Chapter Two
The air was cold. This was Dr. Lewis' first thought as he entered the hospital's day room. It seemed as though one of the higher ups had once again decided that they needed to have the air condition turned up just high enough to make everyone's day a little more miserable. Or was he just imagining the cold? After all, he hadn't felt cold until he opened the door to the day room. Either way he just shrugged the thought away as he made his way to the wall opposite him.
Set aside the wall was a small table where several snack and beverage items had been placed. Seeing as how the hospital's cafeteria was rather small a second place was needed to store whatever wasn't considered to be part of the day's normal meal. What better place to serve than any of the hospital's three day rooms? After all, weren't they built to serve any need the resident doctors might come up with? Filled with lunchroom-style tables it acted as both a second cafeteria and a place where doctors as well as visitors could spend time with some of the hospital's more well off patients.
As Lewis made his way to the table his attention immediately rested on the small black coffee maker that was noisily brewing the day's second batch of coffee. With it being just past ten 'o clock in the morning the first batch was well on its way to digestion by now. Usually he was one of the first ones to arrive at Brookhaven and pour a cup of the steaming liquid, but today he would settle for some of the second batch.
Once he had filled a large cup with coffee Lewis made his way to one of the nearby tables with a stack of files. As he eased into one of the chairs he noticed that the room was empty save for two women sitting at the opposite end of the room. The younger of the pair was dressed in a white blouse and pants that were the color of a pastel green. One of the nurses whose name Lewis couldn't recall at the moment.
The other woman was an older woman, probably just entering her eighties. She, Lewis knew, was another of Brookhaven's patients. Unlike most of the people that stayed at Brookhaven she wasn't so much a threat. The reason for her admittance was caused by a breakdown after her husband had passed away. Lewis let out a sigh as he remembered her case. She was an old woman suffering the loss of the man she had spent the past sixty years of life with. Was it not to be expected that some emotional distress would come from her? Was Brookhaven really the place the store someone like that? Had the thought of a nursing home held less appeal to the women's children when deciding what to do with her? Whatever the cause was for her being brought to Brookhaven the hospital's administrators were always eager for another patient; or paycheck rather. Despite his belief that Brookhaven was the wrong place for the woman they had found a nice comfortable room in the C block of the first floor. There she would live out the rest of her days surrounded by those just barely out of sanity's grasp.
At that moment his mind drifted back to the thought of Cassie. What a contrast she was to the old woman who quietly sat with her attending nurse. Cassie had seemed so young and so fragile, yet so strong. Lewis had really hoped that he would be able to help the girl as he always hated to see such a waste come from society's young generations. He and his wife had no children of their own and as a result he always tried to do whatever he could to help young and struggling adults. Being one of the youngest patients that Lewis had ever been asked to treat he had challenged himself to help the girl overcome whatever was disturbing her. Sadly though he had only been given that one opportunity before her life had mysteriously been taken.
Though Lewis stared ahead with his eyes his mind had been staring off somewhere else. The young nurse though had seen him and taken his stare to be aimed at her. As he brought himself back to reality he found himself startled as the nurse gazed back at him from across the room. She flashed a smile at him and he could only nod his head in acknowledgment before quickly burying his attention into the files on the table in front of him. He did his best to hide the redness that he felt was surely coming to his face and to appear busy at work. Since Cassie's death he felt uncomfortable while at work and more so of those that worked around him. Plus the fact that he was a married man in his late forties being suddenly given the attention of an attractive young woman did nothing to help him. "Best to appear busy," he quietly said to himself.
As he looked through the files that Leslie had given him upon his arrival he noticed that he only had two patients to visit today. Reading their names he let out a sigh of relief as he noticed that neither were of the more unstable variety that Cassie had fallen under. The first patient that he was to check on was a man named Wilson, who had fallen under the medium risk category and been placed in one of the rooms in M block. The other was a woman by the name of Dana who, like the old woman, been deemed a low risk and had been placed in a C block room. Looking down at his watch he saw that more time had slipped past then he thought and he decided to not put off his work any longer. Downing the last of his coffee he gathered up the papers and neatly put them back in their manilla folder. As he left the day room he couldn't help but to take one last look at the young nurse before exiting the room.
As he walked down the hallway he could hear voices and a string of other noises as the hospital came to life in the passing moments between morning and midday. While everyone on the first shift was supposed to be there at eight each morning, rarely did anyone actually make that deadline. Even then none of them did any actual work for several hours, aside from the nurses who were constantly busy with this and that. The noises signaled that the day's pattern was beginning to be set and that soon everyone in the hospital would be fully involved in something.
When he reached the elevator he stepped inside the empty box before tapping the button that would take him up to the hospital's second floor. In the moments that passed he tried to keep his mind busy with any thought he could summon, fearing that if he didn't keep his mind busy it would slip back to thoughts of Cassie. Instead it fell on the matter of his latest horror; the note.
Who could have written it? This was the latest question that plagued his mind. When he opened the door there was no sign of who had written the poorly spelled note. Was the note meant as some cruel joke or was there something more to it? Both these questions Lewis desperately wanted answered, but he knew those answers would have to wait as the elevator's doors opened onto the second floor.
Making his way past the nurse's station and the locker rooms Lewis found a pair of double doors that separated the doctor's wing from the patient's wing. Stepping through them he immediately noticed how the near silence he had enjoyed in the elevator changed into a muffled panic. The patients on this floor were a little more unbalanced then those on the first floor, and therefore a little more prone to shouts of delirium, though they were nowhere near as bad as those locked up on the third floor's S block. Having grown used to such noises he just pushed them aside until he reached the room at the end of the hallway labeled "M6". Slowly he reached for the door's handle, pausing for a moment and putting everything except the awaiting patient out of his mind, before entering the room.
Light bathed in from the room's window and cast its rays on a pale man with wild red hair. Sitting on one of the room's two beds he looked out the window as though he were intent on finding something. Oblivious to Dr. Lewis he sat completely still until hearing the door to his room close.
The moment Lewis closed the door the man leapt from where he sat and spun quickly to face the doctor. Upon seeing Lewis the man quickly snapped his right hand up in salute. "PFC Wilson Ashter reporting, sir!" he crisply said.
"Sit down Wilson," Lewis calmly said as he took a seat opposite the bed. When Wilson did nothing but stand there in salute Lewis gave a sigh before saying, "At ease solider."
With the command Wilson let his hand drop from salute and sat back down on the bed across from Lewis. Standing tall and rigid he tried his best to appear as at attention as possible. His eyes focused intently on Lewis as he awaited what the doctor might have to say.
As Lewis looked back at the middle aged Wilson he wondered exactly what he should say. "Always start with the basics," he told himself. "How are you doing Wilson?" he asked of the patient.
"Doing just fine sir. The nurses have been taking real good care of me." Wilson said in what seemed to be a calm matter. There was something though in his eyes that hinted at apprehension over something.
"What is it Wilson?" Lewis asked as he picked up the ill feelings that Wilson was trying to hide.
"Well sir, I've been shut up in this hospital for some time now and I can't get a clear answer from any of the nurses." Slowly Wilson's posture relaxed and he leaned forward a little, though his gaze never left Lewis. "They won't tell me what happened to my platoon, sir. One minute I'm on the beaches of Normandy getting shot at and the next moment I'm here in this hospital. I just want to know if anyone else from my platoon made it out alive."
Raising his hand to his forehead Lewis gave a small sigh as he looked at the man. "Wilson, we've been over this. You never went to Normandy. There was no platoon that you fought in."
"But sir!" Wilson shouted at Lewis. "I remember clearly our orders. Came straight from Roosevelt they did. And I remember the boat ride to the beach. It was our glorious invasion of Europe, the first great step to taking down the Nazis."
"Wilson this isn't World War II. We haven't been at war with the Nazis in nearly sixty years. It's just a delusion your mind has come up with."
"But I was there! The Nazis were flanking us on all sides! My buddy....Frank....he got shot just below the waist. I wanted to go back for him but our orders were to keep pressing forward."
"Wilson listen to me," Lewis said, trying to get through to the man. "Try and remember who you were before you came to the hospital. Try to remember the man you were and the things you did."
"I'm trying to," Wilson said as he brought a fist up to rest on his temple as he winced in pain, "but I can't remember anything from before the beach. There were explosions all around me.....people screaming....had to keep pressing the advantage. There was a bright flash....a mortar round....just to the left of me."
Cautiously Lewis placed a hand on Wilson's shoulder in an attempt to calm him. "Wilson, the war's over. It was over twenty years before you were even born. There's no way you could have fought in it."
Wilson stopped in his movements for a moment and became very still. For a moment Lewis had thought that his attempt to calm the man down had worked. He was wrong.
"No!" Wilson suddenly shouted as he pushed Lewis' hand away. The force of the push was enough that it nearly knocked Lewis out of his chair. Free of the doctor's grip Wilson scrambled towards the corner of the room and brought his knees up to his chest. There he chose to huddle as his fist remained at his temple and his face remained in a look of pain.
As Lewis watched the man curl up in the room's corner he sank back and thought about how weary he had grown of his job. Dealing with insanity on a daily basis had begun to take its toll on him. Despite that weariness he still wanted to help Wilson to come back to some level of sanity, as he wanted for all his patients. Some days though it just didn't seem worth it. "I'll have the nurse bring you something," he said as he rose out of the chair and headed for the door. Wilson gave no response and Lewis couldn't help but to look at the grown man and shake his head for a moment in pity as he exited the room.
With one of his two patients out of the way Lewis took in a deep breath as he made his way towards the elevator. He knew that his next patient would be a lot easier to handle, and for that he was glad. Ever since his encounter with Cassie, Lewis had come to almost fear some of the more disturbed patients that had been locked up at Brookhaven. It wasn't so much that he couldn't handle people in a condition like Cassie's or Wilson's, no his years of training had prepared him for such cases, but it just didn't seem like his heart was in it anymore. A sort of ambition within him died that night along with Cassie and were it not for his overwhelming desire to help cure the people at Brookhaven he might have quit the profession all together. That would have seemed like a waste though for him to have spent so much time and hard work to get to this point only to walk away, he wouldn't allow it. "Course they never taught us what to do when one of your patients mysteriously gets skewered," he quietly said to himself. He would have laughed at that moment but then realized that he was talking to himself and decided to remain silent for the rest of the elevator trip in an effort to keep what little sanity he had left.
Once the elevator reached the first floor it came to a stop before its doors screeched open. The noise, but not Lewis might have bothered anyone else. He, along with everyone else that worked at Brookhaven, had grown used to such things as the hospital's maintenance staff hardly ever kept anything working the way it should. That plus the fact that Lewis had become so wrapped up in his thoughts that at the moment very little would bother him at all.
When Lewis reached Dana's room he calmed any of the ill feelings he had after his visit with Wilson. The woman behind the door was sensitive to how people acted and though she had never been prone to violent outbursts Lewis didn't feel like taking a chance. After taking a deep breath he smoothed his white doctor's coat and did his best to smile, which ended up taking a real effort.
Inside the room Lewis found Dana sitting on one of the beds gently stroking the hair of a doll. While the woman was in her early thirties she had the personality of a five year old. She had never gone off on some insane ranting about monsters, nor had she ever shown a hint of problem behavior. Yet somehow she had still ended up here at Brookhaven. "Just another body to help add a zero onto our funding." Lewis thought to himself. "Dana," he said in a gentle voice as he approached the woman, "how are you doing today?"
"Oh Doctor Lewis," she said as she looked up from the doll. "I didn't hear you come in. You scared me."
"I'm sorry about that Dana."
"Its okay doctor. You didn't scare me that much." Dana sat up and stuck out her bottom lip to try and show how tough she really was.
"Well how are you doing, Dana?" Lewis asked again as he eased down into a chair.
"I'm okay," she said with a shrug as she turned her attention back to the doll. "I keep asking if I can play outside, but the nurses tell me that's a bad idea."
"They only say that because the don't want you to get hurt." Lewis reassured the woman.
"I know, I know. The world is big and scary, but I'm a big girl. I think I could do it for maybe a little while."
"Well the seasons are starting to change Dana. It's not summer anymore and soon it will be too cold for anyone to go outside."
"Then why don't the nurses let me go? They can come with me if they wanna so I won't get hurt."
"It's just not a good idea Dana."
"But..." Dana started as it looked like tears were beginning to collect in hers eyes.
As Lewis looked at the woman he felt pity. Here she was with her only desire to be able to play outside when others her age spent so much time worrying about bills and relationships, yet that simple desire was still denied. Now as he watched the sadness well up inside of her he felt the need to try and find a way to fix things for her so that she could be happy. He knew though deep down that he couldn't.
Looking around the room he tried to think of something to say that would bring her back to a happy mood. When his eyes fell upon the table set at the bed's edge he saw a chance to talk about something else. "Where did you get that flower?" Lewis asked as he looked back at Dana then once again at the brightly colored flower that had been placed in a small vase on the table.
"Flower?" Dana asked with a look of confusion. She then turned around and saw what Dr. Lewis was referring to. With a simple wipe of her face her tears were gone away with the sad look she had shown. Scrambling across the bed she took the flower carefully in her hands and smiled back at Lewis as she looked at it. "My mamma gave this to me. She said it was to make my room pretty."
"Your mother came for a visit?" Lewis asked hoping to further get into a topic he knew would make Dana happier.
"Yeah, last week." she replied as she stared intently at the flower. "She came and gave me this flower and spent the whole day with me."
"How did that go, Dana?"
"It made me happy to see mamma again. I miss her a lot sometimes. She said she missed me too and loved me, but that I had to stay here. She said I was still too sick to come home."
Looking at the woman Lewis once again felt sorry for her. Dana didn't really understand what was going on or why she was at Brookhaven. For that matter she didn't even really understand what Brookhaven was. She just thought that she was sick with some disease and that the doctors and nurses around her were trying to find some cure for her. Little did she know that her 'disease' wasn't something easily cured, and for her maybe impossible. Though she may not have known what was really going on there was still something that Lewis envied in her. What he envied was the seeming innocence that she carried. The innocence that is born into a child and slowly strangled and murdered by the circumstances of age. Lewis wished he could somehow find a way to have just a small piece of that innocence, but in the wake of something as horrible as Cassie's death he knew that innocence would never again grace his being.
The thought of Cassie pulled his mind away from the sobering innocence Dana portrayed and back to the reality of what was going on. The light from outside told him that time was going by faster than he thought as midday was slowing becoming afternoon. Though he had only been given two patients to visit today he knew that there was a stack of paperwork that needed to be finished before he left for home, and he was looking forward to leaving early. "Well Dana, I have other things I must do," he said to the woman that seemed content to silently cradle the flower given to her by her mother. "If you need anything let the nurses know, alright?"
"Okay doctor," Dana absentmindly said to Lewis. Before leaving he stood at the door for a moment and tried one last attempt to capture some of Dana's innocence for himself. When the attempt turned vain he just sighed before pushing the door open and walking out.
On the way to his office Lewis went over in his head the workload he had to do. There was nothing big, just updating a few files, but the thought of any work related to the hospital around him seemed to take so much from him. He was growing weary of dealing with it all and once again his mind brushed to subject of leaving the profession behind, but he vowed that he was doing exactly what he needed to as he walked down the hallway and found the door to his office.
Once inside he immediately dropped the folders he had been carrying onto his desk and fell backwards into his comfy computer chair. Leaning back he took his rough hands and pushed them through his thinning light-brown strands of hair before having them come to rest on his cheeks. The moment he did so he noticed how rough his face was and remembered that it had been several days since he had last shaved. There were some things in his life that had become so insignificant in the wake of more important things that he had grown to care very little about them. Shaving was high on that list and it almost seemed a chore to get himself to do it.
Without thinking his hand made its way to one of the desk's three drawers and carefully opened it. After it was open halfway his hand felt around inside until it found the smooth glass bottle it was looking for. As his hand placed it on the table he opened his eyes and looked at the brownish liquid that filled just under half of the bottle. He stared at it intently for a moment, deciding what was the best thing to do with the bottle, before he found himself putting the bottle back and carefully shutting the drawer.
Sitting up he looked over the various junk that had collected itself on his desk. The desk's residents consisted mostly of assorted memos and files of importance, but there was one scrap of paper that was different and set apart from the rest. Lewis took this scrap in his hand and slowly read over the barely legible message again. In his mind raced a million questions about the note's sender and what exactly the note meant. He knew that it in some way was connected to Cassie and her death; but how? A sudden urge took hold of him as he wished there was some clue he could go on finding out about the letter. When he pulled back to think for a moment he noticed the stack of work he still had to do and a glance at the room's clock showed that his deadline was drawing nearer and nearer. Feeling defeated he let out a sigh and eased back into the chair. He stared at the note for a moment longer and whispered his determination about finding out the letter's purpose before pushing it to the back of his mind and bringing himself to start on his work.