Page 50 of Antihero
Soft, light footsteps pass outside the door on the other side of the storeroom. One of the nurses on duty, from the sound. I slip my hand into my pocket, and check for the millionth time that it’s still there—the picture. None of us look happy in it, a sea of dour oval faces in sepia tone. We were wearing itchy, too-big clothes we wouldn’t grow into. But it’s the only picture I’ve got of Molly. I’m on the edge of the group; a small, seated figure nearly lost to the light-bleed in the picture's corner. Molly though, she’s in the middle, standing out, not just because of how much I’ve stared at her. There’s a defiance about her somehow, like she was staring down the cameraman. This time, I look at the face beside her, haloed in hair that’s almost violently curly. Gina—her name listed among the others in small cursive print at the bottom.
The same name I’d seen on the records of the asylum that Nick was keeping.Under permanent care, it had said. She’s still alive, stillhere. I’m going to find her.
I don’t know yet what I’ll do then. What my goal really is here.
They’re standing close in the picture, and I know she was friends with Molly, know they were brought here together. Maybe I want a better idea of what happened. Why Molly died, and Gina is still here. Maybe I just want to talk to someone who remembers my sister like I do.
This ward is a close enough mirror of the west one that I have no problem finding my way around, or hiding from the old guard as he makes his pass through the brightly lit corridor. The doors into the rooms are sturdier, with heavy locks bolted to theoutside. Windows on each one give a distorted view into each room. I peer in.
Many are empty, and the ones that aren’t seem to be mostly peaceful. The tenants are asleep, with empty food trays on the small rolling tables by their beds. Each room looks clean enough to be in a hospital, the inmates similarly clean and well-fed. The asylum really has moved away from its reputation. I’d known that, of course, but any lingering doubts vanish as I pause around one corner, an open door into a patient’s room ahead, and I hear the young, soft voice of a nurse. I need to strain to hear, but when I do, all it can be is a bedtime story, whispered late into the night. When I creep closer, risking a peek in, I see an old woman on the bed, eyes softly closed, appearing close to drifting off with her wrinkled hand clutched by the nurse.
No more mother-nightmare wardens like Wanda, the woman I stabbed and garrotted in a dark Feston street a few months back. No more wailing filling these halls, and every room full to capacity, with us crammed into the level below.
I slip past and continue on, losing hope that Gina is actually here, and if she is, that I’ll find her. Until I look into one room and see a woman, about my age, not asleep but sitting in the chair by the window. Face turned away from me, her hair is pulled back into a small bun of messy red curls. She’s preternaturally still, her hands folded in her lap. Her dress is old-fashioned, looking too heavy on her small frame.
Before I can consider it too much, I glance down the corridor, then risk the slight noise of turning the lock, and let myself into the room.
The woman doesn’t stir; the moonlight spills onto her through the barred window. Not all the windows have bars. I wonder if this patient needs them. Around the rolling table and its untouched meal, I step closer, pushing the hood back from my head and tugging the cloth off my chin as I do.
The side of her face comes into view. Her skin is so pale that even the moonlight picks out the blue veins inside her cheeks. Her eyes are open, but they don’t blink, don’t flicker.
“Gina,” my voice whispers out, almost too soft for even me to hear.
Her eyes move. I see that in the way the light shifts on the whites. I swallow, my throat dry. The hair is standing up on my arms as I reach for her chair, and I’ve got a strong, fearful urge to draw back. As though she might snap into movement and bite my arm.
She doesn’t, and I turn the wheelchair away from the window, towards the turned-down bed that I sit on, bringing my eye level below hers. Her face has changed little, though her glorious hair is thinning along the hairline, the cheeks hollow before her time, the eyes too blank. As I behold her, a girl who’s barely two years older than me, now young and old both in the same body, I see one of her eyes is lazy, unmoving, rolled ever downwards.
I wonder if that’s the one they put the pick in. Where that tool entered on the way to her brain, to scrabble what was her. Whathad beenher, I amend, staring into that blank, unseeing face. “Gina,” I whisper. “I… knew you. Back in the home. Do you remember me?”
I remember the last day I saw Gina. It was also the last day I’d seen my sister alive. At the home, watching them and five other girls get into the cars that came. I thought they’d be back by nighttime. Then I thought the same thing the next night. Over and over. Until it was me leaving rather than them coming back.
I reach over to touch her knee, finding it bony and narrow through her heavy skirts. “Gina? Are you there?”Is any of you left?I want to ask. Her one good eye locks over my shoulder so intently that I need to resist the urge to look myself.
This was pointless. A waste of time. I shake my head. What had I hoped? I know what I’d hoped, and it’s both too sad andtoo foolish to admit. That somewhere in here, I’d find my sister, alive, well, waiting. But I buried her, took that wrapped body away from the church graveyard they tried to confine her to. God had never been kind to us in life. She didn’t owe him what remained.
I go to stand, looking away from Gina.
That’s when she speaks, the voice so high and childlike, so familiar, that it stills me as I’m halfway up. “Molly, is that you?”
My heart stutters in my chest. I sit back down slowly, so slowly, and look at Gina. Her eye is focused on me now. My mouth opens and closes. Then I force the words out, half-panicked that what light has switched on behind that eye will gutter out if I take too long to answer, “Yes. Yes, I’m Molly. I’m here.”
She reaches out a shaking hand, and I slip my fingers against hers, letting the surprising strength of her grip squeeze to my palm. “Oh,” she tries to smile, oddly childish on a face that has matured further than it should have. One side of her mouth doesn’t obey her. “You got better,” she says with something like relief.
My teeth press together so hard that my jaw hurts. “What do you mean?”
“I saw you… on the bed, before my treatment. I thought something had gone wrong. You wouldn’t move. You were ignoring me. I saw blood in your hair and…” Abruptly, she stops, then tugs her hand away as though I’ve burned her. She wraps her arms around herself, and I want to reach out again, to apologise for the fear she now looks upon me with.
But… what was she going to say? What was she saying? That she saw Molly after… I’ve leaned forward, fingers brushing her forearm, when I realise what I’m about to do; demand more. Like I’ve got a right, like anyone has a right to more from thiswoman. Gina jumps in shock, then shakes again, but doesn’t try to dislodge me.
“You weren’t moving… no, no.” She shakes her head, refusing to look at me. “You’re dead!” I can feel the buildup in her. She’s about to start sobbing or screaming. “Always ghosts here! Go away! It hurts, it hurts, it hurts…” Her fingers work into her thin hair, drawing loose wispy pieces, ruining the bun.
I’m standing now, and I force my butt back down onto the bed, below her eye-line, holding my hands away from her. “I’m…” I swallow past the lump in my throat. “… not a ghost. Please. I’m not.”
Gina looks up between her hands. “Promise?”
I nod numbly. “Yes, I promise.”
I gulp back a scream when she lunges.
