CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
My feet carried me out into the hallway of Ward Z. The white walls, the yellowed lights, they surrounded me in a different way than they ever had. I stood here alone, everyone else stayed behind in the conference room, per Gary's request, but not me. I had been dismissed, not only from their presence, but from my job. The only job I had ever wanted and I'd barely made it a year before being fired. A job I studied for, for years. Years. Thousands of dollars in debt. Unemployed. That's who I was now.
A nobody.
I stopped in front in Patricia's door. Z07. I wanted peer in the window one last time. Maybe she would be coloring, like little girls were supposed to do, like I did. I realized now, probably too late, that Patricia reminded me of myself. Our situations had been different sure, but we both had a childhood trauma where we made a choice that changed who we were as person forever. I'd come out of it okay because I hid the truth from myself, because I let my dad take the fall for my dirty, terrible deed.
I peered in the window, my breath fogged the glass. I wiped it away to reveal something wrong. Wrong. So wrong. I blinked trying to wipe it away, but it didn't work. The scene remained the same. Patricia hung from the rafter in her room, the identical one in Aaron's room where he did pull-ups every day. But Patricia wasn't doing pull-ups. Instead she hung lifeless, some sort of braided rope around her neck. Her face was purple, blue. Violet.
"No!" I pressed my hand against the sensor on the wall. Her door swung open and I rushed forward, grabbing the chair I sat in during our sessions, to stand on, I pulled her body down, she was so light, limp, that it took hardly any effort at all. "Patricia, no, no, no, no, no, please. No." I started CPR, pumping on her chest.
She wasn't dead. She couldn't be. I was helping her. She was getting better. Closer. She was going to be fine. She had a future no matter what anyone else said. Assholes like Gary Waters – and whoever the fuck else – they didn't know anything about her. They didn't know Patricia. They hadn't spent hours with her, staring at her sad little face, imagining what kind of horrors she had lived through. They had no idea. They didn't know how she would change. How she would get better and go on to do something wonderful and miraculous. Her story didn't end here in Ward Z. It didn't. It couldn't. I wouldn't let it.
I pumped harder, faster. "Fuck, come on, Patricia. Don't do this, don't die. You can't!" The tears were hot against my face, dripping down onto my hands as I pumped. "You have to live! You have to prove them all wrong!"
But she didn't. Patricia laid there dead as I pumped on her chest. She was gone and she didn't come back. I sobbed over her dead body, lying there on the white tile. The room smelled awful, and I realized it was because she'd released her bladder when she hung herself. I fingered the rope and realized it was made of tiny little individual threads she had braided together. There were hundreds if not thousands of them.
I glanced over at her bed and noticed one side of the sheet was frayed. Realization hit me. She'd been taking thread from her sheets each week, it had to only be just one or two otherwise we would have noticed.
She planned this. Was this why she had become restless, was this why her moods had seemed to improve, even if only in the slightest.
"You were excited to die," I whispered. "You wanted this." I dropped the rope and stood, backing away. But then, she wasn't Patricia anymore. Instead I was back on Wuthering Lane with Maria's broken body. The impact had all but crushed her, breaking her back. I could remember it like it was yesterday. The way one of her arms, the one that wasn't reaching for me, had stuck out awkwardly in the wrong direction.
"Little Line?" Daddy's hands fumbled with mine. "Are you okay? I didn't mean to, oh shit, I didn't mean to. I'm so sorry." His voice shook, his breath smelled like whiskey. I couldn't look at him. I tried. But I couldn't look at his face. Only his hands.
He didn't go over to Maria. He didn't try to see if she was okay. Instead he wrapped his arms around me. "I'm so sorry, Little Line. I'm so sorry. Please forgive me. I'm a piece of shit and I'm sorry. I didn't mean to. I didn't mean it. I was gonna quit." He continued to babble on while I stood there in his arms. He was warm in the chilliness of the day. His embrace meant things were going to be okay. I was going to be okay.
"No, fuck, no." My own voice drug me out the memory shoving me into the present. I was back in Patricia's room. I sniffled, sucking in deep breaths. "No." I backed away from her body and made a beeline for the door. I had to get out of there. I couldn't stay in here not with her, not anymore.
Out in the hall, things were still silent, quiet, just as I'd left them, as if the men were all still in the conference room. My feet carried me down the hall toward my office. Toward Z15. I was someone else now, some outside being watching myself move through mechanisms of walking. Watching as I pressed my hand against the pad that gave me entrance into Aaron's room. I didn't bother with the remote, the chains, it sat heavy in my pocket.
I didn't need it. It was over. I was done.
I faced him now. He stood just across the room. I hadn't seen him in so long I had almost forgotten the utter beauty of him. The words in his skin, the twitchiness of his eyes. His wounds had healed from when I last saw him. The swelling of his face gone, the gore on his clothes replaced with pristine white ones. How could I forget his perfection? But I had. He took my breath away.
"Love," I said.
He stalked toward me. I could see the monster, the demon, reflected in his eyes.
"The memories of me. They were in your memories of Love. That's what I had Dr. Wintrone type in. Love." I repeated. "I knew I was lost to you. You weren't really mine, but I was yours." I quoted his own words back to him. The words he said to the camera. The words I didn't hear until it was too late and I'd already ruined everything.
Aaron, a master of words, for once, didn't want to talk. His feet reached me followed swiftly by the explosion of pain in my head. I welcomed the darkness.
I awoke to chaos. That's the only way I could describe it. Someone screamed in the distance. Not a scream out of fear, but one out of pain, torture. The sort of screams you hear when someone was being mutilated, destroyed. The sounds were everywhere. Not just one, but many. They seemed to echo around me. I stared up at the white ceiling. There was a crack there, just above me, a chip of paint. I studied it. Who chipped it?
"Finally awake, my one letter away?"
I turned my head to see Aaron. He sat in an office chair, one much like the one I had in my office. He wore a white lab coat over his white uniform, except it wasn't white, not anymore. Blood covered him, but unlike last time, it didn't seem to be his own. The blood spatter on his face wasn't accompanied by swelling or anything else. Just blood. Whose?
I looked down at myself and simultaneously tried to move my arms. They wouldn't budge. I was strapped to a table on my back. There was blood on me too. I could see it on my white button up blouse and on my legs, but I didn't hurt in any of those places.
Not my blood.
My head, however, had a dull ache, but I surmised it came from Aaron. He must have hit me and knocked me out.
"What's going on?" But then I remembered Patricia. "Oh, God, no. She's dead." The image of Patricia's lifeless body superimposed itself in my mind on top of Maria's. The Huffy bloody bicycle, a limp, broken body. Blood. The carefully woven rope. The urine of the floor. The gore on my dad's truck bumper.
"Remember when you played around with my mind, Violet. When you fucked around in my head like you belonged there? Do you?" Aaron's words cut through the air as he leaned over me, his lips spread to reveal his teeth and his eyebrows dipped simultaneously creating his terrifying frowning smile, the one made for nightmares.
"Yes." I breathed the word out on a sigh, while the screams outside the door continued.
"Remember when you made yourself an audience to things that didn't belong to you? To memories you had no business watching? Do you remember those things, Violet?"
"I do." I knew where I was now. What table I had been strapped to.
He continued to smile down at me. "Well it looks like the tables have turned haven't they?"
I swallowed, the spit going down like a lump in my throat, but I wasn't afraid. I expected the fear to come, but it didn't. "They have."
I stared up into his eyes, those eyes that I had fallen for. Eyes so gray they were black. Perceptive eyes. Shades for the brilliant mind behind it. A mind that had fallen in love with once, until I ruined it. I'd tried to reason with him, to explain, but it hadn't mattered a month ago, and I knew it wouldn't matter now. I had taken him the edge of his mental illness, and precariously thrust him over the edge. I broke the control he had over his mind.
Me.
I did that. My own lips spread into a grin, the movement seemed wrong, but it happened anyway. "Do your worst, Aaron."
He continued to smile down at me while screams echoed around us. "I intend to."