“Can we please have five minutes?” I begged, releasing Ami’s hand and rising to stand protectively in front of the bed.
The nurse shook her head and pushed past me. “Two minutes, then? Please,” I asked in one last-ditch effort to stay. Nurse Allen ignored me completely.
Ami recoiled under the covers as the nurse neared. “No. No more meds,” she whimpered. “Please God, n-o-o-o…”
Was Nurse Allen hurting Ami? Was she the danger? But Ami had said “he” was going to kill her. Who was he?
Ami was in the midst of a meltdown, and the nurse motioned frantically for Bradley to get me out of the room. He placed a hand on my elbow and guided me to the door.
“Okay, okay. I’m leaving,” I huffed, jerking away when we reached the hall.
The guard hesitated once the door slammed shut behind us, and I sensed he was about to say something, but before he got to it, the door swung open once again. Nurse Allen came out, straightening the severe bun on her head. “She’ll be asleep in another minute,” she snapped to Bradley, “but I think it’d be best if you stay in there with her.”
The guard went into Ami’s room but not before shooting me a parting glance of sympathy, mixed with frustration. What had Bradley wanted to tell me? It seemed as if there was something he wanted to get off his chest. Nurse Allen had taken no notice that I could tell, but she did ask me to accompany her to the nurse’s station by the elevators.
I trailed behind her, and when we stopped at the counter, she reached behind it to retrieve something.
“Mrs. Hensley made this for you last week. She started on it after your last visit,” the nurse said as she handed me the object she’d retrieved—a framed painting. “Ami completed it right before she took this turn for the worse.” The nurse shook her head, resigned sadness in her expression. I peered down at the one-foot-square piece of art.
Ami had painted this? It was actually kind of good, relatively simple, but definitely much better than the crayon drawing of the crater and the tree. A girl with long, blonde hair, shrouded in what appeared to be a dingy sheet, stood crying in the woods. The anguish in the girl’s face was nothing short of unsettling. Was this a clue?
The painting shook in my hands as I turned it from side to side to examine all angles. Plain, unfinished wood made up the frame of the odd artwork, and a piece of brown paper had been affixed to the back, secured with a row of staples.
Nurse Allen watched as I took in the painting. “It’s good, isn’t it?” she said.
“It is.” I pointed to the blonde on the canvas. “Do you think this girl is supposed to be Ami?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” She pursed her lips as her eyes flicked to and away from the painting. “Perhaps it is. Narcissistic tendencies are often revealed in a patient’s artwork.”
I wasn’t sure about that, but I supposed she’d know better than I. Since the nurse was being more open than usual, I decided to ask, “Is, uh, Ami going to be okay?”
“Why wouldn’t she be, Miss Fitch?”
I fidgeted with the edge of the backing on the painting and a staple popped up. Quickly, I flattened it back into place. “It’s just, she seems so…unwell. She said she doesn’t feel safe. Could someone—”
“None of them ever feel safe, Miss Fitch.” The nurse rolled her eyes. “I can’t discuss the particulars of Mrs. Hensley’s diagnosis with you, but I’m sure even you can see she suffers from paranoid delusions.”
“I suppose,” I conceded. But something was not quite right.
One of the phones rang and Nurse Allen shooed me along. I gladly made my way to the elevators. As usual, I could hardly wait to get the hell out of Willow Point. On the ride home, I pondered what significance the painting could possibly hold. Was the blonde crying in the woods supposed to be Ami…or Helena? Why was she wrapped up in a sheet? Maybe the girl was someone else entirely, and the painting was just a painting. But since Ami had made it for me, I felt sure it had to contain some kind of a clue.
When I arrived home, I made a sandwich for myself. While I ate I propped the painting up against the Siamese kitten shakers on the table. I stared and stared at the blonde girl in the woods, but nothing jumped out at me. What kind of lame clue was this?
After I rinsed my plate, I sat back down at the table. “Ami, Ami… What are you trying to tell me?” I asked out loud.
Since the image itself was giving me nothing, I picked up the painting and turned it every which way. There was no writing anywhere, not within the painting itself, nor on the plain brown paper stapled to the back. Ami had not even signed her strange artwork.
Out of frustration I shook the small painting, even contemplated throwing it. But as I shuffled it from hand to hand, I heard something sliding around behind the paper backing.
“What the…” I mumbled.
The area of the backing where I’d accidently pried the staple loose, back at Willow Point, was puckered. I slid my finger beneath the loose staple and lifted it. The puckered paper began to peel away easily, staples flying off in every direction.
Suddenly, three loose notebook-type pages, folded in half, fell onto the table. The clue.
I carefully picked up the pages. Lined and slightly yellowed, the edges were ragged, like they’d been torn from a book of some sort. I wondered if these pages were from the same notebook Ami had been drawing in last week. I thought about that picture of the tree and the crater. Maybe that tree and the hole in the ground meant something after all. What, though?
I had thought then that the
