Chapter Text
The stranger’s apartment was a war zone. The last books on the broken shelf had slid off during the night, and the floor was littered with their belly-up carcasses. The shelf itself listed heavily to the side, and paint flaked around the lips of the holes the screws had left behind them. She stacked the new victims against the wall with their fellows and tried to pretend that the disorder wasn’t there. It was a distraction from the problem that had been bothering her all night, and still clamored for her attention.
Instead she downed her meds and called the therapist. It was exactly the kind of interview she’d repeated over and over in the hospital, learning from the set of their eyes and mouths what to say and how to say it.
“Yes,” she said, and, “No, I don’t think so. Mm-hm. Yes. No. Thank-you. I’m feeling fine. Nothing hurts.”
He buzzed in her ear about check-in time, his office, directions.
“Of course I can bring it,” she said, going back into the stranger’s room to stare at the journal. It was right where she’d left it on the bedside table, and still empty. She would need a convincing excuse. “I’m sure I can find the office.”
He’ll be upset when you lie about the journal, head-voice warned her. She squeezed the little phone they had given her. “No, I’m sure. Please. Please. Yes. Thank-you.”
The call finished, she sank back into the bed. Of all the unfamiliar things, she liked it most; it was soft and much warmer than anything in the hospital had been. She burrowed back under the quilt and stared morosely at the journal. The check-in times were set in stone. They had been a condition of her release from the hospital. She remembered that conversation all too well, if only because the therapist hadn’t even attempted any kind of sublety.
“We don’t want anything to happen to you,” the therapist had said. “But we’re happy to help you adjust until you’re fine alone.
She closed her eyes against the journal and made a safe house of the body that didn’t belong to her. Their concern would have been touching, but she was no less alone here than she had been in her padded room. She couldn’t bring herself to care about their missing girl enough to do anything more with the journal than dislike it. What good could it be, ultimately, obsessing over parts of a life that didn’t belong to her? Of course, it was always possible that she might be happier when the blank spaces in her skull filled back up. Maybe the missing pieces would make up for the monsters inhabiting rest of it. It was practically unconscionable to think of fighting the stranger.
That didn’t mean that the idea wasn’t slowly becoming more appealing.
Eventually, she had to get back out of bed. The clocks in the apartment made as much sense to her as the books, but her internal clock had been honed to near-precision by a lifetime of waiting and listening, and the therapist had at least given her check-in times at measurable intervals. She made herself touch the stranger’s possessions again, if only to borrow a sweater and scarf and the longest skirt she could find. The clothes weren’t as easy to hide in as the quilt, but she did feel safer wrapped back up. The shoes presented an altogether different problem. While it was apparent that they had been made for human feet, she wasn’t sure why; they were all heel and strap and bits of leather, entirely impossible and possibly dangerous.
The footsteps came again while she was staring into the closet. They were unmistakably the same in rhythm and volume, uneven and unsteady, and definitely outside the stranger’s door. She backed into the closet, bumping into the shelves. A pair of floral print heels fell past her ear and bounced under the bed. She held her breath.
Don’t be stupid, head-voice was saying. She looked frantically from the little, curtained window above the bed to the open bedroom door, but no, the footsteps were coming from the front door: no-one could see her.
Think what the therapist will say, head-voice went on. She squashed it and concentrated on the pile of books visible through the bedroom door. Another knock. Another. Then the clink of metal against metal, painfully audible to an adept in listening to people on the other sides of doors. The footsteps receded. Shaking, she leaned her head back into the shoe shelves.
Nothing else could be heard from the hall. For a moment she remained frozen, then decision washed over her like a sudden drop in temperature. She dove at the shoes under the bed and managed to contort them onto her feet with trembling fingers. The therapist’s directions mashed together in her brain with the rhythm of the knocking. She stumbled to her feet. The journal. It had to come. She tripped towards the closet for a bag and almost wrenched her ankle. There. Done. The tote was uncomfortably flimsy and smacked into her leg if she clutched the strap; she was afraid of holding the wrong part of it and sending the journal tumbling out to land, covers open, with its blank pages vulnerable. She clutched the bag to her chest and tried to ignore the running commentary in her head that assured her she was doing everything wrong.
They had promised, at the hospital, to help her. They had told her to be wary of people trying to reach her. They would listen, just not for her sake. It was a concession she was willing to make. She was sick to death of listening to invisible people at her door.
Don’t be rash, head-voice warned. If they think you’re hearing things, they’ll lock you back up. It was a valid point.
Something fell onto the mat as she opened the front door. She froze in the doorway, fingers trembling on the knob. Then, she swung it open in one great breath. The hall was empty. There was a ring of keys on the doormat. She snatched them up and shut the door, leaning against it and taking great, heaving breaths. Everything clicked—the sound of metal on metal, the person knocking—and she realized the ring had been hung on the outer doorknob. The keys were cold in her palm, distinct in size and shape though unmarked; one was the double of the housekey the therapist had given her for the apartment. The others, like everything else, were unfamiliar.
These are for her, not you, head-voice said.
“There’s no-one here but me,” she hissed.
She clenched the keys in her fist and hobbled out of the apartments as fast as she could. The library loomed large down the street; it was the one building that the therapist had pointed out to her when she’d been shown to the apartment. The stranger had worked there, made friends there, had a life there. She had no desire to see it; all of the stranger’s friends had been eager to talk to her about cards and books. The therapist’s directions had used the library as a landmark, and she squeezed the keys deeper into her palm while she tried to remember. It had been a left, maybe—and then down the street, and at a crossroads—and she wasn’t certain what that was, but she was turning—and someone was honking—the streets smelled like gasoline—she pushed back the accident—a right after the shop—and then—and then she couldn’t remember anymore and nothing was familiar. The wind bit at her cheeks and stung at her eyes. She kept walking.
It was bitterly cold and overcast and her feet ached; she was lost and she was late. People chattered under the eaves of the buildings and children shrieked from a yard; somewhere in the distance she heard slamming, shouting, laughter, and the tinny blare of wailing voices over a pulsating bass. She hunched her shoulders and fisted her hands in her sweater pockets. The stranger would have known how to get there.
A car ground to a halt as someone darted across the the street. The noise lanced into her, and she wrapped her arms around herself and stumbled around the corner.
A bright light, someone shouting—
“Watch where you’re going!”
She jumped out of her skin and had to creep back in, bit by bit, forcing herself into the present instead of sliding away into the not-real. A woman stood in front of her.
“You almost ran into me,” the other woman said. Her eyes were red-rimmed and her mouth was set into a fierce line. “Seriously, what’s your problem?”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I was lost. I didn’t see you.” The other woman was small, fair haired, careworn despite obvious youth and pretty despite obvious teartracks. Her lips curled into themselves in a sour frown.
“Where’re you even going?”
“I don’t know.” It was an honest answer.
Heaving an exasperated sigh, the other woman pulled one of those little phones from the pocket of her uniform and glanced at its light-up screen. “Then how’re you getting there?”
“Getting where?”
“Wherever it is you’re going.”
“Oh.”
She hitched the stranger’s bag up against her sweater, painfully aware of the borrowed clothes and the empty journal whose corner poked into her stomach.
“Wait,” the woman said with sudden comprehension, “you’re not—“
“No,” she said immediately. Explanations jostled in the back of her throat. “I’m not. Not really. Did she—did I—know you?”
The other woman stared at her.
“No. We never met. I’ve heard about you, though. I didn’t know you were allowed out.” The wind picked up around them, prying at the hem of her skirt, raising goosebumps on the other woman’s arms, and teasing a few fine strands of wheat-blonde hair out of the woman’s hairband. The other woman took a deep breath, closed her eyes, rocked back on her heels. She seemed to climb some insurmountable height before saying, “Ashley; you can call me Ashley. Are you—okay?”
“Obviously.”
Ashley’s eyes flashed.
“You look lost.”
They faced off in the cold, her trying hard to find the courage to move and Ashley trying hard not to shiver. It was apparent that the other woman was fighting a losing battle.
“Look, I can give you directions or whatever, unless you have a problem with—“
“No, that’s fine, I’m fine,” she said. “I already have directions; I just don’t—“
“You obviously have no idea what you’re—“
“I am entirely capable of taking care of myself,” she said, voice rising.
Ashley blinked.
“Okay, okay.” The bite in her voice subsided, and she convulsively scrubbed at her bleary eyes. “That wasn’t what I was saying. Sorry. It’s cold out here.” She rubbed her bare arms for emphasis.
“Why’re you outside, then?”
“Car broke down at work again,” Ashley said. “I have to go get my kid from the sitter and my boyfriend’s working. Forgot my jacket at home. Not a big deal. Where are you going?”
She opened her mouth to explain her trip and the encroaching check-in time, realized how pathetic it would sound to someone who went home to their normal family after they got back from their normal job in spite of normal travel problems, and closed her mouth again.
She didn’t know you were allowed out, head-voice sang. She knows who you are. She knows where you’re going.
She blinked, choked back her rising panic, and shook her head.
Ashley raised her eyebrows expectantly, and another car flew past them, and suddenly the bite of the keys against her clenched fingers was more than she could bear.
“I just…I just got out of the hospital a few days ago. I don’t know anyone, and someone keeps trying to get into the—to my apartment—they left keys there this morning and I don’t know what they’re for and I don’t want to be there if they come back, but I can’t find the therapist, and I won’t go back to the hospital. I won’t go back to being told I’m imagining things or I’m confused. I won’t. ” She unfisted her hand and held out the keys. Her palm was imprinted with tiny tooth marks.
The wind picked up around them and whirled eddies of dirt and fragmented litter at their feet. She was vaguely aware that her knees were nearly knocking under the skirt, but her eyes were fixed on Ashley’s face. The keys were burning from the heat of her hands; sweat gathered in pinhead drops between the metal and her pinched flesh. It seemed she held the keys out for eternities, too rooted in place by fear to retract either her hand or her words.
Now you’ve done it, head-voice said gleefully. She’s got one of those little phones; she’ll call the hospital.
Instead, Ashley’s shoulders dropped in resignation.
“Dunno. Maybe they’re for a car you have or something?”
“If I had a car, I’d give it to you,” she said without thinking. Thinking, in fact, had become difficult. She felt lightheaded. “I don’t know how to drive.” It was a statement of fact, but Ashley’s mouth wriggled and twitched until the woman clapped her hands over it to stifle a laugh.
“It’s not you,” Ashley tried to say, squeaking the words out. Her shoulders shook with laughter even as her teeth chattered. “Sorry, it’s not you, it’s just that—this whole situation—“
“I really would and I really can’t,” She pulled off the stranger’s scarf, dropping the keys in the process. “Here, just—just take it, okay? You can give it back later or something. I’m not being kind. It’s itchy.” She managed to drape it around the other woman’s neck. Ashley’s laughter had turned into hiccups.
“What?”
“Nothing. It’s nothing.” Ashley patted the scarf and then wrapped it around her shoulders. “I had the wrong idea of you—I was expecting someone else. You’re okay, you know that? I owe you an apology. I’m sorry.”
The words spurted out of her like a sudden surge of sickness.
“Do you think I’m crazy?”
“Not for the reasons you think. Promise. I’ll drop by sometime and return the scarf. Where do you live?”
“An apartment. There’s a mat in front of the door.”
“Descriptive,” Ashley snorted as she bent down to retrieve the keys. “These all look like door keys. I guess you don’t have a car to lend.”
“That’s a copy of the house key they gave me,” she said, pointing. Ashley nodded, pulling the scarf closer around her neck as she examined the keys. “I can think of a few places they might be to. Have you tried the library? I know you used to run the place.”
“No,” she confessed. “I’m already wearing her clothes and living in her home. I don’t need her job, too.”
“I can imagine,” Ashley said as she handed the keys back. “It’s the only thing I can think of, though. It’s back that way and to your right. Look for the clock tower. Can’t miss it.”
“Thank-you,” she said. “For talking to me. Not just directions.” Belatedly she realized the other woman was still shivering, and her face flushed. “I don’t want to keep you from your family.”
“Sorry I can’t do more; I’ve never met you in person before.”
“It’s okay,” she said with a strangled laugh. “I haven’t either.”