Page 9 of Sting of Sin

They cleared out. I stayed in the chair a while after, in the quiet, turning my cut over in my hands.

Nobody had to give me that order. That was the thing of it. I'd been living under it for years already, a law of my own making, harder than anything Warden could hand down, every half step I ever eased back from her, every foot of air I put between us that I didn't want there, every one of those visits I couldn't make myself walk into because sitting in a room with Bee and keeping my face straight was more than I had in me. The distance was mine. I'd built it brick by brick and I'd thought I had it down to something I could live behind for good.

Now she was coming here. I'd see her at breakfast. I'd hear her through a wall at night. I'd have to be the wall she stood behind and not one thing more than that, not ever, no matter what my chest did when she looked at me, and I'd have to do it on no sleep, with my guard down, every single day, for as long as it took.

I could do it. I'd done harder. I'd been doing it for years already, just from farther off.

Get me out, she'd said. To me. And I'd said okay, and now okay had a clock on it and risk on it and her scared face at the end of it.

I thought about the word regression sitting in her file. Written up when her brother finally started coming every week, signed by a man none of us had ever once laid eyes on.

He thought he had till Friday.

He didn't.

CHAPTER SIX

THE BAG WAS what broke me.

It sat on the end of my bed when they brought me back from breakfast, a soft-sided gray thing with a zipper, the kind of bag you'd take on a trip you wanted to come back from. Somebody had already put things in it. My folded clothes. The hairbrush. The little zip pouch with my name on a label in someone else's handwriting, Beatrice, like I was a thing that needed labeling so I didn't get lost in the wash.

They were packing me.

It wasn't even Friday. I'd been trying to keep track, and it wasn't Friday yet, and the bag was already there, and that's when I understood the counting had never mattered. The days were never mine. They'd move me when they decided to move me, and the calendar in my head was just one more thing I'd made up to feel like I had a hand on something.

A nurse came in brisk and kind and started checking off a list. Transport in the morning, she said, maybe tonight if the van came back early. Wasn't that good, getting it over with. A fresh start. She kept saying fresh start like the words could scrub a thing clean.

I sat on the edge of the bed next to the bag with my name on it and I felt the gray water close over my head.

No boots had come.

That was the thing underneath the bag, the real thing. I'd given Eli my voice and held onto him through nights that didn't end, and I'd told myself he heard me, he always hears me, and the days had gone by and no boots had come down the hall. And now there was a bag, and a van, and morning, and a hospital waiting at the other end of the road like a spider that didn't even have to move because the web did all the work.

Maybe he hadn't done anything. Maybe three words wasn't enough to move a man across the kind of distance Eli had always kept between us. Maybe I'd spent my last coin on somebody who set it down and walked away after all, not because he didn't care, but because what could he do, really, I was committed for being a danger to myself, I was a court order, I was a problem with a doctor's signature on it, and you can't punch a signature.

The reasonable voice came back. The one that sounds like mercy. Stop fighting it. The new place is just a place. You're good at places. You go small, you go quiet, you find a window, you float. And God, I wanted to. I was so tired. The kind of tired where surrender looks like a soft bed at the end of a long cold walk.

But I thought about the dark behind the wall, and how at the new place there'd be no one, no one, between me and it. No window I trusted. No two sets of boots that came on the regular even if they came too late. Just the soft sweater and the soft voice and all the time in the world, just us.

And something in me, some last lit thing down at the very bottom, said no.

Not the giving-up no. The other kind. The kind that picks itself up off the floor with its teeth.

If they took me, they'd take me fighting. I'd find my voice and I'd use it, scream it, throw it at every stranger in that new place until somebody heard, the way I screamed four years ago in a stretch of woods until the dark took my throat. I wasn't nineteen— I wasn't that girl anymore. I'd been broken so far down there was nothing left to break, and there's a strange kind of free in that. You can't threaten a person with the bottom when she's already standing on it.

I left the bag where it was. I sat on the edge of my bed and I made my spine straight and I waited for whatever came, ready to make it work for every inch.

Night came down slow.

They gave me the night pills, two in a little paper cup, the ones that pull you under deep and flat so the morning comes before you've felt the dark pass. I held them under my tongue the way I'd learned to, took the water, opened wide and dull-eyed for the nurse, and spat them in my palm after she'd gone. I wanted to be awake. If they were driving me into the ground in the morning, I wasn't going down soft. I'd be awake for all of it.

So I was awake when the quiet changed.

You learn the sounds of a place like that. The hum of the lights. The squeak of a cart. The buzz-and-clunk of the doors down the hall doing their locking on a timer you could set a clock by. After enough nights your body keeps the rhythm without asking, and you feel it in your teeth when the rhythm skips.

It skipped.

A door that should've clunked didn't. A long stretch of nothing where there should've been the nurse's rounds. And then, closer, the softest sound in the world, the handle of my own door, the one that locked from the outside every night at nine, turning. Slow. Careful. Like whoever had hold of it knew exactly how much noise it could make and was spending every bit of that knowing to make none.