Sanctuary Bay

by Laura Burns

  “I don’t know. He got on the ferry when he was fourteen, and he didn’t get off of it when he was eighteen. Everyone else did—I know, I was there. My parents and I stood on the dock watching every single Sanctuary Bay graduate walk down the gangplank, but Philip didn’t show. When we asked the school, they said he got on the ferry to go home. They said he finished the immersion program, he got accepted to Yale, he graduated, he got on the boat … and that’s it. Nobody knows anything else.”

  Sarah let out a sharp breath. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  Ethan raised one eyebrow, and suddenly his lips quirked into a knowing smile. “You think he fell off the ferry and drowned,” he said.

  “Um…” Sarah grasped for something to say, anything that wouldn’t sound terrible. She knew what it was like when people refused to believe you. “I don’t know what else to think.”

  “That’s because you trust them.” Ethan spun around and began walking through the room again. “Karina’s not here. We have to look farther inside.”

  “I trust who?” Sarah asked, trailing after him. “The school? Why shouldn’t I? Why shouldn’t you? I mean, I guess they’re negligent if they let someone fall off the ferry and they don’t even notice it.” She frowned. “But that doesn’t mean they’d lie about it. They told you what they knew.”

  “They told my father, and he told my mother, and she told me. Who knows if I ended up hearing anything the school really said? If they even said anything at all,” Ethan muttered.

  “Stop walking,” Sarah commanded him.

  Ethan glanced back at her, surprised. She saw a flash of anger in his blue eyes, but he stopped anyway. “Sorry, can’t you walk and talk at the same time?” he asked. “They really shouldn’t have cut funding to the Head Start program.”

  Sarah didn’t want to get sucked into one of their snarkfests. “You’re talking about your dead brother and looking for your maybe-dead girlfriend. You can take two seconds and stand still while you do it,” she snapped.

  “My maybe-dead girlfriend?” he repeated.

  “No. I just mean … I didn’t mean that. He’s missing. She’s missing. I don’t know what I’m talking about,” Sarah fumbled. “I only wanted you to stop and explain this to me.”

  “Fine.” He sighed. “All I know is that I said good-bye to my brother when I was nine. He was my best friend and my idol and he never, ever treated me like an annoying little kid, even though I probably was.”

  “Probably,” Sarah agreed, before she could stop herself.

  He shot her a sharp look, but he kept talking. “I didn’t understand the full-immersion thing then. I was too young to really get that I wouldn’t hear from Philip for years. He obviously understood, because he cried when he hugged me good-bye. And after a while, I started to realize that I didn’t have a brother anymore. Not in the way that counts, anyhow.”

  “I never thought about that,” Sarah admitted. “I don’t have any family, so the immersion doesn’t matter. I just thought about how it would affect the students here, not about how their families back home must feel.”

  “Yeah, well, their families feel awful,” Ethan said. “Every three months my mom would send off a care package—I’d always go help pick shit out—but there was never anything that came back for us. It was like mailing a box off into the void. We had no way of knowing if the stuff got to Philip. We had no way of knowing if he was even still alive, except for the report cards the school sent. Hell, those could’ve come from a chimpanzee playing with a computer for all we knew.”

  “Wow. When you put it that way, I’m kinda surprised everybody’s folks keep sending the packages so regularly,” Sarah said. “It’s an entirely one-way relationship.”

  Ethan shrugged. “My mom never stopped.”

  “Maybe the time seems shorter to parents,” Sarah suggested. “You were just a kid—four years seems like forever to little kids.”

  “It is forever. I don’t even remember what Philip looks like,” Ethan murmured, his voice barely above a whisper. “I remember facts about him—his hair was reddish, he loved the Red Sox, he would do physics equations for fun. But I don’t remember him.”

  “I … I can’t imagine that,” Sarah admitted. “I remember everything. I have an eidetic memory. It’s when—”

  “I know what it is,” Ethan cut her off, snapping out of his sadness.

  “I also have this thing called HSAM, where I can remember an insane level of detail about everything that’s ever happened to me.”

  “I didn’t know that about you,” he said.

  “You’re upset because you forgot your brother, but sometimes I wish I could forget my parents. They died when I was three, but I still remember everything about them. People say that’s impossible, but it’s not.”

  “Doesn’t that make you feel better, to remember?”

  “No. It’s worse. They still feel real to me, as if they’re still here. Because I remember them like I saw them yesterday. But I didn’t. And they’re not.” Sarah tried to shake off her thoughts. “We’re talking about you, though. And Philip.”

  “Actually we were talking about me and my escape wish,” Ethan said coolly. “You asked why I want off the island, and I’m telling you it’s because I think Sanctuary Bay killed my brother. Or kidnapped him. Or … something. I don’t know what.”

  “Why are you here though, if you think they’re so bad?” she asked.

  “I never wanted to be here. Two months after Philip fails to show up, my dad comes home one day and announces that Sanctuary Bay wants me. Like it’s a good thing.”

  “Even after Philip?” Sarah frowned.

  “Yup. I freaked out. My mom got hysterical. Dad acted as if we were both crazy. He just kept talking about how it was the best school in the entire world.” Ethan gave another bitter little laugh. “I figured I was safe—my mother had to be sedated, she was so upset at the idea of me going here. She kept screaming that she wouldn’t lose another son.”

  “Understandable,” Sarah said.

  “Then a week later, she packed my suitcases and told me I was leaving for Sanctuary Bay in the morning. Like it never happened. Like Philip never existed, like she’d never been hysterical, like she had never fought with my dad about it,” Ethan said. “It was the most bizarre thing I’ve ever seen in my life, the most horrible. It was my mom but not my mom, you know?” He paused for a moment. Sarah had the urge to touch him again, but didn’t. “All the way to the ferry I tried to talk her out of it,” he went on. “I kept reminding her of how she’d reacted a week before. She just smiled and ignored me and then kissed me good-bye.”

  “Why’d you get on the boat?” Sarah asked.

  “I was fourteen and my parents had gone insane,” Ethan replied. “Exactly what option do you think I had?”

  Sarah didn’t answer. Her own experience coming to Sanctuary Bay had been so different, it was hard to know what to think.

  “So, about my maybe-dead girlfriend,” Ethan said. “You want to tell me what you’re talking about?”

  “I just meant she’s missing,” Sarah said again, trying to sound convincing.

  “Great, so let’s go find her. Can I walk now? You done grilling me?” he asked.

  “Yes. Sorry.” Sarah took a shaky breath. She hadn’t thought things could get more intense after last night, but hearing Ethan’s story had brought it to a whole new level. “Where are we going now?”

  “I told you, farther inside. Karina likes the stairway in the old lobby, because there’s a great view of the water from there.”

  Sarah trailed after him, wrinkling her nose at the musty scent in the air. She would’ve expected the crumbling walls to let in the smell of the ocean, but instead it just smelled like animal droppings and mildew. “I can’t believe you guys hang out here voluntarily,” she muttered. “You’re weird enough, but Karina likes things to smell nice. And not have rats.”

  “You clearly haven’t had good enough sex. Karina’s not her
e for the nice atmosphere.”

  Sarah ignored the dig, but felt her face flush. “If she’s here right now, she’s not here for sex with you,” she pointed out.

  “If she’s here, she’s trying to make me worried so I’ll come find her … and then we’ll have sex. Not sure if you’ve noticed, but your roommate thrives on drama, even if she has to create it herself.”

  Karina did have a flare for the dramatic. She started just as many fights with Ethan as he did with her. Maybe they both liked making up. Be here, Sarah silently begged. Be here, Karina. Be here to laugh at me for the great prank you pulled. Be here to make out with your boyfriend.

  Ethan moved aside a heavy board that hung from one rusty hinge—which used to be a door, Sarah guessed, judging from the thick metal dead bolt attached near the top. The lock is on the outside, she thought with a shiver. It was there to lock people in the room, to trap them there.

  They went through a short hallway, rounding a bend where another door had stood. The next room was bigger, with marble on the floor and a once-grand doorway on the ocean side. It had partially collapsed, and the columns that had stood on either side of it were covered in bird poop. “This was the lobby?” Sarah guessed. “The part they let visitors see.”

  “That’s my guess. It had a higher roof and nicer materials. And check out the stairs.” He pointed across the open space to a wide, curving staircase that swept up into the darkness above.

  “It looks like something in a mansion,” Sarah said. And a little bit like something from our school, she thought.

  “The asylum was paid for by a consortium of New England’s wealthiest families,” Ethan told her. “They funded it, then they sent their crazy relatives here and washed their hands of them.” He grinned. “The good old days.”

  Sarah rolled her eyes, knowing he just wanted to get her mad.

  “So the part the rich families saw was gorgeous, but the inmates slept in that awful room,” she said. “Typical.”

  Ethan let her little jab at rich people go. He went over to the stairs and started climbing.

  “Are they stable?” Sarah asked, alarmed.

  “Karina and I have given them a few good workouts,” he said suggestively. “Nothing ever fell down, so I think it’s okay.”

  Sarah glared at his back as she followed him up, a strangely jealous feeling she tried to ignore shooting through her.

  She stopped halfway up at a large window that looked out over the ocean. She leaned on the windowsill and gazed out. The glass was long gone, and the sea breeze felt refreshing on her face. From here, she couldn’t even see the island beneath her. The building was so close to the bluffs that all she saw was gray-blue water.

  “Karina isn’t here.” Ethan said from behind her.

  “No,” Sarah agreed, without looking at him.

  “You didn’t think she would be.” It wasn’t a question. “You want to tell me what really happened last night, Ms. Memory?”

  “We had a fight,” Sarah insisted. She couldn’t tell him about the Wolfpack. “Honestly, I got kind of drunk last night, and that screws with my memory. Sometimes I can’t tell if something’s a memory or a dream.” That’s what Dr. Diaz thinks, anyway.

  “Why did you say Karina might be dead?” Ethan pressed.

  “I told you, it was because we were talking about your brother maybe being dead. I meant missing. What’s upstairs?” Sarah asked. “There were no windows. Is it more ward rooms?” She pushed past Ethan on the stairs and jogged up. The top was hidden in shadow. No window means no light, she realized too late.

  “It’s nothing you want to see.” Ethan had come with her. Sarah felt a rush of relief to have somebody else here in the darkness.

  “Why?” she whispered.

  “These were the treatment rooms.” Ethan stepped around her and led the way down the dim hall. He stopped in a doorway and pulled out his cell. The light cast a dim glow that was almost swallowed up by the darkness. Sarah took hers out too.

  “Is that a tub?” she asked, peering into the room.

  “It’s for hydrotherapy,” he explained. “They used to force people to take baths as a way to calm them.”

  “Right. Sometimes they kept people in the baths for days,” Sarah said, stepping closer to the large metal tub. Secured on either side were rotting leather straps where a patient’s wrists would go. She shivered, backing away. She didn’t need to see any more of this room.

  They continued down the hall. The next room looked like a dispensary, with glass-front cabinets lining one wall. Only a few shards of glass remained. Big wooden filing cabinets ran along the opposite wall, so massive they looked like they should have fallen through the moldering floor.

  Sarah gave the floor an investigative shove with her heel. Seemed stable. She stepped inside and eased open the door of one formerly glass-front cabinet. It was filled with small metal canisters—each one bearing a skull and crossbones symbol printed on the peeling paper label.

  “But this is marked as poison,” Sarah said. “Why would there be poison in a hospital?”

  “I think you’re using the term ‘hospital’ pretty loosely,” Ethan replied. “I doubt anyone really cared much about keeping the inmates healthy.”

  “Their families would’ve cared if they were being poisoned,” she said.

  “Maybe.” He sounded dubious. He took a canister from her hand and squinted at it. “Malaria.”

  “That’s not a poison, it’s a disease.” Sarah gasped. “Oh, but malaria was used as a treatment for neurosyphilis! I read about that. They would give people malaria and hope that the high fevers would fry the syphilis from their brains.”

  “I guess they could have been trying to help some people.”

  “Except for the ones who died of the malaria…,” Sarah said. “There’s a lot of other stuff in here too.” Some of the thick glass bottles had labels still attached, but most of the words had faded beyond recognition. There was one she was pretty sure said “Opium” and another that said “Bromcyan.”

  Sarah stared at the label, stunned as if she’d taken a jolt of electricity to the heart. Bromcyan. The word she’d seen carved over and over in the POW’s cell, the word she’d thought might be the prisoner’s name.

  Had he known it was the name of a drug? Why would he have become so obsessed with it? Obsessed to the point of madness. Had they given it to him? What could it have done to him to make him spend all that time scraping it into the walls, and even the floor, of his cell?

  “What’s with you?” Ethan asked.

  “Nothing,” Sarah said. “I was just thinking how, um, a lot of old psychiatric treatments seem like torture, but they led us to where we are now. Think about it: chemo is poison. Maybe someday in the future people will be horrified we used it.” She shrugged. “It’s the progression of science.” She was babbling, but telling him about the POW cell would mean talking about the Wolfpack, and she couldn’t go there. Not yet. He was an outsider.

  “It’s ancient history,” Ethan replied, bored. “We’re looking for Karina. She’s not in here.”

  “She’s not here at all, then,” Sarah said, feeling her hope die with a stab of disappointment.

  “There’s one more room we can try.” Ethan sounded hesitant. “Maybe I’ll go alone.”

  “What? Why?” Sarah asked.

  “Um … it’s personal. And weird.” Ethan headed back out into the hallway, the light of his cell bouncing along with him.

  Sarah thought about the poison bottles and the tub with restraints next door. Who knew what else was up here? “Nope,” she called. “I’m not staying alone.” She jogged after him, but he had vanished in the darkness of the hall.

  Sarah’s cell gave off barely enough light to see a foot in front of her, so she slowed her pace. She didn’t know the place as well as Ethan did. It was impossible to tell how long this passage was, or how many doors lined the sides. There seemed to be a lot of different treatment rooms, but she didn’t see th
e light from Ethan’s cell in any of them.

  “Where did you go?” she called. “Ethan?”

  The air felt heavy, as if it had been trapped here, stagnant, for decades. Sarah felt the hair on her arms stand up. This place wasn’t right. The yawning, shadowed doorways led into even darker rooms filled with who knew what. More tubs? More restraints? Something worse? “Ethan!” she yelled again, starting to panic.

  Why weren’t there any windows up here? she wondered. Did they not want screams reaching the outside? She’d heard stories about how a lot of old institutions abused their inmates. Had that happened here, in these blackened rooms?

  Something skittered across the floor in front of her, and Sarah screamed.

  “A rat,” she said out loud. “It’s just a rat.”

  The next door on her left loomed up, a square of darker black against the gray of the hall. Sarah peered inside, and there was Ethan. Finally.

  “I can’t believe you took off like that,” she snapped, starting toward the light of his cell. “Did you not hear me scream?”

  “I also heard you say it was just a rat.” He strode toward her. “Karina’s not here. Let’s go,” he said quickly.

  But it was too late. Sarah had already seen the table he stood next to. The strange, old-fashioned lamps hanging from the ceiling made it clear this was an operating room. The table had metal straps bolted to the side, all of them upright now, but Sarah got an immediate mental image of how they’d be fastened down over the person on the slab. “They performed surgery on inmates?” she asked. “For what? Lobotomies didn’t start until the 1930s, and this place was abandoned by then.”

  “Can we just go?” Ethan said.

  “And why would they need to strap people down? Did they not use anesthesia?” She continued. “What kind of surgery would a mental patient even need?”

  “I think they sterilized them.” Ethan’s voice was low. “Most likely against their will.”

  Sarah sucked in a breath. “Because they were mentally ill. The asylum wanted to keep them from breeding.”

  “People did a lot of awful things in the past, things no doctor today would even consider,” Ethan said. “At least, not if they wanted to keep their license.”