The Warden (5 page)

Warden Crawford rounded on her, exploding at her with a sudden cry that sent her sprawling backward. He ripped off his paper mask, half roaring with outrage. “You
dare
question me? You
dare
?” His entire body shook, his eyes larger, blacker, and sharper than she had ever seen them. He looked down, noticing the pronounced tremor in his arms. “Stupid girl. Now nothing can be done today.” He grunted again and waved vaguely at the orderlies. “Clean up. Get her out of here.”

One of the orderlies cleared his throat, shuffling. “But sir, the electroconvulsive shock—”

The warden spun and slammed his hands against the instrument tray, sending gleaming steel in every direction, the sound jarring them all.
“Does anyone in this fucking building listen to me anymore?”

Jocelyn stared, sucking in breaths so hard her paper mask sank in and out against her mouth, expanding and deflating like bellows. His voice rang in the small operating theater, the orderlies stunned into similar silences.

“You,” he finally said, collecting his breath and pointing at
her. “Out. And you two, help me get this patient back to confinement.”

“You didn't tell me about what happened with Dennis Heimline.” Jocelyn didn't mean for it to come out so coldly, but she needed to discuss something—
anything
—to get her mind off what she had seen in Theater 7. He was going to operate. On Lucy. He was going to operate on Lucy and it was completely unnecessary.

Lucy was right. Why does he want to perform surgery on her so badly?

Madge paced outside the back stoop of Brookline. It was one of the few places nurses could find some privacy. And it was one of the few places Madge could sneak a cigarette without a lecture from Nurse Kramer. Jocelyn hated how much her friend was smoking, but she envied Madge the release of a vice. Maybe she ought to take up one of her own.

“He just . . . He snapped at me.” Madge paused, looking out over the distant town. Camford crowded up to the hill where Brookline and the rest of the college sat. It was odd, Jocelyn thought, to even consider the collegiate life going on around them. The students avoided Brookline as if it were contagious. She was beginning to understand why.

“He was talking about the White Mountains again,” Madge added, regarding the burning-cherry end of her cigarette. “And then something just changed and he wasn't himself. Dennis is odd but harmless. He's never threatened me, never said anything to frighten me at all. I don't know what happened. . . .
One minute it was White Mountains this, White Mountains that, and then he lunged for me. He grabbed me around the throat, Joss! It was horrible.” She shivered, taking another long drag. “
I want to pose you
. That's what he said. God, it was just so, so horrible.
I want to pose you, you would be so beautiful
.”

“Why didn't you tell me this?” Jocelyn asked softly. She sat on the stoop, hiding from the drizzle under a shallow, shingled overhang.

“You've been so wrapped up with Lucy. . . . I didn't want to worry you.”

“Yeah, well, you won't have to think about that anymore.” Jocelyn pinched the bridge of her nose, sighing. She had
had
to intervene, but now who would protect Lucy from the warden? “I really stuffed it up, Madge. I'll probably get fired
and
I'll never work with Lucy again.”

Her friend flicked away the cigarette, aiming it at a damp tree trunk. They sat together on the stoop, Madge with her arm flung over Jocelyn's shoulders. “For what it's worth, I think you did the right thing. Anyway, I heard Kramer buzzing to one of the other girls. It sounds like Crawford wants you to work with a new patient coming in. You might not be able to help Lucy, but maybe this one will be easier.”

Jocelyn nodded, swallowing her cynical retort.

“Well, lovely, I'm off,” Madge said, leaning over to squeeze Jocelyn in a one-armed hug. She stood and brushed off her rain-flecked uniform. “Crawford wants to see me. Again. I think the gross old fart has a crush on me or something.”

“What does he want to see you about?” Jocelyn asked quickly. She couldn't explain her sudden sense of dread.

“Something about Dennis. He says I have to see ‘it' now, whatever that means,” Madge said, sounding sad. Resigned. “He says I have to see how far gone Dennis is, that there's no hope for him. When there's no hope, he says, there's only survival. You know”—she paused with the door open, her full lips swishing to the side—“I think I really will dye my hair dark. I could look like Jackie, right? Maybe I'll feel better with a little more glamour in my life. I'll see what Tanner thinks. We've got another date tonight. I bet this time we'll really go all the way.”

“
Ash
. Nurse Ash. Huh. That's a fittingly macabre name for this charming little dungeon.”

Jocelyn blinked at the new patient, taking stock of his slim, tall form, his carelessly tossed black hair and almost unnaturally green eyes. If he were one of the orderlies, he would immediately be on Madge's short list for seduction. Even Jocelyn had to admit, in a quiet, shameful way, that she found him incredibly pretty. Pretty, because there was something fluid and feminine about his frame and his hands, and the way he leaned against the white, spare bed, his arms over his chest, his legs crossed at the ankles.

“I won't fuss if it helps you to have a sense of humor about all this,” Jocelyn said blithely. “We're going to have to get to know each other,” she added, consulting the detailed history in front of her. That was nice, at least, to know a single thing about this person, unlike the strangely vacant past of Lucy. Of Dennis. “And I prefer my patients cheerful, if at all possible. Cooperative, at the very least.”

“Aye, aye,” he murmured, saluting. His lips resolved into a
smirk, their natural resting position. “And how do you run the Good Ship Loony Bin. Is it a
tight
ship or a loose one?”

He wagged his eyebrows, but it was not nearly enough to unseat her. Old Mr. Goldblatt in room sixteen would flirt outrageously, using sexual terminology and phrases that not even Madge could decipher.

“I know this must be difficult for you,” she began, glancing at his chart again and at the reason for admittance. This was a new one. Luckily, her only job was to administer whatever medicines the doctors prescribed and check in on him occasionally. It wasn't her job to cure him. And maybe that was for the best, as she clearly wasn't curing much of anything lately.

D
ESMOND
, C
ARRICK
A
NDREW

S
EX
: M
ALE

R
EASON FOR
A
DMITTANCE
: U
NNATURAL
S
EXUAL
P
REDILECTIONS

Well, that covered a wide swath.

He must have noticed her eyes widening as he quickly laughed and said, “Got caught in bed with the neighbor boy. Well, young man, really. I'm not
that
much of a pervert.”

“I don't believe you're a pervert at all, Mr. Desmond,” she replied, just as readily. She looked up briskly from the file, meeting his bright, challenging stare. “I don't like words like that. They don't do anything but shame. Treatment is not about shame.”

His thick brows went up, up, up in surprise. He looked at her as if he could see all the way into her mind. “You shock me, Nurse Ash. But in the very best of ways.”

She smirked, accustomed to the flirtation of patients eager to get on her good side and slip the rules. “Please let me know if you have any trouble settling in. Accommodating to life here can be”—Awful.
Impossible
—“Tricky.”

“Oh, trust me, nothing I can't handle. I was born to jailors.”

Jocelyn took a few steps backward toward the door, grimacing. “I'm afraid life must have been very unfair for you.”

His eyes, green and light, fixed on her again through his fall of dark hair. “I'm afraid it's very unfair for everyone. You might not think I'm a pervert, but unfortunately, you're not the one in power here. You're not the one with the keys.”

“I'll check in with you again shortly,” she said, leaving before he could tempt her to stay another moment.

The door clicked shut behind her and locked, and not a second afterward came the scream. She knew that scream. It had driven her from sleep and stayed in her nightmares ever since.

Lucy.

No
, she thought, racing down the hall.
Don't let him cut her open
.

S
he was too late, of course. She had known that would be the case even as she sped down the corridor, almost smashing into Nurse Kramer, who had positioned herself like a sentry at the top of the stairs leading to the basement.

“Nobody is allowed below right now,” she said sternly, putting out her arms like a first baseman to keep Jocelyn from forcing her way through. “Nobody.”

“I need to see Lucy. She's screaming.”

“Other nurses are with her.” Nurse Kramer's mouth clamped shut, her fleshy face jiggling to a standstill. “You're not needed.”

“What other nurses? I should be with her.”

“Nurse Fullerton, for one. Just calm down, Ash, and get back to work. I don't want to see you in this hallway for the rest of the afternoon, do you understand me?”

Lucy screamed again, this time harder, a raw, helpless sound that pierced straight through to Jocelyn's spine.
No, no, no.
She was supposed to protect her. She was supposed to make sure nothing worse happened to that child.

“I need you to say that you understand me, Nurse Ash.”

Jocelyn threw up her hands, stalking away. “I understand. I
understand
, if that's even possible in this godforsaken place.”

She rounded the corner and disappeared into the nurses'
station. Maybe if she waited long enough, Nurse Kramer would need to leave for a toilet break and give Jocelyn an opening. But by then it would be too late. Far too late. Still. She tidied until there was no more tidying to do. She took prescriptions and handed out doses in the dispensary. She even paced up and down the hall. All the while, she stayed as close to the stairwell as possible, but Kramer refused to budge.

By five o'clock the screams had stopped, and Jocelyn could only wonder what they had done to Lucy.

I'm sorry, little sparrow.

Her fury turned to Warden Crawford, and then it turned just as swiftly to Madge. How could she be a part of this? Hadn't she been just as doting on Lucy? Lobotomies were an absolute last resort. Surgeries of
any
kind were a last resort. And even if it came to a lobotomy, there were easier, more modern methods that absolutely did not involve a bone saw. Whatever was going on in the basement, she had to put an end to it.

But all Jocelyn could do was wait. She watched the nurses come and go for supper. No sign of Madge. Didn't she have a date? It wasn't like Madge to miss something like that, not when she couldn't shut up about Tanner and his
gorgeous
blue eyes for fifteen seconds.

But the hours blurred together, and between skipping lunch, supper, and all the usual coffee breaks in between, Jocelyn was worn down. She was
exhausted
. Sleep snuck up on her, the after-hours low halogen glow of the lobby lulling her into a doze she hadn't wanted or expected. There were no dreams and little rest, just darkness and the hard, sudden slide into unconsciousness.

And then there was giggling.

It was soft at first, distant, and for a fuzzy, sleepy moment Jocelyn thought she had finally begun to dream. But the laughter continued, louder, sharper. Not laughter. Giggling. Madge's giggling. Jocelyn's head flew up, a string of drool snapping between her lower lip and her forearm. She had curled up against the dispensary counter, her knees tucked up on the second rung of the stool. Now she rubbed her eyes, her face, working blood flow and sense back into her body.

The giggling came again, a feminine, flirty sound that wound up from the depths of Brookline. There were voices, too, but they were muffled and unintelligible at this extreme distance. Jocelyn tumbled off the stool and pulled off her heels—she could run better in bare stockings—and raced to the stairs. Nurse Kramer was of course long gone, having left for dinner and then sleep. A few orderlies and nurses were circulating on the lobby level, but they didn't seem to notice Jocelyn stumbling toward the stairs.

Again she plunged into the cold and again she fought off the creeping dread that seeped over her like a sticky, oozing tar. She abandoned her hard-soled shoes on one of the lower steps, shuffling with free hands and quiet feet to the archway and the soft, winding giggles that came from within.

Now the voices were louder, stronger, and Jocelyn began to make out the words. There were no orderlies to stop her as she stepped beneath the dark arch marking off the corridor.

“W-wait . . . What are you doing? Madge?
What are you doing?
”

Tanner. She could hear the panic in his voice, the high tremor that made him sound like a frightened little boy. Jocelyn ran faster, trying not to slide and fall on her sweaty, stockinged
feet. Where
were
they? She panted, out of breath, ignoring how the corridor became darker and darker, closing in, the corridor more like a tunnel that focused to just a miniscule barrel of light. But she jolted to a stop as the sudden cry of the other patients went up, as if in solidarity with Madge's laughter. A refrain of wild, terrible sympathy.

And then it was a chant. She couldn't hear Lucy's screams but she could hear the others, Dennis and his ilk, their cries coalescing into the same phrase she had heard on that first awful night.

“Help her, help her, HELP HER!”

She found them in Theater 7.

Jocelyn leaped for the doorframe, anchoring her slick and unreliable feet by hoisting herself into the room. She didn't want to freeze. It was the worst possible moment to freeze. Yet she couldn't move. Madge was there, standing on the same operating table where they had bound and gagged Lucy. Below, arms out as if to catch her from a sudden fall, Tanner eased back and forth, eyes glued to Madge, who was swaying on the wheeled table.

“Careful, doll,” she giggled. In her right hand she held a sleek, stainless steel hammer, the kind used with an orbitoclast for lobotomies. “You'll fall! Don't fall and hurt that pretty face.”

“Let me get you down from there,” Tanner was saying, licking his lips nervously and trying to ease toward her. But Madge reeled at his slightest movement, the table shaking, threatening to spill her onto the floor. She swung the hammer, first at him and then at the open air before her.

“Why don't you just come down?” he pleaded. Sweat glistened
on his forehead. The chanting grew louder, earsplitting, and gathering in speed. Jocelyn inched carefully into the room, hands up in surrender.

“I saw him,” Madge was saying. She sounded scared. Little. “I saw Mickey Mouse, but where was Minnie? She wasn't there. And she's so, so pretty. So pretty. But now she's cracked. Now she's broken.”

Jocelyn had nearly reached the pool of light cast by the operating bulbs, but Madge didn't notice, swaying precariously on the gurney, her arms high in the air, hammer swinging like a pendulum.

“Just come down from there and we can talk,” Tanner coaxed, still prepared to catch her if she fell, which was looking more and more likely.

Jocelyn wondered if she could somehow climb up onto the table and tackle Madge, bring her down gently while also disarming her. But that seemed like far too much to attempt without either both of them hitting the ground from a height or Madge accidentally smashing her with the hammer.

“But he said I would see!” Madge shrieked. Her scream only drove the chanting higher, louder, and the words thumped at the base of Jocelyn's skull.

“Help her, help her!”

“Careful, doll,” Madge breathed, laughing, giggling, her voice hiccupping into hysterics. “Careful, doll! Careful! You'll fall! Don't fall and hurt that pretty face!”

Jocelyn saw the hammer go up with more purpose this time,
Freeman
stamped into the shining steel. Both she and Tanner leapt for the table too late. Madge caught herself on the
upswing, rocketing the hammer into her mouth. Teeth shattered, tiny bits of white falling on them like a shower of sand. Jocelyn tossed up her hands, screaming, watching through the splay of her fingers as the hammer landed again, this time dead center of Madge's forehead.

She was still giggling, giggling, giggling.
Smash
.

Tanner grabbed her by the ankles, pulling her down to the floor as best he could, dodging the hammer blows that rained down indiscriminately. While he brought her to the ground, Jocelyn tried to reach for the hammer, but Madge struggled, her giggles turning into shrill arpeggio of screams. She dodged and bucked and smashed the hammer into her forehead again and again, until Jocelyn took a blow to the shoulder herself, finally wrestling the thing out of her grasp.

The hammer had broken the skin, and the deep, dark bruising spread like spidery shadows from the middle of Madge's forehead. The blood ran over them all as Jocelyn and Tanner pinned her arms, held her, her laughter dying down as the light seeped out of her eyes.

“M-Madge, Madge, can you breathe? Oh God, can you breathe? Just stay with me, I'll get someone. . . . I'll get help. I'll get you help.” Jocelyn tore a strip of cotton from her uniform, trying to mop up the free-flowing blood and stop the bleeding at its epicenter.

But the blood poured down Madge's face, splitting over her nose and into her mouth, onto Jocelyn, dripping onto the floor, so red it looked black. “I fell and hurt my pretty face,” she mumbled, words jumbled from her broken and missing teeth. “I guess he got his way.”

“Hold on, Madge, I know it's bad, just . . . Please hold on.”

“Why,” Tanner whispered. Again and again. “Why?
Why?
”

A shadow fell over them, swallowing up the meager yellow light of the operating lamps. Madge had gone limp in their arms and the shrieks of the patients, at last, had ebbed. Jocelyn felt a heavy hand fall on her shoulder. The warden's.

She shivered and tried to cast off his grip.

“Surely you see now, Nurse Ash,” he said. “Sometimes there really is no hope. What could you have done? What could any of us have done? If we hadn't put Lucy's mind at ease—if we had not given her a peace she could not give herself—she might have done this same awful thing to herself. Dennis . . . Dennis could slip away from us any day now.”

“I don't . . . Madge didn't do this to herself.” Jocelyn couldn't look down. She couldn't look into her friend's broken face. Her skin was so cold, they were both so cold, the blood and the sudden gush of tears felt all the hotter. Stinging. “She didn't do this. There was nothing wrong with her.
I know there was nothing wrong with her
.”

She heard footsteps and glanced to the side, watching as two male orderlies filed into Theater 7.

“Escort Mr. Frye to his room, please,” Warden Crawford said, tut-tutting at Tanner and squeezing Jocelyn's shoulder so hard she could feel the bones give and crack.

“I'd like him to stay,” Jocelyn whispered. “Madge . . . She really cared for him.”

“It's best that he go.”

He wasn't given a choice in the matter. They caught eyes, she and Tanner, as the orderlies hauled him away from Madge, his
spectacles askew, his mouth open to call for help. But then the door shut and she was alone with the warden, Madge limp and lifeless in her arms.

“She was going to dye her hair like Jackie Kennedy,” Jocelyn murmured, wiping a stained piece of blond hair off of Madge's cheek. “She wanted to be glamorous.”

“That's nice.”

“You don't care,” she growled. “You don't care about Lucy. You don't care about me or about Madge. You don't care about anything.”

“Now, that's not true,” he said warmly, gently, shifting so that he could crouch in front of her and face her. He reached out, and she tensed as his hand cupped her chin, forcing her to meet his cold, steady gaze. “I care about the future. I care about making sure things like this never happen again—it's senseless, useless.”

Jocelyn couldn't argue with that, but she couldn't look at him anymore, either.
I couldn't help her
. That was the only thought filling her head.
I couldn't help her
.

She hadn't helped Lucy, and she certainly hadn't helped Madge. What kind of nurse was she? What kind of
person
was she?

“Hush,” Warden Crawford said. She hadn't even realized she was crying. The smile he gave her was gentle, fatherly, and for a brief, terrible moment his presence didn't fill her with unease. “Some patients are beyond help,” he told her, lifting Madge carefully from her grasp, “but they are not beyond
use.
We will learn from this, Nurse Ash. Trust me, in time you will learn.”