Chapter 18: Friday, Bec

Editor’s Note:
The next page was written by Bec on hospital stationery.

Friday 11/3, Bec Freeman

This morning started off fuzzy. Apparently I had a nightmare but I don’t remember most of it. The only thing I do remember out of it is a face. It filled my head and needed to be let out so I found a hole in the fuzz and pushed the face out through the hole.

When the fuzz cleared, I was sitting at a table with a half-eaten plate of breakfast in front of me.

I started to panic as I couldn’t remember how I had gotten here. I looked around and saw Mischa and a nurse sitting at the same table and watching me. Beyond them, other patients were sitting around tables and eating their own breakfasts. It took me a moment to absorb where I was and what was going on. The panic subsided and I relaxed.

I wasn’t ready to talk or anything but I guess you could say I was aware of what was going on around me. Then I started, or maybe resumed, eating my breakfast. It was a slice of quiche which was quite nice. There were also slices of melon and a tub of yogurt.

I’ve noticed that I’m not being as active as I normally am so I’m not burning up all of these calories. I’ll have to find a way to do some exercise. I wonder if Dr K would let me out of the ward so I can run up and down the stairs.

I was still in that state where I really like exploring the textures around me – I don’t know why I get like that. They help me stay attached to the world or something, I don’t know. But anyway breakfast had lots of textures and tastes. I took a piece of melon in my mouth and squeezed it between my teeth. I love the way the fruit resists my teeth for a moment and then gives up, releasing a burst of flavor as it does. Each of the different foods on my plate had to be tested the same way. They each had their own texture, their own resistance to being chewed, their own flavor.

I ate the rest of my breakfast like that, entranced by the different flavors and textures of the food.

The hospital caterers seem to have three meal sizes: small, medium and large. I hope they have an extra large size as well for when they have people like Dan staying but I haven’t seen it. I think I’ve been getting the medium size which is probably about right. The food has been better than I expected. People talk about hospital food like it’s the worst thing in the world but it’s been okay. Not gourmet and nothing like home cooking but okay. But like I said, I think I will need to get some exercise, somehow.

After breakfast, the nurse suggested that it would be a good time to get a shower. I took some fresh scrubs and went into one of the bathrooms. This was the first time I got to have a shower in private since I came into the hospital. When I was locked in the secure room, I had to be escorted which meant a nurse had to sit in the bathroom while I showered. I didn’t like that idea so I kind of put off having showers as much as I could. It’s such a relief to be able to shower on my own.

The hospital bathrooms are pretty big with lots of space for wheelchairs or extra people to help or supervise or whatever. Big enough to pivot with my arms outstretched and not strike anything. There are hand rails all over and call buttons and all of that sort of stuff. All those different surfaces for me to run my fingertips over and the non-slip surface under the soles of my feet. Soap and shampoo are in dispensers so you can’t bring your own – not in the pscyh unit anyway. I’m sure that upsets some of the girls but I don’t mind. They probably specially select the soap to be non-toxic and all of that.

The shower had its own set of sensations. The feeling of hot water massaging my face and then cascading down my skin. The feeling of my fingers probing into my scalp as I washed my hair. The feeling of my soapy hands sliding over my skin. The sound of the water rushing out of the nozzle and swishing down to the floor. And then the towel, soft but coarse at the same time. And the way the warm air plays against my drying skin. And then putting on freshly laundered clothes.

I almost went back and had another shower so I could experience it all again.

When I got back to my room, there was a huge face on the wall above my bed. I stopped and blinked at it in surprise. It was the face from my dream. Judging from the style, I must have drawn it but I don’t remember doing that. I had a towel around my head so I could dry my hair – no electric hair dryers in this ward.

I sat down on Mischa’s bed so that I could look at the drawing as I dried my hair. It was big, probably because the face had filled my head so completely before I got rid of it. I looked at the face and noticed that it wasn’t quite right. The drawing exaggerated and distorted the real man’s face. That was when I realized that I was remembering the real man’s face. And with his face came memories of him bursting through the door and knocking Tara down, memories of him looming over me, memories of him talking – boasting about his plans.

Dr K came in and sat down beside me. I wasn’t ready to talk yet but he wanted to know about the picture. His questions made me nervous, like they were dangerous or something. I don’t know why. Maybe it wasn’t so much the questions that were dangerous as the answers to those questions. I had the towel around my head because I was drying my hair. I stopped doing that and draped the towel over my head so that it covered my face. It felt like maybe I was hiding from Dr K – hiding from his questions.

After trying to answer a few of his questions with nods and shakes, I took his hand and led him over to the picture. We had to stand on the bed so we could get up close. I used his hand to point at the nose and the spiky hair, trying to show him how the man had become the minotaur in my head. One of the reasons, anyway.

I think that the main reason was he got all caught up in that whole Narnia mess. And that was probably because I tried to hide in the closet and a closet is like a wardrobe and what happened to Lucy when she was being hunted and tried to hide in a wardrobe? She ended up in Narnia. I think that’s how my stupid brain made the connection anyway. It’s not like I decided to do all that. My brain took over and made it all happen.

I’m differently brained. It makes things difficult for me sometimes.

But anyway, by the time I got him to see the minotaur in the drawing, I was feeling a bit more connected so I pulled away and sat down on the bed. I waited until he sat down on the edge of the bed and then I said, “It’s a mystery, Dr K.”

My voice came out stronger than I expected but still a bit whispery. “It’s a mystery but I intend to solve it.”

I looked at him and he looked at me.

“I think you now remember even more than that,” he said.

I thought about that and then I nodded.

“Maybe, I do,” I said. My voice still little more than a whisper.

I could see that he wanted more and he waited for a moment. I wasn’t surprised when he said, “Well?”

I searched for something I could say that would satisfy him. “Maybe I’m not quite ready yet. Maybe I haven’t connected all the memories together in a way that makes sense.”

I stopped and thought about it. I knew that my next drawing would fill in an important gap. I didn’t know what that gap was but I knew it would be important.

“I have to do another drawing. She has something important to tell me.”

I don’t know who “she” is but the next drawing is definitely a “she.”

He pointed at the wall. “Do you know who this is? I mean the man, not the creature.”

I said “Yes,” straight away but then I realized he wanted a name or an identity or something so I said, “No.”

I’d been starting to put together clues about who he might be and I had a possible answer but my stupid brain hadn’t told me if I was right or not. I was pretty sure that knowledge was in my head somewhere but I hadn’t found it yet.

So I said, “I mean, I do but not really. I mean I have an idea, but I’m not sure if that idea is a memory, or something I’ve figured out from putting clues together with guesses.”

And Mrs Stone thinks I’m good at English expression. Hah! I’m not even sure if that was a proper sentence. But I guess I managed to convey my confusion to Dr K so that’s probably all that matters.

I shrugged and I said, “Maybe we should just keep calling him the minotaur.”

I sat there and waited for his next question. I knew one was coming but I didn’t know what it would be.

Then he used his thumb to point at the wall.

“One of the nurses wanted to know if possibly you could have used a piece of paper rather than drawing all over our nice white wall.”

That didn’t sound like the question he wanted to ask but I decided to answer it anyway. The only problem was that I didn’t really remember drawing it. But I did remember the way that face had filled my head until I pushed it out. It had felt so big inside my head.

So I said, “It needed to be big. I didn’t have any paper big enough.”

He seemed to accept that. “It will have to be cleaned off, of course.”

I looked up at my drawing and felt sad about that. Then I thought of one question he would want to know the answer to, even if he didn’t know he had to ask it. So I said, “It should have been in black, but I didn’t have black so I used blue.”

“Why black?”

Stupid Bec. I was trying to explain about a flaw in my art and he immediately jumped on the bit I didn’t want to talk about.

“Because of all the blood,” I whispered. “There was so much blood and it all looked black in the darkness.”

“Ah,” he said and then he went quiet.

My brain went back to analyzing the picture as a piece of art the way Mom taught me. It wasn’t my best drawing but when I compare it to how I was drawing, say, a year ago, I can see that I’m getting better.

It wasn’t until he started to leave that I remembered something else that he would want to know.

“He wanted to use us for sex,” I blurted out.

He’d nearly made it to the door but he stopped and turned back to look at me.

“The minotaur,” I said in case I wasn’t being clear. “He wanted to use us for sex – Tara and Angie and me.”

He came back and sat down again so that he could look me in the face.

I was remembering things as I was saying them. But they didn’t scare me. They didn’t upset me because it was all boasting and he’d obviously failed. I’d seen Tara and I’d seen Angie and all of us were okay. Well, mostly okay.

“He had a place all ready,” I explained. “A place where he could keep us in cages and only bring us out when he wanted us to entertain him. A place where we could scream as loud as we wanted because nobody would hear.”

I remembered the way his face had looked as he was saying that.

“He was looking forward to making us scream,” I added.

I looked at Dr K’s face and wondered what he was thinking. His face was still and devoid of expression. I couldn’t read anything from him. Or maybe the complete absence of anything was itself a clue. He wanted to hear more.

“I couldn’t let that happen, could I? That’s why I had to fight him,” I explained.

I didn’t expect to win of course. He was so much bigger than me. But I had to try. And maybe if I’d grabbed a knife or something, I might have done enough to chase him away. I don’t remember a knife – that part is speculation. Dr K said I shouldn’t speculate but it’s hard not to.

That was all I had to say. I’d said enough. I dropped my towel on my bed and grabbed my hairbrush from the bedside table. He was still sitting there so I started brushing my hair.

I could feel some of that anger coming back. It wasn’t a memory of the anger I’d felt when he stood in front of me boasting about what he was going to do but it was anger I was feeling now that anyone would try and do anything like that to my sisters.

I used the brush on my hair like it would drive the idea out of my head.

After a few sweeps with the brush I figured that Dr K was still waiting for something from me.

“You understand that, don’t you? He was going to use us for sex, and keep using us for all sorts of nasty sex things until he got bored with us. He was going to take photos and videos and make himself rich by selling them on the internet.”

The picture I drew of me and Cindi chained to the wall suddenly made sense to me. I put it up on the inside of my skull and examined it closely.

“Like he did with Cindi,” I said.

But that didn’t sound right in my head, so I kept talking, “or maybe it wasn’t him that did that to Cindi. I’m not sure. Some of it is still mixed up in my head.”