Page 13 of The Locked Ward

You wake up screaming in the darkness.

You dreamt about Annabelle. You were yelling at her, telling her you hated her, raising your hand to strike her while she cowered. Then she was on the floor, all the life gone from her eyes, blood leaking from her skull.

“Georgia!” A nurse hurries through the doorway. “What’s going on?”

You gasp for breath as you remember where you are. You’ve slipped out of one nightmare into another.

Your chest tightens as pressure builds behind your eyes. You’re seized with the desperate urge to run, to hurl your body into the locked doors.

You try the tricks you’ve established to keep yourself from spiraling.

You breathe deeply from your stomach, not your chest. You remind yourself of the things you can do here: You can draw and color.

You can feel sun on your face in the courtyard on nice afternoons, even though the giant metal fence means you can’t look at anything other than the sky.

You can watch TV, though the screen is behind a layer of plexiglass that makes the images look cloudy. You can eat fresh fruit every day.

It could be so much worse, you tell yourself.

“Take this. It’ll help you sleep.” The nurse tries to hand you a small round pill and a paper cup of water.

But you keep your arms at your side and your expression blank.

Your college paper taught you that you can’t be forced to take medication until you are ruled mentally incompetent, which you haven’t been yet.

Your mind is fully intact. You need to keep it that way.

You’ve been terrified of going to jail because you know what will happen there.

You’ve lost the power and money that provide a protective cushion around anyone with the Cartwright name, even the black sheep of the family.

You’d end up in a maximum-security prison.

A woman like you—privileged, soft, pretty—would be marked by a bull’s-eye target. And not just by people on the inside.

You are desperate to avoid that fate.

A sharp noise comes from just outside your room. The nurse? Or is someone else approaching? Maybe it’s Josh, the man with pitted skin.

You want to get up and look, but you can’t.

Not because your limbs are tied down—you no longer have a watcher or Velcro straps, now that you don’t appear to be a suicide risk—but because your body is weak with fear.

Your brain feels fuzzy; thoughts slip through it and disappear like minnows darting through a cloudy stream.

You listen as hard as you can, but there’s no echo of the noise. Maybe your brain conjured it up. Perhaps your mind is beginning to turn on you.

Silent tears leak out of the sides of your eyes. You don’t have the energy to wipe them away.

What will a month here do to you? A year? A decade?

You lie atop your plain, hard bed and look around at the nothingness of your room. Once, you went into a sensory-deprivation tank. You were weightless in the salt water, and when the lid of the tank was closed, you couldn’t feel your body.

This feels like that.

For the first time, you think maybe jail would have been the easier way.

There is more than one type of death.

It just happens more slowly in this place.