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I sat crisscross applesauce on the floor of our tent, sweat beading on my nose, the devil heavy on my back. I wanted to say sorry, but I was angry at Piper, angry at myself, furious at Gran for being right.

Just as Gran was about to launch into her lecture, Piper burst through the opening of the tent. She made a beeline for her air mattress, flopping face-first onto her pink-and-green sleeping bag without a sound. Gran’s voice faded as we stared at Piper’s heaving back. What now? I wanted to scream. I couldn’t even get disciplined without Piper butting in.

“What happened, my love?” Gran’s voice was so gentle it made me want to cry. This was how it was: my feelings came second to Piper’s. I knew what my role was: shoving my feet into my shoes, I left them alone so they could talk.

I never did find out what caused her to storm into the tent that night—or why her entire personality changed after the camping trip. As I stared at the missing pages in Gran’s albums, I had a vision of sitting on our bedroom floor the day after she went missing, searching through her things. There had been photos among all of her other stuff—some of our mother, a couple of Gran during her wild years, and there were photos taken at church. At the time they’d seemed like mementos, but now I wasn’t so sure.

At that point in my life, the mysteries outweighed the truths. I continued discovering strange things, like the missing pictures, that I knew were clues that would lead to Piper, but nothing ever did. Nothing. The next few years were the most despairing of my life. As the days, weeks, and months trudged by with no sign of Piper, I told myself that Piper was dead.

All these things I discovered, the things that continued to worm through my mind, eventually crystalized and formed the smallest, craziest theory. This theory led me to eventually (and dishearteningly) apply for an internship at Shoal Island a few years later.

Chapter19Present

During The Monthof November, HOTI lays off ten members of the staff. It sends the hospital into a tailspin that doubles everyone’s workload. As a result there are less eyes watching what I do, but hardly a free second to do anything but work. I bounce around the hospital doing jobs wherever I’m needed. At night I toss and turn, my sleep shallow and my skin hot.

I’m having breakfast with Crede in the staff cafeteria when Jordyn steps up to the buffet holding a plate. In the weeks I’ve worked at Shoal, Jordyn’s appearance has changed dramatically. Her face is waxy and swollen, her gaze vapid. She stands motionless for a full minute, contemplating the teriyaki, before putting her plate down and walking out of the cafeteria.

“What’s wrong with her? Is she sick?”

Crede doesn’t look up. “Same as everyone else.” He shrugs. “Burned out.”

I open my mouth and close it again. I could say it the nice way or the blunt way.

I drop my toast. “Crede, are you being serious? Have you looked at her lately?”

He won’t meet my eyes. “People have personal lives. So long as she does her job it’s none of our business.”

Crede looks at his pager. “I have to go. I told Janiss I’d take her a muffin, and then I have a call with Dalton’s attorney.”

“I’ll take Janiss her muffin,” I offer. “Are you talking about the Dalton in D hall?”

“Yep.”

“Why do you have to talk to Dalton’s attorney?”

“He’s been unable to stand trial due to incompetency. The judge has asked for a reevaluation.”

He hands me a napkin-wrapped muffin and I blow him a kiss.

If I’m on the dark side, I have two shadows following me around. I’m quite flattered that they’ve taken to me. Alma—the woman/child—and a thirty-two-year-old guy named Vespa who killed his mother when she asked him to turn his music down. Though the crime happened a decade earlier, Vespa either lives in the time before his mother died or after. He gravitates between all-consuming grief, and when he forgets—paranoia that he is going to do something wrong. He follows me with clasped hands and bed hair, fretting—he is always fretting. On Vespa’s bad days he wakes up asking one question on repeat: Is my mother dead? He can’t make eye contact on those days; he doesn’t want to see the answer in our eyes.

I drop my phone and a Kit Kat in the basket for George. In the weeks that I’ve been here, he’s grown a beard, and beneath the scraggly graying hairs I see the corners of his mouth turn up. George smiles at the chocolate—not me; I’ve learned not to be offended.

Vespa in his plaid robe is the first thing I see. When he’s upset—which is almost always—he chews on one end of the belt.It hangs from its loops, one sodden end in Vespa’s mouth, the other in his free hand like a pet snake.

He lunges forward, and I brace myself. Listening to Vespa is like listening to the side-effects-may-include portion of a drug commercial. I don’t have the heart not to listen, he is always so distraught. His medical knowledge is impressive, so much so, he turns it on himself almost hourly. If he can’t find something wrong with himself, he’ll obsess about one of us dying.

One of the first things he said to me was,“Crede isn’t going to die of lung cancer like everyone thinks, he’s going to die of throat cancer…”

It is exhausting for everyone involved as he often has to be sedated when he became aggressively upset. To Vespa, a skin abrasion indicates cancer; a headache means meningitis. Crede told me that he accurately diagnosed one of the nurses with melanoma—early enough that it saved her life. With plenty of knowledge and none of the symptoms, he’s been diagnosed with HA—health anxiety—hypochondriasis.

“What’s wrong, V?”

“Something bad is happening…”

Hovering close to my right shoulder, he squints at me, his expression flickering between negative emotions: fear, then sadness, then anxiety.

“Like what?”