Music in the Night (Logan 4)

"Distance wouldn't matter to me." He looked at me intently, his eyes burning bright.

Noticing the way he gazed at me made me wonder if I had had a boyfriend before my accident. I knew Lawrence would be disappointed, but that wasn't what kept me from remembering. I realized it had to be something else. But what? Why did my heart start to pound just at the idea?

Suddenly Mary Beth got up and came over to us. One of the younger girls had been talking to her and what she said made her look unhappy.

"Denise says she overheard Billy and another attendant talking about Megan. She says they said Megan's mother is having her transferred to a real nuthouse. From the way they described it, it doesn't sound nice. They called her a straitjacket case." She looked back. "Lulu's very upset. She heard most of it. Now she's just sitting there sucking her thumb. I don't know what to do. I don't want her to end up in the Tower, too."

"Poor kid," Lawrence said. "And poor Megan." "When does she stop being a victim?" I asked aloud.

Lawrence fixed his eyes on me thoughtfully for a moment. "When she wants to," he said.

"You think she wants to be like she is?" Mary Beth asked him angrily.

"I've been doing a lot of reading lately about some of this. Megan feels responsible for what happened to her. She blames herself and she looks for sympathy. It's all she knows how to do at the moment," he said. "The doctors have got to make her see what happened to her was not her fault."

"Maybe you're talking about yourself," Mary Beth snapped, her eyes furious.

He gazed up at her.

"Maybe," he admitted and then looked at me. "Maybe I'm talking about all of us."

I shuddered and looked around at all the other patients. Someone from the outside sticking their head in the doorway to gaze at us might not easily understand how troubled most of us were. For the moment, everyone looked as normal as anyone on the outside--playing cards, games, watching television and laughing, talking, and reading.

It struck me how difficult it was to know about someone simply by looking at them. Maybe it took years and years before anyone really knew anyone. Lawrence was growing more and more attached to me, but what if all that I remembered would devastate him? What if I were exactly like the people he despised? Would my true self, my identity, come rushing back over me and wipe away any identity I had established with him? He and I were truly strangers, a pair of lost souls who happened to meet for a while and soon had to return to our bodies, and those bodies might not be so attracted to each other afterward, I thought.

"I feel like going outside," I said and stood up.

Mary Beth and Lawrence looked at each other and then smiled.

"What? Why are you two looking at me like that?"

"You can't go outside now," Mary Beth said. "The doors are locked, and if you tried to open them, the alarms would go off."

"We are prisoners here," I moaned. "All I want to do is walk in the garden, look up at the stars, feel the night air.

What's so terrible about that? Why won't they let us out at night?"

"It's dark," Mary Beth said. "They can't keep watch over you as easily."

I flopped back into my chair, sullen, my arms wrapped around me.

"I could get you outside," Lawrence whispered. Mary Beth widened her eyes.

"No, Lawrence. You'll get into big trouble."

"How?" I asked.

"The cafeteria staff is gone by now. They go in and out through a side entrance off the kitchen. It's not locked and there's no alarm on it."

"How do you know that?" I asked.

He hesitated and then leaned toward me.

"I did it once. I thought I was going to run away, but the moment I stepped out the door, I froze," he confessed. We were silent a moment.

"I'm going back to Lulu," Mary Beth said. The conversation was obviously frightening her. Lawrence watched her return to the table before he continued.

"I know how she feels. When darkness falls and the doors are locked, the outside of the building feels and looks like the outside world. It's as if the boundaries of this place shrink. She's not ready to return, so she's even afraid of the thought of going out at night," he explained.