THE girl who I witnessed yodeling when she first arrived has the other bed in my room now, but she sleeps with her face to the wall, so all I have is a view of the back of her head and the lump of her body. She sleeps day and night, night and day, and there’s nothing that can wake her, not even when I bolt upright in the dark, shaken to consciousness by a bad feeling I can’t name.
This isn’t a dream—those have been taken from me. This is something else. I let my eyes adjust in the darkness and stare directly overhead, at the ceiling speckled with midnight static. It takes some moments before I start to be able to decipher them. The shadows.
The ceiling and walls are clean and unmarked where my roommate is sleeping—no shadows there. That’s because they’ve all gathered on my side of the room, staining the wall beside my bed and clawing upward to bloom in the darkest spot directly over my pillow, where my head is now resting.
“You have to get out of here,” a voice says.
It wasn’t one of the girls’ voices sidling through the slurred spaces of my mind. It wasn’t Fiona’s voice, her body appearing suddenly beside me in the bed, her mouth tilted to face my ear. It wasn’t even my neighbor, spouting out a random lucid sentence in her sleep. It was my own voice. I’d spoken those words aloud. To myself.
— 57 —
JAMIE has come to visit, and he’s driven my van. He tells me he’ll go drop it off at my house after. A friend will come pick him up, and he’ll leave the keys for me in my room.
I don’t know why he’s come all the way over here to tell me about his transportation arrangements, or why it’s so important to him that I know he got my van off Karl’s back lawn. He goes to the window of the common room to point out the van in the parking lot, and there it is, at the curb beside a low-hanging tree, black and menacing and mine, and if only I could be in it now, going anywhere, just driving.
Jamie’s back is to me, and I can study the set of his shoulders under that old peacoat he’s still got on. His thin legs in those big black boots. The curls of his hair sticking out under that knit cap. If this were the last time I ever got to see him, I’d be okay with it. This memory of him here at the window would be a decent one to hold on to.
Then he turns, and the memory I’m making of him shifts. The pain in his eyes is more emotion than I’ve felt myself in days. It’s like they carved all feeling out of me and handed the gore over to him, as my guest, to carry through the halls on my behalf until his visiting time is up and the dinner hour begins and they make him leave empty-handed.
He takes a seat in a vinyl chair beside me and turns it so we face each other.
“I’ve been thinking about what you said,” he starts. “That night. When I drove you home.”
It’s kind of him, only I can’t remember exactly what I said that night. Bits and pieces like that have been smudged away.
“So that really was what you were seeing?” he goes on. “That girl?” And that’s how I remember I told him about Abby Sinclair.
I have the very strong feeling that he shouldn’t say her name here, so I put my hand on his arm to stop him, the first touch we’ve had between us since he arrived. Unfortunately I’ve used my left arm, and some of the bandage peeks out from the edge of my sleeve. He sees it and freezes. I pull my arm away and put it back where it was.
Jamie and I aren’t together anymore, and I’m not sure if we’re friends, but we’re something. He wouldn’t be here if we were nothing. He starts talking about some random thing and while talking he fidgets—I think the other patients in the common
room
are
making
him
uncomfortable—and it’s while his mouth moves that time slows around him and he doesn’t seem to notice. I’m slow enough to see through it, and what I can see is Fiona standing up from the chair she’s been parked in all afternoon and walking with purpose over to us. She’s behind Jamie’s chair now. Now she’s reaching out her arm and slugging a hand into Jamie’s open coat pocket.