Chapter 26
PRESENT DAY
C ameron must have left the unit.
It’s the only possible solution. Because I have looked everywhere, and he is not here.
Maybe he got sick of not having any reception on his phone, and he decided to step out at the worst possible moment.
I can’t blame him—I’m tempted to do the same, but I am an incorrigible rule follower.
There’s only been one time in my entire life when I broke the rules and did something immoral, and I paid dearly for it.
I could leave the unit and check if he’s outside.
Or I could slip out to finally get some service on my phone.
I know the code for the keypad. It would be easy enough to leave.
But technically, I’m not supposed to. And what if I open the door and a patient comes up behind me and pushes his way out? How would I explain that?
So I decide not to leave the unit to look for Cam. I’m sure he’ll be back soon enough. He wouldn’t risk getting a bad grade, even in psychiatry. After all, that would screw up his dream of becoming a surgeon.
In the meantime, I take Dr. Beck’s advice and try to get some sleep. But there’s no way I am sleeping in a patient room. The sofa in the staff lounge might be old and dirty and have visible springs poking out, but I’ll get a better night of sleep there than anywhere else.
Before I go to sleep, I take my phone out of my pocket and bring it over to the window.
I press it against the glass, which feels cool against my fingers.
I squint down at the screen, waiting for a bar to appear.
If I get any reception at all, the first thing I’m going to do is call Cam and tell him to get his butt back over here.
Please. Just one bar. Please.
But no. Nothing.
I give up. It’s one in the morning—I’m going to try to get some sleep.
Except as soon as I lie down and turn off the lights, it’s clear that sleep is not going to happen.
I stare up at the ceiling, my brain running a mile a minute.
I try to remember the tricks Dr. Sleepy tells his patients to help them sleep at night.
Most of it is stuff I can’t control at this point, like avoiding naps and caffeine, and getting on a regular sleep schedule.
But one thing he always tells patients is that while they’re lying in bed, they can do the four-seven-eight breathing method.
Now I just have to remember what the hell that is.
Okay, I remember. You’re supposed to put your tongue between your upper front teeth, exhale completely, then inhale through your nose while counting to four, hold your breath for the count of seven, and then exhale to the count of eight.
And do that three more times. You’re supposed to make some sort of strange sound while you’re doing it, but I can’t be bothered by that.
Here we go…
Inhale for four. Hold breath for seven. Exhale for eight.
Inhale for four. Hold breath for seven. Exhale for eight.
Inhale for four. Hold breath for seven. Exhale for eight.
This is not working. At all . What I really need is some Ambien. I wish I had asked Dr. Sleepy for a prescription before leaving the clinic. In any case, I am not falling asleep anytime soon.
Where is Cameron? I can imagine him disappearing for a few minutes, but it occurs to me that I haven’t seen him once since we were in the patient lounge together interviewing Spider-Dan.
That was hours ago. It’s not like him to disappear that way.
Cameron might not be as big of a rule follower as I am, but nobody cares more than he does about getting a good grade in a rotation.
Whatever else you could say about Cameron, nobody could match his energy and passion for medicine. He is truly excited about the idea of being a “bone doctor.” He wants to do trauma surgery. He likes the idea of putting people back together after a terrible accident.
That’s really morbid, I commented the first time he said that to me.
Why? He was truly confused. Somebody has to do it. Don’t you want to fix people?
I do want to fix people, but not in the same way. When I was a little kid playing with Barbie dolls, the dolls were always getting “injured” and I would have to bandage them up. Jade used to complain that she was sick of playing Barbie’s doctor’s office. So I got what Cam meant when he said that.
However, I want to fix people without necessarily cutting into them . I can leave the bloody stuff to people like Cameron.
After staring up at the ceiling for about an hour, I recognize sleep is not going to happen. Instead, I decide to take a walk around the unit, hoping I can get rid of some of my anxious energy.
I pass by the two seclusion rooms. The first room is still eerily silent. After all the noise I heard there earlier and the voice begging me to let them out, it’s unsettling how silent it is. I press my ear against the door, listening. But I hear nothing. Not a peep.
Not since the power went out.
“Mr. Sawyer?” I say softly. “Are you all right?”
No answer.
“Damon?” I say.
Again, there’s no reply.
I’m sure he’s just asleep though. He must be.
The lights were turned down in the hallway at ten p.m. to more of a mood lighting, so the glowing green keypad seems even more luminous.
I could type in the code and make sure Sawyer is okay in there.
Or make sure he’s still in there at all.
It would be easy enough to do so. Then I can put my mind at ease.
It’s late enough that it’s quiet on the unit right now, but as I stand there, the sound of footsteps grows louder by the second. I look off into the distance to see who’s walking towards me. A shadow appears from around the bend, but before I can see who it is, the shadow vanishes.
“Hello?” I call out.
A sound echoes down the hallway. It almost sounds like a man chuckling to himself.
Before I can go investigate, I get distracted by a sound from Seclusion Two.
While Damon Sawyer has gone silent, Miguel has definitely not.
He is still singing to himself in the room.
This time he’s belting out a Britney Spears song.
He apparently wants me to hit him (baby) one more time.
He doesn’t have such a bad voice, everything considered.
The dark hallway is filled with patient rooms. The light is on in room 906—Will Schoenfeld is still awake, probably reading.
I still find that patient something of a mystery.
He just seemed incredibly normal for a patient in a psychiatric unit.
Like the sort of person I might be friends with if I met him in a different setting.
And as Jade noted, he’s my type. Cute, nerdy, lanky, well-read. And I liked his smile, the one time I got to see it. If I met him anywhere else but here and he flashed that shy smile and asked me out on a date, I would give him my number.
Of course, I would have had no idea that he was hearing voices telling him to kill people. So I dodged a bullet there.
It occurs to me that I could borrow something from Will’s John Irving collection. It would be comforting to read one of those books, and it might be enough to put me to sleep. He’d probably be willing to lend me one, and I would just return it in the morning.
The door to Will’s room is cracked open, and I knock gently. I don’t hear a reply, and I push it open slightly more. The room is empty, but the door to his bathroom is closed, and the light is on inside. He’ll probably be out in a minute.
He’s still got the stack of John Irving books on his dresser.
Owen Meany is right on top, because that’s the one he’s been reading.
Obviously, I wouldn’t borrow that one since he’s reading it right now.
I remove it from the stack and pick up the second book in line.
The World According to Garp . Another of my favorites. This one would do nicely.
I pick up the copy of Garp to flip through it. But when I flip open the first page, my heart stops.
This book has been hollowed out.
Someone has carved a large hole in the center of the book, leaving a space where objects can be stored secretly. Such as, in this case, a large number of multicolored pills. I recognize them as looking similar to the ones that Ramona has been passing out.
There are more than a dozen little pills stashed away in the hollow space.
A dozen pills that Will was supposed to be taking to suppress the voices in his head—the ones telling him to kill people.
He claimed that the voices had stopped after taking the medications.
But now it looks like he hasn’t been taking those medications at all.
And then the toilet flushes inside the bathroom and the sink turns on. He’s almost done in there.
He’s coming out any second.