Chapter Nine
I leave Dr. Hancock’s office feeling shaken. I don’t know what I’d been expecting. To find Edith Sharp had lived a happy, productive life, raised five children, written a memoir about her brush with madness and her miraculous recovery? I’m beginning to see that no one who is brushed with madness is left unscathed. Just hearing Edith Sharp’s story has left me with blurry vision and a splitting headache that feels like an alarm going off in my head. An insistent wailing cry—
There is an alarm going off—a deafening siren. When I step out of Dr. Hancock’s office the receptionist is standing at the window fingering her pearls. Ben Marcus is nowhere in sight. “What’s going on?” I ask. “Where’s Officer Marcus?”
The secretary gives me a startled look. “An alarm’s gone off in C Ward. It’s—”
Before she can finish, Dr. Hancock comes rushing out of his office. “Code Red!” he barks to his secretary. She turns as white as her pearls.
“What does that mean?” I ask, but Dr. Hancock and his secretary are already walking away. Dr. Hancock turns back to snap, “Stay put!”
Two more doors open in the hall and two doctors in white coats come out and join them in their hurried flight to the elevators. Then I am alone in the reception room staring at the painting of the disembodied eye.
Which isn’t very comforting at all.
I go to the window to see what the secretary had been looking at. The retired Lehman Brothers golfer is waving his golf club over his head while two orderlies in white scrubs try to placate him. Is that the Code Red? But the secretary said the alarm had gone off in C Ward. Isn’t that one of the wings in this building? Ben Marcus said that the doors between the wards and the central part of the building are locked and guarded. So I have nothing to worry about.
So why had Dr. Hancock and his secretary looked so worried?
And how long am I supposed to wait here like a sitting duck? At the very least Dr. Hancock should have suggested I sit in his office. If he’d had the time I’m sure he would have thought of it. He left the door open. . . .
I let myself in, close the door behind me, and lock it. The snick of metal makes me feel instantly better. I pour myself a glass of water and sit down in the plush comfortable chair. I look again at the bookshelves, at the framed diplomas, at the file cabinet . . .
The drawer from which Dr. Hancock had taken out Edith Sharp’s file is slightly ajar. Would it really do any harm to look at it? After all, Sky had given her permission. And I need something to keep my mind off that infernal siren.
I open the drawer. The file is still sticking up so I’m able to pluck it out quickly, upending the file behind it so I’ll know where to put it back. I flip it open, being careful that nothing falls out. The first thing I notice is a photograph of a young woman stapled to the inside of the folder. She’s wearing a neat hairdo—bangs, shoulder-length hair curled under, a headband—that looks like it might have been popular in the sixties—or the early seventies if you were a conservative proper girl.
A scream rends the air and I nearly drop the folder. It sounds impossibly near, practically in the room. But that’s only because it’s coming from the open window. Still holding the folder, I cross to the window. Outside I can see a woman running from the building, a uniformed guard chasing after her. She is wearing loose gray pajamas. Her hair is a white nimbus floating over her head like a cloud, and as she runs up the slope of the golf course I have the impression that the cloud will bear her aloft into the air. I watch, willing it to happen, but then the guard—Ben Marcus, I realize—catches up with her and grabs her around the waist. She spins around and for a moment they look like they’re dancing. But then I see her face. She’s looking up into the air as if she were expecting help to come from above. Her gaze falls on me at the window and our eyes meet for a second before Ben Marcus tackles her to the ground. I flinch, but whether in sympathy for the impact of her hitting the ground or the impact of those wide green eyes I’m not sure.
On the ground, the woman continues to struggle. Ben Marcus is trying to hold her down, and it looks to me like he’s trying to do it without hurting her. Another guard who’s come onto the scene loses patience and Tases her. I look away as her body jerks, not wanting to see more, and realize that now that she’s been caught Dr. Hancock may be back soon.
I hurry back to the file drawer but before I put the folder away I open it to look at the photo one more time. The young hopeful girl in the picture with the old-fashioned hairdo, sweater set, and graduated pearls couldn’t be more unlike the bedraggled fleeing woman with the wild nimbus of hair and lined, weathered face, but the eyes . . . the wide green eyes are the same.
THAT NIGHT AT dinner I don’t mention the attempted escape. I’m still trying to sort out what I saw. More than forty years have elapsed since Edith Sharp was admitted. Was the escapee really the girl in the picture? And if she is Edith Sharp, why did Billie say she got better? And why didn’t Dr. Hancock say she was still at Crantham?
I focus on Chloe, spooning carrots into her mouth, singing the ridiculous little choo-choo song that Billie uses to get her to eat, burping her afterward and walking
