The Affinities by Robert Charles Wilson

Author:Robert Charles Wilson [Wilson, Robert Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781466800779
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

Maybe understandably—or maybe not—a couple of days passed before it occurred to me to call Rachel Ragland.

She didn’t answer her phone, and I left an apologetic message and asked her to get in touch. Another day passed. Nothing. I drove to Rachel’s building, parked, and buzzed her apartment from the lobby. Silence. So I called the local hospitals and found her at Vancouver General. She was in “for observation,” and unless I was family, visiting hours were two to six, at Rachel’s discretion.

By my watch that left a window of three hours, and the hospital was only twenty minutes away. It hadn’t rained since the weekend. The weather had slipped into an autumn lull, all soft blue skies and crisp breezes, and it was an easy drive. But I felt as if some transparent part of me had become opaque: I looked at the world through a lens of clouded glass.

It turned out that Rachel was in a ward in the hospital’s psychiatric wing. A locked ward, though that wasn’t as bad as it sounded; all it meant was that patients and visitors needed authorization to pass through the glass-and-mesh doors next to the nurses’ station. I waited twenty minutes for someone to find Rachel, give her my name, and find out if she was willing to see me. At last a nurse (a young guy in powder-blue scrubs) waved me in. I followed him to Rachel’s bed.

She was dressed in slacks and a plaid flannel shirt. There were slippers on her feet, and she was sitting up, an ancient paperback novel in her hand. She gave me a long, searching look. She was clean and reasonably alert but I could tell by a certain slackness around her eyes that she was back on her meds. Before I could speak she said, “They think I’m suicidal. That’s why I’m stuck here. But I was only cutting.” She held out her left arm to show me her bandages, a swatch of cotton and tape that ran from wrist to elbow. “You know about that? People who cut themselves sometimes?”

“I’ve heard of it,” I said.

“Well, I’m one of them.”

“I’m surprised. I never saw—”

“What—scars? This was the first time I did my arm. I used to just cut my legs. Up high, so I could wear shorts and not show anything. But not a bathing suit. Which was okay because I don’t swim. And I was pretty healed up when you saw me without my clothes on. I’d been good. On the mend. But you could have found scars if you’d looked for them.” She put a bookmark in her paperback novel and set it aside. “So why are you here?”

“Suze called me,” I said. “That night.”

“Yeah, I know. I heard all about it. You told her to phone 911.”

“Yeah.”

“Even though she wasn’t supposed to do that.”

“She said so, but—”

“Because I trained her that way. You know why? Fucking social workers, that’s why! There were a couple of incidents back before I got my prescriptions and now I’m on their watch list or whatever.

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