by Cara McKenna
INTERMIX BOOKS
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have control over and does not have any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
AFTER HOURS
An InterMix Book / published by arrangement with the author
PUBLISHING HISTORY
InterMix eBook edition / April 2013
Copyright © 2013 by Cara McKenna.
Excerpt from Unbound copyright © 2013 by Cara McKenna.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
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375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
ISBN: 978-1-101-62198-1
INTERMIX
InterMix Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group
and New American Library, divisions of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
INTERMIX and the “IM” design are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Acknowledgments
Special Excerpt from Unbound
About the Author
Chapter One
I heard the sign before I saw it, bent metal rattling in the breeze as my car rounded a curve.
DO NOT PICK UP HITCHHIKERS!
The directive was bisected by a ribbon of red rust, as though the sign were bleeding out from its bolt.
Duh-duh-dunnn . . . Cue the requisite horror-movie music.
But ominous sign notwithstanding, the road was quiet and pretty. Elms and oaks and firs rose up on either side, watery dawn sunshine winking between green leaves to the east. There were no pop bottles or old fast-food bags littering the roadside, those scraps of urban apathy I’d grown so used to, living in southeast Michigan my entire life.
Too quiet and pretty, my paranoid inner narrator whispered.
My eyes narrowed at an elderly man shuffling along the shoulder with a walking stick. Though he looked harmless, I knew better than to trust such a thought. But he didn’t acknowledge my approach let alone try to thumb a lift, so I decided he probably was just an old man, out for an early stroll on a June morning.
Then again, I was heading in the wrong direction. If he’d just escaped from a mental institution, hitching a ride from me would land him right back where he’d come from. My heart slowed when a bend in the road took him out of my rearview.
I spotted the gate first—a tall, stately gate, its wrought iron glossy with a fresh coat of black paint, and the name Larkhaven glowering from fifteen feet up, flanked by security cameras. I could feel them blinking at me, curious as crows. I edged my cranky sedan forward to a brick pedestal, and leaned out to press a button below a panel labeled Intercom. A vision of a hand grasping my wrist flashed across my brain and I yanked my arm back inside, bonking my elbow.
“Mother—”
A speaker crackled, followed by a bored female voice. “Good morning. What brings you to Larkhaven today?” This was the guest entrance, I knew, and employees, deliveries, drop-offs, and pick-ups usually came the back way. But I didn’t have security clearance yet.
“I’m Erin Coffey,” I told the panel, rubbing my elbow. “I’m starting today, with Dennis Frank?” Was I? It came out as a question, like I didn’t really believe it myself.
“Hang on.” Silence, then another crackle. “Okay, come on in. Employee lot is all the way around to the left. Follow the signs to the Starling building and the staff entrance, and hit zero on the intercom.”
The gates glided in, divorcing the Lark and haven. I cranked up my window on the sweet spring air and punched down the door lock.
I drove slowly, taking in the grounds as I passed a stand of pines. If it weren’t for the imposing black fence, it would’ve passed for a small private college—five or six three-story yellow brick buildings connected by paved walking paths, green lawns dotted with benches. Nicely maintained, if a bit worn around the edges. A bit eerie as well, with no one to be seen save for a tall woman in blue scrubs, speed-walking across the grass.
The main hospital that governed Larkhaven was a quarter mile away, this campus dedicated to outpatient programs serving those with developmental issues, mental illness, substance abuse problems and the like, along with several short-term residences, plus an eldercare facility with a focus on Alzheimer’s and dementia.
Skylark, one building’s prominent placard proclaimed. Warbler, said another, and Waxwing. The employee lot was just behind the building labeled Starling, Limited Access. My building. Made sense, that the locked ward would be closest to the drop-off zone.
I eyed the windows as I pulled into a free space, searching for signs of violence and chaos, confirmation that I’d made a Big Mistake, but I saw only slim metal bars. They were a grim comfort, at least while I was outside. They kept the scary people in. But once I was inside, I might not find them so reassuring.
And I didn’t mean it, about them being scary people. The mentally ill had enough stigmas to bear without a psych professional casting aspersions.
But I was scared. It felt like someone had drawn my ribs together with corset laces, tugging them tight, tight, tight until I couldn’t get a deep breath, lungs and heart bound.
I’d been immersed in my slow-motion nursing education for four years, now certified as an LPN, and had spent six years as my grandmother’s live-in caregiver. She’d passed in the winter, peacefully. A mercy, by the end. But she’d been the center of my life, and losing her had left me adrift. My certification felt like the only anchor I had, the only arrow pointing me toward anything.
My grandma’s dementia may have disturbed its fair share of people, but she’d been a gentle soul, generally. She’d only ever shouted out of fear and confusion, never anger, whereas this was a high-security ward designed specifically for men who suffered from persistent, disruptive psychotic episodes. A dozen unpredictable, occasionally violent men. And little old me, the LPN who’d had exactly one real patient in her entire so-called nursing career.
And I was little. An inch or two shorter than average, plus after a few y
ears on what I called the Social Security Diet—a lot of beans and toast and soup to stretch the pathetic amount of money the government deemed adequate to keep me and my grandma warm and fed and clothed—I didn’t cut a very authoritative figure. I had a baby face and round blue eyes to match, too-soft light brown hair that defied all promises made by thickening shampoos. Once on the ward, the most intimidating thing about me would surely be the syringe in my hand.
All my worries gathered in a scrum and elbowed for attention. You’ll get stabbed with a plastic fork. You’ll fuck up some poor man’s medication and give him a seizure. Your coworkers will treat the patients cruelly and you’ll be too chickenshit to report them. Amber’s stupid redneck boyfriend will pick today to show up and cause drama, and you won’t be there to rescue her.
Fucking Amber. My fucking sister whom I fucking loved.
I’d loved her from the moment I first held her as a baby, when I was five, but I wouldn’t be here—taking a job that frightened me in this nowhere corner of the state—if it weren’t for her. Her and my nephew Jack in that grubby little house on that grubby little block, thirty minutes’ drive from Larkhaven. If I wasn’t around to check in on them, nobody else would be doing the job. Nobody except Amber’s awful boyfriend or ex-boyfriend or ex-fiancé or whatever she was calling him this week. Jack’s father, she was seventy percent sure. When she was mad at him it dropped to ten percent, soared to ninety-nine whenever they reconciled. She’d turned into our mom. Same temper, same lousy taste in men; a too-young mother prone to impulsive, dramatic mistakes. Our mom had worked two jobs and treated dating like the night shift. Treated dating like playing the lottery, always imagining, This guy will be the one to lift me out of this shithole. She’d never been a lucky one, but you couldn’t fault her determination, putting in the hours at the singles’ bars, upping her odds.
I’d basically raised Amber from when I was ten or so, been the one who got her up for school, fed her, cracked the whip on homework. Not that I did such a great job, considering she’d dropped out at sixteen. I only prayed she wouldn’t take yet another leaf out of our mom’s book and ask me to raise her kid . . . Though mainly because I knew, given how much I adored Jack, there was no question I’d choose to turn my life inside out and accept.
After I shut off the engine, I held the steering wheel and counted my breaths, waiting for my heart to slow, for those corset laces to go slack. They never did. I pocketed my keys and stepped into the cool, damp morning air. There was birdsong all around and the grounds smelled of spring, like the final weeks of school before the freedom of summer. I sucked it in, knowing my first day would be busy, and that I might not get outside again until the end of my twelve-hour shift.
My flats crunched across the gravel lot, to the door labeled Staff Entrance. I pushed the zero key on a bank of buttons.
“Yes?”
“This is Erin Coffey, for Dennis Frank.”
“Hang on.”
I waited in silence for a full minute or more, then the metal door swung in, and a man was smiling at me.
“Come on in,” he said. “Welcome to Larkhaven.”
I stood aside in the little windowless foyer, and the man I assumed was Dennis let the heavy door hiss shut before swiping another open with a keycard. He led me down a short hall and into a cramped break room with a kitchenette, tidy but cast in a sickly glow by the fluorescent bulbs.
Dennis looked about fifty, with gold-rimmed glasses and a professorial goatee, and overgrown salt-and-pepper hair. He wore scrubs, pale blue, and boat shoes. He seemed at once kind and exhausted, defeated and determined, with one of those expressive, guileless faces that told you everything he was feeling.
“Coffey?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Erin Coffey.”
“Oh, sorry, I meant, would you like some coffee?” To demonstrate, he filled a paper cup from a carafe on the counter. When I waved it away he added a packet of sugar and took a sip. He smiled. “Six thirty in the morning on your first day and no caffeine? We’d been hoping to find somebody superhuman for the day shift.”
“I had a cup on the drive over.” Plus, being here had me so jittery, more coffee would surely plunge me headlong into my own psychotic break, landing me in Larkhaven as a patient.
“Well, Erin Coffey, I’m Dennis Frank.” We shook. He paused to check a roster of names listed on a large whiteboard beside the door. “I’ll be showing you the ropes this morning, before I hand you off to one of the senior nursing staff. The nurses run this ward. You’ll see doctors around, of course, for groups and one-on-ones. But their offices are all here on Starling One. S1. Up on the secure floors, S2 and 3, where you’ll spend most of your time, it’s the nurses’ show.” He said it with a little air of false haughtiness.
Dennis and I had spoken a few times already. I’d gone through the interview process at an affiliated hospital back home, recruited via a job fair. Dennis had been present, if only as a kind voice coming through a conference line. He was a veteran nurse himself, turned shift manager and administrator, and he’d been working at Larkhaven for fifteen years, most of them on the locked ward, the unit reserved for the most dangerous patients. What shocking things had he seen in all that time? What shocks were in store for me? My invisible corset gave a mean squeeze.
“So we’re standing in the most important room in the building,” Dennis said, swiveling, gesturing with outstretched arms. “The coffee room. Some argue the smoking patio is more important, but to be fair, it’s not technically a room. Do you smoke?”
I shook my head.
“Give it a week,” he teased, but the joke was playful, not cynical. “Actually where we are now is called the sign-in room. Everyone comes in, writes their name in the appropriate slot so we know what their duty is for the day. You’ll be signing in as a general LPN, so easy-peasy, everyone will know to find you in the usual places throughout your shift. But our orderlies, for example, might sign in for general duties or be assigned for close obs on a difficult patient, so everyone will see they’re busy with a specific resident.”
He grabbed a dry-erase marker for me, and tapped the whiteboard. I printed my first name carefully in a free slot in the nurses’ section, and my in and out times, the same number for both columns—seven to seven. Dennis told me to write nurse shadow in the duties column, so I did, picturing myself as a mysterious Batman-like figure in a dark gray catsuit, black cape, stethoscope glinting in the moonlight. Nurse Shadow. A useful vision, lending me the illusion of unflagging competence until the day I’d feel it for real.
Dennis led me next to a storage room, eyeballed me and said, “Definitely a small.” He slid a bin from a shelf and handed me a set of butter yellow scrubs.
“The women’s lockers are through there,” he said, pointing to a door. “There’s a hamper for the dirties, and you can grab a fresh set from in here each morning. Yellow for the nurses and techs, green for the orderlies, blue for senior staff and managerial scum like me. Plus the classic white coats for the doctors and therapists. The residents in this ward wear gray. The residents in other programs are allowed to wear their own clothes, but at Starling we keep a dress code. Some say it’s depressing, makes it feel like a prison. But our patients do best when things are predictable—egalitarian, if you will—and we’ve found the uniforms help.”
“Right.”
“Bring your own lock if you’ve got valuables, but don’t worry if you don’t have one today. We’re all too tired to steal much of anything.”
I didn’t own anything of value. My cell phone was six years old, practically a brick, and I hadn’t worn any jewelry. If anyone swiped my car keys, they’d wind up driving off in a ’93 Ford Tempo, more orange than teal these days from the rust. The thing had been cranky since I’d inherited it from my uncle in my junior year of high school, and the only force holding it together now was a kind of willful
, joyless, made-in-Michigan pride. The thief was welcome to it.
I changed quickly and met Dennis back in the hall.
“Every morning at ten to seven we have a hand-off meeting in the lounge,” Dennis said as he led me into a stairwell with another swipe of his keycard. We hiked up two flights, then banged a left down an echoing corridor. “The overnight staff catch the day crew up with anything that’s gone on. Ditto in the evenings. Bit old-school, but that’s kind of the Larkhaven way, you’ll find. Usually takes five minutes or less. Then at seven we start waking the residents.”
With a combination of a swipe and deft punching at a keypad, Dennis preceded me into a more welcoming hallway, lined on one side with tall windows, weak morning sun glinting off its clean linoleum floor. Another swipe and code and we were inside a nurses’ station, with a counter and a wired glass window for handing out meds, lots of shelves arranged tidily with boxes and equipment, a scrub sink, and a half-dozen filing cabinets.
The station looked onto a plain room with beige couches and chairs, two big windows; a high-ceilinged space lit equally with overhead bulbs and sunshine, as square and adequate and inoffensive as a Saltine.
There was a patient dressed in the requisite gray in the lounge, leaning a hip on the deep windowsill with his large arms crossed over his equally large chest. He stared over his shoulder into the yard beyond the glass, a placid expression suggesting he hadn’t noticed the cage of white bars marring his view. His head was shaved to brown stubble, and even from twenty feet away I could make out the scar running from beneath his ear down his neck. More an inmate than a patient, he seemed to me, fresh from a brawl in the exercise yard. I eyed the glass of the nurses’ station window, suddenly doubting its un-shatterability. Jesus, what on earth have I signed up for?
Salary, I reminded myself. Insurance. And cheap rent, for as long as I could stand living in the drab little apartment I’d been offered, in the transitional residence just across the road. It primarily housed adults who were enrolled in or had completed programs at Larkhaven, a stepping-stone toward truly independent living. I’d been sent photos. Its walls were painted cinderblock, the space tiny, and I’d be sharing a communal bathroom and kitchen. In all likelihood it would feel far too much as though I were going home to another ward, after I’d clocked out of this one.
