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“Martin.”
The pyro. Makes sense.
“Whitney, you’re after Martin.”
Whitney might have a flair for the dramatic and a tendency to whine, but she’s also been on suicide watch three separate times since she switched wards last summer. The techs keep a close eye on her. So do the doctors.
“Allison.”
I hope the new doc is multilingual or good luck getting anything out of Allison. On her good days, she might humor you by speaking in English, but having her answer in French or German or even Japanese is almost as likely. I think it’s really cool how she knows so many languages, too. We’re only a couple of months apart in age and we’ve moved through the asylum together. She’s not my friend, not really, but she did teach me how to say fuck off in like six different languages by now.
“And… Tai. The rest of you will meet with him on Monday or Tuesday.”
Tai? That’s… that’s a surprise. Not that she calls out Tai. I mean, his anger issues are some of the worst I’ve seen since I’ve been inside. It’s just that I was almost positive she was going to call on—
“Oops. Hang on a sec. Looks like I almost forgot one.”
A post-it note is stuck to the top of her page, the bright yellow square noticeable against the printed sheet. She plucks it off, bringing it closer so that she can make out the scrawl. I gulp, already resigned.
Here it comes—
“Sorry, Riley. Dr. Gillespie wants to see you first, right after we finish up here.”
Yeah. Of course he does.
3
In the asylum, we get a different professional every couple of weeks. Someone’s always leaving or switching floors—even me. I’m used to it by now.
And, no matter what floor I’m on, every single newbie finds their way to my ward sooner or later. I absolutely hate it, but I guess I’m used to that, too. They all want to stop and gawk, probably since I’ve gotta be the most infamous in-patient here.
And not only because of the fatal fire.
My first memory is of the footage from the day my mother abandoned me. I never knew her, don’t remember my dad, so the ten minutes of grainy, black and white video from a bank’s security camera is the closest I’ll ever get to the family that didn’t want me.
Each second is ingrained deep in my brain. The erratic driving as she pulls into view of the camera. How she throws open her door before hopping out of an older model car. She rushes forward, talking to a patch of empty air toward the edge of the screen. It seems as if she’s having an intense discussion with nobody; the camera didn’t have sound so I’ll never know what she said. A few minutes into it, a gas attendant appears, then leaves her alone.
It gets a little… a little weird after that. The footage captures her running back to the idling car, taking an infant—one-year-old Riley—from the back seat, before letting her crawl around for a few seconds in the dirt. She scoops the baby back up, gestures wildly at nobody again, then returns the baby to the car in time for the attendant to re-approach her.
I don’t think she had any idea that the camera was there. Or maybe she did. Either way, she keeps her back to it most of the time as if hiding her face. Watching the footage, there are a few different angles that help me create an image of her in my mind. She was an average height, slim, with a sheet of pale hair cascading down her back. She kinda looks like me, though that might just be wishful thinking on my part. No one knows for sure that that woman was really my mom—how could they when neither one of us was ever identified?—but the older I got, the more I saw the resemblance.
Plus, the Shadow Man told me it was. Imaginary friend or not, I believed him—until he abandoned me, too.
I don’t know her name. I don’t know where she came from. Cops don’t, either. The footage wasn’t clear enough for them to figure out who she was. And no one ever came forward to report either of us missing.
The car she left behind? It had been stolen on the same day she disappeared. The only things she kept inside were me in my car seat, a half-packed diaper bag, and an iron crowbar. When I got older—when I learned the truth about the fae—I wondered if the iron was a clue that they were involved. The Shadow Man assured me that my mother was a human and, because of that, the fae weren’t interested in her. But then he would never tell me why they were after me…
Still, that sucked to hear. I liked the idea that my mother had no choice but abandon me in an old, run-down gas station. I didn’t want to think that she chose to leave me.
She did, though. Leave me, I mean. It’s right there in black and white. She heads out of one frame, appearing in another as she walks away from the car. There was a side door that led to a bathroom. She goes inside. A few minutes later, the gas attendant marches over there and follows her in.
Neither one of them appears in the footage again. When the bank manager found me the next morning on her way to open up, there was no sign of my mother anywhere. The gas attendant, either.
No doubt in my mind that he knew about the cameras. He was extremely careful to keep his face hidden, even going so far as to wear a cap to cover it up. He was just as much a mystery, especially when the cops discovered he didn’t even work there.
He couldn’t.
The gas station closed down the year before I was born.
