The Law of Nines

“There’s a fire escape on the outside of the building, but you can’t use it except in an emergency. The regular stairway is kept locked to control access to the ninth floor.”

Jax tensed at every clunk and clatter of the elevator’s ascent through the building. She only seemed to relax when it wobbled to a stop and the doors opened.

As she stepped out, her gaze swept the nurses’ station, taking in everything, noting the position of everyone working behind the counter. There were four nurses, three female and one male, plus a woman at the computer. Back down the hall Alex could see an orderly getting a mop and bucket out of a utility room. He was sure that Jax was also checking to make sure that she didn’t recognize anyone.

Standing at the high counter at the nurses’ station, Alex signed his name and wrote in the time. Not a lot of people visited the ninth floor. He saw his signature from previous visits several places higher up on the sheet. He slid the clipboard over and motioned Jax to step up to the counter.

“You need to sign your name and write down the time,” he said under his breath. “Sign your name on the line below mine and copy the time I put in.”

Alex watched her sign her name. He hadn’t known her last name before. When she had finished he slid it back across the counter to one of the nurses on duty. The big, hunched orderly spotted the two of them through the large window in the pharmacy and came out to greet them.

“Alex, what have we here?” Henry broke into a rare grin as he stared at Jax.

“Henry, this is Jax, my fiancée. Jax, this is Henry.”

She didn’t blanch at the size of the man the way most people did. “Nice to meet you, Henry.”

Henry smiled at the sound of his name coming from her lips. “I had begun to worry about Alex, but I can see now that he was just waiting for the right woman to come along.”

“You have that right,” Alex said. Eager not to be pulled into a

“How’d you two meet?” conversation, he changed the subject. “How is my mother doing?”

Henry shrugged. “Same. You know the way she is. At least she hasn’t been causing a ruckus lately.”

“That’s good,” Alex said as he followed Henry to the solid oak door leading to the women’s wing.

In her sweep of the area, Jax noted a man—a patient—staring at them through the little window in the door to the men’s wing. She turned back and watched as the orderly pulled his keys out on the cable extending from the reel attached to his belt and then unlocked the door. He ducked and glanced through the window before tugging open the heavy door.

“Your mother was in the sunroom last time I did rounds. You two have a nice visit.” Henry handed Alex the plastic key for the buzzer. “Ring when you’re finished, Alex.”

Alex had probably heard the man say “Ring when you’re finished” a few hundred times. It seemed he should realize that Alex would know the routine.

Jax glanced at the varnished oak doors to each side as they made their way down the long corridor toward the sunroom. He knew that she was calculating every threat, watching for any source of trouble. Of all the places that concerned him, Alex didn’t really think this was a place they had to worry about. Still, Jax’s attitude was making him jumpy.

“We’re locked in here?” she asked. “There is no way for us to get out on our own if we have to?”

“That’s right. If we could get out, then so could the patients, and they don’t want that. We have to go back out the way we came in. There’s a fire escape that goes downstairs on the side of the building,” he said as he gestured surreptitiously ahead to the fire exit, “but the door is locked. A nurse or an orderly would have to unlock it. There’s a stairway in the back of the nurses’ station. It’s kept locked along with the elevator.”

When they reached the sunroom, Alex spotted his mother alone on a couch against the far wall.

She saw Alex coming. He could tell by the look in her eyes that she recognized him.

29.

HI, MOM,” ALEX SAID in a sunny voice as he came to a stop before her.

She was wearing powder-blue pajama pants and a flowered hospital gown tied in the back. He sometimes brought her nice things to wear but she rarely wore them. She was seldom connected to reality enough to be aware of what clothes she had put on, or to care. On the occasions when she had been aware, she had told him that she was saving her good clothes for when she got out.

Some of her lack of interest in what she wore, he knew, was her mental condition, but a large part of it was the result of the drugs. It was the Thorazine syrup they gave her that left her so heavily sedated, largely indifferent to what was going on around her, and made her shuffle when she walked. It weighed her mind down and made her seem twice her age.