Page 40 of Good Half Gone

“You’re being nosy,” she says.

I lift my eyebrows. “I wasn’t trying to be. I’m—”

“Sure.”

The nearest purple wolf looks confused. It seems that during the last minutes of its life, it’s considering why it allowed itself to be eaten by a rabbit.

Without the dead body and chaotic panic, I am able to take a better look at the care station.

Painted in hues of beige, the care station is circular, a curved desk under recessed lights. Patients are able to walk up and speak to the nurses across the desk. Nurses have to walk through a half door to get inside. “Welcome to the care station,” Janiss says coldly. She’s put out with me after my comment. She lurches into a scripted greeting, no longer making eye contact. I follow, taking careful mental notes on everything she shows me. I want to do the job well—above well. I need everyone to agree that I’m an excellent employee if I want to impress Dr. Grayson enough to be allowed around the D hall patients.

“We have a lot of patients to take care of with a lot of varying needs. When you work at the care station, your priority is to be alert and available without judgment—” She gives me a dragging look.

“They’re all capable of serious violence. To forget that is to get yourself injured or killed.” She lowers her voice. “The females are the worst. Women make the worst patients, and you can’t tell me different.”

She waits to see what I say. When I don’t reply, she continues.

“There is no explaining how or why, they just do. We have fifty patients at the forensic unit. The men cause violent crimes on the outside. The women cause the violent crimes inside. I’ve wrestled with more women than men.”

Janiss doesn’t seem to be in the same rush as everyone else. For the next hour I’m shown how to barricade myself into the nurses’ station while Janiss shares details of her knee surgery. I learn about her conjunctivitis and chronic headaches in one sentence, and her strained relationship with her mother (who has body dysmorphia) in the next.

There’s an emergency alarm button and a lock switch you can use to lock the doors to the file room. Strangely, Janiss shares the majority of the information within earshot of patients. She doesn’t expect anything bad will happen, here in this bad-happening place.

The staff cafeteria is serving vegetable soup and grilled cheese for lunch. I grab a tray and get in line behind a group of two men and two women. I recognize one of the women, a nurse, from the dark side. She has tattoos up and down her forearms and one tiny heart behind her ear. I wait my turn for the tongs, looking around for an empty seat while the line chugs along. So far Jordyn, Bouncer and Crede have not shown up for lunch. I’m keeping my eyes open for Dr. Grayson too, but that seems more far-fetched. I turn back to the group in front of me. One of the men is wearing a uniform with a security badge clipped to the front of it. The guy with the badge looks over his shoulder at me, making a point to stare longer than necessary. My body freezes and my heart pounds.He’s just curious about the new girl,I tell myself.He does not know who you are or why you’re here.I smile at him and he turns away. I was being paranoid.

When it’s their turn at the food they goof around, snapping the tongs at each other before taking two sandwiches apiece. The nurse with the tattoos tells the other three to behave, and they move away reluctantly. When it’s my turn I take half a sandwich, snatch a container of soup from the warmer, and scoot to the rear of the room, where a couple seats have become available. I suddenly feel too hot to be hungry; cafeteria anxiety never went away, did it? My kid probably handles this sort of thing better than I do.

That’s the way lunch goes for the first two weeks of my three days on/four days off schedule. Walk in, grab a tray, choose a foil-wrapped sandwich from one of the labeled rows, grab a side, ignore the bottled water for a sweaty cup of lemonade. After that, I’d report back to the dark side. I rarely saw Dr. Grayson, who spent his days treating patients in D. Sometimes I’d see someone from the kitchen wheeling the meal trays to the security door, at which point Bouncer or Dr. Grayson would take over. There were always six covered dishes on the cart—one for each patient and one for Dr. Grayson. I watch the meal cart with a different type of hunger, the dirty dishes the most appealing part.

The end of my training arrives quietly. If Gran were well, she would have made me a special dinner and dessert, maybe even suggested we go out somewhere with linen napkins. That night I put on sweats and one of Piper’s old T-shirts. I dig an ancient box of Hamburger Helper from the back of the pantry, and Cal and I eat by candlelight to make it fancy. I have much to be happy about; the temporary success of securing the job and keeping it puts me one step closer to my goal.

“Your shirt has a cuss word on it,” he says between bites.

“Yeah,” I say. “It belonged to your aunt Piper.”

He studies the shirt more carefully.

“Did she go to that lady’s concert or something?”

I drop my chin to look at an upside-down Britney Spears. On it is the infamous snake picture from the MTV Music Awards above the lyrics: “It’s Britney, bitch!” Before she got religious, Piper liked to steal things. The items were of teenage variety: sunglasses, boyfriends, lip gloss, the occasional necklace. The T-shirt was her last hoorah before the youth group bonfire, during which repentant teenagers burned things that caused them to sin. I saved Britney from the flames, plucking her out of the burn pile and hiding her in the laundry room.

“Nah, we never had the money to do stuff like that. She just really liked her music. She wanted to be a singer too.”

“Cool, can I wear it?”

I eye him over my water goblet. “You want to wear your mother’s T-shirt? Isn’t that uncool or something?”

“It’s not my mother’s T-shirt, it’s my aunt’s…” he counters.

My mouth goes dry. Kid, you have no idea.

“I have some things of hers that you can have if you like…”

I eye the bottle of wine Gran keeps above the fridge. I’m not really a wine girl, but tonight I am thirsty for it.

“I’ll show you after dessert,” I say. “Why don’t you go take your shower while I wash the dishes.”

“We don’t have any dessert. I’ve eaten every last cookie and popsicle in the house, and you haven’t done groceries in forever.”

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