When She Was Bad

CHAPTER FOUR
1

Lilith’s headache is gone when she awakens the next morning. She discovers she can think again, and what she thinks about, with concentrated, pinpoint, laser-like intensity, is escape. Not why she needs to escape-for a limited consciousness like Lilith’s, there are no whys. Somebody’s raping you, you bite their nose off; somebody locks you up, you escape.

There is a complication, though: the need to keep Mullet Woman and the Mad Doctor from discovering her true identity, so to speak. It is imperative they continue to think of her as Lily. Because where Lilith gets a zillion volts of electricity through the brain, Lily gets her brow tenderly mopped. Where Lilith is under room arrest, Lily, eventually, will have the run of the hospital.

Unfortunately, Lilith knows very little about Lily. She’s rich, she lives in Pebble Beach, has a place in Puerto Vallarta; she has a mental disorder; her grandparents were recently killed in a car wreck-everything else will have to be improvised.

The door to her room slides open. “How’re you feeling this morning?” asks Mullet Woman.

“Lots better,” replies Lilith, mimicking as best she can the childish voice on Dr. Cogan’s tape recorder. “A little sore, but at least my headache’s gone.”

“Good, good. Do you think you’re up to having breakfast in the dining hall?”

“Sure,” Lilith simpers. “I guess.”

In Alan Corder’s well-informed opinion, the better the food was in an institution, the less guilty rich people felt about committing their relatives. After a welcome in the spacious reception lobby, a turn around the arboretum followed by a meal in the dining hall had sealed many a deal for Dr. Al.

When Lilith and Patty reached the dining hall, a high-ceilinged, wood-paneled room with white tablecloths and a cafeteria-style counter, half a dozen white-clad nurses and psych techs on break or coming on or off duty were chowing down in great good humor at the largest table, laughing, gesticulating, spearing food from each other’s plates. At a table for one sat a gray-haired man in wrinkled pajamas and limp seersucker bathrobe, chewing single-mindedly at a corner of toast. Somehow a pat of butter, backing paper attached, had managed to affix itself to the side of his head; as they passed him on their way to the counter, Patty reached down and plucked it away.

Food and free entertainment, thought Lilith-but she kept the joke to herself. Turning up her determined little nose at the precooked scrambled eggs in the chafing dish, she ordered two eggs fried sunny-side up, not dry but not runny either, and polished off a Danish and a cup of coffee while she was waiting.

By the time her eggs and Patty’s flapjacks arrived, the room had emptied out until there were only two other diners present. At a corner table, sitting with a huge, curly-haired psych tech, was an oddly familiar-looking little guy in chinos and a dark blue corduroy shirt. Gorgeous, heart-shaped face, bowed cherub lips, and long-lashed, gold-flecked brown eyes. His hair too was brown-not the color people call brown because it’s neither black nor blond, but a deep, rich nut-brown like Guinness ale.

Lilith was on the verge of asking Mullet Woman who he was when it occurred to her that perhaps the reason he looked familiar was that she had met him before, as Lily, at some point during the missing time between Monday morning, when Dr. Cogan gave her that needle behind the coffee shop in Weed, and Tuesday afternoon, when she’d awakened on the cross-shaped torture table with the mother of all headaches.

But while Lilith was trying to figure out a way to get the information she needed without giving herself away, the young man and his attendant rose to leave. On their way out, they stopped by the table where Lilith and Patty sat. The two psych techs exchanged hi’s; the two patients locked eyes for a few milliseconds of the shortest, most intense staring contest in the history of the universe. Then the boyish-looking young man broke into a crooked grin. “Hi, ’member me? I’m Lyssy,” he chirped. “I showed you around the arboretum the other day.”

“Of course-how are you, Lyssy?”

“Pretty good. Hey, me and Wally, we’re on our way to the arboretum. Do you guys wanna come? Is that okay with you, Patty?”

The attendants swapped meaningful glances; at the staff meeting that morning, Dr. Corder had instructed the psych techs to give Lyssy and Lily as much privacy as the dictates of security allowed. “I think we can arrange that,” said Patty, through a mouthful of flapjacks. “Meet you at the gate in half an hour.”