Chapter 10: Thursday

"I'm coming in," Matthew said. "Right now. Through the front door."

"No."

"Del, she booked you a bed in a place women don't come back from."

"For Thursday morning. Friday is the hearing."

"If I disappear upstate on Thursday, I miss my own competency hearing, and the judge rules I was too sick to attend."

I pressed my mouth to the phone.

"That's the plan. That was always the plan."

"Then let me end it."

"If you walk in now, the girl still goes. The others still stay. And the book goes in a furnace."

He didn't say anything.

I listened to him breathe.

"What do you need?" he said finally.

"Be outside. Don't block anything. Let the women do it."

"Let the women do what?"

"I'll tell you when I know."

At six the higher dose came.

The orderly came with it.

She'd been awake for twenty-four hours.

She held my ankles and yawned at the day nurse and swapped the vial while the nurse pulled on a glove.

Saline.

At seven, breakfast. At eight, the dayroom.

The nurse parked my chair in its usual spot, facing the television, and put the brakes on.

The orderly didn't go home.

She sat at the dayroom table with a cup of coffee and her coat on, like she was waiting for a ride.

At a quarter to nine, the white van came up the drive.

I couldn't see it. I heard the gravel.

Every woman in the room heard it too.

The girl was on the sofa with her knees pulled up. She was gray and slow from last night's sedation, but her eyes were open.

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