He kissed her shoulder, then bent down for his clothes. When he was dressed, he leaned closer to her and whispered, “ ’Bye,” and then he left.
Within minutes he was on his motorcycle and racing down the black, empty expanse of road. He almost turned onto the old highway; then he remembered why he’d left Trudi’s house in the first place. The dream he’d had.
His patient.
He thought about that poor girl, all alone in her room.
Kids were afraid of the dark.
He changed directions and hit the gas. At the hospital, he parked beside Penelope Nutter’s battered red pickup and went inside.
The hallways were empty and quiet, with only a few nighttime nurses on duty. The usual noises were gone, leaving him nothing to hear save the metronome patter of his footsteps. He stopped by the nurses’ station to get the girl’s chart and check on her progress.
“Hey, Doctor,” said the nurse on duty. She sounded as tired as he felt.
Max leaned against the counter and smiled. “Now, Janet, how many times have I asked you to call me Max?”
She giggled and blushed. “Too many.”
Max patted her plump hand. Years ago, when he’d first met Janet, all he’d seen was her Tammy Faye fake eyelashes and Marge Simpson hair. Now, when she smiled, he saw the kind of goodness that most people didn’t believe in. “I’ll keep hoping.”
Listening to her girlish laughter, he headed for the day care center. There, he peered through the window, expecting to see the girl curled up on the mattress on the floor, asleep in the darkness. Instead, the lights were on and Julia was there, sitting on a tiny chair beside a child-sized Formica table. There was a notebook open on her lap and a tape recorder on the table near her elbow. Although he could only see her profile, she appeared utterly calm. Serene, even.
The girl, on the other hand, was agitated. She darted around the room, making strange, repetitive hand gestures. Then, all at once, she stopped dead and swung to face Julia.
Julia said something. Max couldn’t hear it through the glass. The words were muffled.
The girl blew snot from her nose and shook her head. When she started to scratch her own cheeks, gouging the flesh, Julia lunged at her, took her in her arms.
The girl fought like a cat, but Julia hung on. They stumbled sideways, fell down on the mattress.
Julia held the girl immobile, ignoring the snot flying and head shaking; then Julia started to sing. He could tell by the cadence of her voice, the way the sounds blended into one another.
He went to the door and quietly opened it. Just a crack.
The girl immediately looked at him and stilled, snorting in fear.
Julia sang, “… tale as old as time … song as … old as rhyme …”
He stood there, mesmerized by the sound of her voice.
Julia held the girl and stroked her hair and kept singing. Not once did she even glance toward the door.
Slowly, the minutes ticked by. “Beauty and the Beast” gave way to other songs. First it was “I’m a Lonely Little Petunia in an Onion Patch,” and then “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” and then “Puff the Magic Dragon.”
Gradually, the girl’s eyelashes fluttered shut, reopened.
The poor thing was trying so hard to stay awake.
Julia kept singing.
Finally, the girl put her thumb in her mouth, started sucking it, and fell asleep.
Very gently, Julia tucked her patient into bed and covered her with blankets, then went back to the table to gather her notes.
Max knew he should back away now, leave before she noticed him, but he couldn’t move. The sound of her voice had captured him somehow, as had the glimmer of pale moonlight on her hair and skin.
“I guess this means you like watching,” she said without looking at him.
He would have sworn that she’d never once glanced at the door, but she’d known he was there.
He stepped into the room. “You don’t miss much, do you?”
She put the last of the papers in her briefcase and looked up. Her skin appeared ashen beneath the dim lighting; the scratches on her cheeks were dark and angry. A yellow bruise marred her forehead. But it was her eyes that got to him. “I miss plenty.”
Her voice was so soft, it took him a second to really hear what she’d said.
I miss plenty.
She was talking about that patient of hers, the one that killed those children in Silverwood and then committed suicide. He knew about that kind of guilt. “You look like a woman who could use a cup of coffee.”
“Coffee? At one o’clock in the morning? I don’t think so, but thank you.” She sidled past him, then herded him out of the day care center and shut the door behind him.
“How about pie?” he said as she headed down the hallway. “Pie is good any time of the day.”
She stopped, turned around. “Pie?”
He moved toward her, unable to keep from smiling. “I knew I could tempt you.”