You up?”
“Huh?” The answer was, Not really.
I’d had a hard night.
Screwy dreams where I was chatting with my Facebook friend. Face-to-face with him. Who kind of looked like Dad, which made no sense except it was a dream, so why not? I was back on the couch in my loose cutoffs and splaying my legs out like when Dad had been trying to watch the Knicks but I’d wanted him to watch me—please, Dad, ME—and I felt that sickening nausea again, because maybe I was doing everything but selling tickets, but before he’d looked away, he’d looked.
Only it wasn’t Dad—in the dream anyway. It was the Facebook friend who’d sent me down a rabbit hole. He wanted to know about the downstairs closet. About the fire. He asked me if I was being careful.
Then he’d whispered: Shhhh . . . I hear something.
So did I.
A door opening.
And because this was a dream where you can be one place and then suddenly another, we weren’t in my room anymore—or maybe it was Tabs’s room—but in the actual basement of St. Luke’s. As if we’d broken in for real.
A door was opening and I was in a panic.
They were going to catch us.
I woke up sweating—jolted upright in bed, it taking me a second or two to realize that’s where I was, in bed—and feeling this “thank you, Lord” sense of relief. Which didn’t last, because a door had opened. It had. And I knew it was my door.
Just like a few nights ago.
I heard another door slamming as I stumbled out into the hall.
The wooden floor felt ice-cold on my naked feet, or maybe I was. As if I’d wandered into that cold spot and was about to pronounce this house haunted.
“Who is it . . . ?”
I hadn’t decided if I should shout or whisper, so I’d compromised. A hush with real purpose.
Nobody answered.
“WHO IS IT?”
The hall was gloomy—just enough light seeping from the downstairs blinds to see that the other bedroom doors were shut tight.
I waited till I stopped sounding like someone’s panting dog.
Till I could catch my breath.
I went back into my room, shut the door, crawled back into bed. I pulled the covers up over my head. I must’ve finally fallen asleep.
Till my cell rang.
“You up?” the person on the other end repeated through the fog.
It was Tabs.
She sounded rattled.
“Now I am. What time is it?” Early. The little light eking through my window was the color of dirty dishwater.
“Don’t know. Think I’ve been up all night.”
“Join the club. Why were you up?”
“Poking around St. Luke’s.”
“Huh?”
“I went back in, Jo. Couldn’t help myself. Kept wondering why Ben’s case file ended there like that. Seemed fishy.”
“You hacked into the system again?”
“Pay attention. Yeah. I hacked into the system again.”
She was speaking faster than normal, like when you’re worried the voice mail you’re talking into is about to cut off. Like Pennebaker.
“Ben’s file didn’t end there,” she said.
“Don’t understand. There was nothing there. We looked.”
“Trust me. The rest of the file’s in there. Just not there, there.”
Either I was too tired to hear straight or she was too tired to talk straight.
Or both.
“It’s filed in a different place, Jo. Capisce? The files we broke into were password protected. Five letters. L-O-R-E-M. Remember . . . ?”
Yeah, Tabs. I remember—it was my suggestion.
“Translation: therapy,” she continued. “Okay, makes perfect sense, right. But they put the rest of his case file somewhere else. I had to go exploring, okay?”
“Why would they move it?”
“Because it doesn’t belong. Because . . . look, follow me. There’s this whole different section with a different password. Latin again, of course. It wasn’t rocket science—I just needed to find out which word. I mean how many Latin words could there be for psychiatric terms, right? That’s what I tried first—you know—treatment, trauma, grief—whatever. Nothing worked. So I went in the other direction.”
“What other direction?”
“The Catholic one. That’s when I found it. The other section.”
“I don’t understand. What kind of section?”
“The one no one was ever meant to see. You don’t even have to know Latin to understand the password for this one: C-O-N-F-E-S-S-I-O. That’s the password. That’s where it was—Ben’s second EMDR session. I just emailed it to you. It was in Confessions, Jo. Understand? Do you?”
Her voice sounded like a taut guitar string right before it snaps.
“Get the fuck out of that house.”