*
The last time I rode the bus, I sat across from a woman with a Seeing Eye dog. The dog had a golden coat and wore a bright yellow vest. He sat perfectly still, like he rode in buses all the time, which I suppose he did. When we passed the evangelical church, the dog started to lick my hand. The woman gave the leash a little yank, but the dog kept on licking. Summer was here; the days had gotten long again. I had stopped seeing signs of Marcus and tried to think as little as possible about what that might mean. I did not know that in a few weeks, the sickness would be all over the news and a hazmatted man with a carnation in his lapel would come to tell me about the Hospital, the first time I had ever been chosen for anything that could be called special. That my life would soon be burned down to a stub. Now I wonder what Clara Sue Borden was doing while I was riding that bus, a dog licking the salt from my arm with its long, rough tongue. Had she already started to feel a strange roughness on her skin, a fuzziness around the edges of her memory?
14.
I wake to voices in the hallway. The pitches shoot up and down. In my half-sleep I see a heart monitor screen and neon lines jumping around from LIVING to DEAD. I stare up at the white ceiling and listen. I roll around and get trapped in my sheets. When I hear Dr. Bek, I kick my way out of bed. He is rarely on the fifth floor in the mornings.
“Louis, wake up. Something’s going on.”
He sits up and his pale hair falls across his forehead in a way that makes my heart pound.
“Something’s always going on,” he says, yawning wide.
We go into the hall. The overhead lights are bright white. The door to the twins’ room is open. Dr. Bek is in there, questioning the nurses from our floor. I look at the three of them standing by the beds, large and huffing and helpless. Next to them is a small tower of linoleum squares and a dark, gaping hole. “Have you looked in the basement?” he’s asking, his blue eyes flitting around behind the shield. “Have you checked all the storage closets?”
Right away I know what’s happened. The twins are gone.
*
An Emergency Community Meeting is called. All the patients are broken into pairs and each pair is assigned a part of the Hospital to search. Our Group gets floor eight. No one gets floors one or ten. There is no mention of the hole.
The eighth floor is residential, like ours: the long hallway, the arched window at one end, the smooth white walls, the row of closed doors. But since the eighth floor is unoccupied, the knobs on these doors don’t turn. Faces, ashen from months spent inside, don’t peek out into the hall.
I don’t like this ghost version of our floor. I don’t like the emptiness, the reminder of what the Hospital will be like after we are gone, dead or released from our contracts. I touch the walls as we pass, imagining I’m leaving my DNA behind. On the speakers, the Pathologist is calling the boys’ names. Other patients are opening the doors to the supply closets and rummaging around inside.
Louis and I go into every room. All the beds have been stripped, leaving behind metal frames and green rubber mattresses. White sheets are folded on the mattresses, like patients have just departed or the Hospital is expecting imminent arrivals. On our countdown calendar, the bird for January is the snowy egret, which has feathers that spring from its body like a long fringe, but there are no calendars on these walls. In the bathrooms the little motes between the shower tiles are thick with black mildew, the mirrors bordered with rust. We shout “Sam!” and “Christopher!” and our voices refract back at us in a way that makes me sick with fear.
I don’t think the twins are here, on this floor, but they are just kids and they have to be hiding out somewhere. We have more rooms to search. We keep going.
At the very end of the hallway, we find a room that has been turned into some kind of storage area. A hospital bed in full recline is parked in the corner. Brown boxes, the cardboard tongues flapping, have been pushed underneath. Tall rolls of plastic sheeting lean against walls, ready to be unfurled into the casings that surround the sick. Empty IV bags hang from metal stands like withered organs. Clear tubes are coiled on the ground and on the mattress and on top of the boxes. Death requires a lot of equipment, we are learning.
I remember Christina, the beeping of her monitors and the squares of flesh-colored tape holding the needles in her veins and the long pauses between her breaths. Her ransacked memory. The years of silence and secrets.
We lived in the same city and she never once thought to claim me, not until she was almost out of time.
Louis and I step into the room. We close the door behind us. This is the last place we have left to search; there is no sign of the twins here or anywhere else on this floor. I see us retreating downstairs and hearing all about how another patient found the boys in the basement or in the library, reading up on the Hawaiian alphabet, or in some remote corner of the Dining Hall.
Behind the door, against another wall, we find a tall tape recorder with two circles that stare out at us like eyes. Louis and I sit in front of it. There are rows of buttons and dials. I press a square button.
Static, Dr. Bek reciting a date, a woman’s voice. The voice sounds familiar, like a voice we used to hear around the Hospital, but it is not one I hear anymore and so I know this woman must be dead.