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Dinah

I stand in the middle of Jessica’s room, thinking.

Right now, she’d be running. It’s a fool’s errand, but she doesn’t know that.

At some point, she’ll reach the fences. Unless she’s a pole vaulter, she won’t be able to get over them without hitting the electric wire.

We spent half a million dollars electrifying the land’s entire perimeter.

The only way in or out is through the driving gate, which is controlled by the remote fobs on our key chains.

Maybe she’ll figure something out. She’s smart—smart enough to read the room, invent a bathroom need, and take off running.

I didn’t suspect anything, mostly because I was frantically trying to save my marriage.

Joe and I were both distracted over the issue, which is the only reason she found that opening.

There have been a few rare moments in the last twenty years when I have mourned the baby I gave away.

I loved her. That’s something I never told anyone, something I will never confess to Joe, no matter how long he locks me in the box for—but after her birth, the nurses wrapped her in a lilac towel and put her in my arms, and I started to cry because she was so perfect and so vulnerable and mine.

The only thing I had ever created, and the love was so scary, so big and fierce and bold, that I couldn’t take it.

I sobbed and I hugged her close and I pressed kisses all over her face, and then they were taking her away and it felt like my heart left with her.

I locked that part of me away after that.

I responded in the immature manner of a sixteen-year-old child.

I turned that love into hate and spent the next six weeks in the facility stewing over how unfair my life had become.

When the adoption paperwork was delivered, I watched my mother sign it, and another brick was added to the wall around that part of my heart.

Years later, when Reese Bishop found me and asked if I wanted to be part of Jessica’s life, I signed a new set of papers, ones that guaranteed that Reese would keep my identity from Jessica and that I would never initiate contact or reveal my maternity to her.

Once I met Joe ... as our relationship progressed .

.. I became more and more grateful for that distance, but it would be a lie if I said that I didn’t occasionally fantasize about meeting her.

Telling her. I’ve dreamed about her embracing me, us comparing strengths and weaknesses and seeing what hereditary items had passed down, if any.

That joint session made a mockery of that reveal.

She didn’t even react to the news, other than to call me crazy and tell Joe that it wasn’t true.

No warm embrace. No forgiveness for abandoning her.

None of the different scenarios I had allowed myself to hope for in the rare moments that I indulged in the forbidden fantasy.

Which is fine. I deserve that. I had, after all, just tried to kill her. What had I expected? Her to rush into my arms?

Now she’s ruined as a test case for Joe.

Her knowing the truth ... seeing behind Joe’s carefully constructed curtain?

She’ll be useless for his experiments. He will find her, and he will kill her.

It’s an outcome risk for all the patients, but that’s why I’ve always chosen them so carefully.

For the most part, they are women who deserve to be test subjects, if not locked away in prison.

The exceptions are the drug addicts or homeless, men and women who have screwed up their lives in unrecoverable ways.

The clinic is a kinder place to them than the outside world, assuming they play along with my husband’s mental games.

It’s not a hard thing to do, yet some of them just can’t submit. I don’t understand it. If I had Joe’s undivided attention for hours at a time, I’d do whatever he wanted—yet they don’t. And they wonder why I don’t have sympathy for them when they complain.

My stance has always been firm, but now, as a patient with my own file and number, I’m beginning to question my future. I saw the way he looked at me. Pure disgust.

Can you be in love with someone who disgusts you?

Can I be in love with a man who locks me in an electrified box?

One that sends an electric current from your toes to your ears at random intervals each hour?

One that is so small that you don’t have any room to move and barely enough air to breathe?

One that is so dark that you have no sense of time or space?

Joe designed the box so that the claustrophobia would be at maximum effect, and that when they defecate or urinate, the stench would fill the area.

They typically vomit after the first bowel movement, an act that comes quicker due to the electric shocks.

The shocks are a laxative of sorts, one that makes the box a shit-filled claustrophobic hellhole where you are constantly steeled against the next volt of electricity, unsure if it is seconds or an hour away.

I’ve always hated the idea of the box. The rest of it .

.. his mad scientist playground where he could conduct his research without the meddlesome oversight of the DHCS or the DSS—that, I understood and supported.

The clinic was nice, our secret little world that we reigned over together.

It has always been our baby, one that we can leave for a weeklong vacation to France, as long as we put enough supplies in each room for the patient to get by on.

I never, in all the time we spent designing and building the clinic, imagined myself as a patient. On this side of the locked door, it’s not nearly as rosy.

I think of everything I do—the cleaning, the smoothie-and-meal preps, the medicine distributions, the laundry, and more. He can’t do it all alone; there’s too much work, and all things he hates to do. He’ll need a nurse, one he can trust, and Joe doesn’t trust anyone.

So there’s my in, the break that will have to occur in my patient experience. I can barter with it. Negotiate for a better cell. Time with him in his office. Maybe a night away in the ranch house.

I’ll need those things. I’ll need the special treatment, the reminder of our life together and the love we have. Without it, I won’t make it in here. I’m not even sure I’ll make it through another session like the one we just had.

That is not the man I love, and this devolution is 100 percent my fault. If being his patient is the punishment for that crime, I accept that but refuse the sentence.

So, how do I get out? I stand in the middle of the room and do a slow turn, thinking through its construction.

This room is different from the others. It’s the only one without a bathroom, an exclusion due to its interior location being too far from the sewer lines.

Joe’s office is adjacent to it, at the end, which means that he has skylights and a window.

This room has neither. We designed them so that the patients would not have a sense of day or evening, nor any possibility of escape.

The ceilings are exposed, and there’s no crawl space.

The doors are steel; the butler’s windows lock from the outside and are too small to crawl through, even if they are left open.

A concrete slab is underfoot, and the ductwork is all embedded and too high and too small for access.

But there is one other thing about this room that is unique. I turn and look into the mirror on the wall, which stretches eight feet across and gives Joe a direct look into this room from any location in his office.

I remember when they put this double-sided mirror in.

I had smiled at the idea of it, because my husband loves a good cliché, whether or not he realizes he’s falling victim to it.

So many things here ... the clipboard he carries, his white lab coats, the formality he uses with his patients .

.. they are all things he has seen in movies or during his residency.

All adopted to support his ego and vision of this place.

The biggest cliché of them all—this window into the room.

For observation purposes, he had told me, his chest puffed, face serious.

Sure. Whatever. Another ten-thousand-dollar expense added to the already ridiculous budget.

I trimmed costs where I could, downgrading items he wouldn’t notice.

This two-sided mirror was one of the places where I had found some savings, which is how I know a very important thing that my husband doesn’t.

It isn’t Teflon, or bulletproof, or double reinforced.

Thank God.