Being Nikki (Airhead 2)

Chapter 21

THE SAD PART OF IT WAS, IN THE END, five of us—not counting Cosabella—ended up going to Westchester. And one of us was unconscious.   It wasn’t nice or fair to use Brandon Stark that way. But we needed his limo. How else were we going to get to Dr. Fong’s house? No taxi would take us someplace so far away, and the trains had stopped running until morning. Christopher said his aunt Jackie would probably let us borrow her minivan, but that meant schlepping all the way out to Brooklyn to pick it up first, not to mention explaining why we needed it.   Whereas there was Brandon, passed out on my couch from too many lycheetinis.   At least we took him with us. Even if we did tell Tom, his driver, to run inside to get some Pepto for him at the deli—then, while he was gone, Steven slipped behind the wheel and drove off with us all inside.   The hard part to explain—at least to Gabriel—was why he couldn’t come along. He had no idea where we were going (except to Westchester), or why. But he wanted to come with us. When I thanked him for his help with Frida and said, “Well, we have to go on an important errand now. I guess we’ll see you later,” he’d said, “That’s nice. I’ll help you,” and held all doors as Christopher and Steven dragged a semiconscious Brandon through them.   And because he wouldn’t leave, of course neither would Frida. Finally, I took him by the arm and whispered, “Please, will you do me a huge favor and take her home? She’s too young to be out this late, and I’m afraid something will happen to her if I try to send her home alone. You saw what happened at the party. Will you see that she gets home to her parents safely? It’s only a few blocks away. ”   Gabriel agreed—but only when I said we’d wait for him. And, of course, when Frida found out she’d be riding—alone—in a cab with Gabriel Luna, she was more than willing to go with him. She whispered to me as we hugged good-bye, “I’m sorry I said such bitchy things to you the other day. I didn’t mean any of them. You’re an awesome big sister, actually. And thanks for these. ” She pointed to her earlobes, into which, I saw, she’d slipped the diamond studs I’d gotten for her.   “You were supposed to wait to open those on Christmas morning,” I said, feeling dismayed. “Now what will you have to look forward to?”   “Seeing you,” she said, and kissed me good-bye, then took Gabriel’s arm and disappeared with him down Centre Street.   But of course we had no intention of waiting for Gabriel to come back. Steven pulled out and started toward the highway at once, anxious to get to Dr. Fong’s as soon as possible. Not that he—or any of us—had any idea what to expect when we got there. Out of all of them, I think I was the only one who kept thinking dinosaur stickers. Those e-mails still didn’t make sense…   …but neither had those dinosaur stickers I’d given to Christopher—at least, not to him at the time. Seen out of context, they had to have been totally random, like those e-mails Justin kept getting, allegedly from me.   Christopher’s words kept reverberating through my head, “No one can just disappear forever…They feel compelled to reach out to friends they knew before…It’s force of habit. Everyone messes up eventually. ”   But who was messing up with those text messages? Maybe it was only a mean-spirited prank (except how could some random kid have gotten Justin Bay’s private number?). Maybe it was nothing. Maybe this whole thing was just a wild goose chase.   But maybe it wasn’t.   The problem was, once we left Manhattan and got to Westchester, Christopher wouldn’t let Steven use the limo’s GPS to find the address we were looking for.   “Are you kidding?” he said. “Stark will point every satellite they’ve got right at us. The cops’ll pull us over in five seconds. ”   Lulu looked excited, hearing that. “Are we actually doing something against the law?” she wanted to know.   Christopher gave her a sarcastic look. “We just stole a limo,” he said.   “Well,” I said. “Technically, we only borrowed it. ” I glanced at the sleeping Brandon, stretched out on the side seat, dozing like an angel in a tux. He was wearing his red velvet Santa hat. “The owner’s still inside, right?”   “Here,” Christopher said, pulling up a map on his iPhone and showing the screen to Steven. “You’ve got another two miles to go on his road. ”   “Thanks,” Steven said from the driver’s seat. The winding countryish road we were on, dotted with large mansiony house after large mansiony house, seemed virtually deserted this time of night. Snow came down in light fluffy flakes, not enough to stick yet, but enough to be beautiful. I was still glad I’d thought to kick off my stiletto sandals for a pair of Marc Jacobs boots. Steven had the heat up in the limo, but even so, my leather jacket didn’t seem like it would provide much warmth when I got out of the car. Maybe that’s because I still had on my halter top evening gown. At least I had Cosabella draped across my thighs for warmth.   “I still don’t get where we’re going,” Lulu said from where she sat next to Steven. Lulu was wearing Tom’s chauffeur cap, which he’d left in the car. It went very rakishly with her bleached blond pageboy, with which she often wore extensions…though not tonight. “But I guess that’s the adventure of it! It’s like a scavenger hunt! Isn’t Nikki fantastic? She always knows the best way to make a party fun!”   I couldn’t tell if Lulu was just trying to make herself feel better, or if she really didn’t understand that something serious was going on. She still seemed to be on cloud nine about her discovery that she and Steven were astrologically compatible, according to her astrologist.   And then Christopher said, “It should be the next driveway. ”   Steven turned down a long driveway walled on either side by low round stones piled one on top of the other, with a sloping yard and nice trees, bare-branched this time of year. The sky was just starting to turn pinky red over in the east, and because the snow clouds were hanging so low, the lights from the city reflected up against them, so it wasn’t hard to see the house, even though it was so late. It was an old-fashioned redbrick colonial, with black shutters and a single electric imitation candle in each window.   I remembered reading somewhere that women put those candles in their windows during wartime, to guide loved ones home. Now people had started doing it during the holiday season as well. Who was Dr. Fong guiding home? I wondered.   Steven pulled all the way down the driveway until it made a circular loop in front of the entrance to the house. Then he stopped the car and turned off the engine.   “Well,” Lulu asked, turning around to peer at us from the front seat, the chauffeur’s cap jauntily askew. “What now?”   I looked up at the house through the tinted windows of the limo. It wasn’t an intimidatingly huge mansion like some of the other houses we’d driven past, but it wasn’t small, either. It looked almost aggressively normal—the kind of house you’d drive by and never think twice about, never wonder who lived there, never think to yourself, Gee, that’s the kind of house I’d like to have someday. It was just…there.   It was silent in the car, except for Brandon’s gentle snoring.   I lifted Cosabella, who was still passed out across my lap, and crawled across Christopher’s legs for the car door.   “What—” Christopher sounded alarmed. “Wait for me. ”   “And me,” Steven said, getting out.   “Me, too,” Lulu said.   Soon I was leading a little parade up to Dr. Fong’s front door—everyone from inside the limo but Brandon, who hadn’t stirred. It was incredibly cold out—so cold my nostrils felt as if they would freeze together if I inhaled too deeply. The air smelled pleasantly of wood smoke. It was silent—absolutely still—in Dr. Fong’s neighborhood except for the sound our footsteps made as we walked up the icy pathway to his front door.   Once there, I lifted the heavy brass knocker and let it fall two or three times. The sound it made seemed so loud in the predawn stillness, I was afraid it might wake some of his neighbors.   After a minute, when there was no reaction, Lulu said, “N-no one is home. ” Her teeth were chattering from the cold. “Let’s g-go back to the car. At least it’s warm there. ”   I ignored her. Instead, I reached up and lifted the knocker and let it fall again.   This time, a light turned on above our heads. I heard footsteps inside the house. Then the door opened to reveal a middle-aged man in a bathrobe, peering out at us sleepily. When he saw my face, his eyes widened perceptibly.   “Hi,” I said.   Dr. Fong started to shake his head. “No,” he said. That’s all. Just a single word.   But there was a world of fear in it.   And he started to close the door.   But Steven was too quick for him. He inserted his foot between the door and the jamb so it was impossible for Dr. Fong to close it.   Then he said, “We’ve come a long way. We just want to come inside for a little while and have a word with you. ”   “No,” Dr. Fong said again. He still looked terrified. “I think you must have the wrong house. I don’t know you—”   “Uh,” Christopher said, moving to stand behind Steven. “Actually, I think you know Nikki Howard—or should I say Em Watts—pretty well. Or aren’t you one of the surgeons who worked on her brain transplant at the Stark Institute for Neurology and Neurosurgery a few months ago? See, I read her medical file, and I know all about it. So, unless you want me to release that file to the press, you’d better let us in. ”   Dr. Fong, looking like someone was holding a knife to his throat—which, I guess in a way, we were—thought about it a minute, then finally took a step back and let us in. We filed into a foyer that was decorated in New England chic, dark polished wood and portraits of duck-hunting dogs. Cosabella sniffed around politely but curiously.   “This isn’t a game, you know,” Dr. Fong said resentfully when we were all inside and he’d shut the door behind us. “They’ll kill you if they find out you know. They’ve killed before. How do you think I got into this mess?”   Hearing those words coming from such a mild-looking doctor, standing in a red plaid bathrobe in the dark stillness of his old-fashioned hallway, chilled me in a way the cold outside never could have.   If it chilled me, it had an even more startling effect on Lulu, who really had no idea what she’d been getting herself into, climbing into Brandon Stark’s limo back on Centre Street in Manhattan. She grew very still—and very somber. Hearing you might be killed definitely destroyed whatever kind of party mood you might have been in. I could attest to that.   “Why don’t we sit down so you can tell us about it?” Steven suggested, in the same calm voice he’d used before. Apparently, he was used to dealing with hysterical brain surgeons.   Dr. Fong did as he asked, but it was obvious it was only because he was cornered, not because he wanted to. He padded in his slippers into the living room, a square room decorated, again, with New England scarcity, where apparently a fire had been burning earlier in the evening. It had gone out, but the smell of burning wood lingered pleasantly in the air. He turned on a single lamp on a table by the window, but only after he’d made sure to close every set of curtains in the room, glancing out each window in a paranoid manner to make sure there were no other cars on the road but ours.   “You’re sure you weren’t followed?” he demanded.   Christopher and I exchanged glances. I had actually been paying attention to this, psycho as this made me seem.   “Yes,” I said. “And no, we weren’t. ”   “You couldn’t have picked a less obtrusive vehicle?” Dr. Fong demanded. “You think a stretch limo won’t be noticed around here?”   “We didn’t have a choice,” I said, taken aback.   Dr. Fong looked around—at Lulu, still in her chauffeur cap and poofy-skirted party dress, perched on the edge of a Chippendale chair; Steven standing tense and at attention by the foyer door, as if expecting Stark to burst in at any moment; and Christopher and I standing by the dead hearth, Cosabella sitting at our feet, staring at Dr. Fong, who looked totally confused in his pajamas and robe, with his black hair sticking up a little in the middle. It was clear from his expression he wasn’t very impressed by what he saw.   “Is there,” I asked, because the thought had just occurred to me, “a Mrs. Fong?”   Dr. Fong looked scornful. “No,” he said. “No, my mother doesn’t live with me. ”   I’d meant did he have a wife, but I guess that answered my question, anyway.   “Why,” Christopher demanded, cutting straight to the chase, “is an ex-boyfriend of Nikki Howard’s getting e-mails from someone using a computer in this house?”   Dr. Fong suddenly buried his face in his hands. Then he turned and marched over to a small secretary, opened it, took out a cut crystal decanter of whisky, and, with shaking fingers, poured himself a glass.   Then he downed the entire contents of the glass in one go. And poured himself another.   This one he carried over to the couch, onto which he sank down next to Cosabella, who’d helped herself to the comfiest seat in the house. When he turned to face us, I was shocked to see he’d gone white as the sails on the picture of the ship hanging on the wall above his head.   “Who else knows about this?” he asked.   “No one,” I said, glancing over at Steven. “I mean, except everyone in this room. And the person who traced the e-mail to here. ”   “Will he tell anyone?” Dr. Fong asked, raising the glass to his lips with trembling fingers.   “No,” I said. I crossed the room to sink into an armchair across from the couch where Dr. Fong was sitting. “Dr. Fong. What is going on?”   Dr. Fong didn’t say anything for a moment. He just stared into the amber depths of his drink. When he finally did speak, it was to ask, “Do you know what the Hippocratic oath is?”   Lulu looked blank. Steven still looked like he wanted someone to come bursting in through the door so he could karate chop them or something.   Christopher said finally, “Yeah. It’s something all doctors have to swear before they can begin practicing medicine. ”   “First,” I said, “do no harm. ”   “That’s right,” Dr. Fong said. “At the Stark Institute, that’s what we tell ourselves we’re doing. No harm. We’re transplanting brains from horribly deformed bodies that otherwise wouldn’t survive into healthy bodies belonging to brain-dead donors so that our patients have another chance at life. That’s what happened to you. ” He looked up at me. “I’ve been working at the Stark Institute for ten years, and I’ve never for a moment questioned the morality of what we do there. Until the day of your accident. ”   His gaze flitted around the room, looking from Steven to Christopher to me.   “What happened that day?” I asked, my voice rough. I coughed to clear it.   “I was only assisting,” Dr. Fong said, his gaze looking far away. “Dr. Holcombe was in charge of your case. Nikki Howard was far too important to be handled by anyone but him. Normally, I run the teaching wing of the institute—”   “Teaching wing?” I interrupted.   “Yes, of course,” Dr. Fong said. “The demand for transplants is so high that there’s a waiting list. But it’s several years long, and some patients can’t—or don’t want to—wait. So, for a fee, surgeons from around the world can come to the institute and we’ll train them to perform the surgery themselves. We allow them to practice on donor bodies—”   “Donor bodies?” I was horrified. Christopher threw me an annoyed look for interrupting again, but I couldn’t help it. Donor bodies?   “Oh, we have quite a lot of them,” Dr. Fong explained. “All sorts of individuals who’ve been declared legally brain dead and who’ve donated their bodies to science. Sadly, there’s no shortage of individuals in vegetative states thanks to accidents and, quite often, drug and alcohol overdoses. What we don’t have, of course, are viable brains to put in them, and that’s what patients like you provide—”   I held up a hand, too sickened to hear more. “Never mind,” I said. “Go on. ”   “Well,” Dr. Fong said. “As I was saying, obviously Dr. Holcombe and Dr. Higgins were the main surgeons on your case. But there was something…odd about your surgery. I was told by Dr. Holcombe that Nikki Howard had had a family history of genetic brain defects and that was what killed her. ”   I saw Lulu look more confused than ever. When no one else, however, reacted to Dr. Fong’s reference to the fact that I was dead, when there I was, clearly alive, she didn’t say anything.   “After he was done stitching you up, I did something I’d never do, under ordinary circumstances,” Dr. Fong went on. “I went to examine the exhumed matter. I’ve always been interested in brain anomalies, and I wanted to see what Nikki Howard’s was. ”   Somewhere upstairs, I heard a door open and close, and then some thumping sounds. Someone was walking around above our heads. Dr. Fong, however, didn’t appear to notice.   “But Nikki Howard hadn’t any brain anomaly. Hers was perfect. There was no defect. The aneurysm Dr. Holcombe claimed she had suffered? The whole reason for her death and this emergency transplant in the first place? It hadn’t happened. She was completely healthy. ”   I looked over at Christopher. He had said there were no accidents. Does anyone really know what happened to Nikki that day? he’d asked. She went down and never got back up again. Stark says it was an aneurysm…but how do we know?   And now we had our answer. It hadn’t been an accident. He looked back at me, smugly satisfied that he’d been right.   “Then…what did they do to her?” I asked him. “To make her pass out like that?”   “We may never know,” Dr. Fong said. “Once the surgery was over, I wasn’t allowed near the body—Nikki’s body—anymore. I was only supposed to handle the medical waste. ”   Lulu inhaled, looking horrified. “Nikki’s…brain?”   He threw her an appraising look, as if she’d suddenly struck him as a lot more intelligent than he’d previously given her credit for.   “That’s right,” he said. “I was the one charged with disposing of it. ”   “But,” Steven said, “you took an oath. ”   “Do no harm,” I murmured.   “Why?” Steven asked. He looked as horrified as Lulu. “Why would anyone remove a perfectly healthy brain from a girl’s body?”   “I think I can tell you why,” Christopher said.   But at that moment, there was thumping from the staircase—a familiar skittering sound that caused Cosabella to perk up her ears alertly.   And the next thing I knew, she’d begun barking, and those barks were met by answering yips as two miniature poodles exactly like her—except one was black, the other cocoa colored—came bursting into the room. They rushed toward Cosy, who’d leapt down from the chair and torn over to them, her tail whipping back and forth excitedly as she greeted what appeared to be two long-lost friends.   “Harry! Winston!” An older woman in a terry cloth robe hurried into the room after the dogs, clapping her hands. “Down! Down!”   Even though her hair was plastered to her head from sleep, and she didn’t have any makeup on, I recognized her. Before Steven broke his stance by the doorway and cried in astonishment, “Mom?” I knew who she was.   Dee Dee Howard. Nikki Howard’s mom was living in Dr. Fong’s house.   The thing was, I’d sort of known it. From the moment I’d put two and two together and I’d realized what those e-mail messages Veronica had told me about really meant. Why else would she have left behind her business and everything else she knew, if it hadn’t been to be with something—or someone—she loved a billion times more?   “Steven!” she cried when she saw him. She reached out to him joyously. He was so much bigger than she was that he had to hunch down to let her take him into her arms. His expression was one of incredulity. “I didn’t know you were here!”   He seemed dazed. “Mom,” he said as she hugged him, “I’ve been looking for you. Everyone’s been worried sick—Leanne. Mary Beth. Didn’t you see the news reports on TV? We thought you’d been killed. ”   “Oh,” Mrs. Howard said. “I’m so sorry, honey. Yes, we saw those. But we assumed it was Stark, trying to trick me. I never thought it was really you. ” She glanced over at me. Then froze. “Oh. Oh, my,” she said as her eyes filled with tears. Her gaze swept over me with what appeared to be a mix of horror and fascination. “I…I don’t know what to say. You…you look just like…”   She couldn’t go on. She didn’t have to. I knew who she thought I looked just like.   The thing was, I knew I didn’t just look like that person. I was that person. I mean, in a way.   Christopher came over to me then, and laid a hand on my shoulder. It was a supportive gesture, and I couldn’t have been more grateful for it.   “This must be very hard for you,” Christopher said gently to Mrs. Howard.   “It’s…” Steven’s mother shook her head. Her Southern accent was much more pronounced than her son’s. But it was pleasant, like her slightly faded good looks. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to stare. You just look so much like her. ”   Because I am her, I wanted to say. Or at least, I’m inhabiting her body.   “It’s all right,” I said instead. At my feet, Cosabella was still having a joyous reunion with her cousins—or brothers, for all I knew—Harry and Winston, happily cavorting on Dr. Fong’s rug. I decided to change the subject. “So you’ve been here the whole time?”   “Oh, yes,” Mrs. Howard said. She had slipped her hand into Steven’s, and was happily holding his arm. “Dr. Fong called me and explained the situation. He told me how important it was not to leave a trail that Stark could trace. I came right away. I’m so sorry to have worried you, honey,” she said to Steven. “But I didn’t dare check in with Leanne, you know how she gossips. And Mary Beth’s just hopeless. But you’re here now, and that’s all that matters. Oh, I’ve got so many things to tell you! How are you? Oh, I’m so glad you’re home!”   Steven looked torn between wanting to laugh and to cry. I knew the feeling. Home. He was as far from home as he could be.   And yet, he was in her arms. So wasn’t he, in fact, home?   From the chair where Lulu had sunk down, I heard a sound. When I glanced over there, I saw her twirling a curl of her blond pageboy nervously. When she saw that most everyone in the room was looking at her, she jumped, and said, apologetically, “Sorry! I just…” She looked wan and delicate in the dim light of Dr. Fong’s living room. “I don’t get it. What are we doing here?”   “We’re here to find her,” I said, nodding toward Mrs. Howard. “But the real story is why she’s here. Right, Doctor?”   Dr. Fong sighed. He didn’t want to talk about this. He didn’t want to talk about it at all.   “I needed her help. I took an oath,” he said wearily. “They told me to throw Nikki’s brain away. But to do that when there was nothing wrong with it…that would have been murder. I owe a lot to Stark Enterprises. But I’ll not be party to killing an innocent woman. ”   “So if you didn’t dispose of Nikki’s brain,” Steven said, looking confused, “what did you do with it?”   As if on cue, a side door opened, and a young woman I’d never seen before, of average height and average weight, with auburn hair that was neither curly nor straight, came into the room wincing as if she’d just woken up, even though the lamplight wasn’t particularly bright.   “God,” she was complaining. “Could you guys make any more noise? Some people don’t wake up at the crack of dawn and are still trying to sleep, you know. ”   Then she seemed to realize that there were more people in the room than just Dr. Fong and Mrs. Howard, and her eyes widened a bit.   It was only when her gaze fell upon me that she fully reacted, however. Color rushed into her full, slightly cherubic face, and her eyes, which were green, flashed.   In a second flat, she’d lifted her hand and brought it full across my face with as much force as she could.   That’s right. She’d slapped me.   “You bitch,” Nikki Howard said.