The Bathroom

PREVIOUSLY: Nurse Dana had called the prepaid phone twice in one afternoon, and old man Pike pressed the phone into Cassian's hand with a warning: do not turn it on tonight. In the dark of Room 104, with the storm pounding the roof, Cassian could not wait.

…

He waited for Ronald to start snoring.

It took a long time. Ronald Fisk was the kind of boy who fell asleep in stages, whispering to himself, rolling over, sighing, and then finally, somewhere past the third verse of the hymn, dropping into a wet, rattling snore that Cassian had never been so grateful to hear.

Cassian counted to two hundred. Then he sat up.

The straw crackled under him like a dry fire. He froze, one hand still on the pillow, and listened. Rain. Wind. The hymn rising and falling through the stone, patient as a tide. In the corner, Albert's breathing had gone shallow and careful, the breathing of someone who was awake and pretending otherwise.

"Where do you think you're going?" Albert whispered.

Cassian had rehearsed this. He pitched his voice low and miserable. "Stomach. The soup from lunch. The jar's not gonna cut it."

Silence. Then, from Karl's bed, a long-suffering sigh. "That's disgusting, Hale."

"Then don't listen."

"If you get caught, you did not tell us you were leaving." Karl's voice was flat as a ruler. "I was asleep. We were all asleep."

"Fine."

Albert let out a short laugh through his nose. "Go ahead. Walk out there. Be my guest." There was something wet and bitter in it, like a man daring someone else to jump first. "Maybe it'll stop being my turn to be scared."

Cassian didn't answer that. He swung his feet to the freezing floor, slid the phone inside his shirt against his ribs where the plastic bit into his skin, and left his boots under the bed. Bare feet made no sound on stone. He'd learned that on his father's kitchen floor, years ago, in the hour before Edward fell asleep in his chair.

By the window, Leo had not moved. But his eyes were open, two wet black coins catching the lantern light, and they followed Cassian all the way across the room. They didn't warn him. They didn't tell him to stay. They only watched, the way a person watches a stranger step onto a frozen lake.

Cassian pushed the door.

It swung inward without a sound, the way the door always did. No lock. No bolt. The hallway beyond it was a long throat of darkness, the oil lamps dead on their hooks, the only light a smear of dull red at the far end where some sort of sanctuary lamp burned in a wall niche. The cold hit him like a slap. His breath came out white.

Don't run, he told himself. Walk like you belong here.

He walked.

The stone ate the heat out of his feet in a dozen steps. Past Room 103, where someone was crying very quietly into a pillow. Past 102, where nobody made a sound at all, which was worse. Behind each door he could feel the same held breath, forty boys lying rigid in the dark and waiting for the night to be over. The hymn seemed louder out here. It came up through the floor, through the soles of his feet, a low vibration that lived somewhere behind his teeth.

Twice he stopped dead because he thought he heard footsteps. Twice it was only the rain finding a new way down the gutters.

The bathroom door stood at the end of the hall beneath the red lamp, warped and swollen with damp. Cassian slipped inside and eased it shut behind him.

The air in here smelled of lye and wet stone. A row of basins ran down one wall, the brass taps beaded with condensation. Moonless dark, except for a narrow window high up where the rain smeared the glass silver. He went straight to the last stall, the one with the rotting door, slid the iron latch, and sat down hard on the closed lid with the phone in both hands.

His fingers were shaking so badly it took him three tries to flip the cover open. The little screen woke up the color of a bruise. One bar of signal. He covered the glow with his palm, leaving only a thin blue crack between his fingers, and dialed the number he knew better than his own birthday.

It rang once.

"Mercy Hospital, Intensive Care."

"Dana," he breathed. "It's me."

For a second there was nothing but static, and then a sound he couldn't place, a rush of air, like someone had put a hand over their mouth and let out a breath all at once.

"Cassian. Oh my God. Oh, honey, hold on. Hold on, I'm going to move, don't hang up." Footsteps, quick and soft. A door clicked. When Dana came back her voice was low and shaking with something that wasn't fear. "Okay. Okay. I tried you twice this afternoon. I didn't know if the number was still good. I was so scared it was a dead line."

"What happened?" His throat had closed to the width of a straw. "Dana, what happened? Is she—"

"She woke up."

He didn't understand the words. They were the right words, but they landed in the wrong part of his head, like a coin dropped into a well that never hit the water.

"This afternoon," Dana said. "Around two. Dr. Patel was doing her rounds and your mom just... opened her eyes. She looked right at the doctor and said, 'Where's my boy?' First thing. Before she asked for water, before she asked where she was. Where's my boy."

Cassian pressed the back of his wrist against his mouth. The tile under his feet had gone strange and tilting.

"She's weak," Dana went on, quick, as if afraid he would stop listening. "She's going to be weak a long time. But her scans are clean, her speech is fine, she knows everybody's name. I shouldn't be telling you half of this, there's a whole protocol about calling the minors on the transfer list, but I don't care. You need to hear it. She's awake."

A sound came out of him that he'd never heard himself make. Not a sob. Something smaller and uglier, torn off at the root.

"Can I—" He swallowed. "Can I talk to her?"

"I can hold the phone. She's very quiet, Cassian, she can only whisper. And I can only give you a minute before the night supervisor comes by. Is that okay?"

"Yes. Yes."

A rustle. A long beat of machines, that slow patient beeping that had lived in his dreams for a month. And then, so close and so small that it seemed to be coming from inside his own ear:

"Cassian?"

He closed his eyes.

His mother's voice had always been a little rough at the edges, a smoker's voice she'd quit ten years ago and never quite recovered from. Now it was worn down almost to nothing. A thread. A breath with a shape.

"Mom," he said. "Mom, it's me. I'm here."

"Baby." She breathed it. "Oh, baby. Where are you? They told me you were... they said school. They said it was a good school."

"It's fine." The lie came out smooth and easy. Practice. "It's good, Mom. It's a good school. They've got books. I'm doing okay."

"Are you eating?"

"Yes."

"Are you warm?"

He laughed. It cracked in half. "I'm warm, Mom."

She was quiet for a moment, breathing, gathering strength. When she spoke again her voice had changed. It was lower and careful, the way it got in the kitchen at home when she was about to ask something she was afraid to hear the answer to.

"Cassian. Did Edward do anything to you? After. After I went to the hospital?"

His hand tightened on the phone until the plastic creaked.

He thought about the slap that had thrown him off his chair. The pen scratching across the contract. The smell of whiskey and the voice calling him a useless bastard. He thought about the way she was lying in a bed with tubes in her, whispering, asking only about him.

"No," he said. "He didn't touch me."

A long breath on the line. He could not tell if she believed him. He thought maybe she did, because she wanted to. He thought maybe he had just become the kind of liar who wasn't lying for himself.

"Daniel's been here," she said. "Every day. He sits by the window. He didn't say anything to me for the first hour, he just held my hand." A wet, shaky sound. "He's a good man, Cassian. I know you don't really know him. But he's a good man."

"I know, Mom."

"I want to leave. When I'm out of here. I want to go with him and I want—I want to bring you—"

"Mom." He said it softly, because if he said it any louder his voice would break and she would hear it. "Go with him. Okay? Don't think about me. Go with Daniel and don't come back to that house. Don't go back to Edward. Not ever. Promise me."

"I can't leave you there—"

"You're not leaving me. I'm at school. I'm fine." His eyes were burning. Behind them, a pressure he had kept locked down for three weeks was beginning to give. "Just go, Mom. Please. If you go back there I'll never forgive myself. Please."

On the other end of the line, his mother began to cry.

It was a small, wrecked sound, the crying of someone with no strength left to cry properly. It went through Cassian like a wire. He pressed his forehead against the cold stall wall and let the tears come, silently, his mouth wide open and no breath in it, his shoulders shaking against the stone.

"I love you," she managed. "I love you so much. I'm so sorry."

"Don't be sorry." He could barely get it out. "It's not yours to be sorry for."

"Cassian?" It was Dana again, close and careful. "That's the minute. I'm so sorry. I have to take it."

"Okay. Okay." He wiped his face on his sleeve. "Dana. Thank you."

"Call me again. Whenever you can. I'll be here." A pause. "Cassian, listen. I don't know what kind of place that is. But you be careful, okay? You be careful."

He opened his mouth to answer.

Something moved in the hallway.

Not a footstep. Not yet. It was the quality of the silence that changed, the way it does in a forest when a deer lifts its head. Under the pounding rain he heard the soft, even slap of leather soles on stone, and then another set, and another. Not one monitor on patrol. Many people. Walking in step.

Coming this way.

Cassian's stomach turned to ice. He snapped the phone shut so hard his thumbnail split, crushing the glow in his fist. He pulled his feet up off the floor and onto the lid of the toilet, folded himself into the corner of the stall, and clamped his free hand over his mouth and nose.

The footsteps stopped outside the bathroom door.

For three seconds there was only rain. Cassian could hear his own blood. He could hear a drip from one of the brass taps, counting out the time. One. Two. The hymn pressed up through the floor and the walls and the soles of his feet, so low now it was almost a pulse.

Three.

The door opened.