“No, I know. I’m sorry,” I said again, feeling truly ashamed. What was I thinking? I was going to scare Demetria and get myself banned from visiting.
“Keep your voice down or you’ll have to leave.” She went back to her table, shooting me one more dirty look. She scribbled something and I hoped it was only an answer to the crossword puzzle she’d been working on.
Demetria seemed not to have noticed, back to staring at the wall.
I leaned closer. “I think you can hear me, Demetria.” I kept my voice low and soft, trying to coax her out. “And if you understand me, if you know what I’m talking about, I can kind of see why you …” I glanced at her wrapped wrists. “Why you’re here. It can drive you …” No, don’t say crazy. “Um, well, it can make things hard. Really hard.”
She didn’t look at me, but she blinked. A sign?
“I need your help,” I told her. “If you know anything about it … please … I’m kind of on my own here.”
She didn’t move and her eyes were still far away. In my heart I knew we were done. I glanced back at the nurse, wondering if it’d be okay to touch Demetria, just to get her attention, try one more time to make some kind of connection. That’s when I saw him. Zander Dasios. Standing by the window. I was sure of it this time.
Immediately, he stepped out of view.
I looked at Demetria—still out to lunch—then walked quickly to the doorway.
“All done?” the nurse asked.
I shook my head. “Just need the ladies’ room.”
I opened the door, my heart pounding at the thought of talking to Zander, but the hallway was empty.
I looked left and right, trotted to one end, then the other. Deserted. I stopped at the nurses’ station.
“There was a guy here a minute ago. I saw him looking through the window in the lounge. Did he come back this way?”
The lady at the desk looked up from a stack of paperwork. “Didn’t notice.”
“He didn’t check out?”
“No. But a lot of visitors don’t.”
“Well, can you tell me when he checked in?”
She frowned, but seeming eager to be rid of me, pulled out the log sheet, running her finger down it.
“The last visitor, before you, checked in at 3:06 p.m.”
But it wasn’t him. The name next to her finger was Joe Liguori. Zander’s name was nowhere on the list.
She saw me looking and closed the book. “Visitor information is confidential.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Does everyone who comes up here have to sign in?”
“Everyone,” she answered emphatically. I believed her. I’d never gotten more than two steps onto the floor before someone was asking if they could help me.
I walked slowly back to the lounge, thinking how the brain works in funny ways, taking the unlikely scenario of Zander being here and turning it into the ridiculous. Because the first thing I’d thought—my insides doing a fluttery spin at the idea—was that Zander was here because he’d followed me.
I was embarrassed it even crossed my mind. I mean, really. He’d decided the mental hospital was the perfect place to ask me out? Even though he’d never talked to me at school? Right. I shook my head.
Demetria was being escorted out of the lounge when I returned.
“Visiting time is over,” the nurse said.
“But I just ran to the bathroom.”
“Bathroom’s at the other end of the hall.”
“Oh. Yeah, well, I got lost.”
She shook her head. “It’s time for her meds. You’ll have to come back another day.”
“Okay,” I said, forcing myself not to argue. “Bye, Demetria. I’ll be back soon.”
Out of habit, I texted Jack on the train ride home: “visited a friend at the hospital today. she’s greek—getting in touch with my roots.”
And I felt like I was. Inching closer to the answers. It hadn’t been much, but the way she’d looked at me … I felt sure I’d connected with Demetria.
They say three’s a charm. Maybe my next visit would be the one.
Chapter 7
I asked Petra about my Zander sighting when I got home that night. It was after eight and she was just starting on a pizza. “Grab a slice,” she said. She didn’t need to offer twice.
“Nope,” Petra said flatly, between bites. “No way someone could have gotten on the floor without signing in. Not with the desk right by the entry. They’re too strict.”
“That’s what I thought. But what if he used a fake name?”
She shrugged. “He could have, but he’d need ID to go with it.”
“Yeah, but it’s not like it would have to be anything all that official. I mean, he wasn’t trying to buy beer, just visit crazy people.”
“True. But why, Cassie? Why would he bother?”
She had me there. Was I really still clinging to the idea that he’d followed me? I shook my head. It had been Joe Liguori and not Zander after all, though it had looked so much like him.
“Unless he’s the father of her baby,” Petra said casually.
“What?”
“I saw it when I was checking her file today,” Petra said, leaning forward, her eyes gleaming. Sometimes I thought she’d become a psychiatrist just because she was nosy, the smartest person I knew who still read the National Enquirer and US Weekly. “It’s part of the standard blood work; the results came back a few days ago.”
“Wow.” I let the idea—pregnant—roll around for a few seconds, like a marble toward the chute of a funnel. Being a single teen mother would be bad. The responsibility of the mark was awful. What if the two were combined—Demetria realizing she was about to pass her visions on to someone else?
Petra was nodding, still leaning forward, elbows on her knees. “Demetria hasn’t said anything about it to her therapist. Of course, she still hasn’t said anything at all to her therapist.”
“Are you sure she knows? About being pregnant?”
“The hCG levels in her blood put her at about eleven weeks. That’s two missed periods. It’s possible she hasn’t realized it, but I’m guessing she has. It might even explain …”
“… why she’s there,” I finished for Petra.
“Exactly.”
And then what Petra said before came back to me. The part about Zander. She’d been joking, but what if she was right? A player, Liv had called him, as if I’d needed her to tell me that. As if it weren’t totally apparent looking at him. Was he the father? That would be a reason to hide his identity. I was disappointed to think he might be exactly what he seemed.