Someone Is Watching Read Free Page A

someone cry out, barely recognizing the voice I know is mine. “Somebody, please, help me.” I struggle into my jeans, then try to stand up, but my legs have all the strength of wet noodles and they collapse underneath me, so I crawl toward the street where I remember parking my car.
    Miraculously, the silver Porsche is still there. Probably too conspicuous to steal. Definitely not the most suitable car for someone in my profession, but it had belonged to my mother and I’m not about to part with it. Now I clutch at the door handle as if it is a life preserver, trying to pull myself up. The car’s sophisticated alarm system instantly erupts into a cacophony of honks, bells, and whistles. I collapse onto the road, my back against the side of the door, my feet sprawled in front of me. Glancing toward the apartment I’ve been watching, I see a man appear at the window. Instinctively, I raise my binoculars. But the binoculars are too heavy, and I’m too weak. They fall beside me, cracking against the concrete.
    The next thing I remember is waking up in the back of an ambulance. “You’re going to be all right,” I hear the paramedic saying.
    “You’re going to be all right,” another voice echoes.
    They’re wrong.
    —
    That was two weeks ago. I’m home now. But I’m definitely not all right. I don’t sleep, at least not without powerful medication, and I don’t eat. When I try, I throw up. I’ve lost at least ten pounds I couldn’t afford to lose, being at least ten pounds too thin to begin with. And not on purpose. I’m not one of those women who believes in dieting or even watching what she eats, and I hate exercise. At twenty-nine, I’ve always been naturally slender. “Skinny Minny,” they used to taunt me in high school. I was the last girl inmy class to wear a bra, although when my breasts finally did sprout, they grew surprisingly, even suspiciously, large and full. “Implants, obviously,” I heard one woman in a group of female lawyers at Holden, Cunningham, and Kravitz whisper as I passed them in the corridor one day last month. At least I think it was last month. I’m not sure. I’m losing track of time. Another entry for my “things lost” column. Right under “confidence.” Just above “sanity.”
    I’ve lost my looks, too. Before, I was pretty. Large, blue-green eyes, prominent cheekbones, a slight overbite that makes my lips seem fuller than they really are, long, thick brown hair. Now my eyes are cloudy with neverending tears and circled by bruises; my cheeks are scratched and hollow, my lips cracked and even torn from where I bite at them, a habit I used to have as a child and have now revived. My hair, once a source of great pride and joy, hangs lifeless around my face, dry from too many washings, as is my skin, which is rubbed raw from all the showers I take. But even with three and sometimes four showers a day, I don’t feel clean. It’s as if I’ve been rolling around in the muck for weeks and the dirt has seeped so deep into my pores that it has infiltrated my bloodstream. I am contaminated. Toxic. A danger to all who look at me. No wonder I barely recognize myself when I look in the mirror. I have become one of those pitiful-looking women you see on street corners, shoulders hunched, trembling hands extended and begging for spare change, the kind of woman you cross the street to avoid. The kind of woman you secretly blame for her misfortune.
    This woman has become my roommate and constant companion. She follows me from room to room, like Marley’s ghost, shuffling across the beige marble floors of my spacious two-bedroom condo. Together, we live on the twenty-third floor of an ultramodern glass building in the Brickell section of Miami, an area often referred to as “Wall Street South.” In addition to being the financial center of Miami, the neighborhood is full of upscale shopping malls and quality hotels, not to mention more than ten thousand condo units in luxury