The rain has left the air thick with humidity, and inside the unit it feels more like the middle of August than the end of September. The central air is working overtime and Isabel begins counting the seconds between its blasts in order to bring on sleep. She makes it to one hundred and loses interest.
Outside her room, over the hum of white noise artificially produced by her Hammacher Schlemmer, Isabel hears a series of doors opening and closing. She strains to understand the muffled urgency of a distant conversation that gets louder and then stops altogether.
They’re late for the one-thirty check.
Out of boredom and the certainty that sleep is futile, Isabel gets up and turns the noisemaker off. She opens her door and peeks down the empty hallway.
She follows the voices until she can vaguely make out a word or two. Isabel recognizes the raspy intonations of her favorite night nurse. Connie is involved in the dispute, evidently taking place in the soft room.
“No!” she hears a male voice say.
“Wait until the count of three,” Connie orders.
“If we…” Another voice trails off before Isabel can identify it.
Around the corner, light from inside the soft room falls in a triangle across the linoleum floor. Shadows slice into it from time to time as figures pass from one side of the room to another. The ebb and flow of agitated voices continues.
“You aren’t listening to me!”
“Okay, here’s what we’re going to do,” Connie is saying over the din. “On the count of three we’re going to lift the top part off simultaneously. The restraints are in place so this shouldn’t be a problem. Fred, you stand on the right and get ready to grab her if you need to.”
“She looks pretty sedated,” the male voice replies. “Maybe that shot’s finally kicking in.”
Isabel inches forward and looks over her shoulder. The hall is still empty. Whoever is in the soft room is commanding the attention of all of the night staff.
“Okay, ready?” Connie asks. “One!”
Isabel inches forward.
“Two!”
Isabel takes two more steps toward the room.
“Three!”
As she moves to the edge of the doorway she hears the sounds of metal hitting the ground and the muffled sound of a woman groaning.
Isabel takes a deep breath for courage and forces herself to look into the room. Strapped into a stretcher with a square of duct tape angrily slapped across her mouth, is Kristen. Her eyes are wildly darting from side to side and sweat is beading on her forehead. She looks petrified, like a trapped animal moments before it tries to gnaw its own leg off in order to escape.
Connie and several orderlies have peeled another stretcher off the top of her. While the others are busy cleaning up a mess of medical equipment, Connie crouches at Kristen’s forehead and is whispering something to her, trying to calm her down. Isabel feels physically ill and turns away.
It is as if a flash of lightning has illuminated a photo negative of her nightmare and in that one moment, the difference between Isabel and Kristen has crystallized. In that instant Isabel knows they are traveling different roads. She stands there, outside the soft room, and hears Regina’s voice. You’re not like the others…you’re normal. She imagines Ben in camouflage marching down the halls of his school. She pictures Sukanya in the laundry room, reciting a Yiddish prayer. She sees Lark’s bloated body dangling, lifeless above the dryer.
She walks slowly, mechanically back to her room.
When Isabel closes the door to her room she knows, perhaps for the first time in years, that she is going to live. Before this night the prospect of returning to the “real world” had filled her with anxiety. Now she feels a quiet confidence.