Breathing deeply, I swung the closet door open and stepped out into the hallway.
I nearly collided head-on with a tall figure in a rumpled tweed suit, and I froze. My head thumped against his chest, and I stumbled back from him. Then I reached my hand up to straighten my cap, hoping it was what a real nurse would do in this situation.
After the man regained his balance, he eyed me sideways, as if not sure he was actually seeing a flesh-and-blood woman. His eyes were red. He clutched a bottle of clear liquid, which sloshed softly as he casually swung it in a short, repeating arc. In his other hand was an empty tumbler. I thought I recognized the smell of cheap gin. My father never allowed it in the house, but from the docks, I knew the smell of a sailor gone on a benjo, and when they drank enough, they carried the smell with them long after the drink was done.
“Do I know you, fair Nurse?” he asked in a low, musical voice, sounding genuinely confused. He was at least a head taller than me and had to look down in meeting my gaze, yet if we had met in other circumstances, I would not have found him frightening. There was a softness to him, a gentle quality. He seemed neither young nor old, with a long, oval face and jet-black hair slicked back from his high forehead. His suit was of fine quality, but the elbows of the jacket were clearly worn, and the top button of the shirt underneath dangled precariously from its thread. He and his clothes had both seen better days.
“I’m not sure.” It seemed the wisest answer.
“Did I hire you? I suppose I might have. I’m sorry I don’t remember things quite as well as I should these days.”
Emboldened, I asked, “Why do you think that might be?”
“Too much to remember,” he said. “Too much of everything.”
“Too much of that?” I gestured at the gin bottle.
“On the contrary. Never enough,” he said. There was some kind of mourning in his voice, quite powerful, obviously sincere. “You’re not here for my signature, are you? That’s all anyone ever wants of me anymore. I am but a pen in hand.”
Had he been anyone else in the world, I might have felt sorry for him. But I knew now who he must be.
The elusive superintendent.
Knowing that he had the power to improve the lives of every single woman here, yet all he did was disappear into the bottom of a bottle, that was reprehensible. It took all my strength to remain calm.
“No, I don’t need you to sign a thing,” I told him.
Given that he seemed nearly too drunk to move down the hallway, it was no wonder we’d never seen him down on the first floor, let alone outside. Each staircase might as well have been an ocean. But he couldn’t be this drunk all the time, could he? This was an extraordinary day for me. It might well be for him. I hoped so.
“Thank Christ. There’s just too much,” he said. “So much to manage, and the investors demand results. Money, money, money. If I don’t deliver, I’m out on my ear. Who will help the women then?”
“I don’t know,” I said, telling the truth.
“I want to help them. To cure them, if we can. That’s why I started here. Maybe tomorrow will be better. Maybe tomorrow I’ll start turning things around. But no one understands how hard it is. Do you?”
I shook my head.
He sighed and held out his bottle in my direction. I was loath to take it, but he seemed insistent, so I did. “Pour me a smile, would you?” he asked.
It was powerfully, painfully clear to me that he didn’t need another. “Are you certain?”
“I don’t pour. Only a man enslaved by the demon alcohol pours his own.”
Half a dozen questions sprang instantly into my brain. I chose the most urgent. “Who poured you the last one?”
“Mnemosyne,” he said.
My heart dropped.
I struggled mightily not to leap forward and shake him until the truth spilled out. Everything counted on keeping myself calm.
“What’s that?”
“Who, you mean,” he said. “She pours for me sometimes. Can’t right now. That’s not her real name, of course. Sort of a joke with myself. In any case, you’ll help me out, won’t you?”
I forced myself to guess at what a real nurse would say. “Sure, let’s call this medicinal. I’ll mete out your dose. Your office?”
He turned and pointed behind him, lurching even on the level floor, and I held the door open for him. He managed three steps through, shooting me a warm, lopsided grin that made me suspect he could be rather charming when sober, if he was ever that. I closed the door behind us, then took a moment to breathe.
Don’t rush, I told myself. Don’t risk anything for speed.
But as soon as we were both inside the door, he settled his empty tumbler on the desk. I poured the gin. He sloshed the liquid in his glass and stared at it for a long moment, grunting low in his throat, but with what emotion, I had no idea.
As he did battle with his tumbler of poison, I took a quick survey of the room. I saw bookshelves stuffed with tomes on scientific learning, everything from phrenology to epilepsy; a leather-topped cherrywood desk strewn with official-looking papers in piles high and low; a slim glass window to the outside, tall enough to let in light but too narrow for a person to fit through; a wall with a fainting couch under a series of not-quite-level framed portraits, beetle-browed, grave gentlemen who I assumed to be the previous occupants of the office; and on the fourth wall, a closed door with a crystal knob that I instantly longed to fit my hand around and turn.
“Pour yourself one,” said the superintendent. “Sure you need it.”
I made the first available excuse. “No glass.”
He reached into the desk and set one out on the leather for me. My glass, like his, was a solid tumbler with a thick base. The desk was not small, yet he was barely able to strike his mark—the glass teetered at the very edge, ready to fall. I reached out and slid it in my direction, then poured in the gin, which stank even more strongly this much closer to me. We clinked glasses and tipped our heads back, me for a sip and him to drink the glass dry. The smell alone burned my nostrils, followed by a foul taste that seared my throat. My lessons from Miss Buckingham’s came in handy as I managed to squelch my nausea and keep my face completely expressionless. I’d learned that in a session called Proper Dining Manners, At Home and Away, taught by a superannuated German countess-by-marriage who always smelled of iodine and peppermints. I wondered if my mother would be proud.
“What’s all this?” I waved at the papers on the desk. I just wanted to keep him talking and drinking until I’d learned all I could.
“She doesn’t tell you much, does she?”
I took a guess at his meaning. “The matron?”
“Her. Missed her calling. Should have been superintendent herself. Or governor. Or president of the United States.”
Carefully, I said, “She seems to enjoy her position.”
“Because it’s the most power she can get. I’ve never met a woman so ambitious. Hungry to rule the largest kingdom she can.”
His dismissal triggered something in me, and without thinking, I said, “Are women not allowed to want things?”
He frowned, and I realized my error.
Quickly, before he responded, I sloshed more gin into his tumbler and went on. “You’re right. She doesn’t tell us much. Just how to care for the inmates.”
He drained the tumbler again, and I expected him to chastise me for not pouring myself one, but it seemed the drink was starting to get the better of him.
After a pause, I gestured toward the door with my glass. “Your quarters?”
He nodded. The motion seemed to make him a little queasy, his eyelids drooping.
“Do you need to lie down?” I prayed he didn’t take my words for a proposition, but I was done being timid. I didn’t know how much time I had here, and what I did have, I would not squander.
“Mnemosyne’s there,” he said. “Letting her rest. Did I tell you why I call her Mnemosyne?”
“
You didn’t.”
“Mother of the Muses. Name means ‘memory.’ She’s to remember why I came here. Who I’m here to help.”
“That’s noble,” I said, torn between queasy disgust at his drunkenness and eager hope that he’d drunk enough to close his eyes and leave me alone to look behind that door.
“I’ll just. . .” he said, rising only to stumble to the fainting couch under the portraits, and collapsed onto it in a motion I realized must be very familiar. His head thumped against the decorative wood frame and came to rest on the dun-colored fabric, his body slumping into the crook of the cushions. Once he landed, the empty tumbler slid a few inches from his fingers onto the wooden floor but didn’t crack or shatter. I thought about moving it but didn’t. When he woke up, there couldn’t be any evidence that another person was ever here, nurse or otherwise.
In a heartbeat, I had my hand on the crystal doorknob and was squeezing, turning, unable to breathe.
As I opened the door, I saw the wall, smeared with riotous color, all blues and purples and reds and pinks like the most glorious of sunsets, and I knew the technique that my sister had used to paint it, the same as she had done years before in her own bedroom. This time too someone had given her paints but no brushes. She’d done it with her bare hands. Among the clouds were pale pastel birds, soaring on broad and outstretched wings, and I knew it could be no one else’s work but my sister’s.
This room was no larger than the one I’d discovered Natasha Maximova in, but it was much more sumptuously furnished. I opened the door wider and stepped inside to take it all in. The bed looked so comfortable, I would have crawled straight into it, had it not already been occupied.
“Phoebe?” I asked.
She raised her head.
Yes. It was, at long last, my sister.
She was thinner than I remembered, which didn’t surprise me, knowing what passed for meals here, and she’d endured them two weeks longer than I. I saw a heap of green grapes in a white bowl on a low table next to the bed—ripe, beautiful, the best-looking food I’d seen in weeks—but they appeared untouched. The luster was gone from her blond hair. From the outside, she looked like any other patient here, dressed in the thin excuse for a dress, with something in her posture that indicated bone weariness.
She sat with her hands folded in her lap. It didn’t seem that she had been praying or pondering when I arrived, just sitting, looking at the colorful mural. After she looked at my face for a moment, she returned her gaze to the wall.
What had they done to her? I’d worried that the rough treatment here could harm someone whose mind was not as healthy and nimble as my own; had Phoebe’s been destroyed by the very treatments that were supposed to help her? Why was she here, in the superintendent’s room? She had clearly made a mural of the superintendent’s wall, and he’d allowed it—what of that?
At length, I spoke.
“It’s so good to see you,” I began, though my voice cracked. It was not good to see her broken like this, not at all. My heart ached at the mere sight of her beloved neck bent in submission. She’d been many things over the course of our shared lives, but I never remembered her being defeated.
When she spoke at last, softly, I was shocked by her words. “It’s good to see you too,” she said. “But you’re not here.”
“But I am.”
I took three steps across the small room and reached out to touch her. She turned her face toward me, but her look was one of horror. She shrank away. Before my hand got to hers, she drew herself into a crouch, making herself small, trying to escape my reach. The bedcovers twisted under her.
I stopped immediately.
After a pause, I spoke as soothingly as I could.
“I’m really here,” I said. “I swear it. I swear it on the third birch behind the woodshed and the broken crockery we buried underneath. I swear on the frozen lake you rescued me from and the horse named Fancy you rode in Yerba Buena when you were seven years old. On our whole history as sisters. It’s me.”
I knelt at her side, looking up, searching to connect.
“Devils always tell us what we most long to hear,” she said, shaking her head sadly. She would not meet my eyes. She curled herself even smaller, pushing her forehead against her knees, cupping her hands over her ears and pressing, a crumpled coral ball on a white sheet.
I said her name over and over. I wanted to shake her or to scream, but I was too afraid. I was terrified of doing something I couldn’t undo.
“I’m here,” I said instead, over and over.
She ignored me. Once, she mumbled something under her breath—“You’re not,” I think—but after that, it was as if I were a ghost or a figment, not acknowledged in any way.
I had never known her to hallucinate before—her madness had always taken other forms—but God only knew what this place had done to her already vulnerable psyche. I cursed myself for not finding her more quickly. I prayed she was not too far gone to save. I remembered the slippery, clouded feeling of the night medicine. Had they used chemical restraints on her too? Something worse?
As I watched, she turned the ball that was her body onto its side, twisting the covers as she lay down upon them, her face turned toward the wall. I saw the faintest suggestion of a chalk number on her back, but it had clearly not been refreshed in days, and I couldn’t make out a single digit.
I left, moving silently, tears streaking my face. I had found her, yes, but I couldn’t reach her. It hadn’t occurred to me that finding her would be insufficient.
From the outer room, I heard the superintendent’s snore. I didn’t know how long it would take him to rouse from his stupor. It could be hours or only moments. I wouldn’t be able to take my sister with me, but I knew where she was. And that had to be enough for now.
“I love you. I’ll be back for you,” I said to Phoebe and expected no response. I hoped against hope that she could hear the words, but regardless of whether she heard, I needed to have said them.
I closed the door between the bedroom and office and peeked into the silent hall to make sure it was empty before stepping back out into the world of the asylum. I slipped back into the same closet and changed my nurse’s uniform for the worn coral dress. At first, I folded the uniform flat and pressed it between my belly and the drawstring of my drawers, hoping to smuggle it back downstairs. But then I decided it was too risky and hung it back where I’d found it. I would need it again, but when I did, I would return here.
Before I stepped out into the hallway again, I lifted my head to look around the closet, and I saw that the shelves went up much farther than I’d guessed. It would take a ladder to reach the top. A warren of alcoves stretched up far over my head, each alcove labeled with a range of numbers: 1 to 10, 11 to 20, 21 to 30, and so on. At first, it looked like each alcove held a single quilt folded over many times—a riot of mismatched colors and fabrics, printed and plain, sumptuous and ragged. But there was something more ordered about the way the colors lined up, something that didn’t match what I knew of quilting.
Finally, I realized what I was looking at. These were our dresses. The ones we’d come to the asylum in. I couldn’t see my own rust-red gown, but even so, my heart beat a little bit faster. I’d found something else secret. I wondered how many other inmates here knew that our dresses waited here for us against the day of our release. We’d been told as much, but we’d been told many things, and it felt good to know this one was true. I wanted to clamber up the narrow shelves like a monkey and pluck my own dress from among the secreted collection, but I couldn’t risk staying away any longer. So I closed the door firmly behind me and clung to the wall, willing myself to glide like a ghost back toward the ward where I was supposed to be.
As long as I’d been away—at least half an hour, probably more—downstairs, I stepped into ongoing disarray. The scene was short of pandemonium, but only just. The nurses were still trying to bring the inmates to heel, but the women of my ward were taking advantage of
the situation to roam farther than they were ever allowed, and several no-longer-silent inmates of Thalia were ricocheting around the hallway as if fired from a gun. Winter was back, but Piper was missing—perhaps she’d gone after Bess—and Salt was helping Dexter drag a kicking inmate I didn’t recognize through the open door of Thalia. Martha was halfway down the hall, leaning against a blank wall, simply watching the pandemonium with folded arms, observing. I made a note to ask her how she’d done it. The woman who had been beating her head against the wall was no longer there. The dark-red smear she’d left on the wall remained.
“Smith,” shouted Winter, catching sight of me. “Into the ward.”
Sweet as butterscotch candy, I followed her instruction and walked into Terpsichore. Inmates were milling about the room, still taking advantage, gossiping and whispering, enjoying the feeling of being unwatched. My mind was still bubbling and singing from finding my sister, my blood thrilling at the idea that no one knew I’d been gone. If I’d gotten away today, I could get away again.
“You!” shouted someone behind me, and I turned, but it was not me she was shouting at.
Standing at my cot was the burned woman Celia. Nurse Winter pointed at her and barked, “You don’t belong here. Get out.”
Celia complied but slowly. As we passed each other, Celia reached out and squeezed my hand. I squeezed back. I wondered what she’d been trying to accomplish. Was she hoping no one would notice the wrong inmate had appeared? Was she genuinely confused? Did she just want to say hello? Unlike the other residents of her ward, she should not have suffered any strange effects from missing the night medicine, given that she wasn’t imbibing it anyway.
In another quarter of an hour, the rest of the inmates who belonged in Terpsichore were back on their cots, sitting in perfect order with their hands folded in their laps, Winter and Piper standing over us. When the door was closed, we could barely hear any more disturbance from Thalia. I was back in my ward with my wardmates. Things were, in a sense, as they should be.
But an undercurrent of disturbance ran through the room, a series of whispers and murmurs, a sense that not all was as it should be. And as unsettled as everyone was, unbeknownst to them, I was the most disarrayed of all.
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