I could almost see all of his thoughts and questions churning in his head. They weren’t the ones I’d expected. Where was his anger? Where was the hurt?
“Angel, Joann has been lying to you—to us—about your family our whole lives.” I pulled away from him and took a step back.
“I know, but I can’t get angry about it. Just knowing something—anything—about where I come from makes me happy. Makes me feel like”—he shrugged—“like I’m someone.”
I watched my friend as he laughed and exuded a happiness I wished I had. His red-blue eyes scanned through the window toward the children’s ward—where his father had been the day before.
“Why aren’t you angry at them?”
“Are you angry at your mom when she hurts you? Do you hate her because she has turned away from you countless times?”
“That’s different.”
“But she’s hurt you, Brighton. And you still love her.”
“Of course.” This wasn’t the same thing at all.
“I’ve been wanting to know something—anything—about where I came from for as long as I remember, and now I know a little bit about myself.”
But none of them care. I wanted to yell this, but I didn’t. But I did speak firmly. “Dr. Woburn is more worried about his job than your life.”
“And you are more worried about your life than Nursey’s,” he returned.
“Don’t call her that,” I said quietly, but deep down inside I was jealous that the nickname still sounded sweet in his mouth. It was bitter in mine. “And Joann has everything. Why do I need to worry about her?”
He stepped away, and his pale face grew slightly pink.
“She’s given up marriage and children for you. She might’ve made some bad choices, but the choice to love you has kept you alive. That’s what Nursey has done.”
Our eyes locked for several long moments, and I could tell we weren’t going to see things the same. He wasn’t wrong, I knew that. But there was still so much wrong that had happened, and I had a feeling that something she’d done, a secret she’d kept, would be the reason I would never get out.
“Angel boy, where are you?” Joyful’s voice was as sharp as a sparrow’s call and as warm as a hug all at once. She loved Angel and me.
Our stare broke when I heard her voice vibrating through the narrow gray halls.
“I’m here,” he said, turning toward the open door, “in Brighton’s room.”
“I been looking for you for ten minutes, boy. I ain’t got time for this,” she scolded. The whites of her eyes grew. “Now, come on. I got your uniform ready.”
He’d always had this sense of glowing to him because of his albino skin, but the glow I saw now was different. He reached out and squeezed my shoulder. “Be happy for me, Brighton. Maybe I can sneak us some extra food.” He lifted his eyebrows in excitement, then he left.
I watched him. From now on he wouldn’t look like a patient, he’d look like a worker. I had suggested Joann do something to get him out of the men’s ward, but now that it was happening, I was nervous about how this might change us.
The lines had been blurred.
All the patients had jobs. Gardening and harvesting in season, peeling potatoes, sewing gowns for the patients and shrouds for the dead. Cleaning and laundry every day. Those who were capable were given tasks for several hours of the day. But there were plenty of patients who weren’t able to do any of these things and who didn’t do much more than stand around the dayroom or lie in their beds and move from therapy to therapy. There wasn’t much for them to do but exist and survive.
I forced a smile as Angel waved goodbye for the day.
An aide had walked Mother back as far as the door and told me she needed washing. I could smell that she’d soiled herself in the few minutes she’d been away. Mother walked to the bed and sat. I knelt in front of her. She raised up her hand and put it on my cheek, and her eyes searched my face for a moment. Her bald head had transformed her in such a strange way. I didn’t want to look at her, but I did. My bald head had transformed me too, only in different ways.
“Mother?” I whispered. “It’s me, Brighton.”
Her first finger lightly tapped my face a few times. A gentle touch from her was not something I often got. The leftover pieces of my heart tried to right themselves, only to find that too many pieces were missing.
“Mother.” The morning’s yellow sun cascaded through the broken windows; the rays cast light across my arms and spanned across her face. The image of the sun on her face made me imagine things I had always wished.
I imagined her walking through our little house to my bedroom some sunny morning. There would be a light breeze pushing against my lacy curtains. She’d sit on the edge of my bed and put her hand on my shoulder or my back and rub in circles. She’d gently push my hair back and wake me for school. She’d say my name, Brighton, a few times, like a pretty whispering song made of feathers and clouds. I’d slowly wake up and I’d say, “Good morning, Mother.”
When the slap came across my cheek, I was unprepared, having fallen into my own Wonderland. I was back in my reality, and I wanted to run away.
Angel learning a sliver of his own history after living his whole life knowing nothing somehow made me feel less known. Would I ever be known? Would Angel?
Dr. Woburn mentioned my father. A convict. What had become of him? Would I ever have a future outside of this building? Would I get the chance to love someone and get married? No, I would be here for the rest of my life. There would be no husband, no children, no life—unless I escaped.
“Brighton?” Grace stood in the doorway, looking around like she wasn’t sure if she was supposed to be here. “I was walking by to go to breakfast.”
I barely recognized her. Her mounds of thick dark curls were gone. Her head was as bald as mine.
“Your hair.” I breathed the words, unnerved at my shock. I’d relished her normalness, and now she looked like the rest of us.
She smoothed a hand over her scalp, then shrugged her shoulders.
“I guess they were nervous about the lice after all,” she said, then turned her gaze toward Mother’s bed. “Is that a straightjacket?”
“They call them camisoles here.” I gestured toward the restraint lying over the foot of her bed.
“So this is your mother?”
My gaze returned to Mother.
“Yes,” I said with a voice laced with disappointment, and my palm touched the place she’d just slapped.
“You look like her.”
I looked at my mother. We were both bald and imprisoned. But so was everyone on the ward. We were all the same now.
Grace didn’t leave the doorway, almost like she was afraid to approach my mother.
“We need to find a way to escape,” I said.
“I don’t think I’ll be here long enough to worry about that.” The truth in that hurt.
“But no one is coming for me.” My eyes were fixed on Mother so I didn’t have to look at Grace. I didn’t want to see how pathetic I looked in the reflection of her eyes.
“Then I’ll come for you.”
And then there was hope.
1939
Undeveloped
A shift had happened. No longer was I a protected little girl who had been born in a shroud of bad luck. No longer was I given time toward any education and separated from the rest of the patients. Everything had changed. Like a tree drops leaves, like a mower cuts down long grass, like a shot of insulin subdues an anxious mind, there was a before and an after in my life now.
It wasn’t that Joann ignored me or cared nothing for me. I disallowed any closeness—though chastised by Angel—and maybe she realized things had changed too. A waxing or waning season, I wasn’t sure. But to me she seemed tired and her resilience low. After years of devoting her energy toward me, on top of her regular duties, perhaps now she felt tired of it all. Even me.
Besides the uniform, the contrast between her
and the patients grew less and less. Her hair, always neat, was less styled, her lips less red, her cheeks less rosy. Her eyes darker. Her skin more ashen. I saw the signs of someone’s soul entangled in melancholy, and I wasn’t sure how my own soul was affected by it, but I knew somehow it was.
Was it my withholding of forgiveness, or was her guilt ruining her? It was hard to tell. All I could think about was Grace and Angel, wondering if it was possible to escape, and how. Escape. Breathing the word itself seemed preposterous. Grace had no reason to believe she would be left at Riverside long term, and she was sure she would find a way to have me released as soon as she got out. She said if the police knew how we were treated, they wouldn’t keep me locked up here. She was sure of this so I believed her.
Angel came to visit when he was able to carve time away from his new duties. And Grace—she was like no one I’d ever met. She was from out there. From the real world. Of course, Rosina, Carmen, Lorna, and all the other women from my floor had also come from there, but she was different.
The other ladies had been at Riverside for as long as I had, or longer. The world they’d known had passed away and a new one that sparkled and sang had arrived—or so Grace told us. Grace was also my age, the youngest admitted patient I could remember. And she wasn’t plagued with melancholy or paranoia, though she’d been given a diagnosis that said otherwise by doctors, so she could tell me everything I’d ever wanted to know.
Grace was vivacious and filled with stories. The other women had long since lost whoever they might have been before Riverside. When you’re treated like a worthless piece of flesh, eventually you believe it. I had seen it happen over and over. The original person disappeared. Someone new was born in their place. It didn’t take long before they became unrecognizable.
I knew this was why Joann had made me keep my distance from the rest of the patients for so many years. It had been for my good. Cutting my hair had not been, nor had solitary or the insulin injection.
Joann still pleaded daily for forgiveness. But I only spoke to her to ask for privileges for me, Angel, and Grace. I knew she’d give in to win me back. And I was too hurt to consider the alternative.
I didn’t ask for much, but Grace and I wanted her camera back, along with some film. All patients had their belongings taken from them and put in the attic to be returned upon their release. She’d brought her camera, having no idea where she was being taken.
At first Joann said no, citing rules and regulations. But a few days later she handed us half a dozen cartridges with the reminder that I needed to remain silent about the secrets I knew and that neither the camera nor the film could be seen by any doctor. If anyone found out we would end up in solitary or worse. And any photographs we took would be destroyed. We agreed. It wouldn’t take many photographs to prove the poor treatment and care we received. Grace would sneak these out and be able to share them to help Angel and me.
It didn’t take long before the snap of the camera box began to pull me from my own dark moods. The trapped image of light inside the little box gave me hope of something unknown waiting to be discovered. Grace’s Kodak had been a gift from her parents and now it was like a gift to me. I didn’t know how it did what it did. And how with a push of my finger I could capture what I saw, images that before could only be captured in my memory.
The only photographs I’d been in were the ones Joann had taken each year on my birthday. And she’d never shown me those. Now here I was on the other side of the camera, with my eye to the viewfinder. The camera had quickly become even more to me than it was to Grace. It felt like a part of me, and since one of Grace’s roommates was prone to taking things apart, the camera stayed with me.
The camera helped me see things differently. I saw the truth about so much my eyes had merely glanced over before. I saw the dust in the corners, chipped plaster. I traced along the room, and my mother filled the frame. She sat with slumped shoulders and her gaze on the floor. Her hair was spiked in various places, and because she’d pulled out so much of it over the years, it only grew back in patches. I scanned over to Grace. She waved and giggled.
Her hair had also started to grow, and the curls formed like corkscrews against her scalp. My life had changed since the day my hair was cut off and I was stuffed away, out of sight. It was Grace’s voice that I’d begun to hear inside my head, speaking to me in a way I’d never known before. Learning about a whole world of things I’d never even heard of before.
Grace taught me about how important light was when taking photographs. She talked about shadows and framing and how all of it was affected by the light that streamed in. She told me to think about the pictures of starlets in magazines and showed me how to capture the glint in the eye.
Then Grace posed like a fashion model, and we both laughed.
“I’m going to take it.” With a gentle press, the button clicked.
“Brighton.” Joann walked in and helped my mother stand up. She was going to see a new doctor today who was visiting from New York. He was assessing certain patients regarding a new procedure called a lobotomy. “You know you’re not supposed to have the camera out when we have a doctor on the ward.”
There was an ache in my heart because she now carried an edge to her voice. I knew that blackmailing her to get my way had been wrong, but I didn’t know how I could’ve done anything differently. I would always do what I could to help Angel and Grace. But that didn’t take away the pain held in the cavern between Joann and me.
When Joann walked away with my mother, I pulled at Grace’s robe and gestured for her to come with me. “Come on.”
“Where?”
“We’re going to get a photograph of hydrotherapy.”
“You devil.” Grace winked as she took my hand, and we tiptoed to the other hall. Photographs of any therapies were, of course, against Joann’s rules.
“I can probably get one through the broken window,” I whispered to her, pointing at the door.
Grace nodded as she kept an eye out for any nurses or doctors.
I had to go on my tiptoes to see through the window. It was filled with the usual patients. Ghosts of vapor and hope rolled around the room. Eight porcelain tubs were stuffed with patients lulled into complacency, only their heads poking through the bathtub covers. Streams of steam escaped through the broken window above us. Oh, to be steam.
With a snap of my finger I’d captured all the forms of water. Water in the tubs. Steam hanging in the air like curtains. Ice in the water cups the barely present nurses drank while inside. And now the forms of the patients were held hostage in the box in my hand. Doubly captured. Would anyone ever know them and who they were? Who they were to me? Would anyone know me? Did their families remember they’d left them here to decay?
I felt a sense of urgency to pull out the film from inside the camera so I could see it again. To see how the mixture of light had cast upon the thin, dark strip of plastic. It was the light painted upon the dark that created the image; darkness vanished when the light touched it. Was light powerful enough to rule the darkness within our reality? I had slowly stopped believing it. Slowly stopped believing that any plan Grace might have upon leaving Riverside would work. Grace’s family was not my next of kin, and there was no guarantee that she’d get out or that she could help my release if she did. All of her assumptions suddenly sounded like a fairy tale.
“I’m never going to see these pictures.” When the words left me, the weight of them fell from my thin body.
The moaning of the hydrotherapy patients grew louder—like mourning.
“What do you mean? What about our plan?”
I shook my head slowly in response and stared at the box in my hands. I’d pushed this truth so far back in my mind that I’d forgotten it existed. None of the staff would ever allow these photographs to be printed. Joann would never allow Grace to take the film out of the hospital with her. Why had I fallen for her idea? Joann was only pacifying me. No wonder she’d given in so easily
. She knew she would make sure the film was destroyed. The real world would never know how an out-of-control patient could be stuffed inside a solitary room, strapped in a water tub, or secured to her bed, all for the convenience of the staff. It surely wasn’t for the healing of the patient. The patients might be left moaning like that for days.
Acknowledging that I would never see the photos I’d taken suffocated me as badly as the camisole had a few weeks ago. Without the miracle of an escape, I would never see the real world Grace spoke of and no one would ever see the hell I lived in. Like the images in the camera, I would never be known without the door being opened.
1939
Patient
I stayed in bed the next morning. I couldn’t get up. My body wasn’t stronger than my mind. All I could think about was spending the rest of my life here—at this home for the mad. I was almost seventeen and knew so little of what eighteen-year-old Grace spoke of—like learning to drive a car or watching a Clark Gable film. She talked about women voting, and I didn’t know what that meant and why it mattered. I craved bologna, even though Grace told me it was gross. It was from out there, so I wanted it.
Angel had been my way out of self-pity for most of my life. But it wasn’t working anymore. Knowing Angel loved his work and didn’t have to sleep in a patient building made him feel different from me now. He was happier than I’d ever known him to be. One day when Dr. Woburn was on the ward, Angel watched and studied his doctor uncle’s face as intently as his eyesight allowed. I knew he was looking for resemblances. I refused to see any.
“Brighton.” Grace’s voice was behind me. “Why weren’t you at breakfast?”
The Bright Unknown Page 9