The Law of Nines. Terry Goodkind
dirt in patches where the ground was heaved and uneven from massive roots hidden beneath. Alex glanced up at the windows all covered with security wire. Flesh was no match for that steel mesh. The back of the building was more honest about what it was.
The sprawling lower floors of the hospital were for patients who went to Mother of Roses for treatment for emotional disorders, substance abuse and addiction, as well as rest and recovery. Alex’s mother was imprisoned on the smaller ninth floor, a secure area reserved for patients considered dangerous. Some of them had killed people and had been found to be mentally incompetent. Several times since Alex’s mother had been confined at Mother of Roses there had been serious attacks on other patients or staff. Alex always worried for her safety.
He scanned the top row of almost opaque windows, even though he had never seen anything more than shadows in them.
The steel door in back had a little square window with safety wire crisscrossed through it. When he pulled open the door he was hit by the hospital smell that always made him resist taking a deep breath.
An orderly recognized him and nodded a greeting. Alex flashed a wooden smile as he tossed his keys, pocketknife, change, and phone in a plastic tub on a table to the side of the metal detector. After he passed through without setting off the buzzers, an older security guard, who also knew Alex but didn’t smile, handed over the phone and his change. He would keep the knife and keys until Alex left. Even keys could be snatched from a visitor and used as a weapon.
Alex bent at the steel desk beyond the metal detector and picked up a cheap blue plastic pen attached by a dirty string to the registry clipboard. That string was the most lax security in the entire building. The woman at the desk, Doreen, knew him. Holding the phone to her ear with a shoulder, she flipped through a ledger, answering questions about laundry deliveries. She smiled at Alex as he looked up from signing his name. She’d always been nice to him over the years, sympathizing with him at having to visit his mother in such a place.
Alex took the only elevator that went to the ninth floor. He hated the green metal doors. The paint had been scratched off in horizontal patches by med carts hitting into it, leaving dirty metal to show through. The elevator smelled musty. He knew the tune of every clunk and clatter it made on the way up, anticipated every shimmy in its labored travel.
The elevator porpoised to a stop and finally opened before the ninth-floor nurses’ station. Locked doors led to the women’s wing on one side, the men’s on the other. Alex signed his name again and put in the time: three p.m. Visitors were carefully monitored. He would have to sign out, with the time, when he left. The elevator door at the top was kept locked and no one would unlock it without a completed sign-in-and-sign-out sheet—a precaution against a patient talking his way past a gullible new employee.
An orderly in white slacks and smock came out from a small office in the back of the nurses’ station, pulling his keys out on a thin wire cable extending from the reel attached to his belt. The orderly, a big man who always hunched, knew Alex. Just about everyone working at Mother of Roses knew Alex Rahl.
The man looked through the little window in the solid oak door and then, satisfied that the way was clear, turned the key in the lock. He yanked open the heavy door.
The man handed over a plastic key for the buzzer on the other side. “Ring when you’re finished, Alex.”
Alex nodded. “How’s she doing?”
The man shrugged his rounded shoulders. “Same.”
“Has she caused you any trouble?”
The man arched an eyebrow. “She tried to stab me to death with a plastic spoon a few days back. Yesterday she jumped a nurse and would have beaten her senseless if another orderly wouldn’t have been ten steps away at the time.”
Alex shook his head. “I’m sorry, Henry.”
The man shrugged again. “Part of the job.”
“I wish I could make her stop.”
Henry held the door open with one hand. “You can’t, Alex. Don’t beat yourself up over it. It’s not her fault; she’s sick.”
The hall’s grayish linoleum floor was struck through with darker gray swirls and green speckles, presumably meant to add a little bit of interest. It was as ugly as anything Alex could imagine. Light from the sunroom up ahead reflected off the ripply floor, making it look almost liquid. The evenly spaced rooms to each side had varnished oak doors with silver metal push plates. None had locks. Each room was home to someone.
Cries coming from dark rooms echoed through the hall. Angry voices and shouts were commonplace—arguments with imaginary people who bedeviled some of the patients.
The showers at the rear of the bathroom were kept locked, along with a few of the rooms, rooms where patients were placed when they became violent. Locking a patient in a room was meant to encourage them to behave and be sociable.
The sunroom, with its skylights, was a bright spot in a dark prison. Varnished oak tables were neatly spaced throughout the room. They were bolted to the floor. The flimsy plastic chairs weren’t.
Alex immediately spotted his mother sitting on a couch against the far wall. She watched him coming without recognizing him. On rare occasions she did know who he was, but he could tell by the look in her eyes that this time she didn’t. That was always the hardest thing for him—knowing that she usually didn’t have any idea who he was.
A TV bolted high on the wall was tuned to Wheel of Fortune. The gaiety and laughter from the TV struck a stupefying contrast with the somber dayroom. A few patients laughed with the TV audience without comprehending what they were laughing at. They only knew that laughter was called for and so they laughed out of a sense of social duty. Alex guessed that it was better to laugh than cry. Between the laughter, some of the younger women glared at him.
“Hi, Mom,” he said in his sunniest voice as he approached.
She wore pale green hospital-issue pajama pants and a simple flower-print top. The outfit was hideously ugly. Her hair was longer than the other residents’. Most of the women had their hair cut short and curled. Alex’s mother was protective of her sandy-colored, shoulder-length hair. She threw fits if they tried to cut it. The staff didn’t feel it was worth a battle to cut it short. Occasionally they would try, thinking she might have forgotten that she wanted it long. That was one thing she never forgot. Alex was glad that she had something that seemed to matter to her.
He sat on the couch beside her. “How are you doing?”
She stared at him a moment. “Fine.” By her tone, he knew that she didn’t have a clue as to who he was.
“I was here last week. Remember?”
She nodded as she stared at him. Alex wasn’t sure if she even understood the question. Sometimes she would say things that he knew weren’t true. She would tell him that her sister had visited. She didn’t have a sister. She would say that she had gone shopping. She was never allowed to leave the confines of the ninth floor.
He ran his hand down the side of her head. “Your hair looks pretty today.”
“I brush it every day,” she said.
An overweight male orderly wearing shiny black shoes that squeaked rolled a cart into the sunroom. “Snack time, ladies.”
The top of the cart displayed a few dozen plastic cups half filled with orange juice, or something that resembled orange juice. The shelves in the cart held baloney-and-lettuce sandwiches on wheat bread. At least, Alex assumed it would be baloney. It usually was.
“How about a sandwich, Mom? You’re looking kind of skinny. Have you been eating?”
Without protest she rose to take a sandwich and glass from the man with the cart when he rolled it near. “Here you go, Helen,” the man said as he handed her a plastic cup of orange juice and a sandwich.
Alex followed as she shuffled to a table off in the far corner, away from the other residents.