I overturn a mop bucket and sit and wait, which is fine for a few minutes but after a little while, pretty damn creepy, especially when I think of those bodies waiting for transport down some unknown corridor. Miles Faye was never creeped out by bodies, but then, Miles Faye never had to hide in a mop closet, helplessly pinning his hopes on a girl who sometimes texts Levi Cantu dirty pictures when she meant to text them to Jeremy White. And the blue-gray of the floor, which seemed harmless at first, reminds me of corpse lips, mold-spotted fruit, bruises. Maybe Dad was right: too many crime scenes and rib spreaders do make a girl morbid.
As the time passes and I give up on reading cleaning product labels to distract myself, I wonder how it was for my dad when he was down here. What I really want to do—though it’s the most likely place to be caught by hospital staff—is sneak down the corridor and look in the morgue, where he spent so many days, where he pried a stone heart out of my grandmother, where he met my mother. Dad once told me this place wasn’t good for him; alone except for the bodies, and under fluorescent lighting unpunctured by windows. In the winter he would enter and exit in total darkness. He said he’d forget what faces looked like in daylight for months at a time, and he was happy to be done with that. Who wouldn’t be?
Then again, I’ve caught him in his office with the shades all drawn after fifteen hours of typing and smoking, sometimes with barely a page to show for it. Before Lindy, I always made sure to knock a couple of times during his binges to remind him he wasn’t the last man on earth in some Twilight Zone scenario. And I spent those occasional nights and weekends reading, which is definitely not the same as spending it alone.
Thinking about Dad with no immediate plotting to keep me busy, I get this ache in my chest, pressure building up that curls my lungs like wet paper and makes it hard to breathe. Quickly I dig into the pocket of my puffy coat, find the stone, and hold it until the closet door rattles open.
“It’s me.” Jessa slips inside, twirling a set of keys clipped to a big plastic Minnie Mouse keychain.
“How?” I hadn’t realized how little I expected her to succeed until now.
“Mrs. Masciarelli is the health records manager. I help her file and move boxes and stuff in the summer. It’s literally the worst. But sometimes it’s okay because Mrs. Masciarelli has this thing. Incompetence? She has to go to the bathroom, like, every twenty minutes, so last summer I would file for twenty minutes and then go see Jake Elroy, who’s this really cute eighteen-year-old who had community service.”
I roll my finger through the air.
“Anyway, I said I wanted to gossip and brought her a coffee. It sped things up.”
“That’s devious.”
“Says you, 007.”
I stand and stretch, having cramped up on the mop bucket. I still hate to ask for help, hate needing help, but times are desperate. “So . . . where now?”
She holds up the keys. “To the storage room! If anyone sees us, say we’re new volunteers.”
“And they’ll just leave us alone down here?”
“No, they definitely won’t.”
We’ve left the closet, rounded exactly one corner, and gone exactly fifteen feet when Jessa’s phone jangles in her purse at top volume.
“Turn it off,” I whisper, giving her the evil eye.
“Wait one sec.” She digs it out and tucks it into her shoulder. “What?” she says into it.
“Turn it off!”
“Oh my god, calm down,” she says. “It’s my brother.” She listens for a minute and then elbows me, totally unnecessary since I’m still staring daggers at her. “Chad says he can only drive us home tonight if we meet him and Jeremy at the Friendly Toast at seven. Want to?”
Perma-crush on Chad notwithstanding, it is impossible to explain how much I don’t care. “Just get off the phone, Jessa. Please?”
“We’ll see you there,” Jessa whispers—a little late for stealth, if you ask me—and turns off the volume on her phone. “Okay, okay. It’s off. Happy?” There are locked doors on either side of us. Jessa points out the medical supply room, food supplies, linen storage, the big laundry room where they wash the lab coats and bedsheets and whatever else is bloodied up. “And here”—she sorts through and selects a key with a blue rubber cap, then slots it in a doorknob—“is the file storage. Voilà!” We hurry inside and shut ourselves in the musty dark before Jessa finds the switch. The lights flicker on halfheartedly.
“Shit,” I can’t help but mutter. Milk crates pale with dust are stacked on shelves around a storage room bigger than our whole basement in Sugarbrook.
“I know, right?” she says. “But it’s not that bad. It’s sorted by year, and then, like, alphabetically.”
I unzip my coat and stuff it in the corner alongside my messenger bag, cleared of schoolwork and all my books but one. “Okay, so I just have to find the box for S in 1998.” To my surprise, Jessa unzips her own jacket, lays it carefully on top of the only island above the dusty floor—my bag and coat—loops her hair into a loose ponytail, and heads over to the shelves, her skinny black cords swishing against each other as she goes.
“What’re you doing?” I ask.
“Baking.”
“I was thinking you could be more of a lookout.”