Chapter 14: The Nighttime Confrontation
The thin hospital pillow still held the shape of her scream. Susanna lay on her back in the dark, the coarse sheet pulled to her chin. The room was a black rectangle, the only light a sliver of pale yellow from the hall leaking under the door. Her body felt both hollowed out and too full, a vessel for something she couldn’t name. Between her legs, a dull, warm ache pulsed in time with her heartbeat. The smell of Lisa’s skin—smoke, lavender, sweat—was in her nostrils, on her tongue. She couldn’t wash it out.
She’d tried. After Lisa had left, sliding from the bed as silently as she’d come, Susanna had crept to the communal bathroom. She’d stood under the weak, tepid spray, scrubbing at her stomach, her thighs, with the abrasive institutional soap. It didn’t matter. The scent was in her hair, in the sweat beading at the base of her spine. It was inside her.
Sleep was a foreign country. Every time she closed her eyes, she felt the press of Lisa’s body against her back, the sharp, proprietary dig of her fingers. You’re always wet for me, aren’t you? The shame should have been a cold flood. It was there, but it was distant, like news of a disaster in another city. Closer, hotter, was the memory of the relentless rhythm, the permission to shatter. To be forced to shatter. She’d bitten the pillow to keep the sound in, but it had escaped anyway—a short, desperate animal sound she didn’t recognize as her own.
Good girl.
The words curled in her stomach like a sleeping snake.
Dawn came not with sunlight—the dormitory windows were frosted glass brick—but with a shift in the quality of the dark, and the first sounds of the ward waking: a distant cough, the rattle of a med cart, the squeak of a nurse’s soles on linoleum. Susanna got up. She dressed in the same grey sweatpants, the same t-shirt. The routine was a cage, but right now the bars felt like something to hold onto.
Breakfast was a silent affair in the fluorescent-bright cafeteria. She pushed scrambled eggs around a compartmented tray. Georgina sat across from her, methodically chewing toast. Polly was stirring her oatmeal, staring into the middle distance. The normalcy of it was absurd. Susanna kept waiting for someone to look at her and just know. To see the fingerprint bruises she was sure were on her hips, to smell the sex on her.
Lisa wasn’t there.
Her absence was a louder presence than if she’d been holding court. Susanna found herself scanning the doorway, her nerves twitching each time it swung open. It was just an orderly, or Jason shuffling in for coffee. The craving was a physical thirst. She hated it. She drank her orange juice, acidic and sweet, to wash the feeling down.
The morning group session was on “Managing Expectations.” Susanna took a chair as far from the usual circle as she could, wedging herself between a mousy woman named Cynthia and the wall. She kept her hands folded tightly in her lap. When the door opened, her head snapped up.
It was just Dr. Wick.
She let out a breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding. The session droned on. Susanna watched a fly batter itself against the window. She thought about the dark patch Lisa had left on her sweatpants in this very room. She crossed her legs tightly.
Afterwards, she retreated to the small, dismal library—a shelf of battered paperbacks and a stained armchair. She picked up a novel, but the words swam. She needed to write. To pin something down. She found a stub of a pencil and a torn piece of paper in the back of a bird identification guide.
The thing about chaos, she wrote, the pencil digging into the paper, is that it makes its own order. It has a gravity. You stop fighting the pull because the fight is more exhausting than the fall. You start to crave the noise because it’s louder than the nothing inside your own head.
She stared at the words. They felt true and pathetic all at once.
“Deep thoughts?”
The voice came from the doorway. Lisa leaned against the frame, one shoulder cocked. She was wearing stolen scrubs, too big for her, the neckline sliding off one sharp collarbone. Her hair was piled in a messy knot. She looked triumphant and utterly bored.
Susanna’s heart hammered against her ribs. She crumpled the paper in her fist. “What do you want?”
“What, I can’t visit the library?” Lisa pushed off the doorframe and sauntered in. The room shrank. She plucked the crumpled ball from Susanna’s hand, smoothed it open against her thigh. She read it, her lips moving slightly. A smirk played on her mouth. “Gravity. That’s cute. You writing a poem about us?”
“Give it back.”
Lisa held it just out of reach, then let it flutter to the floor. She stepped on it. “It’s crap. You’re trying to make it pretty. It’s not pretty.” She moved closer, her scent enveloping Susanna again. “You slept like a rock after I left. Didn’t you.”
It wasn’t a question. Susanna looked away, at the fly now dead on the windowsill. “I didn’t sleep.”
“Liar.” Lisa’s hand came up, not to touch her, but to hover near her cheek. Susanna flinched. Lisa’s smirk widened. “You’re jumpy. You liked it. You’re confused because you liked it.” She leaned in, her voice dropping to a whisper that was all air and threat. “You think too much. That’s your real problem. You need someone to tell you what you are.”
“And you’re going to tell me?” Susanna heard the defiance in her own voice, thin and brittle.
“I already am.” Lisa’s eyes swept over her, a cold inventory. “You’re the girl who comes when I tell her to in a room full of people. You’re the girl who lies awake feeling me inside her. You’re mine.” She said it with a flat finality, like stating the color of the wall. “That piece of paper is you trying to run. You can’t run. There’s nowhere to go.”
The truth of it was a sucker punch. Claymoore was a holding pen. Lisa was right. There was no out. There was only different kinds of in.
“Why me?” The question left her lips before she could stop it. It was the wrong question. It showed need.
Lisa’s expression shifted, the bravado flickering for a microsecond. Something raw and hungry flashed in her eyes. It was gone so fast Susanna thought she’d imagined it. “Because you see me,” Lisa said simply. “The others, they see Crazy Lisa. The nurses see a problem. You… you look at me and you don’t look away. You want to understand the monster. That’s more dangerous than being one.” She reached out then, and her thumb brushed Susanna’s lower lip. It was almost tender. “You’re not like Georgina, whimpering about toothpaste. You have a fucking furnace inside you. You just don’t know how to turn it on. I do.”
She dropped her hand. “Meet me in the west stairwell after meds. The one they don’t lock.” She turned to leave.
“What if I don’t?” Susanna whispered.
Lisa paused at the door. She didn’t look back. “You will.” The certainty in her voice was absolute. “You’re already deciding to.”
She was gone. The library air felt thin and used. Susanna looked down at the crumpled paper under Lisa’s shoe. Her words, ground into the dirty carpet. She bent, slowly, and picked it up. She didn’t smooth it out. She held the tight, ruined ball in her palm.
The rest of the day passed in a smear of scheduled activities. Occupational therapy, where she glued mismatched seashells to a piece of wood. Lunch. The dreaded quiet hour in her room. Her hand kept creeping to her mouth, touching the spot Lisa’s thumb had been.
At meds, she lined up with the others. Nurse Valarie, with her eternal smile, dropped the small paper cup into her palm. The pill was blue. A tiny planet. She placed it on her tongue, showed her empty mouth, accepted the sip of water. She didn’t swallow. She held the bitter chemical taste on the back of her tongue, letting the coating dissolve, as she walked back to the dormitory hallway.
In the bathroom, she spat it into a wad of toilet paper and flushed it away.
The west stairwell was at the end of a long, dim corridor, a forgotten artery of the hospital. The door was heavy, painted a grimy green. She pushed it open. The air was cooler here, smelling of concrete and damp. Metal stairs zigzagged up into shadow.
Lisa was sitting on the third step, smoking a cigarette she’d rolled from pilfered tobacco. The smoke coiled in the still air. She looked up, her face illuminated by the glow of the tip. “Took you long enough.”
“I came,” Susanna said, the door swinging shut behind her with a definitive click.
“I know.” Lisa took a long drag, exhaling slowly. She patted the step beside her. “Sit.”
Susanna sat, not touching her. The concrete was cold through her sweatpants.
“Give me your hand,” Lisa said.
Susanna hesitated, then extended her left hand, palm down. Lisa studied it in the gloom, tracing the lines with her fingertip. “You have writer’s hands. Nervous.” She reached into the pocket of her scrubs and pulled out a small, sharp pair of fingernail scissors, the kind from a personal care kit. “These are mine.”
“What are you doing?”
“Shh.” Lisa took Susanna’s hand again, turned it over. She began, with meticulous care, to trim her fingernails. The snip-snip of the scissors was obscenely loud in the hollow space. Little half-moons of keratin fell onto the step between them. “You were biting them. They’re a mess.” Her touch was clinical, focused. This, somehow, felt more intimate than anything that had happened in the bed.
Susanna watched, hypnotized. Lisa moved to the other hand. Snip. Snip. She filed the edges smooth with an emery board she produced from the same pocket. She worked in silence, her brow slightly furrowed. It was a ritual. A claiming. When she was done, she lifted Susanna’s hand and blew away the invisible dust. Her lips brushed the knuckles.
“There,” Lisa whispered. “Now they’re mine, too.”
She pocketed the scissors. She took Susanna’s newly groomed hand and placed it on her own knee, covering it with her own. They sat like that in the semi-dark, listening to the distant hum of the hospital. The furnace inside Susanna roared, silent and unchecked.
Lisa stubbed out her cigarette on the sole of her shoe. “Come on,” she said, standing up. She didn’t let go of Susanna’s hand. “Let’s go back. It’s almost time for the shitty dinner.”
She pulled Susanna to her feet. She didn’t release her hand as they walked back down the corridor toward the locked unit, their fingers laced together. Susanna didn’t pull away. The clean, even edges of her nails caught the light from the overhead fixtures, a small, perfect testament to her surrender.