Never Fear (20 page)

Bob continued to stare at her, his
pale blue eyes watery and vacant.

For some reason it made her so angry
she stood back up, slowly. How dare he not fucking answer her when
she was being so damn nice. Wasn’t she sweet? Wasn’t she cute?
Everyone always said she was fucking cute. Why didn’t Bob see that?
Why couldn’t he open his stupid slack mouth and answer her? She
reached out and shook the elf in Bob’s lap.

“
Where did you get
this?”

When he continued to stare at her, she
felt the rage coursing through her, an actual chemical response. It
invaded her limbs, shooting down into her hands so that the
intensity of the anger had nowhere to go but out. Without being
aware of intention, she lifted her hand and cracked it across Bob’s
face in a hard, loud slap.

The noise startled her and she jumped
back. “Sorry. Sorry.”

A single tear rolled down Bob’s cheek
and she felt shaky, guilty, shocked. Breathing hard, she backed up
and out of the room. In the doorway, she realized she should grab
the elf but she was so upset over losing control of herself she
just left it. She wasn’t the one who gave the toy to him. Whoever
did could take it away from him. Turning on her heel, she quickly
walked down the hall, heart racing. What the hell had just
happened?

She went through the rest of her
rounds on auto-pilot, trying to figure out how she had exploded so
quickly. Her anger toward Grace was building as she felt like she
was the only one who could have given Bob the elf. After thirty
minutes, she went back to the nurse’s station and impulsively
yanked open the drawer Grace had tossed the elf into.

He was still there. Grinning up at
Maisey.

She slammed the drawer
shut.

*

Grace still couldn’t figure out how
Rose had gotten hold of a pen or how she had managed to break the
skin with it. But it was exactly the kind of thing she didn’t need
going down on her shift. It had to have been one of the other
nurses on earlier rounds. They must have dropped it. Mental
patients were surprisingly cunning and no doubt Rose had scooped
the pen up and used it to impale herself.

“
Just when I think I can’t
be creeped out by anything they do, one of them manages to prove me
wrong,” Patrick said to her back at the nurse’s station. “What the
hell was that? Do you know how tenacious you have to be to stab at
yourself with a friggin’ ballpoint pen?” He shook his head. Patrick
was tall, broad shouldered, sporting a woodsman beard.

Grace liked him well enough but she
wouldn’t cry if he took a new job. Her feelings about Patrick were
ambivalent. But he did his job well and generally without
complaint. She got along better with men than she did with women,
always had. They saw her as a broad, a peer, not as a sexual
interest, so there was no posturing, no bragging, no flirting. She
wondered what Patrick would do if she told him she wanted to take
him into the staff restroom and blow him. The thought amused her.
She didn’t, of course. She just thought it would be funny as hell
to shock him. That would creep him out even more than Rose’s little
pen trick.

“
There is no true normal
here,” she told Patrick. “But if you think about it, everything
here is really routine, mundane. So when one of the patients goes
beyond the usual ranting and babbling and accusations, it’s
unnerving. Just don’t let it bother you. She’ll heal. It wasn’t a
deep wound.” It had just been fleshy. Rose had really hacked the
hell out of herself.

“
So what do we tell the
doctor? I don’t want my ass chewed, and I know I wasn’t in there
earlier today. Neither were you, right?”

“
Only Maisey was in there
on this shift,” she said, with no small amount of triumph. “And
then whoever was on for first shift. There is no telling.” She eyed
Patrick. “So I suggest we don’t tell. Rose could have just as
easily done that with her fingernail.”

Patrick eyed her with disbelief. “I
seriously doubt that. We can’t just lie about it. No one is going
to buy that.”

“
Then you’re basically
throwing Maisey under the bus.”

“
She’ll just get
reprimanded,” he said, suddenly sounding doubtful. “Not
fired.”

“
She’s been here a week.
Of course she’ll get fired.” Grace watched him out of the corner of
her eye. He was wavering. He felt the urge to protect Maisey,
clearly. So predictable. He would jeopardize his own job to protect
a piece of pussy he’d never get to touch.

Fine by her. She thought it was
stupid, but he was entitled to be stupid. She had no intention of
lying about the incident. She had just been curious what his
response would be and now she knew. He was an idiot.

“
I don’t know. I just
don’t think we should lie… it seems unethical.”

“
So don’t.” Grace reached
over to the drawer beneath the desk and pulled it open to grab her
cigarettes. The elf that should have been there, wasn’t.

Damn it.

She slammed the drawer back shut and
went outside to smoke, grabbing her winter coat with the flask in
the front pocket. Just a little nip to get through the rest of her
shift. Nothing more, nothing less.

He knows if you’ve been
bad or good, so be good for goodness sake.

Grace shoved at the emergency exit
doors. How the hell was that song on again? It was a playlist of
what seemed like only four songs that repeated constantly and it
was annoying. Outside snow was soundlessly drifting down in wet
flakes and Maisey was crying behind the dumpster.

Grace sighed and knew she was going to
have to give up her smoke break.

She immediately turned and went back
inside before Maisey saw her and wanted to be comforted for who the
hell knew what. Grace didn’t do comforting.

Back in, she was barely two steps
forward when the lights cut out. Patients started screaming.
Grace’s foot gave way, sliding through a wet spot, and she
scrambled to maintain balance so she didn’t fall.

The generator kicked in and the lights
went back on.

What she saw made her wish they were
back out.

Blood. All over the floor. A heavy
trail of it, fresh, still wet and bright crimson, heading all the
way down the hall. As if someone had been dragged the length of it
while bleeding.

The door slammed shut behind her and
she whirled around to see Maisey standing there, her face pale,
cheeks damp with tears, snowflakes in her hair and dusting her
shoulders. “What is that?” she gasped. “Oh, my God.”

“
It’s blood. Help me
figure out where it’s coming from.”

Without warning, Maisey glared at her.
“Fuck you, no. I’m not doing it.” She brushed past Grace and
stomped off down the hall, rushing into the staff
restroom.

What the hell was that? Totally
unexpected and another time the behavior would have been
distracting, but Grace barely spared a glance in Maisey’s direction
because this was a lot of blood. Enough blood that someone could be
bleeding out and she could be getting fired. Grace wasn’t going to
let either happen.

Not on her shift.

*

Maisey stared at herself in the
mirror, afraid she was hyperventilating. Her eyes looked wild, her
skin tone splotchy and embarrassing. She still couldn’t believe she
had hit Bob and she had screamed at Grace. What was happening to
her? It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

Everyone thought she was
just a pretty girl, but they didn’t know her. She had secrets.
Everyone had
secrets
. Even Santa had secrets, that judgmental old prick. Like he
hadn’t had an inappropriate thought or two about the elves? And
that red nose had to be from years’ worth of hard drinking. No one
got a red nose from being jolly. Excessive smiling just created
crow’s feet.

The random thoughts whirled around in
her head and Maisey felt scattered and crazy and alien. It was like
she had been hijacked by someone else and they were controlling her
thoughts and actions. She splashed water on her face and shook her
head, like she could rattle out the weird thoughts, but they still
teased at the edges of her consciousness, creepy visuals of Santa
and Mrs. Claus, and a view of her own hands reaching out and
choking the life out of Bob while he sat there slackly and took it,
never fighting, like a total idiot…

Maisey let out a cry and grabbed her
head. “No. Stop it. Just stop it.” She didn’t think like that. She
didn’t have insidious evil little dirty thoughts that were
insulting, cruel, deviant. She didn’t.

Yet she was.

Yanking open the restroom door, she
decided she needed to go home. Something was wrong. She wondered if
she were having an aneurysm or something. Could that do this to
her? Make her feel violent and gross?

In the hallway she saw the blood again
and her stomach turned. For a split second she thought she was
going to vomit but she swallowed convulsively and managed to keep
her bile down. Grace and Patrick were at the end of the hall, heads
together, murmuring. Patrick was gesticulating wildly. Moving
cautiously, so she didn’t step in the blood, Maisey made her way to
them.

“
What’s going on?” she
whispered, feeling like she couldn’t say anything in a normal
voice. The hall was quiet, the Christmas lights that had been hung
on the nurses’ station blinking madly. The carols blaring over the
speakers sounded tinny and harsh, forced cheer, a manic response to
Christmas. The patients were quiet, drugged down for the night.
Somewhere in the distance she heard a door open and she turned,
scared, but saw nothing.

“
I have no idea,” Patrick
said. “Look, this blood just stops here, right outside Bob’s door,
but he’s fine. I’ve checked on him three times because I can’t
figure it out.”

Maisey shivered. Why did it have to be
Bob’s room? She still felt guilty over hitting him. It had been
such an unnatural reaction and she hadn’t been able to control it.
Not one bit.

“
I’ll go check on Rose.
Maybe she got herself again,” Grace said, shaking her head, her
mouth pinched.

“
What happened to Rose?”
Maisey asked Patrick as Grace walked away. She rubbed her hands
over her arms, unnerved. The ward had never felt eerie to her, but
now it did. Ominous. The air wasn’t moving and the piped in music
seemed to grow louder and louder. There was a song about a happy
elf playing now.

“
She cut herself with a
pen.”

“
Oh.” Maisey looked at the
smears on the ground, turning a rust color now as they dried. The
abrupt ending at Bob’s door made a shiver roll up her spine. “I’m
going to see Bob.” She needed to apologize.

“
Maybe we should call
someone,” Patrick said, chewing his fingernail.

“
Like who? The cops?” she
said doubtfully. “What would we say?”

“
I don’t know.”

He followed her to Bob’s room, across
the hall. “Maybe you shouldn’t go in there, Maisey.” He grabbed her
arm.

She glared at him, yanking herself out
of his grip. He couldn’t touch her. She’d never fucking said he
could touch her. “Get off of me.”

Patrick blanched. “Fine. Do what you
want.”

She would. She pushed past him and
went into Bob’s room, distraught, hands trembling. There was a
pounding behind her eyes and she wished she’d never taken this damn
job. She was better than this. She deserved something better. Less…
mental.

Bob was still in his chair. His eyes
were fearful when he saw her come in, and oddly, it was a relief.
Having him afraid of her was better than that terrible blankness he
usually displayed. The lights were on, but nobody was home. That
was Bob the majority of the time.

“
Hi, Bob,” she said
softly. “I’m sorry for before. I don’t know what got into me but it
was totally uncalled for.”

He stared. But then he turned, slowly,
and looked to the right, before turning back, his eyes beseeching.
He looked truly terrified. Maisey followed the direction he had
briefly looked in and what she saw made her frown.

“
Where did that come
from?” she murmured.

It was the elf. Sitting on the edge of
Bob’s bed. Grinning away at her.

She leaned over, very, very close to
Bob and searched his expression. “Did he do it?” she whispered,
leaning her head just imperceptibly towards the elf. It was a crazy
question. She knew it was.

But Bob’s head went up and down, very
slowly, before his hand reached out and he laced his fingers
through hers, like he needed comfort.

“
It’s okay.” She gripped
his hand back. “I’ll get rid of him.”

“
Or he’ll get rid of
you.”

Goosebumps rose on Maisey’s skin. Bob
didn’t speak. Bob never spoke. Yet his shaky voice whispered to
warn her. His hand gripped hers so hard it was painful.

And she could have sworn she heard the
elf laugh.

Grace paged Sam to clean up the blood.
She wasn’t going to touch it and it required appropriate pathogen
removal. But to go along with the rest of her lousy day, he didn’t
immediately appear and she wondered what he was up to. Things were
off kilter with Christmas Eve the next day. They were understaffed
and for the love of all that was holy, if someone didn’t turn off
that damn music she was going to lose it. Lose it all over the
bottle of vodka she craved like a hungry baby did a
nipple.