Page 38 of Sting of Sin

I didn't just lie there and let it take me. I told my hand to throw off the blanket and claw for the door. I told my mouth to scream Eli’s name, to scream anybody's name. I told my body to fight the way it hadn't fought four years ago under those trees, the way I'd sworn on my own life it always would from now on.

Nothing answered. The bell was screaming through a house with every wire cut. I could feel the danger now, clear and whole and far, far too late, and I could not lift my own hand off the seat. Whatever she'd put in that tea had reached all the way down into me and pulled the alarm clean loose from the body it was made to move, and left me wide awake at the bottom of myself, watching the world haul me off.

I felt the car slow, and roll. Sideways, through the gap beneath the blanket, I watched the top of our gate slide past the glass. I heard a man call something easy and friendly to Holly, and Holly call it easy back, and a hand somewhere waved a thing through that belonged, waved her through, waved me through, hidden three feet from a man who would have laid his life down for me and never knew I was there. Then the gate was behind us and the road came up gray and open and endless under the wheels.

"There," Holly breathed, easy now, and happy, and so sure she was saving me. "Worst part's behind us. You rest, honey. He's going to take such good care of you, better than any of these lying men ever did. He told me all about you. He said you've been carrying your fear so long you've forgotten how to set it down. And where I'm taking you, you finally get to. For good."

Where I'm taking you.

I tried to scream Eli's name. It came out of me as nothing. As breath. As fog.

And the last thing I had, before the dark came all the way up and closed over the top of my mind, was one clear thought, sharp as a shard of glass in all that softness, the truest thing my body had always known and had finally, finally been right about:

Somewhere at the end of this road, the one from the dark was waiting for me.

And nobody who loved me knew which road it was.

***

I CAME UP through the fog the way you come up from deep water, slow, with the light getting brighter and farther away at the same time, and I broke the surface into a room I had never seen.

It was clean. That was the first wrong thing my drowned mind could hold onto, how clean it was, how quiet, how cared for. Soft gray walls. A window with a blind drawn most of the way down on a flat brown nothing of land. A narrow bed under me with a rail along one side, and the smell of the place was the smell I knew better than my own name, the smell of four years of my life: antiseptic and clean linen and that particular nothing smell of a room where things are done to you for your own good. For one swimming moment I thought I was back. I thought the rescue had been the dream and the hospital was the waking, and grief opened up in me so wide I could have drowned in it all over again.

I tried to lift my hand. It came up off the blanket maybe an inch and dropped, heavy as a sandbag, the muscles in it answering me from a long way off, through deep water, through whatever Holly's tea had poured into the wiring of me. I couldn't make my body mine. I could only lie there and breathe and look.

And then I knew I wasn't alone.

There was a man sitting in a chair beside the bed. He'd been there the whole time, still, patient, his hands folded in his lap, watching me surface, and when my eyes found him a small kind warmth moved over his tired ordinary face.

"There she is," he said gently. "Welcome back, Beatrice. Take your time. There's no hurry now. There's no hurry at all anymore."

Dr. Reed.

My doctor. The tired kind man who'd sat across from me a hundred times in soft lamp rooms, who spoke low and never rushed me, who'd been the one unremarkable gentleness in four gray years. Dr. Reed. And the fog in me reached for him like he was a lifeline, because a known face is a known face, and some broken animal part of me went he's here, the doctor's here, doctors keep you safe.

"You're somewhere you can finally rest," he said, in that gentle clinician's voice, the one I'd trusted. "Somewhere quiet. Somewhere those men can't reach you and crowd you and fill your head with noise. I've watched them undo so much of my work, these last weeks. All that careful progress. It's all right. We have time to put it right again. We have all the time in the world now, you and I."

Something in me, far down, under the drug, under the fog, snagged. My work.

"You've always been so frightened," he went on, soft, soothing, reaching out to smooth the blanket near my hand the way a good doctor would. "Ever since the woods. So frightened, and never able to say of what. Do you remember what I used to tell you? In our sessions? When the fear would come and you couldn't find its name?"

And then he leaned in close, and his voice changed.

It dropped. It shed the gentleness like a coat slipping off a shoulder, all the warmth draining out of it until what was left was low and smooth and patient and cold, a voice with nothing underneath it but interest, and he said, quiet, right against my ear, the thing he used to say:

"What’s in the dark, Beatrice? Tell me."

My whole body convulsed.

It came up out of me before my mind could even reach it, a full-body knowing, violent, total, every nerve I owned standing up screaming at once, my heart slamming so hard the drug couldn't hold it down, because I knew that voice. I knew it the way you know your own name screamed across a parking lot. I had heard that voice low and smooth and patient in the worst dark of my life, in the trees, hanging back where I couldn't see, telling the hands what to do with me. Don’t be gentle. Use her. Break her. The voice that had no face. The voice from every nightmare. The shadow I'd told Eli about just this morning, the one they never got, the one that had been out there the whole time.

It was Dr. Reed.

The room tilted and roared. I lay there paralyzed in my own unplugged body and watched the two of them slide together and become one man, the gentle tired doctor who'd sat at my bedside, and the smooth cold voice that had directed my own destruction in the dark, and there was no space left between them at all. There never had been. He'd been the same man the entire time. He'd put his voice in my ear in the woods and then he'd put on a kind face and sat across from me, and watched me try and fail to remember where I'd heard him before.

"There it is," he breathed, and oh, he was delighted, I could see it, the warmth coming back into his face except now I understood what the warmth was, it was appetite. "There it is. You found me. I wondered if you ever would. I'll be honest, Beatrice, I'd nearly given up hoping. Four years I sat with you and said the gentle things in the gentle voice, and you never once felt it. Do you know how hard that was? To be that close to you, that patient, and never let you see me?" He sat back, pleased, settling in like a man getting comfortable for a long-awaited conversation. "But your body always knew. I could see it know, every session, the alarm going off in you and never able to find the door. That was the sweetest part. Watching you sit there frightened of me and not know it was me."

I made a sound. It was supposed to be a word. It came out as nothing.