I had paused too long. Bradley spoke up at my shoulder. “Thanks,” he said. I felt his palm on my upper back, urging me forward.
I looked around. The incurious nurse had already turned away and was talking to her colleague again. Everyone else in here looked normal. Didn’t they?
The orderly pushing the man in the wheelchair.
The elderly woman walking slowly down the hall, wheeling her IV stand, a bathrobe over her hospital gown.
The nurse passing at the end of the hall, wearing scrubs, a disposable coffee cup in her hand.
I turned back to the nurses’ station, looking for the nurse who had been writing on a clipboard. She was gone.
Had she walked away while my back was turned? Or had she been there at all?
“Violet.” Bradley’s hand nudged me more forcefully. I started walking toward the doors the nurse had gone through, my steps slow.
“Nurses don’t wear uniforms anymore,” I said. “The ones that look like a white dress. With nylons. That kind.”
“Um,” he said. “Interesting.”
“They don’t,” I insisted. “You didn’t see her, did you? Shit, shit, shit.”
My hands had gone cold, and it wasn’t because of the overused air-conditioning. It wasn’t even because of the ghosts, at least not entirely.
Ninety days. I’d spent ninety days in a mental treatment facility. My marriage had fallen apart. I had moved out, had been served divorce papers from Clay. He had Lisette and had begun the motion for custody. His reasoning was that I was mentally ill, and my hallucinations were scaring our five-year-old daughter. I wasn’t able to care for her, the papers said. I was an unfit mother.
It’s just an assessment,I was told.Get an assessment, and then you can argue that you’re perfectly sane. Then you’ll get Lisette back.
So I’d gone. It was just an assessment. But the assessment took days, and then they injected me with something that relaxed me and made me feel drunk. It had loosened my inhibitions, and I’d started talking.
I’d ended up in the hospital for ninety days while they treated mydissociative episode, cause unknown.
When I got out, I had lost custody of my daughter.
We approached the doors. Bradley pushed them open. The nurse I’d seen wasn’t in the corridor ahead, but that didn’t mean anything. She could have turned a corner or gone through a door.
Think, Violet, think.
I wasn’t there anymore, back at that place. There was no assessment. I wasn’t about to lose Lisette, because I’d already lost her years ago. Lisette wasn’t mine anymore.
Who was that nurse, and what was she doing here?
Were there others?
Bradley steered me, just like the orderly had steered the man in the wheelchair. He put his hands on my shoulder blades and steadily urged me forward. He made no comment that I seemed suddenly unable to function.
Another orderly passed us in the hall. Then a woman in a skirt and blouse. Then a young man, tall and thin, his hair messy as if he’d just gotten out of bed, wearing pajamas.
I was cold, so cold.
“Bradley,” I whispered, “what do you see? Who do you see?”
“Keep walking,” he said.
“That boy,” I insisted. “Do you see him?” There was something familiar about the teenager in pajamas.
“Sure,” Bradley said.
“You don’t.”
