Ward D

by Freida McFadden

If they were well controlled, the unit wouldn’t have to be locked, would it? But that’s not the real reason I am dreading my night on Ward D. I can’t tell Dr. Sleepy the real reason I was tossing and turning last night. I can’t tell anyone the real reason I’m desperately terrified of Ward D.

The truth is, I’ve already seen Ward D. I visited it once before, nearly a decade ago. Back when my best friend was a patient there. I still remember her matted hair and wild eyes when I came to visit. She didn’t look like my best friend anymore—more like a wild animal closed up in a cage. But the thing that sticks with me most—the thing I will never forget—are the words she spit out at me just seconds before I ran out of the unit, swearing to myself I would never return ever again: You should be the one locked up here, Amy.

“What if,” I say quietly, “at the end of the night, they get confused and think that I’m one of the patients there and they don’t let me out?”

“What little girl?” “The little blond girl who was standing next to me.” “I didn’t see a little blond girl standing next to you. What are you talking about, Amy?”

Much to my surprise, a little girl is standing there in the grass. In fact, it’s the same little girl with blond curls who I saw over the weekend when we were at Ricardo’s. The one who told me to steal that sweater from the store.

“No.” Dr. Beck frowns. “He’s not ‘a schizophrenic.’ We don’t refer to patients that way. Miguel is a human being, and he’s more than his psychiatric diagnosis. He is not a schizophrenic—he’s a man who has schizophrenia. Do you understand that?”

A mental health diagnosis is not a death sentence. All the patients in this unit are just trying to get better.

My eyes dart between the labels and come to rest on the chart of the patient

in 905. The one with the blue eyes flecked with yellow. My whole body turns cold when I see the name written on the chart: CARPENTER Oh no.

After all, if you meet someone who is truly mentally ill, that’s the only way to know that you’re sane.

Still, something in my gut is screaming one thing: This man is lying to me.

It’s that little girl with the blond curls and frilly pink dress. And she’s standing in the corner of my room.

How does somebody get to the point where their brain stops functioning like a normal brain? That their reality completely breaks from the reality that every other person in the world lives in? And what’s to stop it from happening to anyone else?

“Damon Sawyer wants to kill every single one of us tonight.” “Why…” My voice is a hoarse croak. “Why do you think that?” “Because that’s what he told me he’s going to do.”

“How about in the morning?” I suggest gently. “No, you don’t understand.” Miguel grits his teeth. “The morning is too late.” “But why?” I press him. “Because my father say Damon Sawyer is gonna kill us all by the morning. Kill us all. Muerto.”

“Between you and me…” Mary drops her voice. “I’m not even sure if I’m going to make it through the night.”

“I’m not knitting because I enjoy it. I’m knitting for protection.” I shake my head. “What do you mean?” She looks down at the two knitting needles in her hands. “You can’t exactly bring a weapon onto a psych unit. But in case I need protection, I believe these will do nicely, don’t you?”

Mary reaches into the handbag next to her chair. She digs around for a moment and pulls out another knitting needle. She holds it out to me. “Here,” she says. “You’re going to need this.”

But before I have a chance to celebrate the return of the lights, a man stumbles in the direction of the nurses’ station. It’s Miguel, except he’s not wearing four shirts anymore. In fact, he’s not wearing any clothing at all. And he’s covered in blood.

pick up the copy of Garp to flip through it. But when I flip open the first page, my heart stops. This book has been hollowed out.

Such as, in this case, a large number of multicolored pills. I recognize them as looking similar to the ones that Ramona has been passing out.

And then I see him. The dark figure in the corner of the room. Waiting for me. And the door slams shut. I don’t even have time to scream.

He glances at the closed door, then back at my face. “I saw the blood on the floor too.” That is the last thing I expected him to say. “What?”

“I heard it from my room,” he says. “And then here’s the really wild part…” He takes a deep breath. “When I came out to the hall to see what was going on, I think I saw the door to Seclusion One slamming shut.”

After I punch in the final number of the code, I expect to hear that loud alarm noise and a click as the door unlocks. But instead, all I hear is a soft buzzing noise.

I’m never going to fall asleep. It’s impossible. No matter how tired I am, there’s just no way. And those are my last thoughts before I drift off.

And the noise inside Seclusion One has gone suspiciously silent. But before I can think about it, an ear-piercing sound breaks into my thoughts. It’s a woman screaming.

But she wasn’t alone. According to the chart, she went on her crime spree with her boyfriend. Who presumably came to the hospital at the exact same time she did. The same night Will was admitted to the emergency room. Oh my God.

Will is Jade’s boyfriend.

kitchen. And that’s when I realize whose house this is. My mouth falls open. The drink I have been holding in my right hand drops to the floor, spilling brown liquid all over the grimy kitchen tiles, intermingling with the droplets of crimson.

I yank the blankets off the bed, not bothering to be quiet anymore. I saw a lump on the bed, and I realize now that it was the scarf Mary had been working on.

My heart is pounding as I come out of the bathroom. But not as much as it is when I realize there’s a silhouette in the doorway to Mary’s room.

“It’s just very hard to believe you after you lied about those pills. I mean, you haven’t taken any of the antipsychotics you’ve been prescribed. How can I trust you?”

“Look, I didn’t take those pills because I don’t need them.”

“They never went away because I never heard them in the first place. I was never hearing voices. I… I lied about it.”

I know at that moment, my life will never, ever be the same.

I didn’t do it. I didn’t kill my trigonometry teacher. Obviously.

Well, not everything. I didn’t tell her about the little blond girl. But the little girl disappeared soon after that. And I never saw her again.

If you come back here again, Amy, I will kill you.

Whenever I pick up a book, it’s like an escape. For an hour or two, I get to be part of the book world instead of my own much more boring world.

As I start reading, a sick feeling comes over me. Oh my God. I wish I had read this from the beginning. This changes absolutely everything.

Sawyer was with his girlfriend. The two of them were drinking beer together, and they decided it would be hilarious to go and rob a bunch of banks using their beer bottles. So they went all over town, demanding money from bank clerks while pointing their beer bottles at them. Jade does have a boyfriend. But her boyfriend isn’t Will Schoenfeld, who was never hearing voices at all and just went too far to achieve his dream to be a reporter for The New York Times.

No, Jade’s boyfriend is Damon Sawyer.

I heard he’s been working on the unit for like fifty years!

Except the man I’ve been working with all night has definitely not been a psychiatrist for fifty years, since he himself is only in his thirties.

If the attending physician on this unit is an old man, then who the hell was just with me in this room?

When anyone leaves the unit, the door alarm sounds off. It’s like a siren—you can hear it everywhere. And I haven’t heard that sound once since I first entered Ward D.

But if that were true, we would have heard that deafening siren noise emit from the door. Which means… Cameron never left.

Oh no. Oh my God. I never should have opened the door to this room. I should have made a run for it while I still could.

All I know is I will never forget it, not until the day I die. I will never stop seeing this room, even when I close my eyes to go to sleep at night.