The Murmurings (3 page)

I open the front door just as he’s getting out of the car. As embarrassing as this situation is, it would be a thousand times worse if my mom woke up and stumbled to the door, hung over in her bathrobe. Evan’s wearing faded jeans and a faded green T-shirt, which accents his broad, square shoulders. Dammit. Why did he have to come over looking so cute?

“So where are we going?” he asks with a smile that makes my stomach sink. My anxiety must register on my face because he ducks his head and shrugs. “Sorry, I’m not so good on the phone.”

“You don’t say.” I can’t help but smile back.
God, he’s cute.

We stare at each other for a couple of seconds, and then I remember what it was I was going to say.

“Evan, you can’t come with me. It’s . . . it’s . . . well, it’s complicated, and you wouldn’t want to. Trust me.”

That’s a lie. It’s me.
I
don’t want him to. He’s never asked me about Nell, about what’s going on with my mom, and it’d be fine by me if he never did.

I feel like a total asshole. I wish I could get excited about a cute guy wanting to hang out with me so much that he’d tag along to Oakside. But I can’t because if I want that doctor to stop leaving messages for my mom, I have to go get Nell’s things. Then I can pretend that night never happened, that Oakside never happened. That there’s no chance Dr. Keller knows how much I’m turning out to be like Nell.

“It’s okay. I sort of invited myself along.” His hand is still on the open car door. He absently swings it back and forth on its hinge.

“It’s not that—I want to hang out with you.” Immediately my face gets hot. I almost regret saying that, when he finally looks up, and his lips draw into a broad smile.

“So, what’s this mystery errand?” he asks. I figure I have nothing to lose. If he hasn’t been freaked out by the rumors about Nell, maybe he doesn’t scare easily. And even though
I thought I wanted to be by myself for this, something about his smile makes me wonder if I have to do everything alone.

“Come on,” I say, nodding toward my mom’s car. “I’ll explain on the way.”

Nell David

October 21

The hallways never seem to end here. There are about a million of them, and they go on forever. I know there have to be more patients in a place this big, but I never see anyone but the nurses and doctors in white, with their false smiles and their searching eyes. Apparently, there’s another ward, but I’m not sure what makes that brand of crazy different from my brand of crazy.

I wonder if they make the people from the other ward go into the room with the wall of mirrors, the one that made my legs collapse with fear the first time they locked me in it. They sent LM there today. Afterward, they brought him into the rec room with MM and me. They sat him at a table and gave him whatever he wanted. They told him he did a great job. But LM didn’t look proud. He looked like he’d been robbed of something very precious to him.

Where are you when I need you, T. S. Eliot? I could use your nourishing words right now.

I don’t think they’re going to let me leave this place anytime soon. At first I thought that’s what I wanted. I thought that they could help me. But not anymore.

I don’t like the way they look at Sophie when she comes to visit.

W
E’RE HALFWAY TO
O
AKSIDE BY
the time I gather enough nerve to say why we’re going there. We’d sat in dead silence for about an eternity, so now I have to fill the space with something.

“Oakside,” he said after I told him. He was only repeating the name, but the way he said it told me I’d sufficiently freaked him out with our trip to a mental ward.

“Yeah,” I say now, unable to stop myself. “Nell started hearing things when she was a lot younger, but it got really bad by the time she was seventeen.”

“Uh-huh.”

“She was committed to Oakside after she cut her wrist on glass she broke from the bathroom mirror,” I say, my throat
going dry. “They diagnosed her with schizophrenia. She eventually ran away.”

“From Oakside,” he says again.

“Right. And they found her in Jerome. Dead.”

Evan has nothing to say to this, and really, who could blame him?

“The doctor who treated her at Oakside has been calling our house almost nonstop ever since. He wants to talk to my mom about something.”

I have no idea how much of this has already been relayed to him by the kids at school. I neglect to mention that I have some doubts about Nell’s schizophrenia, and that the way they found her body completely defies explanation. And that there’s something about this guy Adam. I just can’t imagine Nell would have run off with a total psycho. But then, why won’t he come forward?

I also fail to mention that I’m beginning to hear things too, that I’m afraid the people at Oakside somehow know this, that this is why the doctor wants to talk to my mom. Of all the things I’m not ready to talk about, these have to be the biggest. And a ride to Oakside Behavioral Institute is already pushing the boundaries of an appropriate first date.

The car goes silent again until I drive through the intersection at Canyon Road.

“Shouldn’t you make a left?”

“Oh, right. Thanks,” I say, glad he’s helping but completely aware that our conversation has regressed into driving directions. “How’d you know that?”

A tiny smile finds his lips, but nothing about his face indicates happiness, which is how I know I’ve blown any chance at being anything to Evan Gold.

We pull into the nearly empty parking lot in front of the one-story, sprawling facility where I last saw my sister. I wonder if this place ever looked modern, even when it was first built. Now its tan exterior and flat roof make it seem tired, like an old dog limping around its yard.

“Would you hate me if I asked you to wait here?” I say it more to the steering wheel than to Evan, but I can feel him looking at me, and my face gets hot all over again.

“Whatever,” Evan says, his voice kind but distant. I turn to him, but he’s looking out the window. His long legs are scrunched with the passenger seat pushed so far forward. It’s usually just me sitting there.

“It’s not you,” I say, and before I can stop my hand, it’s on his shoulder, which I can feel tense up under his shirt.

He takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. “I can see how you might want to be alone.”

I nod and pull the door handle. “It shouldn’t take long.” But he’s already fiddling with the radio.

I turn my attention toward the entrance.

This place is like a disease. They claim to heal people here, but anyone with a soul who visits knows that’s not true. I have to fight back a surge of nausea every time I walk up to this building.

There’s a welcome mat—an honest-to-God mat with
WELCOME
on it—in front of the sliding glass door. You’re either committed with your heels dragging against the cement, or you’re lured by visits with your drugged-up loved ones or by polite phone calls, the same phone calls that remind you to pick up your dead sister’s personal effects. After the first sliding door, I wait by a Plexiglas window and shove my driver’s license through the slot like I’m at a pawn shop.

The bored-looking orderly behind the window checks my ID and opens the second door, which isn’t on an automatic sensor like the first. The second door isn’t so “welcome.”

“Thanks,” I say to the orderly, but there’s nothing grateful about my tone. I make sure of that.

Once I’m inside, my eyes fixate on the man in the recreation area to the right of the sliding door. He’s pretty hard to miss. Even though he’s sitting down at a table, he’s taller than I am, and probably twice as wide. His head is shaved and shines like a beacon in the overhead fluorescent light. The man’s enormous blue eyes dart everywhere except at the
massive tower he’s working on. To see a grown man playing with Legos—no,
building
Legos with intensity and purpose—is beyond unsettling.

Before, the few times I could muster the courage to visit Nell, I was afraid of this enormous bald guy and his blocks. Fascinated and afraid. That changed when I read Nell’s journal, the one that appeared in my car the day I went to see where Nell had died.

“Help you?”

I’m surprised to see the lady who let me in through the sliding doors emerge from the little room to stand behind the front desk. They must be short staffed today. Normally, they’d have at least two other people hanging around, making jokes in low voices and picking hangnails.

“I’m Sophie David. I’m here to pick up my sister’s things.”

“Oh. OH! You must be Nell’s—yes, uh, let me get Dr. Keller for you. He’ll know what to—I mean, he’ll be able to help—just give me a sec.”

Everything this woman says makes me want to strangle her. Not because she’s saying anything in particular. Because there’s nothing anyone in this place could say that would make me feel okay about being here. Oakside somehow managed to sidestep any legal responsibility for Nell’s death. Something having to do with Nell turning eighteen while
she was committed. After Nell’s funeral, I stopped trying to understand it. We don’t have the money to sue anyone anyway, which I’m sure Oakside knows.

Oakside’s shady business practices aren’t all that give me the creeps. It’s like the moment anyone here looks at me, they can see something I can’t. Like they’re just waiting to lock me up too.

Footsteps echo from down the hall.

Clicksqueak.

The orderly behind the desk could not look more relieved.

“Here comes Dr. Keller now,” she says and hustles away before I can react.

Clicksqueak, clicksqueak.

A handsome, sandy-haired man in his forties rounds the corner, a white lab coat flapping behind him like a cape. This is the first time I’ve seen Dr. Keller in the flesh, and I wasn’t expecting him to be good-looking. This isn’t the type of place I’d expect to attract a handsome doctor. His shiny shoes come to a stop in front of me.

“Pleasure to meet you, Sophie, though I wish it was under different circumstances.”

Dr. Keller’s forehead creases, and his full lips turn down in apology. But I don’t believe it, nor do I feel anything of an apology in his hands as they hold mine in greeting, grasping
it in midair and squeezing it in lieu of the standard one-two pump of a handshake.

“I’ve packed your sister’s things. There wasn’t much, but I’m sure you and your mother will want her belongings.”

He tells me all of this while holding my gaze. He never looks down or away. I’m not sure he even blinks. I end up doing all of it, first blinking, then rolling my eyes to look at anything but his gray ones.

I can’t think of anything to say in response to that, so I just nod. He’s still clasping my hand, and I don’t want him touching me anymore.

Finally, he lets go, then stretches out an arm, his other hand behind his back like a maître d’. He nods in the direction he just came from. “Please, after you.”

A few doors down, I start to head for one hallway, but he intercepts me quickly.

“
This
way, Ms. David,”

I try to glance down the corridor, but he blocks my view. Soon he’s
clicksqueaking
me through a different hallway. We come to a nondescript metal door, and he pulls a card from his pocket and glides it through a reader, releasing a lock. We walk down another hallway. To my right and to my left are smooth gray doors with little rectangular windows, mesh wire netting through the middle of the glass. Every door handle
requires a swipe card. Between the doors are bare gray walls, their slick surfaces transitioning almost imperceptibly to the grayish linoleum. For some reason, this really bothers me. I can’t see the line where the walls meet the floor. This place is supposed to heal people. It seems like you should be able to see the distinction between things.

Dr. Keller’s stride is smooth. I’m suddenly furious that anybody could look so f-ing comfortable in a place where my sister sat in some tiny room with a bed and nothing to stare at but the laces holding the skin on her wrist together and blank walls that look like floors.

I twist the silver ring on my right hand. It’s a habit I’ve developed to cope with memories of Nell. I’m frantic all over again as I remember how they didn’t find a matching ring on her finger in Jerome. She wore it every day of her life, just like I do. It was a gift to us from Mom when Nell turned thirteen.

We turn another corner and stop at a door with Dr. Keller’s name engraved on a shiny silver plaque. He swipes his card again and the lock slips. He chivalrously holds the door for me and slides out a chair in front of his desk, gesturing for me to sit.

“I can just take the box,” I say, not caring that it sounds rude.

As soon as his face creases in that perfect, pitying way, I regret my decision. So he takes a second to register the contradiction as I sink into the chair, then he’s back to being pleasant.

There’s a lidded box with her name in bold black letters on the desk. I suddenly remember one of my first conversations with Nell after she was committed. We sat in the recreation room while she played with the fraying hem of her cotton pants. She was laughing, telling me that they’d expected a guy at first. They’d gotten her first and last names mixed up on her chart.

It took them two days to stop calling me David, LS!

LS stood for Little Sis, her nickname for me. She was forever giving people nicknames, then abbreviating them. She was playful like that. And she’d told me the story like she would tell me any other story, rolling her eyes and scrunching her nose like everything was a joke. But that time I knew she was faking it. I could tell by the way she kept playing with that pant leg.

Dr. Keller pushes the box toward me.

“I didn’t think she was allowed to keep anything here,” I challenge, remembering the long list of rules some orderly had given my mom the day she brought Nell here. He smiles sadly, like he’s been expecting me to say that.

“Well, as you know, we need to ensure that none of our
guests have any opportunity to cause themselves harm. We must, therefore, be strict about the possessions we allow them to retain while they’re here at Oakside.”