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Gwendolyn Briggs only closes her eyes for a second. Just one second. It couldn’t have been more than that. But she would forever remember that second as the longest, darkest hour of her life.
She flinches when the gun goes off. Everyone does. Someone even shrieks when the sharp bang ricochets in the room – though Gwendolyn doesn’t know to whom the startled screech belongs. In truth, she can’t help thinking, she didn’t really know anyone at the party save the bare minimum and most only by name. She only came because she had been invited by…
She turns on her heel so fast she could swear she’s close to giving herself what the doctors call whiplash. The bright blue of her skirts swirl around her calves; a cerulean cylindrical wave stuck in place. Because she is stuck in place. Just as Mildred Ratched seems to be. Like a marionette with all her strings pulled taut by her brother, keeping her limbs locked and looking so still. Everyone else in the room flailing and fussing and freaking out except for her. Gwendolyn cannot recall when, or if, she had ever seen the redhead so still. She had already learned the nurse was almost always moving, in thought or deed, big gestures or small. Even now, she sees Mildred’s lips move but Gwendolyn can’t hear what it is those ruby red lips are trying to say. Not when her focus is drawn to the maroon colour blooming through that teal green silk.
And just like a marionette - her brother has snipped the strings - Mildred drops.
Is it possible for time to simultaneously move so fast and so slow? Gwendolyn can’t comprehend it. One moment Mildred was standing a few feet away and nearly offering her a small smile – the next she’s lying in the middle of that dancefloor Gwen had so keenly looked forward to asking her to dance on. There will be no more dancing now.
She doesn’t even feel it when her knees hit the hard floor. All she can see is Mildred. Mildred lying with her hair cushioning her rare hatless head like a gothic halo, and a bright flower blossoming at Mildred’s side as just as rich and red. The colour seeps through that soft silk bodice in a way that Gwen thinks can’t possibly be real. Until that night, until that moment, Gwen had always loved how Mildred’s eyes could widen with surprise, and how it could make her look so much smaller than the imposing nurse that the woman was. It was always incredible how she could make such darkness look so childlike, when her eyes became big and round, like ink in one of Gwen’s morning papers how they’d glisten still fresh off the press. Mildred’s eyes are glistening now. But there is no joy to be found.
Eyes black as night, lips red as blood, her complexion snow white, oh look what prince charming has done... and in the current company Gwen can’t even give her true love’s kiss. No kiss could remedy this. But damn them all for preventing her from trying.
Someone calls Mildred’s name, but it doesn’t sound like herself – too hoarse and fragile and not the assertive governor’s assistant she’s supposed to be.
“Somebody help! For god’s sake-!” it’s a desperate screeching for someone, at everyone, to anyone who might listen on earth or up in heaven. Where’s the firmness in her tone now? Where’s the steel in her spine now? The only metal left inside is the lead in her limbs rendering her listless while the bullet in Mildred’s chest takes her breath away.
Mildred, for her part, looks eerily calm for someone bleeding to death on the dancefloor. For one bizarre bright moment Gwendolyn can’t help but wonder if the woman has ever been shot before. There’s something she can’t explain in how quickly Mildred’s expression melts from shock to a strange serenity; Gwendolyn cannot possibly understand it. At best, she can only hope that if there is life after this night, perhaps she’ll find the courage to ask her. She’s never even seen the woman without being top to toe in neat-pressed clothes outside of dreams Gwen dare not divulge to anyone. Dreams that may be dashed now, may never come true.
Mildred’s hand is moving then, thin fingers twitch while Gwendolyn’s itch to take them and squeeze tight. Regardless of witness, she gives in to the urge, and tries to ignore how sticky her palm becomes. It distantly occurs to her that this is the first time that she can remember Mildred ever reaching for her and not the other way around.
She watches those ruby red lips part, a name or a word on such soft breath Gwen nearly misses it but she can’t distinguish what Mildred might be trying to say beyond the deafening sound in her ears her own desperation. She gives the nurse’s hand another squeeze – and realises only then that Mildred moves her palm to the wound at her side – how some subconscious part of her implores for pressure not just for comfort but to keep her there. Gwen knows this. That this is the closest she has ever come to being able to wrap her hands around the other woman’s petite waist – and the closest she has ever come to losing her.
“You’ll be alright…It’ll be alright…Stay with me…” the murmurs and mumbles slip out of her own mouth unbidden and almost incomprehensible. She can’t believe they’re in a hospital full of nurses and there’s no-one there able to do anything. No-one willing. Or so it will seem to Gwen when she looks back on this moment. When she will question why they had all let the minutes linger and drag on long enough.
Someone’s hands press over hers, over theirs, large and firm and all thick fumbling fingers. And then someone is talking in her ear – low voice, soft yet shaky, and in her peripheral the sight of mottled skin; Huck. He’s telling her to breathe – no, telling Mildred? He’s holding Gwen’s hand to Mildred’s side; "Keep the pressure Mrs Briggs-" the dim thought rises like smoke from the fire that she wants to say ‘its miss now-‘ but she hadn’t even had a chance to tell Mildred. Telling anyone else first seems wrong in a way she can’t describe, and she can’t divulge.
Mildred’s eyelids flicker and start to fall as though the weight of the world she carries on those slim shoulders is too heavy to keep holding up. But Gwen wants her to keep holding it up. Gwen wants her to keep holding on. Gwen wants to pull away from the warm wet sensation spilling and seeping through her cotton gloves and run away, she wants Mildred to get up and run away from this terrible place with her. She wants…
“It should have been me… It should have… I was standing-“ the words stutter and start as though she’s trying to defend herself but she’s not sure what for or who to. She thinks she sees Huck shake his head a little, but she can’t tell if he agrees or if it’s pity or if it’s something else entirely. He has something white in his hands – a cloth maybe or a towel half-folded – and he’s slipping his hands underneath Gwen’s this time. If there’s any protest worth making sitting on the tip of her tongue, she swallows it the moment she hears Mildred’s soft gasp of pain.
“Stay with me, Mildred,” Huck’s voice beckons, and Gwen can’t help the dark thought within her that says he has no right to call her that. That says her name, her beautiful name sounds wrong in his timbre. That selfishly thinks stay with me. Until another says who gives a jolly damn who or what Mildred decides to stay for as long as her heart keeps beating. So Gwen’s can too.
Huck’s hands are suddenly replaced by a softer feminine touch and for one deluded moment Gwendolyn thinks maybe, just maybe, she has awoken from a terrible dream. If she could just turn to the left, Mildred would be there, a soft smile and shining gaze, able to tell her everything would be okay.
But the eyes that stare back at Gwendolyn when she looks are blue, not brown, and the hands tugging the blanket around her shoulders are a little too fussy and firm. Betsy. The voice that asks if she is alright to stand is higher than Mildred’s ever was and there is no subtle lisp she has come to love to listen out for. Betsy Bucket is the only one she has left to lean on when it feels like the axis her world spun around has been ripped away from her and she’s too dizzy to trust her own two feet right now.
“She’s going to be just fine…”
Gwen hears the words finally in her ears, something registering beyond the high-pitched ringing as Betsy pulls her away with more care than she thought her capable of. But it’s wrong. Betsy’s wrong. How can any of this be just fine? It’s not fine now. There’s so much blood and it sticks the smooth cotton of Gwen’s gloves to her palms like a damp second skin. She wants to peel and scratch and claw it all away but – but it’s Mildred. She’s holding what she has left of Mildred in her hands. And if they don’t help her, if they can’t help her, will this be all that remains of the radiance that was Mildred Ratched?
Her hands are shaking so hard, even Betsy’s trained fingers tremble as she tries to hold them together in Gwendolyn’s lap. The nurse is calling her name, telling her to breathe, and again there’s that terribly intolerable lie ‘she’ll be fine’. But Betsy can’t tell her the one thing she really wants to know; when she had been staring straight into the shadows of death, why did Mildred look so calm?
***
She’s finally aware, when someone helps to lift her from the chair to give her statement, that Edmund is long gone. The carnage left in his wake rapidly cooling, as quickly as that red stain soaks and seeps into the carpet. Gwendolyn can already see it now; how Betsy or one of the other nurses will be there in the next hour, maybe two, on their knees with a bucket of bleach, washing the blood of the love of her life clean away from those carpet fibres like just another incident.
Gwen doesn’t remember what she says to the police. How they got anything enough to note down on their little pads, she’ll never know. She should have propped her governor’s hat on. She should have pulled herself together and pulled her shoulders back and pulled at any goddamned thing to keep her composure intact. But what had there been left to pull when the one thing she wanted to hold onto had already been pulled away from her? Mercifully Betsy says they left her to her morbid thoughts fast; with a murmur that should have been reassuring but wasn’t, and a landline number on a flimsy card should she happen to recall anything else. As if her remembering the look of shock so briefly on Mildred’s face yet burned behind her eyelids like an imprint would do the force any favours for finding Edmund.
Huck is not the first to suggest Gwendolyn should go home. His jacket - tucked around her shoulders at some point – is big and bulky, too wide in the waist and the material is an ill-ironed cotton blend with a collar that itches at the back of her neck. Or perhaps it’s the faint amalgam of cologne and manly sweat that prickles her skin. It’s too masculine to be anything like Mildred. Mildred and her expensive tastes, her silk nightrobes and chiffon scarves and coats of cashmere in colours so richly dyed she always looks like she stepped fresh from the pictures in glorious technicolour, grander than any silver screen dame. Where Huck lightly suggests, Betsy firmly insists; a chance to wash her hands, to change her clothes and a night’s rest would all do her some good she says. But Gwen still struggles to find her feet, even with the solid arm support at her waist. Mildred always hated people touching her waist, she can’t help thinking, it had been one of the first things Gwen had noticed about her, strange as it was.
Later she would wonder how Betsy got the keys to her car when she doesn’t recall handing them over, and she would hand Huck’s jacket back to the kindly young man once she paid top-dollar for it to be dry-cleaned for him at her own behest. But for now, she simply goes through the motions the others bid her to, her body moving while her mind remains fixed in the moment she could not have predicted such a wonderful night would end in.
***
They let her in, the morning after. It takes more cajoling and coercing than she wishes for, though she can almost understand why. It is probably only because Mildred has no-one else – and Betsy’s subtle string pulling among the night staff of her own she has no doubt – that they allowed her into the small room at all to keep the young nurse company. The small room they have set her up in, one that looks too good to be unused patient quarters but not done up enough to belong to a doctor, is a quaint yet impersonal space. A bed with basic sheets fetched from the storeroom, curtains drawn to keep the harsh light outside from breaching the blank walls. It’s all so cold, and empty, devoid of personality, of life. So unprepared for this sudden occurrence, there aren’t even any typical paper-thin flowers wilting in a vase on the windowsill.
There is nothing here that says this room belongs to a slumbering Mildred Ratched – because yes she is only sleeping, resting, recuperating, Gwen has to remind herself every half hour. Mildred’s belonging had been taken away in a small bag to be examined, and they had been returned some time in the night. But the bag remains on the other chair in the room, untouched. Gwen can’t bring herself to even open it, let alone look inside or take anything out. That’s for Mildred to do, once she wakes, once she’s ready. And hard to understand as the younger woman can be sometimes, Gwen is sure she would be appalled by the thought of someone else going through her things before herself. And Gwen’s reluctance to open the bag has nothing at all to do with the glimpse of rusty stain she had seen for just a second through the lip in the bag when the night nurse had brought it in, of course. She doesn’t have the same reluctance when it comes to looking to the pale form lying so still in the bed. Once her gaze falls to her, she can barely bring herself to look away.
Mildred always looked pale; Gwen might have even dared say anaemic more than once. So often like something from an old portrait - how porcelain the fragile shade of the redhead’s skin often was. Given her diet of bologna, peaches, and endless days of exhaustive work with the ill, invalid and insane, it was hardly surprising.
But this was surprising. It was terrifying even, to see someone’s skin so grey. To see someone who was always moving, lying so still. As far as Gwen knew, Mildred Ratched never stopped for anyone; a cog in constant rotation of her own schemes. Every time Gwen thought she figured out how the pieces fit together or how the parts worked, Mildred would turn anew and prove her wrong all over again. Now all of that had been brought to a standstill because of one Edmund Tolleson. Only the steady rise and fall of the redhead’s chest beneath the blankets, and the quiet beep of the machine keeping it going in such a measured manner, assures her of any movement, of any life.
At first, Gwen had wondered whether she should even be allowed in the redhead’s room, let alone by her bedside. She isn’t family, she isn’t a loved one. She’s not even sure if Mildred ever truly considered her a friend until now; one of the few the nurse would allow herself to have.
One look through the door into that sterile silent room however had been all it took to convince Gwen to step inside, set herself down in the flimsy plastic chair by the bed and wait.
She waits all afternoon.
She waits all night.
She waits long into the early hours of morning until even the next night nurse bids her a fond farewell, along with a blanket and another cup of lukewarm tea that must make a half-dozen Gwen has swallowed down along with all the words she cannot say.
She’s not sure when she reached for Mildred’s hand during the long vigil. But once she does, she doesn’t let go. She knows the moment Mildred wakes, the nurse will probably pull away from the contact, or perhaps Gwen will make sure she’s pulled herself back before then so Mildred wouldn’t feel so imposed on so soon. But for now, just for now, while the whole world is quiet save for Mildred’s breathing and Gwen’s own heartbeat thumping, she held on to Mildred’s hand, and hoped somewhere in her subconscious, Mildred might find something to hold on to.