by Eva Pohler
“Will you still come for Thanksgiving?” Ellen asked the second night. It was only two weeks away. “I’d sure like to see your family and to spend more time with you.”
He gave her a smile, and those amazing dimples made another appearance. “I’d like that. I guess we need to decide what to do with the house.”
“Let’s have it there,” Ellen said. “It can be our goodbye.”
“Our last Thanksgiving at home.”
“Exactly.”
Ellen drove Jody to the airport on Wednesday evening. She’d decided to teach the next morning, and she planned to go to the state hospital afterward to see Cynthia.
On the way, she drove by the Gold House. Along with their condolences, Sue and Tanya had been sending photos to her and texting her about their progress. The exterior paint job was complete. She pulled up to the curb and nearly lost her breath. The house looked exactly like the vision she’d had weeks ago.
They’d resurrected the house. Now they needed to resurrect the people who lived there.
Sue and Tanya noticed her car and came out to say hello. They’d both come by with cards and flowers the day before. Today, they focused on happier things.
“Doesn’t it look amazing?” Sue asked.
“That it does,” Ellen agreed.
“Ed says we’ll be done on the inside in three more weeks,” Tanya added. “Can you believe it?”
“No.” Ellen folded her arms in the chilly afternoon air. “Look. There’s something I need to tell you. Something that Bud told me. I haven’t had a chance to talk to you about this before now.”
She told them what she knew about Amy.
“Oh my God,” Sue said.
“That is too bizarre.” Tanya pressed her palms to her cheeks. “I can’t believe it. I honestly cannot believe it.”
Ellen looked first at Sue and then at Tanya. “I want you two to know that, even though she’s not a ghost, you have made a believer out of me.”
“We don’t need you to make us feel better,” Tanya said. “We know what we know.”
“I’m not trying to make you feel better. And I’m not saying I believe they are spirits or souls or what have you. But there is definitely an energy—some kind of impression in the universe—that gets left behind by the living. I’ve felt it. Even Bud says there’s a ghost in there. Not Amy, but someone else.”
She didn’t tell them that she thought her mother’s energy had visited her the two nights Jody was at her house. Ellen had sensed Ima standing over her as she was falling asleep.
“When do you see Bud again?” Sue asked. “To hear the rest of his story?”
“Tomorrow,” Ellen said. “Right now, I’m on my way to see Cynthia. I’m going to tell her that if she’s the Cynthia Piers from the Gold House, then her daughter’s alive.”
When Ellen arrived at the gate to the San Antonio State Hospital, she showed her driver’s license to the guard and told him she was going to visit Cynthia Piers. He checked his database (for approved visitors, she supposed) and then waved her inside.
Betty wasn’t on duty at this time, so Ellen felt a little less confident as a different nurse escorted her down the winding halls to the double doors with the electronic keypad. This nurse was less talkative and less friendly. She entered the code and said, “Go on down to room twelve.”
“You aren’t coming with me?” Ellen asked, surprised.
“Do you need me to?” the nurse asked impatiently.
“No. I guess not.”
The nurse waited for Ellen to enter the double doors. Ellen stopped and looked back, wondering if she should really be doing this alone. Last time, Cynthia had become quite agitated. It had been frightening when the woman who hadn’t spoken in twenty years had jumped out of her bed and had glared at Ellen. Through the windows in the double doors, Ellen could see the nurse walking away.
The Extended Care Unit had a different odor than the front part of the building. Whereas the front office and common areas had smelled like a school cafeteria, this ward reminded Ellen of a nursing home, even though she’d been told there was a separate geriatric unit.
She made her way down the hall to Cynthia’s room. When she reached the door, she recalled the way Betty had knocked before entering.
Ellen tapped on the door and said, “You have a visitor.” Then she took a deep breath and opened the door.
The woman was sitting in a chair near the window. She wore a loose nightgown and was barefooted, her hair uncombed. She gave Ellen the impression of a woman waiting to die. It reminded her of her mother. A chill slid up her back and made her twitch. As she entered the room, Cynthia never turned her gaze from the window.
“Hello, Cynthia,” Ellen said.
Cynthia still did not look at her.
Ellen’s patience vanished. Although she felt sorry for this woman who’d been institutionalized for her fifty-something years, Ellen was tired and frustrated and grieving the death of her mother, and she couldn’t handle this. Why hadn’t the nurse come with her? Ellen pinched her hands together, walked nervously in a circle at the end of the bed, and then groaned.
The groan, it seems, got Cynthia’s attention.
“So you can hear me,” Ellen said.
The woman began to turn away again toward the window, so Ellen quickly added, “So, I’m not really your cousin. And I don’t even know if you can understand what I’m saying, but I’ve just bought a house in the historic district that was once owned by Dr. Jonathon Piers. He turned the house into an asylum, and I’m doing research on his past patients. It’s important that others know what he did. It was wrong. And if you were one of his patients, I’m so sorry. But there’s this girl. Her name is Amy. And she’s looking for her mother.”
The woman flinched and emitted an audible gasp.
Ellen waited for the woman to turn to her and miraculously speak, but that did not happen. Instead, the patient rocked forward and backward in her chair (it wasn’t a rocking chair). She folded her arms across her chest, clasping each upper arm with the opposite hand, and vigorously rocked her body.
This was beyond the scope of Ellen’s understanding. “I didn’t mean to upset you. I just, it’s just that if you’re the Cynthia Piers who once lived at the Gold House, I thought you should know that your daughter is alive and searching for you. She hasn’t left the attic all these years. She refuses to go on with her life. If you are her mother, I would like to know, so I can tell her where you are.”
The woman continued to rock even more violently than before. Ellen was at a loss as to what to do. She stood there, dumbfounded, wondering if she should call a nurse. Then a strange idea came to her. The patient couldn’t speak, but maybe she could write.
Ellen took her purse from her shoulder and dug through it for a pen and a scrap of paper. She found an old grocery list. The back of it was blank and would do. Then, hesitantly, like one would approach a stray dog, Ellen crossed the room toward the rocking woman and offered her the pen and paper.
“Do you think you could write down what you want to say to me?” Ellen asked gently.
To Ellen’s great surprise, the woman slowed her rocking and snatched first the pen and then the paper from Ellen’s hands. At first, Ellen worried she would try to stab Ellen in the eye or perform some other violent act, and she wondered if she had been smart to give the patient a weapon that could be turned against her. But then she was relieved and perfectly stunned when the woman stopped rocking and flattened the paper on the table in front of her. The woman fitted the pen in her fist, and, with an unsteady hand and in the writing of a child, she wrote out, “Who are you?”
Ellen gaped for several seconds before she stammered, “Ellen Mohr.”
The woman pointed the pen to the paper, as if to ask her question again.
Ellen recalled the angry caterpillar in the hall who had asked her, “Who are you?” He had shouted it again and again. Ellen clasped her hands together. “I’m an art instructor at a universi
ty here in San Antonio.” Who are you? “I’m married—thirty years this year.” Who are you? “I have two sons and a daughter—all in college. The oldest is in grad school.” Who are you? “My mother just passed away two days ago.” Who are you? “My father preceded her ten years ago. Heart failure.” Who are you? “I have a brother, Jody, who lives with his family in Kentucky.” Who are you? Ellen felt faint.
She had another surprise when the patient leaned over the table, put the pen to the paper, and scratched out, “Why?”
“Why what?” Ellen asked. “Why am I here? Why do I want to help you and Amy?”
The woman glared at her and pointed the pen to the last word she had written, again asking, “Why?”
Ellen wasn’t sure what to say. She didn’t know the answer herself. Why was she here? Why was she doing this? Who was she?
The woman pounded the point of the pen against the scrap of paper again and again until the pen burst and ink spilled across the table, smearing all over the patient’s hand.
The patient screamed, as if she’d been mortally wounded. She leapt from the chair and rushed past Ellen to the bathroom. Ellen watched through the open door as the woman frantically scrubbed her hands and arm clean of the ink.
At that moment, a nurse walked in the room. “Is everything okay in here?”
Even though this was a much friendlier nurse than the woman who had escorted her previously, Ellen was so flustered, she couldn’t speak.
“Cynthia?” the nurse called before noticing her at the bathroom sink. “Oh, there you are. Are you doing all right?”
The room began to spin. Ellen blinked and stumbled against the bed.
“Ma’am, are you okay?” the nurse asked.
Everything went dark
That evening, Ellen went to bed without eating. The nurse had speculated that Ellen had fainted because she had locked her knees, cutting off the blood flow to her brain. The nurse had given her a glass of water and then encouraged her to go home and take it easy. Ellen had left, frustrated.
Paul had picked up Chinese food on the way home from work, but Ellen had said she’d eat it for lunch the next day. She didn’t tell him what she had learned from Bud about Amy or about what had happened at the state hospital. She was too drained. She went to her son’s old room—her room, dammit!—and lay down.
Who was she? And why was she doing this?
Chapter Twenty: Creature of Habit
The next day, Ellen went by the Gold House after work to check on the progress of the reconstruction. Tanya was there, and Sue was on her way.
Tanya gave Ellen a tour of the completed kitchen. It looked amazing—solid stone counter tops, an old-fashioned apron sink, antique cupboards, and newly finished hardwood floors throughout the house.
“All the rooms are painted, too, except for the attic,” Tanya said. “We’ll have to move a lot of that stuff out if we want to paint the attic, too.”
“I think we should do that,” Ellen said. “It will force us to go through everything.”
“Sue said the same thing. I guess I’m out-voted.”
“You don’t think we should paint it?”
“It’s just a lot of work, going through all of that stuff. I’m still helping my father go through my mother’s things. It’s really taxing.”
Ellen bit her lip. She hadn’t even thought about cleaning out her mother’s house. She put her hand to her head to steady herself. “I just think it would be throwing away useful square footage not to clean it up and paint it.”
“You’re right,” Tanya said. “I know it’s the right thing to do.”
“We can hire someone to help us.”
“No, we shouldn’t. It’s already adding up to be more than we expected, especially when we had to pay for all that new wiring.” Tanya put her hands on her hips. “And we still have to pay to have that dead tree out front removed. Ed recommended someone, but it won’t be cheap.”
“We’ll figure something out. Let’s not worry about it right now.”
“Okay.”
When Sue arrived with coffee for all three of them, Ellen thanked her and told them about her encounter with Cynthia as they sat at the dining room table and drank up.
“How strange,” Sue said when Ellen had finished her story.
“I’m not giving up on her,” Ellen said. “I’m going again tomorrow. Today, I meet with Bud.”
She saw him at one of the back tables slumped over a cup of coffee. His knee bounced beneath the table like a basketball. Part of her wanted to shrink away from this man, who must have done something really awful, something he wanted to unload on her; but, another part of her knew she could not go back. She could only move forward. She had gone too far.
When she sat across from him, he immediately waved to the waitress and asked her for another cup of coffee. Ellen was full from the one Sue had brought, but she went ahead and accepted the cup anyway.
“Thank you,” she said to the waitress.
Once they were alone again, Bud said, “How are you holding up?”
“Fair,” she said. “Not good, but okay. How are you?”
“The same. Fair’s the right word. I’ve been better, and I’ve been worse.”
They both smiled.
Ellen found herself happy to have the warm mug between her hands. She held on for dear life as she anticipated the rest of his story.
“You have to understand something,” Bud said, realizing how anxious she was for him to continue. “Like I said, Amy never left that attic. And although the first doctor had offed himself in—let me see—1972, I believe, Johnny had taken over the practice. I don’t know if he had an actual medical degree, but they called him Dr. Piers, just like they had his father.”
“He may not have had an actual degree? How could he practice medicine without a degree?”
“That’s the thing,” Bud said. “He wasn’t really taking in any new patients. After the scandal surrounding his father, no one in their right mind would admit a loved one into that rest home again. But there were two or three patients that continued to live there, and based on what Amy has told me, I think Johnny treated them.”
“Did Barbara continue to work there after the first doctor’s death?”
“Oh, no. She left as soon as it all came out in the papers. She was lucky charges weren’t ever brought up against her. If any of those patients had loved ones who actually cared about them, Barbara would have been in trouble. But it seems to me that the Gold House was a place where people dumped their unwanted women. If a girl got pregnant out of wedlock, she got sent to Dr. Piers. If a girl wanted to marry someone the family didn’t approve of, she got sent to Dr. Piers. If a man fell out of love with his wife, he sent her to Dr. Piers.”
“Oh my God.”
“Based on what I’ve managed to piece together, I don’t think the majority of those women were ever really sick. It’s our society that was sick.”
Ellen blinked. Just when she thought Bud belonged at the very bottom of the barrel, he said something truly profound. “I think you’re right.”
“But I think the doctor believed in what he was doing. He had trained underneath someone else who had practiced these techniques on Civil War veterans.”
Ellen shuddered.
“That’s why he committed suicide, I think,” Bud continued. “Because he believed in what he was doing and couldn’t handle the way the papers were portraying him.”
“Sounds like the doctor was the one who was sick,” Ellen said.
“Damn straight,” Bud agreed. “And he passed on that sickness to all of his children—his bastard children. He was never married.”
“So you think Johnny was sick, too?”
“Well, what do you think happened to the children in the attic once they were no longer children?”
“They became patients?” Ellen guessed.
“This is what I think,” Bud said. “I think those two or three patients that were living with Johnny after
his father’s death were his half-sisters, probably each from a different woman.”
Ellen’s mouth dropped open. Was Bud saying what she thought he was saying? Was Johnny having sex with his own sisters?
“Enter Amy,” he said.
“So you think Amy was the product of…” she couldn’t say it.
“Yes, I do,” he said. “And like I said before, she, too, was treated by the doctor, by her very own father.”
Nausea swept up from Ellen’s belly to her throat. She thought she was going to be sick. She put her hand to her head to steady the dizziness that was on the brink of overwhelming her.
“Are you okay?” Bud asked.
Ellen tried to breathe.
Bud acted fast. He grabbed a half-empty glass of water from a nearby vacant table, dipped a paper napkin into it, and then placed it on Ellen’s forehead. The cool compress steadied the dizziness, and she was able to breathe. She took the napkin from him and held it against her own head. Then, she took a few deep breaths and let them out slowly.
“Thank you,” she said after a moment.
“I know this is troubling,” Bud said. “You tell me if this is too much for you. You’re going through a lot right now, with your mother passing.”
Ellen closed her eyes, shook her head, and then looked at him. “It’s okay. Please go on.”
“What I’ve been trying to help you to understand is that this child was raised in a sexual climate to be an active sexual being.” He whispered the word “sexual” both times he said it.
Ellen clutched her mug of coffee, fearing his next words. So that’s what he was leading to. He was looking to excuse his behavior.
“In those early days, after I’d finally gotten her to trust me,” he said, “she asked me to…touch her.” He whispered those last two words.
Ellen was horrified, dreading to hear any more.
“At first I got angry with her,” he said. “I told her she was naughty.” Tears came to his eyes. “I’m ashamed to admit this, but I even called her a little whore.” He cleared his throat and wiped his eyes. “That was before I understood what had happened to her, what all she’d been through.”