Where I End and You Begin

by Andra Brynn

  Her eyebrows rise. “You want to actually come with us?”

  I’m not sure. I grew up getting yelled at and whooped for going places that I wasn’t supposed to, so I’ve always been hesitant to join them, but the alternative is to either sit in the car or walk aimlessly with an almost complete stranger. Yeah, I’m not doing that.

  “Yeah,” I say. “I’m gonna bring someone so we can, like, buddy up or whatever.”

  “Good thinking,” she says. “Four o’clock, before it gets too dark.”

  I nod and retreat to the foyer and dial Daniel’s number. This time it comes easily to me.

  I try not to dance from foot to foot like a high schooler calling her crush as the dial tone rings in my ear.

  “Hey Bianca,” Daniel says when he picks up.

  I don’t want to bother with niceties. “Have you ever been urban exploring?” I blurt out.

  “What?”

  “It’s this thing where you go and poke around old condemned buildings and take pictures and whatnot. It’s kind of dumb and dangerous, but it’s a good way to burn an afternoon...”

  There’s a silence at the other end of the line. “No, I know what it is, but I can’t say I ever have,” he says, “unless Roman ruins count.”

  I feel my brows raise in surprise. I’d never thought of it like that. “I don’t think it quite counts,” I say, “but it’s like that. Because, see, the thing is I already promised a couple of my friends that I would drive them up to Nompton to go explore the old hospital there, and they’ll be shit out of luck if I don’t take them, and I was thinking, if you don’t mind, that you could... I dunno... come with us?” God, it sounds stupid when I say it. “I mean... if you want to?”

  “I’d love to,” he says immediately. “I studied photography in college. I’d love to snap some photos.”

  My mouth twists in surprise. “You did?” I say. “I thought you had a background in counseling?”

  “I do,” he says. “I can do more than one thing at once.” I hear him smiling.

  Of course. Well. “So you’ll come?” I say.

  “Sure. When are you guys leaving?”

  I suck air between my teeth. “In about thirty minutes?” I say. God, I hope he doesn’t have something else he should be doing, because if I don’t see him today then I’ll never screw up the courage to look him in the face again. I’ll just avoid his calls, slip between the cracks, and I’ll just be that girl he helped once, and he’ll be the last person who ever threw me a lifeline.

  Which is a dumb thing to think. But...

  “I can do that,” he says. “I’ll drive over there. What should I wear?”

  “Heavy clothes, thick-soled shoes,” I say. “In case there’s something rusty.”

  “Gotcha. See you then, Bianca.” He hangs up.

  I stare at the phone in my hand, then take a deep breath to calm my thundering heart.

  I’m afraid to hope for anything. I’m afraid to hope that he can help me. I’m afraid to hope that I can pull myself out of this death spiral. Midterms start next week, and I’m terrified. I should stay home and study tonight, but I have the strange suspicion that this little adventure might help me more than studying. Give me a new perspective. Something to do other than drown in anxiety.

  I climb the stairs and go change.

  Thirty minutes later Daniel knocks on the door of the house, and I allow myself a small smile. He must have seen the code last night, but of course he wouldn’t use it. I was right to trust him. For once.

  I open the door and he’s standing there in a hooded sweatshirt and a pair of thick jeans. He still looks pretty amazing. He’s wearing his glasses again, and he has a camera slung around his neck. “Good afternoon,” he says formally, as if he’s a butler or something.

  “Hey,” I say. “Come in. Alice and Jibril should be ready in about two seconds.”

  He does, and I immediately regret it. What are we going to talk about? We can’t do any of that deep soul-searching stuff right now—not that I’m going to do that, of course—but I’m also shit at small talk. To my infinite relief my assessment of two seconds was actually accurate for a change and Alice and Jibril troop into the foyer dressed for exploring the great depths of ruin.

  “Hey!” Alice says. “Who’s this?” The good thing about Alice is she’s always direct. You always know where you stand with her.

  “This is Daniel,” I say. “Daniel, this is Alice, and that guy is Jibril.”

  They smile and shake hands all around, and then we file through the lower floor, the boy’s floor, and out the back door to the tiny postage-stamp parking lot behind Marchand. We pile into my car—a piece of shit Chrysler, but a functional piece of shit that I’d give daily blood sacrifices to if it meant it would keep running—and we head off.

  The whole way there Alice peppers Daniel with questions, because she’s that sort of person, and I’m glad because it allows me to get to know him a little better without actually having to interact with him. If only I had a beer, that would make things so much easier...

  Daniel answers all her questions with good humor, and I find out he’s twenty four, from Boston, and he’s taking a break from school right now, which surprises me but I don’t pry. If I could take a sabbatical from school, I would. I’d get myself together. Go to the hospital. Get healed. Then pick up and continue.

  Nompton is twenty or thirty minutes away, and I have to say it’s sad that my car is the only one that can be trusted to schlep us there. If we broke down on the highway it’d be a long-ass trek back to the city from the middle of nowhere. When we reach it I have to park the car on one of the rinky-dink residential streets because we’d probably be arrested for trespassing if we made it obvious we were going to break into the old hospital. Rural Indiana is pretty depressing, to tell the truth. The houses are all dilapidated, their paint peeling and their yards overgrown and weedy. It reminds me a lot of the houses I lived in when growing up, and I have to physically shake myself to knock the cobwebs of old feelings from my brain.

  We walk down cracked concrete sidewalks and cut across a small street. The sound of cars from the highway comes and goes, and we try not to look suspicious as we cut through a small parking lot and finally arrive at the wire fence surrounding the hospital.

  It’s pretty much child’s play to get in. No one really cares what anyone does to a hospital that was last open in the fifties, and if we fall through the floor and die it’ll be our own fault. Smart people don’t go tromping around old buildings that look like they’re held together by the vines growing over their bricks.

  Which is exactly what the old hospital looks like. The general hospital. Back when it was built, I’m sure it was state of the art, but now it’s just a big brick box with broken and boarded up windows. We slip through a gap in the fence—probably left by previous explorers—and we’re in.

  Alice and Jibril take the lead, trying the back door, but it’s locked. We spread out, and when Alice hisses she’s found a way in we practically run toward her. None of us feel like getting arrested today.

  The way in is through one of the basement windows. The glass is broken out, completely gone, and there’s no board blocking it. Alice gets down on her hands and knees and shines her flashlight inside. From my vantage point over her shoulder, I see dark shadows, gleaming white figures, destruction, dust.

  A shiver skitters up my spine on icy paws.

  “Looks good,” Alice says. “There’s a box below the window. Someone’s been here before.”

  “Hope they left everything intact,” Jibril says. “It sucks when a place is cleaned out.”

  “What do you mean?” I say. I’m already about to jump out of my skin, but I’m keeping it under wraps pretty well. It’s not that I’m scared, per se... I’m just getting the creeps, that’s all.

  “Old hospital beds, wheelchairs, operating tables, shit like that,” Alice says. She gets on her stomach and backs into the window. She has plenty of clearance an
d she smiles when her feet hit the box below the window. “I’m in.” And she ducks into the darkness.

  Jibril follows her, and then it’s just me and Daniel standing in the tall, dead grass, staring at the dark hole. The wind rustles in the weeds, muttering to itself.

  “Do you want to go back?”

  I jump about a foot in the air and let out a squeak. “Jesus, man,” I say, immediately defensive. “Keep your voice down.” I glare at him, daring him to make fun of me.

  He doesn’t even laugh, just looks chagrined. “Sorry,” he says. His eyes flicker to the window. “We can go back if you want,” he says.

  “No way,” I tell him. “Let’s go.”

  I get on my belly. Dry stalks of grass reach out to caress my face, and I close my eyes and slip backwards.

  I land on the box and let out a huge gust of breath. “I’m in,” I say, and I duck down and climb down from the box.

  Now that I’m inside, it’s a lot brighter in here than it seemed outside. The windows that are still intact or half broken let the light in from the gray, cloudy day outside, and it’s easy to see what’s around us.

  It’s not immediately apparent where we are, but I see dusty desks and old bookshelves, some dilapidated cabinets, and an old operating table in the middle of the room. There is dust and debris everywhere, leaves that have blown in from outside, chips of paint that have fallen from the walls and ceilings, old papers, anything and everything. I reach into my backpack and pull out my flashlight as Daniel slips through the window and lowers himself behind me. I feel his presence like a warm, living weight in this cold and lifeless world.

  “Wow,” he breathes.

  I can only nod. The abandoned room gives me a strange feeling in my stomach, as though I’m falling. Carefully, we begin to pick our way through the detritus on the floor as Alice and Jibril go ahead of us, more used to this sort of treacherous territory.

  “Oh shit,” Jibril says from the other end of the room.

  My heart speeds up and my fingers are white on the flashlight, even though I don’t really need it. “What is it?” I say. My voice is small.

  “Come over here,” he says.

  My blood rushing in my head, I look to Daniel, and he gives me a reassuring smile. Before I realize what he’s doing, he reaches out between us and takes my hand and forges ahead, leading me. “Step in my footsteps,” he tells me, and I feel something bend inside me.

  Holding hands, I think. I don’t think I’ve ever held hands with a boy—or a man, for that matter. The last time I held hands with any guy, it was my dad, and I was younger, much younger, and things were different then.

  This isn’t like holding hands with my father. It’s like connecting two live wires, and a jolt runs up my arm and through my body, grounding itself in my belly. I shove the feeling away, because it can only make things complicated, and if I tried to seduce my pseudo-counselor that would probably violate some kind of rule.

  His hand tightens on mine as he moves forward and I follow him, stepping where he steps. The hospital isn’t large, and we reach the other end of the room quickly. Jibril is staring up at something on the wall. I follow his gaze. Large, flat drawers are set into it, red with rust.

  It takes a moment for me to realize what I’m seeing, and when I do, I wish I hadn’t.

  “The morgue,” Alice says. Then: “This is so cool.”

  Cool is not how I would term it. My hand in Daniel’s is freezing and I squeeze his fingers so tight I almost don’t realize that he’s wincing with pain. Even then it takes me a second to release him.

  He reclaims his hand and grabs the camera around his neck. Uncapping and adjusting it, he lifts it to his face and snaps a photo of the rusted morgue freezer.

  “Let’s go upstairs,” he suggests. “The light isn’t very good here.”

  I want to kiss him. “Yeah,” I say. “Upstairs.”

  There’s a heavy door set in the wall back where we entered and we pick our way back there. This time Daniel opens it, revealing a set of concrete stairs leading up into the light of the hospital proper. He climbs the steps and I follow, afraid to touch anything for fear the decay will rub off on me.

  Immediately I feel better, and I’m finally able to appreciate the atmosphere. We’ve emptied out into a long hallway with open doors leading off it. The first one we pass seems like it might have been an office or a place to store office furniture, because it’s full of dusty desks and cracked glass cabinets and rusty chairs.

  The air smells like bleach and decay, but really, it’s the chairs that get to me. I never knew chairs could get so rusty. They’re all just sitting there, waiting for someone to plop down on them. They remind me of old people in a nursing home, busting at the seams with a life to tell but no one wants to listen, and their tongues and lips don’t work right any more anyway, so no one could understand them even if they did.

  It’s a fucking shame. I want to sit on each horrible, rusty seat, and I would if I didn’t feel like I was giving myself eyeball tetanus just by looking at them.

  I want to give you a warm ass to hug, I think. Just one last time before you die.

  But of course I don’t.

  “This place is creepy as hell,” Alice says. “There’s probably an ax-murdering ghost here.

  “Why would there be an ax-murdering ghost at a hospital?” Jibril says.

  “I don’t know, maybe he went on a spree or something here and that’s why it closed down.”

  “That’s stupid.”

  “You’re stupid.”

  “Babies,” I say.

  Everyone turns to look at me. I lick my lips. “Babies. If there are any ghosts here, it’d be babies, or women who died in childbirth, or a doctor who couldn’t save his patients.”

  Next to me I feel Daniel shift. “That’s a little morbid,” he says, and it’s the first time I’ve heard anything even vaguely disapproving come out of his mouth. Stung, I scowl up at him.

  “What?” I say. “I love ghost stories. You’re gonna get the ghosts of people who left something undone here, or who died a violent death. It’s common sense.”

  They’re all quiet for a second, and I feel as though I’ve stepped over some boundary.

  “Let’s split up,” Jibril suggests. “Why don’t you two take the bottom floor and we’ll take the top, since we’ve done this before. You know, so we’re not all in the same place just in case the floor caves in and you guys have to call 9-1-1.”

  “Is that likely to happen?” I ask.

  “Not likely,” he says with a grin, “but it never hurts to be prepared. If God wills it, we’ll meet you here in thirty minutes.”

  “I hate it when you say that,” Alice tells him.

  “That’s why I say it,” he replies, and then they are moving through the debris, their flashlights sweeping the walls as they search for the stairs to the floor above us.

  And now I am alone with Daniel.

  He seems perfectly comfortable with this fact. This must not be a date. I watch as he lifts his camera and shoots a few pictures.

  “The lighting today is perfect for this,” he says. “I’m excited. Do you think there was a psych ward here?”

  “Probably not,” I say. “Those were usually out in the country, far away from everyone.” In the wilderness, no one can hear you scream.

  “That makes sense.”

  Together we pick through the trash on the floor. There’s a long row of windows lining the hallway we are in, half of them broken, the other half boarded up. The gray light pools along the floor, illuminating broken two by fours and plywood. When I look up, I see that half the ceiling has come down, and I’m extremely glad that Jibril told us to stay downstairs. It’s dangerous up there.

  It’s a little startling to realize that, while I’ve been downing the liquor like it’s water, hoping for some sort of release, that I don’t really want that release to come today. Sometime in the nebulous future, I might drink too much and keel over. Might
drink too much and go home with the wrong guy. Might drink too much and go to sleep on a park bench in the middle of winter.

  Someday I’ll step over the line, and when I’m dead I can pretend it wasn’t my fault. I can play Russian roulette with my life as long as it doesn’t feel scary.

  It feels scary in here, even though I’m far more likely to be hit by a car than die exploring an old hospital. For the first time in a long time I feel a rush of something akin to excitement. Faced with this rotting corpse of a building, the background noise of low-level existential anxiety suddenly spikes in a quick injection of adrenaline.

  Death feels a lot closer here.

  Daniel stops and takes a picture of one of the windows, and I realize his camera may look huge and old and analog, but it’s digital.

  “That’s a cool camera,” I say without thinking.

  He turns and looks at me. “Thanks,” he says. “I used it in undergrad.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “And you’re in grad school now?”

  He shrugs, looking sheepish. “Well, not right now,” he says. “There is that little sabbatical I’m taking.”

  “I didn’t even know you could do that.”

  “It’s... not unusual.”

  I don’t want to pry. I really don’t. He’s being evasive for whatever reason, so I won’t probe it. But I have to ask. “So you’re studying psychology, right?” I ask. I wonder if he knows Miss Debbie Chandler.

  He gives me a strange look that I can’t quite decipher. “No,” he says, “I just have a background in counseling.”

  “And you decided you’d put it to use on the poor little drunk girl that threw up on your shoes.”

  The words come out more vicious than I meant, and he lowers the camera. “You didn’t throw up on my shoes.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “You didn’t have to call me last night.”

  I press my tongue against my teeth. Technically, no.

  He sighs. “I just wanted to help you. I realize that’s hard for you to understand, but not everyone is out for themselves.”

  He’s making me angry. “I don’t want your pity.”

  “I don’t pity you,” he says. “I don’t even feel sorry for you. You’re kind of an asshole.”