Chapter 10
BANDIT
Solstice Cove Beacon has a fish tank in the lobby, the tall kind that runs floor to ceiling, and the fish move through it slow and untroubled, like there's nothing in the world to hurry for.
I stand in front of it longer than a grown woman should.
There's a fountain, a woman at the desk who smiles like she means it.
The air is clean and a little sweet, and nothing about any of it is what I drove out here braced for.
"Ms. Bennett." She's already got a badge printed. "Dr. Kessler called ahead. We're glad to have you visit with us."
Kessler leaves for his quarterly review, swallowed by a door marked ADMIN after handing me off to a charming elderly lady who walks me through the procedure.
The woman brings me to a spacious locker room. "Phones, bags, anything electronic, they all go in the lockers."
She watches me hesitate. "You could think it's absurd because the cell blocking system prevents all transmission as soon as you pass by the park gates but this is our policy. It’s part of the patient privacy policy because all cellphones double up as cameras.
You know most of our residents can't consent to a camera in the room, so we just don't allow the temptation.
You'd be amazed what ends up online about other establishments who do not follow this rule. "
It sounds perfectly reasonable. I put my phone and my backpack in a beige locker and turn the little key, and she clips it as well as a Solstice Cove Beacon visitor badge onto the lanyard already around my neck.
"There. Keep that visible."
She doesn't touch the rest of it. Why would she? It's a simple lanyard, crowded with junk. Somewhere in the middle of all that bright clutter is a gold lightning bolt no bigger than my thumbnail, and her eyes pass right over it.
I think of Bones' Wear it for me. It is very cloak-and-dagger and it comes with me through the doors of Solstice Cove Beacon to get the grand tour.
It undoes me a little.
This place does it right. There's an art room with light pouring in and a woman painting something furious and nobody stopping her. I watch a patient pass with a nurse's aid who is talking to him the whole time like he's a person.
We stop a minute next to a large open room holding a group session. A young guy says something that makes the circle laugh, the real kind, and the therapist lets it breathe before she brings them back.
And now, standing in a sunlit room watching people working on getting better, and I'm thinking, in the small mean voice that lives in my head, what if I was wrong?
What if Bones and Bishop and his paranoid VP with his lightning bolt tracker have it all wrong?
What if I've been carrying an old woman's confusion around like a calling?
My guide catches me staring down a hallway that branches off the main one.
"That's residential," she says. "Long-term. We keep that wing quiet."
Light hand on my shoulder, she's already turning me away from a door with a keypad at the end of the hallway.
?
I'm entrusted to a nurse who walks me through all the art therapy they are testing and then it's time for lunch. It's actually good.
Most of my student questions get answered, all but one. Over coffee in the break room I mention that I work at Brightmoor and that I helped with a transfer once, do we send you all our hard cases?
"I don't know, we work with a lot of places," she says slowly. "You'd have to ask intake." She pauses and turns around smiling. "Now, if you want the good vending machine, it's down by the gym."
She shows me the state-of-the-art gym with the good vending machine.
By four I've made up my mind. There's nothing wrong with this place and Darling isn't here. I've walked half this building and seen a hundred faces. I'm a little ashamed of the disappointment when I get a chance to redeem myself.
"You want to be useful?" the nurse asks. "We're short for dinner service. You can carry trays. Residents like a new face."
The dining room is bright and loud in the soft way, cutlery and low talk, somebody's radio playing something from before I was born.
I carry trays. I'm good at it. This part I could do in my sleep "here you go, careful, it's hot, you need anything else?
" and for a while it's just hands and plates and the easy nothing of work I know.
I set a tray down two tables over and straighten, and there's an old woman by the window.
I don't look, the first time. Just a resident, hair gone thin and white, hands folded in her lap while a nurse cuts her food into smaller pieces.
I'm three steps gone before something turns me back.
I look again. She's smaller than the woman I remember. Slower. The mean spark is gone out of her, drowned somewhere under whatever they've got her on; her face has the loose, far-off softness I learned to read on a night shift, the look of someone watching her own life from the next room over.
I look a third time.
It's her.
Quieter. Wrung out and dimmed and sat by a window in a cardigan that isn't hers … but it's Darling. It's the woman who got her fingers around my wrist in the back of an ambulance and made me promise to tell the dangerous men who have been tearing the city apart to find her where she is.
Nobody in the room so much as glances at me as I walk to her.
Of course they don't. There's nothing strange in the world about Riley Bennett recognizing a face from her own hallway. It's the most natural thing.
I crouch at the arm of her chair where the nurse was a second ago and isn't now.
"Hi," I say, and my voice comes out wrong, thick. "Hi. It's — you might not?—"
Her eyes drift to me, slow, slow, the way the fish moved in the tank.
And then they catch.
Something climbs up through all that fog and finds the surface and holds. Her hand comes off her lap and closes around my wrist exactly the way it did the night they wheeled her out.
"You came," she breathes.
Her grip tightens.
"Did you tell my boys where I am?"