Passage

“No,” Barbara said, and just stood there, like she had before. “I don’t know where she is.”

But I’ll bet Dr. Wright does, Maisie thought. They were working on a project. Joanna had to tell him the address of where she was going. She thought about asking Barbara to page him, but she remembered Joanna saying he sometimes turned his pager off, so she called the hospital switchboard herself.

“Can you give me Dr. Wright’s number?” she asked the operator, trying to sound like her mother.

“Dr. Richard Wright?”

“Uh-huh,” Maisie said. “I mean, yes.”

“I’ll connect you,” the operator said.

“No, I want — ” Maisie said, but the operator had already connected her. The phone was busy.

Maisie waited till nighttime, when the evening operator would be on, and tried again. This time she said, “Dr. Wright’s number, please.”

“Dr. Wright has gone home,” the operator said.

“I know,” Maisie said. “I need his number so I can call him tomorrow. To make an appointment,” she added.

“An appointment?” the operator said doubtfully, but gave her the number. Maisie called it, just in case he hadn’t gone home, but nobody answered. Nobody answered the next day either, even though she called every half hour.

She would have to go see him. She called the operator again and asked where Dr. Wright’s office was. “602,” the operator told her, which was good. She would have to take the elevator, but her room was 422, so his office should be right above it, and she wouldn’t have to walk very far.

The hard part would be getting down to the elevator without anybody seeing her. The little girl in The Secret Garden had gone at night, but Dr. Wright wouldn’t be in his office then, and she couldn’t do it in the morning because that was when they made the bed and helped her take her shower and brought the library cart around. And at two o’clock her mother came.

She would have to do it after they picked up the lunch trays. As soon as they made her bed, she went over to the closet and got her clothes and put them under the covers. She laid one of the Titanic books open on top of the lump it made so it wouldn’t show, and then lay down and rested so she would have enough energy for the walking.

She ate a lot of her lunch, too, and Eugene, when he came in to pick up the tray, said, “Awright! That’s what I like to see! You keep eatin’ like that, and you’ll be out of this place in no time?”

She had put on her pants and socks before lunch. As soon as he took her tray out, she put on her shoes and turtleneck. She put her robe on over her clothes, pulled the covers up, and lay down, catching her breath and listening.

The little boy in 420 started crying. Footsteps came down the hall and went in the room.

She’d better turn on the TV so the nurses would think she was watching a video and wouldn’t come in to see what she was doing. She got the remote off the bed table, rewound The Secret Garden, and hit “play.”

The crying stopped. After a few minutes footsteps came out of the room and went back toward the nurses’ station. On the TV, the little girl was sneaking up a long winding staircase. Maisie got out of bed, and took off her robe. She stuck it under the covers and tiptoed to the door. There was nobody in the hall, and she couldn’t see Barbara or anybody in the nurses’ station. She snuck really fast to the elevators, pushed the button, and then stood inside the door of the waiting room till the elevator light blinked on. The elevator door opened, and she darted across and pushed “six.”

Her heart was pounding really hard, but it was partly because she was scared that somebody would see her before the door shut. “Come on!” she whispered, and it finally shut, really slow, and the elevator started going up.

Okay. Now all she had to do was find 602. When the elevator opened, she got out and looked around. There were lots of doors, but none of them had numbers on them. TTY-TDD, a sign on one of them said.

She walked down the hall. LHS, the doors said, and OT, but no numbers. A lady carrying a clipboard came out of a door marked PT. She stopped when she saw Maisie, and frowned, and for a minute Maisie was afraid she knew she was a patient. The lady came over to her, holding the clipboard against her chest. “Are you looking for somebody, honey?” she asked.

“Yes,” Maisie said, trying to sound very certain and businesslike. “Dr. Wright.”

“He’s in the east wing,” the lady said. “Do you know how to get there?”

Maisie shook her head.

“You need to go back down to fifth and take a right, and you’ll see a sign that says ‘Human Resources.’ You go through that door, and it’ll take you to the east wing.”

Is it real far? Maisie wanted to ask, but she was afraid the lady would ask her where she had come from, so she said, “Thank you very much,” and went back to the elevator, walking fast so the lady wouldn’t know she was a patient.