The Secret Room

by Sandra Block

I feel a chill tunnel through me, though it may be the flu. “The thought had struck.”

  He lets out an angry sigh. “You have to call the warden.”

  I shake my head in dejection. “He won’t listen to me.”

  “Then I’ll call him.”

  “No. Don’t. That’ll just make things worse.”

  He leans an elbow on one of his pillows. “Then what should we do?”

  “There is someone.” I think of the one person who could help me. The man who helped me find out Jane Doe’s identity. The man who sent Sofia to prison. The burly, kindhearted man who reminds me of my father, who died when I was in high school. “Detective Adams,” I say. And I start looking up his number.

  “Zoe?”

  “What?”

  “It’s three o’clock in the morning.”

  * * *

  So I wait until six o’clock to call him.

  Mike is downstairs making coffee and chatting with his mom, and I hear the tip-tapping of Arthur, who has formed a deep and abiding love for Nathan and his mislaid Cheerios.

  “A riddle?” The detective’s voice is deep and hoarse, as I have clearly just awoken him. “I don’t get it.”

  “It’s about my patients, I think.”

  “What about your patients?”

  I explain about the rash of “bad luck” among my inmate patients and how Warden Gardner is placing the blame squarely on me. I hear pages flipping in his notebook over the phone. “And you said you tried to call the number back?”

  “Yes, but no one answered. And there wasn’t any voice mail either.”

  His pen is scratching paper. “You’ve got my e-mail still?”

  I lift the phone from my cheek to double-check. “Yes.”

  “Good. Send me a screenshot. I’ll try to run the number, but we may need your phone.”

  The suggestion of handing over my primary addiction sends me into a minor panic attack. “Do you think that will be absolutely necessary?”

  He exhales into the phone. “Yes, Zoe, it will be.”

  I pause. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m just overreacting.”

  “You’re not overreacting. At the very least it’s harassment, quite possibly from a prisoner.”

  I pause, deciding whether to voice what has been budding in my head, and will surely sound like paranoid ideation. “This is going to sound crazy, but…”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you think the text could be from someone who’s involved in this all somehow? Like, someone is out there, killing my patients?” There is long pause. “Barbara Donalds, for instance, the one who killed herself. She wasn’t even on Elavil.”

  He yawns into the phone. “I’ll talk to the warden, Zoe, but I gotta be honest. It sounds pretty unlikely.”

  “Yeah, but why else—”

  “We’ll look into it,” he says, humoring me. “Send me the screenshot.”

  “Okay.” I lay my head back on my pillow, fighting another spell of nausea. From downstairs rise up the sounds of doors opening and cheery voices, Nathan whining and racing feet. I still don’t feel in tip-top shape, but I can’t hide out in my room forever. “And there’s one person in particular I was thinking about.”

  “Yeah,” the detective says, “and I have a pretty good guess who that might be.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Walking down the hallway of the busy precinct, Detective Adams limps on one of his bowed knees. His burly frame has grown a bit burlier in the last year. “So it looks like a burner phone.”

  “A burner phone? What do you mean?”

  “Pay as you go,” he explains. “Untraceable.”

  “Oh.” We sit down at his desk. “That doesn’t sound good.”

  “No, you’re right,” he admits. “It’s not very helpful.”

  “Can you figure out what cell tower it came from?” I ask, vaguely remembering this from a Dateline show.

  “Doubtful. But we’ll see. It’ll help to be able to look at your phone.”

  With that unmistakable hint, I remove it from my purse. I hold it in my hand with great trepidation, like a crack addict being asked to hand over the pipe. “You said I could get it back first thing tomorrow, right?”

  “Yes, Zoe. First thing,” Detective Adams assures me, with minimal exasperation considering I have asked this question three times already. Scotty once told me, “You would get the shakes without that fucking phone.” And he’s fucking right.

  “Okay.” Though it pains me, I hand it to him.

  “My tech team is fast, I promise,” he says, placing it on his desk with care. “Any more texts, by the way?”

  “No.” A detective whistles down the hall to get someone’s attention. “But when we find out who it is, we can charge them, right?”

  Detective Adams shrugs. “We’ll see. Fortunately or unfortunately, they didn’t threaten you. So we might not have much of a case.”

  I bite my lip, not liking his answer. “It was probably just a stupid prank anyway.”

  “Probably. But it’s worth checking out.” He ushers me out of the building then, and it’s a ten-minute drive over to prison.

  Soon enough I’m waiting on the women’s floor for a patient, feeling adrift without my phone tucked safely in my purse, when the desk phone rings.

  “Zoe?”

  “Hi, Jason. What’s up?”

  “Can you do another family visit? Abraham Green is here.” His voice sounds stressed. “The warden wanted me to take all the families, but I’ve got a million patients left to see.”

  “Sure, I’ll take him. Is Andre out of Medical yet?”

  “Yup. His boo-boo’s all better.”

  “Pretty bad for a boo-boo,” I counter.

  “Not as bad as Jimenez. Who is in Medical right now. And who I have to see next.”

  I’m thinking back at the name. “Oh, the penis guy? Don’t tell me he got a hold of paper clips again.”

  “Nope,” he says. “A safety pin this time.”

  * * *

  We sit in the family conference room, the plastic veneer of the table reflecting a fuzzy version of Abraham Green’s face.

  “Andre is making some progress,” I say. Andre himself looks down grimly at the table. He grips the edge of the table with red-gloved hands, his bandage gone.

  “Good,” Mr. Green answers, hopeful and smiling at his son.

  “I’ve explained to him how important it is to take the pills,” I say, more for Mr. Green’s benefit than Andre’s.

  “But they make me cloudy,” Andre objects, and the sentence does come out slow.

  “It’s okay, son. You’ll get used to them.” Mr. Green turns to me for confirmation. “Isn’t that so?”

  “Yes. And once you’re stable, we can lower the dose, if the side effects are too strong.”

  “It’s tough in here, though.” Andre’s eyes dart around the table, not focusing on either of us. “I gotta be on my toes.”

  “Don’t worry about that.” Abraham Green waves away the statement. “You won’t be in here for long. I’m working with the lawyer.”

  Andre subtly rocks back and forth in his chair. Scruffy hair is coming in under his chin, perhaps part of an effort to look older than his mere sixteen years. “Can I tell you something, Dad, if you promise not to get mad?”

  “Of course, Son.” Mr. Green takes hold of Andre’s orange sleeve. “You know that. You can tell me anything.”

  Andre looks doubtful but pushes ahead anyway. “I got a warning.”

  “Okay.” He turns to him. “A warning of what?”

  “Beast Boy came by the other night. He said Violator’s coming. He said to take care of things.” There is a pause while Mr. Green looks down, then a slam on the table makes both me and Andre jump.

  “Damn it, Andre.” His father stands up with clear disgust. “That’s fiction. I told you that before. These are stories, Son, stories. You’re not a child anymore, Andre. It’s time to grow up.”

  As he settles b
ack in his chair, both father and son look embarrassed. A depressing silence fills the room as I finally get a glimpse of the not-so-perfect Mr. Green, breaking at the seams under the stress. And I can see Andre, too, as a little boy, being scolded by his father for reading comic books. But that’s why we’re here. To scratch the surface of this relationship. To mine out the cracks and hopefully start to repair them. “I’m sorry,” Mr. Green says, to both of us. “I’m just at odds and ends here with all this.”

  “Of course,” I say.

  Mr. Green pushes the back of his hand to his mouth, holding back a sudden sob.

  “He helps me, Dad,” Andre says, as though to convince him.

  His father sucks in air, trying to collect himself. “Who helps you, Son?”

  “Beast Boy,” he says. “And he would have helped Mom, too.”

  “All right, Son, all right.” Mr. Green reaches over to massage his shoulder.

  “I’m sorry, Dad,” Andre says, leaning into him.

  “It’s okay.” Abraham pulls a tissue from his pocket, and his wallet comes out, too. It falls open, revealing a crooked picture in a plastic shell. Behind the sheen is a young smiling boy with a front tooth growing in. At first I assume it’s a picture of Andre when he was younger, but then I notice his skin tone is lighter, and his nose a bit broader.

  “Is that Andre’s brother?” I ask, openly staring at the photo.

  “Oh no.” He holds up the wallet for us both to see and smiles at the picture, which seems to conjure up a happier memory. Then he claps the wallet shut and shoves it back in his pocket. “That’s his cousin, Jermaine.”

  “He’s part of the coven,” Andre whispers to me.

  Mr. Green shakes his head in exhaustion. “What’s he saying now?”

  “A double,” Andre whispers, even softer. “Like Steel Serpent.”

  * * *

  The scent of coconut overwhelms me as I reach the office.

  “I can smell that you’re wearing your lotion.”

  “Yup. Love it.” Jason sniffs his arm with ecstasy, as if he’s on an air freshener commercial.

  “Sure is beachy.” I log into the computer and read over some patient notes. “So Fohrman is off his hunger strike.”

  “Yeah, turns out he’s no Gandhi.” He leans over my chair, the scent of coconut following him. “Hey, can you take Timothy Gordon for me?”

  “The arm guy?”

  “Yeah. You’ve seen him before, and I’m getting crushed here. Dr. Nowhere won’t care anyway.”

  “No problem,” I say, happy to get my census back up.

  Jason goes to see another patient, and I wait in my clinic room until Timothy Gordon is led in. His arm is now out of the torture-device cast, the screws gone. “How is the arm doing?” I ask.

  He lifts his arm as if it’s a foreign object. “Okay. I guess.”

  “You guess?”

  He gives me a small smile. “You’re not gonna like my answer.”

  Tapping my eraser on the desk, I say, “Try me.”

  “I think I figured it out,” he answers in a low voice, as if revealing a secret. “The arm isn’t mine.”

  I pause. “Not yours?”

  “Correct. But I figure, if it isn’t harming me, I might as well just ignore it.”

  “Interesting.” It is a coping mechanism of sorts, though it doesn’t address the central issue of his ambivalence toward his limb. Standing up, I examine the arm, which is a touch atrophic and pale from the cast, but otherwise exactly like his other arm, softly freckled, with light-ginger hair. “How long have you felt this way?”

  He scratches an itch at the wrist. “I remember it back in high school a little. My mom told the doctor, who said it was a phase. And it did go away for a while. But it seems like it came back.”

  “Have you been stressed?” I ask.

  “Ma’am,” he says with a wry smile, “no offense, but this place is practically the definition of stress.”

  “No offense taken.” I do a brief exam. Normal muscle strength, no pronator drift. No extinction to double simultaneous stimulation, which could be a soft neuro sign of a sensory problem. His reflexes are symmetric. “Does it ever do things you don’t want it to do?”

  “No, not as I know.” He extends and flexes it. “Only does what I tell it to do.”

  “Doesn’t try to shut your book, or choke you, or something?”

  The question elicits laughter. “Do people actually have that?”

  “Alien limb syndrome. Often from a stroke.”

  “Well, I ain’t had no stroke. Just a funny feeling about my arm.” He rubs it again. “I’m not fully convinced that it’s mine. But no one seems to agree with me, so I learned to stop arguing about it.”

  When he lifts his arms again, I catch sight of something. A fine line encircling the bicep in blue. So light that it would be easy to miss. “What’s this?”

  “Oh,” he says, caught out. “A tattoo. It’s supposed to be…therapeutic.” He appears embarrassed at the admission. “Pedro did it for me.” He pinches the skin around the tattoo line, then lets it go slack again. “Told me it would provide a physical separation for me. He said it’s mystical. He’s half-Navajo or something.”

  “Huh.” I sit back down.

  “Pedro’s mostly full of shit,” Timothy admits, “but I think maybe he’s onto something.”

  I don’t tell him that an SSRI probably wouldn’t work any better. “Tell me if the tattoo doesn’t work, okay? Before you try to hurt your arm again, you have to tell me, okay?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Of course.” He pulls his sleeves back up, and the guard leads him out, and I sit there wondering how I’m going to chart this one, let alone explain it to Dr. Novaire or the skeptical warden.

  A mystical, therapeutic tattoo.

  * * *

  “Aren’t we going out to dinner soon?” Mike asks.

  “Uh-huh,” I say, mouth full of peanut butter sandwich, while Arthur drools at my feet. “Why do you ask?”

  “No reason,” he says, extending his legs on the couch to check his e-mail. “Just that you’re already eating dinner.”

  “No, I’m just fighting this flu still. It’s weird. It seems to come and go.” I wipe my hands on a paper towel, which Arthur grabs and trots off with into the living room. “There must be benefits to owning a dog, right?”

  “Yes. But they’re subtle at times.” Mike puts his phone down. “Anything new at work?”

  “Kind of. Got an interesting patient.” I sit next to him on the couch, and he scoots over to make room. “He doesn’t believe his arm is real.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Odd, I know. He doesn’t think it’s his own arm. At first I thought it was depersonalization, but now I’m thinking more body integrity disorder.”

  “You see some messed-up folks. Thank God for simple things like kidney stones.” Mike turns the television on to the Sabres pregame show. He is the only one I know who watches the pregame show.

  “I saw the detective today.”

  “Oh yeah?” He looks away from the game. “What did he have to say? Anything on the texts?”

  “No, unfortunately not. He said it’s a burner phone.”

  Mike looks troubled. “I was thinking about it,” he says, as an ad for a bank comes on with smiling people shaking hands. “Maybe we should get you a gun.”

  The idea shocks me. “No way,” I say, shutting him down immediately.

  “Think about it. I could take you to the range, teach you how to shoot.”

  I gaze at him in a new light. “You know how to shoot a gun?”

  He shrugs. “It’s not that difficult, Zoe.”

  “Yeah, but I mean—”

  “I know what you mean. My dad used to be big on that kind of stuff.” He doesn’t say anything more. Mike doesn’t speak to his father, who left his mother for a younger model when he was in high school and left their family on food stamps.

  “Anyway, no guns. End of discussion.
”

  “Pepper spray?” he ventures.

  I think about it for a minute. “Yes. Pepper spray I would agree to.”

  “Good,” he says. “I’ll pick some up tomorrow.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  I was sick over Barbara Donalds. I’m no angel. I’ve done terrible things before, but this was different. She didn’t deserve this. So I stalled. I came up with excuses.

  And you punished me.

  I wasn’t sure at first. You hadn’t brought me to the room in over a week. But I could explain that away. You were busy. You had a real life. You had other things to do.

  But then when it was time for class, there was no denying it. You barely looked at me, leaning over the other girls, putting your hands on their shoulders. I doodled in my notebook, sketches of your tattoos, and you ignored me. You praised the other girls for their essays. You even chuckled when that fat bitch was flirting with you.

  When class ended, I felt physically ill. It took everything not to cry. The girls scattered all over the room, looking through the stacks for the latest Danielle Steel or whatever. I went over to you, to our corner. I asked if something was wrong.

  You were leafing through someone’s journal and didn’t look up. I told you I’d help you if you helped me. You’re not helping me.

  I’m trying, I said.

  Not hard enough.

  I reminded you how I got on the computer and figured out her password. You were so happy when I did that before, I remember. You smoothed my hair.

  But now you just looked at me, your eyes turned icy. I want another name. Either you get it for me or I don’t need you.

  I felt my lips tremble. I’ll try.

  You looked around then, and seeing no one was there, you leaned in. I thought you were going to kiss me and I relaxed but you grabbed me by the crotch. I gasped, feeling my pants pushing into me. You lightened your grip then, just a bit, and started rubbing. I groaned without meaning to, and you leaned into my ear.

  You want more of this? you asked, and like an idiot I nodded. Then get me another name. And then you dropped your hand and walked away, leaving me there.

  Furious, humiliated, and panting.

  Like a fucking dog.