Liz pulled her car up to the gatehouse and stopped before the closed gate. This tiny building was no bigger than a phone booth, she noticed. Liz had never seen a real phone booth, of course, but she'd seen a lot of old movies. Most people had seen them too, probably, so everybody still knew what a phone booth looked like. Even people that didn't watch old movies knew that Superman changed clothes in a phone booth. And it was certainly a safer bet to say it looked like a phone booth than to say what it actually looked even more like, which was the TARDIS. Because then she'd have to explain what *that* was. Not that that mattered. None of this mattered. She wasn't here to describe the gatehouse for posterity, she was here to try to get Claire out of the mental hospital. *Why is my brain like this*, she thought.

The window of the gatehouse was closed, but she could see that it was unoccupied. Clearly this structure itself was a relic from an earlier era, before downsizing, before deinstitutionalization. On the window, taped from the other side to keep it out of the elements, a sign said:

> STATE HOSPITAL FOR WOMEN. > > YOU ARE UNDER VIDEO SURVEILLANCE. > > Visiting Hours 8--5 M--F. > > Visitors: Use Call Button For Admittance During Visiting Hours. > > Employers: Use Key Card. > > Emergency Services: Use Master Key.

*"Employers?"*, Liz thought. Surely that was a typo that was supposed to say "Employees." But the sign looked like it had been taped up there a long time. Wouldn't they fix it? Maybe not. Maybe nobody had noticed, maybe nobody had ever looked at it. Employees would already know to use their cards. And anybody official enough to have a Master Key would know to use it. Liz wondered what a "Master Key" looked like.

She pressed the button next to the intercom speaker.

"Front desk here," came the tinny, distorted reply, "identify yourself and who are you here to see."

"Liz Allman, to see Claire Allman," she said.

"I don't see you on the list, Ms. Allman."

"Look under Elizabeth," Liz repeated for the 1000th time in her life.

"Ok, I'll buzz you in. Drive through the gate as soon as it opens, it closes automatically."

Slowly, with a metal-on-metal grinding sound, like the sound of a freight train stopping, the gate slid open. As soon as it was open sufficiently wide for the car, Liz drove through quickly while it was still moving open. She preferred this to the presumed alternative if she hesitated, which was driving through it as it was closing on her. In the rearview mirror she watched as the gate re-closed behind her. There was an identical gatehouse on the other side of the fence, presumably she was going to need to get buzzed out by the same person who had just buzzed her in.

She wondered if that clinking, clanking, slow moving gate was seriously the thing that stopped patients from wandering out. Surely not, she corrected herself immediately. Certainly they already aren't allowed anywhere near the gate. But then again, both the gate and the fence it was a part of were far from mere formalities. Anyone who did manage to bypass other security measures would still have to deal with a tall chainlink fence topped with barbed wire. *Defense in depth*, Liz thought, a term that she mainly associated with all of the "defensive coding" courses she regularly had to pass to keep her job.

With the gate behind her, Liz's mind wandered back to thoughts of the "Master Key." She imagined it being one of those oversized golden keys that cities hand out as awards. Don't they? Was that still a thing? Was it *ever* a thing, or was it just something they made up for the Simpsons, when Homer thought his was chocolate and tried to eat it. No, of *course* that's not what they were. Even Liz knew that. Real ones must be normal keys or they couldn't actually be used on any locks. But still, it must be where they got the idea for the big ones, if they were real. Liz wondered if anyone actually made chocolate ones, maybe she'd buy one for Claire as a present when she got out...

*Claire! Oh poor Claire*, Liz looked again at all the security fencing and "defense in depth" and wondered why in the world her little sister needed to be locked up in a place that looked so much like a prison. She felt slightly guilty now, for thinking about chocolate at a time like this.

The hospital's main building loomed ahead of her. It looked, she thought, even more like a prison than the outer defenses. It clearly looked like it had been built in stages. The first, presumably Victorian stage, was of stone, and looked for all the world like a castle. Not like a fairy-tale castle, of course, like an actual medieval fortress. Square, massive, solid, as if built to withstand a siege. This was of course just as fanciful, Liz thought, as if it had been built to look like Disneyland. Nobody in the 19th century was ever going to attack an insane asylum. Or would they? What if the state was actually using it as a prison for labor leaders, socialists, anarchists, such people were often called "mad" by the authorities. No, even better --- suffragettes! It was the women's asylum after all, it would've been feminists declared mad and placed in there. Look how scared those Victorian men were of women, Liz thought, *they had to lock us up in a place like that*.

*Okay, maybe not literally. We don't know why it was built like that. All we know is Claire is in there now*

But, really, she thought, of course it wasn't real, but would make a good movie, she was imagining some kind of epic "storming the Bastille" moment where the people besiege a mental asylum to free politically-imprisoned suffragettes, guessing who would play who in the movie, wondering if the tie-in videogame would suck... oh wait, maybe it starts as a game. Then the movie later. That's better. *Focus on Claire*.

To the sides and behind, the original stone core was attached to later additions --- probably New Deal era --- defiantly Deco, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the medieval monstrosity. They rose almost as high, only the tallest spires of the old castle overtopping them. Liz wondered if those tower-like corners had ever actually been used as lookout posts, watching for stray patients on the grounds, or if they were just security theater, like at the airport.

In front of all that sat a low, ground-hugging entrance wing, the newest part, with an incongruously mid-century-modern look. It reminded her of a deck of cards her grandparents kept from the 1964 World's Fair --- each card showed a different building, and every one was the most "1964" thing imaginable. She parked in front of the building and started toward the doors, through a small and mostly unattended garden.

A marble sculpture stood along the path: impossibly beautiful neoclassical figures, gods or angels or something. The plaque read: *Cupid and Psyche, carved by Augustus Blomfeld, a gift of the Johnson Family Trust, 1926.*

*Johnson.* One of the cards in that deck had shown the S.C. Johnson Wax Building --- a name she knew from the hornet spray her dad used. She once watched him sprint across the yard, chased by an angry swarm after the can sputtered out too soon. As a kid, she'd imagined the Johnson Wax pavilion at the World's Fair filled with giant insect statues --- hornets, ants, cockroaches --- glaring down at visitors.

She'd never been to a World's Fair. There hadn't been one in the U.S. in her lifetime. *Is it possible to miss a place you've never been?* The thought hit her hard. Somewhere in the back of her mind John Linnell started singing about a small girl all alone at the '64 World's Fair.

Liz was overwhelmed. She avoided crying only because she'd reached the front door.

The door was a solid, wooden or possibly metal door - it was hard to tell - with a small window in it. The window was the kind with the cross-hatched pattern often seen in older "shatterproof" windows. *You don't see that anymore*, thought Liz. It reminded her of high school, where the big glass window that separated the principal's office from the main hallway was made of precisely that kind of glass.

She tried the handle, but the door was locked. She noted another intercom, like the one at the gatehouse, next to the door and pressed its button.

The same voice, with the same tone and same amount of distortion, greeted her again. "Front desk. Who are you and who are you here to see?"

"Liz --- I mean, Elizabeth Allman. For Claire Allman."

She wondered how the woman on the other end of the intercom could ask her the same thing again, like she hadn't just asked it, like Liz was stuck in a loop. Was she even talking to a human? No, no, they wouldn't put a computer in charge of letting people in and out of a secure place like this. Then again, with all the downsizing and skeleton crew this place seemed to be running on, who knows, maybe they would, maybe it was just some ancient automated system from 1998 still chugging along. But no, *really, Liz*, they wouldn't do that. They wouldn't. Probably.

"Come in," and she heard an electronic click, the front desk had remotely unlocked the door for her.

If the door reminded her a little of high school, stepping into the waiting room and lobby was like going back in time. You couldn't have planned this place to look more... like itself... than it did. It reminded her of school, of going to the DMV, it reminded her of how the county health department looked when she'd had to go there to take mandatory food safety training before she could get her first job.

When she was 16, Liz was the cashier at Pizza Dee-Luxe, a mom-and-pop operation. Literally, the co-owners were a married couple in their fifties. In spite of the county-mandated training, Liz rarely actually handled food. Mr. Civitelli did most of the scheduling and assigning of employees' shifts, as well as making the dough personally, and he preferred to keep the girls out front on the cash register where the customers could see them, not in the back making pizza and definitely not out on the roads delivering pizzas.

Mr. C believed in keeping girls safe, he said, and his idea of "safety" was things like his dress code for female employees, which included rules like "none of those tops that tie in the back, because all the fellas have to do is untie it and there ya go!" She wasn't sure if he also lectured the "fellas" not to be untying anyone's clothes. *I would've made a lot more in tips if they let me deliver pizza*, she thought.

*Wait... why am I thinking about pizza?!*, she stopped herself and returned her mind to the matter at hand. She blinked, forcing the memory back into its proper place, and there he was.

Standing at the front desk waiting to see her was a man in a white lab coat, pink shirt, gray slacks. He had neat brown hair and just a little bit of 5 o'clock shadow. Behind his glasses she could see his eyes, intense brown eyes, looking into her own. For a second she couldn't meet them, she looked down at the floor, where she noticed his polished brown leather shoes. *I bet those shoes clack when he walks*, she thought. *Look in his eyes, you nerd, this is Claire's doctor!*. She lifted her eyes back up to his face, forcing herself to meet and greet this man, *for Claire*.

*That's right, Liz, don't think about any of this other bullshit, think about Claire. Do it for her.* Liz thought about Claire. When she was 13, when Claire was born, and Julie was nursing her, and offering to hand the baby over, Liz was terrified she'd drop Claire, but Dad insisted. She didn't drop her. She held the baby until she was asleep. *I look like Kitty Pryde holding that baby that later became Cable*, Liz said to Dad and Julie and Dad just nodded, but Julie knew what she meant and had to dry her eyes...

When Liz was 16, and Claire was 3, Liz and her friends would be just about to leave the house, to go "cruise" which to them just meant aimlessly driving around eating french fries and listening to mix CDs --- everybody made their own mixes and they had to work out a system to make sure everybody's got heard and nobody got upset --- not meeting any boys... Claire would come up with her little pigtails asking if they were going to get ice cream and if they were she wanted to go, and before you knew it Claire would be sitting in the back of the car in her carseat with the wind blowing in her face eating a tiny little ice cream cone, listening to Avril Lavigne or something, and Liz's friends didn't mind they all loved Claire, she was everybody's little baby sister...

And Dad always told her, "Lizzie, if anything ever happens to Julie and me, Claire is your responsibility! I mean that Lizzie, it's in my will! She's yours." And Liz always thought this was just one of those things people say, like it was supposed to make her more of a responsible person, and maybe that's how Dad meant it, but he didn't know, he couldn't know, what was coming. And then, when Claire was 8, and Liz was 21, Claire became Liz's responsibility. Until Claire was 18, yes, but really for the rest of Liz's life.

When Claire was 11 and got a trophy for being the top of her class, Liz took her out for ice cream, a full sized cone this time. When she was 13 and got her heart broken for the first time, Liz was the one she cried to. When Claire was 15 and learning to drive, Liz was the one in the car next to her. Liz's car, the same one Liz got on her 16th birthday, a new car had not been on her list of priorities and besides a Civic is forever.

When Claire graduated high school at the head of her class with a "full ride" to the U. --- the school Liz had had to transfer away from when Claire became hers --- Liz was in the stands cheering. Then she gave her all of her old school swag, which she'd kept, just in case she ever went back, and later just in case Claire ever went. When Claire needed extra money to pay sorority dues, because no scholarship covers that, Liz dug into her pockets.

When Claire was out of the house, it was just Liz and Biscuit again. Biscuit was a beagle, the puppy that Liz adopted when she was in college, in spite of everybody saying it was a bad idea to try to have a puppy when you're in college. *And it was.* And then, Biscuit was gone, and it was just Liz. She couldn't remember the last time she had a home all to herself with nobody and no beagle. Had she ever?

When Claire was 22 and graduated college, Liz was in the stands again, cheering again. When Claire got a job, a real job, not serving pizza for Mr. Civitelli --- not the same one, his son, who was not very different just younger --- a real job, in Human Resources, Liz exhaled. She'd done it. Liz relaxed and had a glass of wine. She'd done it. She'd raised Claire. She'd gotten her to safety. She'd finished the job. She'd earned the right to relax. She'd earned the glass of wine. She'd earned the quiet. She'd earned---

And now Claire was here, in this place, and this man, this Doctor, impossible to face as he was, was in charge of her.

"Ms. Allman?" he said.

"Doctor," Liz said sternly, "I demand to see my sister at once."