There was something about the music box that always made her think of home.

            She fiddled with the gears, oiling them between the pads of her fingers, making sure they ran smoothly despite the box being quite a few years old. It had never meant to last that long. When something happened, she turned to her music box. 

            She needed the repetitiveness of the melody, of the song long forgotten that was cranked out when she played it. It had been a gift to her from her father.

It had also been one of the few personal things she had been allowed to take. 

She sat on her bed, the creaky metal frame and coils that made the mattress oh so uncomfortable, staring out the thick paned window that was so small she couldn’t even see the parking lot that sat just outside. She could see the stars, though. She knew she would always remember them - like salt against the sky, like someone spilt the shaker against a very dark cloth. 

The whole point of the hospital is to talk. Everyone talks. They tell their stories every day in group, lunch, crafts, breakfast, dinner. The black memories that spill from their lips are eating them alive, turning them inside out. They cannot stop talking.

She chose to cut all her words out. Her head was full enough with them, she didn’t need her mouth to be full too. 

She rooms with a girl named Mara. Mara sleeps quietly most of the time, except when she doesn’t. Sometimes she shakes, gasping for air, and cries out. She reaches, and whispers, “Audree.” 

Audree gets up from her bed and sits on the floor in front of Mara on those nights. She sits and listens to whatever Mara has to say. Audree’s a listener - Mara recognizes this.

“You’re so quiet,” Mara whispers this night. Her hands shake as she reaches for Audree’s shoulder. “You have no idea how tedious it is, listening to somebody talk out loud.”

Mara silences for a bit, staring into Audree’s eyes. Audree feels a tug in her chest.

“I’m talking to you, did you know that? In my head. I’m telling you everything. I want to talk to you, but I don’t want to take up your head space, does that make sense?”

She makes a sleepy sound. “I’m going to tell you my whole story. You’re a keeper.”

Audree sits on the floor in front of Mara’s bed until she falls asleep. The noise in her brain comes together in one voice, loud, you’re a flight risk. She doesn’t mean it.

The noise goes back to clamoring voices almost immediately. Audree gets up slowly and sits back down on her bed. She goes back to fiddling with the music box and something tells her she won’t be getting any sleep that night.

She wakes in the morning with a dry, scratchy throat and a rat’s nest for hair. Mara is passed out on her own bed. Her limbs are sprawled out and sheets are flung everywhere. Her Hello Kitty pillow is squeezed tightly under one arm. There’s a mess of curls where the pillow should be.

Audree elects not to wake her roommate and steps outside into the hall. Other girls are beginning to make their way to breakfast. They drift down the hallways, talking in low voices, their eyes all too dull or all too bright. Audree steps into the bathroom just across from her room and stares into the warped mirror.

Whatever it’s made of it isn’t glass. It’s plastic-y and makes her reflection all wrong and cloudy. She reaches up to detangle her hair with her fingers. She has to head to her private session soon, she knows this. Her body clock has picked up into overtime, working to make up for the lack of clocks in the hospital.

She wonders what her father is doing at that moment. She wonders if he’s thinking of her. He hadn’t spoken to her since last week, but then again it hadn’t been a full week yet. She squeezes her eyes shut.

“I’m going to go talk to your dad, let him know you’re settled in and that you’ll be taken care of.” Another beat of silence. Audree looks up at the nurse. “Would you like to say goodbye?”

“Yes, please.”

The hum in her brain starts up again. The voice that she hears all too often and sounds too much like her father begins to whisper.

“Stop it with that thing.” 

Audree froze and glanced up at her father. The music box tumbled to her lap. He stood, frowning, in the doorway. “I feel sorry for whoever has to listen to that at all hours of the night.”

“I’ll do it just to annoy them,” Audree remarks. 

Audree desperately wishes she hadn’t told the nurse she wanted to say goodbye. Her father paused, drinking in her words. He seemed to give this a lot of thought, but then again, he seemed to give everything a lot of thought. They stared at each other for a moment, father and daughter, he not really seeing her and her feeling as though she was seeing him for the first time. She always wished she could communicate with her father. But, unfortunately, every interaction left her too quick with her tongue, too ready with a retort to stabilize their relationship. 

Her father closed his eyes. It seemed like he was straining for something, anything, to hold on to. He settled on cold indifference.

“I’ll check in weekly.”

Audree blinked. Her feet had taken her to her session without her realizing it. She could’ve sworn just a few minutes ago she had been standing in the bathroom with low chatter drifting through the hallways.

She brings up her hand and knocks on the door.

Clementine is soft, soft, soft. Her name isn’t really Clementine – it’s Clement – but the nickname suits her well enough. She’s round, her skin is tan. Her eyes are brown, but more orange, like someone had split amber into them. She greets Audree with a kind smile and a, so, what’s up with you? Like they’re childhood best friends sitting at the lunch table. She’s always clean, her clothes rustle softly. She never raises her voice. Audree likes Clementine. Clementine feels safe.

Audree’s seen her sitting with the other girls. She rubs their backs when they start to sob so hard they choke. She positions her arms around Mara when the panic swells up in Mara’s blue, blue, blue eyes. Audree’s even seen her sitting at the Crafts table, pawing through boxes of donated trinkets, and smiling with such sincerity Audree is almost sure it has to be fake.

Clementine should be someone’s parent. She should be Audree’s parent.

“Come in.” Her voice is soft, too. Warmth bubbles up in Audree’s chest as she pushes the door open and feels her muscles relax.

“Ah, Audree!” Clementine grins up at her from her chair. The lighting is low, warm tones. “What’s up?”

“Hi,” Audree manages to squeak. Her voice is raspy after a day’s unuse and the dry September air.

For some reason, Clementine’s office is the only place she feels she can talk. She doesn’t talk much outside save for a quick comment here and there. Clementine notices this. She watched Audree play with her music box in group.

            “We’re going to do some writing today.”

            Clementine slides a soft-tipped marker and a pad of paper over to Audree. Normally, writing would make Audree perk up. It was one of her favorite things to do, writing. If she had been allowed a pen she would have been writing day and night.

            Writing in therapy was different.

            “I want you to write what you think when you’re thinking about hurting – ” Ah, there it is.

            Audree stiffens in her chair. “I don’t want to do that.”

            Clementine gives her a look. Black bubbles up in Audree’s chest, threatening to spill. She feels her inside voice taking over and demanding to be heard. It clamors against her mind and pounds on the walls she so painstakingly built.

            “I know you don’t want to, but this is something you need to do. Sometimes writing out the words on paper takes them from your mind,” Clementine says.

            Audree knows that. She knows that. Decidedly, she refuses to look Clementine in the eyes.  

            Protests from Clementine die down. Clementine has an enormous tank in her office, home to a fat and idle turtle that paddles around and around. Around and around and around, barely making any headway.

            Audree finds the inside noise quieting as she watches the poor turtle fight his useless battle. She could watch him for hours and days, she finds him so incredibly patient at a task that ultimately means nothing, because it’s not like he’s getting out of the tank anytime soon, right?

            She reckons it would be lonely, of course. She reckons that maybe she wouldn’t want to watch him for hours and days.

            And Clementine just watches her watch him. Clementine watches as Audree’s breath evens out and as Audree says, “okay.”

            Audree writes. She doesn’t write about what Clementine asked her to at first. She begins to sketch out the turtle in his tank, paddling towards a rewardless goal. She writes about him. She writes about what his life would be like if he were a free turtle.

            The inside noise bubbles up again. Audree freezes, Clementine looks up from her iced coffee. “Audree?”

            Audree furiously scribbles out the turtle. The voice screams at her. OUT. GET IT OUT. CUT IT ALL OUT.

            Hands shaking, she rests the marker and paper on top of Clementine’s desk.

            Clementine pauses. “Cut it all out,” she reads slowly. “Cut what out?”

            Cut out her father. Cut out her friends. Cut out this hospital, the all too white walls, the girls with so much going on inside of their bodies, their brains, that their guts are spilling onto the floor. Cut it out until she gets smaller, and smaller, until she becomes nothing.

            “All of it.”

            That’s what was in Audree’s head when she did what she did to end up with Clementine.

            But she couldn’t even do that right.

            The music in her head makes her eyes cloud over. Audree’s body is weirdly heavy and light at the same time and a little bit of her is leaving, floating away—Clementine calls this dissociation—but she lurches up and out of her chair.

            “I have to go,” Audree whispers. Her voice feels strange and lofty.

            Clementine nods. “Your dad visits in two days, right? What are you going to tell him?”

            Audree pauses with her hand on the doorknob. She doesn’t turn around. “I don’t know.”

            Audree waits until Mara is asleep that night. Something about what Mara said stuck with her. About Audree being quiet, being a keeper.

Audree decides to talk.

            Audree lays for a while on her bed before she hears Mara breathing deeply. She starts talking. 

            “My dad tries,” Audree whispers. “I know he does. He just doesn’t seem to connect with me.” 

She tries to imagine what Mara would say. “Audree, from what it sounds like, he doesn’t even care.”

            Audree sits up abruptly. There’s a flash in her mind. Her dad, a constant presence but not a sturdy one. The man with whom she lived but didn’t have a relationship. She was left to raise herself. 

            “He does; he wouldn’t have sent me here if he didn’t,” Audree affirms. There’s a pause. “Right?”

            In the morning, when Mara isn’t in her bed, Audree waits. Because she knows Mara is coming back, at some point, to go to breakfast with her, to laugh at the mediocre food. But Audree waits. And waits. A nurse brings her breakfast. She sits and waits. 

            Mara comes back well into the afternoon, well after rec time and lunch. Her eyes are red-rimmed and puffy, but she’s smiling. Her smile is so big it threatens to split open her face. Audree knows she should be happy for Mara when Mara tells her she’s being released. Audree knows she should jump up in celebration and hug her sorta-friend. 

            Audree doesn’t. Audree sits in silence as Mara talks about all the stuff she will do once she gets out. She talks about everything she’s going to do once she leaves Audree behind in the hospital. 

            Mara’s going to go out and experience the world. Audree’s going to be stuck in a concrete box.

            Audree finds herself sinking farther and farther into loneliness. The music box calls out to her more than it has in a while. She spends her spare time tinkering with it, seeing if she can fix the ground-down gears. All she sees is mahogany wood and steel gears. Instead, she focuses on the bumps, the hitches, the screws. She pours all her time into a box no more significant than the size of her hand.

            While she tinkers, Mara packs. By the night, Mara is gone.

            All she leaves behind is a notebook labeled Keeper. It’s a black and white composition, pages so wrinkled that it looks stuffed.

            Audree flips to the first page and feels her face flush a blooming red as she stares at it. 

            Another life, maybe. In another life, Audree will sit down and read every page.

            Audree feels as though she should have more feeling towards Mara’s leaving. She supposes she does, but it had been buried long before she knew what they were.

            With Mara gone, and no one to think to, Audree allows herself to finally drift off to sleep, the word discharged bouncing around in her brain.

            By some cruel twist of fate, Audree is woken up early by a nurse alerting her to her father’s arrival. She blinks sleep out of her eyes, vision blurry. Vaguely, she wonders why he’s here so early. The other bits of her brain haven’t woken up yet.

            The nurses usher her to Clementine’s office. When she opens the door, she is blinded by the overhead lights. All ambient lighting Clementine has deliberately set up is turned off. It’s deliberately been replaced by the same, cold, unfeeling lighting that follows her everywhere else in the hospital.

            Her father is sitting in Clementine’s chair. Her father is sitting in Clementine’s chair. A word of protest bubbles up in her chest as he turns around to look at her. It quickly solidifies.

            His face is grim.

            “Audree,” he begins. His tone is formal. It feels like he isn’t even speaking to his daughter.

            “Dad.”

            “Clement tells me that you’ve been doing tremendously better.”

            “I feel like I am,” Audree begins carefully. She knows this might not be going where she wants it to, but nothing has clued her in to anything obvious.

            “You feel like you are?” Her father raises an eyebrow.

            “I am doing better, sir.”

            “I hear your roommate was discharged.”

            “Yes, sir.”

            There’s a moment of pregnant silence. Audree shifts uncomfortably. He hadn’t invited her into the office like he usually did. She hadn’t moved from the door frame.

            “I feel like this place isn’t doing you much good anymore,” her father says, finally.

            What is he talking about? The voice hisses. You’re useless, you need to be here. You need to stay here.

            “What do you mean?”

            “I mean I don’t want you here anymore. I’m manually discharging you.”

Thinking of leaving made her panic. It makes something shift inside of her, like the loosening of stones after one is plucked from the pile, tumbling down, down, down into the pit of her stomach.

“No, no, no, no, I need to stay here, you can’t take me out –“

“I can and I will.” Her father stands. His voice is gravelly and sounds full of concern, but Audree knows that it’s contempt. “You would do better at home. Where I can keep an eye on you.”

Her father makes his way to the door like it’s a done deal, like Audree’s feelings don’t mean anything. Her feelings didn’t mean anything when he first admitted her. Admitting her was just a necessity to keep himself out of the public eye.

“You don’t get to decide what’s best for me.”

Audree doesn’t know why she whispers it. She doesn’t know why these words come out of her mouth. They’ve been clawing at her since the beginning of time. Her voice is scratchy from not being used. Frankly, she sounds like a croaky frog.

But they’re words. They’re words. They’re what she’s wanted to say.

Her father laughs. He laughs. It’s cold, unfeeling. There’s no warmth behind the sound. He leans down. Looks Audree right in the eyes. “Oh, but I do.”

Too late Audree realizes that she’s pressing her thumb into the gears of the music box again. It hurts. It hurts more than she remembered it. The steel digs into her skin – it’s all she can focus on as her father discusses her discharge with the nurses.

            The familiar melody begins again. Slow, steady, firm. Everything she is not. It hums in her mind, drowns out both the inside and outside noise. She knows that once her inside music starts up, she won’t be able to hear anything else.

            Her father heaves two green suitcases into the back of a black Subaru. The day is gray and cold. Soft clouds billow out around the sky and the smell in the air promises rain. Briefly, Audree remembers that the day wasn’t like this yesterday.

            Her father presses his thumb into the small of her back as she reaches for the door handle. “You will not embarrass me again.”

            She stiffens. “Yes, sir.”

            She folds herself into the front seat next to her father. Audree never once looks back at the hospital.

            The silence is stifling. Audree opts to look out the window as the car melts into traffic. The hospital disappears as they make their way down the long block of cafés and bars, family-owned trinket shops, and the place that boasts twenty-one different pie flavors.

            The shops call out to her. Their lights are warm, they glow faintly against the mute sky. They beg her to stop, to eagerly rummage through racks of things she knows she doesn’t need and laugh delightedly when she finds something she likes. She wants to. She doesn’t get the choice.

              Audree doesn’t know if she’ll get the choice ever again.