Chapter Six #3
Flicking a glance at him, I say, “What? We were all depressed lunatics. There aren’t cameras in the bathrooms, and the woman next door to me tied her bathrobe sash to a hook on the back of the door and hung herself.”
“But you said you never felt like that.”
“I never did. I gave up instead.”
I walk down the corridor the way we came, and Gage follows me into another section of the building. This wing has huge rooms and comfortable couches and chairs are arranged near large potted plants and decorative rugs. The windows are floor-to-ceiling, letting in the light and it sparkles against the cheerful colors that were supposed to encourage us to participate.
“What would you talk about?” Gage asks, wandering around the room. The bookshelves are still filled with books, all types of fiction that some patients read, but I never did. A coffee table is covered in old issues of Good Housekeeping and animal magazines like Cats .
Baby’s nails scratch on the floor as she sniffs around, her ears cocked in curiosity. There must be a lot of different scents in this room.
“What would I talk about?”
“Yeah.”
“Nothing. They would wheel me in here, and I would sit in a corner. I’m not sure I could have joined in even if I had wanted to. The day Zane brought me home, Dr. Reagan looked at my medication list and he said they shut my brain off. That’s exactly what they did. They turned me into a doll. That’s all I was and that’s all I could be.”
“The longer we’re here, the more I’m beginning to hate your brother.”
Gage’s eyes hold a dark fury I would not want aimed at me.
I grab his hand and ask him to meet my gaze. “Don’t. You saw the video of me breaking down at the Lyndhurst. He thought he was helping me. He thought I was getting care here. He thought Stella had abandoned him, and he was grieving her. What would you do if I suddenly disappeared?”
“I would search every corner of this earth until I found you. I mean it, Zarah. There is no way in hell I would let you go that easily. Zane should have fought. He should have fucking fought for Stella and for you. He gave up.”
“Yeah, he did. Our parents hadn’t been gone a year, and he was drifting. Not everyone is as strong as you. Are you going to punish him for his weakness? He’s done plenty of that on his own. It’s why Stella forgave him. Hating him for what he did wouldn’t only hurt him. It would hurt her, and me.”
He breathes through his nose and stares out the window. Baby paws at his thigh, and he absently rubs her head. I don’t know what he’s thinking, and I wish I could take his pain away. Finally, he turns to me. “Is this all there is? Do you have any memories of the girls who would sit with you? Any glimmers of anything?”
I try to force my thoughts to the places my mind doesn’t want to go. “I don’t know. I would need to see pictures of the girls you’re talking about. The girls who have died. This place, there were a lot of patients in and out, and I didn’t care. I didn’t care about anything because all I could think about was Ash selling Stella, men abusing her, and Zane trapping me here.”
“Okay, I don’t want to push you—that you came is enough. We can go, if you’re ready.”
“There’s another place we have to see.”
“Where? I think this is it, unless you have a movie theatre in here?” He smiles, but it doesn’t reach his eyes.
His presence steadies me but doesn’t prevent tears from clogging my throat. “I love you, Gage.” It comes out low and sad.
“Sweetheart, you tell me that like one day I’m not going to say it back. I love you, too. There’s nothing in the world I wouldn’t do for you.”
He kisses me, soft and sweet, and I almost forget I spent hours in this room, sitting in a wheelchair, waiting for someone, something, to rescue me.
Reluctantly, I pull away. I want to finish this tour so we can leave. I’m sorry I haven’t been a help, that being here hasn’t brought back any memories. Not the kind of memories he’s looking for. Names and faces. I was never invested in the people here, never cared enough to get close to anyone.
A trickle of sweat rolls down my back. I’m still wearing my jacket, and I’m getting warm.
“Where are we going next?” Gage asks.
“The basement.”
“Have you been down there?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
That’s the crazy part. I know there’s another area of the facility. I know there is, because I remember being strapped to a chair, someone hooking me up to a machine that, I don’t know what. Read my brainwaves or something. If I try to remember details, then the whole thing feels like a nightmare and I begin to doubt myself.
“How do we get there?”
I bite my lip. “I’m not sure. Gage, I don’t want you to think I’m a freak.”
“The last thing I’m going to think is that you’re a freak, but you were under a lot of strain, a lot of pressure, and a lot of drugs. Maybe what you remember is real to you, but it’s not. Do you know what I mean?”
He means I believe my own hallucinations. The stories my brain made up because of the medication.
“I know what you mean, but it will help my recovery to know for sure, right?”
I’m determined to find the rooms I’m thinking about if only to prove him wrong.
There’s an area of the sanatorium we haven’t seen yet. Not the basement part I’m thinking about, but the wing where the doctors kept their offices. I lead Gage down another hallway full of doors that aren’t marked, the nameplates pried off leaving only the dark outlines of slim rectangles. Out of curiosity, I push one open revealing a large office. There’s an expensive-looking desk that’s empty, and bookcases made of real wood and not cheap particle board line the walls. Those too are empty, except for a stray book or piece of paper. Thick carpeting covers the floor, and a plastic, dusty plant hangs from a hook screwed into the ceiling.
Poking my head into two other offices, I find the same.
But it’s the elevator at the end of this hall that piques my interest.
“What’s upstairs? The movie theatre?” he asks, trying to joke.
“Not sure. I’ve never been.”
“Do you want to go up and check it out?”
“No. There’s a basement. I swear to God, there’s a basement.”
“There probably is, Zarah. The furnace room and water heaters are down there. Circuit breakers in an electrical room. Maybe a generator in case a blizzard wiped the power out.”
My heart starts hammering, but in a good way, now. I’m on to something, I can feel it.
I push the call button, and I tingle with apprehension and excitement as the guts of the elevator start to churn. When the doors bump open, I’m the first inside, but the only directions to go are up or to return to this floor, and I wilt. There’s a keypad above the button panel and the red emergency knob all elevators have. A beige phone sits in a glass box. Just a regular elevator the doctors used to go upstairs.
Crap.
The red light on the keypad blinks.
“Maybe the maintenance staff have a back way to go downstairs,” Gabe says gently, rubbing my shoulder. “Like a stairwell, or a service elevator near the delivery bays.”
Baby sits and waits, looking at us.
“Yeah, but the thing is, I think I remember being in this elevator. But I’m sitting. Because I’m in a wheelchair.”
I brace against the wall, and bending my knees, I slide down into a sitting position. I close my eyes and think.
There are two doctors near my chair wearing white lab coats, one holding a clipboard, the other a tablet. Both are older men, one has glasses and the glare hides his eyes. Dr. Pederson? I don’t know. Not the doctor who would come into my room and adjust my medication. I would know his face, and Ash was never far behind. I never knew any of their names—they never bothered to introduce themselves to the patients. We were beneath them, to need this place.
Strong cologne wafts into the air and it turns my stomach. It smells too much like what Ash wears, and it reminds me of him. I clench my robe in my fists. I’m dressed, kind of, in my lounging pants and a matching top, a silk robe tied around me. I’m wearing socks but no shoes.
The doors drag closed, and the doctor nearest me punches in the code. I’ve watched him do it a million times since Zane admitted me, since they started poisoning me. His finger, quickly jabbing at the numbers.
What are they?
They’re always the same, never changing. The motion of his hand, always the same, never changing.
My legs start to cramp, and it distracts me. Have I been sitting too long? In the wheelchair? Or am I confused now? Where am I? I’m free. Stella came for me. I’m crouching now, and my legs hurt. Okay.
Gage is quiet, watching me, and I feel his eyes boring into my brain. He’s tense...he doesn’t know what I’m remembering.
Grounded, I let myself slip into the past. Sweat beads along my forehead, but I don’t break my concentration to wipe it away.
The action. I push my mind back to the movement of his hand. He reaches toward the keypad, and the cuff of his shirt rides up his arm. A gold watch glints on his wrist.
The numbers are always the same.
The motion of his hand is always the same.
Start at the top. Seven, eight, nine.
Move to the bottom. One, two, three.
Move back to the top. Seven, eight, nine.
One number in the middle. Four, five, six.
“Seven,” I mumble, watching his hand in my mind. “Three. Eight. Four.”
Can I be sure? It’s been a year and a half since I’ve been free of Quiet Meadows, and I’m confused and lost more often than not. In my memories, I watch his hand again, his buffed fingernails shining in the sickly yellow fluorescent lights.
Maybe it’s not a three, maybe it’s a two. Maybe. I don’t know.
My eyes flicker open.
Gage is deathly pale and he’s breathing shallowly through his mouth.
“What?”
“Where the fuck were you? I’ve been waiting for you to come back for fifteen minutes.”
“Oh!” My legs buckle and I fall onto my butt. Baby jumps up and protectively stands next to me, pushing her body against my shoulder.
Desperately, I beg, “Try it. Try it before the numbers fly out of my head. Seven, three, eight, four.”
“What the fuck, Zarah? You freaked me out.”
“I was there. I was here . In this elevator, with two doctors. Please, Gage. Hurry. The numbers will disappear. Seven, three, eight, four.”
He punches them in, and the light on the keypad blinks red to green. The elevator lurches.
“It worked,” I whisper, then let out a gasp of laughter. “It worked.”
Gage kneels next to me, nudging Baby out of the way. “You scared the fuck out of me. It’s like you were under a spell.” He brushes the hair out of my face. “Are you okay?”
“Yes.” I rise to my knees using his shoulder as a support. “Yes. It worked. God, it worked!”
“I don’t give a shit about that. I care about you.” He grips my chin and meets my eyes, worry creasing his face.
I press a quick kiss to his lips. “I’m fine. Help me up. My legs feel like spaghetti.”
We’re stumbling to our feet when the elevator reaches the basement, and the doors slide open.
The stale air hits me, and I recoil, pressing my face into Gage’s chest. I breathe in the scent of his leather jacket and try to keep my stomach from purging the cheeseburger I ate at lunch.
Baby barks and races off.
“Jesus. Let’s get out of here.” Gage’s voice rumbles through his chest under my ear. “Fucking creepy.”
I force myself to step away. “No. I need to see this. I have nightmares about this place.” He clenches my upper arms, and even through my jacket, his hold hurts. “I need to know what’s real and what isn’t.”
“Okay,” he says reluctantly, “but the minute you say we go, we go.”
“Yeah.”
The basement is dark, dank, and there’s only one lone light weakly shining down the hallway.
Gage turns on his phone’s flashlight.
I don’t see Baby anywhere.
There’s a receptionist’s cubby to the left, vacant now, and dark like a cave. A fiberglass wall separates us, a hole cut into the middle and a slot at the bottom for paperwork exchange. That’s all there is, and we turn a corner to see the rest.
A scream rips through the air, and I jerk.
“What?” Gage asks.
“Nothing.” He didn’t hear it. The scream came from inside my head. Echoes of squeaky wheels, women crying, pleas to stop, and men, growling to tell the truth. Tell the truth and the pain will go away.
A doctor rolls me down the hallway, and I pass a blonde woman who is also sitting in a wheelchair, tears streaking her face, her skin white as a sheet. She’s shaking, and I know she’s hurting. The doctor wheels me into the room a nurse just pushed her out of. It’s my turn.
I stumble.
“Zarah?”
“I’m okay.”
I step into the room, but I’m not with Gage any longer. I’m sitting in a wheelchair, and I start to tremble inside. The chair is still here, secured to the floor in the center of the room. Gage shines his phone’s bright beam onto it, but the doctor lowers the overhead light to calm me down. They can’t start if I’m agitated, they said it skews the results. The tests. I don’t know what they’re testing me for.
A burly orderly picks me up and places me in the chair. It looks like a dentist’s chair, curved to fit my body. My wrists are strapped to the armrests, my ankles to the foot of the chair, and I know what’s coming next.
Tears drip down my face.
“She’s already crying,” a nurse says as she sticks sensors to my forehead.
“That’s good. She’s learning we’ll punish her if she lies.”
“Never lie,” I mumble.
“That’s right, sweetheart. You know what happens when you lie.” The doctor caresses my cheek, wipes the tears off my skin.
“You’ll hurt Zane and Stella.”
“That’s right, Miss Maddox. We hurt the people you love. And we hurt you, too, don’t we? You must be punished if you lie. Tell the truth like a good little girl.” He looks at the nurse. “Are we ready to begin?”
“Yes, Doctor. I’ll turn on her music.”
“Thank you.”
The classical music my mother used to listen to fills the room, and I relax, let thoughts of her fill my mind and heart. I can hide in the music, in the memories of my family.
“Miss Maddox, we’ll start slowly today. What is your birthdate?”
I don’t know. I struggle to remember my birthday, even while vivid flashes of birthday parties my parents used to throw for me flick through my head. I say nothing.
“Miss Maddox, these are the easy questions. You need to tell us your birthdate.”
I start crying again. “I don’t know.”
“That’s the wrong answer, Miss Maddox.”
A jolt runs through my body, and I cry out. “Please!”
“You know what happens when you lie. Tell us your birthdate.”
“I can’t.”
Another zap goes through me, and my back arches away from the chair.
“Give her a moment,” the doctor says, noting something on a clipboard.
He lowers the lights further.
“Miss Maddox, what is your brother’s middle name?”
I should know this. I should. I should know Zane’s middle name, but when I try to say it, when I try to bring it to the tip of my tongue, I can’t. Something so simple, and I don’t know it. I struggle against the straps holding me down. I need to get out of here, I need to run. They’ll accuse me of lying if I can’t tell them.
Tears pour down my cheeks. “I don’t know.”
A zap stronger and longer sizzles through my body, and I pee in my pajama pants.
The doctor scoffs, annoyed. “She’s growing weaker.”
He slaps me, but the sting is lost in the pain already radiating through my body. “Miss Maddox. We know where Stella Mayfair is. Do you want us to hurt her because you’re so weak?”
“No, please.” I’m sobbing, and the room smells like my misery, urine, and fear.
The doctor turns off the light and I’m sitting in complete darkness. I can’t see when he’ll strike.
“Miss Maddox, tell me the name of your high school. Tell me your address. What is your social security number? What are the names of your father’s business partners?”
These are things I should know, things I should be able to rattle off, and I can’t, oh, I can’t, and I’m scared to tell him I don’t know. I bite my tongue until it bleeds, the coppery taste of blood filling my mouth.
He jolts me, and I shriek. “Tell us!”
“I can’t, I can’t,” I scream. “Please believe me.”
My body braces for another shock, and just before it jolts me, the doctor says to the nurse, “The drug is working. The results are wonderful.”
The electrical current he uses to punish me courses through my body. I can’t stand it anymore. My mind blacks out and I crumple to the floor.
I wake up in Gage’s lap.
He’s sitting in the field outside Quiet Meadows, holding a handful of snow to my forehead and rocking me back and forth, the light winter wind blowing around us.
My tongue is stuck to the roof of my mouth, and I taste blood. I struggle to open my eyes, the hazy grey sky blinding after standing in the dark basement.
Baby presses her nose to my cheek.
“What happened?” I ask, pushing his hand away. The snow is melting and running down my neck.
“You fainted. You were in some kind of trance, reliving a memory. Your screams...Jesus Christ, Zarah, they were torturing you.” He cuddles me close, and I nestle against him.
He cries into my hair, and I let him pour out his pain. I’m no stranger to men crying. Zane has done plenty of it in the past year. Sometimes there’s strength in letting down your walls.
“Why? When I was talking, did I say why?”
He draws in a deep, shaky breath. “Let’s talk at the office.”
I groan. I don’t want to wait, but Gage looks like he’s going to pass out too, and I give him the time he needs the way he’s given it to me. “Okay.”
I try to stand, but he picks me up and carries me around the building to the truck. “Did you carry me all the way outside?”
“I had no choice. You collapsed.”
He sets me in the passenger seat and brushes his lips over mine. I can taste the horror and agony in his kiss. “I’m sorry you saw that,” I whisper.
“I’m glad I was with you. It won’t be for nothing. I promise.”
On the drive back to his office, he doesn’t let go of my hand.
Linc’s gone when Gage helps me inside, his arm wrapped tightly around my waist, and the scent of our cheeseburgers lingers in the air.
“Can I have a cup of coffee?” I ask, kicking the snow off my boots.
Baby heads straight to her cushion, and after two turns, finds a comfortable position and falls asleep. I wish I could crawl into bed, too.
The memories I relived in that basement room slither around my stomach. My skin’s clammy, and my heart thumps painfully.
“Yeah, sure.”
We hang up our jackets, and I sit in a chair in front of the desk Gage and his dad use to fill out paperwork and do research. I like the look of the sleek Mac on the desktop, and it reminds me I wanted to learn how to use a laptop and go online. The idea seems trivial, now that my memories of Quiet Meadows are surfacing and Ingrid’s missing, news Rourke is involved in this whole mess somehow, and someone blowing up Gage’s truck.
He hands me a cup of coffee sweetened with vanilla creamer, and I wrap my hands around it gratefully. Maybe the caffeine will perk me up. I feel depleted, like I’ll never have enough energy.
Instead of sitting in the chair behind the desk, he leans against the edge, close enough our legs touch. I rest my hand against his hard thigh, needing the connection as much as he does.
“Tell me what they were doing.” I don’t want to hear, but I need to. What they were doing to me at Quiet Meadows is the key to everything. Why would they want me to tell them details of my life that they would already know? Why didn’t I know the answers?
“They were torturing you. They would ask you a question, you wouldn’t know the answer, and they would shock you. Maybe with a stun gun, I don’t know. You cried and begged them to stop. Eventually they did. By the sounds of your screams, you couldn’t take anymore.”
I fight the chill that runs through me. That part of my life is done. I’m safe now. “Did I say why? Why would they ask me those questions? Why would they punish me if I didn’t know the answers?”
“You said something at the end, but I couldn’t make it out. Something about a drug working? I don’t know, Zarah.” He pauses. “I recorded it.”
“What?” Coffee sloshes over the rim of my cup and soaks into my jeans.
“I filmed it. On my phone. I thought maybe one day it would be evidence.”
“I don’t want to see it.” I can’t live through that again.
“You don’t have to. Christ, I don’t want to watch it either. Seeing the real thing was fucked up enough. You were saying all the lines—yours, the doctor who was testing you, the nurse. They played music? To keep you calm?”
“They would play my mother’s favorite classical music.”
“How would they know she liked to listen to it?”
“I don’t know, but someone knew because they would play it every single time. Sometimes it did what they wanted it to do and I would disappear into the music, pretend my mom was still alive.”
“I need to tell Zane.”
I shoot off my chair and the rest of my coffee flies onto the carpet. “No! He’d never get over it. He would never forgive himself. All he knows is that Ash drugged me to keep me quiet. That’s enough, that’s more than enough. Gage, please,” I beg, turning my eyes to him, “please, don’t.”
“I don’t know how I’m going to be able to keep him from finding out. Some fucked up shit was going on there, and they could have been doing it to more patients than just you. We have to find out what they were doing and why.”
“I agree, but Zane doesn’t have to be involved.”
Glaring at the floor, he says, “I don’t like it. He should know and he should be held accountable. You were in there because of him.”
I gather my courage and say the hardest thing I’ve ever said in my life. “If you tell him, I’ll never speak to you again.”
He meets my eyes, his hazel irises shooting fire. “You’d choose your brother over me?”
I lift my chin. My jaw wobbles but I won’t let the tears out. If I cry, it will ruin the strength I need to put behind the word. “Yes.”
He stares long and hard, so long I think he’s going to tell me to get out, and I would. I would walk right out of here holding my head high. Zane and Stella mean everything to me, and I won’t betray them for a man I met only a few months ago.
“Okay. I can respect that, but if he finds out, and this will get out, even if you don’t want it to, you can’t blame me.”
“I will if it’s your fault.”
“That’s not fair. I filmed it. Zane’s going to see it one day, Zarah. If that’s your way of thinking, it will always come down to me.”
“Then delete it.”
Gage crosses his arms over his chest. “No. This is bigger than you or you wanting to protect your brother. If we can find out what we need to know without Zane seeing it, fine, but until then, I’m hanging on to it.”
As much as I hate it, I see the need to keep it for evidence. “Then email it to yourself and delete it off your phone.”
“Done.”
We’re glaring at each other when Linc bustles in, breaking the hostile spell. He looks between us, calls for Baby, and disappears as quickly as he appeared.
“I’ll call for a ride home.”
“You’re going to make me sleep alone after what I saw?” His body relaxes and he blows out a breath. “Come home with me, please.”
“You still want me to? I don’t want to fight.”
“I’ll keep my mouth shut, I promise.”
I step between his legs and wrap my arms around his waist. “Well, maybe not for the whole night.”
“Hmm,” he hums against my hair. “You’ll have to convince me.”
Rising on my tiptoes to reach his mouth, I don’t wait to try.