Choose Your Master

Elspeth

There are moments in an audit when the client's controller walks into the room while you have his second set of books open on the table.

The textbooks say remain calm. The textbooks say let him speak first.

I have never read a textbook that was written by somebody in a nightgown.

"Sit," says Bridget Sorrell.

She says it quietly, without moving from the door. She doesn't point. She puts the penlight into the pocket of her tunic and the room goes darker, a gray fog with an edge of sodium light seeping under the door.

I get off my knees and sit on the edge of the bed. The mattress cover hangs open between us like a gutted fish.

"The camera comes back in two minutes," she says. "Hollis passes in nine. You'll want to be under the blanket in ninety seconds with your back to the lens, and you'll want to put that in your mouth." She tosses something small. It lands on my knee. A mint. "Chew. It makes the pulse look different on the monitor."

I don't move.

"If I wanted you in the Quiet Room," says Bridget, "I'd have done it from the door."

It is the most logical thing anyone has said to me in three weeks.

I unwrap the mint. It tastes of cold, and cheap sugar, and the last thing I should be able to taste in this place: relief. I pull the mattress down over the canvas, drag the blanket to my chin, and turn on my side. The lens comes round. It rests its four seconds on the long gray lump that is Dahlia Reeve, sleeping, and swings away.

Bridget stands there until it has gone. Then she crosses to the chair that no one has ever sat in and lowers herself into it. It is the first time I have seen her sit.

"How long have you known?" I ask.

My voice comes out different. Level, a little rough. The voice I use at the head of a conference table when a CFO tells me he doesn't remember a wire.

"That you were awake?" She takes off her half-glasses, folds them, lets them fall on their chain. "The first morning. Take the pills, I said. You took them. Quick and clean. You didn't gag, you didn't ask what they were. You did the cheek trick on the left side. Left." She looks at me. "Most patients, even the clever ones, do it on the right."

"You checked my mouth."

"I checked a pink hole." A hard dry sound that might be a laugh. "I'm paid to see what's there, Mrs. Marrow. Not what isn't."

The name hits me like a hand on the face.

Mrs. Marrow.

Nobody has called me that in nineteen days. Nobody has called me anything I recognize. I sit very still and let it go through me, and it hurts like a limb coming back to life.

"My name," I say, "is Elspeth."

"I know your name." Bridget's voice is low. "I read your intake chart the day they brought you in. Elspeth Calder Marrow. Thirty-four. Forensic accountant. Sedated in the back of a black Suburban from Lake Verrin with a bruise on your jaw and no shoes. The paperwork said Dahlia Reeve. The wristband said Dahlia Reeve." She rubs her thumb across her mouth. "I've been a nurse for thirty years. The wristband and the face don't match, you notice."

I breathe out.

I have been alone with this for so long that I had not realized how much of it I was carrying in my jaw.

"You said Twelve," I say. "You said she wrote on the mattress."

Her face does something terrible. It doesn't crumple. It closes, as a hand closes around something it doesn't want to drop.

"She did."

"What did she write?"

"I don't know." Bridget's eyes slide to the corner of the room. "I took the cover out the night after. Before anyone could see. I burned it behind the laundry in a coffee can." Her mouth works. "I didn't read it. I told myself I didn't read it. That was easier."

"Why did you burn it?"

"Because if I'd left it, the doctor would've seen." She turns back, and I see in her eyes something so tired that I almost look away. "And because it was hers. She'd earned that, at least. A thing nobody got to take."

The corridor is silent. Somewhere in the walls, a pipe knocks.

"Mrs. Marrow."

"Elspeth."

"Elspeth." She tries the word. It's a clumsy one in her mouth, a stone to hold. "I need you to listen very carefully, because I'm only going to say this once, and then I'm going to leave, and tomorrow morning I'm going to give you your pills and look at your mouth with my penlight and call you Dahlia. You understand?"

"Yes."

"This place has three masters."

I wait.

"There's the doctor," she says, and ticks him off on a finger. "He thinks he owns it. He designed every room. He decides who's sedated and who isn't and who goes to the glass room and who goes down the east corridor. He's clever, and he's cruel in a way he has convinced himself is care, and God help any woman who gets between him and the idea of her. You've noticed."

"I've noticed."

"There's Hollis." A second finger. "Hollis isn't stupid. Hollis isn't what he looks like. He's the family's. Cordelia Marrow pays him, and I mean in cash, on the side, every month, and he phones her on a number he thinks I don't know. If anything happens in Wing C that she'd want to hear, she hears it before the doctor. The wall? The numbers? She knew by supper."

"I thought so."

"And there's her." She says it without a finger. "Cordelia. The board. The family. Whoever signs the checks, signs the doctor. You think it's him you're fighting. It isn't. Not at the end. He's the lock. She's the key."

She stops. Her shoulders have risen toward her ears. She lowers them with an effort.

"So choose," she says.

"Choose what?"

"Your master. You're going to need one. That's how it works in here." Her voice is almost gentle. "A patient who has no patron doesn't last. The ones who made it past a year were the ones who found a hand to hold. You can have the doctor, if you can bear it, and I think you can; I've seen what you do with your face. You can have me, though God knows I'm no use to anybody. Or you can try the third way, and go over their heads."

"To whom?"

"I don't know." A thread of anger runs through it, thin and bright. "That's the point. I've never found anyone to go to."

I think about it.

I think about it in the way that I would think about a client's offer to settle. I take the three names and lay them out in a row, and I give each of them a value, and I look for the discount rate.

Kestrel. A man whose pulse leapt to eighty-eight under my fingers. Whose notebook says Normal progression. Who holds the keys to the glass room, the pharmacy, the schedule, the tapes. Who is, I am fairly sure, afraid. Of sleep. Of his own board. Of something that happened in the east wing long before I woke here. A man afraid is a man you can lean on.

Bridget. Who has just let me live. Who can give me the shape of the building. Who is afraid too, but of a different kind: the fear of a woman who has seen something and kept her head down in order to keep her job.

Cordelia. The one I do not know.

"No," I say.

"No?"

"I'm not going to pick a master." I lift my chin. "Masters are for people who think they're servants."

Bridget stares at me.

"I don't need a patron," I say, "I need leverage. There's a difference. A patron is someone you owe. Leverage is something they owe you. The whole of my professional life, I have dealt with people who thought they held the paper. I've never met one who didn't pay up when I showed them the receipt."

"You don't have a receipt."

"I will."

"You don't have a phone, a pen, a window that opens, or a friend." She leans forward. "You have a pencil and some arithmetic."

"I have Dr. Kestrel."

It is out of my mouth before I know I'm going to say it. And it is only as I hear it that I understand it is true.

Bridget's face goes very still.

"You can't," she says.

"I already have."

"Elspeth." Her voice drops lower. "He isn't a man you play. You think you're studying him. He's studying you. He's been in there for twenty years."

"I know."

"He's not a monster. That's the trouble." She says it as a woman might admit to an old illness. "If he were a monster I could stand it. He's a good doctor. He's gentle with them. He cries, sometimes, in the east corridor, with the lights off, when he thinks no one's there. He'll hold a girl's hand all night. Then he puts her in the green room. And he does it because he thinks it's right. Because he thinks the pain is in the way."

"The green room."

"The Quiet Room." She says it fast, as if the words were hot. "He had it painted. I don't know why. Nobody does."

I think of a keyhole. I don't know why. The thought arrives from nowhere and leaves without a name.

"He'll take everything you are," says Bridget, "and put a better thing in its place. And he'll be so kind about it that you'll thank him."

"Then he's got a weakness."

"What?"

"He needs to be thanked."

A long silence. The camera returns to the end of its arc, and I feel it more than hear it, a small mechanical weight settling against the ceiling.

"Dear God," says Bridget softly. "You're going to do it."

"Yes."

"You're going to let him do it to you. For a purpose."

"I'm going to let him think he's doing it."

"It isn't the same." Her mouth twists. "It never is. I've seen women who thought they were pretending. After six months you can't tell where the pretending stops."

I don't reply.

I am afraid of that, too. It is the first line on the second page of the ledger, the one headed LIABILITIES, written in a hand I recognize as my own. A mind beginning to pull toward a chair in a glass room.

"What do you want?" I ask her. "You haven't asked for anything. You've told me everything and asked for nothing, and in my experience, that's the most expensive way to start a conversation."

For a moment I think I've gone too far.

Then Bridget Sorrell laughs, quietly, a real laugh, rusty as a gate.

"You'd have made a good nurse," she says.

And then, in the same breath, the laughter is gone.

"I've got a boy," she says.

…

She tells it in six sentences. She says it the way people tell the thing they've said to themselves a thousand times, with all the edges worn smooth.

"Daniel. Twenty-four. Schizoaffective. He was nineteen when it started. I was working double shifts at a county hospital in Newburgh, and I couldn't afford the place that could help him, and one day a man in a good coat came to the ward and said the Marrow Foundation had a residential program for young adults, in Vermont, and a position at a private institute for a nurse with my qualifications. I took it. I took it eleven years ago. Daniel's been at Hollowbrook for five of them. Heated pool. A garden. A psychiatrist who says he's making progress."

She wipes her mouth.

"Dr. Kestrel signs his chart. Every quarter. Every quarter, I hold my breath, until I see the signature."

"And if the signature doesn't come?"

"Then there's a letter. An administrative reorganization. Funding review." Her eyes are dry. "Daniel's the sort of boy who can't be moved to a state facility. He'd be dead by Easter."

I don't say anything. There is nothing to say. I know the shape of the debt. I have audited a hundred of them. A hostage is a line item.

"That's why I didn't read the mattress," she says. "That's why I told myself I didn't. That's why I do the cheek check and I say good girl and I look away. Don't think I'm proud of it."

"I don't think anything."

"You should." Her eyes meet mine. "You should think what I am. A woman who watched a girl go into the green room and didn't stop it. I held her hand, you know, at the end. She wanted her mother. She asked for peppermint. I had one in my pocket."

The mint. It is still on my tongue, thin and cold.

"I'm not asking you to forgive me," says Bridget. "I'm telling you why I'm here at three o'clock in the morning with a penlight in my fist. I've been looking at that wall for twenty months. I've been waiting for the next one to write something on it."

"Then help me."

"I can't." It is a flat, fast reply. "Not like that. I can tell you which camera is on which sweep. I can tell you when the doctor's away on a Thursday for the board. I can tell you what's in the pharmacy cupboard, and who has the keys, and where Hollis keeps his phone. I can look the other way. But I can't carry a letter out of this building, Elspeth. I can't make a phone call. They log my phone. They log my coat. If I put a foot wrong, they move him."

"You don't need to carry anything yet."

"No?"

"I need to be believed first. I need to win."

"And then?"

"And then," I say, "I need you to choose."

She is still for a long moment.

Then she gets up. She smooths her tunic with both hands. Her tortoiseshell glasses swing on the chain. At the door she stops with her fingers on the latch, and without turning round she says:

"There's one more thing."

"Yes?"

"The doctor didn't get the idea of the Glass Orchard from nowhere." Her voice is so low that I have to hold my breath to catch it. "I've been in this building eleven years. I know when a room is a shrine. Whoever she was, she's down there. In the glass. When he's in that room, he isn't talking to you."

She opens the door. The corridor swallows the light.

"Move the hem," says Bridget. "Hollis knows about hems. I'll be back at six."

The latch clicks. The lock slides home, and this time I hear it.

…

I lie in the dark with my eyes open.

I have a pencil. A number. A weather report that does not match. An ally who is not an ally, who has a boy in Vermont. A doctor who is afraid of the dark.

And a choice that I have already made.

I do what I always do at the end of a day: I take the ledger down off its shelf in my mind and I close it. I rule a double line across the page.

There are three entries on the last page, written in the hand that Dennis taught me when I was twenty-one. An accountant writes a plan in the same way she writes a balance. Three columns. No adjectives.

NAME. Elspeth Calder Marrow. Alive. Sane. Not a murderer. On the record.

TRUTH. Dennis Oakhurst. Larkspur. Four hundred and twelve million. Under the stone at St. Aldric's. Out loud, in daylight, before the people who bought it.

BLOOD.

I stop over that last word. I let the pencil in my mind sit above it for a long time.

Then I write beside it, in a hand so small I can barely see it:

Every one of them.

Including the ones who were kind.

Outside the window the snow has come back, thin and sideways, blowing against the iron bars with a sound like a pen on paper.

From tomorrow, Dahlia Reeve is going to be the most obedient patient that Aldenmoor has ever held.

I think I will be very good at it.

That is what frightens me.