The Bright Unknown

by Elizabeth Byler Younts

  Angel nodded. I didn’t.

  “Suppose Ezra Raab wants nothing to do with me—with us?”

  Joann inhaled deeply and eyed her husband before looking back at me. “I believe he will at least be willing to help you,” she said. “But whatever you do—don’t come back here. Milton isn’t a large city—Angel is too recognizable.”

  “And you’ll be gone?” How could it be possible that these were our last minutes together? That we would say goodbye for our whole lives?

  “We—” She couldn’t finish her thought and broke down. Dr. Woburn took a step forward, but she held a hand out to stop him. She sniffed and wiped her eyes before wrapping her arms around herself. This tightened her blouse, and the smallest of roundness boasted evidence of the baby growing within her.

  “Maybe I’ll be lucky enough to have a little girl like you,” she said when she saw me looking.

  Dr. Woburn showed us where to sit and where the toilets were and reminded us to keep to ourselves. We had food and money in Angel’s bag. He explained about cars called taxicabs and how one could take us right to Ezra Raab’s home if we showed the driver the address. He showed Angel how to count money.

  Then Dr. Woburn extended his hand to Angel, and after a few beats Angel offered his in return. It struck me that I’d never seen this gesture offered to Angel—and I knew it was the beginning of our goodbye. After the lengthy handshake Dr. Woburn nodded at me, eyed Joann, then stepped toward the parking lot and waited for his wife.

  Standing in the train station, its tall roof above us, on a sidewalk open to the tracks, nothing felt familiar except for the hovering sky. At least that didn’t change.

  After years of so much noise, the silence around the three of us was jarring. None of us knew what to do. Then Joann took a step toward Angel. He put down his suitcase, and they embraced. Angel was more than a head taller than her now. He was wearing denim pants and a button-up shirt and a coat. He had a gray cap on his head. Nicer than the stocking cap he wore sometimes when it was cold. This one had a bill that buttoned in the front in a wooly fabric.

  They released one another but held each other’s gaze. Angel wiped a tear away and cleared his throat.

  “Goodbye, Joann,” he said, and it sounded so final.

  “Goodbye, my boy,” she said as a tear escaped down her pale cheek. Then she turned to me. Angel instinctively took the bag from my hand and stepped back toward the bench where Dr. Woburn had told us to wait.

  “I can’t say goodbye to you.” Until I said those words, I didn’t know what I would say. But the words fell from my mouth like they’d been sitting there for all time. Perhaps the truest words I’d spoken, but a truth I had to let go of.

  We were near each other’s height now, though she was still a mite taller than me. She closed in the space between us and smoothed my hair and tucked the strands behind my ears. She took a handkerchief from her skirt pocket and wiped my tears. She smiled through her own.

  “You were a perfect baby—my perfect baby. You looked right into my eyes the morning you were born.”

  I nodded and untangled the words in my throat. “I’m so sorry I’ve been so angry with you.” All the anger I’d been carrying had fallen away somewhere; I didn’t know where or when, but it was gone. I loved her.

  “Don’t.” She put a finger to my lips like a mother would, then smiled as she tapped my nose. “Know that you’re my first daughter, and I will tell this baby all about their big sister, Brighton.”

  Then she released a heavy sigh.

  “Remember when you were a little girl and we read Pollyanna, and you asked me a question? Do you remember?”

  My throat was camisoled, and words were fixed tightly in the small crevices inside. I only nodded, but Joann waited until I could answer.

  “I asked if I had an aunt like Polly or a grandmother like in The Princess and the Goblin.” Was I still that eight-year-old and this was just a dream within a dream?

  Joann nodded.

  “Maybe you do have an Aunt Polly, Brighton-girl.”

  My brow wrinkled up and my toes wiggled in my shoes.

  “But you said you don’t know if she’s alive. Or anything about her.”

  “I don’t. But I believe there’s an Aunt Polly out there waiting for you. It might be your father or maybe this long-lost sister of your mother. But it might be someone neither of us knows but that God has already put in place for you—and Angel. Look for her. Look for the ones with the kind faces like Pollyanna, Wendy, Sarah, Anne, and so many more.”

  “But those are just children—just little girls. What could they do to help?”

  “Little girls grow up and become women.” Joann’s eyes glassed over and she gripped my hands. “Find them, Brighton, and they will help you. You still have a chance. All this heartache. All these poor decisions. Blame me for all of it. But don’t let any of that anger keep you from living a full life.”

  Her voice got fierce and ragged and old. “You are strong. The strongest person I know. You need to be brave. You need to want this new life.”

  We held one another and cried. My throat was swollen with hurt and thankfulness. I’d loved the mother who had given birth to me—I always would—but Joann had mothered me. She’d kept me safe and in many ways thought of my life ahead of her own. She’d made some poor choices, but had also given up so much of her life for me. That was what a mother did. She was my mother in so many ways that mattered.

  “Will we really never see one another again?” I asked.

  She held me close and my head rested against her chest, so near to her heart.

  “I don’t think so, love.”

  “What will you say if they ask you—about me?” I wondered aloud.

  “I’ll say I never knew you.” Her ghostlike words created cobwebs in the corners of the train station. “Besides, you’re registered as dead.”

  I pulled away from her and looked at her deeply in her eyes. We lost ourselves in one another’s gazes, and I thought maybe we’d stand like this forever.

  “I love you.” She held me so tightly my heart slowed down. I felt calmer in her arms.

  “I love you, Mother.” I’d never called her that before, but nothing had ever felt more right than saying that now. Her gasping cry echoed in my ears. Was she in physical pain like I was? My heart hurt.

  Then without warning she pulled back and looked me in the eyes.

  “You’re free now, my bright girl,” were the last words she spoke to me before she turned and walked away. She didn’t look back.

  1990

  Questions Without Answers

  I need to wash myself. Wash the dirt and sweat that are clinging to me from that place. The place that has too quickly become familiar again. All the ghosts. The voices. The fear.

  I don’t want to remember it.

  I don’t want to do this project with this woman. I don’t want to be the person I am. I don’t want to be Nell or Brighton or Doc’s wife.

  I want to be a plain, old regular human walking on planet Earth who doesn’t have anything special about me.

  The phone is ringing when I rush into my hotel room. Doc and Kelly Keene are the only ones who know where I am. But I can’t talk to anyone right now. If it’s Doc, I’ll call him back later. When I am ready to talk about it. Will I ever be? The ringing phone starts to sound like those birds again—the birds from the asylum property calling me by name. The sound reminds me of who I am and how they heard my first cry, my first giggle, my first fit of anger, all of my firsts. And how I am responsible for Mother’s death. Did they hear her falling? Would they answer the questions I’d had my whole life? Did she cry for help? Did she hum her song? Did she say my name?

  I press my eyelids tightly together upon my twisted wonderings.

  I am cold. I am shivering. I rush to the bathroom and pull off all my clothes, and like my son when he was young I let them fall on the floor. I turn on the shower and sit on the floor of the bath. The water comes ou
t so cold it takes me back, so far back that it feels like yesterday. I reach up and turn the knob. After another ten or fifteen seconds the warmth coats me. I lean against the back wall and let it run over me. The pressured water feels like needles, anesthetizing me. My eyes are still closed, which means I can see everything from those years. If I can only open them I will return to this hotel room—this life, Nell, the person I am now—and let go of that other hurting girl I used to be.

  Breathe. Breathe. Slowly. Deeply. All things bright.

  I do what the voice from deep within me tells me to do. But gasp when I realize the voice isn’t my own. It isn’t Doc’s either. It is Nursey.

  When was the last time I’d called her that?

  I cry and I sit there for a long time. In short intervals the phone rings again—a dozen rings and then silence. After five or ten minutes it rings again.

  I get ahold of myself, but it might’ve been thirty minutes or two hours. I don’t know. I haven’t felt this sort of attack in a long time. But it has brought something out of me that couldn’t wash down the drain, so it still covers me like an invisible shroud.

  I dry myself, get dressed, and comb my soaked hair.

  I startle when a series of knocks sounds at my door. Then someone saying “hello” a few times. Impatient people do that sort of thing.

  “I’m coming, I’m coming,” I say.

  I open the door to find a small, dark-haired young woman with busy curls. She has big eyes and a round face, like she hasn’t lost her baby fat yet. And maybe she hasn’t—she is young—younger than my own children.

  “Let me guess—Kelly Keene?” I meant to hide the irritation in my voice, but the day has been long and my reserves are low.

  “I called a few times,” she says gently with a shrug and a nervous giggle that I can’t hate her for. “But no one picked up.”

  “Yes.” I cleared my throat. “I was in the shower.”

  Then we share an awkward pause, and every coherent word has flown from my mind.

  “Do you want to go downstairs to the restaurant to talk, or do you want to stay in here?”

  I am glad she broke the silence.

  I turn around and look. There’s really nowhere to sit, so downstairs it is. But it is the last thing I want to do now that the cloak of exhaustion has settled in. All my contracted muscles and nerves have released now and taken all my energy. But we only have a few days together, so it must be done.

  Or I can leave and pretend Kelly Keene doesn’t exist.

  But I know what it’s like not to exist. I wouldn’t wish that on anybody.

  The girl—she doesn’t seem to be much more than that—is polite enough to wait downstairs at a table for me while I dry my hair. It’s pin straight and quick to dry. In less than twenty minutes we are sitting in a corner booth at the hotel restaurant. The shadow of my panic attack hovers near me.

  “About my film.” The practice of formalities never caught on. This always perturbs Doc’s colleagues.

  Kelly doesn’t look surprised and hands me a bag like she’s proud to have fulfilled a promise. She will never know that the weight of the bag is heavier than just an old camera and a handful of cartridges. I can’t look in the bag now or I fear I will have another attack. There’s not a whole lot left inside of myself today. I rub my fingertips against the dirty pillowcase. This had been mine. I can’t get used to the idea but keep my hands on it.

  “Are you going to look inside?” She sounds hopeful.

  “Not now.” I force a smile. “How did you find me?” I ask without warning. Another question I’m not going to pretend isn’t important.

  Kelly finishes her sip of coffee and gives a sheepish smile.

  “There were letters along with the film in that pillowcase,” she says. “Finding this felt like treasure among all the old files. Our job was to look through every item.”

  “And you connected Nell Friedrich and Brighton Friedrich?” I knew I should’ve changed my last name, but it was all I had left of my mother, so Doc, as a psychologist, never pushed me.

  There’s that cute little shrug again.

  “Grace’s sister’s letters mentioned you. And your letters to Grace after your release were put inside also.”

  That would’ve been Aunt Eddie’s doing.

  “I didn’t have to make the connection when it was all there.” She pauses, then in double speed she says, “I read the letters.”

  “You read my letters?” Should I be insulted or grateful?

  “I did. All of this was before I really understood what I was dealing with. Not just old dusty files but people—real people.” Then she touches my hand. “I could tell you really loved your friend Grace.”

  I move my hand away.

  Grace. After I’d escaped I had written those letters with such hope and hadn’t known anywhere to send them but Riverside. But I never heard from her again.

  “So when you understood that patients were actually human, you stopped being a snoop?” I wish I could raise an eyebrow, but I’ve never mastered that—but I do smile a little. I can’t help but like the girl.

  “Not at all.” She smiles in return. “I felt it was my duty to find any owners of these items or who they should go to all these decades later.”

  She is right about that. And just like that we talk like old friends or maybe a niece and aunt.

  “So tell me about all the cataloging,” I say.

  “Two other graduate students and I were assigned for a summer to catalog everything that was left behind because the community center project was in the works. All the archived files, suitcases, clothing, so many personal items—most of which was unlabeled, so we don’t know who to contact. They’ll either stay in a labeled storage box or get tossed. But there were a few things—personal things—that I couldn’t overlook.”

  There is an unexpected pause, and I can see there is something she needs to say.

  “What’s that you’ve got on the other side of your tongue, Miss Keene?” There I go again, not being graceful. Graceful? I am Grace-less.

  “Grace’s file.” She breathes in deeply.

  “Have you found her too?” I lean toward her.

  Then her face does that thing people do when they don’t want to talk about something. Her lips purse. Her head tilts. Her eyebrows have that wavy, knit-up look to them. It’s bad. I know it. She just shakes her head.

  I never learned anything more about Grace since my last glimpse of her. There were several possible scenarios. Sterilization. Transfer. Even a lobotomy. Of course, at the time I didn’t understand what a lobotomy really was. I didn’t know, along with so many, that it ruins the person. Shatters them. Traps them.

  “Her file showed a transfer—but the place she was taken to shut down decades ago. I’m not sure how to find out more.” Kelly shakes her head. “I’m sorry. I really wish I had more news for you.”

  “Did you contact her family? I’m sure they’d want some of these photographs.” I rush my words. “She had a sister who loved her.”

  She shakes her head. “I’m trying. Her parents have passed. I looked there first. It wasn’t like finding you. You were easy. Between your letters to her with your new name and the newspaper’s ways of finding people who don’t want to be found, I had everything I needed.”

  Without knowing it, I’d led her right to me. Things I’d done so many decades ago out of survival were giving me a chance to bring pieces of my friends back to life. But excavating all of this is doing something to me that I haven’t prepared for.

  My face feels red. Warm. Full of tears. I shake my head. I will have to digest all of this later, not now. I inhale deeply and wipe a hand down my face.

  She pulls an old envelope from the bag at her side. She slides it across the table.

  I look at it. I know the handwriting.

  “It’s from your nurse,” she says. “This was also inside the bag of film. She wrote that she hoped all of this would make it back to you someday. And
the photographs of you—as a baby.” She shakes her head as if in disbelief of what she’s seen with her own eyes.

  My breath is caught in my throat. I never saw Joann again. Not because I hated her—I loved her—but because there were too many memories. Too many hurts.

  “Did you read it too?” My tough voice cuts up my anguish for a moment, giving me a chance to breathe.

  “Wouldn’t you have?” She smiles sweetly.

  I nod and swallow hard.

  “You loved this nurse—Joann—very much.”

  “Yes, we were close.” I want to say more. I want to use the word mother, but that word is buried so deep inside of me. My own children were never allowed to call me that; they called me mom or mama but never mother. I brush my hand against the old paper and begin building the courage I’ll need to read it later.

  “The old photographs of you as a baby have your name, dates, your age, and sometimes even your weight and height. I was hoping it wasn’t true or that I was misunderstanding something. All of it seems so crazy.”

  I can’t contain my laughter over her use of the word crazy, and it breaks the stunned nature of our conversation and makes a few people turn to look at us. Kelly puts a hand over her mouth.

  “Don’t.” I wave off her embarrassment. “There was a lot of crazy that happened.” But even in the laughter, nostalgia takes over. “There was also a lot of not crazy in those walls—sadness, loneliness, and misunderstandings.”

  The pause we share has an almost holiness to it. It reminds me of the moments before you take communion bread in your mouth and chew—the joining of remembrance and thankfulness.

  “I’m kind of surprised you’re normal, you know? You hear of children who weren’t given a normal upbringing and how it ruins their chance at a typical adulthood.” She rambles and I stifle a chuckle. “I’m a psychology minor.”

  “Believe me, Kelly, I’m not normal—and neither are you, for that matter. What’s really normal, anyhow?”

  She tucks her lips, looking embarrassed. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean—I keep putting my foot in my mouth.”

  “It’s all right.” Then I pat her hand, because that does feel entirely normal. It’s odd how fluidly we all use that word, and it’s equally as odd how indefinable it is.