Five Days in Summer

visit on her way to the outside world, she shrugged her shoulders, took a key off a peg board marked only by numbers, and muttered, “Follow me.”
    They were led to room 513. Nancy unlocked the door, pushed it all the way open and walked away.
    Seated in a shabby green chair in a corner of a room with two single beds but only one dresser was the woman who had once been Janice Winfrey. She faced the window, but her expression was blank, not absorbing the summer afternoon, or the other patients milling on the lawn, or the cadre of her fifth-floorneighbors lucky enough to be out on the grounds with Margaret Nelson as their tour guide. Whatever Janice Winfrey saw, it was not outside her eyes, and it was not inside this moment.
    She was a small, fine-boned woman with light brown skin. Her hair was cut in a quarter-inch bowl around her skull, nearly shaved, with just enough left to stop her from looking like an inmate. She wore a bright orange flowered housedress you could have bought at the five-and-dime, a far cry from what she must have worn in better days: a tailored dress, Geary decided, pale blue, a string of pearls on her fragile neck.
    Amy approached her first. “Mrs. Winfrey?”
    Janice didn’t react.
    “Mrs. Winfrey, I’m Amy Cardoza. This is Dr. Geary.”
    “John,” he said. “Is it all right if we come in?”
    She could have been a wax statue.
    Geary had seen people like this, in a kind of living coma that locked them outside their minds but inside their pain. It was like the opposite of amnesia, where instead of forgetting they’d get lost in a flood of memory; a hatch got stuck open, and they endlessly drowned in their trauma but never died. Crippling, but not killing. It must have been a living hell; he could only begin to imagine it.
    It was a long shot, but he decided to try to connect with her. He approached her slowly, kneeling in front of her so their faces were level. He looked into her eyes; they were like marbles, empty jewels. Up close he could see that her skin was covered with the creased fissures that would eventually deepen into age. She was only in her thirties, but she seemed a thousand years old. Amy stood back a good five feet, watching. When Geary reached out, he could see Amy at the edge of his vision, shaking her head. He did it anyway, touching Janice’s hand as gently as he could.
    Janice’s eyes blinked, only once, but it was a sign of reaction.
    Amy took a step closer.
    Geary breathed deeply and watched the eyes. “We were hoping to talk to you,” he said, “about Chance.”
    Janice’s eyes slammed shut. Her lips tensed.
    “Back off,” Amy whispered. “You’re scaring her.”
    Geary pulled his hand away, but stayed close, still kneeling in front of her.
    “There’s another woman,” Geary whispered, “a mother, like you. She disappeared. She has children.”
    Janice had refrozen. There was not a flicker of anything, anywhere on her.
    Geary felt Amy’s hand clamp down on his shoulder. Her eyes were brown, he now noticed, like Janice Winfrey’s, but alive. Amy gripped his shoulder and her eyes begged him to stop. There was a tenderness in her face that upset him, and he didn’t know why. She shook her head.
    “She wants to,” Geary said, “but she can’t.”
    Margaret Nelson appeared in the doorway, smiling. “You see?” she said. “Nothing. She’s been here almost seven years, and she’s never spoken, not once.”
    The patients they saw on the way out, the ones with grounds passes that gave them the chance to sway and rock and talk to figments of their imaginations in the fresh outside air, seemed lucky compared to Janice Winfrey.
    They didn’t say a word until they were back in the car. Amy put her hands on the steering wheel and her forehead on her hands. “What does he do to them?”
    “That’s the question.” Geary rolled down his window and waved at a young woman whose head bobbed in rhythm with her feet as she walked. She synchronized her hand to wave back in tempo.
    Amy steered the car away from the hospital groundsand to the road that fed them onto the highway. The air-conditioning was on but Geary kept his window open so he could feel the rush of air and hear the whiz of traffic. Amy didn’t object. She must have felt it too: relief, just to be out of there.
    They were over the bridge and back onto the Cape when her phone started to ring. She reached into the space between their bucket seats and dug her hand into her brown leather