When the attendants called, we rose to dress and ready ourselves for our hike. I moaned and grabbed my belly, complaining to Salt that I didn’t feel well. He didn’t even hesitate before yanking me by the elbow to put me in the line at the door. I sagged, and he righted me. I let my knees buckle, and he kicked me sharply in the shin; the pain stiffened my legs, and I was upright again.
“Fresh air’ll be good for you,” he grunted, and we were underway. I paused to be chalked, bent at the waist to keep up the illusion, and put my hand on the rope to follow the crowd.
Once we returned from the walk—I’d dragged my feet the whole way, groaning softly from time to time, which had resulted only in sweet Hazel offering repeated sympathies and Bess offering to shut me up for good if I couldn’t keep silent of my own accord—I tried my luck with a more compassionate ear.
When Piper came to move me, I stood still and clutched my belly again.
“No work,” I said. “Can’t.”
“I’ll take you to the doctor,” said Piper.
I backtracked quickly and hastened to add, “Can I please just rest? I don’t want to trouble him. Take the girls to their morning shifts, and when you come back, if I still feel bad, then I’ll go be seen.”
The woman with the rag bundle took up wailing, as she sometimes did, and Piper’s head snapped up to turn in her direction.
“Go,” I said and sank to my cot, making it hard for her to hold me. She gave a quick sharp nod and was off.
As soon as I heard the bolt slide home, I was up from my cot and moving toward Damaris’s, shoving my hand down between the mattress and the frame until my fingers met the thick, crumpled paper. It was wrapped around some kind of small box, and I pulled it all up together. I scraped my hand on something sharp while pulling it back up, but the pain didn’t stop me. I didn’t have time for it.
I studied the map, willing its contours to cement themselves in my brain. There it was: Melpomene, second floor. Yes, there were faint lines within its large square, a warren of rooms. They were not labeled by number. I cursed to myself and checked the small box, thick as my thumb and half as long, that the map had been wrapped around. It contained half a dozen phosphor-headed matches. I shoved it down the front of my dress quickly and returned my attention to the map, taking a moment to commit the other wards to memory as best I could: Clio, Terpsichore, and Thalia here, with the dining hall, kitchen, and entry; on the second floor with Melpomene were Polyhymnia, Erato, and Calliope, whose purpose I did not yet know; and the third floor consisted of Euterpe and Urania and offices. Whose offices? I looked, and there were several, one quite large, looking like a series of adjoining rooms.
I held the paper close to my face and spotted the ghost of a notation in pencil I had not seen before. The first few offices were marked with small checkmarks, as in a ledger, and in the hallway next to them was written darkness? in the tiniest, faintest letters.
Suddenly, there was sound, and the bolt thudded. Back so soon?
Moving quickly, I crammed the map back between the bedstead and the mattress and leapt back toward my own cot, landing hard upon it. The door opened, and Nurse Piper came in, holding Mouse’s arm in one hand and guiding the woman with the rag bundle with the other.
“Something going around, I guess,” she said. “Several ladies not feeling well today.”
I grunted and rolled onto my side while she got the other two situated.
She put her hand on my head to feel for fever, and I felt a flush of shame. I was deceitful and awful, and here this woman was, taking me at my word.
“You do seem ill,” she said. “Look how pink your cheeks are. How are you feeling?”
“Not well, but no worse, thank you.”
“Your abdomen?”
“Still pains me.”
I wished one of the others would act up and distract her, but they stayed silent, and I cursed them for it.
“To the doctor, then?”
“Just sit with me, if you would,” I said and tried to appear pathetic, in need of comfort. A conversation with Dr. Concord would do me little good today. I was burning to get to Melpomene, and I wouldn’t be able to slip away if I were being escorted to and from his office. My best bet was to wait until evening and borrow Nora’s key, if she’d let me have it. I knew full well she might not. If she wanted compensation, I was empty-handed.
Could I give her the map? I doubted she would need it, but still, it was an asset. I had nothing else.
Thinking of the map, I let my eyes flicker over to Damaris’s bed, and with a sinking heart, I realized the corner of the paper was still visible above her mattress. I hadn’t shoved it down far enough. Anyone who looked could see it if they looked closely.
I closed my eyes and groaned, hoping Nurse Piper’s attention would be on me and not the rest of the room.
The clatter of footsteps approached the door and then spilled inside. The rest of the women had returned.
Piper rose from where she’d been sitting at the edge of my mattress and shepherded the girls into their places to rest on their cots for a few minutes before the midday meal.
Then I saw something odd, and my heart sank.
Mouse was not at her cot. She was walking toward Nurse Winter, and as I watched, she tugged on the sleeve of the nurse’s uniform and pointed toward Damaris’s cot. Damaris was already sitting on the foot of it and either had not noticed the visible paper or hadn’t had time to do anything about it.
I saw Mouse pointing, and her finger was as terrible a weapon as a knife. I couldn’t move. I watched in horror.
Nurse Winter bobbed her head and strode in Damaris’s direction. Mouse returned to her cot with a smug smile. If I could have reached her, I would have slapped the smile off her face. Damaris looked up at Nurse Winter’s approach with no guile or expectation in her face, merely curiosity. The birthmark on her neck looked like it was choking her, but her expression was placid. Guilt washed over me in a wave. She had no idea what was coming.
“This is your cot, Miss Patterson.” Nurse Winter’s words were stern, emotionless. She did not sound angry. She was merely making a statement, yet there was something terrifying in it.
“It’s mine,” said Damaris.
“And this?” She plucked the map out, unfolded it, and regarded it. “This is a map of the asylum, is it not?”
I expected her to say she’d never seen it before, to protest, to evade. Instead, she simply said, “Yes.”
Before I knew what was happening, Winter had her by the shoulder and was shoving her out of the room, the map crumpled in her other hand. They were both terribly silent.
When Damaris hadn’t appeared in the dayroom two hours later, none of us knew what to think. There were two equally strong rumors, one that she was being sent back home to the bosom of her family, and one that an attendant had misjudged his strength in restraining her, snuffing out her breath by accident, which the matron and superintendent were hastily working to hush up. Neither of the rumors seemed likely, but if she wasn’t among us, where was she?
I felt sick for my part in it, but I also wondered. The map was ragged with folding and refolding, the paper fragile with age. Had it really belonged to Damaris, or did she only claim it to be sure no one else would suffer punishment? She had a bigger heart than most anyone in Goldengrove, not to mention those beyond.
The gossip about Damaris raced through the dayroom like wildfire, weaving in and among our other activities. Winter and Piper were caught up in a conversation of their own—was I imagining it, or were they sneaking looks at Nora in between words? Hazel had a dog-eared Bible open on her lap, pretending to read aloud from it, but she was actually recounting the plot of one of her favorite novels, called Washington Square. In it, a well-off young woman is romanced by a charming young man, only to be cruelly jilted by him at the last. We all found fictional tragedies more compelling than our own. Hazel was a talented orator, embellishing the story with a wide variety of lively expression
s and gestures, and her two most loyal audience members, the firebrand Martha and the empty-headed Nettie, faced her equally rapt.
I perched next to Jubilee on the piano bench, having been informed that the piano itself was as dumb as a cloth poppet. Its wires had all been removed after one inmate plucked out a wire with the intention of using it to strangle a nurse, and not a single one of its eighty-eight keys made any sound whatsoever, no matter how hard they were struck. If music had once been a part of the therapies of Goldengrove, perhaps meant for the ladies of Euterpe or Erato, it certainly wasn’t now.
Suddenly, over Hazel’s shoulder, I caught an unexpected blur: the woman with the rag bundle making a sprint for the door. She ran every few days, and this time, she made it out of the room without anyone being close enough to catch her. Last time, she’d made it to the roof; a moment later and she and the bundle would’ve gone over the edge, like the poor doomed Mary.
Quick as a flash, Salt sprinted after her, leaving no one on that side of the room to guard the women who remained. The door clanged behind him, but he had failed to pause long enough to lock it, and as smoothly as if we had planned it in advance, three of us stood up and slipped out. The nurses were deep in conversation on the other side of the room, and it wasn’t clear they’d noticed the fleeing woman, so even if they chased us immediately, there was no chance they could catch us all. I didn’t know what the other two women planned to do with their freedom if they got it, but I knew what I’d do with mine.
Mounting the staircase to the second floor was the first challenge. I removed my shoes to edge silently up the stairwell. I heard shouts echoing and paused to listen, pressing myself flat against the wall. Were the sounds getting closer or farther away? When I couldn’t tell after a moment, I started moving again. No sense in losing time. I didn’t know how long I had, and I didn’t know if it would be enough.
I started at every little noise. I crept and snuck. It was a long way to the ward, and I could have been caught countless times. I began to worry what my punishment would be if I were. The image of poor Damaris loomed in my mind’s eye. I shut it out. I needed all my power, all my focus, to get me to Melpomene in silence.
At the entrance to the ward, I could see a nurse standing near the door, her starched whites gleaming against the pale walls. A woman in the coral dress of a patient approached, and I expected the nurse to step into her path and block her with a rebuke.
But the nurse spoke to her tenderly, warmly, her face softening into a smile. As I watched from a distance, the nurse reached out for the hand of the inmate and tugged her in, a motion of deep intimacy. I saw the patient reach her hand up to the other woman’s face, then their bodies pressed and blurred together into one shape, melting into the shadows.
Instead of watching any longer, I took advantage of her distraction and slipped inside the ward, taking a quick left down the first hall. I knew women had been sent here for acting as men with other women, but it was the first time I’d seen it myself, and I was surprised a nurse had let herself be seduced. Then again, if a doctor could be seduced, why not a nurse? Or was it the nurse who’d done the seducing? The women here were as varied as the ones outside. Even more so, I realized, with fewer of society’s rules to inhibit them.
In any case, I had more important things at stake. On the map, the ward’s rooms had been unlabeled, but in reality, each door was stenciled with sharp black letters against the white of the wall. I only had to turn one more corner to reach 5-C, and when I was there, I found myself breathing in gasps unexpectedly.
I had gone through so much to get to this moment. Now, I finally had Phoebe in my reach. I fumbled with the handle, found it blessedly unlocked, and pushed it open to slip inside.
A slim figure sat on the bed, head bent, unmoving. The door snicked shut behind me, and the two of us were alone.
I had never seen her before.
Chapter Twelve
The woman in Room 5-C had blond hair as pale as straw, lighter than the gold of mine and Phoebe’s. Even seated, I could tell she was tall, with a dancer’s grace, and thin to the point of emaciation. One arm was bound tightly to the side of her body with wet bandages pulled taut, which looked intensely uncomfortable, though she did not seem to react.
I knew it wasn’t her, yet I said, “Phoebe?”
The woman looked up. She had once been beautiful, but it looked like the teeth of poverty had shredded her. Her skin was dry and papery, her bones showing through. Had her madness made her like this? Did it matter?
“Yes,” she said.
“Phoebe Smith?”
She jabbed one finger in the center of her bony chest and said, in a thick, tight accent, “Phoebe Smith.”
I burst into tears.
This was the last thing I’d expected. I’d thought I was at the end of my quest, yet now I found myself no closer than I’d ever been. Everything in me wanted to collapse and surrender. I almost wished myself in the cold baths—a torturous place I had wished more than once never to experience again—simply to blast me awake and give me clarity. All I could feel now was exhaustion, defeat, ruin.
With a supreme effort of will, I pulled myself together. Struggling to understand, I longed for the luxury of time I didn’t have. I couldn’t waste a single minute wondering how this had happened or wishing it were different. I was here now, with this woman. I had to make the time count.
“You aren’t Phoebe,” I said.
“I am Phoebe.”
“But you’re not! She’s my sister! I know who she is, and you’re not her!”
She gazed at my face uncomprehendingly. Her great, large brown eyes, staring at me like a cow’s, were empty of any intelligence or awareness. She placed the unbound hand on her chest and said again, with no more inflection than the first time, “Phoebe Smith.”
I rushed up to her—I couldn’t help it—and grabbed the threadbare fabric of her uniform dress in both of my fists. I could feel cold radiating from her bandage, and it did not slow me down a whit. I had never wanted to hurt another human being so much in my life. The depth of my fury scared me.
“Who the devil are you?”
She opened her mouth to speak the same words again—I knew they would be the same—so I clapped my hand over her mouth.
“Never you mind,” I said. “Ow!”
She tried to bite me. However worn and destroyed the rest of her looked, her teeth were as sharp as anyone’s.
I yanked my hand back.
“But I don’t understand.” I let the words spill out, even knowing she likely couldn’t understand any of them, if she hadn’t understood anything I’d said so far. “You’re using her name. But you aren’t her. Is she not here anymore? Where did she go? She can’t have gone home again, I don’t think, or maybe she did . . . but there’s no way to know. Or maybe she’s just using a different name. Though why would she? Is she using your name, whatever it was? How can I figure that out? I can’t. I can’t.”
I began to cry again. I put my face in my hands, and the tears ran into my cupped palms and washed my cheeks, until I felt wetness running down my neck into the collar of my dress. More and more and more tears came. Like a flood, like a river. Even in my wrecked state, I wanted to laugh. I doubted even the nurses in the washroom, zealous with their rough soap, could have scrubbed my face so clean.
I felt the thin woman place her free hand on my back, her fingertips spreading over my shoulder blade, then rubbing in a gentle circle. She began to murmur in a language I didn’t understand. It wasn’t French, Italian, or German, each of which I’d been tutored in to some degree. I tried to focus on the individual words. They were like little soap bubbles—rising, popping, vanishing—but there was also a throaty, tight burr to the voice.
I took a guess. “Russian?”
“Roose, dah,” she said.
We had Russians in San Francisco, most two generations removed from ancestors who’d tried to claim Oregon and came south when they failed. For my sixte
enth birthday, Father had taken me to buy a fur from a stout, grizzled man named Vodniak. He’d had an accent like this. I could place her looks now, the aristocratic Ural tilt to her chin, like the ballerinas of the Bolshoi Theatre. Knowing this solved absolutely nothing, but for now, it would have to do.
Her gentle hand on my back helped calm me just a little, enough to help a single clear thought enter my mind: if my sister wasn’t here, I needed to leave. The nurse and her patient would not be distracted forever. The nurses of my own ward were likely searching for me by now. I stood to go, heading toward the door.
I expected the Russian not-Phoebe to stop me or at least to speak to me. But she didn’t rise or reach out or rush the open door. She didn’t say a word. As I closed the door, I stole a last glance behind me. She was still sitting on the bed, head down, free hand laid across her lap, motionless, as she’d been when I found her.
As I slipped back down long hallways and empty stairs, the drumbeat pounded in my head: I had failed, failed, failed. I’d found the woman using my sister’s name, and she was not my sister, so now there was no way to find my sister at all. She could be anywhere in this maze or nowhere.
I allowed myself a brief fantasy of her at home, reunited with our parents, who had realized their terrible mistake in sending her away. I pictured her standing on the porch as Matilda opened the door for her and the housemaid’s shocked, pleased gasp as she recognized the prodigal daughter. My mother would rush to the door and cry out her name; my father would choke back his emotions, a fist at his mouth; Phoebe would smile enigmatically for a moment, savoring the dawning recognition on their faces, and then open her arms generously to embrace them. The lamplight’s golden glow would bathe their three entwined forms, holding each other tightly, wracked with relief. Our parents would murmur sorry, sorry, so sorry under their breath, their regret overflowing, steady and soothing as a river.
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