eighty-seven

Nathan wasn’t sure how long he’d been living in this room in the hospital. Years. No, he reminded himself. A week at most. A different room, a different hospital. Not even in England anymore.

He sat up in bed and wiped the dribble from his mouth. His thoughts were so ponderous he’d forgotten them already. The afternoon sun coated the room in a thick haze that he waded through to reach his jeans lying on the floor. The fabric disturbed every hair on his legs when he pulled them on.

On the bureau sat his goldfinches. A dozen of them in modeling dough. He’d told his therapist here—not Brenda, she was one of the head nurses—about his dreams. The ones that featured hands suffocating and reviving a goldfinch. He’d tried to tell the therapist what it meant to him, these dreams, these goldfinch replicas—the beginning of it all, at least for him. Twelve-year-old Zoe running to him one day, beaming with pride. See what I can do?

The sight of her suffocating the poor bird had repulsed him. When she healed it, she’d repulsed him even more. He no longer cared if the staff didn’t believe him. Here he was, once again. Yelling down the walls wouldn’t make what he had to say sound any less insane.

So, once again, he’d fake it. Tell everyone what they wanted to hear. He collapsed on his bed and curled up, too tired for the common room, after all. His eyes drifted shut, and then drifted open again sometime later. The goldfinches on the bureau fluttered. If he pointed that out, Brenda would up his meds, so he wouldn’t mention it.

A knock bolted him out of bed. Groggy and loose, he folded to the floor.

“Nathan,” Brenda said. Another knock. “I’m coming in now.”

Without a word, she helped Nathan to his feet. “You have a visitor.” She hesitated. “Sid Gibson.”

Nathan brushed his hands through his hair. “I’ll see him. He owes me something. He promised.”

He tucked in his shirt over his new tummy bloat and tried to straighten his shoulders, but they refused to hold their positions. One of his feet caught on the other. He stumbled forward. Brenda caught and held him. He shrugged her off and shuffled forward. When he’d settled himself at his table with the colorful dough, Brenda escorted Sid to the chair next to Nathan.

He scooted his chair closer to Sid’s, watching Sid’s lips form words that floated out of his mouth inside bubbles. He interrupted them to say, “You promised me Annie’s journal.”

“And you shall have it. Danny confiscated it for the case against Zoe. He promised me he would return it to you.”

Case against Zoe. If Sid wasn’t here about the journal then—“Why are you here?” he said.

“I would have come sooner, but I ran into difficulties. The lawyers straightened it out, I’m glad to say.”

Nathan noticed Sid’s teeth behind the word bubbles. Crooked teeth. Sharp little fangs. He blinked and they returned to normal.

“I owe you an apology,” Sid said. “I hid the sleán in your painting supplies to implicate you. I was jealous of your budding relationship with Annie.”

The word bubbles knocked against each other, popping before Nathan could decipher them.

“Elder Joe? Remember him? Killed by a turf cutter?” Sid smiled. “I know it’s difficult. The drugs they force into you—it’s fiendish. Not a bother if you’re not catching my meaning.”

His words were coming too fast. Nathan thought maybe, just maybe, there was a fact related to Zoe within all those word bubbles. “Zoe?”

“You landed a rum deal with her as a daughter, didn’t you?”

“Rum deal.”

“Listen, my friend, I’m after ridding you of Zoe. Hopefully for a long time. In that respect, you can relax. Prison for her, eventually. It will happen.”

“For what she did,” Nathan said.

“Exactly.”

Sid understood Nathan. He was the one person on the planet who did. Maybe Nathan could reveal the truth to him. Maybe Sid would believe him. The one person on the planet. That would be something. Then he wouldn’t talk about the past again. Ever.

He bent toward Sid and lowered his voice. A quick glance around the ward told him that no one spied on him, but just in case, he mumbled his words. Sid leaned forward.

“Zoe practiced on me.” He pulled up his shirt and lowered his jeans to show Sid his scar, but quickly, before anyone saw. Sid whistled low. “The healing. No one believes her, but she can do it. She practiced on me. Over and over.”

Sid looked impressed, maybe even entranced. “You let her torture you?”

Torture. Nathan retreated from the word. He floated above himself, hearing his flickering, unsure voice, sounding like he didn’t believe himself.

How it had all begun with the poor goldfinch, and how Susannah refused to believe it even when Nathan corroborated Zoe’s claims that she could heal. Susannah had looked at him strangely then, the first time he’d seen wariness aimed at him. Perhaps he’d been losing his marbles already. Perhaps he and Zoe shared a delusion. He’d heard all the theories. He didn’t give a shite about the theories. He knew what he knew: he was to blame for Susannah’s death.

He retreated from Zoe after that. He let Susannah and Zoe battle it out, mother and daughter. Susannah wanted to send Zoe to a private clinic for treatment. Zoe’s fights with Susannah. Her neediness with Nathan. Nathan’s love for his wife over his daughter that caused him to side with Susannah despite what he’d seen. The goldfinch. The strife—and Nathan’s avoidance of the strife—escalated until the day he found Susannah at the bottom of the stairs.

Nathan paused to catch his breath. Those were the most word bubbles he’d uttered in weeks. Sid urged him to continue. “You have quite a story there, mate.”

Nathan remembered the bizarre light in Zoe’s eye, a determination when reviving her mother failed, her teariness. “I’m going to practice even more,” she’d said. “No more goldfinches. I’ll learn how to heal properly so I can save people.”

She’d leaned into Nathan, her head under his arm, her arms around his waist. “Now it’s us, and we’ll be perfect, you’ll see.” Her hot hands stuck to him through his shirt. His heart squeezed itself off from her with such disgust that she couldn’t help but notice. She’d pulled back with her eyebrows drawn together in reproach.

That was the moment his life changed, when doom lowered itself over him. And he’d known then, hadn’t he? He’d known his guilt, and his memory began to slip after that. When Sid said “torture,” maybe he was correct. Penance and guilt and Zoe always there. Nathan let her cut him. He let her.

He hadn’t cut himself. He knew that much. He’d swear by that.

Yet it wasn’t torture—not according to Zoe. She practiced on him, improving her healing skills until the moment his mind snapped and he turned her knife back onto her. Sometime later, he came to in a psych ward, safe from her, and now here he was, safe again. Better yet, there would be no Zoe waiting for him or searching for him when he got out.

Nathan’s words floated away from him. A vague emptiness surrounded him, comfortable as a cocoon. A foreign feeling of relaxation overcame him. Relief. Gratitude.

“I have a gift for you.” Nathan beckoned a nurse and asked her to fetch his personal belongings out of storage. The nurse returned and hovered next to them as Nathan fingered his scant belongings. Wallet. Keys. Mobile. And the last item, which he placed on Sid’s palm.

“Fishing wire?” Sid said.

Nathan waited for the nurse to leave before he spoke. “I remember now. The last of it. Everything.”

But memory was a mistress, his thoughts said, ever slick and untrustworthy. He shook them off. “Susannah’s death wasn’t an accident,” he said. “She tripped over this wire stretched between the balusters. I don’t think Zoe meant to kill her—”

“You said she tried to heal your wife.”

“She did, she did. That’s what Zoe said.” Nathan’s word bubbles dissipated again, doubt creeping in. Or maybe that was her strategy. To be seen by Nathan as the good daughter, trying to heal her mother.

Sid’s hand landed on his arm. His skin against Nathan’s prickled and rubbed, but Nathan forced himself to concentrate on the word bubbles.

“She wanted you all to herself,” Sid said. “Then, and now.”

Nathan pressed his hands over his face. Convulsive shudders took over his body. His teeth chattered. One of the nurses stooped and placed an arm around him, but Nathan shook his head for her to leave.

When he looked up sometime later, one minute, five minutes, Sid still sat beside him, waiting with his teeth covered, thankfully. He pressed the fishing wire between his hands in a prayerful gesture. “I’ll cherish it. Thank you, my friend.”

The fog cleared out of Nathan’s head for a moment. “Annie,” he said.

“Yes, Annie.” Sid tucked the bundle of fishing wire into his pocket. “You could say she sacrificed herself for you. If not for her death, you wouldn’t at last be safe from your dear daughter.”

“You believe me—about Zoe?”

With a slow nod, Sid said, “I find that I do.”

Nathan sagged back on his chair. All he’d ever needed was one person—not Zoe—to believe him. Tears streamed down his face, and Sid didn’t bat an eye. He watched Nathan in that way of his, like his teeth were about to transform into fangs again.

Nathan waved to Sid, stumbled to his feet, and left the room. He didn’t care if he ever saw the man again. In his room, he nestled under the bedcovers and fell into a dreamless sleep.