Even though Becky still made me feel uneasy, I was worried about the same thing.
The woman in triage said something to Mr. Mercer in a low voice that Emma couldn’t hear. He nodded, then hobbled across the lobby to a gleaming bronze elevator. With a ping, the doors slid open, and he got inside. Emma followed him. “Where are we going? I thought she was in the ER.”
Mr. Mercer didn’t answer. She could see their blurred reflections in the dented metal of the doors, but unlike in the mirror at the restaurant, here they looked warped and eerie. A Muzak version of “Bad Romance” oozed out of the speakers. The elevator crept up an inch at a time.
“Have they checked her in already?” Emma asked again. “Is it serious?”
Mr. Mercer just pressed his lips into a white line. Then the elevator dinged and the doors slid open. Gold letters spelled out the name of the ward on the sage green wall facing them: PSYCHIATRIC AND MENTAL HEALTH SERVICES.
Emma grabbed her grandfather’s arm and forced him to look at her. “What are we doing here? You have to talk to me.”
Mr. Mercer adjusted his crutches under his arms. “I don’t know much more than you do, honey. The nurse on the phone said it was bad. Becky’s had some kind of … episode.”
“Some kind of episode?” Emma’s voice sounded shrill in the quiet hallway. “What does that mean?”
Her grandfather opened his mouth to answer, but before he could, a thickset nurse with a stiff gray bouffant hairdo came around the corner to meet them. She glanced at her clipboard. “Dr. Mercer?” she asked, her voice brisk and efficient.
Mr. Mercer stepped forward. “Yes. How is she?”
“Follow me.”
Wordlessly, they trailed the nurse through the waiting room and down a wide green hallway. The nurse’s rubber-soled clogs made no sound on the linoleum, but Emma’s heels clicked loudly. Otherwise, the ward was quiet. Instead of medical charts or germ prevention posters on the walls, there were soothing pastel landscapes and the kind of motivational posters you saw in a junior high classroom. One was even that gray tabby dangling from a tree limb with the words HANG IN THERE.
A strange sensation settled over me, sort of like a deep, vibrating hum. The farther we went into the ward, the stronger it became. “Be careful,” I whispered to my twin, wishing she could hear me. “Something isn’t right.”
They passed a nurse’s station, and Emma stared disinterestedly at a bulletin board that said VOLUNTEER OF THE MONTH in glittery letters across the top. But when she saw the girl’s picture hanging below, she stopped short. It was Nisha Banerjee, smiling almost shyly in her candy-striper uniform. Emma cocked her head. Nisha volunteered here? Emma remembered that Nisha’s dad worked in psychiatrics, but a stint on the psych ward seemed like a strange after-school activity.
You wouldn’t have caught me volunteering here in a million years, not even if it guaranteed me admission to the college of my choice.
When Emma looked up, the nurse was escorting Mr. Mercer around another corner. All the doors on the ward had a window near the top, so the patients could be watched when the door was closed. She was too afraid to peek inside, but she could hear one man singing softly in a language she didn’t recognize. Behind another door, a woman babbled something that sounded like “You have to find them in your hair, that’s where they like to hide.... They spy on you, so you have to pull them out by the root.”
Emma hurried to catch up to her dad and the nurse. “It looks like a total psychotic break,” the nurse was murmuring when Emma reached them. They came to a stop outside a closed door that looked just like the others. A cheap print of Monet’s haystacks decorated the facing wall. There was a stain of something red—blood?—on the linoleum floor.
The humming was louder now. The pain of everyone on this floor—their anxiety, fear, and heartbreak—vibrated through me. Each emotion had its own pitch, as though a dozen tuning forks were being struck simultaneously. But one feeling united all the patients on this floor: They were stuck, imprisoned in these rooms and in their own flawed minds. I understood how they felt, more than I cared to admit.
The nurse placed her hand on the doorknob. “Would you like to see her?”
“Yes,” Emma said bravely, stepping forward.
Mr. Mercer’s eyes snapped into focus, as if he’d been gazing somewhere far away and had only just realized Emma was there. He put his hand on his forehead and took a deep breath. “I don’t know what I was thinking. I should have left you downstairs in the waiting room. This isn’t how I want you to meet your mom.”
Emma crossed her arms over her chest. “No. I’m staying.”
Mr. Mercer looked like he wanted to say something else, but then he nodded. “All right,” he said to the nurse.
She opened the door.
A woman in a hospital gown writhed back and forth on the bed in the room as though her skin was crawling with spiders. Her black hair was a deep tangle around her head. Her face looked hollow, and far too thin, and her skin had an unhealthy ashen hue. She wore a plastic hospital bracelet on her wrist. Emma could just make out the name written in thick black ink—Rebecca Mercer.
But this couldn’t be Becky. It looked nothing like her. It didn’t even look like the woman she’d seen in the car a few days before. This woman was deranged, a stranger. Tears dotted Emma’s eyes. She placed her hand over her mouth, swallowing a sob.
The woman’s head whipped around. Her gaze lit on Emma, and all at once she fell still.