The Warden Read online

  Everyone here is so wonderful, Mom. Just so warm. Kind, really. You’d be so proud of how Madge and I are doing. The warden has taken a shine to us, and I think this points to a bright future for us both.

  She winced at the memory of writing to her family. Three drafts ended up crumpled, torn, and thrown under the bed because they told the truth. Even writing it all out had felt strangely cathartic—the long hours, the strange requests that they filled for Warden Crawford (sit with the patients between these hours and these hours, use these words with them but not these, give them exactly this kind of food), the secrets, the pervasive cold of the basement, the violent, screaming episodes. . . .

  But Jocelyn couldn’t bring herself to send those letters. Her mother would worry, and Jocelyn couldn’t have that.

  There was one bright spot to write about at least, she thought with a half smile: Lucy had seriously improved in the last few weeks. Crawford had even encouraged Jocelyn to take the girl outside a few more times, and as long as he stayed out of sight, the time out of doors seemed to soothe and bolster the child, even if she had never spoken another word after that first trip.

  Jocelyn roused herself from her thoughts, finding Madge had put on her nylons and heels and moved to the bedside table. Holding the Minnie Mouse figure, she swayed almost imperceptibly back and forth.

  “Madge? We should get going, don’t you think?”

  Madge’s bouncy blond curls shot up as she inhaled and placed the figurine back on the table. “I was just looking at her. She reminded me of our trip to Disneyland when I was nine.”

  “I didn’t know you went to Disneyland,” Jocelyn said, grinning. “I’ve always wanted to go. It sounds so magical.”

  “It was,” Madge said, smiling herself at the memory as she followed Jocelyn out of their room and into the hall. “It was. I climbed on a bench because a crowd was forming around Mickey. My father told me to stay still and be patient but I couldn’t. I climbed onto a bench for a better look. I remember him saying, ‘Careful, doll, you’ll fall! Don’t fall and hurt that pretty face.’ But of course I was so excited that I did fall, right on my dumb face. Mickey came over because I started bawling my eyes out.” Madge shrugged and snorted. “So I guess in the end I got my way.”

  “We should go back together,” Jocelyn suggested lightly. “Maybe next summer. I’ll have some money saved up by then. It could be nice to get away.”

  “I’d like to see it again. This time I won’t climb any benches.”

  They ate at their usual table. Madge stayed silent, forking down the eggs and porridge on her tray. It seemed to take longer to get their food these days, but Jocelyn didn’t mind. Her appetite had improved, but not much. Madge, on the other hand, was hungrier than ever. She had put on a little weight because of it, but she simply looked prettier; Jocelyn was fairly sure nothing at all could take away Madge’s appeal.

  The orderlies had noticed, of course, David and the others swarming around like vultures whenever Madge flounced down the corridor alone, but she only had eyes for Tanner. And that was generally in her favor, considering he practically drooled on himself whenever she happened by.

  “Nurse Ash.”

  Jocelyn started, dropping her spoon into her oatmeal and splattering her uniform. She hastily dabbed at the mess with her napkin, twisting to find Warden Crawford standing next to her, his hand flattened on the table near her tray. Madge, apparently, had been too engrossed in her scrambled eggs to notice his approach.

  “Enjoying a leisurely breakfast, I see.” He retracted his hand, digging into his pockets for a mint before clearing his throat and nodding toward the exit. “I need you in my office.”

  “I’ll be done in just a—”

  “Now.”

  Jocelyn paled. He had never used that tone of voice before. She quickly gathered her napkin and drink onto her tray and scurried to the drop-off window. As she returned, Madge gave her a quick, nervous wave. Jocelyn didn’t dare return it.

  Oh God. Was she in trouble? Following him out of the cafeteria, Jocelyn ran through everything she had done the day before. It was possible she had given someone the wrong medication or the wrong dose, or she might have forgotten to mark down her rounds correctly. But that was so unlikely! She paid excellent attention to detail, even when tired, even when under immense pressure. . . .

  “You can relax, Nurse Ash. Nothing is amiss.”

  “It’s just that usually you don’t summon me that way, sir. . . .”

  Warden Crawford chuckled, nodding and munching on his mint. “Today is unusual. Today is special.”

  Special? Jocelyn didn’t like the way he lingered over that word. They arrived at his office, but they stopped there only briefly. She stood near the door, watching him collect a stack of files from his desk and a leather bag that she knew to carry his medical instruments. Unlike his office, his instruments were kept in perfect order, a fact she observed on the rare occasion he even brought them on his rounds.

  They made the descent to the basement, a trip that Jocelyn still found unsettling. It didn’t matter how many times she traversed those steps, she never got over the feeling of the wet cold creeping into her bones.

  “And how is Nurse Fullerton?” he asked, breezy.

  “Oh. Fine, I think. Working hard like the rest of us,” Jocelyn answered.

  “You don’t sound confident.”

  “I can’t see inside her head,” she replied.

  “More’s the pity,” Warden Crawford said with a short laugh. “She seemed quite disturbed after treating Mr. Heimline yesterday. I had to calm her down for an hour afterward.”

  Jocelyn slowed—Madge hadn’t told her a single thing about this. It wasn’t like Madge to keep something dramatic from her. “This is the first I’m hearing of it.”

  “Hm.” He shrugged, leading her down the last of the stairs and toward the yawning archway. “She must have made a full recovery then. Forget I said anything.”

  She wasn’t likely to forget, but Jocelyn tried not to dwell on Madge’s problems, recognizing that they were on their way yet again to Lucy’s room. Normally, Crawford would stop well short of the girl’s door, aware that even the briefest glimpse of him could send her into a spiraling panic.

  But this time he marched up to the door without a hitch in his step, motioning to two of the orderlies to join him. He stopped and turned to look at Jocelyn, watching her down the thin, arched bridge of his nose. “Why don’t you wait for us in Theater Seven, Nurse Ash.”

  “But Lucy is always so calm when I’m—”

  “You will wait in Theater Seven.”

  Jocelyn snapped her mouth shut, taking a tiny step away in the face of his command. She had the gall to hesitate, but Crawford stared at her until she began to leave, his eyes never straying from her as she continued down the hall. She didn’t look away either, glancing over her shoulder to watch as the orderlies opened the rusted, scraping door to Lucy’s room.

  The door to the operating theater had to be opened, cutting off her view of the corridor. The last sound she heard before stepping inside was a single, piercing shriek.

  This was a nightmare. She was paralyzed, in her skin but out of her mind, watching as if her soul had departed and now hovered just above the ground. Why couldn’t she move? It was fear, she knew—fear and sharp, crushing failure.

  Lucy, God help her, was strapped to the operating table, her cries long since snuffed out by a hateful gag.

  Jocelyn’s fingernails cut into her palms and her mouth behind her white paper mask had grown clammy. The girl’s black, glassy eyes stared up into the light hanging over the table, reflecting the perfect yellow circles. She had gone still. That was worse. When they had first dragged her in, she had kicked and screamed and struggled, but now, facing her wide-eyed resignation, Jocelyn felt she had given up.

  He wants to cut it open and scoop out what’s inside.

  A shiver propelled Jocelyn forward and into the harsh light over the operating t
able. The orderlies who were there to assist, also garbed in white with their mouths covered by crisp paper, paused with their hands in midair, staring. Warden Crawford stopped what he was doing, too, setting down the gleaming bone saw.

  “Your participation in the procedure is not yet required, Nurse Ash,” he told her gently. “You may step back.”

  The room was cold. Too cold. How could he operate with steady hands when it felt like they were all encased in ice? And now, over the paper mask covering half his face, Jocelyn could see just his eyes. Just his eyes, and they were different. Honed. Sharpened like a razor, cutting into her as readily as he was about to cut into little Lucy.

  Little Lucy, who still wouldn’t speak, but smiled whenever they got to see the birds outside, and smiled a little bigger when Jocelyn called her “sparrow.”

  “Is this . . . is this really necessary? She’s been improving, sir. Steadily. You’ve seen it, I know you have. Why would you—”

  “You may step back.”

  Don’t let him cut open my head.

  “No,” Jocelyn said. Her voice shook, but she pushed through it. This was all that mattered. Lucy, and doing right by her, was all that mattered. It was why she had become a nurse. It was why she had even stayed at dark, horrible Brookline in the first place. “No, sir, I can’t let you do this. There is no medical justification for this procedure. You know it isn’t right. We both know it isn’t right.”

  Warden Crawford rounded on her, exploding at her with a sudden cry that sent her sprawling backward. He ripped off his paper mask, half roaring with outrage. “You dare question me? You dare?” His entire body shook, his eyes larger, blacker, and sharper than she had ever seen them. He looked down, noticing the pronounced tremor in his arms. “Stupid girl. Now nothing can be done today.” He grunted again and waved vaguely at the orderlies. “Clean up. Get her out of here.”

  One of the orderlies cleared his throat, shuffling. “But sir, the electroconvulsive shock—”

  The warden spun and slammed his hands against the instrument tray, sending gleaming steel in every direction, the sound jarring them all. “Does anyone in this fucking building listen to me anymore?”

  Jocelyn stared, sucking in breaths so hard her paper mask sank in and out against her mouth, expanding and deflating like bellows. His voice rang in the small operating theater, the orderlies stunned into similar silences.

  “You,” he finally said, collecting his breath and pointing at her. “Out. And you two, help me get this patient back to confinement.”

  “You didn’t tell me about what happened with Dennis Heimline.” Jocelyn didn’t mean for it to come out so coldly, but she needed to discuss something—anything—to get her mind off what she had seen in Theater 7. He was going to operate. On Lucy. He was going to operate on Lucy and it was completely unnecessary.

  Lucy was right. Why does he want to perform surgery on her so badly?

  Madge paced outside the back stoop of Brookline. It was one of the few places nurses could find some privacy. And it was one of the few places Madge could sneak a cigarette without a lecture from Nurse Kramer. Jocelyn hated how much her friend was smoking, but she envied Madge the release of a vice. Maybe she ought to take up one of her own.

  “He just . . . He snapped at me.” Madge paused, looking out over the distant town. Camford crowded up to the hill where Brookline and the rest of the college sat. It was odd, Jocelyn thought, to even consider the collegiate life going on around them. The students avoided Brookline as if it were contagious. She was beginning to understand why.

  “He was talking about the White Mountains again,” Madge added, regarding the burning-cherry end of her cigarette. “And then something just changed and he wasn’t himself. Dennis is odd but harmless. He’s never threatened me, never said anything to frighten me at all. I don’t know what happened. . . . One minute it was White Mountains this, White Mountains that, and then he lunged for me. He grabbed me around the throat, Joss! It was horrible.” She shivered, taking another long drag. “I want to pose you. That’s what he said. God, it was just so, so horrible. I want to pose you, you would be so beautiful.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me this?” Jocelyn asked softly. She sat on the stoop, hiding from the drizzle under a shallow, shingled overhang.

  “You’ve been so wrapped up with Lucy. . . . I didn’t want to worry you.”

  “Yeah, well, you won’t have to think about that anymore.” Jocelyn pinched the bridge of her nose, sighing. She had had to intervene, but now who would protect Lucy from the warden? “I really stuffed it up, Madge. I’ll probably get fired and I’ll never work with Lucy again.”

  Her friend flicked away the cigarette, aiming it at a damp tree trunk. They sat together on the stoop, Madge with her arm flung over Jocelyn’s shoulders. “For what it’s worth, I think you did the right thing. Anyway, I heard Kramer buzzing to one of the other girls. It sounds like Crawford wants you to work with a new patient coming in. You might not be able to help Lucy, but maybe this one will be easier.”

  Jocelyn nodded, swallowing her cynical retort.

  “Well, lovely, I’m off,” Madge said, leaning over to squeeze Jocelyn in a one-armed hug. She stood and brushed off her rain-flecked uniform. “Crawford wants to see me. Again. I think the gross old fart has a crush on me or something.”

  “What does he want to see you about?” Jocelyn asked quickly. She couldn’t explain her sudden sense of dread.

  “Something about Dennis. He says I have to see ‘it’ now, whatever that means,” Madge said, sounding sad. Resigned. “He says I have to see how far gone Dennis is, that there’s no hope for him. When there’s no hope, he says, there’s only survival. You know”—she paused with the door open, her full lips swishing to the side—“I think I really will dye my hair dark. I could look like Jackie, right? Maybe I’ll feel better with a little more glamour in my life. I’ll see what Tanner thinks. We’ve got another date tonight. I bet this time we’ll really go all the way.”

  “Ash. Nurse Ash. Huh. That’s a fittingly macabre name for this charming little dungeon.”

  Jocelyn blinked at the new patient, taking stock of his slim, tall form, his carelessly tossed black hair and almost unnaturally green eyes. If he were one of the orderlies, he would immediately be on Madge’s short list for seduction. Even Jocelyn had to admit, in a quiet, shameful way, that she found him incredibly pretty. Pretty, because there was something fluid and feminine about his frame and his hands, and the way he leaned against the white, spare bed, his arms over his chest, his legs crossed at the ankles.

  “I won’t fuss if it helps you to have a sense of humor about all this,” Jocelyn said blithely. “We’re going to have to get to know each other,” she added, consulting the detailed history in front of her. That was nice, at least, to know a single thing about this person, unlike the strangely vacant past of Lucy. Of Dennis. “And I prefer my patients cheerful, if at all possible. Cooperative, at the very least.”

  “Aye, aye,” he murmured, saluting. His lips resolved into a smirk, their natural resting position. “And how do you run the Good Ship Loony Bin. Is it a tight ship or a loose one?”

  He wagged his eyebrows, but it was not nearly enough to unseat her. Old Mr. Goldblatt in room sixteen would flirt outrageously, using sexual terminology and phrases that not even Madge could decipher.

  “I know this must be difficult for you,” she began, glancing at his chart again and at the reason for admittance. This was a new one. Luckily, her only job was to administer whatever medicines the doctors prescribed and check in on him occasionally. It wasn’t her job to cure him. And maybe that was for the best, as she clearly wasn’t curing much of anything lately.

  DESMOND, CARRICK ANDREW

  SEX: MALE

  REASON FOR ADMITTANCE: UNNATURAL SEXUAL PREDILECTIONS

  Well, that covered a wide swath.

  He must have noticed her eyes widening as he quickly laughed and said, “Got caught in bed with the neighb
or boy. Well, young man, really. I’m not that much of a pervert.”

  “I don’t believe you’re a pervert at all, Mr. Desmond,” she replied, just as readily. She looked up briskly from the file, meeting his bright, challenging stare. “I don’t like words like that. They don’t do anything but shame. Treatment is not about shame.”

  His thick brows went up, up, up in surprise. He looked at her as if he could see all the way into her mind. “You shock me, Nurse Ash. But in the very best of ways.”

  She smirked, accustomed to the flirtation of patients eager to get on her good side and slip the rules. “Please let me know if you have any trouble settling in. Accommodating to life here can be”—Awful. Impossible—“Tricky.”

  “Oh, trust me, nothing I can’t handle. I was born to jailors.”

  Jocelyn took a few steps backward toward the door, grimacing. “I’m afraid life must have been very unfair for you.”

  His eyes, green and light, fixed on her again through his fall of dark hair. “I’m afraid it’s very unfair for everyone. You might not think I’m a pervert, but unfortunately, you’re not the one in power here. You’re not the one with the keys.”

  “I’ll check in with you again shortly,” she said, leaving before he could tempt her to stay another moment.

  The door clicked shut behind her and locked, and not a second afterward came the scream. She knew that scream. It had driven her from sleep and stayed in her nightmares ever since.

  Lucy.

  No, she thought, racing down the hall. Don’t let him cut her open.

  She was too late, of course. She had known that would be the case even as she sped down the corridor, almost smashing into Nurse Kramer, who had positioned herself like a sentry at the top of the stairs leading to the basement.

  “Nobody is allowed below right now,” she said sternly, putting out her arms like a first baseman to keep Jocelyn from forcing her way through. “Nobody.”

  “I need to see Lucy. She’s screaming.”

  “Other nurses are with her.” Nurse Kramer’s mouth clamped shut, her fleshy face jiggling to a standstill. “You’re not needed.”