“This place always gives me the creeps, ” she told her sister. Allyson was sitting safe at home in Cincinnati, more than a thousand miles away.
“Why?” Asked Allyson. “Because it’s full of dying people?”
“Maybe partly,” Lexie said, “but I think it’s more the way they kinda package the whole thing here, like everybody’s getting ready for a birthday party. I mean–
A woman’s voice interrupted. “Can you help me?” It sounded weak, but piercing. “Can you help me?” Again.
Lexie slowed and glanced to her right. In a lounge doorway a woman sat in a wheelchair. Her hair was tousled, her hands outstretched, reaching toward Lexie.
“I, uh — I” Lexie started, then noticed that the woman’s gaze was fixed somewhere behind her, and her eyes seemed unfocused. The image came to Lexie of someone caught in a swirling river at floodtide, about to be swept away.
Lexie swayed uncertainly. Both her hands were full. She heard Allyson saying, distantly, “Are you there?” as if the call had dropped, which it often did. And looking closer, she saw the woman was strapped into the chair, with what looked like a seat belt.
Lexie thought, I bet she’s from the Memory Unit at the other end, and she was parked here while the attendant is outside smoking. She probably doesn’t remember how to unbuckle the belt.
The woman repeated her call, “Can you help me?” and Lexie snapped back to her own reality. “Sorry,” she told the woman, and started walking again. “I’m here,” she said into the phone. “Just got derailed for a minute.”
Lexie was headed for the second last room in the long hallway. Each door she passed had someone’s last name in block black letters on a card in a slot, and she knew most of them by now: Callahan, Bradley, Washington–
— No. Washington’s slot was now empty. Washington — Lexie didn’t know if it was he or she — was dead.
“Looks like another one bit the dust,” she told Allyson.
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