John Burley - THE HIDING PLACE

Good morning,” I greeted Amber, stepping to the counter at Allison’s Bakery for my usual cup of joe. She smiled widely as she poured and, sliding the beverage across the counter, selected a few small confections and popped them into a sample cup for me to try. I picked one up between my thumb and forefinger, raising an eyebrow.

“Cinnamon apple crunch,” she said, “with just a touch of hazelnut.”

I took a sip of coffee, forgetting to blow on it first, and almost burned my lip.

“Be careful,” Amber warned, but I held up a hand, accepting the blame. I knew better. The coffee here was hot. You had to give it a minute.

“Don’t forget these,” she said, tapping the cup of apple crunch. I picked it up and took it with me as I crossed the bakery, stopping to add some milk to my coffee and to toss the sweets in the trash before temptation got the best of me. I waved to Amber as I exited the shop, heading in to work a little earlier than usual in order to review some charts and catch up on paperwork.

I was thinking about the day ahead of me when a screech of brakes brought me around to the present, my body flinching as a dark Chevy sedan came to an abrupt stop at the crosswalk, its bumper only a foot and a half from my lower leg. My heart, responding to the threat after it was over, doubled its pace in the space of a few seconds.

“Sorry,” I called out, shamefaced, realizing I hadn’t checked for traffic before stepping into the street. I stepped back onto the sidewalk, motioned for him to proceed. The car idled for a good ten seconds, enough time for people behind it to start tapping their horns. I wondered whether he wanted me to cross, but I couldn’t make out the driver through the glint of sun coming off the windshield. I decided to hold my ground, indicating again that he should go. The car sat idling for another few seconds, then lurched forward and passed me, hurtling down the street and hooking a right at the next intersection.

I’d barely had a second to look through the side window at the occupants, but I’d taken in as much as I could. The faces of the driver and passenger had been turned in my direction, contemplating me with their slate-faced stares. It was the two businessmen I’d noticed in the coffee shop the week before, on the day after the storm. My mind moved from day to day since then, realizing their consistent lingering presence in the background of my commute: at the bakery that first day, in the doorway of the flower shop perusing the day’s offerings, at the newspaper stand a half block from here, on the park bench across the street, and now …

I walked quickly up the hill toward the hospital, checking over my shoulder several times along the way. I’m just spooked by the near miss, I told myself, that’s all . Of course I had seen them many times before on my way to work. They were on their own way to work, weren’t they? There was nothing more to it than that. But always lingering, a small voice inside my head interjected. Never in a hurry. Never actually going anywhere . Until …

Until today. And what’s different about today? Well, I was heading in earlier, that was one thing. Perhaps I’d caught them off guard, thrown off their schedule. But there was something else that was different as well. I thought of my confrontation with Dr. Wagner the day before. There’s more to this case than you’re prepared to handle, he’d advised me, but I had bulldozed ahead anyway, pushing him for answers that he was either unable or unwilling to give. In doing so, I’d raised my head above the water, called attention to myself as a possible threat to whatever or whomever he was protecting. In response, the incident today had been … what? An escalation? A warning?

I passed through Menaker’s guarded gates with a palpable sense of relief. For the first time, I felt the full weight of the protection it had to offer—not to the patients hospitalized here or to the outside world, but to me personally. I looked back toward the fence, the iron posts standing shoulder to shoulder like sentinels.

There are broader forces at work here than you can imagine , Wagner’s voice echoed inside my head. Suffice it to say that Jason is only tangentially involved .

Perhaps, I thought, but he is involved . And now … so am I.

I’ve mentioned before that, in the best sense of the word, Menaker is an asylum. It is about safety. But lately, it seemed, Menaker was also about secrets. Was it really possible that Dr. Wagner had been compromised, infected by whatever broader forces he was referring to? Could I no longer trust him? As I looked around once more—at the security cameras perched strategically near the corners of the buildings, at the two nurses engaged in hushed conversation as they shuffled along the walkway to my right, at the guard observing me with an innocuous smile from the booth near the facility’s front entrance—I began to wonder how far such an infection might spread, about how far it may have already spread.

There was no way of knowing for sure, so I lowered my eyes to the concrete walk in front of me and headed inside.

You were telling me about your conflict with Michael,” I reminded him. We were near the northern perimeter of the property, and as we talked I found myself frequently looking past the fence at the streets beyond, my eyes searching for idling cars, for the two men who’d nearly run me down earlier today. A few people shuffled by on the sidewalk, glancing toward us with interest, curiosity, or vague indifference—I wasn’t sure. I had the persistent feeling of being watched, although there wasn’t much to be done about it. The perception, I knew, might not even be accurate. Most likely, it would pass.

Jason’s eyes were focused on our shuffling feet. The spring breeze lifted a finger of dark hair from his forehead, and I could see the hint of a scar—like a reverse comma—on his left temple. It actually added to his appeal, giving his youthful face a touch of maturity. Maybe it was simply the intimacy of knowing his secret, of having been trusted with a view at the portions of the wound that ran much deeper than skin.

“I don’t know if I lost Michael’s friendship completely that day—the day he struck me. But what I did lose was his willingness to express that friendship, to try to understand what I was going through. He told people what had happened. To this day, I can’t bring myself to believe it was something he did out of maliciousness. Maybe he was confused or hurt. He probably felt betrayed in a way—like everything we’d shared up to that point had been a lie. If he’d realized that I’d been as surprised by my actions as he was, that if this was an ambush it had been sprung on both of us … He would have scoffed, I’m sure. But it was true. Still, it didn’t matter. He told people, I think, because it was impossible for him not to. There are some things you can’t carry around on your own for very long. I don’t blame him. But once it was something beyond the two of us, there was really no stopping it.”