Room 14's Secret novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Quiet Hours
Melinda plays sedated while her husband and best friend plan Friday's hearing, then a note slides into her tray: Room 14, two a.m.
My husband visits me at two o'clock, between his lunch meeting and his three o'clock call.
Quinton likes to be efficient, even when he is ruining someone.
For three months he put something in my evening tea.
He filmed me crying at the kitchen counter and screaming at the ceiling, and he showed the films to a doctor.
Now I am locked in a psychiatric ward, and the doctor has told a judge I am a danger to my own daughters.
I stopped swallowing my pills fourteen days ago.
Nobody knows that but me.
Today Quinton brought Giselle.
I lay on the narrow bed with my eyes half shut and my mouth hanging open.
A thread of drool ran down onto the pillow.
I had practiced it in the steel mirror over the sink until it looked like the real thing.
Giselle has been my best friend since we were fourteen.
She sat in the plastic visitor's chair, the same one she sits in every Monday, and smiled at the nurse in the doorway.
"Thank you for being so good to her," she said. "You have no idea what it means to us."
Quinton was pacing.
I could tell from his shoes on the linoleum, quick and short.
"The hearing has been moved up to Friday morning," he said. "The judge already has the doctor's report. It says no improvement."
"Because there hasn't been any," Giselle said softly. "Oh, Quinton. I hate saying it. Look at her."
"She doesn't know her own name."
"She doesn't know where she is, sweetheart. That's the worst part."
Giselle stood and tucked the blanket under my chin.
Her hands were warm and gentle.
I kept my face slack and my eyes on nothing.
"When the judge rules, we file the adoption papers on Monday," Quinton said. "Posy already calls you Aunt Giselle."
"I'd never replace her mother. I just want the girls to have someone."
"They will. They'll have you."
They were planning to take my children and they were talking about it over my bed.
They did not even lower their voices.
Quinton took out his phone.
"The judge's clerk wants one current video," he said. "For the file."
He held the phone over my face and I stared through it.
Giselle smoothed my hair back so the camera would see all of me.
"Poor thing," she whispered. "Get her good side, Quinton."
I thought about Posy's missing front tooth and the way the baby says "Mama" with three As.
I did not move.
The phone chimed when he stopped recording.
"That's enough," Quinton said. His voice cracked on the last word. "I can't stay in here, Giselle. I can't look at her."
"Then go. I'll say goodbye to the nurses and meet you at the car."
Quinton left first, as he always does.
I heard his shoes go straight down the hall to the front stairs and not once toward the far end.
Giselle stayed ten minutes more, as she does every week, thanking the staff.
Her heels crossed the floor outside my door.
Then they went the other way, toward the end of the hall, and I heard a bolt slide.
A minute later they came back.
She left a tin of lemon shortbread at the nurses' desk and was gone.
I lay still and counted to three hundred.
Then I sat up and put my hand inside the seam of my pillow.
Fourteen white pills were folded in a tissue, one for every day I had pretended to swallow.
Four days until Friday.
A judge was going to read a report, watch a video of a woman drooling, and give my daughters to the two people who had made her.
I decided I would not be asleep when he did.
So I stopped waiting and started planning.
At six the aide brought my dinner tray, the same as every night.
It was the new night orderly, a big man in navy scrubs with a scar through one eyebrow.
Zachary, his badge said.
He glanced at my wristband, Melinda Garrick Teel, and then at my face.
He set the tray on the table and took hold of my wrist, the way they all do, to check my pulse.
His thumb stayed on my skin one second longer than it needed to.
"Eat what you can, Mrs. Teel," he said, loud enough for the hall.
He left.
Under the napkin was a folded square of paper towel.
The handwriting was small and square.
I know you're awake. Room 14. Two a.m. Bring your pills.
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