The Warden by Madeleine Roux

Brookline Hospital, Spring 1968
    I t was raining. Pouring, actually—a fact that Madge, Jocelyn’s bus companion for the last six hours, delighted in reiterating every other minute.
    â€œDo you know how long it takes to get my curlers to cooperate?” Madge sighed, standing next to Jocelyn on the dark pavement, a copy of Photoplay held over her head to ward off the raindrops. The magazine buckled in the middle, sluicing water down the front of Madge’s coat. “So much for making a good impression,” she muttered.
    Jocelyn smirked, warm and dry under the ugly but decidedly practical plastic rain bonnet. “It looks like you’ve got a condom on your head, dummy,” Madge had teased on the bus, scrunching up her nose behind her Photoplay , so that both she and the full-color image of Jackie Kennedy were giving Jocelyn less-than-impressed looks.
    â€œNow who’s the dummy?” Jocelyn said as they turned to walk up the drive. They stepped through the lingering exhaust cloud the bus had left behind as a final, indifferent good-bye. The driver had glanced at them repeatedly during the trip. Jocelyn hadn’t noticed it at first, and then maybe she’d thought he wasjust admiring Madge. Madge was incredibly admirable.
    A few grumbles from Madge later and they were clicking their way across the paving stones toward the hospital. It looked . . . well, less cheery than it had in the hiring brochures pushed on them at their recruitment meetings. Jocelyn and Madge had graduated together from Grace Point in Chicago with Bachelors of Science in Nursing, Jocelyn with honors, Madge with style.
    In the brochure, Brookline shone like a lighthouse on a rock, white, pristine, all glimmering windows and tidy lawns. Patients beamed from their beds or wheelchairs. Nurses smiled with appropriate modesty and wisdom together in the halls. Doctors scrutinized charts, mustaches askew from the depths of their concentration.
    â€œGoodness gracious,” Madge mumbled, drawing to a halt at exactly the same point Jocelyn did.
    â€œIt’s not so bad,” Jocelyn insisted. She forced a smile, first at the hospital and then at Madge. “Cheer up, buttercup. We’re hired. We’re professionals .”
    â€œ Single professionals,” Madge said, giggling. “Oh gosh, am I blushing? I think I’m blushing. It’s too good to be true.” She cast a long look around, her smile wavering a little as another gush of rain poured down her front. Jackie Kennedy was looking severely worse for wear. “And here I so wanted to say: we’re not in Kansas anymore. Or Chicago, I guess. You get the idea. But the rain’s just the same.”
    â€œAre you kidding? We’re practically New Yorkers,” Jocelyn teased. A black wrought-iron fence surrounded the front grounds of the hospital. The building sat well back from thefencing, looming, a little hunched, either from the nearness of the dark clouds or from a shoddy foundation. To the left, New Hampshire College buildings encroached, but only a few students ran back and forth in the quadrangle, their heads bowed under umbrellas. Jocelyn turned back to the fence and stepped up to the gate, pushing on the handle and wincing at the rusty screech that followed. “Yup. Very cosmopolitan.”
    â€œNow who’s the spoilsport? Come on, let’s get inside. I’m drenched.” Madge hurried beyond her, one hand desperately holding the magazine over her buttercup yellow hair, the other toting along her one and only bag. “What are you waiting for? I want to meet the staff. And the doctors! And my future husband!”
    Jocelyn rolled her eyes, but she had to smile; Madge was right, this was a big day for them both. She hurried up the paving stones, her eyes flicking skyward at the suggestion of a silhouette in one of the windows above. It was there and then it was gone, but as Jocelyn ducked inside the hospital, she