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thought, mentally parroting Doctor Rosen's words of encouragement. I can pay my own way in the world and come and go as I choose.
     
    Doctor Rosen, a cherub-faced man with sad eyes, said it was natural to be afraid at first, but if she didn't give into the fear, if she went about her days with a brave face, the fear would go away after awhile. Was he right about that? It had seemed very right when she was sitting across from him in his office. She'd felt confident then. Fight those fears, Caroline," he'd said. "Rise above them and live your life as you deserve to. Don't let the world steal more from you than it already has."
     
    "I'll try," she whispered into the semi-darkness of the room. I'll try.
     
     
     
    Six
     
     
     
    Lynne Addison was also having trouble sleeping, while her husband Joe was lying on his side, away from her, snoring softly. She envied him. She couldn't rid herself of the memory of Caroline waving to her from the backseat of the cab. Of her ghostly face in the glass.
     
    Many patients had come and gone in the years Lynne had been at Bayshore Mental Hospital, but only a handful stayed with her, haunted her. Caroline Hill was one of them. She'd seemed so lost when she left in the taxi, so vulnerable to the outside world, even though she'd been doing her level best to put on a brave face.
     
    She'd been through a lot in her short years. Her parents tearing her away from a boy she loved like they had, and a few months later having her baby ripped from her arms, and all by the time she was seventeen. Caroline had told Lynne she'd held her little girl just long enough see run her fingertips over the blond peach fuzz on her perfect little head, see one tiny fist raised in the air, as if in protest. And then the woman from social services came into the room and scooped the newborn up in her arms, and Caroline never saw her again.
     
    Caroline said the baby's cry reached back to her, from the hallway, sounding like the mewling of a lamb. How that sound must have tormented her, breaking her heart like shattering a piece of fragile china. So often, Lynne had heard her crying in the night, begging them to bring her baby back, always to be answered with a needle in the arm. And oblivion.
     
    It was after that that she slipped into a deeper, darker place and remained there for a very long time. The primal wailing, the thrashing about, eventually grew silent, still. Her tears dried, she drifted through her days eating little, sleeping as long as we'd let her. Someone would finally come and raise her from the bed, wash her face, force food into her. Give her her meds. Sometimes that person was Lynne.
     
    She didn't fight us. She took her medication without complaint. Sometimes the pills were a different color, or size, but she was too far out of it by then to notice.
     
    Lynne had tried to get the dosage reduced, but was quickly put in her place by the doctor on staff at the time. She was just a nurse; he was the doctor, he reminded her. She was grateful when Doctor Rosen came on staff. Things began to change then.
     
    Caroline said she barely remembered those days. They were a blur. Though she did have a vague recollection of her mother and father, he a stern-faced man and she a weepy woman in a black, veiled hat. An odd memory to have of one's parents. Lynne remembered them too, and Caroline's description was apt. Such sad people. Guilt-ridden, probably. And then one Sunday afternoon on their way to their regular Sunday visit with the daughter who was unresponsive to their efforts to touch her or talk to her, they were killed instantly in a head-on collision with a truck. At the time, the accident appeared to have little effect on Caroline, but of course it had to have had. At some level anyway. What will happen when she opens that trunk?
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    Seven
     
     
     
    The knock on the door the next day had frightened her at first. Then a deep but young voice called through the