“For what it’s worth, I think you should be able to see your children.”
His eyes still on the bloody water, he shrugged, the small gesture tight with pain. “They’re right. I’m not fit.”
“That’s rubbish,” I said. “You have a few nosebleeds, that’s all. Your children would survive it.”
“Is that all you think it is?” He dabbed his nose again, then rinsed the flannel, swirling it for longer than necessary. “After the war,” he said slowly, never raising his eyes to me, “I wasn’t myself. I began drinking. It got . . . very bad.” He pulled the flannel from the water, wrung it out slowly. “Antonia—that’s my wife—was frightened. She told her father she didn’t want me around the children anymore. And her father told me that I would come here and recover, or he would move them all back to the family home and I would never see any of them again.”
I sat very still.
“So,” he continued, “I came here. I thought I’d dry out—you know, a few days of the shakes, stiff upper lip, carry on and that sort of thing—and go home and take up my life. And then . . .” He looked up at the blank wall where a mirror would be, though no man was given a mirror in his room at Portis House. He stared at the wall as if he could see himself. As impersonal as a doctor, he pulled downward on the skin of one exhausted, bloodshot eye, and then the other. “The first time it happened,” he said, “I pissed myself. And they told my father-in-law. They told him.”
That bell sounded inside me again, somewhere deep down. Oh, I understood that kind of fear. I understood it well.
Mr. Mabry, said Matron’s voice in my mind, has a particular psychoneurosis. And then, Martha: He gets afraid. He thinks he sees something.
He’s coming.
I leaned forward in my chair, unable to keep quiet any longer. “What is it?” I asked him, unable to keep the pleading from my voice. “What is it? What do you see?”
“You’d like me to tell you, wouldn’t you?” His gaze cut to me. “You’d like to know what we all see. And when the doctors make you tell them, I’ll never see my family again.”
“No,” I said. “No.”
“That’s how it works,” he said. “That’s how it is for all of us.”
I was silent.
“I’m quite all right, Nurse,” Mabry said after a moment. He looked away. “I’d like to get some rest, if you don’t mind.”
? ? ?
“He all right?” Roger asked when I came out into the corridor. He leaned against the wall, his arms crossed over his chest.
“Yes,” I managed. “He just wants rest, that’s all.”
Roger’s eyes watched me keenly in the gloom. “All patients present and accounted for,” he said. “Tucked into their beds like children on Christmas Eve.”
“All right.” I had known it, of course—known that whatever I had followed down the stairs had not been a man. “And Mr. Childress?”
“Sleeping like a little baby.”
There was something nasty in his tone. I wanted to get away from him, the sooner the better. “Very well. I suppose—”
“What should I do with Patient Sixteen?”
A low bell of alarm sounded in my gut. “Beg pardon?”
“He probably wants out by now, but I think we should leave him in. At least for a while.”
“What are you talking about?”
Roger’s eyes gleamed as if he’d been waiting for me to ask. “I locked him in.”
“You what?” I launched myself down the hall, fumbling for my keys. “You can’t do that. What’s the matter with you?”
“He wanted to come out when the shaky one started screaming,” said Roger, following me. “He was getting agitated. I needed him to stay put.”
How long ago had that been? Half an hour? I reached the door and knocked on it. “Jack? Mr. Yates?” I clumsily tried my keys, one after the other, in the lock. There was no answer.
“You don’t have the key. I do.”
I looked up at Roger. He was half smiling. He’d heard me use Jack’s first name. My heart was in my throat, my head pounding. I was nearly sick with panic. Half an hour. It was long enough. He’d tried to kill himself once before. For the last part of my life, I’ve wanted nothing more than to die.
“Give me your keys,” I said.
“He wouldn’t stay in his room. It teaches them a lesson.”
“Give me your keys.”
He sighed and handed them over as if put upon. I called Jack’s name again and pushed each key into the lock, my fingers sweating, until one of them turned.
The door swung open into darkness. I took a gasping swallow of panic. If anything had happened, if he was dead, it would be my fault alone. I’d seen the door shut half an hour ago. Stupid, stupid. If he’s dead, you’ve killed him.
“Jack?” I whispered into the dark.
A long moment of silence, and then something moved. I swallowed another breath.
“Jack,” I said again.
He got up from the window seat and walked toward me. He propped a forearm on the doorjamb and leaned on it, looking down at me. “Hullo,” he said.
I looked into his face, taking it in for a long moment. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. And you?”
Something was wrong. I reached up and tilted his face farther into the light from the corridor, studying him more closely. My hand was icy with the aftereffects of terror, but he didn’t complain. His skin was rough with stubble. I stared into his eyes and found the pupils dilated.
“What did you take?” I asked him.
“Nurse Weekes,” he drawled, and I realized how close our faces were. He smiled and tweaked the edge of my pinned cap.
I squeezed my fingers harder along his flawless jawline, pulling him back to attention. I could have shaken him. “You took this before. What was it?”
“The doctors gave it to me.”
“Liquid?” I said. “Shots? Pills?”
The large pupils focused on me again. “Pills.”
“How many?”
“Two.” He blinked slowly. “Three.”
Three pills had done this to him? And how many had the doctors given him? A bottle? If he swallowed the whole thing, no unlocked door, no rule about belts or braces, would save him. “Give me the bottle,” I said.
He leaned a little farther forward, his gaze soft on me. “You’re damned beautiful.”
Something jarred inside me like a shard of glass. No one had ever called me beautiful before. Oh, I knew I wasn’t ugly, but “pretty” was always the word applied to girls like me. As in, Come over here, pretty girl, or Do you like a drink, pretty girl, or Are you going home, pretty girl? I squeezed my legs as my knees went weak. He was drugged; that was all. Too drugged to notice the shock on my face as the word “beautiful” rolled from Jack Yates’s tongue. I kept my voice careful. “Give me the bottle,” I said, and let him go.
Obedient as a child, he went back to his room, fetched the bottle of pills, and gave it to me. I turned away from him and saw Roger still standing behind me, watching. His eyes followed my hand as I dropped the bottle into the pocket of my apron.