Karen does not like the hospital all that much. The walls are all the same color, which are the same color as the bedsheets and curtains, which are the same color as the blinds and her furniture, which at this point, she feels is the same color as her life.
She sighs and swallows down her medication.
It's a dull off-white, as most psychiatric hospitals are. She wonders, briefly why they never bother to put up posters or framed pictures in her room, or anywhere else much for that matter. Schools had them all the time- motivational quotes, sweet and loving photos of children and families- but she supposed that it wasn't the same for adults. They were the kids that should have grown up by now. They should have had all their problems solved already. There are no stickers or encouragements for those who lag behind.
She hasn't told Andy yet. She doesn't know if he'll have the strength to hear, or if she'll even have the strength to tell him.
"Good morning, Mrs. Barclay," her nurse calls from the door. A sign to another start of her day. Her new personal assistant was sweet and attentive, but it was strange, having someone to have to look after her. As if she were a child. Mothering her as she should have mothered Andy.
"Good morning," she says instead, and swallows the guilt and the shame.
She lets the nurse busy herself while she stays deep in her thoughts, only responding when required. She'd like to think that it's not her fault – and truly, it is not her fault at all – but there were things hidden away inside of her that even she did not know until the first day she'd been taken, Andy ripped away from her as if she was a danger. As if she had been the one harming him.
Looking back, she realizes that even he had never hurt Andy. Not in the way some had. Not in the way they continued to, although he'll never admit it to her. She can see the hurt in his eyes, the scars that still affect everything he does.
After several weeks of heavy therapy, she held on to her story. The truth that she, Andy, and Mike Norris knew. No matter the medication dosage, the exercises and the charts she was given to complete, she did not change her story. She would not deny her son, ever. But after several weeks of therapy, they did find something. They caught it, but there was no guarantee they could completely cure it. The beginnings of dementia.
They would not have caught it so early on, had she not been admitted when she did. She spent the first week after the realization bitter, and angered. It wasn't fair that a wrongdoing against her had actually turned out for good. She did not want to find herself grateful that any of this had happened. She had violent fits and bursts of outrage, lashing verbally – and sometimes physically – at the attendees, the other patients, and once even at Mr. Norris. For some reason, she'd been particularly angry at him too, as if it were his fault that things had happened the way they did. She'd slapped his hands away as he'd tried to calm her, seeing him as patronizing and unsympathetic.
She remembers, with another flitting pass of guilt and admonishment, the way the hurt had sparked across his eyes. He hadn't reached for her again.
"Did you sleep well?" the nurse – Stacia, her name was Stacia – opens her curtains and blinds. As if she wanted to see the outdoors, gray and dreary as the inside. But she doesn't say this. She smiles and thanks her, and is genuinely grateful for her care, at least. She could be worse. She's heard plenty of frightening stories from some of the other patients who had been transferred to this hospital. Stories of ill treatment and neglect and abuse.
"I did, thank you," she replies, and she doesn't talk about her nightmares. The ones where Andy dies in varying and brutal ways, and she stands, frozen. Watching. Allowing it to pass. She always wakes in a cold sweat. It should bother her more, but she knows she won't remember them soon. She forgets more and more as the days pass.
Stacia sets out a cup of tea on her bedside table. She can already tell by the its soothing scent that it is her favorite. She remembers because she had written that down as well.
She cannot remember their apartment address anymore. She's begun to start writing information in a small notebook that she keeps under her pillow, just to memorize every night. Her maiden name, her late husband's name, the nurse Stacia. Her birthday, her favorite food. The list grew so quickly. She wanted to cry about it, but she couldn't remember these things with an emotion. They were just things she needed to know now, things that she memorized like a school girl and her vocabulary.
She almost cried when she had to write Andy's birthday down. How much longer until she does not remember him, either?
She has not told him yet. She does not know how to tell him, but rather reviews all the information she needs before he comes to see her, so that he does not suspect. Every time he calls or tells her anything, she writes it down when he's gone, so she will remember. She reads his pages the most, even on nights she cannot remember at first why they are important to read.
Stacia tells her that breakfast will be ready soon, and she can make her way to the dining hall whenever she feels up for it. She doesn't know if she will at all. Her appetite is smaller today.
Her anger and resentment at her misfortune only worsened when Andy began to write her letters.
Stacia leaves, and that is when Karen opens her drawer, just to read them again. She tries to feel some spark or surge again, but the anger is gone. It's as if she's forgotten anger itself, making it no longer an emotion, but just another word to write in her notebook.
Andy was a writer. She saw it from even his young age. He articulated everything better on paper than he did on tongue, and she sees it again now, watching his penmanship improve from letter to letter, his vocabulary advance, and his sentences grow longer and more complex. His standard English morphed into an almost poetic style of his own, and she wonders if he'd ever considered it. Writing. But he's never mentioned it, and she's never asked. Andy does not like to be questioned too much, she sees the way he starts to squirm in his chair and change the subject if he feels she's prying too much.
She'd fight for more information, as a mother, if she did not know so much how it felt, as a patient in a psychiatric ward. It feels as if someone is splitting you apart, stitch by stitch, until everything sacred has been exposed under a harsh, white light, useful only for study, when to you, it was so much more. It's a harrowing and undignified feeling, especially if the information is ripped away without consent. She will not be to Andy what the doctors were to her. She cannot do that – she refuses to do that – as a patient, and a mother. Especially as a mother.
But the letters were a small piece each, and piece by piece, she learned enough. And she hated every bit of it. And then she felt guilt over it. And then she was disgusted, and she hated it, and she hated herself most of all, because she believed she'd allowed it to happen.
And then one day, she'd read them again and, crying, accepted it.
She doesn't leave to eat. She sits instead, and writes in her notebook of things to remember. Today she adds that sometimes she is not hungry in the mornings, and that is okay. She also adds that she needs to call Andy today. She hasn't seen him in quite a while, and it's worrying. She has not seen him since they had last talked about her unexpected visitor.
She hadn't thought of him much, the doll, before he'd shown up in her room, snarling and angry and full of intent, and empty of action. As soon as she'd seen him she'd known at once that he was the reason her previous nurse had died, and believed for a moment he'd come for her, too.
Instead, he'd asked for Andy's whereabouts, but that was not all so surprising either. She was more surprised that he'd taken so long to come ask, if he'd been searching and waiting with no results for so long. But even if he'd threatened her – which he hadn't, and she found that stranger still – she did not have the information she needed, as Andy never told her much anymore. Her insight to her son had stopped with his last letter.
I feel like I'm drowning, and I have to learn all over again how to swim. I'll breathe again soon, I think. You just keep pushing up until you hit the surface.
That was after Kent. She hasn't asked if he's hit the surface yet.
"He's your son," Chucky had snapped, bitingly, and she knew he was frustrated and not necessarily trying to weigh her down with her already existing guilt, but she felt it all the same. She'd held her tongue and watched him pace, anxious. Unprepared. Desperate, even, although she could not really understand the reason for it. "How do you not know where your own son is?"
"I suppose I could find out if you could get me out of here, since you put me here to begin with," she'd finally said, reaching for her tea on the side table. Stacia had brought the tea then too, because she knew it was her favorite. She'd hoped he did not notice the way her hands shook. In favor of Lady Prosperity, he did not, as he was too vexed with his own problems. His hands were shaking as well, she noticed, and it comforted her. It eased away the threat of his presence.
"Why do you still want to find him, anyways?" she'd asked. She couldn't help herself. If there was any way to end this torment, she supposed that discovering the source of it could be a start. He did not look at her, and there was a heavy tension settling over her. It was as if he could not look at her. As if he was afraid to.
He didn't answer that.
"Why did you kill my nurse?"
He didn't answer that either.
In fact, it seemed she'd only caused his brow to furrow more, his hands to tremble more, and his general behavior worsen. She'd kept sipping at her tea – partly because it was a little too hot to swallow all at once, and partly because she'd needed to prolong the small distraction as much as she could.
She has tea now, right next to her, in the very same mug. The very same flavor of tea, a nice honeyed chamomile. She'd almost asked Chucky if he'd wanted a cup, and she laughs thinking about it. She blames it on the fact she is forgetting everything these days. Perhaps she'd had a momentary lapse then, and confused him for a regular visitor passing by. He certainly no longer had that look of a toy by the time he'd come to see her; she could see the sweat on his brow and the way his pupils had dilated when he'd asked her where Andy was. But she'd remembered, and she felt the anger all over again, and she'd held her hand over the desk drawer where she'd kept all of Andy's letters. But she'd kept her cool, and as a result, she'd still held the upper hand, and Chucky had left, seemingly chagrined and penitent.
Andy had wanted to know what they'd talked about. She couldn't tell him. She still cannot, or at least, she thinks she cannot. Andy cannot hear those words from her mouth. She is sure he would find it utter betrayal, even though she would only be relaying the messages.
"Andy had written me about you, when he was growing up," she'd told Chucky, while he was there, pacing, possibly trying his hardest to deduce where it was Andy had gone, and where he could be going next. "He mentioned everyone who had died because of you."
"So you learned that I have blood on my hands – a startling fucking revelation, was it?" he'd snapped, in the midst of his thoughts. His steps seemed so heavy in the room for someone so small. She wondered at the source of the weight.
"You listen to me at once," she'd snapped back, with equal hostility, ever so tired of his rudeness. His audacity. She'd even physically snapped her fingers in his direction, and she'd remembered the time she'd held his once doll-like shell over their fireplace, the same threat and motherly protection pumping her adrenaline. "It took me some time, but I've pieced it together enough to begin to piece you together as well. They all had one thing in common, these people you did away with."
He'd pretended not to care, but she saw it in his step. They'd slowed, just a fraction, but they'd slowed nonetheless. She had his attention the moment she'd claimed she could expose him. It only strengthened her resolve.
"Every one of these people – Andy had mentioned them before. Foster family members, teachers, neighbors, therapists – even a colonel. I didn't think there was a pattern about it until my nurse."
His step had come to a complete halt then, and she'd watched as his fists curled and uncurled, and she'd felt it. An epiphany, a eureka. She'd set the tea cup down, folded her hands over her lap, and leaned forward, even as he'd backed away, as if distance could protect him from words.
"You've always done that one thing so well, haven't you?" she'd said, and then he'd looked at her. She couldn't tell if he was waiting for her to say it, or if he was silently begging her not too. Not that it'd mattered. She'd said it anyways.
"What a contrary little thing you are," she'd told him, and even as he bristled, she'd continued. "To so violently torment my child and protect him, all at the same time."
"That is not …" he'd started, but she'd pushed forward, surer than she'd ever been.
"You didn't like the way my friend Maggie spoke to him," she began to list off. "The owner of the company that made your shell and dismissed my son's claims so that he could gain more revenue. Andy's foster parents were dismissive and impatient with his trauma. The teacher who put him in detention for something that was not his fault. The colonel who'd mistreated him. Brett Shelton – although it seems you've failed in that department, and it turns out it was a good thing."
Chucky's eyes had brightened with anger, and with something else she could not describe. She didn't care to stop and try.
"The man who wanted to put Andy through electroshock therapy. The nurse who did not treat me quite the same and Andy as if he were human refuse. Even the Tommy doll which Andy hated that his foster parents had gotten for him. Do you need me to go on?" she'd stopped for a breath, but the list was long. There were many letters in her drawer.
"It's not…" he'd tried again, and again, she'd cut him off. There was such an intensity about him as she stopped his defenses once more, but still, he did not make a move towards her. By then, she'd known he would not.
"It's not what, Chucky?" she'd asked. "Go on. Try to tell me that I'm wrong. In fact, prove it."
She'd held out her hands in front of him, and looked at him straight into his eyes, and watched as he'd – although ever so slightly, almost overlooked – flinched. "Do it now. Kill me."
"I …" And for a moment, she'd thought that perhaps she'd calculated wrong, and that this was to be her end. He'd moved a step forward, and she'd prepared to defend herself, feeling foolish for even challenging him.
But one step was all he'd taken. "I can't."
And before she could gloat – not that she'd wanted to – he'd run out of her sight, leaving her alone.
She takes one more look at her cup again before picking it up and sipping the tea, now cooled. She cannot remember what flavor it is, and she forgets to call Andy.
AN: I usually hate doing this, but I just wanted to let you all know I am so, so grateful for all of you who keep commenting and are patient with me as I slowly update this. Know that I am always working on it; I will finish it. Also, for those interested, I do have a tumblr ( .com) again, dedicated to this story and the characters in it, and the development that will take place.