“Bye, Jim,” Thea called. “See you again sometime?”
I stopped. It was the exact question I’d been ready to ask her.
You got your answer, you big dummy. Doris cackled in my head. You’re going to see her every day.
Every. Day.
Chapter 2
Jim
I spent the weekend in a rented U-Haul, making the three-hour drive between my shitty little apartment in Richmond and the shitty little house I’d rented in Boones Mill. After my successful interview at Blue Ridge, George Hammett—my new landlord—practically threw the keys at me from the cab of his truck, then screeched away before I could change my mind.
He didn’t have anything to worry about. I didn’t need much. The house was shabby as hell but livable. During two days of unpacking and cleaning, I managed to not think about Thea Hughes for a grand total of eight minutes.
Fuck me. She’s a resident.
A resident.
Stupid of me to not see it. I should have paid better attention.
What was her diagnosis?
Maybe something minor.
Maybe she was recovering…
Then Alonzo’s words rattled in my head: Everyone here is suffering from permanent brain damage. Our job is to help them adjust to their new reality.
Thea Hughes wasn’t recovering and wasn’t going to get better, and I had to adjust to that reality too. She was a resident of Blue Ridge Sanitarium. I was an orderly charged to take care of her, end of story.
End of our story.
I took my attraction to her—an attraction I’d never felt toward any woman—and shelved it away with the speech therapist dream.
Sunday night, I fired up a frozen dinner in my new house’s old microwave. After, I set my guitar on my lap and played Guns N’ Roses “Sweet Child O’ Mine” quietly, so the neighbors wouldn’t hear. I sang about eyes like the bluest sky, belonging to a woman who exuded warmth and safety.
She’s a resident.
I put the guitar away.
Later, I lay in my bed, listening to the crickets grow loud as summer approached while reading my worn out, dog-eared copy of Fight Club. My fingers turned pages I’d read a hundred times, and the dim light made the scars across my knuckles gleam white against my tanned skin. The scars came from countless fights during endless school days. Days when the soundtrack of my life was taunting voices and the rattle of chain-link in the yard where they always cornered me.
I hid my bruised face from Doris as best as I could when I got home, but she always found out.
What happened this time?
N-N-Nothing—
Spit it out, you big dummy!
I did get big. Bigger. Stronger. I lifted weights and started winning every fight. By senior year of high school, no one dared to fuck with me. Including Doris. I moved out of her house the minute I turned eighteen and never looked back.
The scars on my knuckles were badges I’d earned, as was the silence when the taunting stopped. But it lived on in my mind—a poisonous voice of someone who was supposed to watch out for me and tormented me instead.
Watch out for yourself. Keep your head down. Do your job.
Thea Hughes, I thought with a pang in my chest, wasn’t going to be anything but part of my job. I could watch out for her too.