Room 14's Secret: The Heiress Who Outsmarted Her Betrayers novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Needle

Adele stalls the injection long enough for the night orderly to swap the vial, and is wheeled to a visitor she doesn't expect.

The day nurse held the syringe up to the light and flicked it twice.

A bubble rose and popped.

I knew that drug.

I'd spent fourteen days spitting it into a mattress.

A pill I could hold under my tongue. A needle went straight in, and nothing I could do with my mouth would stop it.

One shot would put me back where I'd been for a month.

Slow. Wet. Gone.

I wouldn't be awake on Friday.

"Little pinch, sweetheart," she said, and pushed up the sleeve of my gown.

She set the tray on the bed by my hip, with the vial on it, uncapped.

I let my eyes drift toward the ceiling.

Then I let my left arm jerk.

It caught the edge of the tray.

The tray flipped off the bed and hit the floor with a crash that rang down the whole hallway.

The vial rolled under the visitor's chair.

"Oh, for God's sake," the nurse said.

I arched my back.

I made my heels drum on the mattress.

My head knocked against the rail, and that part wasn't acting.

"Help!" the nurse shouted toward the door. "I need a hand in fourteen!"

She grabbed my shoulders and pinned them.

Footsteps came running.

The door banged open.

It was the night orderly, with her coat already on and her car keys in her hand.

Her shift had ended ten minutes ago.

She dropped her keys on the chair and caught my ankles.

"I've got her legs," she said. "Get her arm."

"She knocked the whole tray over."

"I see it."

The orderly looked at me once, very fast.

I looked back.

Then she crouched, still holding one of my ankles, and reached under the visitor's chair.

Her back was to the nurse.

I saw her hand go into her coat pocket and come out again.

She stood up with a vial between two fingers and set it on the bedside table.

"Here," she said. "It didn't break."

"Thank God for small mercies," the nurse said. "Doctor wants it in her before rounds."

I let the fit run down.

Slower kicks. Then twitches. Then nothing.

My chest heaved under the thin gown.

The nurse picked up the syringe from the floor, swore at it and threw it in the sharps bin.

She tore open a fresh one from her pocket.

I watched her stick the needle into the vial the orderly had handed her.

Clear liquid filled the barrel.

I didn't know what was in it.

The orderly's face showed nothing at all.

She was holding my ankles very gently now.

"Hold still, Mrs. Kearns," the nurse said.

I held still.

The needle went into my upper arm.

It stung, and then it spread cold under the skin.

I waited.

One. Two. Three.

I waited for the heaviness I remembered, the warm sand pouring into my arms and legs.

Ten. Eleven. Twelve.

Nothing came.

My heart was beating hard and clean.

Saline.

I let my jaw go slack anyway.

I let my eyes half close.

"There," the nurse said, pressing the cotton ball down. "That'll keep her quiet till Friday."

"Is she on that every morning now?" the orderly asked, like she was asking about the weather.

"Every morning, six sharp. Doctor's orders." The nurse snapped off her glove. "Husband's worried she's been agitated."

"Agitated," the orderly said.

"Kicked a nurse on the long-stay wing last month, apparently."

That was a lie.

I'd never been to the long-stay wing.

The orderly picked up her keys.

As she passed the head of the bed she squeezed my foot through the blanket, once.

Then she was gone, and I heard her shoes going down the stairs.

Six sharp, every morning.

She'd have to be here every morning at six.

She worked nights. She'd have to stay an extra hour, every day, for four days, without anybody noticing.

I didn't know her name.

I'd never asked.

The nurse straightened my blanket and wiped my chin with the corner of the sheet.

She wasn't rough about it.

She just wasn't anything about it.

At eight an aide spooned oatmeal into me, and weak tea in a plastic cup.

I gagged on the tea. I couldn't help it.

At nine-thirty the door opened again.

The day nurse came in pushing a wheelchair.

"Up we go," she said. "You've got a visitor."

My stomach dropped.

Stewart came at two. Stewart always came at two.

She hooked her arms under mine and swung me into the chair.

My head lolled against her shoulder.

"Not your husband," she said, as if she could hear me. "A lawyer. Some patient-rights thing from the state."

"Ten minutes, the doctor says, and I sit in."

She wheeled me out of Room 14.

We passed the dayroom.

Through the doorway I saw the old woman by the window, the one who never spoke, with her hands folded on her knees.

Her name was the first one on the bed frame.

The nurse stopped at a door marked CONSULTATION.

She knocked once and pushed it open with the chair.

The room had a table, two chairs and a box of tissues.

A woman stood by the window with her back to us.

She was gray-haired, very straight, in a charcoal coat with the collar turned up.

She turned around.

I had sat on her lap at my grandmother's Christmas parties.

She looked at me in my gown and my gray socks, with drool drying on my chin, and her mouth went thin.

"Thank you, Nurse," she said. "I'll take it from here."

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