The Bright Unknown

by Elizabeth Byler Younts

  “Information?” Grace asked, breathing heavily.

  “We need to get our files.” I looked between the eyes of one hopeful friend and one suspicious one. “Angel and I have family out there somewhere and our history is in there. We deserve to know more about ourselves before we run.”

  “Maybe I could find Jonah.”

  “I could find my mother.”

  I didn’t know who I had out there, but maybe my files would reveal something. Maybe then we could break through the fence and start a new life.

  “They’re in there.” A windstorm of voices and strong arms of several aides broke our plans and thoughts.

  They didn’t hurt us on purpose, but expecting a fight they still handled us roughly. Angel pulled his arm away and explained he was needed in the groundskeeping shed. The aides didn’t know how to respond, knowing his duties, so they let him go. Grace and I let them take us back because we knew what our next step was now. Finally we knew.

  Grace and I were immediately put in solitary. We were across from each other, but Grace didn’t stay up and talk with me this time. She retreated to some cavern of the room and left me alone. I slept for much of the time and dreamt of a dad I’d never met. In my wakefulness I prayed to a God I was sure was out there somewhere to help me find something in my files.

  The night of the second day my door was opened quietly. I sat up, surprised. Nurses and aides left solitary patients alone at night unless there was a problem, but it wasn’t an aide. It was Angel.

  He smiled and held up a ring of keys.

  1941

  Pandora’s Call

  At first Grace fought us in her disillusionment. It was like she didn’t know who we were. But when her eyes sharpened, she stopped her struggling. We had her out a few moments later. With both the solitary doors shut it appeared we were inside and quiet. We tiptoed down the hall toward the back stairwell door. Angel had already made sure the hall was empty. The one benefit of understaffing—no one was around.

  We continued to scan the dimly lit hall. We saw no one, and all we could hear were several snoring patients and Carmen’s moaning. Her stomach had been hurting for days and she wasn’t eating. But Joann didn’t know when Dr. Woburn would get to her. There were so many patients, and it could take days.

  Angel produced another key and opened the records’ office door. We slipped inside and the door clicked behind us. Angel led us between shelves filled with files. We sat together, and Grace began twisting her hands like they were wet cloths being wrung out.

  “I came in earlier and found our files. They were alphabetical, so it was easy.” Angel was the picture of confidence. His brow unwrinkled and mouth turned up in a smile, his pure white skin a beautiful reminder of the purity I’d always seen in him. He pulled four folders out from the bottom shelf and brought them close to his eyes, reading the name in the corner, then handed us each our files and an extra one for me—Mother’s.

  I sat for well over a minute looking at the file folder with my name on it. I was afraid. Nervous. Uncertain. Angel and Grace didn’t seem to have any hesitations.

  “Let’s take turns,” Grace suggested. “Angel, you go first since you already started.”

  “Look at this,” Angel said and took out a photograph from his file, and as he pulled it close to his face, he leaned toward the small cascade of light. I looked with him. It was of a toddler of maybe three who was purely white. “It’s me, right?”

  I just nodded, my throat choked to the brim with hope and fear.

  His voice was nostalgic and almost wistful. Like he was mining the memory of the photograph. I looked closer and saw a young boy of white sitting—no—nestled in the lap of a beautiful, youthful blond woman.

  “I bet that’s my mother. Cynthia, right?”

  I nodded again. That night two years earlier, when I heard so much on that balcony, now seemed like an eternity ago.

  “There’s not much here.” Still leaning toward the light and squinting, he finally handed me an official-looking document.

  “Your mother’s name is Cynthia. But her last name and your father’s name are blacked out of this paper. See? Looks like your first name was marked over too, except I can see an L. Your name starts with an L.”

  He grabbed the document from my hands and desperately tried to see it for himself. He held it up to the light, but after a few moments he sighed and carefully folded it and put it down. He riffled through a few pages of medical records—his checkups and documentation of his poor eyesight. But there wasn’t anything else. His smile faltered like a passing breeze, and his gaze returned to the photograph before he put it into his chest pocket.

  “It was worth a shot.” He sighed and looked over at Grace. “Your turn.”

  Grace bit her lower lip and slowly opened up her folder. Numerous letters fell out, and Grace pored over them first. Her hospital records fell out of the file toward me. The files listed every outburst, escape attempt, refusal to eat or be medicated, confinement, and more. The words anorexia nervosa were listed. I knew this diagnosis well.

  “Anything on there about sterilization? I’ve been threatened, you know.” She said the words without emotion as she looked through the letters.

  “Yes,” I admitted. “It’s mentioned that you’ve been evaluated for it as a possibility.”

  “More than a dozen here.” Grace’s whisper rose in pitch as she splayed the letters in her hands. I wasn’t sure she’d even heard me.

  “From your parents?” I asked.

  She shook her head, and a tear dripped down from her face to the papers.

  “Mostly my sister. And one from my father. They’re all open.”

  Her hands shook as she carefully pulled out a letter. Her father’s name was on the return address. Her eyes scanned the lines, and after a minute she folded it back up. Her face remained blank as she spoke.

  “He said that if they deliver any letters to me from my sister or Jonah, he will pull his generous monthly funding.” She pinched her lips together. “There are nearly a dozen from my sister. Only one from Jonah.”

  She looked at the postmark dates and put them in order.

  “Go ahead,” Angel said to me. “It’s your turn to find out who you are.”

  “Angel, I know who I am.” A surge of defensiveness rushed through me. Maybe it was because I was afraid I would learn that there was nothing to know.

  Angel tilted his head toward me. “This is what we’ve been wanting to do ever since Nursey gave you that photograph of your mother on your fourteenth birthday, Bright. Only we never had the guts to do it. And we trusted Joann too much. Go ahead. See what’s inside.”

  I slowly inhaled and opened Mother’s folder first. It was thinner than I expected and there was nothing inside except medical findings. No correspondence. No photographs. No old documents with maybe the name of my father on them. There was nothing.

  I held my breath as I pushed it aside and opened my own. Several photos slid out. One was of my mother and an older man who appeared to be her father. My grandpa. I analyzed him head to toe, and nothing about him seemed familiar. The next photograph was also of my mother, a little older this time, though with a young man at her side. He had to be my father. He was handsome and had a mustache. He had dark hair. His skin looked smooth, and his eyes were sharp. Like he knew something. They were handsome together, and I guessed Mother to be about my age.

  The rest of the photos were ones Joann must have taken of me. One of me getting a bath in a washbasin. One of my mother holding me. I couldn’t have been more than a few months old, and my mother was nursing me. She was looking at me. I couldn’t see her face; it was curtained by her hair. But the baby—me—in the photo was looking up with a hand raised to my mother’s face. So I knew there had been a time when our souls had connected.

  I flipped through the annual birthday photos, and when I found the one of Angel and me together I took it, along with the baby photo. No one would ever know.

  �
�Jonah still loves me,” Grace whispered. “But he went west to San Francisco to build ships for some war in Europe.”

  Her voice faded as her eyes continued to scan the letter in her hands. “He wanted a fresh start.” She finally released a sigh, then went back to reading her other letters.

  I returned to my file and pulled out the medical section. It was small, but I wanted to comb through everything possible while I had the chance. It was Joann’s writing, so small it was difficult to read. I glanced through most of it. Nothing more than weights and heights and occasional fevers. Not much of any importance.

  “Wait,” Angel whispered, putting his hand over mine and Grace’s. “I heard something.”

  I held my breath. Footsteps came down the stairwell at the end of the hall. Angel’s hand tightened on mine and our gazes held fast. We were tucked away enough that if someone looked in the office window, they would not see us. A minute later we saw the shadow of an aide dragging a patient toward the therapy room. I couldn’t tell who it was.

  We waited and listened. We didn’t breathe. We heard a few doors open and close and the heavy door to electroconvulsive therapy click shut. Why it was important to administer shock therapy this late at night instead of during their normal day hours, I did not know. But our first concern right now was to get back to our rooms undetected.

  “We should go,” Angel said and closed his file and carefully put it away. He reached for mine next.

  I hesitated.

  “I’m not putting mine back,” Grace said a little too loudly. Her cut and bandaged hands held her file to her chest.

  “Take the letters out of their envelopes and return everything else to the file. We don’t need anyone getting suspicious,” Angel said. We all knew the nurses were in and out of her file often these days.

  She stuffed the folded letters into the back of her underwear.

  “If we’re caught, we’re dead.” She eyed us both. “Come on, Bright.”

  I was still holding my file. I flipped through it and pulled out a sealed yellow envelope before I handed the rest to Angel. I too stuffed the envelope and a few photos I’d grabbed in the back of my underwear.

  Angel quickly escorted us with his ring of stolen keys back to solitary. He let Grace back into her room first and then, before closing me inside mine, he held me close.

  “We’re doing this, right?” he asked.

  “Yes. We need to make a plan. Maybe steal those keys again. Maybe find a way through that fence in the back.” I shook my head because I really didn’t know.

  “We’ll figure it out.”

  After Angel left me I got into the dingy cot and pulled out the yellow envelope. It was sealed and blank on the front. I looked over at the high window. The golden moon shone through the bars, and for a brief moment I reveled in its beauty. It didn’t matter that I was looking at it through a cracked and ugly window—it didn’t keep the moonlight from glowing or keep it from being lovely.

  I ran my hands over the envelope. Was this a Pandora’s box? If opened would it bring chaos to my world—more than I already had? Pandora had never been able to close it again, and because of that her life was never the same.

  1941

  Till Death Do Us Part

  I didn’t open the envelope that night. There wasn’t enough light to see what was inside anyway. But even when the sunlight poured into the room the next morning, I still didn’t open it. And when Grace and I were both released before breakfast I kept the envelope closely tucked into my thin, worn-out underwear.

  We were ushered to the breakfast table, and I watched as Grace tried not to walk stilted because of the letters she’d stuck in her underwear. We sat at the table with Lorna and Rosina and a few ladies I wasn’t familiar with. Carmen was in her room, still wailing over her stomach. And Angel was suddenly a few tables over, holding trays of plates to be served by the kitchen staff. It wasn’t uncommon for us to see him a few times a week. He peeked over and smiled. I smiled back, and Grace hit my thigh under the table.

  “I stole a candle and match from the office last night,” she whispered.

  “What? I didn’t even notice.”

  “That was not the first time I’ve stolen something.” She winked at me. It was a comfort to see her more like herself this morning. Like the Grace I’d known for the last two years.

  “And?”

  Her eyes became small pools, and her smile began to shake from emotion. “I used it to read some letters last night. My sister.” She sipped the coffee in front of her before making a face. “She is trying to get me out.”

  Out.

  The small word rattled around in my mind like a wild patient in the solitary room. I squeezed my eyes shut for a moment. Would we go from talking about escaping and stealing files to complaining about our rheumatism and growing soft in our middles? If that was the case, my mother would probably be long dead. What if Grace got out and I was left here? Would she even be able to find a way to get me out? And what about Angel? But she’d been here long enough now that being released became less and less expected.

  “Is your sister changing your dad’s mind?”

  “No.” She paused and groaned when the bowl of porridge was placed in front of her. “She’s trying to trick him into signing papers that he doesn’t realize will release me.”

  Hearing that was a letdown. Tricking and playing games? That was how Hannah thought she could get Grace out? I had only seen her father for a few minutes and knew he wasn’t a man who was easily manipulated.

  I let her talk until she had no more words. And then I saw Joann down the hall through the open dining room doors.

  “We need to talk about—you know.” Grace leaned toward me.

  Grace talked about hitchhiking, how to earn money on the road by washing dishes, and how we could save enough money to take the train west to California. She went on and on about how we could go to the beach out there and work in the factories that were popping up that her sister wrote her about—something about a war—and how we’d eat steak and drink real coffee every day and on the weekends we’d eat cheesecake and drink lemonade.

  There was so much of what she said that made little sense, but what did make sense was that I was losing Grace. Her hold on reality was wrinkling up like an old newspaper that couldn’t be ironed out again.

  “Lorna”—Grace’s eyes were crazed—“did you ever try to escape this hellhole?”

  Lorna was in a mood this morning. Quiet and brooding. Her words were few and not entirely in clichés. She whispered under her breath and looked around like she was afraid or suspicious. Oh Lorna. She’d had spells like this for as long as I could remember, but the good stretches had been so good. She looked at Grace and tilted her head, her effort to understand visible all over her face. Her thin, wispy lips came together.

  “Dance with the devil.” Her whisper back came from both parts of her mind, I was certain. The tilted and the lucid one. “Dance with the devil.”

  She repeated her phrase and looked around like she was looking for this very devil.

  “Don’t think about it.” Rosina looked up from her bowl of picked-at porridge. But she wasn’t looking at Grace; she was looking at me. “There are many ways in, but without someone from the outside, there’s only one way out.”

  I knew she was right.

  “Maybe we have to dance with the devil to get out. We’re already in hell. He should be easy to find.” My words braver than my heart.

  Later that day there was a great thunderstorm after lunch. Everything on the property had lost power and we would not be served dinner. The main problem was that the lack of lights made patients difficult to control. It was so dark, I could barely see my hand in front of my face.

  Hours into the blackness the emergency lights from the generators finally bloomed. They were dim, and only a smattering of soft light was thrown into the halls. Before Joann had left I had stolen her flashlight when she set it down briefly. It made the rest of her shift
incredibly difficult but I didn’t care. I wanted the light. I touched my back where the yellow envelope protruded out of my underwear.

  Patients were slowly but surely directed or escorted to their rooms. I made sure to help Mother. When I tucked her in, the sharpness of her shoulders pressed against my hands like daggers. She was so thin I was surprised she could still hold herself up in any way. The electroconvulsive therapy had made her sleep deeper, and she seemed to be further away than normal. She didn’t even moan much during the night anymore, and there was part of me that actually missed the sound.

  I was standing over Mother when a shrill sound from down the hall made me jump. Mother gasped and awoke with wide eyes. It was Carmen. No doctor had made it out to her today as promised.

  The shrieking didn’t stop. Nurse Wilma yelled from another part of the hall that she was coming. She had her hands full as the only nurse on the ward that night.

  I poked my head into the hall, then walked out. My eyes had fully adjusted to the dim lighting, and I could see I wasn’t the only one in the hallway. I went across the hall and peeked inside Carmen’s room.

  Wilma rushed over from another hall, her breathing rapid. When she passed me she left behind a layer of her sweat on my arm.

  “She’s dying, she’s dying,” Rosina said as the frantic nurse entered, then she returned to kneel at her sister’s bed. She crossed herself. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Dios te salve, Maria.” She began to recite what I knew she called the “Hail Mary” prayer. I understood the first few words, but the further she went on in Spanish, the more I lost their meaning. I didn’t, however, miss the comfort in her words. Her desperate pleas needed no translation. I became a companion in her prayer.