None of the nurses reacted as she passed the station, barely even glancing up from their filing and typing. The ward was as quiet as ever, a silence heavy with drugged sleep and barely suppressed panic. Emma heard a voice in one of the bedrooms chanting a children’s rhyme. “Ring around the rosy, a pocket full of posies. Ashes, ashes …” The person trailed off into garbled laughter, or maybe it was sobs. Emma couldn’t tell. She forced herself not to walk too quickly away from the sound. She was supposed to look like she belonged here.
The now familiar pulse of the ward’s emotions thudded dully around me. It felt like quicksand, pulling me down. I hovered close to my sister, clinging to her thoughts and feelings, trying to stay afloat.
As she passed the common room, she saw the same blank faces angled toward the television set, the same dark-haired woman rocking herself violently in the corner. Mr. Silva sat in the armchair he’d occupied two nights earlier. His eyes met hers and narrowed suspiciously. She held her breath, half expecting him to get out of his chair, to come toward her sniffing like a dog.
But after a moment, he turned back to the television set, his black eyes losing focus. She wiped the sweat off her forehead and kept moving.
Around a few more corners she found it: a wooden door labeled RECORDS. She swiped her card against the reader and heard the lock click. Glancing up the hallway to make sure no one had noticed, she slid in and shut the door behind her.
The light fluttered on, revealing a narrow closet filled with dusty metal cabinets reaching from floor to ceiling. Carefully typed alphabetic labels were affixed to the front of each drawer. Emma took a moment to listen to the room’s deep silence, her blood pounding in her ears. For better or worse, she was moments from finding out the truth about her mother.
She traced her fingers over the letters on the cabinets until she found a drawer labeled L–N. She gave the drawer a firm tug. It didn’t budge.
Then she noticed the LED screen blinking on the top of the cabinet. PLEASE ENTER CODE, read the message. She stared blankly at it. What was it Nisha had said? My mother’s birthday is September seventh. Emma reached a trembling finger up to type 0907 on the keypad. The drawer slid smoothly open.
Inside, it bulged with files, each one packed with documents, forms, and even photos. Emma scanned the labels quickly, trying to get her bearings in the dense forest of alphabetized folder tags. Her eyes darted over a particularly fat file. Then she did a double take. Her gaze shot back to the file. “Landry,” she whispered.
She thought of Ethan’s mother shuffling past the living room window, wearing a threadbare robe. She’d had cancer … but did she also have psychological issues? Before Emma could stop herself, her fingers reached for the file and pulled it out. Her breath caught in her throat when she saw the patient’s first name printed precisely on the cover. It wasn’t Mrs. Landry’s file at all. It was Ethan’s.
Emma’s fingers tightened around the edge of the manila folder. Maybe it was a different Ethan Landry. It had to be a common name. There had to be an explanation.
Deep in her gut, though, she knew. This was Ethan’s file. Her Ethan.
Ethan had told her not to come here, and now she knew why. What was in it? What had he hidden from her? Suddenly Emma felt angry and deeply hurt. She had shared everything about herself with Ethan—things she’d never told anyone, the worst stories from her foster homes, stupid childhood fantasies, her most private secrets.
Emma took a shuddering breath, then slipped Ethan’s file back where it belonged. She couldn’t betray his privacy, no matter how betrayed she herself felt.
“It doesn’t matter,” I told her. “It’s not why we’re here. Now hurry,” I said, as we both heard footsteps approaching. Emma tensed. But whoever it was walked past the records room, and she let out a breath of relief.
Emma shook her head quickly to clear it, then flipped to the back of the drawer. MELVILLE, MENDEL, MENDOZA—there it was: MERCER. She pulled out the file and laid it flat across the drawer. On top was Becky’s most recent admittance form and a scrawled copy of her prescriptions. Behind that were her session notes, stapled into a clear plastic folder like a kid’s book report. They were written in Dr. Banerjee’s neat, slanting cursive.
Patient is despondent and unresponsive, was all that was written under one day. Another note read:
Patient refers constantly to some “terrible act” she has performed. Have cross-checked with her police record, but nothing seems to correspond with her guilt complex. She will suffer these delusions of persecution until she is able to confess.
Some of Becky’s sketches were included in the notes, the same intricate and abstract filigree that filled the notebook Emma had found in the attic. Patient’s art shows both incredible creativity and crippling level of compulsion, Dr. Banerjee had written on the back of one of them. Increased dosage recommended.
None of this was anything Emma didn’t already know. She turned a few pages.
Patient talks frequently about the daughter who was taken from her. She seems convinced the child is being brainwashed and fantasizes about stealing her away.
The paper rattled in Emma’s hand as she started to tremble. A daughter taken from her? Did that mean Sutton? Had she come back to Tucson in August to take Sutton away from the Mercers? Had Sutton fought her—and lost? Emma kept reading.
The little girl was born twelve years ago this month. It seems to bring back bad memories for Ms. Mercer and exacerbates her episodes.
Twelve years ago this month. That couldn’t mean Sutton or Emma.