no idea just how close he’d come with his silent diagnosis of insanity. The truth of the matter was that Dana did feel like she was starting to go a little bit crazy lately, just a smidge Looney Toons, a textbook case of PTSD if she’d ever seen one.
Then again, when had crazy people ever been trusted to make their own diagnoses?
A biting cold delivered by a howling wind sliced effortlessly through Dana’s white lab coat and swirled her recently re-grown short blonde hair wildly around her scalp as she made her way quickly up to the main doors of the apartment complex before fishing out her magnetic key card from her purse and sliding it through the electronic reader. Cleveland in the wintertime had never been an especially pleasant place to be under even the best of weather conditions, but today’s lake-effect winds were making things that much worse, that much more unbearable. It was the kind of cold that hurt you all the way down to the bone. The kind of cold that made you want to curl yourself up into a tight little ball and simply cry yourself to death.
Dana shook her head to chase away the temptation and stepped inside the building, pausing a moment to shake off the cold and luxuriating in the warmth of the space that went to work on defrosting her frozen cheeks. Taking a breath, she then headed for her landlady’s apartment on the first floor, deliberately ignoring her mailbox located in a honeycomb arrangement in the middle of the lobby. No doubt the damn thing had been crammed full of credit card bills and Publisher’s Clearinghouse letters that breathlessly informed her that she could be the next lucky winner of the million-dollar prize. Pulling open another door at the northeast end of the lobby, Dana made her way down the hall and knocked lightly on her landlady’s door. A moment later, Maggie Carter fiddled with the chain on the inside and opened up the door. ‘Dana!’ the old woman pronounced happily in her thick Polish accent. ‘Welcome home, honey! We were so worried about you! How are you feeling?’
Dana smiled – a real smile this time. It was hard not to when you looked at Maggie Carter. Eighty years old if she was a day, she’d escaped her home country and its Nazi persecution during World War II and had subsequently changed her name from Magdalena Abrahamowicz to the more American-sounding Maggie Carter in an effort to fit in better with her new surroundings. The name change had been made to honour her adopted country of the United States, but the simple truth of the matter was that Maggie Carter would have fit in anywhere she went. She possessed a smile that lit up the room like a sunburst every time she showed off her false teeth and – even at her considerably advanced age – still moved around town like an eighteen-year-old girl brimming over with enthusiasm and good cheer. Dana knew that she could probably learn a thing or two from the old gal. Life wasn’t all just gloom and doom and serial killers, after all. There was some good stuff about it, too – however hard that good stuff might be for her to see sometimes.
‘I’m fine, Mrs Carter,’ Dana said, catching a whiff off freshly baked bread coming from the kitchen that made her stomach growl. ‘Feeling much better. And how are you and Mr Carter doing? How’s his colitis these days?’
Maggie Carter rolled her eyes halfway around her face and waved a frail arm in front of her painfully thin body, jiggling the loose skin hanging off her right biceps like a rooster’s comb. ‘I’m wonderful, sweetie – thanks so much for asking. And for Mr Carter, well, Bob’s sleeping again, but what’s new, right? His health is fine, though. He might not look like much, but that man’s as healthy as a horse. Eats like one too.’
The old lady cackled at her own joke, and Dana soon found herself laughing right along. She just couldn’t help herself. Maggie Carter’s laugh was infectious.
The old woman stepped to one side and motioned for Dana to come inside. ‘Anyway, get the heck out of that cold hallway already and get your pretty little butt in here. You’ll catch your death of pneumonia if you’re not careful. Kind of reminds me of Warsaw in the wintertime.’
Maggie Carter paused then and shook her head, no doubt in an effort