The Dead Girls of Hysteria Hall

by Katie Alender

  Mom had a PhD in women’s studies. To put it mildly, she didn’t find stuff like this amusing. Janie and I heard the danger in her tone and didn’t comment.

  “That’s Maxwell?” Janie asked, standing on tiptoe and reaching a finger up to touch the dried swirls of oil paint. “He looks mean.”

  I batted her finger away. “He’s the founder of an insane asylum,” I said. “Not Mr. Rogers.”

  The silence was broken by artificially cheerful whistling as Dad entered the room behind us. We all spun to face him at once.

  “What’s up?” he asked.

  “What’s up,” I said, “is that I’m the only sixteen-year-old I know who owns a mental hospital.”

  He didn’t answer right away.

  “Brad,” Mom said, a trace of sharpness in her voice, “you don’t seem surprised.”

  “Oh no, I am,” he said. “I am. A mental hospital? That’s … not what I imagined.”

  My mother folded her arms over her chest. “What did you imagine?”

  Now Dad was starting to look a little uncomfortable. “A school, maybe? I mean, I didn’t know details. The lawyer told me it was some kind of institute, and that there was a recovery center interested in the property, once the structure was retrofitted …”

  “Wow,” I said. “Way to keep all the important stuff to yourself.”

  “What’s a recovery center?” Janie asked.

  “Same thing,” I said. “A place for crazy people.” I crouched to pick up the bags I’d dropped, then started back for the front doors.

  “Where are you going?” Dad asked.

  “To the car,” I said. “We can’t stay here.”

  “Of course we can. Where else would we stay?”

  I stared at him in blank disbelief. “Um … how about anywhere that isn’t an abandoned mental hospital?”

  Dad shook his head. “Don’t be overdramatic. Cordelia lived here her whole life, and—”

  “And look what happened to her!” I said. “Exactly. I’m not staying.”

  “If we don’t get this place to at least a basic level of safety and cleanliness, we can’t sell it,” Dad said. “And if we can’t do that as a family, then someday it will be all your responsibility. And you’ll have to do it alone.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Sounds perfect. I’ll deal with it when I’m older.”

  Not the answer my father had hoped to hear. He sighed. “We’ve already decided that this is what we’re going to do this summer. It’s a family project, and—”

  “Some project. We do all the work, and Delia gets all the money,” Janie said, tossing her long blond hair haughtily over her shoulder. (I’d caught her practicing that move once in the mirror and thought it was a little too sad even to make fun of.)

  “No more debate,” Dad said. “We’re staying. Cordelia had a small apartment, separate from the rest of the institute, and that’s where we’ll be living. No more discussion. Right, Lisa?”

  Mom took a few long seconds to think before she spoke. “Okay,” she finally said, turning away. Her usually sleek hair was starting to fuzz out from its perfect ponytail.

  I hate to admit it, because it highlights a certain amount of adolescent self-absorption, but that was the first time it occurred to me that maybe this wasn’t my mother’s ideal way to pass the summer—that maybe she’d been roped into it, just like I had. Ordinarily, Mom’s idea of a good time was an evening spent in the air-conditioned den of our house, eating takeout Chinese and following obscure threads of Internet research on her laptop. Maybe being locked away in the middle of nowhere was almost as much of a punishment to her as it was to me.

  I caught my mother’s eye. The briefest hint of mutual understanding passed between us, but then she turned away, smoothing her hair. A dim light of hope began to glow in my heart. Maybe Mom would be my ticket out of this place. But I knew her better than to press the issue when she was exhausted and irritated.

  Finding out what a wardress was would just have to wait, because Dad opened another door on the far side of the room and held it open for us. “Mesdames,” he said grandly, “I present the main hall.”

  Janie screwed up her face. “How do you know that?”

  “There’s a sign on the door, madame,” Dad said.

  “I’m a mademoiselle,” my sister said, rolling her eyes.

  “I should hope so.” My father gave me a goofy wink.

  I wanted to roll my eyes at him, too, but his dumb sense of humor always made me feel a stab of tenderness. He couldn’t help it if all his jokes were dad jokes.

  The “main hall” wasn’t quite as grand as its name implied. It was a long, low-ceilinged passageway with several doors leading off of it. Even the lush wallpaper and hanging brass lamps didn’t dampen the claustrophobic feeling, and I was relieved when Dad opened the first door on the right.

  “The superintendent’s apartment,” he said. “I guess that makes us the new superintendents.”

  We stepped into a good-sized living room. There was also a dining area, a tiny kitchen, a bathroom, and a single bedroom. Once upon a time it had been a luxurious space, with gilded wallpaper and checkerboard floors, but now it felt old and worn—basically, like an old lady had been living there alone for decades. There were deep ruts in the floor from Aunt Cordelia’s walker, which was still stashed in the corner of the bedroom, a medical-looking metal tray on the kitchen counter, and a lavender couch in the living room. A table in the corner held a small, old-fashioned TV set, but for all her frantic channel flipping, Janie couldn’t get a signal.

  “Not as bad as you thought, is it?” Dad asked, looking from Mom to me. “It’s pretty clean, considering. Toward the end there was a home-care nurse who cleaned up even though Cordelia ordered her not to. The place was a wreck. She’d poured salt everywhere and scratched up the wood floors pretty badly.”

  “Like this?” Janie asked, looking down at her feet. We all walked over to see the word DON’T carved into the wood in letters about a foot tall.

  “Wow,” Mom said. “That’s not going to buff out.”

  “Don’t what?” Janie asked.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Dad said. “We’ll sand it down. You’ll never even know it was there.”

  “Sounds super fun,” I said. “Can’t wait to get started on that. Anyhoo, I’m going to go look around. I’ll see you guys later.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Mom said. “You can’t just wander off.”

  “I’m not wandering,” I protested. “I just want to see what’s here.”

  My mother’s glance at Dad was clearly an appeal for backup, but Dad shrugged. “I don’t see how it can hurt. It’s probably just a bunch of empty rooms.”

  “Maybe Janie can go with you,” Mom suggested.

  “No way!” Janie shrieked. She’d already retreated to the couch to play games on her phone.

  “Well …” My mother peered out the window at the line of dark gray clouds that had appeared on the horizon. “Just don’t go outside.”

  “I’m not looking to get struck by lightning,” I said, grabbing the key ring off the stained wood dining table. I slung my army-green messenger bag over my shoulder and pushed through the door to the hallway.

  Maybe I was more annoyed than I had any right to be, but I was sick of being treated like a flight risk.

  Okay, yes, I’d messed up.

  Yes, I’d messed up in a really big way.

  But no, I was not a delinquent. No, I was not a liar. No, I was not looking, at every turn, for a chance to run off and end up living on the streets, picking pockets and sleeping in bus stops.

  I just made one bad call.

  It started back in January. I was hanging out at Nic’s house, along with my then boyfriend, Landon (more on that particular disaster in a moment). It had been cold and rainy for about two weeks straight, and we were going stir-crazy from being inside.

  “Where would you go right now, if you could go anywhere?” Nic asked.

&n
bsp; “Hawaii,” Landon said.

  “Hogwarts,” I said.

  Landon poked me in the ribs. “Dork.”

  “I’d go to the beach,” Nic said. “Any beach where it’s warm. I haven’t seen the ocean in like three years.”

  “Me neither,” I said. And that was fine with me. I’m not the beach-going type. The thought of being crowded into an endless sea of sun worshippers was the opposite of tempting—give me wizard school any day.

  “You know what we should do?” Landon said. “We should go someplace for spring break.”

  “To the beach!” Nic said, sitting up.

  “Or to Orlando … ?” I said. “You know there’s an entire theme park—”

  “Yes, Delia,” Nic said. “We know.”

  “Not Orlando,” Landon said. “Daytona.”

  “Okay, and which one of our moms is going to be willing to come with us to Daytona?” I asked.

  Landon flipped his floppy blond hair to the other side of his head. “Um … why would we invite someone’s mom?”

  I was puzzled by his lack of understanding. I mean, a lot of my geekiness went over his head, but I thought this was pretty cut-and-dried. “Maybe … so we’d be allowed to go?”

  Nic was sitting on the edge of the bed in deep contemplation. Then she brightened. “Hey! My church does a youth group trip every spring break. We could tell our parents we’re going on that, and then just fly down to Daytona. They don’t have to know about it.”

  Oh. So I was the one who hadn’t understood. This trip was supposed to be sans parental units. My stomach lurched. As far as child-rearing styles went, my mother and father leaned pretty far into the “over-watchfulness” category. If I snuck off to another state—without so much as a grown-up in the group—and they found out … ? I’d be grounded until forever.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Nic said, leveling me with her dark-lashed gaze. “You’re thinking about Brad and Lisa.”

  “Specifically, about the heart attacks they’d have if they found out,” I said.

  “But they don’t have to find out!” Nic said. “The youth group goes to the Bahamas. They don’t have cell service. So we send an e-mail every couple of days and say we stopped in at an Internet café. You’ll come back with sand in your shoes and a sunburn. They’ll never even know.”

  I closed my eyes for a moment to think about it—about the epicness of it—and as I did, I felt Landon’s warm hand on my forearm. A straining sensation pulled at my heart.

  “Just consider it, Delia,” he said softly.

  Landon McKay wasn’t the quarterback of the football team or anything, but I’d never quite gotten past feeling like I was the lucky one in the relationship and he was doing me some sort of undeserved favor. Because of this, he held the upper hand in negotiations of every sort.

  “Yeah, but why do we have to go to Daytona?” I asked.

  Nic shrugged. “Because that’s where cool people go. And we’re nothing if not incredibly cool.”

  I was silent.

  “All right, we can spend one day in Orlando at your Hogwarts theme park,” Nic said. “Deal?”

  “Deal, deal, deal,” Landon urged, smiling at me.

  He flopped his floppy hair again, and I knew resistance was futile.

  “Deal,” I said, the sound of the word settling uncomfortably in my ears as Landon’s hand closed tightly around mine.

  It’s definitely fair to say I had a bad feeling about the whole thing from the beginning. When the time came to siphon money from my savings account to pay for the plane ticket and my share of our fleabag motel room, even Nic seemed to be having second thoughts. The problem was, neither one of us was willing to admit it.

  The morning of March 8, I hugged my parents good-bye, commanded Janie to stay out of my room, and ran out to Nic’s waiting car with a suitcase full of sunscreen and bathing suits, reminding myself that statistically, 99 percent of the things we worry about never occur.

  Except two things happened.

  One, I accidentally left my cell phone on the kitchen counter.

  Two, Landon texted said cell phone three minutes after I’d left for the airport to say he changed his mind and thought maybe it wasn’t an awesome idea so he wasn’t going to go. And OH, by the way, last night he ran into a girl he’d gone to summer camp with and realized he had feelings for her and thought it was fair that we take this week apart to explore the idea of not being a couple anymore. And OH, double by the way, he still loved me and cared for me and wanted me and Nic to be super careful in Daytona because he’d heard it could get a little wild.

  So after five months of being a couple, the boy I kind of in the back of my head could picture myself eventually marrying (I know, I know, but I couldn’t help myself) not only sold me out but also dumped me … over text.

  Too bad I wasn’t there to see it.

  But Janie was.

  So my parents showed up at the airport, demanded to be let through security and practically caused a national security crisis, and then accosted Nic and me in the waiting area, where we were drinking Starbucks and keeping watch for Landon.

  It was a super fun day.

  Dumped, caught, and yeah—grounded until graduation.

  Later that night, as I lay on my bed, I reached for the framed photo of Landon that smiled at me from the nightstand and flipped it facedown.

  Next time I get a bad feeling about something, I thought, I’m going to run so fast in the other direction all that’ll be left is dust.

  OBSERVATIONS MADE AFTER THE FACT

  Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

  In a way, I was right.

  All that’s left of any of us is dust.

  Living people can be so arrogant sometimes.

  (And I can say that, because I was one.)

  My exploration had two main objectives: One, to see more of the building, because (creepy or not) it was by far the most impressive thing I had ever been able to claim as my own, and that provoked in me a burning curiosity to see every nook and cranny.

  Two, I wanted to unearth more about Aunt Cordelia. The letters she’d written me were rubber-banded together in my messenger bag. I’d reread them on the car ride and noticed repeated mentions of a room that she loved—her own little office, where she felt free and peaceful. If there was some secret worth learning about Aunt Cordelia’s death, about what she’d done and why, it had to be in that room. She’d listed a few details about it: blue-painted walls, an antique lamp, and a little desk by a window where the sunlight came slanting in. So I knew that the room wasn’t in the superintendent’s apartment.

  I decided to start in the wardress’s office, which was dim and smelled like stale library books, with wood-paneled walls and a large, fancy desk. Everything was old-fashioned and covered in a quarter inch of dust.

  The desk was in immaculate order, not an item out of place except for a folder labeled DISCHARGE PAPERWORK—1943.

  In that moment, it fully sank in that the charming cottage of my daydreams was an honest-to-goodness mental institution. An incredulous laugh bubbled out of me at the sheer preposterousness of it.

  But when I picked up the envelope, revealing a perfectly dust-free rectangle on the desk’s surface, an uncomfortable tingle made its way down my neck. In more than seventy years, no one had come into this room and moved this folder?

  A dozen yellow slips of paper spilled out when I tipped the envelope. I picked up the closest one. There was a name typed at the top: VICTORIA FOWLER, and below that, a date: JULY 18, 1943.

  I wondered what Victoria had done, and whether being here had helped her at all. Just how troubled did a female have to be to be sent to a place with the word institute in its name, anyway? Were the patients criminals, murderers, completely insane? Or were they just headstrong women whose families decided things would be easier if they were locked away?

  Having recently been categorized as moderately “troubled” myself, I was a little sensitive to the idea.r />
  I shook off the uneasy feeling. Back to business. There was no way this was the room Aunt Cordelia had talked about in her letters.

  A second door, labeled NO UNAUTHORIZED ADMITTANCE, opened into a little nurses’ office that contained a bed, a desk, and two chairs. On one of the chairs was a metal surgical tray, identical to the one in Cordelia’s kitchen.

  I paused on my way through to glance at a newspaper clipping that had been left on the corner of the desk. The headline read: ROTBURG SANITARIUM TO CLOSE DOORS AFTER 77 YEARS. I scanned the first few paragraphs, which quoted a man from the Pennsylvania State Board of Medicine as saying that there had been numerous problems at the Piven Institute over the years, and the decision to close was “strongly supported” by the state.

  The imposing stone institution has remained in the care of the Piven family since its founding, even after the 1885 disappearance of founder Maxwell Piven. Local legend speculates that Maxwell, tired of the day-to-day burdens of his role, went west to California in search of a new life.

  Hmm. Maybe we Pivens have always been the type to sneak off without permission.

  Next I found myself in a small back hallway. The closest door had a sign that read NURSES’ DORMITORY, and the other signs were for the kitchen, janitorial closet, basement, and patient stairway.

  I hesitated, thinking how nice it would be to explore somewhere light and tidy, like a dormitory for efficient, white-frocked nurses. But by now I had a sense, down to my core, that what I was searching for wasn’t contained in any cheerful, well-kept rooms.

  The kitchen, janitorial closet, and basement seemed too creepy for solo exploration. So I passed by them and started to climb the stairwell.

  On the second floor, I came to a small landing with a cork bulletin board on the wall. A yellowed paper sign was pinned to it with rusted thumbtacks:

  IF THOU BE HUMBLED AND RENOUNCE THY SIN,

  THY PITEOUS SOUL MAY FIND MERCY WITHIN.

  —LORD P. LINDLEY