Page 6 of Sting of Sin

"Then we don't wait on paper," I said. "Lawyer starts today, fine. But she's not in that van in four days. We take her out ourselves, before it comes, and figure the how between now and then." I looked at Throttle, then back at Warden. "She asked me to get her out. I told her okay. I don't break that. Not for paper, not for cops, not for nothing."

"That's a committed patient walking out against orders," Warden said. Not arguing. Just saying it out loud so we all heard it. "They'll call it an abduction. Cops. Reports. Reed gets to stand up there and play the poor concerned doctor whose sick girl got grabbed by bikers."

"Let him," I said. "Let him stand wherever he wants and talk to a form all day. He don't get to keep her in a box 'cause a judge rubber-stamped his say-so."

The room sat quiet. Warden looked at Throttle. Throttle looked at the floor, then at me, and something settled in his face, hard and certain, the same look he'd had the night we went into those woods.

"First we try it clean," Warden said. "Then we do the alternative. No heat that lands on us. No marks on anybody can lead back here. You get her out, you put her behind the gate, the lawyer cleans up the rest after." He pointed his chin at me. “We can’t fuck this up.”

"I got this," I said.

"Then we're good."

We weren't good. Wasn't a thing about any of it that was good. But it was moving now, and moving was better than sitting in a plastic chair watching that place eat her an inch at a time.

Four days, Reed had said.

He wasn't getting four days.

CHAPTER FOUR

AFTER YOU SPEND the last thing you have, you find out real quick whether it bought you anything.

I'd given Eli my voice. Three words, dragged up out of the dead cold place by their roots, and the second they were out of me I felt how much they'd cost, felt scraped hollow, felt like I'd handed over the only coin I had left and now I just had to wait and see if the man took it somewhere or set it down and walked away.

He wouldn't set it down. I knew that. I knew Eli.

But knowing a thing in your chest and believing it at three in the morning are two different things, and the nights had gotten long.

One day, two, I couldn't tell you how many. They don't make it easy to count in here, on purpose. But something had changed in me after the visit, and I hated it, because the change was feeling. The whisper had cracked a door, and now things were getting through that the pills used to hold back. Color came in too sharp. Sounds had edges. And the fear—the fear that used to live way down under the water where I couldn't quite reach it—the fear came all the way up now and sat on my chest and breathed.

Because the clock was running, and I could hear it.

They told me about the transfer like it was a kindness. A nurse with a soft face said won't that be nice, a fresh start. Friday, she said. Like Friday was a normal word. Like Friday was a thing that happened to normal people and not the day they were going to put me in a van and drive me three hours into the middle of nowhere and shut a door I would never get back out of.

They came for me that afternoon and walked me down to his office, the one with the soft lamp instead of the hard ceiling light, the two chairs turned to face each other, the box of tissues I never touched. Dr. Reed was already there. He stood when I came in, the way he always did, and gave me that warm, tired smile, and waited until I'd folded myself into the chair across from him before he sat.

"Beatrice. Thank you for coming down." He said it like I'd had a choice, and he said it kind. "I wanted to walk you through what's ahead. You deserve to hear it from me, instead of just having it happen to you."

I let my eyes go to the lamp. I let the gray come up and his voice reach me through the water, the way I took everything in that place, at a distance, secondhand, like weather happening to someone else.

"Friday, they'll move you out to Dr. Sutter's program," he said. "I won't pretend it's close. It's a good way from here, and I know that's hard, especially with your brother and his friend coming around again like they’ve been." Something passed over his face, gentle, sorry. "But it's the right place for you. More than we've been able to give you here. More time, more hands, the kind of care I've wanted for you and never quite had to offer. Dr. Sutter's good, Beatrice. I wouldn't hand you to just anyone. You know me well enough to know that."

I didn't know Dr. Sutter. I didn't know anything about him except the way the name had dropped through me like a stone down a well that first day, and the way the cold rose now, in that soft-lamp room, every time it came out of Reed's mouth—Sutter, the program, Friday, move you out—the bells starting up their low far-off ringing somewhere under the gray. Not at the man across from me. At the thing he was describing. The van. The distance. The door at the end of it that only opened one way.

He talked a while longer, settling in, being looked after, how proud he was of how far I'd come, and I sat very still and gave him back the face that was no face, the one I'd had years to perfect, and let it all wash over me while the bells rang and rang underneath.

"You're somewhere else again," he said near the end, soft, almost fond. "That's all right. You've earned a little somewhere else." He rose, and the session was done, and a nurse came to take my elbow. "I'll look in on you before Friday. We'll say a proper goodbye."

They walked me back to my chair, and I turned to the window and tried to find the line of mountains, but my hands had started shaking and wouldn't stop, and the gray water I used to float on top of wouldn't hold me anymore. Hope had thinned it out. I couldn't sink and I couldn't swim. I just thrashed there in the middle, feeling everything, the worst place there is.

Friday, I thought. Friday they take me where the boots don't come.

I didn't know if Eli had done anything with my three words. I had no way to know. No phone, no clock, no calendar I could trust, no face I could ask, nothing but a nurse saying isn't that nice and a soft man saying proper goodbye and a door at the end of the week swinging shut.

***

NIGHT CAME DOWN, and I couldn't find sleep in it.