It is later that night that I see Dr. Elgin in the hall. Her hair has fallen out of the low ponytail she wears, and is hanging in pieces around her face. She’s speaking in earnest to one of the orderlies, a dark man, who turns on his heel and runs toward the nurses’ station. When I draw closer, I see that she’s out of breath.
“Dr. Elgin?” I say.
She says my name; I can see it form on her red lips, but there is a screaming coming from the room to my left that drowns it out. I jar, my eyes wide. Screaming is as constant in a nut house as medication, but this screaming is different. Perhaps I am too familiar with the screams that emanate from the mouth of a tortured human. They are different from the screams of anger or injustice. The orderly returns with two others. They slip into the room as Dr. Elgin stands slump-shouldered next to me. I try to see into the room, but the only thing visible is their white backs as they struggle to subdue a thrashing body. The first time she says it—the woman in the room—I don’t register its meaning. She’s chanting it, over and over, the two words running into one another so that you have to break them apart to hear what she’s saying.
Pinkzippopinkzippopinkzippo
Pink Zippo
Pink Zippo
Pink
Zippo
I reach up and cover my mouth with my hand. Dr. Elgin, divided between the woman in the room, and the distress on my face, looks for the moment like a cat deciding between the fat mouse in the corner or the skinny mouse in front of her face. She recovers herself quickly and grabs me by the shoulders, ushering me away.
“Let’s get you to bed, Margo,” she says. “It’s verrry late.”
Exactly. So why is she here?
I crane my neck, trying to catch one last glimpse into the room…
It’s a coincidence, I tell myself. I hurt Leroy as much as he hurt me. He didn’t have the time to find someone new. He is methodical. He takes months to search out his prey—watching, stalking, planning. I’ve been here for a little more than a month. Not long enough. Or did I trigger something by disturbing his pattern? Did he lash out to get back at me? We are back in my room, the bare and dingy walls already wearing down at my hope.
“It’s a coincidence,” I say out loud.
Dr. Elgin looks at me, her sharp eyes not missing a thing.
“Or is it?” she says softly into my ear.
I am gently left in the center of my room, the door closing behind me. Her soft purr has left me immobilized.
“Or is it?” I say.
The next morning, when the doors open for the day, I dress quickly and scurry out, heading for the nurses’ station. Come morning, we are to take our showers in the communal, then we have breakfast, and after that, free time, which I usually spend thinking about Leroy. The one that got away!
Her door is on the way to the bathrooms. My bladder is swollen beyond what is comfortable, but I need to see the color of her hair. Her door is not open like the rest of ours. Sometimes this happens when a patient is too ill to come out for the day; they call it ‘rest time,’ but what it really means is you’re having an episode and are too doped up to get out of bed. Nurse Fenn sees me lingering in the hall. We are not allowed to linger, but to move with purpose throughout the day. Seize! Charge! Believe! Hope!
“Move along, Margo,” she says. “It’s your bathroom time.”
“Who is in this room?” I ask, pointing.
Fenn looks squirmy, like I’ve asked her to name ingredients to her grandmother’s famous cookies.
“I heard her screaming,” I rush. “Last night. I just wanted to see if she was okay.”
Fenn seems more comfortable with that, She looks up and down the hall, then lowers her voice. They like me, the nurses. They think I’m kind. “A writer,” she says. “Famous.”
I blink at her like it makes any difference to me. I need to know the color of her hair, but I realize how crazy I’ll sound if I ask.
“What happened to her?” I ask softly.
Fenn folds in her lips, shakes her head like it’s too sad to say.
“Assault,” she whispers.
I am skilled at containing my emotions. I wasn’t always, but killing people will change you a bit. I breathe through my nose—inhale exhale, inhale exhale.
“Nurse Fenn,” I say sweetly. “What color is her hair?”
This question does not come as a surprise to her. Crazy people ask crazy questions. What they haven’t figured out yet is that I’m not crazy.
Fenn is about to open her mouth to chide or answer me when Dr. Elgin comes striding down the hall. It’s a surprise to see her here. The other crazies part for her, giving her room to walk and looking at her with a certain adoration. Everyone likes her, and, by mutual consent, we all wish she were here more often than the stocky, curt Dr. Pengard. She acknowledges me with a nod, because I am her favorite, and slips inside the famous writer’s room. The screaming starts five minutes later. I run, not walk, to the bathroom. I might be responsible for her pain.
What color is her hair?
What color is her hair?
What color is her hair?
It’s on an endless loop in my brain. A carousel that goes round and round, making me dizzy. She’s been locked up in that room for days now, screaming for most of it. On one of those days a man came. Handsome, with a face that wasn’t made to smile. He was taken to her room, and then the screaming stopped for a little while.
I ask Dr. Elgin about her, but she presses her red lips together and tells me nothing. I overhear a nurse say her name, and I memorize it for later. It’s on the tenth day of her stay that I finally see her. Brown hair. She has a streak of gray at her temple, and I wonder if she had her stylist put it there on purpose. A nurse wheels her into the rec room, and sets her in front of a blank canvas and several tins of paint. She closes her eyes tightly and pushes them away, muttering something under her breath. Then she is gone, her room cleaned out and someone new assigned to it. But I know. Leroy hurt that woman. He took the rage that he felt for me, and he hurt her. And now I have to get out of here and stop him before he does it again. Once and for all. No mercy this time.
ON THE LAST DAY OF APRIL, after I’ve been at Westwick for just over four months, I tell Dr. Elgin everything. I tell her about Leroy, and what I did to him—the months of planning it took before I climbed through his kitchen window with the intent of killing him. I tell her how he overpowered me, and then deliver my suspicions that he drugged me and wrote the note himself. When I confess that I am the reason the writer screamed ‘pink Zippo’ from behind the doors of her room, there is nothing on Dr. Elgin’s face to give away whether she believes me or not. She simply listens as she always does. When our session is almost over, she promises to look into Leroy Ashley, and I feel a burden lifted from my chest. It’s good to tell. To have someone know who you are. But the next time I see her, she does not speak about Leroy or the writer.