Chapter Thirty-Two

Anne is sitting in her jail cell adjacent to her brother’s when he asks, “Anne, what happened?”
Anne stoically walks over and sits down on the cot in her cell and looks up at the cement ceiling with chipped paint. “I was almost there, Brad. Almost there.”
Brad walks over to the bars between the two cells and grabs a hold of them, “You mean….did it work?” Brad asks, almost in a whisper.
“I don’t know,” Anne replies. “I had to leave him to recuperate from surgery and I never got to get back to find out.”
“So you don’t know if Greg is O.K.?” Brad shakes his head from side to side. “You know they are going to find out that you took him out of the institute.”
A smile forms on Anne’s face, “Greg will never be able to tell.”
The woman starts laughing loud enough for it to echo throughout the basement.

Stephanie is leaning against the beige wall as everyone has become completely silent and looking at her, when she hears Dr. Ramsey’s voice.
“Stephanie, do you know this woman?”
Silence.
Tears start forming down the woman on the stretcher’s face but she has stayed calm since focusing on Stephanie.
“Let’s get this woman on the bed, now,” one of the paramedics shouts out. He’s an older man with a stethoscope around his neck and taking charge as if the leader of the team.
The four paramedics are lifting the woman onto the bed. One each has grabbed an arm or a leg to help lift the woman’s weight.
“Stephanie, answer me,” Billy protests to the nurse but she can not stop staring at the aged woman on the bed.
The crowd in the room is quickly strapping down the woman onto the bed with no resistance.
“Is that necessary?” Stephanie speaks up now enough to be heard.
“This woman is crazy,” proclaims the leader of the paramedics. “She was encountered on the highway south of Waterville just wandering. She was lucky she didn’t get hit by a car on that highway.”
“Wandering like that?” Stephanie asks while motioning to the woman. The woman appears like she is in her light eighties with her overly wrinkled skin and puffy bags under her eyes. She has on a pink bath robe that was once fluffy but now so worn there are holes where stitching is coming apart. The slippers on her feet were once a matching set, but now caked in mud and the soles are half ripped away. “She wouldn’t go out wandering like this?”
“So you do know her,” Billy states.
“She’s all yours now,” the paramedic says and motions for the others to follow him out the door.
With the room all but cleared out, Stephanie approaches the woman and leans down next to the bed.
“Stephanie,” the woman whispers, “Why are they doing this to me? I’m fine.”
Stephanie reaches over and places the woman’s hand in hers. “I’m sure you are, mom.”