THE LITTLE HELPER
He sees you when you’re sleeping. He knows when you’re awake.
Grace Boggs rubbed her eyes as she walked down the hall of the psychiatric ward of Charity Hospital, the Christmas song blaring over the PA system. It was a jarring and ironic jingle in a wing where half her patients were paranoid. All she needed was a single patient to stop and listen to the cheerful lyrics about Santa stalking and she was in for a hell of a night. She’d been working this wing for twelve years and she knew the drill. Christmas was infused here for the morale of the staff, not the patients, many of whom never seemed to notice that suddenly there was an explosion of garland and blinking lights after every Thanksgiving.
Walking into Mr. Jefferson’s room, she assessed him. He was standing in front of the window with his eyes closed. He wasn’t a patient who needed to be restrained, merely locked in. He had been brought in for wandering onto a playground in his bathrobe, touching the back of the heads of several small children, trying to access their brains, per his explanation. “You okay, Mr. Jefferson?”
He turned, but didn’t open his eyes. “Go away.”
“It’s time for your medication. Can you open your eyes for me?” Despite a constant weariness after the dozen years on the job, Grace still cared about her patients somewhat. She just didn’t have a lot of energy left for bullshit. It was two days before Christmas and she wanted to be at home with her vodka.
“No. If Santa thinks I’m sleeping, he’ll come down the chimney. If I’m awake, he won’t show and I have a thing or two I want to say to that fat fuck about what he owes me for the Christmas of ’59, when he no-showed.”
Running her tongue over her teeth, Grace longed again for a drink, but instead spoke in low and soothing tones to Mr. Jefferson, encouraging him to take his medication. Ten minutes later, she was back in the hallway, behind on her rounds, and pissed off to see the new hire, Maisey, sitting on her young and perky ass, blond head bent over.
“What are you doing?” she snapped, resenting Maisey’s smile and pert tits. She had waltzed onto the ward only a week earlier, all bouncy breasts and backside, charming the doctors and patients alike, with an infectious laugh and a total lack of respect for personal space. She was a hugger and a thigh-toucher and Grace looked at her and saw not her own youth, but what she had never been. She’d never been particularly pretty or sexy or charming and Maisey reminded her of that fact.
“Oh, hi, Grace.” Despite the fact that Grace’s tone had been sharp, Maisey still looked up and smiled at her. “Look what I found in the storage closet in the empty Christmas tub! Why isn’t this out? I think it would be fun.” She held up a toy in her hand.
Grace’s eyebrows went up. It was a skinny elf wearing a perpetual grin as annoying as Maisey’s. He had on striped leggings and had the kind of figure Grace could only dream of— all long limbs and flat stomach. She knew what it was. The Elf on the Shelf, a marketing trend that had taken off in the last decade with parents who needed to outshine other parents on social media with all the creative ways they could display their family elf on the shelf. It was a bullshit made up tradition that merely gave parents one more way to lie to their children in the name of Christmas.
Not that she was cynical or anything.
“Why would we want to do that elf thing? We’re already doing a Secret Santa gift exchange.” Which was pointless. Every year someone gave Grace hand cream or a candle and every year she was forced to do the same for a co-worker. Just once she wanted to request her secret Santa get her vodka, but her love of the bottle was a heavily guarded secret. Secrets, secrets, everywhere.
“It’s for the patients. I think they would get a kick out of it.” Maisey stood up and pretended to make the elf talk. “Merry Christmas, friends! Let’s sing some carols.”
Grace had tried to hide her disdain of Maisey, but this time she couldn’t prevent a snort from slipping out. “Are you serious? The whole point of the elf on the shelf is that he moves around while everyone is sleeping. Do you honestly think that is a good idea where half the patients are paranoid and the other half are afraid of their own shadow? There’s a reason it was still in the storage closet—it’s a bad idea.”
“I …” The blood drained from Maisey’s face. “I just thought it would be fun.”
Annoyed beyond reason, Grace snatched the toy from Maisey’s hand and tossed it into a drawer behind the nurse’s station where they kept their communal candy stash and Grace’s Virginia Slims. “Just use a little more sense next time, honestly. Don’t show that to any of the patients or I’ll write you up.”
She stomped away and went into Rose Litwinksi’s room. Rose was only thirty-two but looked like she was twenty years older, mental illness weaving lines of worry and fear into her once smooth face. A veritable roadmap of mental illness. “Hi, Rose, how are you tonight?” Grace asked.
“The elf made me do it,” Rose said, looking ashamed and embarrassed.
Now it was Grace’s turn to furrow her brow. A shiver rolled up her spine. “Do what, Rose? What elf?”
But Rose looked away and smiled, a secret, sly smile. “Never mind.”
Then Grace saw the dark stain at the waist of Rose’s hospital gown, the blood spreading across her abdomen.
“The elf did it.”
*
Maisey thought Grace was a grumpy old poop, bitter because she probably hadn’t had a date since the eighties, and sex— never. The older nurse struck her as someone who needed a good pounding. Okay, so Maisey understood that the patients weren’t exactly going to understand the concept behind the elf on the shelf, but if anything, they needed a little magic in their lives. They needed a voice of hope, a cheeky joke. It would bring some smiles, she was sure of it, and obviously someone else in the past had thought the same thing since the elf had been with the other Christmas decorations.
But whatever. Grumpy Grace had put the brakes on fun.
When she heard Grace yell, for a split second, she hoped the old bat had fallen, but then she felt immediately guilty. Grace wasn’t that bad. Plus she was actually calling for help with a patient. So Maisey hot-footed it out of the nurse’s station but the other nurse on duty, Patrick, waved her off.
“I’ve got it,” he said. “Just finish your rounds, please.”
“Okey doke.” Maisey checked the board and started down the hall. She smiled at Sam, the man in his sixties who had been the janitor at the hospital for thirty years. “Hi, Sam.”
“Hello, Maisey. What are your Christmas plans this year?”
Sam was the kind of guy who always smiled back, who made small talk, who asked Maisey how her day was and meant it. He was a nice person, so in short, the opposite of Grace. Grace thought no one noticed she was sour or that she sometimes looked at her purse with a little too much longing. Maisey wasn’t an idiot. She knew there was a flask in there.
It was clear Grace was a crank because she missed her boozing when she was at work.
“Oh, you know, just eating too much food.” She laughed. “How about you?”
“The wife’s family is coming over. I’m looking forward to ham and football games.” He waved as he went on down the hallway.
When Maisey went in to Bob Davenport’s room, she grabbed his chart off the door and started glancing through it. When she looked up she let out a shriek, totally caught off guard. Bob was sitting in a chair.
With the Elf on the Shelf on his lap. What the hell?
“Where did you get that?” she asked, annoyed. Was Grace messing with her? She wouldn’t put it past the old bitch.
Bob just stared at her like he had no idea who she was or what she was talking about. He was young, only in his mid-twenties, so her age, but he looked like hell. He nervously tugged at his hair and he had scabs on his face from chronically picking. She immediately felt bad for snapping at him. He hadn’t done anything wrong.
“Hey,” she said in a more gentle tone, sinking down into a squat in front of him so they would be more at eye level. She tapped the elf on Bob’s lap. “Where did you get this?”
Bob continued to stare at her, his pale blue eyes watery and vacant.
For some reason it made her so angry she stood back up, slowly. How dare he not fucking answer her when she was being so damn nice. Wasn’t she sweet? Wasn’t she cute? Everyone always said she was fucking cute. Why didn’t Bob see that? Why couldn’t he open his stupid slack mouth and answer her? She reached out and shook the elf in Bob’s lap.
“Where did you get this?”
When he continued to stare at her, she felt the rage coursing through her, an actual chemical response. It invaded her limbs, shooting down into her hands so that the intensity of the anger had nowhere to go but out. Without being aware of intention, she lifted her hand and cracked it across Bob’s face in a hard, loud slap.
The noise startled her and she jumped back. “Sorry. Sorry.”
A single tear rolled down Bob’s cheek and she felt shaky, guilty, shocked. Breathing hard, she backed up and out of the room. In the doorway, she realized she should grab the elf but she was so upset over losing control of herself she just left it. She wasn’t the one who gave the toy to him. Whoever did could take it away from him. Turning on her heel, she quickly walked down the hall, heart racing. What the hell had just happened?
She went through the rest of her rounds on auto-pilot, trying to figure out how she had exploded so quickly. Her anger toward Grace was building as she felt like she was the only one who could have given Bob the elf. After thirty minutes, she went back to the nurse’s station and impulsively yanked open the drawer Grace had tossed the elf into.
He was still there. Grinning up at Maisey.
She slammed the drawer shut.
*
Grace still couldn’t figure out how Rose had gotten hold of a pen or how she had managed to break the skin with it. But it was exactly the kind of thing she didn’t need going down on her shift. It had to have been one of the other nurses on earlier rounds. They must have dropped it. Mental patients were surprisingly cunning and no doubt Rose had scooped the pen up and used it to impale herself.
“Just when I think I can’t be creeped out by anything they do, one of them manages to prove me wrong,” Patrick said to her back at the nurse’s station. “What the hell was that? Do you know how tenacious you have to be to stab at yourself with a friggin’ ballpoint pen?” He shook his head. Patrick was tall, broad shouldered, sporting a woodsman beard.
Grace liked him well enough but she wouldn’t cry if he took a new job. Her feelings about Patrick were ambivalent. But he did his job well and generally without complaint. She got along better with men than she did with women, always had. They saw her as a broad, a peer, not as a sexual interest, so there was no posturing, no bragging, no flirting. She wondered what Patrick would do if she told him she wanted to take him into the staff restroom and blow him. The thought amused her. She didn’t, of course. She just thought it would be funny as hell to shock him. That would creep him out even more than Rose’s little pen trick.
“There is no true normal here,” she told Patrick. “But if you think about it, everything here is really routine, mundane. So when one of the patients goes beyond the usual ranting and babbling and accusations, it’s unnerving. Just don’t let it bother you. She’ll heal. It wasn’t a deep wound.” It had just been fleshy. Rose had really hacked the hell out of herself.
“So what do we tell the doctor? I don’t want my ass chewed, and I know I wasn’t in there earlier today. Neither were you, right?”
“Only Maisey was in there on this shift,” she said, with no small amount of triumph. “And then whoever was on for first shift. There is no telling.” She eyed Patrick. “So I suggest we don’t tell. Rose could have just as easily done that with her fingernail.”
Patrick eyed her with disbelief. “I seriously doubt that. We can’t just lie about it. No one is going to buy that.”
“Then you’re basically throwing Maisey under the bus.”
“She’ll just get reprimanded,” he said, suddenly sounding doubtful. “Not fired.”
“She’s been here a week. Of course she’ll get fired.” Grace watched him out of the corner of her eye. He was wavering. He felt the urge to protect Maisey, clearly. So predictable. He would jeopardize his own job to protect a piece of pussy he’d never get to touch.
Fine by her. She thought it was stupid, but he was entitled to be stupid. She had no intention of lying about the incident. She had just been curious what his response would be and now she knew. He was an idiot.
“I don’t know. I just don’t think we should lie… it seems unethical.”
“So don’t.” Grace reached over to the drawer beneath the desk and pulled it open to grab her cigarettes. The elf that should have been there, wasn’t.
Damn it.
She slammed the drawer back shut and went outside to smoke, grabbing her winter coat with the flask in the front pocket. Just a little nip to get through the rest of her shift. Nothing more, nothing less.
He knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake.
Grace shoved at the emergency exit doors. How the hell was that song on again? It was a playlist of what seemed like only four songs that repeated constantly and it was annoying. Outside snow was soundlessly drifting down in wet flakes and Maisey was crying behind the dumpster.
Grace sighed and knew she was going to have to give up her smoke break.
She immediately turned and went back inside before Maisey saw her and wanted to be comforted for who the hell knew what. Grace didn’t do comforting.
Back in, she was barely two steps forward when the lights cut out. Patients started screaming. Grace’s foot gave way, sliding through a wet spot, and she scrambled to maintain balance so she didn’t fall.
The generator kicked in and the lights went back on.
What she saw made her wish they were back out.
Blood. All over the floor. A heavy trail of it, fresh, still wet and bright crimson, heading all the way down the hall. As if someone had been dragged the length of it while bleeding.
The door slammed shut behind her and she whirled around to see Maisey standing there, her face pale, cheeks damp with tears, snowflakes in her hair and dusting her shoulders. “What is that?” she gasped. “Oh, my God.”
“It’s blood. Help me figure out where it’s coming from.”
Without warning, Maisey glared at her. “Fuck you, no. I’m not doing it.” She brushed past Grace and stomped off down the hall, rushing into the staff restroom.
What the hell was that? Totally unexpected and another time the behavior would have been distracting, but Grace barely spared a glance in Maisey’s direction because this was a lot of blood. Enough blood that someone could be bleeding out and she could be getting fired. Grace wasn’t going to let either happen.
Not on her shift.
*
Maisey stared at herself in the mirror, afraid she was hyperventilating. Her eyes looked wild, her skin tone splotchy and embarrassing. She still couldn’t believe she had hit Bob and she had screamed at Grace. What was happening to her? It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
Everyone thought she was just a pretty girl, but they didn’t know her. She had secrets. Everyone had secrets. Even Santa had secrets, that judgmental old prick. Like he hadn’t had an inappropriate thought or two about the elves? And that red nose had to be from years’ worth of hard drinking. No one got a red nose from being jolly. Excessive smiling just created crow’s feet.
The random thoughts whirled around in her head and Maisey felt scattered and crazy and alien. It was like she had been hijacked by someone else and they were controlling her thoughts and actions. She splashed water on her face and shook her head, like she could rattle out the weird thoughts, but they still teased at the edges of her consciousness, creepy visuals of Santa and Mrs. Claus, and a view of her own hands reaching out and choking the life out of Bob while he sat there slackly and took it, never fighting, like a total idiot…
Maisey let out a cry and grabbed her head. “No. Stop it. Just stop it.” She didn’t think like that. She didn’t have insidious evil little dirty thoughts that were insulting, cruel, deviant. She didn’t.
Yet she was.
Yanking open the restroom door, she decided she needed to go home. Something was wrong. She wondered if she were having an aneurysm or something. Could that do this to her? Make her feel violent and gross?
In the hallway she saw the blood again and her stomach turned. For a split second she thought she was going to vomit but she swallowed convulsively and managed to keep her bile down. Grace and Patrick were at the end of the hall, heads together, murmuring. Patrick was gesticulating wildly. Moving cautiously, so she didn’t step in the blood, Maisey made her way to them.
“What’s going on?” she whispered, feeling like she couldn’t say anything in a normal voice. The hall was quiet, the Christmas lights that had been hung on the nurses’ station blinking madly. The carols blaring over the speakers sounded tinny and harsh, forced cheer, a manic response to Christmas. The patients were quiet, drugged down for the night. Somewhere in the distance she heard a door open and she turned, scared, but saw nothing.
“I have no idea,” Patrick said. “Look, this blood just stops here, right outside Bob’s door, but he’s fine. I’ve checked on him three times because I can’t figure it out.”
Maisey shivered. Why did it have to be Bob’s room? She still felt guilty over hitting him. It had been such an unnatural reaction and she hadn’t been able to control it. Not one bit.
“I’ll go check on Rose. Maybe she got herself again,” Grace said, shaking her head, her mouth pinched.
“What happened to Rose?” Maisey asked Patrick as Grace walked away. She rubbed her hands over her arms, unnerved. The ward had never felt eerie to her, but now it did. Ominous. The air wasn’t moving and the piped in music seemed to grow louder and louder. There was a song about a happy elf playing now.
“She cut herself with a pen.”
“Oh.” Maisey looked at the smears on the ground, turning a rust color now as they dried. The abrupt ending at Bob’s door made a shiver roll up her spine. “I’m going to see Bob.” She needed to apologize.
“Maybe we should call someone,” Patrick said, chewing his fingernail.
“Like who? The cops?” she said doubtfully. “What would we say?”
“I don’t know.”
He followed her to Bob’s room, across the hall. “Maybe you shouldn’t go in there, Maisey.” He grabbed her arm.
She glared at him, yanking herself out of his grip. He couldn’t touch her. She’d never fucking said he could touch her. “Get off of me.”
Patrick blanched. “Fine. Do what you want.”
She would. She pushed past him and went into Bob’s room, distraught, hands trembling. There was a pounding behind her eyes and she wished she’d never taken this damn job. She was better than this. She deserved something better. Less… mental.
Bob was still in his chair. His eyes were fearful when he saw her come in, and oddly, it was a relief. Having him afraid of her was better than that terrible blankness he usually displayed. The lights were on, but nobody was home. That was Bob the majority of the time.
“Hi, Bob,” she said softly. “I’m sorry for before. I don’t know what got into me but it was totally uncalled for.”
He stared. But then he turned, slowly, and looked to the right, before turning back, his eyes beseeching. He looked truly terrified. Maisey followed the direction he had briefly looked in and what she saw made her frown.
“Where did that come from?” she murmured.
It was the elf. Sitting on the edge of Bob’s bed. Grinning away at her.
She leaned over, very, very close to Bob and searched his expression. “Did he do it?” she whispered, leaning her head just imperceptibly towards the elf. It was a crazy question. She knew it was.
But Bob’s head went up and down, very slowly, before his hand reached out and he laced his fingers through hers, like he needed comfort.
“It’s okay.” She gripped his hand back. “I’ll get rid of him.”
“Or he’ll get rid of you.”
Goosebumps rose on Maisey’s skin. Bob didn’t speak. Bob never spoke. Yet his shaky voice whispered to warn her. His hand gripped hers so hard it was painful.
And she could have sworn she heard the elf laugh.
Grace paged Sam to clean up the blood. She wasn’t going to touch it and it required appropriate pathogen removal. But to go along with the rest of her lousy day, he didn’t immediately appear and she wondered what he was up to. Things were off kilter with Christmas Eve the next day. They were understaffed and for the love of all that was holy, if someone didn’t turn off that damn music she was going to lose it. Lose it all over the bottle of vodka she craved like a hungry baby did a nipple.
“This is just BS,” she muttered to herself, starting to feel like this had all gotten away from her.
Maisey came out of a patient’s room holding the elf on the shelf straight out in front of her, like it had been pissed on. She brought it to the nurse’s station and dropped it into the trash.
“What are you doing?” Grace asked her.
Maisey just shrugged. “I’m getting rid of it.”
Grace was amused. So Miss Perky had lost a bit of her holiday cheer.
But then Patrick started yelling and she and Maisey went running. What they found made Grace’s stomach sink. “Holy Jesus…”
It was Sam. He was in the storage closet right next to the back door. He was dead, eyes wide open. His chest had been torn open and there was blood all down his abdomen, his pants stained red. It was a shocking and brutal death and Grace backed up, afraid she was going to vomit. Maisey started screaming, a high-pitched hysterical shriek that harmonized with the holiday music still raging over their heads and it all collided into Grace’s head, paralyzing her.
She breathed hard, in and out, grappling for the door to close it shut behind them, blocking them all from the terrible view of Sam.
Maisey turned to her and held out her hands, her eyes glassy and filled with shock.
“What-
A knife dropped from Maisey’s hands, clanking down onto the linoleum floor, its blade stained. “I found it in my pocket,” Maisey said. “I don’t know how… I didn’t do anything… oh, God.” She turned and threw up all over the wall, hunching over, not even pulling her hair back.
Grace watched, horrified. Disgusted. This was wrong. All fucking wrong.
Maisey stood up and grappled at the doorframe, trying to hold herself up. Her face was tear-stained, makeup running, vomit splattered all over her uniform.
Not so pretty now, was she?
*
After the police left, and extra staff had been called in, and all hell had broken loose and settled back down again, Grace sat outside by the dumpster, ass on the curb of the driveway. She took a long swig off of her flask and passed it over. Following it with a long drag on her cigarette, she blew the smoke out as she spoke.
“You went too far, you know. There was no reason to kill Sam. I just wanted the blonde fired.”
She didn’t expect a response and she didn’t get one.
“He was a nice man. A good man. The best.” She was already buzzed. Her stomach was tight and before long she’d probably be tossing the vodka back up but she couldn’t stop herself. There were tears in her eyes, blurring her vision. It was freezing outside and she wasn’t wearing a coat, but the wind cutting through her felt fitting, appropriate. She needed to be jarred.
“You’ve got to promise me, you won’t do anything like that again. Do you understand?” She reached back to retrieve her flask, ashing her cigarette into the slushy snow.
The elf winked at her.
Grace stood up on shaky legs, and once back inside, put him prominently on the countertop of the nurse’s station.
“I love the Elf on the Shelf!” the cheerful temp nurse said, poking him in the gut like he was the doughboy. “OMG, I had one of these when I was a kid.”
It was the last thing she wanted to deal with tonight. Her shift was over. She was going home to spend her Christmas Eve alone with takeout and her Smirnoff. But she didn’t want to return to work and have to deal with Perky, part two.
She met the gaze of the elf. “I changed my mind.”
“What?” the new nurse asked in confusion.
“Oh, nothing. I was just talking to myself.” Grace smiled and grabbed her purse.
She whistled along to the Christmas music as she left.
He knows if you’ve been bad or good…