As usual, Big John did not register her presence. He was thirty-one, but he looked much older. As his nickname suggested, John was a large, lumbering man. He had the size, the strength, and the sense of a bull, but a gentle one. Marion recalled the taleFerdinand the Bullevery time she saw him. Then again, John’s gentle nature had a lot to do with the medications he was on. Without them, he could be dangerous. Ferdinand had been a natural pacifist.
“How about you, Ian? Who’s winning the game?”
Both men stared at the board. She wondered if either had moved the pieces at all or if someone else had just left them in place. Neither knew the answer, but she could tell from a slight shift in their expressions that they had heard her.
John’s empty gaze gradually rose, shifting in small, jerky movements due to his nystagmus. The motion left him dizzy and with a kind of double vision, trapped in a sliding world of vertigo. He could see, but everything was blurry. Besides that, he had catatonic schizophrenia with both negatism and mutism, meaning John rarely acknowledged stimuli, nor did he speak. His checkers partner looked equally lost. Neither of them was aware that anything was wrong with them.
“Looks like you both are winning,” Marion said, leaning over the board. “Who is red and who is black?”
After a couple of long breaths, Ian gingerly picked up a black piece and gripped it to his chest.
Big John’s eyes widened, but he said nothing. Other than his eyes, he did not move.
“My mistake,” Marion intervened gently. “I should not have asked. May I have the piece, please? There, that’s it. It was right here before I interrupted.”
Once everyone was calm again, and Marion had finished her examination of Big John’s status, she signed his chart, left it with the weary nurse, then left the ward. Her happy mood from the morning had dissolved, and she blamed herself. If she could manage to switch her schedule around, shecould get past this most discouraging ward first, then move onto brighter, more manageable cases. But Marion was a creature of habit, like many of the patients. And like them, she might never change.
As she headed toward the exit, a man’s slurred voice travelled down the corridor. “Help. Help, please.”
Marion was done for the day. She picked up her pace and strode past his door, certain that whatever it was, a nurse would take care of him.
“Doctor. Help!”
She hesitated then backed up to regard the man in his room. Not too many people immediately identified her as a doctor. Most assumed she was a nurse.
The patient was unfamiliar to her. She frowned slightly, wondering at the restraints binding the young man’s wrists and ankles to the bed. Nothing to cause bruises, just soft sheets tied tight, but it was enough to hold him down. Every part of him was contained except for his head, and he’d lifted that off his pillow to watch her. She tried not to react when she saw the disaster on his face. He’d obviously been in some kind of brawl or accident, because it was terribly cut and swollen. She noticed with a clinical interest that he wore a black eye patch over the place where his right eye should have been. The left side was purple with bruising.
“What do you need?” she asked, remaining in the doorway at a safe distance. The restraints were on him for a reason.
“Let me loose.” His voice was thick, like cold syrup. “I don’t need to be locked up.”
“Somebody thinks you do.”
His file hung on the door, so she lifted it off and read through. Daniel Neumann. Born in 1945, so twenty-two years old. His eye was gone due to trauma, she read, and the left side of his face, chest, and shoulder were badly burned from an explosion. The initial surgery had been done long before, but the site had gotten infected. As a result, he’d spent a day at the Toronto Western Hospital getting antibiotics, then he’d checked himself out. Two days later, the police picked him up from a fight outside a bar. That’s where he’d gotten all the bruises, she surmised. They didn’t chargehim with anything, because according to witnesses, he had been the victim, not the instigator. Nevertheless, he’d hospitalized two men and left three others injured. He refused to return to the hospital, but he was still behaving wildly—shouting profanities, swinging fists—so the police had brought him here. Two nurses stated they felt threatened, and the decision was made to restrain him. Only the most senior nurse, Thelma Goodwin, had been able to medicate him when he arrived.
No one messed with Thelma.
“Daniel Neumann,” Marion said. “My name is Dr. Hart. I’m reading your history here. It appears you don’t like hospitals. You left the last one against your doctor’s advice.”
“I didn’t need to be there.”
From this distance, she sensed intelligence, though he was clearly heavily medicated. “You seem to know a lot about what you need and don’t need.”
“You can come in.” He jerked his wrists up an inch, yanking the sheets against the bed frame, then he dropped his head back onto the pillow. “I’ll behave.”
She stepped inside the room, intrigued despite common sense. Most of the patients in this building were doubled up in a room, with a small bed on either wall and a window and nightstand in between. Or else they were in group rooms, which held eight or more beds. This patient was on his own. His room was tiny, made even more so by his large size.
“Were you drunk last night, Mr. Neumann?”
“Major.”
“I see.”
“No. Major Neumann.” He had to turn his head slightly farther when he faced her to compensate for his missing eye. “And no. I was not drunk.”
“Why did the police bring you here, then?”
“They got the wrong guy,” he said lamely.
