AS LESTER LEADS me past the door to the east-west corridor, I catch a glimpse through its window of the dim main tunnel. Somewhere in its distant shadows is the Unit. How the hell am I ever going to reach Mary in time if I can’t get in there?
“Dorothy.” I look up. Miss Gibbs is walking toward us, smiling. “I guess you missed us too much to stay away.”
“Good to see you, Miss Gibbs,” I slur to Doe-Eyes.
She squeezes my hand gently, and a memory surges forward:
I’m strapped to the examination table. Coal-Eyes is about to inject me, when a woman’s voice, warm and soothing, says, “If you tell me the truth, I’ll get him to stop, honey.”
Then a delicate-looking hand squeezes mine tight.
I look up and see Miss Gibbs. She leans in close, till she’s inches from me. “Just whisper it in my ear…”
Gibbs?
Gibbs is CIA! She’s the one in charge of extracting information from Mary.
Don’t you dare react.
I will my face to stay flat and still, not show any emotional response to this revelation, while my insides roil. I give Gibbs a dull half smile and let Lester pull me down the hall.
I keep my eyes pointed groundward as we exit the elevator onto the first floor’s main corridor. Just beyond the ward gate, I smell Sherman’s cologne.
“Dorothy.”
I turn to him slowly. The doctor’s looking me up and down, assessing. “Doctor Sherman … it’s nice to see you,” I say slowly, trying to exude an air of benign compliance I don’t at all feel. Now that I’ve regained my faculties and can fully appreciate the depths this man brought me to, I just want to grab him by the throat and lean in hard.
“I’m so sorry about your husband’s mishap, Dorothy, but we’ll be sure to take good care of you here.” Then he walks on.
Lester deposits me in the dayroom, which looks unchanged. A few new faces but the same vibe of questionable incarceration mixed with mild madness. Germanic Nurse is watching my arrival from the nurses’ station.
“Holy Toledo!” Suddenly Georgie’s got me in a bear hug. Her fluffy pink sweater tickles my nose. Aware I’m being observed, I try to temper my reaction to this reunion. But damn, it’s good to see her. My inclination to cry, though less than it was in November, is still present, and my eyes start to fill.
There’s a distinct chance I’m becoming a bit of a gal pal.
Jesus.
Georgie puts her arm around my shoulders and steers me away from the nurses’ station. I keep my eyes on the floor as I let her slowly walk me to an empty table at the far end of the room and help me into a seat. As she stops to push a hank of my hair that’s slipped in front of my face out of the way, she says to herself, “What in heaven did they do to you?”
I smile up at her, eyes now sharp and focused, and whisper, “I’m fine, Georgie. Don’t scream—”
She just about jumps out of her skin—but manages to do it silently, not drawing Germanic Nurse’s attention. She drops into her seat, dramatically clutches her hand to her chest and hisses, “You scared the living daylights out of me! Faker.”
“Sorry, I had to.”
“But that day of the Christmas concert, when you were so—”
“That was real. The Unit.”
She shakes her head, trying to banish all the awful, then pivots to my clothes for some relief. “That’s some getup you got there,” she says, eyeing the dress and pointy bra. “You certainly know how to make an entrance.”
“I try.”
“So, if you’re not really ill, or overtreated, then why on earth did you let your husband bring you back here?”
“He doesn’t know I’m here,” I say.
“You brought yourself back to Hanover?”
I relay the discoveries of my long, strange trip—from Hanover to my “home” with Paul, to the blighted future and back to 1954, on a mission to get information from a Unit patient before it’s too late.
All the crazy weirdness. But none of the particulars. No mention of Mary’s name, the virus sample I’m after, or the whistleblowing against the government that led to Mary’s incarceration at Hanover. Certainly no mention of her interrogation by Gibbs and the mystery beady-eyed CIA man in the Unit.
I need to protect Georgie. Don’t want to fill her with knowledge that would be of interest to whatever secret pocket of the CIA Gibbs and Dr. Coal-Eyes are part of.
When I’ve finished my story, Georgie sits silent.
“I know, it’s a lot to swallow,” I say. “I don’t expect you to—”
“How can I help?” she says.
“You believe me?”
“Sorry, no,” Georgie says bluntly, “but you are my friend who’s come back here at great personal risk to accomplish something you believe in, and I will support that endeavor … As long as it won’t land me in any hot water…”
Same old Georgie. Going along to get along.
We spend the next few hours spitballing ideas on how to reach Mary. The idea of pulling the fire alarm seemed promising before Georgie informed me they’re locked. Stealing a staff member’s keys also had its moment, but having seen one of those shiny key reels up close that night in the infirmary with Lester, I can attest to their strength. No one’s slipping one of those off a belt without detection.
And so the day goes, me racking my brain, coming up with awful ideas, Georgie her own equally bad ones. At one point I spy Lillian looking at us from across the room. Wave for her to come over but she shakes her head.
“What’s with her?”
“She’s kept her distance ever since you were sent to the Unit,” Georgie says.
I walk over and take a seat next to Lillian. She’s not happy, seems extra nervous at my presence. I open my mouth, about to ask what gives, but she puts her hand up. “Don’t say a word.” I start to protest, but she again stops me. “Please. I mean it, Dorothy. After I told Dr. Sherman about your plan, I felt so awful. And, well, I’ve been trying to be better.”
“By not talking to me?”
“By not telling Dr. Sherman things about people he might want to know … I’m getting better at it. Just this week, I didn’t tell him Maren stole a dinner roll from Esther and hid it in her sweater sleeve,” she says, and smiles.
“That’s good,” I say.
“But I’m still not great at it.” Her hands are twisting her skirt like she’s wringing it dry. “That’s why I need to keep away from you. So I’m not tempted … to learn things … You should go now.”
Lillian’s trying with all her might to control what she can in her world. Not for me to screw with that. I get up and walk away.
Five o’clock rolls around without a decent plan, and my angst building, when Germanic Nurse’s voice booms from the loudspeaker: “Ladies, tonight is Hanover’s New Year’s banquet. Those who’d like the chance to decorate a party hat beforehand should make their way to the dining hall.”
“New Year’s. I completely forgot!” Georgie says breathlessly as patients begin heading for the door.
“Probably because it’s not really New Year’s,” I say.
“But don’t you see?” she says. “There are sure to be Unit patients brought up for the meal. Maybe the woman you need to speak to will be—”
“She won’t,” I say. “She’s not a patient they ever allow upstairs.”
Georgie’s looking at me, and I can see the little gears turning in her head. “Ever? Why would she never be al—?”
“Drop it, Georgie.”
Different holiday, different pictures taped to the walls of the dining room’s serving area. Now, instead of turkeys and Pilgrims, there are pictures of clocks, Father Time, and Baby New Year.
I follow behind Georgie in line. As the woman in the hairnet loads my tray with a fake New Year’s feast of ham, peas, rice pilaf, and a dessert of apple crumble, I watch a kitchen worker opening the nearby dumbwaiter and placing two familiar covered pots inside. Pureed dinner for the Unit, though the women there won’t know it’s dinner. No such specifics of time allowed in that netherworld.
“Move along,” the hairnet woman orders, and Georgie pulls me away, out into the deafening dining hall packed to the gills with patients—many of whom are not truly ill. Just inconvenient. Mouthy, embarrassing, unconventional women, swept up and deposited in Hanover so the normies won’t have to deal with them.
Someone on the hospital staff has taken Fake New Year’s Eve quite seriously. Tables are full-on festooned with confetti, streamers, noisemakers, and party hats, some of which industrious patients have decorated and now wear. Crayons, colored paper, and pens from the craft session still lie scattered about.
Lillian averts her eyes as I pass her table.
Limited to my slow Dorothy gate, I quickly fall behind Georgie in our trek down the center aisle. So I’m alone when I start to pass Norma and Carol’s table. “Look who’s back. Wonder Gork,” Norma says to me, and Carol howls at her brilliant wordplay.
I’m so tempted to react. Funnel all my disappointment and rage at failing to reach Mary into pummeling the she-bully. But I manage to keep my dull half smile firmly in place—
Till she trips me.
My tray and I go airborne, and it’s looking like an ass-over-teakettle situation is unfolding as I sail over the checkerboard floor. But then my body, like a cat, wrests back control midair—and I land on my feet, tray still in hand, not a pea out of place.
Reflexes are definitely back.
You know what’s also back? Knee-jerk rage.
I turn toward Norma, about to go postal—when a hand gently alights on my arm. It belongs to Joe, the custodian. “You all right, miss?” he asks, and his concern manages to interrupt my chain reaction of anger and frustration.
“Yes,” I say, and walk away.
When I reach Georgie’s table, I take a seat on the bench, spy the big clock on the wall—and sink into a funk.
Five thirty. Time’s just about up.
If Kyung’s right, Mary dies in the next few hours. And I have overcome time machine brain damage, ECT brain damage, and gaslighting by a fake husband, not to mention marauding young religious thugs in the future, only to sit here, uselessly chowing down on pressed ham.
My eyes drop from the taunting clock to the table below it, full of Unit patients. The kitchen staff’s decorated it like the others: hats, crayons, confetti, and streamers—but the gray moths seated there are oblivious to the festivity. They only have eyes for the slop in front of them, completely wrapped up in the attempt to feed themselves.
I recognize one of them from my time in the Unit: Frida, the woman with the unibrow.
As I watch Frida try to scrape up a spoonful of pureed ham, a brief flash of having done the same comes to me, and I remember how it felt to have one’s whole world reduced to a spoon and bowl full of mush. To put all you had into a good swallow. So you could keep going.
Tears are rising and it’s a battle to stuff them down, so it takes me a moment to realize who’s sitting next to Frida—
Dr. Mary Pell.