My hasty steps carried me past the last of the disreputable buildings, the bucket shops and doggeries reeking of cheap gin, and brought me into the clear, to the edge of Superior Wharf. I paused to take it all in. The familiar sight still struck a chord of awe in me. The sky was a smear of gray above the pale-blue water. The harbor was a forest of masts, dozens of square-rigged ships lined up at their moorings like horses in their traces, eager to be underway.
This was the busiest hour of the day, as I knew it would be, the chaos barely restrained. The wharf teemed with life. Cargo rose on the broad shoulders of hired men. Here and there, the dark gray bulk of a donkey engine belched steam with a groan. The singsong cries of the chiefs and captains sounded out over the din. I heard metal on metal, leather on wood, wind on canvas. A thousand breaths caught in a thousand men’s chests as they struggled together. I breathed with them for just a moment before I stepped forward and let the crowd swallow me up.
I knew my destination like I knew my own heart. When we were younger, my father would regularly bring us to look at his fleet, and on days he was in port, we’d accompany our cook, Mrs. Shepherd, when she delivered his lunch. My mother eventually put a stop to it, adamant that the wharf wasn’t a place for young ladies, but my feet still knew the familiar path.
My father’s ships docked all the way at the west end, at the choicest piers, which I would avoid. The wrong set of eyes on me, one moment of recognition, could end everything. Instead, I aimed much nearer, toward the southeast, headed for the third pier. Despite the commotion on all sides, the wood of this pier was bare and the water beyond it glassy and empty. No ships moored there. The currents were unfriendly.
A fragment of a shanty swung through the air to me.
And hie, and ho, we’re Hades-bound
Though never shall we burn
And ho, and hie, black Death himself
Shall bid us fair return,
Shall bid us fair return.
As my foot landed on the wood of the third pier, a cry escaped my lips. I hadn’t planned on that. Yet once I started, I could not be silent. Anger and confusion and desperation had brought me here, and I saw at once that I could roar all three of them in one sound, so I did. A loose sail whipped against its mast with a frantic thump, countless creaking hulls strained at anchor, and my own howl joined in.
It felt good to scream. So I screamed.
Heads were beginning to turn around me. I stayed steady in my course. I continued walking to the end of the third pier, still howling, pausing only to take in enough breath to howl again. Down here close to the water, the smell of fish scales and new blood was strong. The salty tang of the ocean rose up to me as the waves beat restlessly against the pilings, each watery slap like an open palm striking flesh. I removed my shoes, also stolen, and laid them neatly next to one another with both worn toes pointing out to sea.
And then I jumped.
* * *
My sister had a habit of saving my life. The first time, I was only three years old to her five, and I wandered away from the group at a family picnic. She found me teetering on a stony cliff above the Bay, leaning forward for a better view of the waves crashing against the rocks far below, and she took my hand to lead me back. In my first ten years, she saved me four times over. The cliff first. After that, there was a runaway horse, which would have thrown me had she not managed to calm it with her gentle, musical voice. Then a bright handful of poisonous berries she pulled from my mouth with her own fingers even as I bit her over and over, not knowing what was at stake. Finally, just after I’d turned ten, a deep, cold lake I’d walked into on a whim, and her screams that brought our father running to pull my body from under the surface, sodden, motionless.
Ten years after that, the madness had come upon her, and I knew my turn would come to do the saving. Now it was here.
In all my twenty years, I had never done anything so outrageous. I was not myself. Instead, in my way, I would be the great Nellie Bly. Together, in 1887, Phoebe and I had breathlessly read “Ten Days in a Mad-House” in the New York World, shocked by the miserable conditions on Blackwell’s Island, astonished by Bly’s bravery. Had it only been last year? It already seemed a lifetime ago. Father took the New York papers—surely an extravagance, as domestic and foreign papers alike were available at his club, but he said there was no substitute for news with his morning coffee. If Mother didn’t snatch them away quickly enough, Phoebe and I took them to her room to read together. So we’d had leisure to read about the daring young journalist, how she peered and skulked around a poorhouse to feign insanity convincingly, how she endured the cold baths and cruel nurses, all to bring more attention to the mistreated inmates of the institution. In the end, her efforts had won an immense sum, a million dollars, in additional funding for the next year—one hoped it would be enough for food without spiders in it and the salaries of doctors who would pay attention.
My reasons differed from Bly’s, but I thought her methods worth imitating. In our house on Powell Street, I was helpless, but once I was inside the asylum, I could find my sister and demand her freedom. I could invoke my father’s name and even Mr. Sidwell’s if necessary and take her home. Out of sight was out of mind. If I brought Phoebe back into my parents’ sight, they’d be forced to make the decision all over again, and I was convinced that this time, they’d make the right choice.
That was the plan.
For Phoebe, I had made the decision to drown again. Indigent women who crept aboard my father’s ships or any ship along Superior Wharf were evaluated by the police to determine their state of mind. If they were criminal, they went to the jail; if insane, Goldengrove. I only had to demonstrate evidence of insanity on this pier or near it. I had chosen my place and my moment.
Only there was so much I had failed to take into account.
The ocean is not a lake. A pier is not a beach. I hadn’t understood how long and silent the fall would be on the way to the water, nor how much like stone it would feel when my body struck it.
I’d thought I would have to force myself to go limp. I’d thought I would have to hold myself still, to work hard to stay under the surface, to fight against my body’s instinct to swim. I’d planned to appear helpless.
When I hit, the sound of my body striking the surface reached me first, then the pain. I was being wrung out like a rag in the fist of a giant. The pain exploded within me and crossed me out.
After that, for some unknown time, there was nothing at all.
I came to myself again deep underwater, in a black panic. I caught a distant glimpse of my own hand, pale like a corpse’s. I tried to reach up with it, but it did not move. The pressure in my chest was enormous, my hunger for air desperate. I fought the instinct to open my mouth and lost. The dark saltwater was around me, in me. All was dead silence.
Like a hundred tugging hands, the currents drew me down.
My chest and throat burned. My waterlogged body sank. I could feel eternity hurtling toward me as what little I could still see began to go gray and dissolve. From within my skull bubbled a single frantic burst, a last, sad fact: Here Lies a Pretty Fool would be my tombstone, and my poor sister would die alone in that hellhole.
No sound, no sound, no sound, only pain.
Then, with a thunderous growl, the water next to me roiled and churned. Another jumper. My body was yanked into strong arms. Whether we were headed up or down, I honestly could not tell, but I had no fight in me.
Then we were up. Light returned. Sound came back. Both hurt, but in a good way, a hopeful way. When I met the air again, I gulped it in, unable to do otherwise, though it seared almost as fiercely as the seawater.
“Grip on, ye mad tart,” my rescuer growled, but I could do nothing to help him. My limp arms slid off his shoulders, and I went under again. I was only an inch from the air, but my head would not turn. I would not have minded dying if it meant there would be no more pain.
More arms, strong arms, hauled at me. The water
receded as I rose, then fell again. I felt the back of my head smack hard against something—the wood of the pier?—and stars bloomed white in the blackness behind my eyes.
Was I back up in the world or not? What was I imagining? Faces swam in and out of my vision, blurry and faint. The plan had called for me to laugh after my rescue, to seem as mad as possible. That was what always disturbed me most about Phoebe’s fits: the laughter. Not the days where she lay still and silent, but the way her piercing laugh cut through the air while she said and did the darkest things, hurting her body, cursing her soul. Her laughter was the music of harm, of cruelty, of sadness. So I’d made laughter part of the plan.
But I could barely recall the plan, and when I opened my mouth to laugh, a great gush of water and blood came pouring forth onto the planks. My body rejected everything I had swallowed and more. Salt burned my throat. People jumped back, groaning, exclaiming, though I could not make out their words.
Whatever the rest of the plan was, I thought as I slid back into sweet oblivion, I hoped it would take care of itself.
* * *
“Poor thing. Poor thing,” came a woman’s voice. She smoothed a heather-gray blanket over my shoulders, tucked it in more tightly around my arms. Then she disappeared, and the blanket remained. A while after that, the blanket too was gone.
I awoke inside a building I did not recognize, with no sign or lettering to anchor me. I’d been set down on a chair in a small square room, my wet red dress clinging, still clammy on my goose-pimpled skin. Sounds beyond the walls might have been women’s voices, but no part of me could be sure. The back of my head still stung.
A woman in a neat cap and unadorned navy-blue dress looked me over and leaned forward. Had she been there already when I was brought in? Had I missed her arrival?
“Name?” she asked.
I remembered, dimly, that I had planned to use my real name. It would hardly give me away; the state of California was lousy with Charlotte Smiths. But when I opened my mouth to speak, nothing came out. I felt a burning, trembling pain on both sides of my throat. Breath hissed out of me but no words.
The woman looked up at me for a moment, but my silence didn’t seem to surprise her in the least.
“Age?”
I begged my hands to cooperate. Slowly, with a tremor, they did, and I bent enough fingers back to leave two on one hand extended, the other hand in a fist.
“Twenty?”
My head twitched down, almost of its own accord. She marked something in what looked like a logbook and ran her finger down the page. I had no prayer of reading the words. My vision was still blurred and cloudy. Nothing felt right. In a way, I felt I still might be under the water, might still be in danger of drowning. Rising to flee crossed my mind, but my body had no way of following the order, were I to give it.
“Complaint?”
I stayed silent. Was there a wrong answer? A right one?
“Complaint?”
It didn’t matter, since I couldn’t speak. It dawned on me that this might be an advantage. I’d wanted to seem lost. Now I was.
The woman looked me over again, her gaze intent, then changed her question. “Are you in despair?”
Was I? No, I wasn’t, but if I were a madwoman, the right answer was yes. I looked down at my lap. My fingers looked dead, as they had underwater, long and pale and limp. The pain in the back of my head swam around to the front, as slippery and broad as an eel.
“Do you have somewhere to go? Family? Anyone to send for?”
I shook my head from side to side, gently so as not to make the pain worse. I had to be alone in the world if I wanted to be sent to the asylum. I had to be poor and lonely, a danger to myself. Silently, I tried to seem that way.
The woman in the chair seemed to tire of waiting for a reply. She made a final mark on her paper and shouted, “Orderly! Another for the trip.”
A door somewhere banged open. Then I was in the air. The wind was gone from me. I realized I had been slung over a man’s shoulder, my hindquarters bobbing in the air indecently, my face against his shirt. The shirt had once been white. He smelled of musk and onions.
The quality of the light changed. We were outdoors. I was right side up again for a moment, and then I fell onto something hard. It was the back of a wagon. People—all women—surrounded me on three sides. They smelled far worse than the man had, a queer mix of dirt and salt and flowers gone to rot. Some were shouting, some were silent, and perhaps it was better for me that my addled mind could not make sense of the chaos. More tattered skirts and bare limbs than I’d seen in all my years surrounded me. The pressure in my head roared up again and blotted out the light.
I squinted at the man who had dropped me there, into the last spot left.
“Be good,” he said and shut the door.
* * *
For the next little while, there were flashes of clarity, but they had nothing to do with where I was, only where I’d come from. Back when my life felt real—before my parents committed my sister to Goldengrove and hollowed that life out—I had developed a particular habit of reverie. Whenever I found dark thoughts slipping over me, I remembered a happier time. I lost myself so thoroughly in the details of the pleasant memory that it felt more real than reality, and this drove the dark thoughts away.
But in the back of the wagon, I was still half-wrecked from a chestful of saltwater and a sharp blow to the head. My thoughts of the past were not fully clear, nor were they fully happy. I could not fight my way back to the good memories, not this time.
We bumped along in darkness. Each sway and thump of the wagon gave rise to groans, snarls, moans.
I saw my mother in the parlor at midnight, ill-lit by the guttering lantern, saying in a firm, forced voice, “It will be lovely.”
Darkness again.
Phoebe was screaming no and death sentence and outrage. She was screaming no.
Darkness.
Phoebe’s brittle, high-pitched giggles welled up from behind her bedroom door, which was locked from the outside.
Dark.
Three people at the broad mahogany dinner table, flanked on all sides by empty chairs, those of us who remained outnumbered by those who’d gone.
Then nothing.
Chapter Three
Whatever else Goldengrove might or might not be, it was strikingly beautiful. A beautiful building, argued the experts, inspired beautiful thoughts, even in the most damaged, suffering minds.
In the illustrations, it looked like a castle. Two stories high, three walls enclosing an inner courtyard, crowned by a steeply gabled roof. Narrow windows alternated with wider ones, each framed by a pale sill against the darker brick. The front entrance inspired awe: a brick arch above the front door rose in a series of toothed circles arranged in a horseshoe, its lines both exotic and welcoming.
When I arrived in a wagonful of indigent San Francisco madwomen, however, we did not enter by the front door. I remembered my clear vision of Phoebe entering that way, her head bent under the Moorish arch. It was a fiction. Somehow, the loss of that image, which I had never wanted, was even more haunting. Could it be worse here than I’d imagined? What else had I gotten wrong?
The long, rough ride had dulled even the fiercest of the madwomen overnight, and when the back gate of the wagon thumped open and sunlight flooded in, there were grumbles of protest, not howls. One by one, we stepped down from the wagon into the unknown.
White figures formed a line on either side of the wagon all the way to the entrance, gradually tapering inward, like a chute. I had seen cattle driven this way, and I knew what awaited them. I wanted to run. There was nowhere to run to. In the distance, a black iron fence rose above our heads. Nearer, the building that was our destination loomed, casting a broad, dark shadow.
The figures in white all had a sameness to them, a haunting, heavy presence. Go, they called. No came the response. Go again, and somehow, the chaos melted into something less wild, protest without resistance.
Once we were inside, the nurses, their caps perched atop tight, neat chignons, herded us smoothly forward. My head ached, and I lost track of where we were. Every hallway was long and barren and identical. No way to tell one from the next. We bumped and jostled, we waited, and at last, we came to rest in a long hallway that looked exactly like all the others, with one exception: in the center of the floor rested a single wooden crate, empty.
Then, as if by magic, a woman appeared. It was easy to tell she was in charge. Her uniform was pale blue instead of white, her cap a pointed one, and on her belt, she wore an iron ring of keys the size of a fist, jangling and clinking with every step. She was the smallest woman present—petite, slender—yet her gaze demanded attention.
She stepped up onto the wooden crate and looked us over like cargo, yes, or disobedient children. We looked her over in return. Her eyes and hair were both dark. Her shoulders were narrow, her body lean, and though her dress was spotless, it hung loosely on her, awash in extra fabric at the hips. The mere set of her jaw made me want to step back, to cower, to shrink away.
“I am Matron Baumgarten,” she said in a voice with a vinegar tang, as if we’d already done something to offend her. “You will address me as Matron if you ever have occasion to address me, which you will not. This is Goldengrove, a haven for women of your kind.”
I looked to the women on my left and right. On one side, a woman my mother’s age muttered to herself in a language I didn’t understand, unkempt black hair like a storm cloud around her face. Her skirt was dark with something that might have been blood. On the other, a waif of a girl who couldn’t have been more than sixteen wept quietly, her face flushed, her cheekbones so high, they cast small pools of shadow. The woman on her far side stroked her back with a flat, gentle hand. I couldn’t tell whether they were acquainted before now or as much strangers to each other as the rest of us. Whatever we all were, we were not of a kind.
The matron went on. “Whether you were sent here by a loving family who did not know how else to help you or whether you were rescued from poverty, you will be treated the same. You will be treated for your conditions. If God and science allow, you will be cured.”
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