“Please move back,” she said. “Don’t lean on me. Please. You don’t need to stand so close.”
No one listened.
She forced her elbows out, kept close to the cart, and shuffled along with the slithering, rambling, fitful horde. While looking down to avoid the brown smears and yellow puddles on the floor, she accidentally ran the front of the cart into another resident. She stopped and looked up, alarmed. Hopefully she hadn’t hurt anyone. A teenage girl in a cloth diaper and a pink sweater stood bent over, one hand holding the back of her bare leg.
“Oh my God,” Sage said. “I’m so sorry. Are you all right?”
“That’s okay, that’s okay,” the girl said, her eyes rolling toward the ceiling. “That’s okay, that’s okay.” Then she straightened, turned, and kept going.
Mortified, Sage held the cart back briefly to see if the girl was bruised or bleeding. Thankfully, no marks reddened her pale skin. No blood ran down her leg.
When Sage started moving again, she stood on her tiptoes and peered over tilted heads and sloped shoulders to see where they were going. She searched for Tina too, but picking one person out of the roiling mob was impossible. At the end of the hall was a set of double steel doors, which hopefully meant they were being taken to classrooms, with desks and a teacher and some semblance of order. Willowbrook was called a school, after all. Surely most parents sent their kids there for the benefits of special educators who knew how to work with the disabled. There had to be some reason they let their children live there. The tiniest spark of hope ignited inside her. Surely a teacher would listen to her.
Then she saw where they were headed, and a cold slab of dread pressed against her chest.
CHAPTER 6
Standing in front of the nurses’ station where Sage had first seen Nurse Vic, two burly-looking attendants allowed one resident at a time to take a plastic medicine cup from a stone-faced woman in a gray skirt and blue blouse. Nurse Vic supervised the process from behind the counter, refilling the water glass and restocking the medicine cups. One by one the residents put the cups to their lips, then took a sip of water from the glass and threw back their heads to swallow. After the woman in the gray skirt took their empty cups and put them back on the counter, Nurse Vic waved the residents on toward the double doors at the end of the hall. The line limped slowly but steadily along. Anyone in a wheelchair or cart who was unable sit up on their own was heaved upright by the attendants, and the woman in the gray skirt held the cups to their mouths and gave them a sip of water, carelessly letting it spill down their chins and necks. If a resident was uncooperative for some reason, whether sitting or standing, the attendants forced the pills into their mouths with their fingers, without giving them a drink afterward.
Sage didn’t know what to do. She couldn’t let them drug her. Couldn’t let them turn her into a zombie who slept and swayed and lurched around this hellhole. She’d never get out of there if she was hopped up or knocked out by some powerful psychiatric pill. Then she realized no one checked to see if the residents actually swallowed the drugs—not the attendants, not the woman in the gray skirt, not Nurse Vic. If she was careful, she could hide the pills in her mouth and get rid of them later. No one would know. Surely she couldn’t be the only person in Willowbrook who did that. If she got caught, she’d likely be punished, but it was a risk she had to take.
Then she noticed a slender girl with a familiar head of strawberry-blond hair at the front of the medicine line, swaying back and forth as if listening to music. Sage’s breath caught in her chest.
Rosemary.
She let go of the cart and sidled up its side, her bare legs scraping the oversize wheels as she fought her way through the crowd toward the nurses’ station, determined to get to her sister. Gently pushing the girls and women to one side and craning her neck to see, she tripped over wayward legs and feet, bumped into shoulders and heads, and tried not to lose her balance. Not that there was anywhere to fall; the rocking, jerking, twisting residents were crushed together like kindling, filling every available space.
“Rosemary!” she yelled.
The strawberry-blond girl stepped up to the woman in the gray skirt and took a plastic cup.
“Rosemary! It’s me, Sage! Turn around! I’m right here!”
Out of the corner of her eye, Sage saw Marla shove her way into the crowd and start toward her, anger twisting her face. “Don’t you leave that cart there!” she shouted. “Get back to it right now!”
Sage froze, adrenaline coursing like fire through her veins. If Marla sent her to the pit or had Nurse Vic drug her, she’d be done for. She fought her way back to the cart and took the handle. Thankfully, Marla stopped, waited to make sure she was staying with the cart, then turned around and waited near the wall. Breathing a sigh of relief, Sage stood on her tiptoes to look for Rosemary.
Rosemary had taken the pills and was returning the plastic cup to the woman in the gray skirt. Sage almost called out her name again, but stopped. There would be time to find her when they got to the cafeteria or classrooms. And they couldn’t reach each other right now, anyway.
Then Rosemary turned, revealing her profile, and Sage’s heart sank. The girl had a high, round forehead, bulging eyes, and a cleft lip. It wasn’t Rosemary. Damn it. How could you have been so stupid? Did you really think it would be that easy?
Besides, if Rosemary had returned, Dr. Baldwin would have realized Sage was telling the truth. Rosemary would have been taken back to her ward, and Sage would have been released. Unless Dr. Baldwin decided not to let her go so she couldn’t call the cops on him for keeping her there against her will. Unless he was trying to hide the fact that something bad had happened to Rosemary.
No. She couldn’t think like that. This was real life, not some horror movie where the evil doctor locked up sane people and hid bodies in the basement. Then again, no horror movie could ever be as terrifying as Willowbrook.
Pushing the ridiculous thoughts from her mind, she cursed herself for letting her imagination get the better of her. She didn’t have time for that shit. It was nearly her turn to take the pills, and she had to figure out how to pretend she’d swallowed them. When she steered the cart up to the counter, one of the burly attendants hefted the girl inside into a sitting position, and the woman in the gray skirt bent down to give her the pills, holding the cup to her lips. For the first time, Sage noticed the woman was barefoot, which meant she was a resident, not an employee. Why was a resident helping hand out drugs? It seemed odd.
After attending to the girl in the cart, the woman handed Sage a plastic cup and the glass filled with murky water. Eyeing Nurse Vic to see if she was paying attention, Sage took the glass and the pills, like tiny orange eggs in the cup. When Nurse Vic lowered her gaze to fill a tray with more drugs, Sage popped the pills into her mouth and, using her tongue, pressed them between her upper teeth and her cheek. But when she started to take a sip of water, she hesitated. Everyone had shared the same glass, smearing the sides and rim with fingerprints and lip marks and drool. But there was no time to react, and nothing she could do about it anyway. She closed her eyes and pretended to take a quick drink, trying not to gag, then put her head back and pretended to swallow. When she was done, she gave the cup and glass back to the woman and, without waiting to be waved on, pushed the cart away from the counter to join the others, who were being herded through one side of the double doors at the end of the hall.