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“Yes, I think so,” I say, keeping my feelings to myself.
Despite my misgivings, I have to go in. I turn away from Anna. It takes a second to gather courage, but eventually I step forward, toward the room. The man hears me coming. He throws a glance back over his shoulder and I get my first good look at him.
“I didn’t know anyone was here,” I say, stepping inside the room, hearing something like fear in my voice. The man wears a green trucker cap, the brim of which darkens his face, though his eyes are a vivid blue. Dark curls spill out from beneath the hat. There are subtle lines around his eyes and mouth and if I had to guess an age, I’d say forty. “Are you... Are you family?” I ask, swallowing hard, taking in his bent nose, which looks like it had been broken at some point in his life and was never properly realigned.
There is a moment of hesitation, during which he takes stock of me. His eyes travel over my face, down my neck to my chest, to where my name tag sits, just above my left breast. I follow his gaze, staring upside down at my own name and feeling my heartbeats gain speed. My full name is on the name tag. Meghan Michaels. My picture is there too. The state requires it of all health-care workers, going so far as to say how the letters in our name must be of a sufficient size and easy to read, and the picture must be current. It’s to protect patients, to ensure they receive care from qualified professionals, but who or what protects us from them?
I’ve heard other nurses articulate their fears before, about how this or that has happened to someone they know: a discontented patient or family member learns their name, finds them on social media, finds out where they live, or a drug addict tracks them down, mistakenly believing nurses have free and unrestricted access to pills. We don’t. Our privacy is at risk and sometimes our safety is too.
His eyes come back up to my face, which they peruse before finding my eyes. His head cocks and he’s slow to speak, but when he does, he says, “No. A friend.” I wonder if even that is true.
My words are tremulous. “I’m sorry,” I say. “Only family is allowed to be here.” It’s not the hospital’s rules, but what Mr. and Mrs. Beckett wanted.
He says nothing at first. His eyes hold mine and I wonder if it’s meant to be intimidating, because it is. I have a very physical reaction to his stare. My chest tightens. My heart rate changes, becoming faster so that I can hear the whoosh of blood in my ears. I feel his stare all the way to my core, and I want so desperately to look away, to turn around, to see if Anna and Luke still sit at the nurses’ station behind me, to know that they’re there and I’m not alone, but I don’t. I keep my eyes on his, telling myself that I have no reason to be scared.
He breaks his gaze then, reaching for a coat lying at the end of the bed. “I was just leaving,” he says. He takes his coat into his hands and goes to move past me, stepping too close on the way to the door so that I fall back, so our elbows don’t collide.
“I need pictures of me as a baby,” Sienna says first thing when I walk into the apartment that night. She’s in the living room with the TV on, wrapped in a blanket, doing homework. It was a long, restless walk home from work, because I couldn’t stop thinking about the man who came to see Caitlin at the hospital, specifically his ice-cold eyes and the way they stared at me, making me feel uncomfortable, if not scared. I kept thinking for the rest of the day that he might still be at the hospital somewhere. I saw him leave her room; I didn’t see him leave the building. It was unlikely, but something I couldn’t shake. I looked all around for him when I left work, wondering if he was there, hiding out in the ambulance entrance or in the loading dock as I moved down Wellington and past them in the dark.
“Hello to you too,” I tease, hanging my coat on a hook. “My day was fine, thanks for asking.”
“It’s for a school project,” Sienna says curtly. She’s been in a mood lately.
“When do you need them by?”
“Now. The project is due tomorrow.”
“Sienna,” I say, disappointed because Sienna never used to leave things until the last minute but it’s becoming more common now. It’s a teen thing—the lack of motivation, the poor time management—but the subtle changes in her behavior are becoming more apparent all the time. If it’s not the slip in grades, the irritability or the way she blows hot and cold, then she’s pushing the boundaries, impatient to grow up. I don’t like it and I wonder what I have to blame for it—hormones, boys, Ben, drugs?
“What?” she asks, quick to take offense. “I looked. There are like none here.”
She’s right. There isn’t enough room in our apartment to keep things like photo albums, and Sienna was born at a time where not everything was digital as it is now. The first few years of her life are chronicled in scrapbooks that I keep in the building’s basement, where there are large metal cages for each tenant’s things, which hold everything I took from my life with Ben that I wasn’t able to fit into the living space.
“They’re in the basement,” I say, and then I tell her I’ll get them because it will be easier than to explain where they are. I grab my keys, head out the door and lock up behind myself, moving down the stairs to the foyer. Once there, I unlock the basement door and pull it open to an oppressive blackness. I reach for the light at the top of the stairs, flicking it on, but nothing happens. I toggle the switch up and down, but the basement stays dark. The light bulb at the bottom of the steps must have gone out.
I can’t go back up to Sienna empty-handed. She’ll be upset. Grudgingly I decide that I’ll be okay because there is another light downstairs, an exposed bulb with a string that hangs from the low ceiling just above the washing machine.
I steel myself. I take a breath and step into the darkness. I leave the door behind me open, held secure by a door wedge that’s always sitting in the foyer to hold the door open for deliveries and such. I feel grateful for the foyer light, which pales as I descend, moving further away from it, down the stairs’ bare wooden treads and to the concrete floor at the bottom of the steps.
The light is on the other side of the basement. There are rusty, steel weight-bearing columns between it and me, which I try not to run into, feeling blindly with my hands. I regret leaving my phone upstairs because I could use the flashlight on it. Instead, I feel around for the string in the darkness, managing to conjure up all sorts of terrifying thoughts in the five or ten seconds before my hand connects with it, such as: What if I’m not alone down here? What if someone is here with me?
I flash back to the man’s eyes from the hospital, how they were haunted.
When I find the string, relief floods me, though the amount of light the exposed bulb gives off is practically negligible.
I look around to make sure I’m alone, and I am. The basement is small. The walls are cinder block and the ceilings are low. It can’t be more than six feet from the floor to the rafters, so that taller men would have to duck so as not to hit their heads.
The metal storage cages are against the opposite wall, creating dark pockets where the light doesn’t reach. I go to the cages, finding ours. It has a padlock on the door. I spin the dial, entering the combination and then pull down on the lock to open it. I slip the padlock off, replacing it over the metal loop so I don’t misplace it while searching for the scrapbooks. The cage door creaks as I open it. I step inside, unwanted thoughts suddenly filling my mind about getting locked in the cage, whether accidentally or on purpose.
How long would it take for someone to find me? If I screamed, would anyone hear?
I begin to search. The faster I find the scrapbooks, the faster I can leave. I roll our bikes out of the way to get to the plastic storage containers stacked three high behind them. The containers are labeled and while some labels are specific—Christmas lights—others are not: Keepsakes. I find one of the bins labeled keepsakes and lift the lid, setting it aside. I start rifling through things like a wedding album and pairs of Sienna’s adorable baby shoes, tiny Sherpa lined booties and black ballet slippers that fit in the palm of my hand. Thoughts of baby Sienna crush me and I find myself on a trip down memory lane, discovering a lock of hair from her first haircut and a cozy, wearable sleep sack that stirs up memories of sleepless nights in the rocking chair in her room—a time when I wished her older so she’d sleep through the night, but that I would give anything to have back now. I press the sleep sack to my chest, smelling it, embracing it.
I’m somewhere far away, deep in thought. I’m not in the basement at all but in Sienna’s nursery with lullabies playing so softly from the CD player that they won’t wake Ben. The room is darkish, save for the starry globe-shaped night-light that projects stars on the ceiling and wall.
The cage door behind me suddenly creaks.
Someone is in the basement with me.
