Mirrors (3 page)

Still, his mind swept through new thoughts that had been out of sight until now and began connecting the dots methodically. The hall, the recreation room, the sight of Alice restrained, the elevator. The security measures…

Like a mirage taking shape in the distance, a thought formed. A solution. However fragile, he clung to it as if it were a lifeline.

It was bold in its simplicity, but it might work.

He stood unmoving for a full minute, lost in his thoughts, considering his options. It could work. It had to work.

Then again, it might not. And if it didn’t…

Austin settled on his course of action, took a deep centering breath, faced the recreation room, and started walking, a whirlwind of objections crowding his mind. He shoved them to the edge of his consciousness and moved forward. One foot in front of the other. He knew what he would do.

He pushed into the recreation room and stood inside the door for several moments, watching. Fourteen patients all dressed in blue scrubs sat throughout the room. Most slumped in metal folding chairs on the left side of the room, staring at a cartoon playing on the flat-panel TV that hung halfway up the wall.

A nurse on the far side of the room offered a smile, then returned to her conversation with a patient. No other staff members in the room at the moment. Two sets of double doors flanked the room, the one behind him and a pair on the opposite side of the room.

To his immediate right, a young patient sat motionless in a wheelchair, staring straight ahead with vacant eyes. The boy he’d seen yesterday. His name dangled at the edge of Austin’s memory. Jacob.

Austin walked past the boy and crossed the room calmly, feet padding softly on the linoleum floor. A strange sensation hatched somewhere deep inside his gut. It swelled with each step, feeding on the adrenaline that drove him forward.

The nurse glanced up when he stopped in front of her.

“Can I help you, sweetie?”

Her name was Claire, according to the name badge clipped to her pocket. She was a slight woman huddled next to a patient at a squat table, overseeing a crayon drawing of a purple dragon and a unicorn. Two cups filled with markers and pens sat in the middle.

Austin reached for a blue ballpoint pen. “Just need one of these.”

“Why, sure. Help yourself.”

“Thank you.” He slipped the pen into his pocket, veered left, and made his way toward the TV, eyes fixed ahead.

Odd how detached his body felt. Everything seemed to move at half speed. The better part of his logic began to suggest that what he had in mind would end very badly. But it presented no reasonable alternative, so he ignored those thoughts and followed his intention.

Without breaking stride, he grabbed an empty folding chair with one hand as he passed by it. Dragged it loosely behind him as he rounded the first row and angled for the wall.

Last chance, Austin. Are you sure?
A chill cascaded over his scalp.

He stopped in front of the TV and gripped the back of the chair with both hands. In one smooth motion, he lifted it and, jaw clenched, swung it with as much force as he could put behind it. The chair came forward hard and fast, and the impact shattered the TV screen.

He spun around and stared at the horrified faces. The room filled with gasps and cries as fear swept over the fragile-minded patients. A girl pressed her hands to her ears and rocked back and forth. Another pointed at the TV with a trembling hand, shouting something Austin couldn’t understand. Others pulled at their hair, peace shattered by the angry man.

He screamed full-throated and flung the chair away. It ricocheted off the wall with a deafening clang and unleashed chaos. Now patients were scrambling, trying to get up. Trying to escape.

Adrenaline surged through his veins, and Austin surrendered to the surge of emotion that raged inside him. He was on a rollercoaster, plunging—too late to turn back now.

He strode toward Jacob, quickly now, intent. The boy just stared at him, unaware it appeared. All the better.

The nurse rushed to the back of the room and jabbed her thumb against a red button. A security alarm.

A tremor took to Austin’s hands and his lungs heaved thick breaths as he picked up his pace. At the exit next to Jacob, he stepped over to the red box housed in a Plexiglas case on the wall. He flipped the safety case open, wrapped his fingers around the white lever, and tugged down.

The fire alarm’s deafening scream shrilled above the din, and patients scattered, driven by the unbearable sound.

Austin crossed to Jacob, rounded the wheelchair, and gripped the handles.

“Come on, Jacob. Let’s go for a ride.”

The boy didn’t respond.

The doors banged open as he backed into them, pulling Jacob into the hallway. He swung the chair and pushed down the hall, heading in the same direction of the ill-fated escape attempt he’d taken yesterday.

Austin moved with measured steps that matched the drumbeat of his heart. For the moment he felt the thrill of perfect control. Strange how intoxicating it was.

They’d just taken the turn and sped to a quick clip before any sign of pursuit reached him—the sounds of the rec room’s door crashing open, and running feet.

So… This was it.

He spun the chair around and faced four attendants all focused on one thing: Stopping him before he caused any more damage—to himself or others, especially Jacob.

The fire alarm fell silent; someone had shut it down.

Austin slipped the blue pen from his pocket, gripped it tightly with his fist, and pressed the sharp point against the side of Jacob’s throat.

“No farther,” he said evenly.

The attendants slowed, but they didn’t stop. They spread across the width of the hallway and moved steadily, arms at their sides, palms open and forward, wide stance.

“I said no farther!”

Austin grabbed a fistful of Jacob’s hair and jerked his head back. Pressed the pen deeper until he felt the resistance of the windpipe against the ballpoint. The boy didn’t resist. Made no sound.

“I swear. If you take another step, he’ll die.” Austin’s voice sounded strangely distant to himself. “I’ll punch him so full of holes…”

The attendants stopped, eyes locked on Austin, but none of them spoke.

His hands were shaking, and he couldn’t stop them. Again, the voice of logic told him he was going too far. But another told him he hadn’t gone far enough, and the second voice rode the crest of his adrenaline.

He jerked the pen away and gripped the wheelchair handles with both hands. Began backing down the hall toward the exit doors at the far end. Then spun around and pushed the chair at a full run.

They gave chase, but he rounded the next turn safely and headed toward the doors that opened onto the reception room where he’d picked the lock yesterday.

Behind him, they made gains. Didn’t speak, didn’t attempt to restrain him.

Halfway down the hall, he spun to face them again, pen back at Jacob’s neck.

“Stay back!”

They pulled up, eyes on him, still spread across the hall. Still no warning, no urging him to stop. It was almost surreal.

Austin started backward, feet shuffling across the hard floor as he pulled the wheelchair. Every few steps he’d glance over his shoulder. Except for them, the hall was empty. Why wasn’t anyone trying to cut him off from the other direction?

Within seconds he’d closed the distance to the reception area’s double doors.

“Come closer and I’ll push it into his throat,” he said.

They pulled up, ten feet away now, still unfazed by his threat. Why?

He glanced down at the boy, who stared forward unaffected except for tousled hair, which fell across his freckled face. A thin smear of blood had formed where Austin nicked the boy’s pale skin.

Could he have pushed it into the boy’s neck? He was playing a role, but how far would he have gone?

He pushed the thought aside and reached back for the door.

A sudden rush of jagged heat entered his body and climbed his arms the moment his hands connected with the door’s cold steel handles. White-hot light exploded behind Austin’s eyes. A million needles pressed against his skin as electricity coursed through his body.

He felt himself convulse. His jaw locked tight. His legs gave way beneath him and he crumpled to the hard ground.

His vision narrowed. Darkness crowded the edges of his sight.

Then the world simply disappeared.

EVERYONE HAD voices in their head, right? Thoughts were just unspoken words. If someone invented a speaker that could be hooked to the brain and give voice to every thought, the whole world would sound like a crowded auditorium before the guest of honor took the stage.

Christy remembered taking a bus downtown to city hall once to sign some emancipation forms that would give her full autonomy as a minor. She was seated two rows from a woman who kept mumbling to an imaginary person in the empty seat beside her. “I’m so glad I’m not like you. If they knew what kind of person you are, they’d lock you up.” On and on.

The rest of the bus sat in an uneasy silence, staring at the oblivious woman. After getting off the bus, Christy headed into city hall, pondering what she’d just witnessed.
Poor woman has totally lost it,
she kept thinking.
I’m glad I’m not like that.

She suddenly became aware that, instead of only thinking the last sentence, she’d said it, unaware of the others walking down the hall. She’d actually said, aloud, “I’m glad I’m not like that.”

The only difference between her and the woman everyone regarded as plain crazy was that Christy kept most of her thoughts to herself, whereas the woman seemed either unable or uninterested in doing so.

The whole world was full of incessant, often crazy, often cruel and judgmental thoughts that were rarely given voice.

The chatter whispering through Christy’s mind told her that she had to get a grip or she really was going to lose it.
This is crazy, I’m not insane. I’m not Alice and I’m not fractured. This is all a mistake.

Something was on the verge of breaking, and when it did, she would collapse into a mumbling heap of subhuman insanity.

But strapped in a wheelchair, wheeled first into the elevator and then onto the second floor, she was so acutely aware of the unspoken thoughts that she wondered if she had already lost it.

She knew it wasn’t true. That her thinking was only the consequence of a tragic series of errors in an inhospitable environment. But her grip on that certainty was slipping.

The facility’s second level was dimensionally similar to the first floor—wide halls in a U shape with doors on either side. But the hall floors were tiled in a glistening black-and-white checkerboard pattern. The walls were spotless, shiny-white as if only freshly painted. And the doors were made of polished aluminum, giving the appearance that the whole floor was germ-free.

The wire-mesh reinforced windows on each door were too high for Christy to see through from the wheelchair. She could only imagine the worst, but those, too, were only thoughts.

The attendant who transported her didn’t say a word. She asked him where the other patients were as they rolled down the hall, but he kept silent, which only filled her with more uneasy thoughts.

He angled for a door near the end of the hall, turned her chair to face it, then stepped around her and unlocked it by passing his wrist in front of a small black pad on the wall. She looked back down the hall. The steel elevator doors at the end made her think of a vault door.

Austin might be more intelligent than most, but his mind wasn’t going to break down any doors. She was on her own. More than anything, she hated herself for being alone, like she’d always been.

The attendant wheeled Christy in, freed her arms, and left without taking the wheelchair with him. The lock on the door snapped into place as the door closed.

A thick silence settled over her like a heavy blanket.

She looked around the large room, lost. Pressed white sheets covered a single bed to her right. The walls were shiny, like the walls in the hall. Same checkerboard tiled floor. Just past the bed, a door, maybe to the bathroom or a closet. One small chest of drawers beside the bed topped with white Formica.

To her left, the room ran twice as wide as the one downstairs. In the extra space sat a large white desk with a brushed-nickel lamp. One high-back chair behind the desk and one smaller chair facing it. A whiteboard on the wall behind the desk. A mirror on the adjacent wall. Likely unbreakable.

Christy sat in the wheelchair for several long minutes, unsure what she was meant to do. Even less sure she wanted to do anything at all.

The ceiling vents were narrow. No way out there. Nor would there be a way out anywhere. She couldn’t shake the feeling that they’d built this place to house deranged psychopaths or insane sociopaths.

She finally stood up, walked to the door by the bed, and peered inside. Plain bathroom with a toilet, a shower, and a sink with a mirror above it. No vanity, no soap or shampoo, no towels.

She stepped up to the mirror and blinked at the image staring back at her. Her eyes were swollen and her cheeks had flushed a ruddy red. Lips dry and cracked. Strands of hair had come loose from her ponytail and were sticking out haphazardly, giving her the appearance of a crazed woman just out of an asylum.

She tapped the mirror. Chromed metal. Of course. Nothing would be breakable in this place.

A slow tour of the bedroom confirmed her thinking that everything was designed for permanence. The drawers on the desk were locked, the lamp had a sealed bulb and was bolted to the desk. Even the chairs were affixed to the floor, and the screws that fastened them down had no heads.

When she ventured to the narrow pane of reinforced glass set in the door and peered out, the hall was vacant. Not a soul.

Christy finally retreated to the bed and lay down, feeling deprived and lifeless. She stayed liked that, staring at the ceiling, for what felt like an hour and still no one came. Had they forgotten about her? Of course not. She didn’t know what “progressive treatment” meant, but she could imagine that leaving someone to their own thoughts indefinitely might qualify.

There was no clock, no sunlight, no switches on the walls, nothing on the ceiling but the narrow vents and two banks of bright fluorescent lights. It could be the middle of night and she wouldn’t know it.

Slowly her concerns began to sag into that place where meaninglessness meets hopelessness. She kept rehearsing the events of the day—her break in, her mistaken identity, Austin’s attempt to free them.

The
what ifs
swarmed her mind like angry crows.

If only she’d left home with her wallet, she would have walked out of the ward the moment she proved that she was Christy. Lawson would have checked his patient roster, found no Christy Snow, and let her go.

If she hadn’t made the call to Austin, he wouldn’t have come looking for her. If he hadn’t come looking, he wouldn’t have stumbled upon Fisher and Alice. If he hadn’t stumbled on Fisher, the man wouldn’t have had any reason to cover his tracks and hide Alice. He’d have had no reason to admit Christy to replace the girl who’d gone missing on his account.

If only…

Christy paused. Somewhere in the back of her mind the
if
became an
unless
. Unless she was completely wrong about all of this. Unless she hadn’t left home without her wallet because she’d actually never left her home at all. She’d never left her home because she lived here, not there.

She’d seen a documentary about a patient whose brain damage had so affected his long-term memory that he couldn’t hold more than one day in his mind.

But the details of her life as Christy were too real. She had a couple dozen journals in her apartment that spelled out her last few years in great detail.

Hours slogged by and no one came. She made a dozen trips to the door to peer out and not once saw any movement. If there were other patients on the floor, they were in a different section.

What if she was alone?

Christy had drifted into a mind-numbing stupor when the sound of the lock snapping open jerked her back to the room. She caught her breath and sat up as the door swung open.

“Hello, Alice.”

Kern Lawson closed the door behind him and headed for the desk.

“Sit with me.”

She rose and crossed to the seat facing the desk. Sat down as he sank into the chair opposite her.

For a long time he studied her as if trying to decide what to do with her. A minute went by and still he said nothing.

“This is crazy,” she finally said. Her voice was thin, not the kind of convincing tone she wanted to project.

“It is. Very. Which is why we are here, darling.” He opened his palms. “Plum nuts, bonkers, crazy. You’ll note that up here we don’t use terms like
mentally challenged
. We tend to go right for the heart of the issue. It’s controversial, but we find it produces wonderful results with the right treatment.”

She was at a loss.

“How do you like your treatment so far?”

“What treatment?”

He chuckled and she was surprised to find a sliver of comfort in the sound after hours of solitude.

“What treatment, indeed,” he said. “The first step here is for me to help you see through your illusions,
capisce
? You have to see yourself for who you really are before we can begin to break down that false self. The delusional self.”

“I’m not delusional.”

“No? Truth is, you’re not seeing what is real even now, as we speak. But I’ll let you discover that on your own. See the illusion. Then break with it. That’s all I’m asking of you, Alice.”

“I’m not Alice.”

“Okay, we can start with that. You don’t think you’re Alice. But the fact is, you don’t really know who you are. Are you ugly? Are you pretty? Are you an outcast? You’re broken, Alice. You aren’t whole. Correction is needed. The first step is embracing that. I can fix you.”

A distant, high-pitched whine sat at the back of her mind.

He leaned forward on his elbows.

“You’re living in denial, Alice. You’re so afraid of what you might find if you really get a good look at yourself that you’ve shut your eyes. Permanently. I can help you see the truth. But you have to face the truth, beginning with fundamentals, like how you really look, in the real world.”

Her heart worked its way through thick beats.

“You think this”—he motioned to her—“is the real you. It’s not. The real you is actually not quite this pretty. Most therapists feed their patients a load of lies, pump them full of sunshine, which helps in the short term but doesn’t fundamentally change them. I prefer to help the patient see the real truth themselves. I call it
ther-I-py
. And I let you be the
ther-I-pist.
It upsets some.”

He paused.

“Dive off the deep end with me, Alice. Think of me as the law, again, no pun intended. A measuring stick for what’s good and what’s bad about you. Let me reveal who you really are so we can make the appropriate corrections. What do you say?”

“You’re saying I’m ugly?”

“Ugly? That’s a matter of perspective. But your refusal to admit that you’re ugly is triggering denial on a much deeper level. You’re broken. Correction is needed. I can make you whole again.”

“But you actually think I’m ugly?”

“Isn’t that what you secretly think every time you look in the mirror? My nose is too big. My cheeks are too fat. I need to lose twenty pounds. No one loves me the way I am. I don’t have any really good friends. No family. Isn’t that why you secretly hate yourself?”

She felt her fingers trembling on the armrests.

“The problem, my dear, is that you’re delusional about many things. Drop the illusion and you’ll see who you really are. It might be a bit uncomfortable at first, but it’s the only way to make you whole.”

“You don’t understand,” she said with a little hesitation. “I don’t even belong here. I may not like some things about me, but I’m not the person you’re talking about.”

He stared at her for a long moment, then abruptly rose.

“I’ll make you a deal, Alice. You give it a good thinking tonight, there’s no rush. Look at yourself in the mirror long and hard, and let’s see if you can see through the illusion you’ve created around your cozy little life. Convince me tomorrow that you love everything about yourself, and I’ll consider a different form of therapy. Maybe electric shock treatments. We’ll see.”

“Shock?”

“Just a little something to get the juice flowing. No pun intended.” He headed for the door and she pushed herself to her feet. “Your call, Alice. Go deep or keep it shallow, the choice is yours.”

He unlocked the door, opened it, and turned back.

“Get some sleep.”

The door shut and the lock engaged.

“Wait!”

As if responding to her voice, the overhead lights blinked out. Darkness engulfed her. Pitch. A thin line of light peeked out from under the bathroom door but it wasn’t enough to give the room any shape.

“Wait!”

If Lawson could hear her, he was paying her no mind.

She stood still, trying to let her eyes adjust to the darkness, mind spinning with the realization that she had no control of the lights.

The bed was straight ahead, next to the bathroom door.

She crossed the room, stepping carefully even though she knew there was nothing to trip on. Reached the bathroom door and pulled it open, half expecting to see Lawson leaning against the sink, waiting for her.