The Bright Unknown

by Elizabeth Byler Younts

  I hadn’t often prayed, but deep within myself I knew exactly what she said. Pleading and begging were a well-understood language. I’d done plenty of that myself, so perhaps I’d prayed more than I realized. Maybe even my first squalling cry as a baby was a type of prayer. Were my words still considered prayers when I wasn’t sure anyone was listening? Maybe Rosina’s God heard me too.

  Rosina’s weeping words whispered throughout the darkness. Wilma checked Carmen’s vitals, and the dampness in the room crept around me like a second skin. The emergency lights shuddered at a crack of thunder, and another onslaught of rain began pelting the roof. My skin felt clammy, and my toes curled on the cool, moist floor. The layer of stickiness made my stomach churn.

  Wilma got a syringe of insulin ready to calm Carmen, and when she tapped the air bubbles, her narrowed eyes almost crossed. As a child, I used to laugh when she did this.

  “Wilma, is she going to die?” In the dense air of the room a whisper sounded like a yell and every breath like a gasp for life.

  “Go to bed, Brighton,” she snarled. “It’s probably gas.”

  “No, no, no.” Carmen groaned louder than Rosina’s strung-together holy words.

  Wilma threatened me again, holding up the insulin syringe as if she’d use it on me. I retreated and returned to my room. Many of the patients had become agitated at the disruption, and the noise all around the hall sounded like the buzzing of bees. Those of us who were well enough were forced to help restrain the difficult ones while Nurse Wilma gave Carmen her attention.

  The insulin didn’t help Carmen quickly; she didn’t settle for a few hours, which was odd. Then the sudden stillness crawled along the halls like spiders. I was covered in sweat—not all my own—and breathing heavily. So were those around me. But the silence was cavernous and growing.

  We gathered in the hall near Carmen’s room. I leaned against the wall a step away from her door. The beams of light from the few flashlights caught on our shining skin and eyes.

  But then came Rosina’s cry. Louder than Carmen’s had been.

  My heart stopped. The tension was tighter than any camisole anyone had ever worn. No one breathed a breath.

  Wilma appeared at the doorway of Carmen’s room, and Rosina’s crying stirred the very molecules in the air.

  “I think her appendix burst,” Wilma said, her words falling from her mouth between gasps of panic.

  Beside me Grace whispered a no. I sank to the floor. Memories of Mickey’s heart attack years ago resurfaced. Another one lost in this cruel world. And there had been so many others I hadn’t known. Bodies in white shrouds carried out so often they were forgotten before they could even become the ghosts that haunted our peeling-plaster-walled rooms.

  We were all ordered back to our rooms, and Wilma’s own grief made us obey. We left Carmen to her eternal sleep, her dingy gray blanket covering her face. Rosina was at her side, her words trapped by her grief. The entire floor felt like death and shock and sorrow. A death like this happened in the infirmary—not on the ward floor for everyone to witness.

  I kept the flashlight with me as I walked to my room. Mother had fallen asleep in her camisole and seemed calm enough now. Given how thin she was, I was amazed at the effort it had taken Grace and me to fit her into the straightjacket a few hours ago. But it was for her safety—though I didn’t know when I had come to this conclusion. Why did safety have to come with pain and fear?

  Even behind my door I could still hear Rosina crying. How could I possibly sleep with the sorrowful serenade?

  I lay corpse-flat on my bed like Carmen would in her casket, but instead of clutching a bunch of flowers in my cold hands, I held a small piece of light. The flashlight moved up and down with my breathing. I flicked it on and then off. On and off. I liked the control, even though the light temporarily blinded me every time it was on.

  The ward now was filled with cries, wails, and groans. And the envelope called my name.

  I distracted myself for a little while, almost convincing myself to wait another day to read it. I was so tired—but mostly I was afraid.

  I turned over and pulled the envelope out from where I’d finally stowed it between the bed frame and the thin mattress. I sat up. I touched every part of the envelope. Then, finally, I carefully peeled back the flap, realizing it had been opened at least once before but so long ago that it had resealed.

  There was one sheet of paper inside. I tucked the flashlight under my chin and pulled the paper out. It was folded in two places and appeared to be an official document.

  I unfolded it.

  Across the top read Death Certificate.

  Death?

  I looked at the name of the person listed as dead.

  Female Baby Friedrich.

  With the date of my birth.

  This was my death certificate.

  I, nameless me, was dead.

  1941

  Waking Up Dead

  When I woke the next morning the sun looked different. Mother looked different. The stench down the hall smelled different. Nothing was the same anymore. Knowing that my life had been blotted out of existence broke the small sliver of hope for survival that I’d hidden away in my heart. Every breath I’d breathed was a lie according to that certificate. The greatest of all realities I now lived in was that because of my death, there really was no hope for anyone to come for me.

  It made my desire to escape greater and my motivation to plan it impossible. I wanted to hide away and took up my old habit of retreating nightly to the Juliet balcony. Grace’s poor behavior kept getting her sent back to solitary, and every time she came out, she looked less like herself. She wasn’t lucid long enough to talk about anything significant. I was afraid for her—afraid for us both. Our only reprieve from the ward was peeling potatoes in the damp basement and scrubbing sheets in the laundry room.

  I didn’t see Joann often anymore either, but I’d seen Dr. Woburn more in the last few weeks than I had in months. Things in the ward were changing. New therapies I’d never heard of were being tried. Convulsive therapy using injections was now almost entirely replaced with the ever-growing electroconvulsive therapy. Almost every patient had been administered this new treatment.

  Mother continued her sessions, but it did not improve her lucidity. It only made her more compliant. I did not believe anything would bring her back to herself. I didn’t believe anyone thought there was a therapy that would. But it was clear she’d become an experiment. The shock therapy did seem to make her physically stronger after days of sleeping it off, which made her desire to wander greater. So instead of sitting or lying around for many hours in the day, now she would walk laps in the dayroom in agitation. Like she was trying to find a way out. Like she wanted to climb the walls and seep through the cracks.

  In this we were the same.

  The rate of sterilizing patients had increased. One of Grace’s roommates, Geraldine, cried through her recovery. Her husband had given permission for the surgery, making the twenty-five-year-old woman unable to ever bear children. She was told that the melancholy she’d experienced because of pregnancy and delivery was reason enough to never give birth again. But the forced sterilization had made her little more than a shell of a woman, and her previous melancholy was only a glimpse of what she experienced now. She said she’d never be well again. But no one listened to women like her, and she was forced into shock therapy for the mental wound the hospital itself had inflicted.

  I squatted low in my small balcony. The constant rain we’d been receiving had let up, but the cool air around me was still damp. The fresh scent wooed me. With my head back and my eyes closed, I let the call of a cardinal and the high-pitched squeal of a warbler serenade me from a nearby tree. What freedom birds enjoyed.

  I held tightly the local paper I’d swiped from Joann’s bag earlier and hidden my death certificate inside. Having a newspaper would not get me into trouble. Most of the newspapers around the ward were decades old. A patient fro
m my childhood, Ethel Block, used to read the same several newspapers from 1914 every day because it kept her calm. Was she still alive?

  I wasn’t.

  We had begun to hear of the possibility of war, and we were losing staff at a speed no one anticipated. Aunt Eddie and Nurse Wilma were transferred to other wards. The entire hospital was over capacity—the highest number of patients in the hospital’s history with only half the staff. A nurse or aide was charged with the care of over a hundred patients now. Joann was working harder than I’d thought possible. All available camisoles were being used, and some women were restrained for days until a nurse had time to come around again. And while I was busy on the floor helping the staff, I was only allowed to take direction, even if I saw a patient left unattended.

  After a distant roll of thunder and a tear of lightning, the rain started again. The bright light reminded me of how with multiple lightning strikes there was sometimes a circle of safety in the center. I’d read once about how a man and his horses were all struck, but the wagon’s passenger was not.

  Was I that passenger in these moments? Was I being spared?

  Louder than the thunder was Rosina’s screaming, which squeezed through the cracked open window of the balcony. I ran in from the balcony and rushed toward the yelling. Lorna was pulling Rosina out of her room by her hair. I looked around, and there was no aide or nurse to be seen.

  “Grace,” I yelled. “I need help.”

  Then I remembered she was in solitary. I cursed under my breath.

  I grabbed Lorna around the back to trap her arms tightly to her body. She wasn’t very strong, nor was Rosina, and she let go quickly. Lorna continued to scream and fight, but she wouldn’t be able to best me.

  “Lorna,” I said, “calm down or I’ll have to put you in a camisole.”

  The voice was mine, but the words felt like Joann’s or any other nurse’s.

  “Calm before the storm. Calm before the storm,” she repeated a few times and then tried to bite me, but she couldn’t get close at her angle.

  “Rosina, please, just go to your room and close your door. Push a bed against it. I don’t know why she’s after you.”

  “She said I was the devil.” Rosina looked confused. “I don’t know what happened.”

  “Speak of the devil. Calm before the storm.” Lorna tried to wrench from my grasp and kept repeating the two phrases.

  Joann came in and exchanged Lorna for Grace in the solitary room. For the first time in my life I wished for a dozen more solitary rooms. Or maybe just one for me. The dayroom echoed with the groaning of restrained patients. Lorna was still screaming. Rosina’s crying could be heard through her door. Grace’s dead expression, however, was the loudest in my ears. She stood statue still where Joann had left her. I put her to bed.

  Joann and I worked together for the next hour to get everyone else to bed. Then I went with her to the first floor and worked with patients I didn’t know. The new night nurse arrived and was more drill sergeant than caregiver. Hours later Joann and I were in the stairwell. We slid down to the floor and leaned against the second-floor stairwell door. The coolness went through my thin gown, and it felt good. Rain cascaded down the outside of a nearby window and gave me a chill. But I was next to Joann, and for a few minutes it felt like old times.

  But then I thought about my death certificate. I didn’t know who was responsible for it, but because of the conversation I’d heard when I was sixteen about the secrets she had, I guessed she would at least know about it. Why was I considered dead?

  “I shouldn’t be sitting here. I have well over a hundred patients, and I haven’t seen half of them today.” She shook her head, and tears began to trace down her cheeks. “Which means that a dozen of them are still in hydrotherapy and have been since yesterday. And my shift ended hours ago. Oh, Brighton, I’m doing nothing more than the custodial care aides provide because there’s little time to do anything else.”

  She wiped the ready tears from her eyes with her sleeve. Sweat lined her hairline. She looked over at me.

  “This isn’t what I ever wanted for my patients. This isn’t what I wanted in being a nurse. The neglect isn’t intentional. This neglect—”

  She paused and then went on to talk about the war on the horizon. I couldn’t follow so much of what she said, but knew the places she mentioned: England, Germany, Poland, Russia. I knew those countries from the globe she had taught me with. What had happened to that globe?

  She broke down then, weeping so deeply she had a hard time catching her breath.

  I took her hand like I used to when I was a child. It used to make us both feel better. Would it now? The questions about my death certificate sat impatiently on the other side of my tongue. I needed to know more. I opened my mouth.

  “Can I tell you something?” Joann said before I could speak. She let go of my hand and put her arm around me and pulled me close to her soft chest.

  In a moment I became my ten-year-old self again. She still smelled the same—of some perfume mixed with the sweat of work. It was the scent of the woman who had acted as mother to me.

  “Hm?”

  “Sid—Dr. Woburn and I—” She paused. “We’re married.”

  I turned in her hold and looked into her eyes. Married? Had I heard her correctly? “Truly?”

  She licked her finger and made a cross sign over her heart. “Till death do us part.”

  She looked down at her left hand and rubbed her fourth finger. She held it up and wiggled her fingers.

  “I never wear my wedding band here.” She released what I could only interpret as a happy sigh. But her nervousness surfaced when she chewed on her lower lip.

  “How long?”

  “Last year. A bright, sunny Sunday afternoon—April 14.”

  “A year now.”

  She nodded. I knew why she hadn’t told me. She knew it would scare me to think she’d quit working. But she was still here.

  Silence settled as I wrestled with this confession.

  “I’m going to have a baby, Brighton,” she said and put a hand on her abdomen. She smiled, and her eyes again filled with tears. These tears looked clear and crystalline instead of like thunderclouds. “I’m going to have a baby.”

  I didn’t know what to think or say. I looked down at her belly. I’d never known anyone who was pregnant. I’d only heard about how babies grew inside a woman’s belly and how her stomach got larger every month until the baby was born. I’d seen diagrams in our science books, but I’d never seen it in a real person. I couldn’t stop from putting my hand on her abdomen too. It just seemed like a regular belly.

  “A baby is really in there?” I asked, feeling something inside myself that I’d never felt before. What was it? In the almost eighteen years I’d lived in the asylum, I’d seen a lot of people die, but I’d never seen anyone born. Would I ever even see this baby?

  What this really meant was that I would not see Joann anymore. She would quit at the hospital, ceasing our relationship, or our escape would be successful. Either way, our days together were numbered. For us, it was not like a marriage with the sacred words of till death do us part.

  She would be leaving me, even though she said she never would. Or maybe I would be leaving her.

  I pulled myself from her warm hold, suddenly feeling alone and cold.

  She didn’t let me get far, though, and put her hand over mine, and our hands were warm for a while. “It’s early still. We haven’t even told our parents.”

  I’d never considered Joann having parents. But of course she did. This child would have grandparents and maybe aunts and uncles. Maybe sisters and brothers or both someday. Joann would be the real mother to this baby, not just a stand-in. I was losing her.

  Suddenly I realized this baby was Angel’s cousin.

  I pulled away from her hold. She didn’t seem to notice, and her hands laced on her abdomen.

  “What are your parents like?”

  Her eyes shone lik
e the springtime dew. She already loved this unborn baby. And she loved the baby more than she loved me, and while I knew that was a good thing, it hurt deeply.

  “They’re going to be dizzy with excitement that I’m finally giving them a grandchild. It has been a constant argument for years—first to get married and then to have a baby.” She inhaled deeply, and her sigh came out in words. “They don’t know—well, why it’s taken me so long.”

  She went on to talk about her nieces and nephews and why this baby would be the star of them all. She talked about how she hoped for a girl and liked names like Rebecca or Suzannah but that Dr. Woburn wanted to name a daughter after a famous woman of science like Marie Curie or Elizabeth Blackwell.

  But my mind remained on what Joann had said earlier—that her life choices had been an argument with her parents for years. That was because of me. They didn’t know why she’d said no to that boyfriend long ago or Dr. Woburn for years, because they didn’t know about me. I was her secret—the girl who died on her birthday but was still alive eighteen years later.

  “You’ll be leaving, then,” I interrupted her.

  Should I tell her I was leaving too? With Angel and Grace? Of course I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t let myself wonder if it would ever happen. Joann’s mouth froze, open mid-word. She held her breath. A few long moments later she looked at me and pressed her lips together. “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “Soon. Nursing colleges have graduation in May. We are hoping to hire some then.”

  “That’s next month.”

  Silence like dust floated in the air.

  “One more thing,” she whispered. “I saw Grace’s name on the list.”

  I looked over at her. Did I even have to ask?

  “She’s going to be sterilized soon. Her father has already approved it.”

  Later this conversation rolled and spun in my mind as I lay sleepless in my bed. I thought about how Joann was having a baby and she’d be leaving the hospital. About Grace’s fate. And would we ever leave here? The little protection I had would be stripped away, and I might even be subjected to the therapies and treatments that other patients went through. A new nurse would come in, and I would be considered just another patient claiming to be sane. None of the secrets I thought mattered would matter anymore; I would just sound like another lunatic.