17. Olly
SEVENTEEN
OLLY
Don’t. Panic. I told myself this over and over as my IV pole was attached to an extra-wide wheelchair I was deposited in.
Don’t panic? That was an easy bunch of bullshit to say.
My breathing was coming fast and shallow, and I felt goosebumps form where an unnatural cold had settled over me.
This woman who pushed me, I knew I couldn’t trust her, but I’d already forgotten who she was.
An image formed of Miss Gulch from The Wizard of Oz, riding her bicycle with Toto in the basket.
At this moment, careening through a busy hospital stoned out of my mind, I just knew that whoever was driving this thing was all kinds of trouble.
I was Toto in the basket, and with my baby on board, I couldn’t jump out.
She pushed me at a harsh clip through the antiseptic-smelling corridors, as we weaved around other people and hospital workers with carts of things, me gripping the armrest tight in my chair with my arm that was out of the sling.
The arm in the sling was pressed with all my strength over my chest and heart, as if I could protect myself if I just hung on to something dear.
We took the elevator to the bottom floor, and I was certain as the elevator moved downward that I was going to float up and out of my chair.
I just held on tighter and breathed a sigh of relief when we left the death trap.
I mean, technically we’d only moved two floors down, but still.
It was like I was getting anxiety from everywhere, and trying with all my might to keep it from growing into full-fledged panic.
Was that goddess-be-damned injection actually intended to help calm me?
I tried deep breathing, as I was taking rather shallow breaths, and all that accomplished was when my nose told me the cafeteria was just up ahead because of the smell of cheap coffee, pizza, and meatloaf.
Around the corner and down the hall to the Mental Health Inpatient Unit, according to the signage that I kept looking at, in case I wanted to backtrack out of here.
I just kept clinging to the fact that whatever else this mess is, it is above all, my story, and I have decided it’s a love story.
It’s important to remember that for the fight for my freedom ahead.
It’s important to remember Clark. And someone else, someone new but not quite ready to face the world…
Bea! How could I ever have hated her? Called her a parasite and resented her enough to want to give her away?
Now that we’ve stopped zipping through the corridors at warp speed and were moving at a pretty normal clip, I moved my free arm over from the armrest and placed it on my bump.
I think I was around eighteen weeks, now, but it’s so hard to hold on to things, like my mind has become some kind of slip and slide.
I couldn’t even retreat to my inner ocean because it has been cut off from me, along with my regular psychic powers. What was capable of doing that?
I thought of the drugs finding a new home in my bloodstream, and about the woman who said she was my...
doctor, right? Psychiatrist. The one who had made my blood run cold when we met, and I was still on the verge of chattering my teeth.
Perhaps she was capable of severing my powers and sealing them off.
Or that injection! The walls still looked like they were rippling and in motion.
People coming toward us seemed that they would walk straight into me.
And I had nothing to block out the noise I couldn’t explain, like I was hearing the goddess herself humming at me.
No, that had been Fatima, over the past two weeks, holding my hand gently and humming, then softly singing songs in Persian she loved from when she was a girl.
The fact that Fatima vanished right about when I got that injection made me think of Gemma Diaz and how she would pop in and out.
Fatima may have psychic abilities of a sort, but they were the kind of the dead because it was clear to me now that I had summoned her from wherever she had been.
As for the maniac steering my chair, what was her name, again? Oh, right. Bell. I knew her from before this place. It was only my fear of her, intense and sharp, as well as my desire not to hurt Bea, that kept my ass in the chair and not make a breakaway attempt.
Everything was like molasses right now when I tried to think or move, but I think she really was my Organization Doctor when I was a kid, or should I say, when I was an Asset.
That was the only way her greeting made sense because that was what they called everyone from their spies to their experiments.
I didn’t want to be an experiment, and I felt incredibly frightened when I realized that I might never see the outside of an institution again.
It was just a matter of time until they moved me from here to an Organization facility.
What was to stop them from using their mental abilities to hoodwink Clark and Shepard into believing that I had premature labour, and Bea and I hadn’t survived childbirth?
That horror I was feeling before? It went up a notch.
I kept struggling to take those big breaths because anxiety verging on panic was exactly where I didn’t want to be.
Dr. Bell rang the bell to the unit’s main door and kept one bony hand pressing down on my shoulder.
A woman answered, opening the door wide with a smile plastered on her face.
I reached out to just graze her surface thoughts, and nothing.
All I wanted was someone who felt safe and empathetic, like Fatima.
But I can tell this new nurse was genuine because her smile was like sunshine and puppies, not intimidation and spiders.
Her skin was a lovely sepia tone, her black hair in a bun, and her striking hazel eyes reminded me of something.
No, someone: Clark. I automatically dubbed her Nurse Nice in my mind because I wanted to remember that smile and my sense of ease around her.
It was more than just that, though. I had to have at least one ally in here, and maybe she could be it.
I sighed quietly in relief as she took my chair from Dr. Bell, who gave my shoulder a little squeeze before walking out of sight.
Even as fucked up in the head as I was at present, I knew that was not a reassuring squeeze.
That was a “you better get with the program and not give us any shit” squeeze.
I might not have access to my powers at present, but I still had strong intuition, and I was going to be counting on it as I navigated whatever they were going to put me through.
My hands had started to shake uncontrollably, and my heart rate rose to the point I was sure I was tachycardic.
I knew I was at least half out of it still because the walls kept moving, and I had very little depth perception, but I surprisingly remembered that I had been through their torture when I was an infant to age eight, and if I could withstand their methods then, I could handle them now.
And I would...as soon as I could keep my eyes open.
With Dr. Bell in the mix, there was no voluntarily closing my eyes no matter how I felt because I needed to take in everything around me so I wouldn’t panic too badly.
Plus, I didn’t trust her enough to close my eyes around her.
Who could? She was an extremely powerful psychic, and she could be responsible for everything from my powers being out of my control to admitting me to the hospital against my will, knowing exactly what steps she’d have to take—or have taken—to do such a thing.
I realized that the scary old bitch was going to be in charge of medications for me, and I felt my heart rate rising even more and my breathing a bit more laboured. Still, when Nurse Nice did my vitals, I was within range for everything, so I at least had that.
Next, it was off to the barracks.
I let out a long breath and closed my eyes before conceding that I needed help getting from the wheelchair into a bed in a private room on the unit.
Well, technically it was a double room, but there weren’t enough patients to make it a full house.
I asked for the bed by the enormous window even though I knew that the parking lot lights might keep me awake at night through those too-thin curtains.
I wanted to be near the trees, and the forest out back.
As I settled in, my free arm went to my belly as I lay on the uncomfortable mattress, now in the soothing dark of the night, wondering how much time it had been since I last saw Clark at work, laughing on a coffee break as we babbled very quietly about our newly revealed feelings for each other, before he somehow vanished during Jeff’s interrogation.
Jeff...a bolt of straight-up fear went through me when I thought of him, and I wished I had another blanket, not for warmth, but to hide under.
Why should I feel fear now when thinking about a friend?
Why did I feel more than fear, but actual terror, when I thought of what may have happened to Clark?
Because I knew, that was why. What they were capable of, that was.
Squeak, squeak. Faint shouts through the walls...
“Ignore it. Focus on what you know to be true. Tell yourself the truth a hundred times if you need to.” I felt the creatures in my inner ocean moving, once again, their pace erratic, their emotions out of balance.
One large beast with four fins, which reminded me of a particularly rotund manatee, came close to the surface with a comforting song.
I felt more memories come rushing in, and I whispered words of thanks as this spectacular beast slid back down to the depths of my mind.
I was raised in a forest by the sea, by people who were trying their best, I suppose, though they did let greed and money influence their big decisions, rather than love.
Those weren't the rush of waves I heard now, no matter how hard I closed my eyes and wished I could throw open my windows for the sounds of the crashing ocean to break against the rocks of the far side yard of my childhood home. I didn’t cook this up because I was stoned; I...
remembered it. If I committed myself to trying to break through whatever was blocking my memories, at least that would be time well spent while I worked on the obvious: an escape plan.
The Mental Health Inpatient Unit—because who wants to call it the psychiatric ward, honestly—had its own rhythms and routines as certain as the tides yet as changeable as the shoreline.
More squeaky footsteps in the hall. A momentary spill of light into my room as someone poked their head in.
The light retreated as she was satisfied that I’m here alone, alive, and lying in bed exactly as I should be at sometime after ten, when last meds of the day were dispensed, and it was officially bedtime.
The shoe squeaks continued down the hall, with momentary pauses as they stopped at the doors to the four other patients currently residing here.
Though it was night, it was not nearly as quiet and dark as it should be for sleep.
There was a light from the parking lot that shimmered in through the curtains—I knew that would be a problem—yet more light crept in around the crack in the door.
We were not allowed to shut them, but a hand towel over the top of the doorframe at least lets us get close to having them closed without the click of the latch.
A little magic trick learned from Nurse Nice who wheeled me into my room a few hours earlier.
There were the red lights of the smoke detector and the other little miscellanea of hospital equipment that look menacing in the night, with their faint glow, like the pumps on the IV pole.
And the symphony of sounds was not just squeaky shoes and the occasional patient who wouldn’t cooperate, but the echoes of toilets flushing, of faint crying or outright sobbing.
The night nurses watched YouTube or Netflix astonishingly loud for the hour at their station, the reverb of Hollywood sounding alien in this place, where the normal churn of the world outside felt detached from the everyday life cycles of medication time, psychiatrist time, time for trays to be wheeled in for our cafeteria food.
“Meds and trays. Meds and trays. Always on a loop.” I picked that up from a man in the next room whose mind was practically eaten away by cancer, and I had no clue how he was still alive and able to communicate.
But my own brain was starting to light up again, urged on by the gentleness of the fearsome creatures who were the embodiment of the ocean at the heart of me.
I wanted to roll over onto my front, but the hard mattress would dig into my tummy instead of my shoulder blades. I flopped over onto my side in compromise, the plastic crinkle of the pillow inside its raspy case brushing against my cheek.