The Gifting (31 page)

I remove the iPad from my backpack and hope this little trick will work. I press the back of the iPad against the scanner, marked with Safe Guard’s logo. Shady Wood’s account pops up on the screen. I click on a tab marked
employee access
and punch in my father’s work password. I’ve watched him key it in enough that it is ingrained in my brain. Once I’m in, I hold up the iPad to the scanner again and all of Shady Wood’s security system information pops up on the screen. With shallow breaths, I type in
west wing code
.

E6bs*9zx%

I punch it into the key pad above the scanner and like a miracle, the red light turns to green and the lock clicks. Luka grabs the handle and slowly pulls it open to a deserted hallway, lit with fluorescent lights. We stand close, our hearts beating so fiercely I can hear Luka’s. After a short beat, we step inside. I can’t believe we’re actually in or that my grandmother is somewhere close by. The impossibility of finding her presses against my shoulders. This place is a labyrinth of rooms filled with who knows how many patients and we don’t have the slightest clue where to look. Luka taps my shoulder and jerks his head for me to follow. We slink against the wall, quickly but silently, desperate to get out of plain view. Luka grabs the handle of the first door we reach and pulls me inside. Our breaths escape in quick, nervous puffs as we stare at one another inside what appears to be a supply closet.

“Now what?” All our plans in the car involved getting inside. We never considered what to do if we succeeded.

Luka looks around, as if something inside will help us find my grandma. He digs out some scrubs from a box and we both put them on over our clothes. I have to roll my sleeves and my pants several times when the sound of whistling outside stops my movements. My eyes go wide. Luka puts his finger up to his lips, then cracks open the door the tiniest bit and peeks through. He motions for my backpack. I hand it over. He removes one of the tasers and points for me to creep toward the back of the closet.

“What are you going to do?” I half-whisper, half-mouth.

“Get in the back.”

The footsteps and whistling grow louder. With my heart in my throat, I obey Luka’s command. As soon as the whistling reaches us, he bangs on the supply closet door. The whistling stops. I duck behind a mop bucket, picturing the doctor or nurse or whoever it is standing on the other side with a cocked head, wondering at the loud, unexplained thump.

“Is somebody in there?” The feminine voice sounds more confused than frightened.

Luka twirls his hand at me to speak.

I clear my throat. “Help, please!”

The door knob twists and the woman appears, but before she even knows what’s happening, there’s an awful, screeching zap and she falls to the ground. Luka tasered her.

I blink dumbly as he drags her into the closet. “What are you doing?”

“Getting her key fob.”

“What voltage did you use?”

“A very high one, apparently.” He nods to a shelf with duct tape and rope. “She’s not going to stay unconscious forever and we can’t have her alerting people that somebody knocked her out and shoved her in a closet.”

Together, we tie her hands and feet and put duct tape on her mouth. I keep muttering apologies, even though she can’t hear me. I remove the key fob from around her neck. Luka takes her charts and we peek outside again. With the coast clear, we leave the closet and the woman behind.

“Slow down,” he says from the corner of his mouth. “Act natural.”

So easily said, so hard to do. But I force my legs to decelerate and keep pace with Luka, who carries himself with such a sense of authority I’m reminded of his father. He walks with the folder open in front of him, his head down, as if studying the notes on one of his patients. “Do you see her name anywhere?” I mutter.

He shakes his head.

A nurse comes out of a room. Besides the lady we knocked unconscious in the hallway, she’s the first person we’ve run into. I’m certain she will hear the hammering of my heart, the quickness of my breath, but Luka pretends to engage me in a deep discussion, pointing at something in the file, and the nurse passes right on by. We pass several more people, but nobody speaks to us. As far as I can tell, nobody even looks at us. Luka and I keep our heads bent together, like two doctors consulting. We step inside the first stairwell we reach and head up to the second floor. It’s obvious there are no patients on the first.

When we come upon a room, I use the key fob. The door unlatches and what we find inside is beyond disturbing. So disturbing that we forget ourselves for a minute and stare with gaping mouths. Rows upon rows of beds, exactly how I’ve always imagined eastern European orphanages. Only instead of babies in cribs, these are full grown, emaciated adults hooked to IVs. Every single person is unconscious. Gravity pulls at my shoulders, until I’m not sure I can stand beneath the oppressive weight of what I’m seeing.

“What is this?” I whisper.

“It isn’t rehabilitation, that’s for sure.”

Swallowing my horror, I force myself to walk up and down the rows, looking at each face, hoping to find my grandmother. The more I look, the more my nausea grows. “I don’t see her.”

“Didn’t you say your grandmother was constrained?”

“Yes, she was.” And these people aren’t. They don’t need to be.

Eager to get away from this place, I hurry out the door after Luka only to find the same thing in the next room. A room filled with the living dead. By now, it’s late morning, almost lunch time, yet nobody is awake. The silence is eerie. “Luka, in my dream, my grandmother was in her own room.”

We head back into the stairwell and climb another flight of stairs, only to find the same thing on the third floor. The fourth feels different. We peek into the window of a room and see a man inside, rocking back and forth, bound in a straitjacket. Luka points to a pair of initials on the outside of the door and snags the chart. Jonathan Becket, diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder.

We go from door to door, searching for the initials E.E. When we can’t find them, we head up another flight of stairs and continue our farce, wondering how long before the woman in the closet downstairs comes to and starts flailing around for help. Panic and urgency throws us into fast forward, our desperation growing as we climb yet another flight of stairs to the last floor. Five doors down, we finally find it.

E.E.

Luka opens her chart—Elaine Eckhart. Diagnosis: Paranoid Schizophrenia. Threat to Society. Uncooperative. Highly delusional.

My pulse throbs erratically as I hold the key fob up to the door and the small red light turns green. Without giving myself time to think, I open the door and step inside.

It is exactly like my dream. A white box, barren, with that same awful fluorescent lighting. And there she is with her long white hair, shackled to the bed like a prisoner. She stares up at the ceiling, unresponsive to our presence, until I take another step closer and her head jerks around. She blinks, then strains away from me as far as the restraints will allow.

Approaching slowly, I bend down to her eye level and look into eyes that are like my dad’s but nothing like my dad’s, because his are always so logical and sane. Never this wild or unhinged.

“Do you know who I am?” I whisper the question, as if the walls have ears and at any minute a team of doctors will swarm into the room and lock me up in the room next to Elaine.

Her face flickers with the smallest hint of recognition. I can almost see her fighting for clarity, but whatever medicine they have her on seems to be winning the battle.

I hold my hands up, fingers spread wide. “We aren’t going to hurt you.”

She squints from me to Luka, from me to Luka, her terror slowly subsiding. “Who is he?” she finally asks in a dry, raspy voice.

“He’s my friend. We came to help you.” This is a lie. We came so she could help us, but the notion is hopeless, because how in the world can she help us? She doesn’t even know me. What did I expect—a flood of love and recognition? Answers upon answers? How could I expect any of that when she’s been locked up in this place for the past fifteen years?

“My name is Teresa Eckhart,” I say. “Does that name mean anything to you?”

Nothing.

“A long time ago, you tried to take me. You thought I could save you.”

Her fingers flutter.

I reach out and take hold of them, as if my touch might offer her comfort. “We don’t have much time.” I glance over my shoulder at the door, then back at her. “I’m having dreams. Dreams like you used to have.”

“Help.” The whispered words send a chill through my bones. They are the same ones I read all those months ago in her journal, before I went on medicine and let innocent people die.

“We can’t help you without information. We need to know what you know.”

“Help,” she says again, louder.

“I want to help you, but we don’t know what’s going on.”

She lifts her head off the pillow. The tendons in her neck bulge. “Please, help me.”

“Why did you try to kidnap me all those years ago?”

She shakes her head and closes her eyes and a wave of despair crashes over me. Despair and panic. Because all of this was for nothing. She’s incoherent. Whatever she used to know has slipped away in the years upon years she’s spent locked in here. I jiggle her fingers, my final plea for answers.

Her eyes pop open, filled with terror again. The digital number on the heart monitor in her room jumps several paces and the monitor begins beeping—a loud, alarmed beep, as if notifying the nurses and doctors that one of the patients is about to have heart failure. “You are the key,” she rasps.

Luka grabs my arm. “We need to get out of here.”

“I’m the key? The key to what?”

“Come on, Tess,” Luka urges.

The beeping grows louder, faster. And my grandmother nods, as if agreeing with him. I want to tear away her restraints. I want to take her with us, far from this place. But we aren’t equipped for that.

Luka grabs my elbow, but I jerk free. “We can’t leave her here!”

“We don’t have a choice!”

“You’re the key!” she yells.

With my grandmother’s odd words ringing in my ears, Luka yanks me out of the room and we sprint toward the stairwell, afraid to look behind us. We leave her, in this madhouse of a prison. We race down the stairs, and as soon as we reach the first floor landing, Luka stops us both. He motions for us to slow down, to walk. So we do, until we get to that stretch of deserted hallway. Something about finding the place we started propels us into panic-mode. I race toward the supply closet, positive the woman will no longer be there. Positive somebody has to be on to us. I glance at my watch and am shocked to discover we’ve only been inside for twenty-five minutes. The woman stirs on the floor and moans. I toss the key fob at her and we take off toward the exit. We throw open the door and come face-to-face with a woman on the other side.

She rears back and clutches her chest. “Oh my goodness, you scared me half to death!”

“We’re so sorry.” Luka grabs my elbow. “She’s not feeling well. Needs some fresh air.”

The woman lets her hand fall away from her heart, gives us both an odd look, then walks inside. Once the door closes, we run. We run like we’ve never run before. We use his father’s ID to get back out. This time a voice is not required and as soon as we’re past the gates, we sprint to his car and collapse against the seats. We did it. We got to my grandmother. We accomplished our mission.

Only instead of feeling victory, I feel defeat.

Without saying anything, Luka starts the car and drives away. The more distance we put between ourselves and Shady Wood, the more our breathing returns to normal. And the more my sense of defeat grows.

“We didn’t learn anything,” I say, tears burning my eyes. “It wasn’t worth it.”

“That’s not true.” He pulls onto the main road, his attention glued to his rearview mirror, as if waiting for police lights and sirens, some sort of sign that we’ve been caught. “We learned that something is seriously wrong. Shady Wood says they’re taking patients in for the purpose of rehabilitation. What we saw back there? That wasn’t rehabilitation. That was messed up. They’re all in medically-induced comas.”

“We can’t leave her there, Luka.”

He reaches across the consul and squeezes my hand. “I know.”

His phone rings. His home phone number flashes on the screen. Luka powers it off and throws it in the back seat. “What do you think she meant when she said you were the key?”

I shake my head. “I have no idea.”

Luka merges onto the highway, toward home.

“We are in so much trouble,” I say.

He doesn’t respond. Really, what is there to say?

Trouble

L
uka threads his fingers with mine as we pull through the gates into Forest Grove. He squeezes my palm. “We’re in this together.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t be.”

“What?”

I pull my hand from his. “I don’t want to drag you into my problems.”

“Tess, you didn’t drag me into anything.”

On the contrary. I dragged him into last night’s dream.

“I’m part of this whether you want me to be or not.”

“Even if it means being grounded for the rest of our lives?”

“Even if.” Luka pulls into his driveway. The front tire is barely over the curb when both of our doors open and our parents march outside. It’s as if they’ve been watching for us out the window. Mr. Williams stalks toward the car.

Luka grimaces. “I apologize in advance for anything he says.”

His father raps the driver’s side window with his knuckle. “Out!” The glass muffles the word, but not enough to snuff out its sharpness. “Now.”

Luka grabs the handle and does what his dad says. So do I.

A vein in Mr. Williams’ temple throbs. His eyes are so dark, foreboding settles in my stomach. And I’m not even the object of his wrath. He pins every ounce of that on Luka. His mom? Not so much. She glares at me like this is my fault. I can’t help but think that she’s right.

My parents race over to my side. Mom wraps me in a hug, then grips my arms and pulls me away, her face a perfect storm of bewilderment and relief. “How could you do that to us? Your brother is in the hospital, on the brink of death, and just when we find out he’s okay, you go missing?” Before I have time to respond, she crushes me against her chest and squeezes. “Where did you go? What were you thinking?”