The next morning, his mother cooked breakfast. She liked to do that sometimes, usually when she had been out late the night before (which she hadn't been doing so much since Sheriff Graham died), or if she'd been spending a lot of time at the office. Family Time, she called it. Henry called them Victory Breakfasts, because that's what they actually were. Whenever his mother had beaten someone, bullied them into doing what she told them or frightened them into not speaking up. Whenever she was happy, she made breakfast.
Usually it was pancakes. Once or twice she'd tried French toast, and there had been the Great Frittata Experiment of last May, but today it was pancakes. They were apple, her specialty, and gluten-free and vegan, which was supposed to make them healthy, which meant you weren't supposed to care how they tasted. His mother set a laden, steaming plate in front of him, and Henry carefully dissected them, removing every slice of apple and setting it in a small pile on the side of his plate.
His mother gave his plate a pointed look. "We're playing that game again, are we?"
"It isn't a game," Henry said, and began to cut his pancakes into small, equally-sized squares.
"You love apples," she told him.
"You love apples," Henry told her. "I object to apples on moral grounds." And she knew that. They'd had this conversation several times.
His mother gave him a look. He knew that look. It was the I am right, and you are wrong, but I'm choosing not to make an argument out of this because we are having pleasant Family Time look. It was the look that said he'd won, and that he would pay for it later. For now, she scooped the apples off of his plate and onto hers, and poured herself a cup of coffee.
Henry concentrated on cutting up his pancakes. The pieces had to be equally-sized, but he also had to end up with a number of pieces that was either divisible by either three or four, which was the number of pieces he could get on his fork to make a reasonably-sized bite. When he was younger, it had to be divisible by three only, but Dr. Hopper had talked to him about trying to be a little more flexible.
Seventy-two. Perfect. That meant twenty-four bites. Henry carefully speared three pieces onto his fork, and sampled. If he ever opened a bakery when he was grown up, he was going to use butter in everything and never, ever leave out the gluten. "May I ask a question?"
"You may." She poured the barest, smallest drop of skim milk into her coffee and stirred.
"When you get sick and you have to go to the hospital, do they tie you down?"
"What?"
"On your wrists. Do they tie you down? So it'd leave marks."
His mother set the spoon down. "Why are you asking me this?"
The lie came easy. He'd had a lot of practice. "Ryan was telling me about this movie his brother let him watch. About a hospital. And when people went there they got tied down and scary stuff happened to them."
"Was this a horror movie?" His mother had strong opinions about horror movies.
Henry shrugged.
His mother gave him an arch look as she started to cut into her pancakes, making sure to include a lot of apples. "I think it sounds a little inappropriate for a ten-year-old boy. I think I should have a talk with Ryan's parents."
Ryan was going to pound him. "But do they? At real hospitals?"
"No, of course not," his mom said, patting his hand. "Not unless you need it."
She made it sound so comforting. She was good at making things sound comforting; Henry wondered if she practiced it, like he did with lying. "Who needs it?"
She took a second before answering. Henry could almost see her putting the answer together in her head. "Sometimes, when people are very sick, or they're seeing or hearing things that aren't there, they try to hurt people, or themselves. In those cases, yes, patients may need to be restrained for their own good."
For their own good. His mother used that one a lot. "No," Henry said. "That's not true. That's something you say when you want to do things to people that they don't want."
"Henry — "
"You don't get to decide what's good for other people."
"In an ideal world, yes, that's so. But sometimes people are too sick, or they can't think right, and then other people — "
"No." It was very nearly a shout, and Henry could feel himself shaking with anger. He could feel it, red hot and glowing underneath his skin. "That's just an excuse. It's their life, not yours, and it's wrong, and you know it's wrong. And you do it anyway."
His mother set her fork down and sat back in her chair. "I think this isn't about a horror movie. I think someone overheard something about that patient who escaped from the hospital."
Henry didn't say anything. He thought it was probably the best option.
"I don't know what someone might have overheard, but that patient is sick, and she is dangerous. She tried to hurt me, when I wanted to take her back to the hospital," his mother said, holding out her right hand. It was wrapped up in an Ace bandage. "She needs to be confined — "
"For her own good," Henry said.
"Yes." His mother smiled at him, and speared an apple slice with her fork.
Henry thought about how the lady had looked when he first saw her, sitting in the river. Scared. Terrified. The tears streaming down her face. He had wanted to help, but instead he messed up and now the lady was back at the hospital and his mother was smiling and made him pancakes. Henry hated his mother then. You weren't supposed to hate people when you were just a kid, because you didn't know anything. You were supposed to wait until you were grown up and had experience and knew what people were like before you could hate them. But Henry knew his mother, and he hated her.
And he was here for eight more years. Whatever happened with the curse and with Emma, his mother had legally adopted him, and this wasn't a magical fairy tale world where you could run off and find a nice woodcutter to live with. Here the police found you and brought you back. There were laws here, about adoption and custody and everything; Henry had Googled them. There were laws here about everything.
He didn't like thinking about that. It always made his stomach twist up and his heart start pounding and a horrible, stinging, powerless feeling rise up in the back of his throat until he thought he was going to vomit. But his mother was staring at him — smiling at him — and he was powerless. He knew it. And his mother knew it.
He ate his pancakes.
She woke, slowly, to sunshine. It was bright and warm, streaming through the blinds on the wide window across from her.
The window.
She pushed herself up, tried to push past the muzzy, thick-headedness. She was out — she had gotten out. Her one leg felt heavy, and awkward, and it took a while, staring at the big white cast wrapped around it, to work her way backwards through her numb, tired mind until she remembered the car. Truck. The impact.
She looked around at the room, twice as big as what she'd had, and there was a window and a door and the door was standing open… And she was lying on a real bed, with a mattress and pillows and a blanket.
Out. She was out.
But — no. She frowned. The smell. The smell was still the same, and the sound of sneakers squeaking against the tile floor. And through the open door she saw doctors and nurses strolling through the hallways.
She shifted, tried to push herself up further, straining to use arms that seemed to have forgotten how to work and a body that seemed to be, simply, drained, and had to stop, gasping, at the tight vice of pain squeezing her chest. She could handle it, she'd been in pain before…
The thought was so strange it stopped her. She'd… she'd been in pain. At some point. She couldn't…remember when, but she knew there had been pain like this…weight on her chest, gasping for breath, chains pulling at her wrists and ankles…
"Oh, no you don't." A tall blonde man in a long white coat strode in, crossing straight to her bed. "We understand, all right? Consider the message received. You don't want to be here. Unfortunately, you're stuck here for the time being, at least until we're satisfied that you're stable and you're not going to do anything ridiculous like OD'ing on your meds again, got it?"
She didn't say anything. He looked her over and said, "I mean it — you try and run out of here again, which would be really stupid and dangerous in your condition, and I'll have to have you restrained. I don't want that, and I'm going to go out on a limb here and you don't want that, so let's not do anything that will make the really tired doctor have to do that. Okay?"
She wanted to ask what was going on, but she didn't. That would have meant breaking her silence, and for so long, so so long, her silences were her only weapon. Instead she pushed herself up, all the way, past the tiredness, hissing her way through the pain, trying to get her legs over the side of the bed, but the cast was heavy and awkward. And the man was there, pushing her back. She tried to push away — to scrape and bite and free herself — but she had no strength left, and the man called out and nurses rushed in. They held her down, cooing ridiculous things like there, there and calm down and it will be all right. The man stepped away, and stepped back, holding a syringe.
She didn't speak then, but she did scream. Or it would have been a scream, but she hadn't used her voice in so long, so it was simply sound, rough and raw and frantic and wild, sheer terror made sound. She fought as hard as she could, which wasn't very hard, and because she couldn't fight she screamed.
She tried to reach up, to get out, to get away, but there were hands, holding her, pinning her, in spite of the fight, the screams.
The Woman would come. She would come, and she would stand there, smiling down at her, eyes alight with triumph. They would send her back. She knew they would send her back, and the rage and terror twisted up in her chest and escaped as screams. Oh god, not back there, oh, please please god not back there, she would rather die, please just let her die…
She felt, vaguely, beyond the pain, the short sharp stab of a needle. The hands held her fast until the drugs drifted through her and held her down.