PRESENT DAY

Aurora Heights Psychiatric Center
Blackburn, Michigan
September 17, 2018

┈┈

Beneath the cloudless morning sky, Rayne Foster felt an overwhelming sense of vulnerability, as if at any moment the ashen-azure expanse could draw her into its void as easily as a dust-bunny to a vacuum. A lone barn swallow soared overhead, its tawny belly vibrant against steely blue wings. Its form cast a fleeting shadow over her eyes. Dressed in jeans, a white cotton shirt, and a blue-plaid flannel, Rayne should have been warm—if not sweating—beneath the harvest sun. Yet she shivered, teeth clamoring like a little wind-up toy.

"Can we please just get out of here?" she murmured. Something had caused the hair on the nape of her neck to stand, and she was more than ready to pop a few pills and take a nap already.

Sharing a seat beside her on the front steps of the psychiatric hospital, Officer Emma Scott removed a paisley handkerchief from the breast pocket of her uniform. She dabbed a pebble of perspiration from her forehead. "Ten more minutes, kiddo."

Rayne pinched the bridge of her nose. "Fine."

"You think she'll show?" asked the officer.

"Not in this lifetime."

"But you want her to?"

"I don't know."

The officer nodded. "Then, we'll wait."

"Fine . . ."

The sun was too bright, the noises too loud. Anxiety fused to the walls of Rayne's chest like a sticky tar. It clogged her organs, and quickly, it began to nauseate her, churning her stomach in a way that left her feeling dizzy.

The officer tried again. "We could swing by the house on our way out if you want."

"No," Rayne answered stiffly. "If she isn't here, then there's a reason. Don't torture the old woman, and stop torturing me."

"Well, you shouldn't leave without saying goodbye to your mom. Let's wait a while."

"Don't tell me what to do," Rayne snapped, lashing out the way teenagers often do. Pivoting on the concrete stairwell, her curls, cropped short and dense as summer stormclouds, brushed her cheek as she studied the building behind her.

It was almost too clean, too quiet. The brickwork had been scrubbed, the thresholds power-washed, the railings sterilized down to the screws. It gleamed with a shine so severe it made imperfection feel profane, and bleeding, a crime. This place hadn't healed her. It had only archived her. Polished the grief, sanitized the rage, then handed her back like something successfully contained.

She couldn't wait to leave.

Thirteen months ago, she'd been ushered through its doors under circumstances she still couldn't comprehend. A crime. A collapse. Aurora Hospital first, then here—its sister psychiatric facility about twenty miles from town and about a thousand miles from forgiveness.

The Aurora Heights Psychiatric Center.

For four months, Rayne had not screamed or wept or spoken a single word. She had not eaten on her own, flinched when touched, or looked anyone in the eye. She sat in a chair with her body like a marionette half-slung on its strings, eyes wide open and always looking somewhere no one else could follow.

Catatonia, they called it—a neurological shutdown born of trauma. Then slowly—like limbs thawing in late spring, like a dream bleeding back into daylight—she began to return. Coherence came. Coordination returned. But her mother never did.

Not even once. Not even to say goodbye.

Rayne was headed southeast now. Out of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and toward the promise of Pennsylvania. A reform school dressed up as education, or perhaps, it was the other way around. Another kind of prison. Different walls. Different windows that might still blink with reflected sky, only to reveal a whole lot of nothing.

And her mother couldn't even swing by for a brief send-off?

But . . . Dad would have, she thought, picking at her fingers.

He would've arrived a little too early and parked a little too close—half on the curb, electric blues humming low through cracked windows. He would've approach with that awkward, almost reverent energy of men who know they're not supposed to cry but do so anyways. He would adjust her collar as if correcting the posture of the world, ask her if the pills helped—really helped—or just dulled her edges to make her a little easier to ignore. A little easier to manage. He would've packed her silk bonnet, tucked it between some books, and warned her not to let anyone shame her into forgetting who she was.

"Take care of those curls," he'd probably say, tapping her temple like it was a compass. "You'll need 'em to smell the weather." Something about how hair always knew when rain was coming, even when she didn't. And her little sister would've been right there with him, tapping her own forehead in the same spot, like they'd been practicing this moment in private.

Her mother, on the other hand, never had the patience for Rayne's hair. Said it had a mind of its own, just like the rest of her. But her father saw it differently. Always treated it like a map. Something knotted and wild, but always trying to lead her . . . somewhere. A chaos that always knew its direction, even when she did not.

Rayne rolled a curl between her fingers absently, as if trying to feel the last time he braided it. She couldn't remember. Only that his hands were far gentler than they ever looked. And he'd never once called her too much.

Rayne blinked hard at the light, eyes stinging from the heat—or maybe from the ghost of a feeling she hadn't named in weeks. "I don't think she can say goodbye," she murmured, turning away from the wretched hospital.

"Well, it's harder for some than others," remarked the officer.

"That's not what I mean . . ."

"Okay, I'll bite. What do you mean?"

"I mean, I'm dead to her . . . She already said her goodbyes."

The policewoman considered this. "Well, then. It's her loss."

Rayne looked up at her.

Officer Emma Scott had the kind of brightness Rayne had learned to brace against: sun-warmed skin, creases etched at the edges of her eyes, and the polished calm of women who'd been believed their whole lives. It was the sort of kindness that in less genuine souls might bruise, but with Officer Emma Scott, it somehow remained safe.

Somewhere in her mid-thirties, the policewoman kept her maple-brown hair in a messy ponytail, always with a spare tie around her wrist. She was married, with three sons who played baseball and broke things. She had a chocolate Labrador, and two perpetually unimpressed cats named Mittens and Priss. Suburban perfection incarnate. An attractive, athletic, white woman with a badge.

Yet she never treated Rayne like some grim obligation or a checkbox on her clipboard. She didn't smile like it was protocol. Didn't flinch when Rayne went quiet. And now, sitting here in the long blue shadow of a building neither of them would miss, Rayne felt something impossible forming in her chest: the distinct and foreign inkling that this woman might actually . . . miss her?

"I don't get it," said Rayne. "Why are you being nice to me? I thought we were supposed to hate each other."

The officer's lips twitched wryly. "We do. You and your little buddies egged my house back when you were thirteen. You remember that?"

Rayne felt a reluctant grin tugging at her. "I remember you ruined a perfectly good prank the night before . . ."

"Yeah, a prank that involved trespassing on public property," the officer reminded her.

"Public property," Rayne stressed. "Meaning, it was my middle school. Meaning, I reserved the right to rearrange all of Mrs. Kirkowski's things."

"You reserved the right to remain silent is what you did."

After a moment, they were both laughing under their breath. Until, that is, the bittersweet nostalgia faded into a mournful silence and the quiet truth that reality never forgets to collect what's owed.

During Rayne's institutionalization at Aurora Psychiatric, Officer Scott had visited every Monday at precisely nine o'clock. Sometimes with Tupperware full of food that didn't taste like hospital. Sometimes with dumb jokes. Always with the same look—watchful but never pressing. Rayne had no idea why she came. To supervise? To comfort? To report back?

Whatever the case, Rayne realized she was going to miss the officer, too.

"I think I miss those days," Rayne whispered. "Back when the worst thing I ever did was egg some officer's house . . . "

The policewoman said nothing. 

That, too, was a kindness.

Rayne still had no recollection of what it was she did to land herself in the psychiatric hospital in the first place. Oh, but everyone else knew. The whole damn town knew. Maybe even the whole state. Rayne was aware of some details, but only via second-hand accounts from witnesses like Officer Scott. Her past had been pried open and rewritten by others. Her own memory remained frustratingly empty—abstracted like a photograph with faces rubbed away. Nothing more. Nothing . . . personal.

"Ugh." She pressed her thumb-knuckle into the pocket of her right eye. "Damn it . . . "

"You okay?" the officer asked, placing a hand on her shoulder.

At the touch, the officer's concern manifested itself in Rayne's mind as the vision of a waxing crescent moon transitioning into full. For as long as Rayne could remember, touch always had this uncanny ability to trigger her overactive and eerily accurate imagination. Today, the image was crystal clear in her mind's eye, and that clarity only augmented the pain in her temples.

The policewoman cleared her throat. "Did they, uh, give you your meds before you checked out?"

"It's just aspirin. I'll be fine."

"Not talkin' about the stuff for your headaches, kid. I'm talking about the big stuff. The stuff that keeps you functioning." Realizing her words had struck an offensive chord, she added a quick: "Oh, you know what I mean. Did they give it to you before you left?"

"They should have."

"But did they?" she pressed gently.

"I'm pretty sure they can't discharge me without it."

"Then they should've given you something for the headaches, too. Did they?"

"I don't . . . remember." Rayne now pressed both palms into her temples, wishing the policewoman—as awesome as she was—would just shut up already. Just for a moment. Just long enough for the world to steady.

Somewhere in the distance, birdsong cut out mid-note. Though the air hovered somewhere near eighty degrees, Rayne's shivers doubled. Her recent weight loss had stripped her down to bone and instinct, tawny skin clinging to her frame like paper left out in the rain—thinner than memory, thinner than sanity. Her clothes hung around her as unflatteringly as they would a metal hanger, as if made for someone who had vanished.

The weather made no sense. The heat didn't touch her, not really. And the leaves of the northern hardwoods flanking the hospital were deathly still, a sight Rayne had not witnessed during all of her thirteen months in-house.

There was always a mild wind sweeping the Upper Peninsula.

Why wasn't there one now?

Just as Rayne twisted her index finger into the flesh of her temple, trying to root out the pain, she suddenly felt it. Not the ache. A presence.

At first, it was only a shape in the periphery—a spectral outline stitched together from shadow and heat shimmer. But then, it stepped forward. A lonely, malnourished wolf with tangled fur tugging at its flesh. It took one oddly strong step out of the bed of red maples that edged the parking lot, and Rayne stopped moving and stared. Gray wolves were not uncommon in northern Michigan, but seeing one so alone, so sickly, and so close to civilization was unnerving in its rarity.

When its paw hit the dirt, the wolf raised its haggard head and pierced Rayne with a preternatural gaze. Upon eye contact, an abrupt recollection of last year's winter swelled in Rayne's bones, locking her limbs into place. The creature's eyes and the memories they invoked startled her into a deeply pooled silence. No rustle. No birds. No breeze. Only the pulse in her ears, hammering a slow, unbearable rhythm. A fleeting warmth stirred her chest, like a long-forgotten dream, before it was swallowed only by dread.

She was trembling violently now, her mind spiraling backward and too far from grasp.

"Rayne?" The officer's voice reached her like light through fog.

A snap of fingers.

"Where's your head at, kid?"

Something tapped her temple.

"Anybody in there?"

Suddenly, and with an unrecognizable edge to her voice, Rayne whispered, "He's watching."

"What? Who?"

"Look at him. He's watching."

The officer followed Rayne's sightline, and something in her face shifted—subtle, sharp. She said nothing. Her hand moved toward her holster, slow and quiet, as though guided by reflex more than reason. Her eyes narrowed, lips parted slightly, breath stalled halfway out of her lungs. It was almost as if she, too, recognized something buried inside the mangy beast.

The wolf's stare was endless, holding them both captive. Its eyes were white, challenging the ivory glow of snowfall during December whiteouts; curbing the outer-bounds of the irises, a striking Alice blue glimmered as would ice floes in sunlight. They were the embodiment of winter. Rayne's body reacted to their frostiness, an icy chill slipping under her skin and quaking her bones even further. As rays of gold fell through the leaves, harsh shadows lined the wolf's face, mimicking patterns in camouflage. It was by a quirk of fate, Rayne had hoped, that a stray sunbeam illuminated those eyes and those eyes alone.

"It's him," Rayne whispered. "Oh, God. It's him. He's back."

The officer shifted her gaze toward Rayne. "Who?"

Her eyes shimmered, and the scintillation was a wicked green as opposed to their usual dark, ruddy brown. In the same breath that her eyes had glossed over, Rayne also stopped shivering.

"Don't listen to him," Rayne said, although it did not appear to be her own voice. And she did not appear to be speaking to the officer.

If Rayne had been more aware of her surroundings, then she might have recognized the fear lacing the officer's plea: "Rayne, no. Please, don't do this."

"Look at him. He's still watching," she said again, more urgently this time. She wasn't aware of anything anymore.

Just . . . those . . . eyes . . .

The officer scanned the yard, bypassing the wolf at the edge of the rubified maples, and zeroed in on the social worker leaving the eastward exit of the building. Quickly, the officer said, "Rayne, listen to me. Hear my voice and come back. If they find out about this—they won't let you leave. They don't understand. I need you to focus."

Rayne couldn't hear her. She couldn't hear anything but the otherworldly voice screaming in her skull. Forced words slipped off her tongue, and she could do nothing to stop them from breaking through the barriers of mind and medicine as they inundated the world of rationality—the world in which she had once belonged to, so very long ago.

"He's still watching you," she whispered fiercely—brutally—as if her words held the ominous power to slice into the very air before her and harm any who dared listen.

"Rayne, please."

"Always there. Always waiting. Always watching."

"Rayne," the officer snapped, and Rayne turned her distant gaze toward her.

"He's still watching you!" she screamed, and her voice was shrill and hoarse as it jumped an octave. "He's watching you, Rayne! He's watching!"

As she raised her voice and caught the case worker's attention, Officer Scott barked at the girl, startled probably in part by how monstrous her sleep-deprived face and underweight figure appeared. "Rayne! Goddamnit, stop this!"

Rayne stilled.

The officer took a moment to monitor the change in the girl's irises, which she had already witnessed once before—on that dreadful night thirteen months prior. As Rayne suddenly blinked, the emerald-green that clouded her eyes dissolved beneath the murky chocolate flood of her natural shade, and the officer exhaled. "Jesus, it happened again," she uttered softly.

"What do I do?" Rayne trembled. "Oh God, what do I do?" The look on her face was panic in its purest form. Her eyes twitched in their stress-carved sockets, lingering on the fast-approaching caseworker, as if she might actually confess the details of the psychobabble fit that had just occurred.

The officer shook her. "Don't. Don't you dare say a word."

Feeling like herself again, Rayne snapped, "Quit telling me what to do!"

"Rayne, listen to me. You are so close to living a normal life at Maria J. Westwood. Just keep taking your medication, go to school, keep your head down, and move on with your life. Okay?"

"Move on? I killed someone! I don't deserve to move on . . ."