I don’t run.
I can picture what Fiona wants from me: a daring escape while the hospital staff is distracted. She longs for the sight of me leaping over the half door that divides the patients from the so-called healthy people on the other side, making it out to the elevator, and riding it down to freedom. But she’s forgotten how slow I am.
There is the moment in which I could make my escape.
And then that moment passes.
I do make it downstairs, and outside, but only with the nurses and the orderlies and the other patients. A group of us takes the back stairs, the emergency exit I didn’t even know was so close to the common room, and we are made to do so without getting our coats, though it’s still only January.
It had been snowing before, I think, but now the bleached-out sky spits up only a few damp flurries. So we stand there shivering in our cotton shirts, with a lucky few in sweatshirts. We watch the parking lot in a daze.
Fiona is at the end of the row we’ve formed against the hospital’s back brick wall, near the shadows and out of reach of the sun. No one’s guarding her, and someone should be. Her spine is slumped and her red-dyed hair hangs in her eyes. She wears the clothes she always wears, the last outfit I remember seeing her in and the outfit she wore through the ashy rooms of the dream: the too-short shirt and the too-tight jeans.
Her bare stomach is exposed to the biting cold. She makes no movement, doesn’t even shiver.
They’re saying it’s only a fire drill, but I know better. We wait outside longer than any drill should last, wait until someone inside gives the all clear.
Then we can go back in. We pile up, one behind the other, pushing into the oversize elevator, enough of us inside you’d think we’d make it sink instead of rise.
Fiona is between me and the paneled wall, and as the elevator doors fold closed I feel how hot her skin is up close, how it roasts against mine. I don’t move away, because I want the mark on me after. I want the proof we’ve both been here.
The adult ward has also been evacuated—in a time of emergency, no one would be left behind—and some of their patients are on the elevator with ours. One of the women has suddenly taken a liking to me. She’s sandwiched beside Fiona, but she ignores Fiona entirely and focuses her attention on me.
Her blue hair is cotton-candy soft, and hollow punctures in her earlobes show where thick piercings used to be.
When she speaks, her voice is fainter than I expect. Gentle.
“They’re wrong about us,” she whispers, her heated words in my face.
The elevator, so fully loaded, takes its time lifting us between floors.
“Who is?” I say back.
“In another place, in another time, we’d be shamans,” the woman whispers with shining, truth-telling eyes as blue as her head. “We’d be gods.”
I turn to Fiona to see what she thinks of this nonsense. There is a muscle in her cheek that jitters—if she lets it go, it would allow her mouth to smile.
A nurse takes the blue woman by the arm and says to me, “Don’t you listen to Kathy. She knows that’s all in her head.
And she knows she’s not to talk about such things with the other patients.”
The blue woman knows no such thing —her blue eyes tell me so—and then when the elevator doors open and she leaves, she takes everything she knows with her.
I can tell Fiona thinks she’s insane.
We’ve returned to our side of the floor, to our vinyl chairs and to the hour before it’s time for dinner, which we look forward to and dread all the same.
My gray notebook is where I left it, open to the page I’d given Fiona to write me a message, though the pencil has vanished from the room.
She’s left me a drawing that’s been scratched into the paper, like with a fingernail. I can see it if I turn the page this way and that, let it catch the light.