after to seek indictments, and not the week before.

I don’t know why a woman who’d known me for half an hour chose to save my husband, when six of Richard’s colleagues ended up on trial. Five, after Albert Werner put a bullet through his brain while out on bail. I could only guess.

Somdahl & Associates crashed, along with Clarien, the pharmaceutical company, and two others whose files turned up “irregularities.” A lot of people suffered financial loss, unemployment, near-devastation as a result. Including us. But through all of it I felt lucky. Blessed. And able to sleep nights, sleep deeply, from the moment Richard made that phone call. But only for three weeks.

Madeeda died the day after I saw her in the hospital. Twenty-one days later my daughter was born. We named her Grace.