“Sure,” I said, unable to look at Thea any longer; my eyes ached. “I better go.”
“Bye, Jim,” Thea called. “See you again sometime?”
I stopped. It was the exact question I’d been ready to ask her.
You got your answer, you big dummy. Doris cackled in my head. You’re going to see her every day.
Every. Day.
Chapter 2
Jim
I spent the weekend in a rented U-Haul, making the three-hour drive between my shitty little apartment in Richmond and the shitty little house I’d rented in Boones Mill. After my successful interview at Blue Ridge, George Hammett—my new landlord—practically threw the keys at me from the cab of his truck, then screeched away before I could change my mind.
He didn’t have anything to worry about. I didn’t need much. The house was shabby as hell but livable. During two days of unpacking and cleaning, I managed to not think about Thea Hughes for a grand total of eight minutes.
Fuck me. She’s a resident.
A resident.
Stupid of me to not see it. I should have paid better attention.
What was her diagnosis?
Maybe something minor.
Maybe she was recovering…
Then Alonzo’s words rattled in my head: Everyone here is suffering from permanent brain damage. Our job is to help them adjust to their new reality.
Thea Hughes wasn’t recovering and wasn’t going to get better, and I had to adjust to that reality too. She was a resident of Blue Ridge Sanitarium. I was an orderly charged to take care of her, end of story.
End of our story.
I took my attraction to her—an attraction I’d never felt toward any woman—and shelved it away with the speech therapist dream.
Sunday night, I fired up a frozen dinner in my new house’s old microwave. After, I set my guitar on my lap and played Guns N’ Roses “Sweet Child O’ Mine” quietly, so the neighbors wouldn’t hear. I sang about eyes like the bluest sky, belonging to a woman who exuded warmth and safety.
She’s a resident.
I put the guitar away.
Later, I lay in my bed, listening to the crickets grow loud as summer approached while reading my worn out, dog-eared copy of Fight Club. My fingers turned pages I’d read a hundred times, and the dim light made the scars across my knuckles gleam white against my tanned skin. The scars came from countless fights during endless school days. Days when the soundtrack of my life was taunting voices and the rattle of chain-link in the yard where they always cornered me.
I hid my bruised face from Doris as best as I could when I got home, but she always found out.
What happened this time?
N-N-Nothing—
Spit it out, you big dummy!
I did get big. Bigger. Stronger. I lifted weights and started winning every fight. By senior year of high school, no one dared to fuck with me. Including Doris. I moved out of her house the minute I turned eighteen and never looked back.
The scars on my knuckles were badges I’d earned, as was the silence when the taunting stopped. But it lived on in my mind—a poisonous voice of someone who was supposed to watch out for me and tormented me instead.
Watch out for yourself. Keep your head down. Do your job.
Thea Hughes, I thought with a pang in my chest, wasn’t going to be anything but part of my job. I could watch out for her too.
I rolled into the Blue Ridge Sanitarium at 6:45 a.m.
“Happy to have you on the team,” Jules said, shooting me a wink. “Very happy.”
“Break room?” I asked.
She rolled her eyes with a sigh. “You’re no fun. Back there, second door on the left.”
The employee break room consisted of a few lockers, a card table, and men’s and women’s bathrooms. A white uniform consisting of pants and a button-down, short-sleeve shirt was waiting for me in an open locker, along with my badge and nametag.
Just as I’d buttoned up my shirt, a wiry guy entered the break room. He looked to be about thirty, with a full head of brown hair and friendly dark eyes.
“It’s too early for this shit, am I right?” Laughing, he extended his hand. “Joaquin Reyes. You must be the new guy.”
“Jim Whelan,” I said, shaking his hand.
“Good to meet you, Jim. Alonzo comes on in a few hours. I’m going to show you the basics. The layout of this joint, where shit is stored, all that.”
“Sounds good.”
Joaquin showed me around, cracking jokes and flirting with the nurses we passed. I braced myself to see Thea Hughes around every corner but saw no sign of her.
While Joaquin sped around the place like he was born there, I made a mental map: resident rooms and nurses’ station on the top floor.
Therapy rooms and the medicine room on the second floor.
The break room, supply storage, cafeteria and rec room on the ground floor.
Blue Ridge was much larger than the exterior led me to think. The additions built to accommodate the residents had newer paint and prison-like barriers. Like the fence that surrounded the nurses’ station and another blocking off the resident quarters from the downstairs.
“Think of them like child-proof gates,” Joaquin said. “Most of the residents can’t remember shit, and they’ll wander right out the door if we’re not careful.”
“They have amnesia?” I asked, my thoughts darting directly to Thea.
“Some worse than others,” Joaquin said, heading down the stairs. “But Alonzo will tear me a new one if I say any more. He’s in charge of training new hires how to talk to the residents so you don’t freak them out.”
“Yeah, he mentioned that,” I said, remembering Thea’s panic because I couldn’t answer her question, How long has it been?
We arrived on the ground floor, where Joaquin unlocked the door to a cleaning supply closet. “Once a month, the director of the place shows up,” he said. “And we all gotta be on our best behavior. Then there are the doctors.” He rolled out a mop and bucket. “The neuropsychologists come up from Roanoke Memorial to do rounds. Specialists are in and out. Some are decent, but most won’t even acknowledge an orderly’s presence. When in doubt, just stay out of their way.”
I nodded.
Joaquin pressed the mop handle into my hand. “Not a big talker, are you? But you got a phone? If not, we got some old pagers lying around.”
“I have a phone.”
“We’ll get you all the numbers. You gotta keep your phone on you at all times. We’re always short-handed. Lots of turnover. Hours can be grueling. Late nights. All-nighters.”
“I’m on the day shift.”
Joaquin smirked. “Technically. You’ll end up working at least a few night shifts, rookie. Lunch is forty-five minutes unless you’re needed for a resident and, like I said, we’re always short-handed. You do get a fifteen-minute break every four hours. You smoke?”
“No.”
“We’ll see how long that lasts. Orderlies in other facilities don’t do janitor work, but that’s not the case here. We gotta take on multiple jobs.” He pushed the mop and rolling bucket to me. “Mop up the cafeteria, now. Later, you’ll work at the rec room and help supervise FAE.”