Blue Asylum (10 page)

More water drops began to fall, each one of them cold and surprisingly heavy, as though a giant frozen fingertip were coming down to tap her, reminding her of something urgent she hadn’t done. It was uncomfortable, painful enough for her to wince with each drop, but she thought,
This is endurable. I can stand this,
and found some comfort in this thought.

But the drops increased into a stream, growing more painful as the moments passed and the stream grew in power and volume. She closed her eyes, her entire body shaking, chilled down to her childhood prayers, her teeth gritted, hands clenched into blue-tinged fists as the water came pouring down. Her hair was freezing wet against her neck, her gown soaked. Rivulets of water ran down her body to the floor and down the drain with a metallic gurgling. The pain grew worse, as though nails were being driven into her head, and she struggled vainly against the straps that held her down. She began to panic, because the pain was approaching an unbearable state and she didn’t know where to put it. There was no room for that kind of agony, and yet it came. Her head was breaking apart, her skull cracking. She felt hot blood pouring from her scalp, but the water rushing into the drain was crystal clear. It was too much to bear now and so she did not.

Screaming, she called out for her father, remembered desperately the soft warm water in which he had baptized her. Remembered the sun and the sky but the pain was too much, so she screamed for the God who lived inside her father, and when He made no answer and the pain grew even worse—intolerable pain, pain beyond understanding, the pain of literally coming apart on the level of bone and brain, pieces of herself breaking off invisibly to expose the hot nerves, red-tipped like flowers, she screamed and screamed and screamed and screamed, for as she was stripped down to nothing, to a specter, and as the room grew dark and she slipped into unconsciousness, she saw, at the window, the doctor’s face come into view. Sad, it seemed. Concerned about whatever lump of nothing remained in the room.

Iris was astonished, once again, to find herself alive. She lay in her bed, covered with warming blankets, her hair dry, her body restored. She moved a hand out from under the covers and touched her head. It was whole and unbroken; the skull that had come apart was back on tight; the mind within it was stunned but coherent. Afternoon light filtered into the room.

The doorknob turned, and Dr. Cowell entered, followed by a nurse. He drew up a chair to her bed and sat down heavily, balancing the chart on his knee while the nurse busied herself straightening Iris’s blankets.

“How are you feeling?” he asked. His British lilt felt like a water drop against her crown, one of the early ones, not painful but still uncomfortable enough to make her wince.

“Can you send the nurse away?” she asked, surprised by the sound of her voice, as though she were hearing it for the very first time. “I need to speak to you alone.”

The doctor hesitated. The afternoon light streaked across his glasses. He pushed them back on his nose and motioned to the nurse.

The door closed and he leaned toward her slightly.

“You are a fool,” she said.

His eyes widened. He let out a little gasp.

“What?”

“A fool. An idiot. A moron. For no good reason, you have put me through the worst physical pain imaginable.”

“But there’s not a mark on you!”

“I saw you looking through the window at me before I lost consciousness. Did you not see the expression on my face? This is not treatment. This is torture. Punishment for my quarrel with the matron and refusing to flatter you like all the other silly maniacs. If it has improved the circulation of anything to my head, it is the realization that I am alone in this world.”

“You’re not alone, Mrs. Dunleavy.”

She used all her strength to raise herself up in bed. “Get out. There are souls waiting for your incompetence. I’ve undergone your torture and there is nothing more you can do to me.”

The doctor looked distressed. “I only did what I thought was right. I only wanted to help you!”

“Get out.” She pointed toward the door. “Get out, get out, GET OUT!”

Wendell’s eyes were wide. His mouth hung open. From his position beneath Iris’s window, sitting with his arms holding his knees, his back against the asylum wall, he had heard everything. He could not believe it. He had known the inhabitants of the asylum—whether nurses or attendants or patients—to speak to the doctor only in the most respectful of tones. No one had ever called him such names. Not even his mother. The thought of his esteemed father being called a moron was scandalous and exotic and thrilling and wrong.

He had heard whispers about the water treatment. Penelope had gotten it once and could not walk upright for three days. And it was his horror over the thought of her enduring it again that had led to the biggest sacrifice of his life.

Penelope and Wendell sat facing each other over a half-finished sand castle. Her doll was propped nearby, facing them. The tide came in close to the hem of the doll’s dress, then washed back out again.

“Was it really beautiful?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Show me,” Wendell said.

“Show you?” Penelope lifted a flame-colored eyebrow.

“I want to know exactly how it felt.” A sandpiper darted in and out of the waves.

“How old are you?” Penelope asked.

“Thirteen.”

She contemplated this and nodded, as though this settled the matter. She cleared aside the barely begun sand castle so she could sit closer to him. Now they were knee to knee.

“Close your eyes,” she ordered.

He obeyed. The surf and the cry of gulls. The creaking of an old palm tree growing behind the dunes. Penelope’s breathing. He waited in the silence and then felt her warm fingers on his neck.

“My neck is sweaty,” he said, by way of apology.

“Shhh.” Her grip tightened. He felt a small pain from the pressure against his vocal cords, but nothing else, besides the ecstasy of her nearness.

“Hmmm.” Her voice was soft. Her fingers shifted and tightened their grip, and all of a sudden, there it was. His head was suddenly full of breeze and blood. He felt dizzy. His thoughts sloshed together, swirling. His face grew hot. He tried to take a breath but discovered that, although he could not, he really didn’t need to. Breathing was something he could put way on the back of the shelf, along with math. He opened his eyes a slit, and red light poured in. Red like blood, like Calusa waters. His head fell back; his mouth fell open. He was moving backward in the direction of sand, and the sleepiness that overcame him was something wise and still; he loved everything, he loved her, he had misplaced her name but loved whatever that was out there in the red darkness . . .

“What in the hell?” The rough voice of the chef was accompanied by the wrenching away of Penelope’s fingers from his throat, and Wendell coughed and gasped, tears running down his face. His eyes flew open. The chef had him by the shoulders and was shaking a less perfect world back into him. Moment by moment he recovered bits of himself: reason, the memory of names and places, the boundary between his skin and the universe.

“Talk to me, boy!” the chef bellowed, continuing to shake him with one hand and tapping his face, so hard it hurt, with the other.

“Stop hitting me,” Wendell managed.

The chef turned on Penelope. “Go on, git out of here. Take your doll and git, now, git, crazy girl!”

“No, wait!” Wendell croaked, but Penelope was gone.

“You’ve got her paw prints on your throat!” the chef exclaimed. “Damn girl nearly killed you.”

“No, no, you don’t understand. She was showing me what it feels like to hang yourself.”

“Are you out of your mind? You let her strangle you?” He snorted in disgust. “You let a woman strangle you, no telling what she’s gonna want next.”

The chef got up, dusted the sand off his knees. “I’m gonna tell your father. That girl is dangerous.”

“No! I told her to! I should get in trouble, not her.”

“You’re just a damn kid. You’re twelve years old.”

“Thirteen!” Wendell shouted. He threw himself at the chef, grabbing onto his trouser legs. “Please, please don’t tell my father. He’ll give her the water treatment and it hurt her so bad last time. She couldn’t bear one more treatment. Please, chef, I will do anything. I will work in your garden and wash your vegetables and clean your fish and do your dishes, forever! Forever!”

The chef pushed Wendell hard with his foot. He fell onto his back in the sand.

“You’re as crazy as she is,” the chef said.

Wendell stared up at the sky. “I know.”

The chef pointed a big black finger down at his chest. “All right. But if I ever see you near her again, I’m gonna tell your father what happened. You understand? Ain’t gonna have no dead boy on my watch, even a stupid one.”

The Cowell bedroom felt stiflingly hot, so much so that the doctor and his wife were covered by a single sheet, and he had dared crack the window open at the risk of exposing himself to the biting insects of the nighttime world. A bare minimum of breeze came through the room, causing the oil lamp on the night table to flicker. The resulting draft carried the scent of Mary’s bergamot lotion into the doctor’s nostrils. On those rare occasions when she desired lovemaking, she always applied this concoction, specially made for her by the chef. The doctor hated the scent of bergamot but could never summon the courage to tell his wife her application of that supposedly inviting potion had the opposite effect upon his passions, and that when he performed the act, he did so in spite of the horrific aroma, not because of it.

He had been in a dark mood ever since the plantation wife had excoriated him in a most shocking and boorish manner, completely misunderstanding the compassion and years of careful study behind his water treatment. Wounded, he had canceled his afternoon appointments and remained under a storm cloud all through dinner. This romantic overture was his wife’s way of noting his distress and comforting him without necessarily getting involved, and he would have partaken more or less willingly of this gift, but for the fact that she had evidently applied the lotion with an exuberant generosity, and he was still preoccupied with the earlier slight. How dare she, that lunatic, that inmate, that woman, call him an idiot and order him out of the—

Mary touched his shoulder. “Do you suppose Wendell is asleep?”

“I don’t know. The boy stays awake at all hours, from the way he comes dragging in to breakfast.”

She moved a little closer to him and stroked his arm. “You are too preoccupied. You have been working too hard.”

“It’s just that a patient shouted at me today. And called me terrible names.”

“What do you expect, my darling? You work with people who’ve taken leave of their senses. Surely you aren’t going to let this man upset you.”

“Woman.”

She let out a high, girlish laugh that carried within it the odor of her teeth-cleaning powder. “Well, that is even more the reason to dismiss it. You are a famously recognized expert on the insane. She is probably jealous and intimidated by your knowledge and your fame.”

“True,” he conceded, taking the next deep breath through his mouth as she slid farther over and draped her arm across his chest. “I have one of the highest success rates in the country of restoring lunatics back into wives, fathers, accountants, farmers, soldiers . . . the list goes on and on!”

“On and on,” she murmured, caressing his chest through his nightshirt.

“And many, many people have benefited from the water treatment. Do you know that I have, in fact, received several grateful letters from former patients that name the water treatment as the turning point in their recovery?”

He sat up in agitation. Her hand slid off his chest and made a small thump on the mattress. “She called it torture! As though I were some kind of monster!”

Mary sighed and slid back over to her side of the bed. “I’m going to sleep,” she announced, and blew out the lamp, leaving him in darkness, but he barely noticed. He wasn’t even in the room. He was in Iris’s room now, in his mind, in the fading light of afternoon, and she was screaming at him.

Get out! Get out! Get out!

The next morning, Iris made her way slowly to the dining room and took a seat, nodded at the attendant who appeared to pour her coffee, then ordered grapefruit and a poached egg. Her movements were unsteady, her voice soft and halting. She added cream to her coffee and took a delicate sip. The unbearable pressure of the water had shaken up terrible memories.

Mattie was first to die. Old Mattie, whose index finger was bent from so much sewing. Iris Dunleavy heard the pop of the gun and then Mattie’s gasp, unmistakable. The same one she made when lighting the coal stove and the match burned her hand, or darning a sheet and the needle came too close. Or when something in her back caught while she tried to lift a baby. It was that sound, only deeper, sharper; it had no ending as it rose into the cool springtime air of Virginia, with its tulip trees and willows.

Mattie first. Then the others. Bunched up together, pinned into a tiny clearing in a thicket of cypress trees, one by one, they fell on the ground, crowded so close they took Iris down with them.

Underneath the bodies, there were no thoughts and her senses flourished. Cold soak of groundwater on the back of her head. Acrid smell of gunpowder. The early light gone. The air pitch black under the sweaty weight of the dying. Moans, gasps. An unfinished prayer. The death throes of one made the whole pile of them shudder. Someone’s blood ran into her mouth.

“Oh, my dear friend.” Iris looked up as Lydia Helms Truman slid into the seat across from her. “Those terrible brutes. What have they done to you? Your screams could be heard echoing down the hallway. I begged the matron to stop it. She ignored me. As she was walking away, I bit her.”

Iris felt herself smiling, even though she did not feel happy. It was as though the smile had flown away from the vision of the massacre like a bird. “Lydia, you shouldn’t have done that! Now the matron will be after you as well.”