CHAPTER FIVE
"Patricia, can you hear me?" I stared at the little girl across the metal table. "My name is Dr. Adeline Violet." I'd been inside her room for five minutes. My first patient visit on my second day in Ward Z.
Her sandy hair hung long, to the middle of her small back. He gaze was blank, flat brown eyes, staring at the wall somewhere above my head.
"Patricia?"
I'd been shocked when I'd read over her file this morning in my office. This was an all-male medical facility, and yet Patricia Philips was a ten-year-old female in Z07. Her file revealed a myriad of tragedy – a child forced into sex trafficking by her own parents. Pornographic videos of her sold online having sex with her older siblings. The videos, a police report stated, date back to Patricia as young as eleven months old – her body violated repeatedly by all of the men in her family. Until one day her house burned down and all of her family died. Since then there had been a number of suspicious fires started within her vicinity. Notes in her file revealed the scratchy, hurried hand of nurses and doctors from previous facilities.
"She can start the fires out of nothing."
"It's her. She doesn't have a soul."
"There's a demon in her."
"Patricia, do you go by any other name? Maybe Pattie or Pat?"
Silence.
She continued to stare at the wall above my head. Her expression unchanging.
Her room was neat, tidy. The small bed made. It wasn't a mess, like most little girls rooms should be. It wasn't full of Barbies or toys. Instead she lived in a steel white cell. No possessions outside of her jumpsuit and bland sheets.
I frowned. Her file also said she never spoke. Since her arrival some two years ago, Dr. Smith's patchy scrawl said he'd never heard her utter a single word. A silent frequency. She would eat and sleep, use her small toilet in the corner, and shower when allowed – but outside of that, she just existed. Sitting in the chair she sat in now or sitting on her bed.
I chewed the inside of my lip, considering the medication she'd been on. A slew of downers.
Maybe she didn't need medication? Dr. Smith hadn't recorded any malfeasance or fires since she had arrived.
Plus the damn place is fireproof. If she set a fire in here, she would just succeed in burning herself.
"Patricia, do you know how to talk?"
No response.
I pulled out the Rorschach inkblots placing the same one before her as I had Aaron Whitman the night before.
"Could you tell me what you see here, Patricia?"
Her gaze diverted to the inkblot, but she made no sound.
I waited. Something I had learned in medical school, and turned out to be true in the working world: waiting was key. As a psychiatrist, we were taught that people in psychiatric hospitals knew our goals, our plans – at least the most basic ones, and often patience and the willingness to wait for response were attributes we needed to emulate.
After some time I put the inkblot away and decided to just talk to her. "The weather outside was chilly today when I walked over my from my house. Colder than yesterday. I hope the fall feeling returns and stays a little bit longer. I didn't bring my coat this morning, and I shivered all the way here. I was too stubborn to go back. I was already on my way." It reminded me of a time in grad school when I'd forgotten my jacket in my dorm and Anthony Rogers had given me his, even though it was freezing out. There wasn't time for me to go back and he suffered all evening without one. It was the beginning of our relationship – a warm memory, one that quickly shriveled and died behind my eyes.
I cleared my throat, focusing back on Patricia. "The leaves are turning on the Aspen trees. Have you ever seen leaves turn, Patricia?" I continued, "they are somewhere between green and gold. The in-between. It's nice."
I spent the next thirty minutes talking to her, about the weather, the trees, the sun, the wind. Had she ever experienced them? Had she breathed in the scents of the world as she ran through the yard, chasing one of her siblings? Had there been anything simple about her life?
She's here, Adeline. Of course, she hadn't. Not in the way she should have.
A paragraph in her file from her foster mom had stuck out to me the most. Patricia had stayed with her directly after the fire that had killed the rest of Patricia's family:
I'd been excited at the prospect of have Patricia stay with us. We had wanted a baby for so long, but had never been blessed with one. She was our first foster child, and our last.
She took everything from me.
She'd been with us only three months when my husband started to change. He didn't look the same anymore. He didn't feel the same. My husband. The man I'd loved for a decade had grown cold. Different.
He stopped loving me.
It only took three months. Three months of the monster inside her. I knew before I caught them together. I felt it in my bones. She told me, with her vacant eyes. She was dead inside and she sucked the life out of him too. The demon in her lured him, it festered under his skin until he wasn't the man I married anymore. Until he was a monster fucking a child.
I caught them. And while I wailed and screamed at him, he tried to calm me. That's when I smelled the smoke.
The woman's husband had died in that fire trying to save Patricia – not his wife.
I stared at the little girl, curious. I was far from equipped to work with someone of her capacity. Child psychology was the least of my qualifications. I was certainly more qualified to treat the most damaged adults over children. Especially children who were accused of being some sort of demonic pyromaniac sexual predator.
Patricia was a first for me in many ways. Of course, I'd never treated a child, and I'd never had a patient who didn't talk, at all – or acknowledge my presence, but the more I watched her, the more I wondered if anyone had ever taken the time to talk to her. The woman's testimony in Patricia's file suggested that perhaps for a short time someone had, maybe. Previous psychiatrists, including Dr. Smith, didn't record anything specific they said to her, outside of asking very pointed questions about her past.
When I closed the door of her room behind me, I made a note to talk to her every day.
"Dr. Violet." Christopher, the day nurse approached. "Z15 is asking for you."
I furrowed my brow. "Aaron Whitman? Did he say what he needed?"
Christopher smiled a crooked, knowing smile. "He said he missed you."
I kept my face emotionless. "All right." But my heart rate picked up in my chest. There was no denying that I'd spent the night thinking about him. After I'd been spooked and hurried home, the inside of my new house had been a surprising comfort. The sheets softer than anything I'd slept on in months. The supplies in the kitchen were an array of foods far superior to the stale foods the cafeteria in my previous apartment had offered. But once I was in bed I'd thought about him. Aaron Whitman. Part of me wished I'd taken his file home, so I could look through the pages of his life and learn what really landed him in Ward Z. But I had forgotten it on my desk.
"You're just one letter away from being my most favorite thing in the world."
I'd fallen asleep, his intelligent gray eyes haunting me all night.
"We need to do a room turnover for the patients today. We do it every Tuesday. Since he's asking for you, we'll start there."
"Why on Tuesdays?"
Christopher frowned. "It's just the day we do it."
"Seems like a strange day – the middle of the week."
"We have to send out the laundry to the main part of the hospital. They only accept it from Ward Z on Tuesdays." His mouth had formed a thin line, hiding the gaps in his teeth.
He didn't like that I was questioning him. I let my lips turn up a bit in the corners as I turned away. I didn't really care that today was laundry day – or anything of the sort, but if I decided Wednesday was a better laundry day, then that would be laundry day. I knew it, Christopher knew it, and I wanted to make sure he knew I knew.
You know, the classic - I see you, see me, see you, situation.
AKA: I run this show down here. I may be new, and a woman, but I could also hold my own. I wasn't going to let a gap-toothed old man push me around with a smug look on his face – we were on the same team, and he needed to know who the captain was.
"You asked for me, Mr. Whitman?" I said, a bit later when I entered Z15. The orderlies followed in behind me. One started pulling off the sheets, the other holding a broom.
"I haven't been able to stop thinking about you."
The orderly removing the sheets paused, he was the taller of the two on day shift, Ryan, I think.
"Is that so, Mr. Whitman?" I stood, my back against the wall closest to the door.
He nodded, singing. The soft melody seeping from his lips. His fingers tapped. He sat at the table where he'd been last night. The same chair. He wore the same white jumpsuit, or I guessed it was the same.
"How could you miss me, if you don't even know me?" I met his gaze head on. The dark pools of gray seemed to summon me, as ridiculous as that sounded. The twitchy pupils, seemed to beg me for reprieve, for murder, for connection, for death.
I blinked and looked away.
"I know you, Violet. My one letter away. So close."
"Hey, shit-brains, it's Doctor Violet," Lewis, the orderly with the broom, snapped.
"Lewis!" The word came out like a cough, surprise dragging it out of me in a gasp. "That's enough."
"You think I have shit for brains, little Lew?" Aaron had fixated his gaze on the orderly. Lewis was probably the youngest on the staff, albeit, that probably put him at my age, maybe a few years younger. "Shit. Literal, shit." Aaron paused, his fingers still tapping. "Think about it. If someone had shit, feces, for their brains, they wouldn't be smart enough to get themselves put in here, in this room inside Ward Z, would they?"
"Mr. Whit—"
"But they would be able to get themselves hired as a fucking, pathetic little maid for the people who really matter. Me, if your enlarged feces brain didn't catch where I was going with that."
"Listen, here, you—"
I stepped between Lewis and Aaron. "That's enough, Lewis. You need to leave Mr. Whitman's room."
"This is bullshit." Lewis dropped the broom he was holding and stormed out.
Something crashed out in the hallway. Ryan sighed, his arms full of sheets, and followed Lewis out.
"I knew you were sweet on me, Violet." Aaron's warm hand clasped mine. I jumped, turning toward him but he held on tight. I'd moved within inches of where his hand was strapped to the table. "I figured you would be if you watched me last night."
I furrowed my brow. "What are you talking about?"
His hand squeezed harder, his other hand tapping. "The cameras." His twitchy gaze flashed up at the corner of the room, where there was indeed a black orb sticking out of the ceiling.
"I didn't—"
"You didn't know?" His mouth spread into a grin, revealing his shiny teeth.
My heart pounded in my chest. My skin tingled where his hand held mine. I'd never been an overtly sexual person. I didn't make time for that kind of thing, even though I had a fascination with touch, sex in itself had never done much for me. My friends said I was having sex with the wrong people – if that was the case, then I hadn't had sex with any of the right ones. The few men I'd been with had counted more towards emotional companionship, rather than intense sexual escapades.
Yet, here I stood, Aaron Whitman's hand clutching mine, his nails digging into my skin painfully. His face just beneath mine. Something warm sizzled inside me, something frantic, needy, desperate to claw its way out.
"Violet."
Let them scream. My gaze traced the words along his jaw. A different script from the one across his forehead.
"Violet."
I blinked, but my eyes, were desperate to return to Aaron. They didn't want to stay in their safe place, their home behind my lids.
"You didn't know there were cameras?"
"I, uh, no." I needed to step away, put distance between us, clear my head.
"Well, now you do. You should watch." His gaze traced over my face, over my blond hair, which I'd worn down today. "Your eyes aren't quite blue are they? They're something else, like your name. I wonder…" His words trailed off as he looked down at my hand. "Do you bleed violet too?" Aaron's nails bit harder into my skin. "I want to see it."
Frozen. That's what I was, as I stood there, mindlessly watching Aaron dig his nails into my flesh. It hurt, but somehow the hurt was separate from me. It belonged to someone else and I watched right along with Aaron curious as to what he would find.
But, what happens when he finds out I don't bleed shades of violet?
"Dr. Violet?" Christopher's voice pulled me out of my haze and I recognized where I was – in a patient's room, letting him hurt me.
I jerked my hand away, surprised when it actually came free of Aaron's sharp clutch. I moved back, not meeting his gaze.
"Yes?"
"Is everything all right?"
I could hear Aaron singing behind me.
I sighed. "Sure, yes, everything is okay with me. Lewis, however, needs to be dealt with."
Christopher nodded, glancing between myself and Aaron.
"He can't just go into a patient's room and provoke them," I added, hoping to alleviate the awkward and unexplainable situation he'd just walked in on.
"Okay, I'll talk with him."
"Good." I moved to walk past him.
"But Dr. Violet," I paused in the threshold of the door. "You're bleeding."
I glanced down to see the red blood running down my hand, and several dark droplets cooling on the floor.
I went straight to my office and shut the door.