She looked back at the girl through the liquid air.
Sarah’s eyes had rolled up into her head. Droplets of sweat slid off her forehead and spattered to the floor. Her limbs were shaking. Jess immediately thought of an epileptic fit, but the indications were not quite right. It was more like a concentration so tense and desperate as to cause a seizure. She shouted Sarah’s name, and the girl whipped her head back and forth, teeth chattering together, making one long unintelligible sound: “N-n-n-n-n-n-n-n—”
It built, swelled—
—then, all at once, ceased. It was as if a wave of water had broken over their heads, as if a light switch had been flicked off. In the sudden stillness Jess could hear Sarah’s unconscious body slump to the floor, and her own breathing, rough and ragged, loud in her ears as a bellows. Quickly she went to the girl, felt her pulse, quick and light as a bird’s wing, her breath fast and shallow. But the skin of her forehead had smoothed and she looked peaceful.
Jess went back to the door. This time the bolts slid back smoothly into place with a soft click, and the door swung open. Maria was on the floor on hands and knees, scrambling to sweep up the contents of the tray. A syringe and several vials, more pills…
Emergency lights had blinked on, throwing feeble orange light on the hallway. Slivers of glass from the broken bulb glinted orange on concrete. There were shouts from the other rooms, someone running above their heads.
“She’s okay,” Jess said into the silence, more for herself than the nurse. “She’s out cold.”
Maria seemed to flinch at her voice. Then the big woman climbed to her feet and took a new syringe out of her pocket. Wordlessly she entered the small room and knelt at Sarah’s side; lifted the syringe to the light with trembling hands, tapped it, squirted a tiny fount of sparkling clear fluid, and bent again to the girl’s arm.
Only then did Jess remember that she had forgotten to put Sarah’s straitjacket back on. But Maria did not seem to notice.
—9—
“Evan Wasserman called this morning,” Shelley said. She sat straight in her chair with her hands folded over the papers strewn across her desk. “He told me you went directly against his orders and removed Sarah’s restraints.”
“I felt that she had to trust me. I took a chance.”
“A very dangerous one, according to Evan. Sarah has been aggressive with people before. You went in before she had her medication. He was extremely upset about that.”
“What could she possibly have done? She’s ten years old.”
“That’s not the point.” Shelley paused. “Evidently there are problems between the two of you. I understand why. But the simple fact of the matter is that this is his hospital and his patient. You have to follow his rules.”
Jess tried to keep down the sudden blood that rushed to her cheeks. She nodded, feeling like a scolded child. It was ridiculous, really. Shelley was right. And yet she felt betrayed.
“Tell me exactly what happened.”
Jess related the previous day’s visit, beginning with her arrival in Sarah’s basement room. She tried to remember everything Sarah had said, each indication of her mental state, including her paranoia about the “white” people. Still, Jess had the frustrated feeling that she was unable to get across the thrust of events exactly the way they occurred. There were things that happened that would sound crazy if she repeated them now: the way the lights had blown out in the hall, the sudden jamming of the door locks, the way Sarah knew her medication was on its way long before there was any sign of Maria and the tray. Jess prided herself on her logical, orderly mind. Those things were not logical and she tried her best to dismiss them.
And yet she couldn’t, damn it. They kept pushing themselves back in.
When she had finished, Shelley said, “She’s all right, you know. Evan wanted it stressed, however, that she was in a very dangerous state and that it was touch-and-go for a while. Apparently she’s had seizures before.”
“Has she been tested for a lesion in the temporal lobe?”
“I’m sure they would have taken an EEG to rule that out.”
“Her file had a lot in it about brain wave activity. Maybe they suspected some sort of damage, or tumor.”
“I suggested it myself, actually, when Sarah was first assigned to state care. Though she was only a little over a year old, the symptoms indicated some physical trauma. We looked for swelling, collections of fluid, anything that might suggest an injury. We thought epilepsy, searched the readings very carefully. But there was nothing.”
“She thinks she’s in prison,” Jess said. “They’ve got her scared to death.”
Something must have shown in her eyes. Shelley leaned forward intently. “You’ve done more with her in your visits than that entire staff has in months. She had shut down entirely with me, saw me as some kind of enemy, which is one reason I haven’t gone to see her the past few weeks. But she’s connecting with you, you’re building trust. That’s good. That’s one reason why we decided to bring you into this. Still, you have to be careful to view her as your patient and nothing more. Getting too attached can only be painful. There are bound to be setbacks.”
Jess nodded. She had read about a case involving a young girl and a home care specialist; the child had been ill with a lengthy terminal disease, the sort that led to many highs and lows and false hopes. The specialist and the child spent most of the day together, and slept near each other at night. By the time she died the specialist had formed such a strong attachment that she refused to return to work, and in fact reported many of the same false symptoms of the disease. She described the death as if her own child had died.
“I want to ask you something,” Shelley said. “This may be painful too and if you don’t want to talk about it I’ll understand. Earlier you mentioned your younger brother was autistic.”
The use of past tense did not escape Jess’s notice. Either Shelley had remembered from their previous conversation, or she had taken a guess. “And now you’re wondering whether that has something to do with it. Whether I have some hidden agenda.”
“The thought crossed my mind.”
Maybe Shelley was right. She would have been a fool not to realize that her brother’s death had pushed her toward child psychology in the first place.
Just because I’m interested in Sarah’s case doesn’t mean I’m looking for some kind of payback.
A familiar memory slipped up on her. Michael, standing on the sidewalk, the sound of the children in the playground, the noise of passing cars. She reached out to him but he did not see her. He did not see anything or hear her screaming.
“I was supposed to be watching him. We were near the park. My mother was at a pay phone and Michael stepped out into traffic. He was hit and killed instantly.”
After countless looks of pity and murmurs of sympathy through the years she had learned to keep the whole thing to herself. But Shelley’s reaction was not the one she had expected. Shelley simply looked at her and said, “And you blamed yourself for this.”
“My mother had put him in my care. I knew what he might do. I should have stopped him.”
“You were how old?”
“Nine.”
“You must see,” Shelley said gently, “how ridiculous that is.”
“I was old enough for it to matter.”
“Of course. But not old enough to be blamed for it.”
Shelley said this as if it were a common truth. And Jess supposed that under normal circumstance it was, but she was not a normal girl. She knew what she was capable of and what she wasn’t, and that was what had made it so difficult. Anyone could say that she had been too young, that her mother should never have left her alone with him. But that didn’t change anything. It only shifted responsibility.