Session 1
The air in Sunridge Hospice was perpetually two degrees too warm, smelling of industrial lavender air freshener and the underlying, sweet-rot scent of slow decay. Dr. Jennifer Cole’s office was an island of ordered chill within it. The walls were a soft grey, the books on her shelf arranged by the Dewey Decimal system, a single, flawless orchid on her desk the only concession to life. A single petal had dropped, curling on the grey desktop. Her notepad lay centred, a pen parallel to its top edge.
Her new patient, Robert Maxwell, was a sculpture of ruin in a wheelchair. Eighty-four years old, but his body seemed to have collapsed in on itself, leaving a landscape of sharp bones and papery skin draped in a hospice-issue robe. His head lolled slightly, a strand of white hair stuck to a dry temple. But his eyes, when the nurse positioned him and left, did not have the milky vacancy of late-stage dementia. They were a pale, washed-out blue, and they darted around the room, landing on the orchid, the pen, the seam where the wall met the ceiling, with a frantic, animal alertness.
“Robert,” Jennifer said. “My name is Dr. Cole. I’m here to talk with you. To listen.”
He made a wet, clicking sound in his throat. His fingers, twisted like old roots, plucked at the blanket over his lap. “The… the bells are too loud,” he whispered. His voice was a rustle of dry leaves.
“Bells?”
“Not sound.” He shook his head slowly, as though the motion cost him something. “In the chest. When they laugh. It jangles.”
Jennifer wrote: *Auditory hallucination? Synesthesia?*
“Who laughs, Robert?”
But he was already gone, his gaze drifting to the window. “The tea is cold,” he murmured. “Martha always let it get cold.”
Jennifer capped her pen. The session was ten minutes old. She had twenty more to fill. She asked about his breakfast, his sleep, the pain in his hands. He answered in monosyllables or not at all.
When the nurse came to collect him, Robert looked back at her from the doorway. His eyes caught hers, and for a moment they were clear.
“You’ll come again,” he said. Not a question.
“Yes,” Jennifer said. “I’ll come again.”
He nodded once, then the fog rolled in and he was looking past her, at something only he could see.
That night, Jennifer sat in her silent apartment and ate a pre-portioned salad. The television played a nature documentary with the sound off. A lioness stalked a wildebeest across the Serengeti.
She was not thinking about Robert Maxwell. She was not thinking about bells or laughter or the way his eyes had cleared at the door. She was thinking about her performance review from six months ago, the one that had resulted in her transfer to Sunridge. Dr. Cole shows exceptional clinical insight but struggles with appropriate emotional boundaries. She had not struggled. She had simply recognized something in the previous patient that no one else saw, and she had acted on that recognition, and the hospital had called it over-involvement.
She finished her salad. She washed the bowl. She placed it in the drying rack beside the identical bowl from the night before.
At 11:47 PM, she opened her laptop and typed “bells laughter” into a psychiatric database.
Nothing of note. She closed the laptop. It was nothing.
