three
The siren wakes Nico first.
It cuts into the heavy sleep that’d finally fallen over her, tugging her from her momentary respite. Through the fog in her mind she tries clinging to the inexplicable emotion still coursing through her veins, the rapidly fading remains of some dream she’s already forgotten. Nico runs her hands over her face and groans. This is the third time the sirens have gone off this week.
She hears the screaming next. Frustrated that she can’t remember the source of the overwhelming feeling her dream had given her and irritated that she’d been roused from it, Nico pushes herself to a seated position. Through the security lights filtering through her window from outside, she peers at the clock hanging high up near the ceiling. It’s 4:30am.
The shouts that join the screaming coax Nico from her bed, momentarily alerting her to the possibility that Gert is suffering another attack. But it doesn’t sound like Gert.
One peek out into the hallway confirms her suspicions. Squinting against the sudden brightness, Nico spots several nurses and a few security guards grouped a few doors down, attempting to calm an overly excited patient she can’t see yet. But it isn’t Gert. Nico catches a flash of dark, curly hair as the girl struggles against the efforts opposing her.
“I swear I’m telling the truth! You don’t know anything!” The patient breaks free from the nurses, screaming over them. Nico finally recognizes her as one of the younger admissions. Molly…something. Nico struggles to remember. “You’re not listening to me! I’m strong. Really strong. I’m stronger than all of you combined.”
“We hear you, Ms. Hernandez.”
“But you’re not listening!” With a shriek, Molly yanks her arm from the grip of one of the smaller nurses. The woman staggers forward, eyes wide and terrified. “I snapped my bed in half. Look in my room and you’ll believe me!”
“I’m looking at your bed and nothing’s out of the ordinary,” a male nurse shouts and, for a quick and fleeting moment, Nico finds herself curious to step forward and peak into Molly’s room herself to assess its condition. Beside the man, Nico spots another nurse readying a syringe, fumbling with it in her gloved hands. A sedative.
“What do you mean? You…you don’t see it? It’s right there!” Molly screams, gesturing wildly toward her door. Her eyes are wide and desperate. “I’m not imagining it!”
Stop. Just stop fighting them, Nico repeats wearily in her own mind, silently pleading with the girl to put an end to the chaos. Still caught somewhere between reality and a fabricated memory, she leans heavily against her doorframe. Stop fighting or you’ll go to Solitary. Down the hall, beyond the excitement, Nico’s eyes catch sight of Gert’s purple hair emerging from her own room.
“Wait!” Molly thrusts her hands out in front of her, prompting the Gibborim staff to fan out cautiously around her, as if frightened by what she might do next. Somewhere in the back of Nico’s mind she likens the girl to a wild animal trainer, arms outstretched in some careful attempt to placate and calm the beasts snarling before her.
“Wait,” Molly repeats, softer now as the voices permeating every inch of the corridor begin to quiet. Outside, the siren continues to wail. “Wait, I-I can…I can show you. I can prove it.”
Interest piqued now, Nico watches as Molly lowers her arms to her sides. She closes her eyes, growing slowly still as though preparing to pull a force from the very core of the earth itself. It’s quite the intriguing display, and equally upsetting as Nico notices the sudden gesture the male nurse signals to his companion.
A verbal warning lodges itself in Nico’s throat, fighting to break free. Instead, Nico keeps her lips pursed tightly together as the woman plunges her syringe into Molly’s upper arm and surprises the girl out of her focus. An expression of betrayal washes over Molly’s face, and her eyes widen briefly in devastation before they roll back. The stronger, more physically fit members of the staff rush to catch Molly when she slumps forward, supporting her between them. Among the commotion, another nurse slips behind the group and eases the door to Molly’s bedroom shut before locking it.
“Everyone back in their rooms,” a security guard commands. Nico finds herself briefly disappointed that Chase isn’t one of them, and she wonders if the situation might have ended differently had he been here. But he never is—he must only work the day shift—and once again another patient’s struggle ends the way the others have. It’s another Thursday morning.
Nico shares a quick, tired glance with Gert down the hall as the remaining patients grumble dejectedly to themselves. Then, slowly, she eases her own door closed.
“Are you not gonna eat this morning?”
Nico blinks at Gert, willing her eyes to focus on the little gleam of light reflecting off the rim of her glasses before lowering her gaze to the food piled onto the paper plate in front of her. She pokes at the glop of rehydrated eggs and lazily eyes the soggy bacon beside them. The special food item of the week. Nico’s stomach churns painfully.
“No, I am,” she mumbles. She lifts one of the greasy strips with her plastic fork and holds it up to her nose. It doesn’t smell terrible, at least. “Sorry, I’m just tired today.”
“When is anyone here not tired?” Gert averts her attention back to the food on her own plate and shovels some of the eggs onto her fork. “Did you get any sleep after everything happened?”
“With Molly? I think so.”
“But not much?”
Nico attempts a bite out of her bacon. When it doesn’t tear, she resorts to shoving the entire strip into her mouth instead before speaking. “It was more like a weird limbo than anything else.”
“Kind of like most nights, huh?”
Nico nods, shifting her focus toward the strenuous task of gnawing down the bacon fat. The conversations she and Gert have during breakfast are mundane and redundant and bereft of real substance. However, they are just stimulating enough to keep their minds busy and their thoughts from running rampant into some dark cavern they cannot escape. No, they’d long discovered just how important these short little exchanges are in keeping their sanity here.
Stealing a glance toward the table beside theirs, Nico catches sight of the three patients grouped silently together. None of them speak to one another, yet one girl whispers into her watered-down oatmeal, giggling as if it’d just spilled to her all her companions’ dirtiest secrets. Somewhere in the back of Nico’s mind she recalls that her name is Destiny, and she wonders, in all the girl’s wildest dreams, if she’d ever predicted her own destiny would be to wind up here. Alone.
“They took her to Solitary.” Gert’s voice tears Nico’s attention from the adjacent table. Her lips are pursed in a tiny frown. “Didn’t they?”
Nico finally swallows down the bacon. “Probably.”
“It’s a shame. I…I didn’t know her very well, but…” Gert trails off, focused on the remaining eggs she combs her fork through. As she scoops a bite into her mouth, she shrugs. “She always complimented me on my hair.”
“It is nice hair,” Nico comments, feigning nonchalance as she fights not to think about Molly cooped up in Solitary Confinement, surrounded by padded white walls designed to absorb her screams. Slowly driving Molly madder and more desperate than she’d ever felt surrounded by other patients. Doing far more harm than good.
“Eh, my roots are like three inches long at this point,” Gert says. “I wish they’d let me touch it up again, but they probably won’t for another several months.”
“And only if you behave.”
“When have I ever not behaved?”
Nico shrugs, offering a half-sincere smile. “You shouldn’t have too much to worry about, then.”
A sudden sob steals the girls’ attentions toward the back of the room, where one of the newer patients pleads with a white-clad tech. Nico manages to pick out a few of the sentences she says through her hitching gasps. “I’ve been good after the window incident…Please. I want to go outside this week… Can’t you vouch for me? Tell them I’ve been good?”
“Holy shit, it’s Thursday, isn’t it?” Gert asks. “We get to go outside today.”
Nico smiles a little as she attempts to drown out the woman’s cries. “Good thing you’ve behaved after all.”
Gert chuckles a little, half-heartedly. She combs her fingers through her hair, fighting to free a few knots as she speaks. “How do you want to do it this time? Together or alone?”
“If it’s alright with you,” Nico begins. A particularly loud shout from the patient causes her to wince. If the woman doesn’t calm soon, she too will be taken away to Solitary. Just like Molly. “If its alright with you, I’d like to venture out alone today.”
Gert nods. “I understand,” she says, and suddenly Nico wants more than anything to somehow skip the next few hours, to rush through their scheduled television time in the rec room and escape into the fresh air.
Clarity is a disorienting thing.
Typically cooped up in a lifeless and colorless environment, Nico finds it easy for the brain fog to spread the longer she remains indoors. She allows it to numb her hearing, her sense of taste and smell and touch. She wills it to weaken her eyes, dulling and blurring her eyesight as she keeps them unfocused at a chip in the wall paint or smudge on the tile floor.
The bright, kinetic life that greets her when she finally steps outside nearly overwhelms her every time.
The autumn air is cool today, but the sun is warm. It’s an inviting comfort against her sensitive skin, like a gentle embrace from an old friend welcoming her back into its arms, and Nico finds the heavy lump in her throat tighten again. Her vision blurs momentarily, this time not from voluntary lack of focus but instead from the stinging tears that surface the moment she takes that first, deep breath. She lets the fresh, energetic breeze fill her aching chest.
As she walks, Nico allows herself to tune back into her senses. She listens to the crisp crunch of the dried and deadened leaves under her feet, to the clatter of the occasional stone she sends rolling over its companions with a small kick of her shoe. She focuses her eyes on the grass, counting as she continues slowly onward and noting the sharp lines and edges of the pale green blades. The air is tinged with the scent of smoke, of some controlled fire or factory or chimney somewhere in the distance, hidden behind the trees that shield the hospital from the rest of the world. Somewhere in the recesses of Nico’s mind, she knows the smell reminds her of autumn. It’s the ghost of some excitement she can’t remember feeling but recognizes all the same.
She only allows herself to ponder these things outdoors.
A distant shout behind her brings her back to the present. Turning to glance over her shoulder, Nico spies one of the white-clad nurses chasing after a laughing patient, a girl Nico doesn’t know very well. The girl believes her very real and serious circumstances are a game today. She holds a piece of paper up in the air, shouts something unintelligible, and tosses it toward the nurse. As the nurse scrambles to retrieve the paper, the girl cackles again and races off toward a group of patients huddles under a nearby magnolia, where she begins collecting the browning blossoms that had fallen there. It’s very likely the paper is blank.
Tearing her eyes from the scene, Nico finds she’d inadvertently begun wandering down her routine path once more. She can feel the eyes of another nurse on her as she turns to continue her journey toward the southwest fence, daring to approach as close as she can without convincing someone that she’s attempting an escape plan.
The idea alone is ludicrous—everyone at Gibborim knows the tall wire fence, towering up over the hospital’s second floor windows, is armed. Even if the security guards hadn’t warned her about the fence’s danger, Nico can hear its low, menacing hum now even from ten yards away. Just a single touch would trigger an electrical pulse strong enough to kill her in seconds.
She may be institutionalized, but Nico knows even she isn’t that ignorant.
So, no, she will not escape today. What she will do, however, is peer through the gaps in the fence’s wiring from where she stands and gaze off at the storage building in the distance, isolated from the rest of the asylum. The structure stands along the edge of the trees, its old and faded bricks blending into the rust-colored leaves still adorning the tree branches behind it. Like some exiled sentry, it extends upward two stories, and its dark windows stare back at Nico like the cold and sunken sockets of a skull that’d long lost its eyes.
It’s all very haunting. Curious. And for reasons Nico cannot explain, she loves it.
“What’s over here?”
The sudden nearby voice sends Nico jumping a mile. Heart clamoring in her throat, she half-expects to see Gert standing beside her despite the agreement they’d made at breakfast. She is not prepared, however, to see Karolina instead. The girl grins from ear to ear as she holds up her hands in surrender.
“Sorry! Sorry. It’s just me.” Karolina releases a puzzlingly lighthearted giggle, though Nico wonders if she should have anticipated it at this point. Karolina established it the moment they met; nothing about her matches the subdued, muted atmosphere of the Gibborim Asylum. She doesn’t fit into a place like this. Everything about the situation feels unnatural.
Nico finds herself both awestruck by the girl once more and irritated at the sudden interruption. “You always sneak up on people without warning?”
Karolina’s giggle subsides. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you,” she says. “I just saw you over here by yourself and I thought—”
“Yeah, well, you’ll find most people here like to be by themselves.”
“Oh.” Karolina’s soothing voice falters. “Right. I…I can leave you alone.”
“No. No, it’s fine.” Giving her head a quick shake, Nico averts her gaze to her feet, then back to the desolate brick building. She hugs herself, cupping her elbows in her palms as though to protect herself from the sudden chill the breeze washes over her. She won’t admit to anyone the real reason she does it is for comfort, to create whatever protective boundary she can from the uncomfortable tug in the pit of her stomach Karolina incites within her. She can’t put her finger on it. She isn’t sure she wants to.
She listens to the little crunch beneath Karolina’s foot as the girl steps closer. Nico hugs herself even tighter.
“What is that place?” Karolina asks.
Nico shrugs. “Some electrical building for additional supplies.” she answers. This was the last thing she’d expected Karolina to say.
Karolina’s brow quirks upward. “Why do you think it’s all the way out there?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, have you been there before?”
Nico shifts uncomfortably. “No.”
“Then, how can you be sure it’s an electrical building?”
“I don’t know. What is this, some kind of interrogation?” Nico can’t help the biting tone in her voice now as she finally turns her head to look up at Karolina. “When I said it was okay for you to stay here I didn’t mean you could suddenly grill me for information like this.”
Karolina’s eyes widen briefly, and she takes a small step back. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to frustrate you, I was just…” Her blue eyes flit back over toward the electrical building, skimming the trees beyond it as though fishing for the right words in her mind. “I’m just trying to figure things out.”
Nico’s brow furrows as she studies Karolina, feeling a little freer to do so now that the girl isn’t looking back at her. “Figure what things out?” she asks.
Karolina’s eyes remain on the building through the wire fencing as she shakes her head slightly. The light wind tousles her golden hair, brushes it gently against her flushed cheek. Nico has the sudden curious urge to tuck the strands behind Karolina’s ear. Instead, she tightens her grip on her own elbows.
“I don’t know,” Karolina answers finally. “Things about this place. About Gibborim. Why I’m here. Even things as simple as what that building is, for example.” She waves a hand in the direction of the forest. “It seems like no one here really knows anything for certain.”
“Someone’s sounding like a conspiracy theorist over here.” Nico forces a chuckle, tries to make her voice sound as jovial and teasing as possible, but she’d be lying if she told herself Karolina’s words didn’t just leave an uneasy sensation settling deep within her chest. She attempts to dislodge it with a deep breath.
Turning back to look at the building herself, Nico continues. “Anyway, someone explained everything about the purpose of that place to me a long time ago, but…it’s just hard for me to remember.”
“Seems a lot of things are hard to remember lately.” Karolina’s voice lowers as she says this.
Nico finds herself nodding. “Maybe,” she says. The uneasiness in her chest increases, and she wishes with every fiber of her being that she could give Karolina some kind of answer, to placate her insatiable curiosity with an explanation that didn’t sound unequivocally obtuse. She just wants Karolina to stop looking for answers where she shouldn’t.
For a moment Nico’s tempted to bring up Janet’s words, to explain the science behind dissociative amnesia, but she holds her tongue, thinks better of it. Something tells her Karolina won’t want to listen to it.
“Listen,” she begins. She can feel her fingernails digging into her sleeves, and she attempts to loosen her grip. “All these questions you’re asking. This whole…questioning everything and everyone…it’s…it’s not a good idea. It’s going to get you in trouble. Get you sent to Solitary Confinement like Molly, and—”
“Who’s Molly?”
“It doesn’t matter.” Whirring on Karolina suddenly, Nico can feel the panic creeping up the back of her throat. “What matters is, she’s gone now and who the hell knows when she’ll come back. If she does. And if you keep asking me these questions, you’re gonna get us both in trouble.”
Karolina looks genuinely alarmed. “Nico—”
“Look, I get that you’re new here and confused and scared, but I have no idea who you are or why you continue to approach me, and I…” Scanning the yard wildly as she fishes for the right words, Nico finds a small wave of relief washing over her as she spots a flash of purple hair lingering near the hospital’s back entrance.
Karolina takes a step forward. Nico feels her warm fingertips brush her wrist. “Nico, I—”
“I can’t risk never coming back outside again,” Nico continues as she shies away from Karolina’s touch. “I’m sorry.”
Karolina’s lips part again, but Nico is already turning away. Fighting to steady her breathing, she quickens her pace as she crosses the yard toward the promising sanctuary of Gert’s company, blinking rapidly in some desperate attempt to erase the ache-inducing hurt she can still see etched into Karolina’s pretty face.