Chapter 35 Emily #2
“No, I shouldn’t think so,” Emily said darkly.
She watched Annie for a moment as chatter continued around them.
She couldn’t wait to eat a good meal in her parents’ quiet dining room—the next night.
It wasn’t anything when compared to Annie’s eagerness to see her son, but Emily still felt it keenly.
“I suspect it will take some time,” she continued.
“To explain everything to him and have him understand. I’m certain he’ll be just as glad as you are that you’ve been released.
” She smiled and downed the last of her tea, took another bite of bread.
Annie bobbed her head in acknowledgment, but her eyes were a little strange—out of focus, the pupils small. “I, uh, I really don’t feel well at all,” she said.
“What’s the matter?” Emily asked, ceasing chewing as she watched her friend’s face with growing alarm. She was breathing heavily through her mouth now, as though each inhale was a struggle.
“Annie?” Emily asked, louder. Annie’s face had suddenly paled to the colour of soured cream, her eyes half-closed. Her forehead and temples were sweaty, and she continued to pant. Something was wrong, very wrong.
“Matron!” Emily shouted, rising from her seat just as Annie slumped onto the table. “Help! We need help!”
She was aware of a sudden silence in the room, then it erupted again in alarmed voices, other women calling for help on her behalf. Panicking, Emily acted on instinct, wrapping her arms around Annie and lowering her to the floor, supporting Annie’s head in her lap.
“HELP! For God’s sake!” she screamed, tearing her eyes away from Annie’s, which had slid out of focus. She was heavy in Emily’s arms.
A crowd of inmates had formed around them, all asking what was happening.
Gertrude and Lizzie were screaming at a pair of matrons near the doors.
Gert tried to grab at one of them to come, but the woman withdrew.
The other followed Lizzie over to where Emily and Annie were heaped on the floor beside their table.
“Gertrude, get Matron Carnegie!” Emily bellowed across the room. Gert nodded and sprinted out the door. If these matrons were too stupid or stubborn to respond, they needed Carnegie. She knew Annie better than any of the others.
“What’s happened?” Matron White was there now, demanding answers from a standing position, hands on her hips.
Emily gaped. “She’s ill, terribly ill, can’t you see? She’s nearly unconscious, something’s wrong!” She hated to say it, but did anyway. “She needs the doctor!”
“The doctor is gone for the evening,” White said dismissively. “It’s after six.”
“Well, you come help, then!” Emily shouted. Other inmates were goading White now, too, shrieking at her to do something.
“She’s probably just having a fit, she has them all the time, she’s a lunatic!” White snapped back. “Just leave her, she’ll be fine.”
“She doesn’t have fits like this,” Emily heard Bernie say from somewhere in the crowd. “Just look at her!”
“Emily!” Gertrude shouted, and Emily watched her shove the other girls aside as she led Matron Carnegie over. Relief at the kind matron’s arrival crashed over Emily in a wave that broke the dam of her shock, and then the tears came.
“Please,” she begged. “Help her!”
“Leave her!” White snarled.
“What happened?” Carnegie asked, ignoring White’s protests entirely as she knelt.
“We were talking and she said she didn’t feel well,” Emily recounted, “then she got all pale and clammy and collapsed.” Her own breath was coming in sharp stabs now. Tears fell from her eyes. “Please help her!”
Carnegie fingered Annie’s throat. “Her pulse is dangerously slow,” she muttered. “Matron White!” she snapped, “go fetch some adrenaline and a large syringe from the infirmary.”
Above them, White blustered, “I don’t take orders from you! I’m the head—”
“Just do it!” Carnegie barked, and White’s mouth fell open, but she pushed her way out of the room anyway. Emily frantically watched her leave. Was she going to get what Carnegie needed? Or had she just abandoned them?
“Stone’s gone,” Carnegie said. “We’re on our own.
Here, let me try, there’s something I can try, I read about it.
Set her head down on the floor, but keep your hands under it for support, just gently.
And the rest of you, back up!” she called to the surrounding women, who did as they were told. All was quiet now.
“Okay,” Emily sniffed, complying, feeling as though she might be sick. “What are you going to do?”
Matron Carnegie didn’t answer, but lowered her mouth to Annie’s and blew air into it.
Emily watched, fascinated and terrified, as the matron pressed her fists into Annie’s chest with all her might, counting under her breath, then leaned forward and blew more air into Annie’s mouth.
She repeated the process several times before exclamations from around the room signalled the return of Matron White, along with two other matrons who now flanked her like security guards.
“Move aside!” she sniped, making her way through the throng. “I don’t know why you’re bothering, but here it is.” She shoved a syringe and vial toward Carnegie, who was still occupied with this treatment she was attempting. She looked up at White and snatched the supplies from her hands.
“Radcliffe, keep doing what I was doing,” she said. “While I prepare the adrenaline.”
“What? Um—” Emily panicked.
“Just do it.”
Emily took a deep breath and followed Carnegie’s lead, placing her mouth over Annie’s with renewed sobs. Her friend’s lips were blue. “Oh my God,” Emily said as she pressed down on her chest in repeated thrusts. “Annie, no…”
“Stop,” Carnegie said. “Open her dress, right to the skin.”
Emily pulled at the fabric, but it wouldn’t give. Her eyes darted to the table next to them and she lunged forward, seizing her dull dinner knife. Several inmates gasped or shrieked as she held Annie’s dress with one hand and, after three attempts, sliced it with the other to reveal her brassiere.
“Wait,” Emily said. “What are you going to—” But she watched in horror as Carnegie plunged the syringe into Annie’s breastbone.
Emily cried out as several of the onlooking inmates screamed.
Carnegie watched Annie’s chest, then lowered her ear to her face, frowning, before starting up the chest pressure again.
The dining hall was silent but for Carnegie’s panting breath as she pressed in that horrible rhythm.
Tears streamed down Emily’s face. To her left, Gert and Lizzie looked aghast as Lizzie cradled a sobbing Peggy to her chest.
After what felt like an age, Matron Carnegie stopped, and sat back on her heels, swiping her brow. “She’s uh—” She sighed. She looked at Emily sadly. “She’s dead. I’m sorry. She’s dead.”
Everyone froze.
Emily’s sobs became louder as reality began to cut through the layers of shock.
She continued to cradle Annie’s head in her hands, ran her thumbs over the soft hair at her temples.
Tears dripped onto the floor and Annie’s forehead.
Annie had endured so much in this hellhole, and she had come so far in her sense of self-worth and hope for her future since Emily first met her six months ago.
After a long moment, she removed her hands and used them to pull the blue fabric back over Annie’s exposed chest, a small dignity at the end of a life that was mostly devoid of it.
They had been so close to getting Annie out of here.
So close.
…Too close.
A chill lowered down then, trickling from the tips of her ears to the soles of her feet, the creeping frost of realization.
“Stone did this,” she said aloud, looking up now at the crowd of distraught faces all turned toward her and Annie. But her eyes sought Matron White. “This was Stone.”
“Steady there, Radcliffe,” Matron White said, eyes blazing with warning. “You are clearly hysterical, you—”
“No,” Emily said, standing up on unsteady legs. “This was Stone! It must have been!”
“You are speaking nonsense,” White snapped. The room was deathly quiet.
“Annie told me, at the start of supper, that Stone had given her a new medication today, something she didn’t recognize!” She fought a wave of nausea at the thought that Annie had been alive and breathing and talking mere minutes ago.
“Dr. Stone is frequently altering the psychiatric inmates’ courses of medication. Inmate Little always had—”
“No! Stone gave her something bad, something that did this!” Emily gestured to Annie’s body and felt every eye in the room drawn there, too.
“That’s enough, Radcliffe!” Matron White said, taking a step toward Emily now. “This is your final warning!” She turned and said something to Matron Jansen, beside her, who darted away into the crowd.
But the rage and exhaustion and grief were driving Emily’s body and mind now. She was beyond caring who knew about her.
“I’m a journalist!” she screamed to the room at large.
“I’m a journalist and I came here to see everything that’s been happening, how you’ve all been treated in this horrible place!
” She looked around at the surrounding women.
All eyes were on her now, some full of confusion, others excitement or disbelief.
Matron White’s eyes were narrowed, but Emily didn’t care.
“Stone’s been infecting you all with VD!
” she bellowed as loudly as she could, her voice filling the crowded space.
There was a general outcry, and she heard Eliza moan.
Her eyes sought June now, visible at the back of the room.
Her mouth was twisted to the side, either in a sneer or appreciative smirk, Emily couldn’t tell.
“That’s why you can’t figure out how you got it!
And she’s getting paid to do it by a drug company! I have the proof!” she cried.
“That’s enough, Radcliffe!” White said, and she and Matron Grimes lunged toward Emily, who was still at the centre of this ring of witnesses, the eye of the storm.
“Get off me!” She struggled against White and the two other matrons who shoved her, face down, to the ground. She cried out as White pressed her knee into Emily’s spine and her fellows wrenched Emily’s arms around behind her back.
“Stop that! What are you doing?” Carnegie shouted.
Emily felt restraints being pulled tight around her wrists.
One side of her face was pressed painfully into the gritty dining hall floor.
The inmates were chattering now, the noise swelling.
At least now they all knew. There were witnesses to Annie’s death, witnesses to her own abusive takedown, witnesses to her claims against Eris Stone.
Awkwardly, she met eyes with several of the inmates now, imploring someone to help her. Thelma just sneered.
“These are the ravings of a madwoman!” Matron White shouted. “And they will be treated accordingly! Radcliffe is clearly insane!” With a dawning sense of horror, Emily realized it was a performance. A justification for what they were about to do.
“White, no!” Carnegie cried.
Matron Jansen was back. She handed a package of something to Matron White and Emily strained with her one available eye to see what it was. The sea of brown-clad women watched, and several began to exclaim and gasp as White leaned over Emily, whose panic crested.
“NO!” Emily screamed. “No! No! Get off me! Get off me! June! Eliza! Help! Please!”
But no help came. She should have known her “friends” couldn’t be real. Not in this place. Annie had been the only one. And now, because of Emily, she was dead.
The last thing Emily heard was one final protest from Matron Carnegie before the sting of a needle pierced her neck.
The iron bedsprings were digging into her back.
She was cold, uncovered. The air smelled different—musty and humid.
She gasped a breath and, eventually, her eyes fluttered open.
Her body felt heavy, her mind and reactions slow.
She blinked several times, noted the dark stone wall across from her.
She winced, and shifted her weight with a little grunt. She sat up, ran a hand over her face.
She was in the basement, she realized. She looked around.
In one of the isolation cells. She took a deep breath, massaged a particularly painful spot near her right kidney.
She glanced down and saw, through the dark, that the mattress had been removed from the bed, leaving only the springs for her to sleep on.
Her eyes flicked to the corridor beyond her cell door.
The only light came from the sconce on the wall opposite.
She couldn’t tell, from here, whether it was night or day.
Perhaps whatever White had drugged her with had knocked her out all night.
Perhaps it was already her discharge day.
She stood then, shaking her head once more to try to clear the fog that was only just beginning to lift. She staggered to the cell door and clutched at the bars. A cold fear gripped her as she saw the woman sitting on the old wooden chair across from her cell.
Eris Stone stood and slowly stepped forward, just out of Emily’s reach. Her glasses flashed, white coat glowing eerily yellow in the light of the sconce on the wall. Emily swayed a little, knees feeling as though they might buckle.
“Stone—”
“No one threatens me, Radcliffe.”
Emily’s mind was slow, struggled to respond.
“So you may as well get comfortable,” Stone said with a terrifying grin that didn’t meet her eyes. She turned and disappeared down the corridor, her footsteps growing quieter.
Emily stood at the cell door, her breath coming shallow. And in the dim light, her gaze finally landed on the skirt of her dress.
Emily’s scream tore from her lungs and echoed down the barren corridor as she stared in horror at her brand-new, unmistakably blue dress.