Blue Asylum (23 page)

The rain poured down harder. A bolt of lightning lit up the room, and the doctor noticed Wendell’s hand was unwrapped and the stitches in his stumps were clotted with sand. He felt a bit sick. He hadn’t seen the wounds since the day of the attack.

He went into the bedroom, where his wife was fast asleep, and retrieved a bottle of witch hazel. He poured the witch hazel into a porcelain bowl, found a cotton cloth, and returned to Wendell’s room. He sat on the bed and began to wash the stumps of his injured hand, going slowly, with great tenderness. He was growing angrier by the moment—not at the boy, but at the woman who had made him a pawn and was now somewhere out there in the middle of a storm with his most fragile patient.

That conniving woman. That spiteful lunatic. She’d taken everything from him—his professionalism, his sanity, even the loyalty of his son. He would find her. He would bring her back and deny her all privileges and keep her locked in her room. No more checkers, or walking on the sand, or swimming in the calm, blue water. Then perhaps she would understand how pleasant island life had been, compared to the asylums he’d seen elsewhere.

He shook his head, hating her so much.

Wendell opened his eyes early the next morning to a pounding headache and the sight of his father sleeping upright in the chair beside him. His ghost fingers ached, and he was startled to find his hand unbandaged. Something terrible had happened the night before. Slowly, certain details came back to him. Brandy. Spinning stars. Sand beneath his head. Bernard’s sow of a wife.

Ah, yes, that was it. He had helped two lunatics escape. Shame and guilt flooded him. He sat up, causing the bedsprings to creak and wake his father. The doctor rubbed his eyes and also seemed to require a few moments of orientation before a look crossed his face that meant he, too, remembered the night before.

“I’m not angry with you, Wendell. You’re just a boy. And the soldier can’t be held responsible for himself. I blame that woman. She played upon your mind. Took advantage of your trust.”

Wendell crawled out of bed. Sand fell from his clothes and showered the floor. He went to the window and looked out at the morning. The storm had washed shells high on the beach.

“That’s what happened, isn’t it?”

Wendell sat by the window, his elbows resting on the sill, crying. After half an hour of his father’s pleading, Wendell had finally broken down and given him the one piece of information he had on the whereabouts of the missing patients.

“North.”

With that his father had dashed from the room. A short time later, the chef had knocked on his window and proceeded to yell at him through the glass. The chef was as angry as his father had been calm and wasted no time telling Wendell what a fool of a boy he was, letting two lunatics escape in his boat, and how dare he steal a bottle of brandy? Did the boy know what brandy cost? And did he know he got the dock guard fired? The chef’s red, open mouth was a furnace stoked with pilfered brandy and the wood of a stolen canoe, and when he finally left, and Wendell’s shoulders were slumping in relief, he suddenly appeared at the window again to lambaste him some more.

The chef was right. He was a fool. A one-handed fool. And what of Iris and Ambrose? Had they perished in the storm? Was there yet more death on his hands? Would two fresh graves be dug in the back of the property, in the tiny cemetery that held his beloved Penelope?

Wendell forgot and wiped the tears from his face with his bad hand, which made him shriek in pain and cry all the harder. His door opened and he heard his mother’s footsteps, lighter and brisker than his father’s, approach him.

“Mother.” He turned his tearstained face to her. “I’ve done something terrible.”

“Oh, no no no, son!” she cried, sinking to her knees and throwing her arms around him, crushing him in an embrace so tight it restricted his breathing. “I’m proud of you. I think you were very clever, helping that woman leave the island.” She rocked him as, half comforted and half oxygen-starved, he blinked in confusion.

“You did fine, son,” she murmured. “It was time for her to go.”

The doctor could see so clearly now. He’d let a woman, a convicted lunatic, stand as his equal. He’d trusted her, even . . . loved her. And due to his brief flight of madness, he had nearly destroyed everything he’d built for himself and, in the process, let two inmates escape, one in dire need of care, and one who begged for comeuppance. The remains of sand and ashes on his office floor were an embarrassment to him now. He must leave orders that the entire area be scrubbed with ammonia water.

He threw his clothes into a valise as Mary watched him, arms folded, face the familiar color of an incipient breakdown. Out near the dock, a rickety, open-hulled fishing boat waited—the only craft available on such short notice.

“Why do you have to go after them?” Mary asked. “Why can’t you just send the guards?”

“Because the guards are idiots. And they don’t know how to approach lunatics. They only understand brute force. They’d probably beat the two of them to death in the process of capturing them.”

He added a shirt to the valise.

“But you know that boats make you seasick. You vomited the entire way from Punta Gorda when we moved here.”

“Thank you for reminding me.”

He closed the valise and locked it.

“Whom do you want to bring back?” Mary asked. “The man, or the woman?”

“What in heaven is that supposed to mean? Both, of course. Both are my patients.”

“But you only put macassar dressing in your hair for one of them.”

The doctor stared at her, struck dumb.

“I noticed you had gouged some out of my jar. You used too much. Your hair was almost dripping with it. So I asked one of the nurses for your schedule of patients that day. You were seeing her. Iris Dunleavy. When is the last time you smoothed your hair for me?”

He picked the valise off the bed. “You are mad. Absolutely raving mad. I feel nothing for this woman but pity.” He said the words so angrily that he believed them himself.

“You are a terrible man, to abandon your wife and child to chase after another woman.” Her face was bright red now. He had never seen that color without the accompanying tears, and sure enough, here they came.

“A woman
and
a man, Mary! Lunatics!”

The open-hulled fishing boat awaited him at the end of the dock. Guards sat fore and aft, wooden paddles across their laps. The doctor looked doubtfully down into the craft. He was covered in rose oil in a desperate attempt to ward off insects and wore his widest-brimmed hat to protect his face from the beating sun. He handed down his valise to a guard and turned toward his silent goodbye committee, his wife and son. He leaned forward to give Mary a kiss on the cheek, one firm enough to leave a brief white patch on her scarlet face, but she seemed unmoved.

He looked at his son. Silently he reached inside his pocket, took out the junonia shell, and handed it to him. He watched, with a flush of pleasure, as the boy’s weary eyes brightened and his mouth dropped open.

The doctor stepped down into the middle of the boat, and one of the guards released the knot that held it to its mooring. The current moved the boat swiftly away from the dock. Mary remained motionless, stone-faced, but Wendell stared at the junonia with a boy-size measure of joy that was still evident even in the advancing distance between them. The shell had effected its desired response, and the doctor felt briefly light and happy, until his stomach suddenly heaved, and he vomited over the side of the boat.

Fort Myers could not be trusted. It was occupied by the Yankees. Ambrose and Iris saw the Union flag from the sea, and there was no telling what those men would do to a disheveled Southern couple washed up on their beach—whether they would be laughed at, thrown in jail, interrogated, or ignored. They kept north and as the sun went down on the second evening found a little town sitting up on a ridge. They beached their canoe and trudged up the slope. Ambrose slung his haversack over one shoulder while Iris carried the bag of sugar close to her breast. Lights glowed and the town was loud, full of voices and gunshots and music and laughter and high-pitched love spats between drunks.

They wandered down the dirt street, lost immediately in the bedlam. The chaos held them safe. The town swarmed with traders, freed Negroes, deserters, brigands, Indians, cowboys, cattle, and wounded veterans from both sides. No one cared who they were or what they wanted. It was a town for the lost. It had a trading post, a dry goods store, several saloons, a clapboard hotel, and endless carts set up, selling everything from cherry pies to cures for malaria.

The bag of sugar sold for thirty-seven dollars to a horse trader who waved his hands to dramatic effect when he bargained, and the two fugitives went to the single hotel in town to rent a room. Ambrose paid the clerk and put the remainder of his money in the pocket of his coat, and he and Iris ascended the creaky stairs to the third floor, where a simple room awaited them. They walked in and lit the kerosene lamp, revealing the furnishings: a bed, a chifforobe, a chair. Another room to the side, an indoor bathroom, contained a clawfoot tub, a washstand, and two large pitchers of water.

They moved around, touching things, saying very little, unsure with the proximity of each other in a closed space. This was married space, intimate space; they’d been herded here by circumstance, far too soon.

Ambrose went to the window and opened the curtains to reveal the dirt street and the milling people. Down in the street, an old Indian sat cross-legged in the path of a buggy. The man in the buggy shouted at the Indian, but he remained implacable, hands resting on his knees, as though the man in the buggy were a phantasm and so was the town. Ambrose turned away from the scene and paced slowly around the room, hands in his pockets. He took off his hat, set it on the chifforobe, and then reconsidered and put the hat back on his head.

“The bathroom smells like something rotten,” Iris said.

“It’s from the rain. And the heat.”

He opened the window. Immediately the sound of a scream came into the room, followed by loud, crazy words that made no sense, evoking the asylum and its deranged inhabitants.

She sat down on the edge of the bed. “Isn’t there peace left anywhere?”

He started to close the window.

“No. It’s all right,” she said. “At least the air is fresh.”

He sat down in the straight-backed chair that was set against the wall without any desk or table to give it context. And so he sat, knitting his long fingers together, his legs slightly apart, resting his elbows on his thighs. He looked down at the floor and she watched him, his dark hair curling over his ears, the light from the lamp moving over the stubble on his cheeks. Darkened in all the brooding parts: hair and eyes, hollows of the face, lids, space made by the joining of his hands. Take away his shadows, and perhaps he’d lose his dimensionality and slip to the floor, flat as a piece of paper.

She was very tired, and her back hurt from sitting up in the canoe all those hours. She watched him as he stood, put his coat on top of the chifforobe, dropped the cash from his pocket on the bed, and silently began to count it.

“What will we do when it runs out?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Maybe there’s some work I can do around town. I was handy around the farm before I went to war.”

“I don’t know if jobs exist here, beyond selling and trading.”

He finished counting and rubbed his eyes. “Do we have to think about it tonight?”

“Of course not.”

He gave her a smile of conciliation. “I’m sorry. I just have a bit of a headache from rocking in that canoe all those hours.”

“I have a bit of one, too. I’m going to take a bath. I can feel the salt clinging to me.” She went into the bathroom, shutting the door behind her. She put the stopper in the tub, poured in a measure of water, and climbed in, using the cake of soap she’d found on the washstand to lather her body, washing out the sweat and ocean salt from under her arms, her neck, her chest, her stomach. She was softening. Losing the grit of the hours at sea. When she finally felt clean she rinsed herself, dried with the threadbare towel, and found a thin cotton robe in the cupboard next to the washstand. She had managed to bring a comb with her, leaving all her other possessions behind in that asylum room, and now she faced the mirror, working the comb through the tangles.

She had no idea what to do with or say to Ambrose once she stepped back into the room. That part—what they would actually do, minute by minute, once they escaped—had gone unrehearsed. So intent was she on taking him with her, all her efforts had simply been focused on forcing her will upon him. Now that the escape was over, ordinary living left her without a rudder.

She opened the door and stepped back into the room. Ambrose slept on the bed, in the middle of the counted money. He must have collapsed from exhaustion while she bathed. She gathered the money from the bed, reaching under him for the last bills, and stuffed them in a drawer on the left side of the chifforobe.

The streets were quiet now. Nothing but wind came into the room. The shadows from the curtain were huge on the wall, fluttering in the light of the kerosene lamp. She sat down next to Ambrose, studying his face. Under his purple lids, his eyes began to roll as he slid further into sleep. Something about a man in repose left him looking pure, all essence and no façade, just breath and skin and shadow.

She took off his shoes and socks, found a washcloth, and wet it with the last of the water from the pitchers. He didn’t stir as she bathed his feet. Perhaps he would not enjoy the sensation had he been awake; soldiers associated the bathing of feet by a woman with illness and death. His toenails were too long. She would clip them for him, she decided, glancing at the rest of his body to see what else was neglected. She longed to see him underneath his clothes, to be introduced to certain pockmarks and freckles and scars only nurses and lovers know.

She dried his feet, holding them in her hands, enjoying their warmth. She wanted to lie in bed with him, without clothing. Move her hand down the length of his chest. Let the lovemaking that followed reassert his manly position, no longer broken veteran but whole lover, in command, the natural way a man takes the upper hand. The shock of entry, the rocking and murmuring. But for now, he slept like the dead. The ends of his trousers were wet from where she had bathed his feet. His shirt was untucked, the sleeves unbuttoned. Emboldened by the fact he didn’t stir, she moved her fingers through his hair. Was it possible that their story could end well? During wartime, sad stories get sadder and even happy stories end in sorrow. But what if their love proved to be the exception?