After Hours (InterMix)(11)

“I hope so.”

“Just know that whatever anyone in there says to you when they’re having an episode, it’s not personal. You’re the just the face that was closest to theirs when the impulse hit. Like you happened to be walking by when they whipped a door open, and got clocked in the head.”

I nodded, finding some comfort in that.

“They didn’t know who was behind the door. They just needed to shove. But letting them see you flinch is like handing them a weapon—they’ll use it if they know it’s there.”

I knew he was right. But skins didn’t thicken overnight, and realizing the only way to get my armor built up was to be verbally assaulted over and over was a defeating thought. Defeating and dehumanizing. Probably felt an awful lot like being locked in a psych ward. I sighed, and the exhalation made room for a measure of calm. I gulped it down like a quenching drink, thirsty for more.

“How long have you worked on the ward?” I asked, just as Kelly pulled us onto a rural route, trees giving way to a vast stretch of fallow fields.

“Four years. Four and a half.”

“Is there a lot of turnover with the patients? Have any of them been there as long as you?”

“Sure, two or three. Don and I came to the ward the same week, actually. Probably part of whatever bond we got going.”

“How long do most patients wind up staying?”

“’Til they’re better.”

“On average?”

“Couple weeks, maybe a month. Tough to say. Lots get on the right antipsychotic regimen, get better, get cleared, think they’re cured and go off their meds. Or they go home and get triggered by the same shit that landed them with us to begin with. So maybe a month, but then another month, and another . . . Some patients in Larkhaven have been institutionalized on and off for twenty years or more, but most don’t stay in the locked ward for longer than it takes for their drugs to kick in or their addictions to be treated.”

“That’s good.”

“Most patients don’t want to stay in a unit like ours long-term. They want their own clothes back. They want to be trusted with metal cutlery and get more visiting hours with their families, stand a chance at meeting a woman or seeing their loved ones with a bit more dignity. There are a few types like Don, though. Guys who thrive on the routine and the restrictions, real institutional cases. Or ones like Lonnie, who’ve been in and out so much, the ward has become their own little world. A place where they feel they understand their spot in the pecking order, unlike on the outside. But it’s not ideal. After years of the same gray pajamas, same meals, same views out the same windows . . . Sounds like prison. To me, anyhow, to lots of those guys. But it keeps the ones like Don safe, I guess.”

“I hope that’s not how it feels, working there—like it’s a prison.”

“Not when you get to clock out every night, get paid and have the freedom to drive to a bar once the working day’s done, order whatever you want to eat. Leave the job behind the second you wipe your name off that board.”

“I guess.” But I worried it’d feel like a sentence to me. I’d chosen this job, but out of duty and under duress. I’d be going home to just another ward, practically, as long as I stayed in the transitional residence, and playing nurse on the weekends for free, trying to enact order to combat my sister’s chaos. Would I ever feel like I was off duty? Would I ever leave the day behind when the door to Starling clicked shut at my back? Right now, I couldn’t imagine it.

The outskirts of a small city appeared beyond the fields. Buildings drew closer, revealing their wear. The sun was just meeting the horizon, ripening the clouds to a warm mauve.

Kelly drove us past a huge factory, windows shuttered in plywood, its vast parking lot eerily absent of cars. Corroded wisps of razor wire coiled along the top of the chain-link fence.

“You been to Darren before?” Kelly asked.

“No. Do you live here?”

“Yeah.”

“You like it?” I asked, as another block of urban decay slid past.

“It’s a shithole.”

“Oh.”

“Former factory and mill city—no shock—now it’s caught someplace between ghost town and ghetto, with a little river of civilization running through the middle, paying taxes.”

“Is it dangerous?”

“Parts are, sometimes. But mainly it’s just quiet. We got substance abuse issues and the crime that goes with it, but not as bad as other places, since public services are practically nonexistent here. But you can buy a two-bedroom house for twenty grand, so here I am.”