by Leah Bobet
Jane Doe, she gifts me. That’s the name for girls who don’t have a name they know Above, like Violet. Catatonic. That’s when someone won’t move, won’t talk, won’t see. Supervised care facility.
That’s a Whitecoat hospital.
She stops. “Don’t hate me for this,” she says, hands fidgeting on the papers, straightening them just so against the wood-grain lines of her polished kitchen table. In the other room, Violet lies hands tucked in her lap, staring at the swirls of white plaster on the ceiling. She don’t blink. She don’t speak.
Doctor Marybeth pronounced my ma dead when I was but three years old. She clipped the cord from my belly when I was born, and held my hand a long night when I was seven and my throat closed up with fever. “I don’t hate you,” I tell her.
I’m afraid to take her hand or smooth it down calm from a fist. I’m not Jack. I don’t need to decide, though, because she takes mine, squeezes it; holds on too long.
I have to hide in the bathroom when the car comes to take Violet away. Passing or not, the Whitecoats — Doctor Marybeth calls them paramedics — will have questions. They’ll want to know ’bout Violet’s finding, the smell of smoke on her clothes. They’ll want to know who the strange boy is. It’s easier for her to lie to them if I’m not about.
“Lock the door, Matthew,” she tells me as the knock raps on the front door, and I push the little brass button beside the bathroom doorknob three times to make sure it’s locked tight. I sit on top of Doctor Marybeth’s clean white toilet and stare at patterns on the brown-and-white tiled floor while Whitecoat boots stump down the hall past me. Stop in the parlor, and lay eyes and hands on Violet.
“Need to carry her,” says a voice, burnt and thin. “The hall’s too narrow for the stretcher.”
“Shit,” says another: prompt, sharp, sucked dry of anything good. “Help me lift.”
I close my eyes, picture it like a Tale: his hands on Violet, taking Violet away. And reach out for a hand that ain’t here to hold.
Ari. The idea comes without the asking: Ari carried away by Whitecoats with a grunt and a stomp, kicking, screaming. They’d put a needle in. They wouldn’t want her changing while they did it.
Forget shadows. Forget ghosts. I should have gone back for her.
The Whitecoat feet tromp back up the hall, heavier this time, slower. “Bring the stretcher to the doorway,” the second voice says, and it’s strained from weight; and then muttered low, something nobody’s meant to hear: “Don’t you worry, now. We’ll get you somewhere nice and warm.”
The feet fade out, disappearing into the big cold world Above.
The silence is like buildings before they burn.
I get up. Turn the knob. Open the bathroom door a touch, just a handspan, and slide my head through the crack. Look down the hall through Doctor Marybeth’s wide-open front door.
Everything outside is white lights. White hands, white as drowned blind mice, are putting Violet on a hard white bed with metal wheels that glimmer and force your eyes away. A white car’s coughing stink into the air beside it, and the red-and-white plastic bar atop it glows, throwing that sharp light everywhere.
I watch Doctor Marybeth bend over the wheeled bed half-shadowed, her face closed up smooth and tight as a tunnel grave. She’s not crying no more. Atticus’s lesson, I think; big kids are quiet, and big kids are sharp, and I huddle tighter behind the thin, useless bathroom door, shaping words for it in my mouth. Tasting them quiet against the day when I can carve the Tale down on the door with the martyrs.
Doctor Marybeth sees them gone and then stands in the doorway a minute, two, letting hot thick air slide through the open door. I put my hands behind my back, fight the wanting to get up and close it, to draw her crook-elbow back inside.
When she does come back to me, her mouth’s drawn small and her face is damp. “Nobody’s admitted your others to the hospital,” she says after a long moment. “I asked.”
I should be relieved. Or terrified: Hide Heather Mack lost in the dark. “Oh,” is all I say, and she closes the door.
We stand quiet for a long minute.
“That’s what it’s here for. The medical system,” she says finally, soft so Whisper and Jack, locked upstairs in the attic room, won’t hear her giving sedition into my ears. “It’s to take care of those who can’t care for themselves.”
“Atticus and Whisper could care for themselves.” I look down at the pale pinkish wall between the front window and floor. Doctor Marybeth’s painted it for a rosy dawn; or so she told me, waiting for the car to come. I’ve not seen a dawn Above that was softhearted as that.
“Yeah,” she says, and wipes her nose with a tidy pinch. “The problems start when you can’t decide who can care for themselves and who can’t.”
The stubborn rises in me, hard as a grown-in crab claw. “And who says they get to decide anyway?”
We both know who they is. Doctor Marybeth looks away. She sits down right in the hallway and leans her head against the wall.
“You take an oath when you become a doctor,” she says after a minute. Her hand goes up to her belly, just beneath her heart and breasts and the corner-crux of her ribs. My good clean mad fades away; that’s where I keep my oaths too, sworn and private. Where Jack Flash taught me all good oaths stay. “They’ve changed it a lot. Things change. But you swear not to hurt anyone.”
She settles her hands on her knees: rough skin, a lighter brown than my own. “Lakeshore didn’t hurt most people. It was the patients who were going to hurt other people, or hurt themselves.” She looks up at me, and her eyes are black and tired. “You don’t see the worst of how people can end up. The real worst cases never make it down to Safe.”
“Reynard made it,” I say. “And Heather.”
Reynard, who was Teller before me, crawled down to Safe. He near drowned in the sewer pipes, dragging himself by his elbows ’cause his legs didn’t work right. My pa found him passed out at the gateway to the old sewers, exhausted, beard choked with filth and teeth bared with anger. Heather, who took Reynard’s wheelchair after he died and went into the ground, was carried down. Mercy knew her from the same Whitecoat home built with ramps and lifts and buttons where once she’d been kept locked away. One night she and Mack went up without having a duty, and they carried Heather all the way home.
There were others Mercy wanted out; friends, Sick or Freak or in trouble. But we only had one wheelchair.
“That’s not what I mean, worst,” Doctor Marybeth says. Her eyes don’t even flicker. “I don’t mean physically. If the bad cases really did make it down to you, you’d have sent a lot more people out.”
Suddenly I get it. She means the screamers. Whisper talks sometimes about them: screamers, cutters, ones who’d trip you in the dinner line and smile dog-tooth smiles. Sent a lot more people — I turn full to Doctor Marybeth. “You knew ’bout Corner.”
“Yeah,” she says, like a kid caught filching paper to doodle.
“What happened?” I ask, and this time I hold her eye, try to push the Tale free just by force of looking. Not a hand on the back, not encouragement gentle and soft. Tell me a Tale. Tell me true.
“She wouldn’t say the whole,” Doctor Marybeth says, quieter than sedition, or shadows, or ghosts. “She came to me half past midnight, and wouldn’t let me near.” She wraps her arms around herself like restraints, showing me the weight and heft of Corner. “Stayed the night, and all she said was she was never going back.”
“You didn’t know it was Killer,” I say, hushed with the thought of Corner’s bloodtouch bloodstain hands wrapped ’round Doctor Marybeth’s crockery; Corner’s body curled up in the upstairs bed with the big eagle quilt about its shoulders. My arms prickle where they clutched it three nights past.
Doctor Marybeth lowers her arms slowly to her sides. “Matthew,” she says, careful and delicate as bad news. “I don’t think she killed.”
I watch her. Blink once, twice. That can’t be telling true.
“Oh?” I manage, ugly little droplet of sound. Doctor Marybeth nods once, still studying me, watching me as Whisper does: that same look of mingled sadness and care that makes me turn aside. She reaches out a hand and I pull mine away, fingertip-small. Enough to make her rest hers back on the beat-up rug; on the floor.
“They’d fought before, of course,” she starts, like it’s of course to think of Atticus and Corner together, in love, fighting. “Not a lot came of it. Corner would sleep somewhere else, go walking. I caught them in the middle of it once, about turning pages fast enough, of all the little things, and they were both so embarrassed….”
I study the pattern of the carpet: a double-headed bird, all in red. Two beaks open wide, two sets of claws. A Beast.
“She came up that night and I thought something’d happened, someone was ill or the roof had fallen in. But she said everyone else was fine, just … she wasn’t going back to him.” A pause. “That exactly. Wasn’t going back to him. And asked me for a place to stay the night.
“You didn’t know Corner,” she says. “You don’t know how much it was for her to ask for anything. They were all that way in the beginning, but her the worst. So I gave her the spare room. And I begged her to stay until I could get to the bottom of it.”
“How long?” I ask, hollow-voiced and hushed.
“Three days,” and now the guilt’s in, the ache of someone else’s Tale coming through her voice into her restless hands. She plucks at the fringe of the carpet, braids it, discards it. “On the second day I went down to Safe.”
Doctor Marybeth is always sent for. There is always someone with a light to guide her through the new tunnels, the old tunnels, the sewer. “I didn’t know you knew the way,” I say awkward, knowing that this is real secrets now, the kind that would get people in trouble if Atticus were still living and the world not upside down.
“I remembered the way.” She’s calm and neutral, watching me just as much as I’m watching her for every little flick and fillip of voice. “One day there was going to be an emergency and there’d be no one to hold my hand. So I —” she pauses. Out the rightmost edge of my eye I catch a sharp, small smile. “— I counted the turns.”
I whuff. My papa’s snort. Don’t underestimate those Above.
“So I went down to Atticus,” she says, and the smile sinks back into her cheeks to drown. “They’d taken away her Sanctuary.”
I wasn’t the Teller when Corner’s Sanctuary was took — Reynard was. I was nothing but my papa’s little boy with a small gift for the Telling, and I watched the taking-away of Sanctuary from behind his stone-steady legs with a fear I didn’t have words for. I remember jostling; I remember Atticus saying the terrible click-sharp words.
I remember what color Atticus’s eyes were when he exiled the first Beast from Safe.
I don’t remember Doctor Marybeth there. But Papa had his big hand on my head all through, and when it was over he took me back to the house he and I shared once my mama was gone and told me, serious and quiet, what it meant to be Killer. Why it was a thing grave enough that someone would ever have their Sanctuary taken away.
That it wouldn’t happen again. That I was Safe.
Last time.
My belly turns with a sudden, sharp little terror. “You didn’t see him do it, did you? You weren’t there for it all.”
The look Doctor Marybeth gives me is sharp and peculiar, and “No,” she says. “Not until the end. Not ’til it was over.”
I’m shamed at how relieved I am to hear those words.
“I got … upset with him,” Doctor Marybeth says, in a house Above with hardwood floors and worn-patched carpets, in a place where I have no Sanctuary and nobody cares ’bout the Tales of Safe. “I said things that couldn’t be taken back. How he could ever throw her out over one of their spats …” She closes her eyes. “And then he showed me Jonah’s body.”
The knot in my belly hardens. “I thought you said it wasn’t Killer.”
“She wasn’t,” Doctor Marybeth says soft. “I got an autopsy later.” She glances at me to make sure I know autopsy and I do. Another Whitecoat wickedness; the sundering of the dead. “Jonah’s heart gave out. That was all. He had one of his seizures in the tunnel and he died.”
“That’s something Corner could do. With the bloodtouch,” I argue, like I don’t already believe her, like I haven’t known the story of Corner’s exile was rotten since the day I was first asked not to Tell it no more.
“Maybe if she was still in the tunnel. But not from my top bedroom,” Doctor Marybeth says. “And Atticus would’ve known that, if he’d been thinking past his hurt pride. He would have known it cold.” She pauses. “I’m sure he came to regret that after.”
We’re quiet a long minute. Together. Apart.
“I got back Above and told her. I thought maybe if she let it cool he’d listen to reason, understand she wasn’t in the tunnels that night, wasn’t hurting anyone. Or Whisper and Violet and Scar would talk sense into him; he was at least listening to the other founders in those days. And if not …” She stops, swallows back too hard for regular spit and air. “If not, I’d help her find a new name, a job. Somewhere to live.”
“Above,” I say soft, so soft.
I barely hear the next part, no matter how strong all my straining. “I said I’d keep her safe,” Doctor Marybeth whispers, and leans her head back against her sunshine wall. “Except in the morning, she was gone, and it wasn’t back to Safe. And that’s when the trouble with the shadows started.”
My breath catches. Doctor Marybeth’s eyes are shining wet.
“There was no telling him anything after that, you know. After people started to see things in the sewers — even before anyone got hurt. For Atticus, that proved everything: the killing, the motive, all of it. There was no explaining. And —” a shrug. A spill of crying that she doesn’t move to wipe away. “That was the end.”
“The end,” I repeat, hollow. My hand twitches; I should paint this, carve it; it’s a Tale of Safe. But I’ve got no paints, no carving knife, and I don’t know if it’d go on the martyrs’ door or my own. I put the hand in my jeans pocket and it sits itself still. “Who knows this?”
“You.” The corners of her mouth tighten. “Me. Jack.”
“Jack?” I ask, startled, remembering his hush-up looks and his laters — “Jack doesn’t come Above.”
“No,” she says, and looks me full in the face. “I go down.”
Oh.
“What’re you going to do?” she says after a minute, still crying midnight silent, chin still lifted high. “Corner killed Atticus,” I murmur, turning it over in my head, my free hand cupped like a ball around something too big to hold on to. “And its shadows … they hurt Violet. And Whisper’s ghosts, and Mack, and Mercy. And … and Seed.” My throat gets hard and hot. “And I don’t know who else yet.”
“You don’t know she killed Atticus.”
“I saw it with my own two eyes,” I snap, and the memory of pressure flickers beneath my right one, where something that knew my name — a shadow, a monster, low-voiced Corner with the bloodtouch in its furious hands — asked me for a Tale. “I don’t know what we’re gonna do,” I admit, and close my hand. “Everything’s broken.”
There’s no sound but the wind.
“It —” she pauses, and then takes a deep breath. “What do you need?”
I bite my lip. Think about monsters and not-monsters, and one lone shadow weeping. ’Bout all the Tales that don’t get told no more, and all the things we don’t know about Corner.
“We found Atticus’s file,” I start.
She shakes her head, out at the corner of my sight. “They don’t keep files at Lakeshore. When they closed it, they transferred it all.”
“‘Phantom limb syndrome. Post-trau
matic stress,’” I quote her, and she blinks. “We need —” I pause, wet my bitten sore-chewed lips. “We need Corner’s file. We need to know about Corner.”
Doctor Marybeth puts a hand on my shoulder. Awkward, like she don’t know whether to be a mama or a friend or someone who oughtn’t to touch at all. “I know where the records were moved. You’ll have them. You’ll have them by tomorrow evening.”
She’s so relieved to give something, to trade something good for Violet and those white, white hands that I feel like dirt, like a crawling thing to smile. To take her hand, say “Thank you, Doctor Marybeth,” like a child.
And then to ask, quiet like sedition, “There’s another file too.”
When I get upstairs, Whisper’s perched in the attic bedroom in a pile of skirts and tumbledown, eyes reddened and living. She looks up at me from the center of a circle of paper scraps that radiates out like a summoning sign. Doctor Marybeth’s spare bed’s been moved to the side, and underneath it is dust and dust that goes on for half an age.
Dust is old skin, I remember; Atticus’s teaching. Could be Corner’s dust. I step out of it and wrap my arms around my chest, like Doctor Marybeth did, to hold out the sudden cold.
“It’s done,” I say low, so to not disturb her ghosts. “I need to go get Ari.”
Whisper nods once, face bleak as the night sky Above, before turning back to her pictures.
“Bring that one to the left,” she says, and Jack looks up from the circle he’s pacing round Whisper’s scrap-heap fortress, shifts a flick of paper to where she’s pointing.
“What’re you doing?” I blurt, all knees and elbows, and Whisper settles another curl of scorched notepaper a precise finger sideways.
“I’m going to call out Atticus,” she says simple, and the hard, frowning concentration that’s normal Whisper, regular Whisper with a broken pipe or food shortage, is back in her face. “It’ll take half an hour. Close the door.”
The sun’s already going down. Ari’ll be mad at me for sure now. Bea might be too; I told her I’d be back before dark for bottles, and Bea I owe Sanctuary and don’t want to displease. But I’m sworn to keep Safe. To do my best for Safe.