Chapter Four
AFTER YOU SPEND the last thing you have, you find out real quick whether it bought you anything.
I'd given Eli my voice. Three words, dragged up out of the dead cold place by their roots, and the second they were out of me I felt how much they'd cost, felt scraped hollow, felt like I'd handed over the only coin I had left and now I just had to wait and see if the man took it somewhere or set it down and walked away.
He wouldn't set it down. I knew that. I knew Eli.
But knowing a thing in your chest and believing it at three in the morning are two different things, and the nights had gotten long.
One day, two, I couldn't tell you how many.
They don't make it easy to count in here, on purpose.
But something had changed in me after the visit, and I hated it, because the change was feeling.
The whisper had cracked a door, and now things were getting through that the pills used to hold back.
Color came in too sharp. Sounds had edges.
And the fear—the fear that used to live way down under the water where I couldn't quite reach it—the fear came all the way up now and sat on my chest and breathed.
Because the clock was running, and I could hear it.
They told me about the transfer like it was a kindness.
A nurse with a soft face said won't that be nice, a fresh start.
Friday, she said. Like Friday was a normal word.
Like Friday was a thing that happened to normal people and not the day they were going to put me in a van and drive me three hours into the middle of nowhere and shut a door I would never get back out of.
They came for me that afternoon and walked me down to his office, the one with the soft lamp instead of the hard ceiling light, the two chairs turned to face each other, the box of tissues I never touched.
Dr. Reed was already there. He stood when I came in, the way he always did, and gave me that warm, tired smile, and waited until I'd folded myself into the chair across from him before he sat.
"Beatrice. Thank you for coming down." He said it like I'd had a choice, and he said it kind. "I wanted to walk you through what's ahead. You deserve to hear it from me, instead of just having it happen to you."
I let my eyes go to the lamp. I let the gray come up and his voice reach me through the water, the way I took everything in that place, at a distance, secondhand, like weather happening to someone else.
"Friday, they'll move you out to Dr. Sutter's program," he said.
"I won't pretend it's close. It's a good way from here, and I know that's hard, especially with your brother and his friend coming around again like they’ve been.
" Something passed over his face, gentle, sorry.
"But it's the right place for you. More than we've been able to give you here.
More time, more hands, the kind of care I've wanted for you and never quite had to offer.
Dr. Sutter's good, Beatrice. I wouldn't hand you to just anyone. You know me well enough to know that."
I didn't know Dr. Sutter. I didn't know anything about him except the way the name had dropped through me like a stone down a well that first day, and the way the cold rose now, in that soft-lamp room, every time it came out of Reed's mouth—Sutter, the program, Friday, move you out—the bells starting up their low far-off ringing somewhere under the gray.
Not at the man across from me. At the thing he was describing.
The van. The distance. The door at the end of it that only opened one way.
He talked a while longer, settling in, being looked after, how proud he was of how far I'd come, and I sat very still and gave him back the face that was no face, the one I'd had years to perfect, and let it all wash over me while the bells rang and rang underneath.
"You're somewhere else again," he said near the end, soft, almost fond. "That's all right. You've earned a little somewhere else." He rose, and the session was done, and a nurse came to take my elbow. "I'll look in on you before Friday. We'll say a proper goodbye."
They walked me back to my chair, and I turned to the window and tried to find the line of mountains, but my hands had started shaking and wouldn't stop, and the gray water I used to float on top of wouldn't hold me anymore.
Hope had thinned it out. I couldn't sink and I couldn't swim.
I just thrashed there in the middle, feeling everything, the worst place there is.
Friday, I thought. Friday they take me where the boots don't come.
I didn't know if Eli had done anything with my three words. I had no way to know. No phone, no clock, no calendar I could trust, no face I could ask, nothing but a nurse saying isn't that nice and a soft man saying proper goodbye and a door at the end of the week swinging shut.
***
NIGHT CAME DOWN, and I couldn't find sleep in it.
There's a kind of tired that has nothing to do with rest. I was that kind.
The kind where giving up starts to look like rest itself, where a quiet, reasonable part of you sits down beside you in the dark and starts to whisper, maybe it's easier if you stop.
Maybe the new place is just a place. Maybe you survive it the way you survived this one, small and quiet and behind glass.
And I listened to that voice longer than I'll ever want to admit, lying there with my shaking hands, because it was offering me the one thing I was starving for, which was to stop being afraid.
And then, sometime in the dead middle of the night, I woke.
Or I think I woke. That's the part I could never be sure of, after, whether my eyes came open or only believed they had.
There was a shape in the doorway.
Darker than the dark around it. Tall, and still, not the moving still of someone passing on their rounds, but the planted still of someone stopped.
Someone standing in the gap of the half-open door, looking in at me.
Not for a second, not in passing. The way you look at a thing you mean to come back for.
The cold went all the way to the bone. The bells didn't ring; they screamed. I couldn't move. I couldn't make a sound. I lay pinned under my own thin blanket and stared at the shape, and the shape stared back.
I blinked.
The doorway was empty.
Just the hall. Just the strip of gray light and the line under the door and no one, nothing, no shape and no watcher, the way there's never anything there when you finally make yourself look.
A nurse on rounds, moved on. A trick of the dark and the meds and a mind that had carried too much for too long and was maybe, finally, four years late, starting to come apart at the seams. I laid every reasonable thing I had over my hammering heart like blankets, one after another, and not a single one of them took.
Because reasonable had nothing to do with it.
The bells never dealt in reasonable. They only ever knew what they knew.
Something had been there. Or nothing had. I would never be able to prove either one to a living soul, and that, I was learning, was the worst place a person could be made to live, in the gap between a thing your body is certain of and a thing you can't show anyone else.
But the shape, real or dreamed, did one thing for me: it killed the quiet reasonable voice stone dead.
Because that voice had been telling me to lie down and let it happen, and now every feral nerve I had was on its feet and screaming that letting it happen was how you ended up in the woods.
I'd had this feeling once before. A whole day of it.
And I'd talked myself out of it with reasonable things, and reasonable things had very nearly been the end of me.
Not again.
I thought about Eli then—not the love, I'd buried that so deep it barely had a pulse, but the other thing, the bedrock thing.
He heard me. He always hears me. He was coming.
He had to be. And if he wasn't, if Friday came and the van came and the boots didn't, then I would not give whatever was on the other side of that wall the satisfaction of finding me already broken when it finally came through.
I uncurled my hands. I made them still. I turned my face to the window and found the mountains in the dark and held on.
Three days. Maybe two.
And I did not let myself decide whether the shape in the doorway had been real, because it didn't matter anymore. Real or not, it had told me the truth the bells had been telling me all along, the truth I'd spent four years refusing to hear.
Something was coming.