PRESENT DAY

Aurora Psychiatric Hospital
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 some pills and take a nap already.

Sharing a seat beside her on the front steps of the psychiatric hospital, Officer 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."

"Then we 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 said, "We can 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."

"You shouldn't leave without saying goodbye to your mom. Just be patient. Let's wait a while."

"Don't tell me what to do," she snapped, lashing out the way teenagers often do. Pivoting in her stairwell seat, Rayne's short brown ringlets brushed her jawline as she turned to glare at the building behind her. She couldn't wait to leave.

More than a year ago now, Rayne Foster had been the perpetrator of a horrific crime. She spent two weeks in Aurora Hospital before being transferred here, to its sister psychiatric facility, about twenty miles outside of town. Thirteen months she had spent under lock and key, analyzed by doctors, nurses, and psychiatrists—only nine months of which, she had actually been coherent. Even after she regained mental and motor functionality, Rayne's mother still never visited her.

Not even once.

Now for the first time in her life, Rayne would be leaving the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and traveling southeast, toward her new reformatory school in Pennsylvania. She would be completing her last year of high school in a prison-like campus until June.

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

"I don't think she can say goodbye," Rayne mumbled, turning away from the wretched hospital.

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

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

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

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

The policewoman considered this. "Well, if that's the case, then it's her loss."

Rayne faced her.

Officer Emma Scott was a rather attractive woman, somewhere in her mid-thirties. She had an athletic figure, shoulder-length maple brown hair—always pulled back into a messy ponytail. She was also married, with three sons on the cusp of adolescence. It appeared she was living the American dream: a loving family, a white picket fence, a chocolate Labrador, and two cats named Mittens and Priss. Yet for some reason, Rayne now felt the distinct and foreign inkling that this woman might actually . . . miss her?

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

The officer smiled. "We do. You and your little buddies egged my house back when you were thirteen. You remember that?"

"I remember you ruined a perfectly good prank the night before . . ."

"Yeah, a prank that involved trespassing on public property."

"Public property. 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, awkward silence. During Rayne's stay at Aurora Psychiatric, Officer Scott had visited her every Monday morning at exactly nine o'clock. Rayne never knew why, but she even swung by on certain holidays with Tupperware entrees and desserts in hand.

Truth be told, Rayne was going to miss the officer, too. 

She scratched the back of her neck. "I miss those days, you know."

"Do you?"

"Yeah. I mean, back when the worst thing I ever did was just egg some officer's house . . . "

The policewoman sat quietly.

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 of the details herself, but only via second-hand accounts from witnesses such as Officer Scott. Her own memory of the incident, however, was merely an abstract scene, conjured based on the stories that had been recounted to her by others. 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 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?"

"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. Despite the eighty-degree weather, the intensity of Rayne's shivers doubled.

Following her recent weight loss, Rayne's tawny skin was now a flimsy layer over her bones, and her clothes hung around her as unflatteringly as they would a metal hanger. Although the heat had little effect on her, she questioned the weather. 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 she twisted her index finger into the flesh of her temple, a malignant presence chose to make itself known: It came to her in the form of a lonely, malnourished wolf, tangled fur tugging at its flesh. She looked up as it took one oddly strong step out of the bed of red maples edging the parking lot. 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—one that not only drowned out the cacophony of nature's songs chirruping around her but her own thoughts as well. A fleeting warmth stirred her chest, like a dream long forgotten, before it was swallowed by dread. 

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

"Rayne?"

She was vaguely aware of the officer snapping her 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."

When the officer recognized the distressed look in Rayne's eye and followed her sightline, she fell silent. Her hand hovered over the gun in her holster, just in case the mangy beast began wandering too close, but she, too, was captivated by its very appearance. The wolf's 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 glazed over, Rayne also stopped shivering.

"Don't listen to him," she said, although she did not appear to be speaking to the officer.

If Rayne had been more aware of her surroundings, then she may 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 was not 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 still 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!"

She 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. "It happened again," she uttered softly.

"What . . . 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 . . ."