by Cylin Busby
The long, dirty hair, wild eyes, and pockmarked face. I knew it well. I knew it would be him.
And it was. But the hair was gone, now replaced with a crew cut. The skin was raw and broken out. Even though he had to be thirty now, his skin looked like a teenager’s. And his eyes were the same. Maybe worse than I remembered.
I pulled out the plastic chair and took a seat. As he reached for the phone, I noticed the small tattoos on his hands, letters, something written in the space between his thumb and first finger, and a cobweb over the back of his hand. I pictured those hands around Olivia’s neck. I picked up my phone and held it to my ear.
“Who the hell are you?”
I was surprised that I had never thought about what this would be like, to actually have a conversation with him. For some reason, I had only imagined seeing him, confirming what I already knew. “I’m a friend. A friend of Olivia Kemple’s,” I said.
It took him a minute to register who I was talking about. Then his face took on a harder look. “And? What do you want, a medal or something?”
“I just wanted to see you,” I told him honestly.
“Well, now you’ve seen me. Happy?” He leaned back in his chair and stared at me. I didn’t know what to say. “How is she, still got a pulse?”
I swallowed hard, feeling like I might throw up. “Yeah,” I said weakly. “She’s in a coma, it’s stage one.” I didn’t know why I added that, like he would know what it meant, or even care.
His face took on a softer look. “But she’s alive, right?”
“Yeah, she’s alive,” I said, my voice catching on the word. I held the phone tighter to keep my hand from shaking. Maybe he did care. Maybe he felt bad about what he had done to her. I wanted to believe that he did. But looking at his face, at his cold eyes, made me doubt that. It didn’t matter. I didn’t want to think about what it was like for him. I hated him.
We sat staring at each other for a moment, neither of us saying anything. Then he broke the silence. “So what do you want? You want me to say something? You want me to say I’m sorry? You come here to make me feel bad?”
I couldn’t answer him. What did I want him to say—was there anything he could say that would make me feel better? This was the man who had hurt Olivia. I was seeing him for real—just a few feet from him, the man who had haunted my dreams for months. But he had no way of knowing that.
Suddenly he slammed his fist on the glass separating us. “Hey, I asked you a question! What do you want?”
I stared at his hand on the glass. But I saw it coming down, over and over again, on her. The sickening sound his fist made when it connected with her skin. When I glanced back up, his face was the angry mask it had been in my dreams.
“Don’t touch the glass,” I heard one of the guards behind him say.
“You’re a waste of time,” he hissed at me. He slammed the phone into its holder and pushed his chair back hard. I watched as he left the room through a door in the back, led by a guard back to wherever they were keeping him.
For just a moment, I thought my arms wouldn’t move, that I would be paralyzed again, strapped down, like I was so many times when I saw him in my dreams. That I would be powerless. But I wasn’t. I carefully put the phone back into the cradle and sat for a minute thinking about what he had said. A waste of time. That’s what he thought of me. That’s what he said about Olivia.
I looked down at my hands in front of me on the desk. I made two fists, then opened them, spread my fingers. I was awake. This wasn’t a dream.
I walked slowly out through the holding room, and back out into the parking lot. The sun felt good on my face. I stood for a moment on the walkway and just soaked it in, taking a deep breath. I felt like something had been washed off me. Some weight had been lifted. I understood now. What Olivia had shown me and why—all the things she couldn’t tell me. I had to see for myself.
So it was real. He was real. Thomas Mason. The things I saw in the hospital—they happened. I thought of the little girl in my room, dripping blood, opening the drawer. That wasn’t a dream. And the guy with the burned face. He was real too. They had been patients at Wilson, like me, like Olivia. They were still there, in some limbo, the place where I had once been. Where Olivia was now, where I had left her. Unable to get out, to ever leave.
“That was fast.” Mike looked up from his phone when I opened the car door. “Did you get to see … your mystery prisoner?” I could tell he was trying to keep things light, but I wasn’t in any position to help out.
“Yeah, I saw him.” I snapped on my seat belt and leaned back. I looked over at Mike, but he was staring out at the prison. I could tell there was something he wanted to say. When Mike got serious, sometimes it took him a minute. I was quiet until he was ready to talk.
“Is this about that girl, the one you thought you knew at the hospital?” he finally said, still not meeting my eyes.
“Sort of,” I started to explain. “But it’s not what you think. I’m not crazy or anything. I’m okay, I really am.” Mike looked over at me, and I could see the worry on his face. I hated what I was putting my friend through. “Trust me.”
He started the car and we drove home in silence, broken only when he dropped me off in front of my house. It was late afternoon, but I was happy to see that Mom’s car wasn’t in the driveway yet.
“Just tell me one thing.” I could hear the frustration in Mike’s voice. “Did you do whatever it was you had to do?”
“I’ll never go back there again,” I told him. I thought about Thomas Mason, his fist on the glass. On her. I felt sick to my stomach.
I closed the door to his car and walked up the steps to my house, hearing him drive away as I put the key into the lock. I barely got inside before I raced to the kitchen and retched into the sink. I realized that I had hardly eaten all day as I dry heaved over the counter, feeling like my insides were coming out. When I could catch my breath, I found my note to Mom sitting on the table, the one from this morning. I looked at the words I had written just hours ago and wondered, if I could go back and do this day over again, would I do it differently? Would I decide not to go to the prison? No. There was no other way. I had to see for myself, to know for sure. But now that I knew, I didn’t feel better. I felt worse.
I tore the note in half, hard, harder, over and over again until it was nothing but pieces of confetti. Then I sat on the kitchen floor and watched the room get dark, until the sweep of Mom’s headlights in the driveway brought me back to the world of the living.
Chapter 28
I had to see Olivia, to talk to her. Now that I knew that my dreams had not been dreams, there was something I needed to tell her. Now that I knew more about her. About the other visions I had while at the hospital. But getting to Wilson was going to be a problem. I couldn’t ask Mike, and Allie was also out of the question. Mom was a no. I pulled up the bus-system map on my laptop, but something about taking a bus, or a series of buses to see Olivia felt wrong—I just kept thinking about her waiting at the bus stop that night. Then I started thinking about her spending her days—every day since I had left the hospital—waiting for me to come back, thinking that I had left her and forgotten about her. Alone and haunted by those thoughts, those memories she had shown me. Alone with the others, that little girl, with the man with his burned face. I had to shake my head to make the images go away. I called the cab company and ordered a pick-up for the next day I had off from rehab, after Mom would be gone at work. It would cost a small fortune, but I didn’t know how else to get there, and I had to see her.
When the cab pulled up outside, I left my crutches by the door and grabbed my keys. My hands felt damp with sweat as I climbed into the backseat. I told the driver, a gray-haired guy with a beard, where I was headed, and the address, but he just grunted out an “Okay” and started driving. I felt nervous, like I was meeting Olivia for a date or something, butterflies in my stomach. I knew what I had to do once I got there, what I had to say.
/>
“You want me to wait?” the cab driver said when he pulled up outside the Wilson Center.
“I’ll probably just call another cab for the way back; I don’t know how long I’m going to be,” I told him.
“I was going to grab a coffee. I’ll swing back by here when I’m done,” he said, turning around to look at me. “Off the clock.”
I couldn’t believe he was being so nice to me. “Um, thanks, that would actually be great.”
He grabbed a clipboard next to his seat and starting writing something down as I took out my wallet to pay. “You know somebody in there?” he said, not looking up from his pad.
I swallowed hard. “I do,” I said finally. “A friend.” The word caught in my throat. She wasn’t a friend. She was so much more. How could I describe what Olivia was to me?
He nodded and looked up at me, waving away my twenty-dollar bill. “I’ll be here when you get out, kid.” Obviously he knew what kind of patients they had at Wilson. I didn’t want to ask how.
I walked in through the sliding door and to the front desk, where I signed in just using an unreadable scribble. You didn’t have to say who you were visiting or show ID, so I didn’t. The guy behind the desk didn’t even look up at me. I walked by the nurses’ station confidently, like I came here all the time. No one recognized me, no one noticed me. Why would they? Norris wouldn’t be here until the night shift. And without the crutches, with my short hair, I looked nothing like the guy who had been a patient here. I was just another visitor now.
I went down the hall without even looking into my old room. It was dark, and looked like it was still empty anyhow.
“West.”
I heard someone say my name, quietly.
I stopped. No, it was impossible.
The voice was so familiar, so linked to this place, for a moment the wires got crossed in my mind and I spun around expecting to see her, to see Olivia standing there. By the time I had turned, I knew it wasn’t her, instead it was another face I knew well, a warm, open face.
Nurse Norris.
“West,” she said again. “I thought that was you.” She put down the chart she was holding and moved closer to me. How the dynamic had changed. Instead of looking down over me, now she stood smiling in front of me, almost a foot shorter than I was. “What a nice surprise.”
“I just … I just came for a visit,” I started to say.
“But not to visit me—I don’t usually work days. But you know that already, you remember my schedule.” Her eyes held mine and I could tell she was waiting for me to say something. “So what are you doing here?”
I was caught, with no explanation. “I don’t know,” I finally said. And it wasn’t a lie. I was confused. Why was I here? What had I hoped to accomplish? To tell Olivia something, to tell her that it was all real, that the things we had seen and felt were real. That I had seen the man from my dreams, that I understood now. That I had come back for her, like I said I would.
“Come have a seat.” Nurse Norris motioned to the chairs off to the side of the hallway and I took one beside her. She waited silently, patiently for me to talk.
“I feel like I knew—” I stopped myself. “Like I know the people here.”
“Well of course—you know me.” Norris smiled. “But why do I get the feeling you aren’t talking about the nurses and the doctors?”
I met her eyes and saw that she understood, or was trying to.
Maybe Norris was the one person in all of this who would understand. Who would believe me. The words rolled out of me, before I could stop myself. “There was a patient here, in my room before me, a man, his face was burned….”
I heard Nurse Norris suck in her breath in shock. I glanced at her and saw her hand go to her heart. “No,” she said quietly.
“I saw him. He was standing in my room. His name is Paul.”
Norris shook her head, then looked down the hallway. “I can’t comment on other patients,” she started to say.
“You don’t have to say anything; I already know. And there was a girl, a little girl, dripping wet, and blood …”
I saw Norris’s eyes well up with tears. “Katie,” she whispered, biting on her lower lip.
“Yes.” I didn’t want to tell Nurse Norris how the girl searched the drawer, looking for something. How angry she seemed, how sad. “They’re dead, aren’t they?” I asked her. But I already knew the answer. Or I thought I did.
Nurse Norris stood up and held her hand out to me. There was a weak smile on her face. “There’s something I want to show you.”
I stood and took her hand, and let her lead me down the hallway like a child. She stopped outside a room on the other side of the hall and motioned for me to go inside. I looked at the body on the bed, terrified of what I might see.
“This is Paul,” she said quietly. He looked different than I remembered, than the photos, than the man who stood in my room that night. The scars on his face were pink now, not blackened and burned. Some hair had grown back around his head, but he was still badly damaged—he had a breathing tube in his throat and a bandage taped over one eye.
“He was in room 201 for a time. He needed some surgery, skin grafting to prevent infection. He was in another hospital, and when he returned he was placed in this room. But he’s not dead.”
She took my hand and led me from his room before my mind could even process what I was seeing.
“And here’s Katie,” she said, taking me into an open doorway across the hall. She pulled back the curtain around the bed to reveal a little girl—not dripping with blood, but with carefully braided hair along either side of her face. She looked peaceful, as if she was just sleeping, except the fact that she was also on a respirator and connected to all the beeping, ticking machines beside her bed. It was the little girl I remembered, the one who searched the drawers, who grabbed my arm.
“She’s been here for a year now,” Nurse Norris explained. “She just turned nine.”
“They’re all—”
Norris interrupted me, “They’re not dead. They’re coma patients. Like you were.” She paused for a moment, letting me take it in. “Is there anyone else you’d like to see?” Nurse Norris looked down the hall, to the doorway of Room 203. She knew.
“Olivia.” I said her name quietly, and something in my voice must have given me away.
“Oh, honey.” Nurse Norris put her arms around me and pulled me into her for a hug.
“You believe me? You believe that I saw them?”
“I do.” She nodded, but stopped herself. “Why would you want to come back here and surround yourself with so much darkness? Why don’t you just leave this all behind you, go on with your life—”
“I can’t,” I interrupted her. “I can’t just forget what I saw. And Olivia, she’s still there—she’s still stuck there. How do I just walk away knowing that?”
Norris was silent for a moment. “I don’t know.” She took a deep breath. “I learned a hard lesson when I came to work here. When I first started out, I thought I could save everybody. I thought with enough kindness, with enough attention, maybe …” She shook her head. “But most of these patients, they won’t get better. That’s hard. It’s hard to come to work every day and to know that, to keep going, keep caring, when you know how it will end, every time, that the patients you take care of for years will never get better.”
She looked at my face to be sure I was following her. “It’s just hard, West, and I wish you didn’t have to know about it.”
I looked down at my sneakers. I felt empty inside, hollow. I thought maybe Nurse Norris would have an answer. The fact that she believed me—that she confirmed what I already knew—was important, but yet it had gotten me nowhere. The people I thought were ghosts haunting the hospital weren’t ghosts at all. They were alive, or some version of being alive. They were trapped between being living and being somewhere else. And they were all so deeply unhappy, so sad, lost.
“Why don’t you sit
with Olivia for a while?” Nurse Norris asked, pulling me from my thoughts. I nodded and she patted the back of my hand. “I think she’d like that,” she said, and motioned toward room 203. My knees almost buckled as I moved to walk down the hall; I had forgotten that I’d left my braces at home. Nurse Norris helped me get my balance.
“Come say good-bye before you head out, okay?” She squeezed my arm as I walked down the hall.
When I rounded the doorway to 203, for a split second I expected to see Olivia, my Olivia, sitting in bed, looking up from a magazine, her long hair down around her shoulders, surprised and happy to see me, a smile slowly crossing her face. But she looked exactly as she had the last time; a body in a bed, her dark hair short, the long, deep pink scar across one cheek. I hardly saw those things, though. I knew the girl in the bed wasn’t her, wasn’t where she was or how she really looked.
I pulled up a chair alongside the bed and took her hand. “It’s West,” I whispered. “Olivia, it’s me.” I listened to the sound of the ventilator pushing air into her body, over and over again. The rhythmic, muted beep of the heart monitor.
You have to come back for me.
I thought about how she didn’t want me to leave, how hard she tried to convince me not to have the surgery. How scared she was for me.
Don’t leave me here.
But how much did she know? Did she understand that waking up would take me away from her, away from wherever we were together? Maybe she was terrified of being alone.
Promise me you’ll come back for me.
Or maybe she knew there was only one way out. It was a place you didn’t come back from. She had seen others go there before me.
Sometimes I think I’m never going to get out of here.
She was waiting for me to come back. And here I was.
I pulled my chair closer to the bed and put her hand up to my cheek and felt her warmth. “Olivia,” I whispered, “I came back for you. Just like you wanted me to.” I took a deep breath. “The things we saw, the things we felt, it’s all real.” I stopped and leaned in, putting my face close to hers. “Those people—the dreams I had. They aren’t dreams. Or ghosts. They’re real people, but they’re stuck here. They can’t move on, can’t let go.”