“It’s wrong not to let me visit,” Maxine complained. But no one was allowed to visit the Sick Ward, for fear of epidemics. Besides fire, it was the institution’s biggest fear.
“Let me have her stick,” persisted London. She had been asking for Rose’s stick for weeks, but Maxine hesitated to let go of the only piece she had left of her sister. “It will help her. I know it.”
Maxine relented. “Take it on Monday.”
Alice pursed her lips.
“It’s okay, Alice,” Maxine said. “London won’t let anyone find it.” And without thinking, she reached out to touch Alice’s hand.
Alice snatched up her spoon, and London squinted a warning at Maxine.
Bruised, even if she did understand, Maxine moved past it by launching into her new favorite topic of conversation. “Let’s talk about the plan.”
“You’ve got to dry that shit up,” London snapped. “Those two ass scratchers are always listening.”
The three girls couldn’t help themselves, and they glanced down the table at Bessie and Ellen.
Ellen sneered back, and London itched to give her the finger, but didn’t. “Screw those bims,” she said. “Anyway, the kind of fever Rose has takes a real long time to heal. The nurses say it hurts the heart, and even when the fever breaks, Rose’s heart will need time. A lot of time. You gonna eat the rest of your bread?”
“I know,” Maxine grumbled, ignoring the bread request. “You’ve already told me.” London was always meaner on Fridays. The girl hated the weekend. Maxine leaned in closer and whispered, “We shouldn’t think about going to the beach until summer anyway; just like you said, it’s always nicer in warm weather. We’ve got plenty of time. We don’t turn fifteen until the fall—”
“Tomorrow is choir,” Alice interrupted, changing the subject.
Maxine smiled, and let herself be distracted. She had been allowed to continue with her piano lessons before choir practice. According to Miss Petruskavich, Maxine was becoming quite good. She was going to play the organ for the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s Messiah at Easter, which was the last day of March, nine weeks away. Her only hope was that her sister would be well enough to come and hear her play.
God, she missed Rose. The pain of it felt like she’d swallowed a hunk of apple and it had lodged itself behind her collarbone. No amount of time spent at the piano was worth it if Rose wasn’t there.
The claps sounded for Manual Training.
“I know what you just did, Alice,” Maxine said, collecting her tray and standing. “I don’t know why you two don’t like the beach.”
“We do like the beach,” London said. “Everybody likes the lousy beach.”
It was true. London and Alice had been helping with the plan. It had been Alice’s idea to stash the money they’d stolen in an old borax detergent box. Alice had then hidden it outside the back door of the washing room, where the attendants and maintenance men hung out, smoking and flirting. She was made to clean up the old butts a few times a day and had found it easy to bury the box under the rocks near the maple tree.
Eleven dollars and seventy-eight cents. It was more money than Maxine had ever seen in her entire life. And they’d stolen it. Together.
Well, not exactly together, but as a team. A team led heavily by London, who had stolen eleven dollars and sixty-seven cents of it. Alice had found a penny in the pocket of one of the outside dresses she’d been hand-washing, and Maxine had discovered two nickels that Ragno had missed when she’d cleaned out the vent.
The claps sounded a second time. Ellen and Bessie got up and made sure to pass closely by the three girls, Bessie shoving Maxine into the table as she passed.
“Come push me, bitch,” London spat.
In an attempt to refocus London, Maxine kept planning as they joined the line. It was Miss Sweeney today, so they took their time. “We need to step up our search for clams,” she said.
London, cramming the rest of Maxine’s bread into her mouth, eyeballed her.
“Okay,” Maxine said, “I need to step up my search for clams.”
They all knew Alice couldn’t. Getting caught doing anything wrong would be far worse for Alice than it would be for them. It would mean another long trip to the cages. Or worse. They’d often heard the rumors of girls being sent to the state prison a half day’s drive to the west, even if they’d never known anyone to go.
“We’ll only need enough to get by for a month,” Maxine said. “After that we’ll have jobs and the rent won’t be a problem. How much is rent again, London?”
“A sawbuck or two. For a dump. But I already told you, if we look suspicious, which we will, they’re going to shake us down for more.”
“Twenty dollars,” Maxine moaned. “How will we ever find that much?”
“More like thirty,” London said. “We’ll need to eat.”
The girls shut up then and found their places in line. They would now walk together out of the dining hall and outside the building, where they’d break apart for Manual Training. Maxine was still in the clothing room because of Rose. At the Fernald School, routine and regiment were as important as breathing, and once a thing had been written down, it entered a realm akin to holiness. They’d replaced Rose with Frances, so other than the constant ache of missing Rose, the clothing room wasn’t much different. Frances’s rheumatism exhausted her arms and legs by the time Manual Training began each afternoon, and Maxine made her lay out on a stack of towels while Maxine folded. She knew Frances hated that Maxine had to work harder because of her, so Maxine made sure to mention how much London was doing for Rose in Sick Ward. Frances understood.
Frances also didn’t mind if Maxine rambled on about things like what it would be like to sail on a ship in the middle of the ocean, to be floating on water as deep as the sky was high. Frances said it took her mind her off her aching knees.
But today Maxine was quiet. She folded dress after dress without saying a word, while Frances lay on the towels.
“What are you thinking about?” Frances asked.
“Stealing money.”
Frances laughed. “Really?”
“Yes.”
“What would you do with it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe buy Rose a bucket of Bit-O-Honeys. You know how she loves those things.”
Frances laughed again. And then she lay quietly for a moment, before whispering, “I know where you can steal a lot of money.”
Maxine stopped folding, the dress suspended in front of her.
London closed the book. She had once again finished chapter fifteen, Rose’s favorite, where the hero, Dantès, imprisoned wrongly, digs a hole through his jail cell wall and finally, after years alone in a cold cell on an island in the middle of the sea, makes a friend.
It looked as though Rose were sleeping. But within a second of London’s voice stopping, Rose’s eyes popped open and she grinned.
“Fooled you.”
“Did not. You’re a shitty little liar. I knew you were awake.”
“I like the abbé,” Rose said. “I wish he didn’t have to die.”
“But he saves Dantès and gives him a great new life.”
Rose frowned.
“You should sleep,” London said.
“I’m not tired. I want to get up. Please, London.”
“You can’t. The doctor said your heart needs more rest.”
“I don’t care about my heart.”
“Listen,” London said, remembering Rose’s stick. “I have a surprise for you.”
“Maxine? Is Maxine coming?”
Crap. Now London had done it. “No, Rose, not Maxine, but something nice.” London pulled the stick out from under the bed where she’d hidden it earlier because Rose had been asleep.
The girl beamed, clasping her hands together in silent happiness. She knew not to make a loud fuss.
“Damn, Rose,” London snapped, handing her the branch. “You’d think I’d brought you a ham dinner.” But London
didn’t feel snappish. Especially when Rose slid the stick beneath her blanket, closed her eyes, and released a happy sigh.
But then her eyes popped open.
“Do they let you visit Maxine and Alice, too?” she asked. “Like they let you visit me?”
London was disappointed the branch hadn’t wiped out thoughts of Maxine. At least for a little while. She hated that she’d lied to Rose, pretending to visit her each day instead of admitting that the old woman had left her, and that she had no one. She’d tell the truth soon. When Rose’s heart was better.
“Yes, I see Maxine and Alice,” she snapped. Because now she felt snappish.
London thought about Maxine and her jelly bean of a plan, and then how Alice kept blinking at her, like somehow London could stop it all.
“Do you sit on the couches?” Rose asked. “The soft-looking red ones in the visiting room? Maxine always wanted to sit there.”
“Sleep now, Rose,” London said. “I’ll be back later.”
Rose closed her eyes and hugged her stick. Taking advantage of what was most likely momentary obedience, London hurried off to the crib room—away from couches and plans and missing sisters. It was dark and comfortable in the crib room, and she picked up Miriam and rocked her.
She loved the soft weight of the babies in her arms, even if they did reek worse than the scummy sewage bubbling in the harbor channel. She often read to them about the Count of Monte Cristo just as she did for Rose. Once they were bathed and changed and fed, she’d wander the dark aisles between the cribs reading about the island in the middle of a shark-infested sea, with its looming prison that no one had ever escaped. Except Dantès.
Gladys would linger nearby, looking for work that kept her close to the story.
“So, he climbs into the dead man’s shroud, and sews himself inside?” Gladys asked.
“After dragging his friend’s dead body to his own cell through the hole they’d carved in the wall.”
“And he’s thrown into the sea?”
“It’s how he escapes,” London explained. “Then he finds his friend’s buried treasure and avenges himself on all his enemies.”
Gladys thought Dantès went too far. London thought he might have gone farther, maybe killed that bitch Mercedes too, the girl who’d left him to die in prison. The only opinion the little yappers had was that London keep reading. Sometimes, after she’d been reading for half an hour and was stopping for a drink of water, the babies would begin to whimper and call out. The sound made Gladys laugh.
“They sure do like that story,” she’d say.
London knew why. It was the same reason why she liked it. It was the only one they had.
* * *
January faded into February, and February moved into March, and the routine inside the crib room became comfortingly familiar to London. Nurses and doctors came and went, and other attendants now and then, but mostly the crib room belonged to Gladys, London, and the babies.
London visited Rose every day at the beginning and end of her shift, and always reported how Rose was doing to Maxine and Alice. The weekends dragged, as classroom time and Manual Training were replaced with choir and orchestra and Sunday school. All of which London despised. She chose to attend choir instead of orchestra because the music teacher let London sit in a pew and re-wind the metronome when necessary, which wasn’t often, and that made London’s job very relaxing.
Weekends were made harder by Maxine’s constant talk of the plan. Eloping.
It was impossible.
Maxine didn’t see it. Alice did, but because she loved Maxine, she’d never say so. London didn’t say so either, which was strange for her because she wasn’t against the crushing of hope, if the hope was ridiculous, which this was. Ridiculous. There was no way the four of them were escaping. They might as well be locked inside the prison on Dantès’s island, surrounded by the raging sea.
Maxine’s plan had them stealing enough money to rent a flat and eat. But London couldn’t think past the ten or so long, dark miles between Boston and Rose.
Rose.
She didn’t seem to be getting better. Another thing London didn’t say. London figured she didn’t understand the heart, and so maybe it took longer than other body parts to heal. She hoped. Even if that hope was ridiculous.
On the Friday before Easter—the one they called “good”—the institution was whirring with visitors. London finished washing Miriam, who was sleepier than usual. The baby barely opened her eyes when London wiped her down with a warm cloth. Gladys was busy resupplying the medicine cabinet, and London was almost halfway through the weekly bathing when a doctor walked in followed by three visitors.
London knew the man to be an ass, and immediately moved toward Miriam, but he got there first, stopping next to her crib with a man and two women dressed in outside clothes and who were now holding handkerchiefs to their noses.
“Yes, the stench,” said the doctor, and he smiled congenially. “It has been firmly established that the feebleminded emit a disagreeable odor.”
London quickly sniffed her armpits and looked over at Gladys, who vehemently shook her head.
The doctor droned on about indolence and deficiency, but the visitors were hardly listening, too busy gawking at the sight of the children in the cribs.
“Are they human?” asked the man.
“They have a human origin,” the doctor said. “Although, children such as these are insensitive to hunger, cold, and pain.”
He reached into Miriam’s crib and pinched her. Hard.
London gripped the metal of the crib she stood by to keep herself from leaping at him and ripping out his throat. Gladys thrust her head deep inside the cabinet with the sheets and towels.
“You see how it doesn’t cry out? I know this would be painful to myself or any other normal being. But it doesn’t have the same sense of pain as you and I.”
He moved with the visitors through the aisles, while they gasped at one baby and then the next. As soon as they’d moved far enough away from Miriam, London went to her, plucked her from her crib, and held her tightly against her chest.
The visitors huddled close together as they were guided through the room, stopping to stare into each crib while the doctor rattled off a list of diseases, disorders, and sicknesses afflicting the tiny humans lying in their beds. As they came closer to Gladys in her cabinet, the doctor stopped and smiled at her.
“Hello there, dear,” he said. “How are you today?”
The visitors, unsure of themselves in this environment, and only feeling safe when standing behind the doctor, did not greet Gladys.
“Hello, doctor,” Gladys replied. “I’m well. And you?”
The doctor turned to the visitors. “You see. Imbeciles are capable of affection toward those who treat them kindly.”
He moved his party to the double doors, and the visitors, having seen enough of the dark crib room, quickly backed themselves out as the doctor lectured on, his muffled voice continuing after the doors closed. London and Gladys didn’t move until they could no longer hear him.
“Prick!” London whispered, not wanting to alarm Miriam, still in her arms.
“Ignore it,” Gladys said. “We have work to do.”
“I didn’t know you were an imbecile. I thought you were an attendant,” London said.
“I am an attendant.”
London couldn’t help it, she laughed.
Gladys just shrugged.
Drawing Miriam away from her, London leaned to put the baby into her crib, but then stopped. The baby’s head jerked, her eyes were rolled up toward her forehead, and her tiny legs and arms were twitching rhythmically.
“Gladys?”
The woman rushed over and inspected the baby, then stood back, not daring to look at London.
“What’s happening?” London asked. “What’s the matter with her?”
“She’s having a seizure,” Gladys said.
“How do we stop it? How do we
make it stop?”
Gladys shook her head.
London grasped the infant closer as if to keep her away from Gladys’s helplessness.
“London,” Gladys said. “London, it’s her time.”
London shook her head, though she knew it was true. The babies were here to die. Were expected to die. Miriam was here because she was never getting better. Just as Rose was never getting better.
Rose was never getting better.
London felt as if she were spinning. As if she were turning round and round in a place without light, without air.
“We need to be here for her,” Gladys said. “It’s all we can do.”
London held on to the seizing child. “The world is a shitty, shitty place,” she cooed into the baby’s ear. “I don’t blame you for leaving it.”
The seizure stopped, and London, relieved, looked up at Gladys and then back at the baby. But the relief was short, and Miriam entered a second seizure.
“Jesus,” London said. “How long will this go on?”
Gladys said nothing.
Miriam stiffened in London’s arms, the seizure stretching her out like a board. Her beautiful dark eyes disappeared into her eyelids, and her breath was short and raspy.
“Does it hurt her?” London asked
Again Gladys didn’t speak.
“Does it fucking hurt her?”
“Yes,” Gladys said. “I think it does.”
The truth, as disgusting as it was, soothed London, and she held on to Miriam, never taking her eyes from the child’s face. In that moment she thought of her mother, dying in a room in East Boston. Alone, except for a four-year-old who couldn’t help or understand. But London remembered it now. The room. Her mother. The damp smell of illness. How she’d shoved her face against her mother’s warm neck, sucked in the warmth of her, begged her to get up. Begged her to stop crying. But it had been London who’d been crying. The neck turning cold. And she’d been hungry.
“It won’t be much longer,” Gladys whispered.
It wasn’t. Miriam took her last faint breath within the minute… and was gone.
The two of them stood together in the darkened room surrounded by the soft coos and clucks of the living. Holding on to the moment. Marking it for themselves. Marking it for her. Making it matter. The end of Miriam’s short life.
The Degenerates Page 14