I put down the journal and look up, as if I expect to hear the doctor and his patient in the room above me, as if I am the private nurse listening for a summons. Instead I see only sunlight pouring down the spiral staircase and hear only the creak and groan of the metal stairs when the wind blows. I get up and climb up the stairs. It hadn’t occurred to me to open the windows—hadn’t one been open the first night?—so I’d never noticed if they had locks on them.
When I get up to the top floor I’m startled to see that the sun is already low in the sky. I’ve lost track of time reading in the room below without windows. It was a fortress of paper, obliterating the outside world. But up here the world opens up; there’s so much light and air! And yes, a window is open, the one over the makeshift desk. I lean over the desk to inspect it. The window opens by pushing out at the bottom. Heavy copper locks are on the top sash of each window and a metal rod is attached between the sill and the bottom sash to keep it from opening more than ten inches. I look around the room. All the windows have similar protective measures. How could E. have gotten out?
Maybe Billie made up the whole story. I’ve learned over my first week here that Billie has a taste for the sensational and macabre. She delights in following tabloid news stories about domestic violence, prison breaks, and alien abductions. I caught her one afternoon reading aloud to Chloe a story about a woman in Queens who drowned her five-year-old son. She doesn’t understand a word of it, she assured me when I objected.
I’d thought of mentioning it to Sky, but I didn’t like to complain when Billie was so helpful with Chloe. Besides, Chloe obviously adores her.
Still, I can imagine Billie inventing a story about an escaped patient throwing herself from the tower. All the ingredients are there—lunatics, mental hospital, medieval-looking tower—like flour, eggs, and butter laid out on a kitchen counter. Who could blame her for mixing them together and making a cake? It wasn’t her fault if the story has lodged in my brain. There’s no Esta here to warn her about impressionable types.
The more I think about the story the more improbable it seems, especially that part about the woman surviving and being cured. I’m glad I didn’t tell Sky that Billie’s story was what inspired me to read her father’s journals. I’m not sure why I’ve kept this from her except that I suspect it makes me seem less like a serious archivist and not the kind of person she would want assisting with her memoir.
I push the window as wide as it can go and look down. Below is the flagstone terrace where we ate dinner. A person landing on that hard stone would do more than break her leg. I pull my head in—but something yanks me back as if a hand has grabbed my hair and is dragging me out the window. But of course it’s only my hair caught on the edge of the window frame. Still, I feel the blind panic of being trapped. I’ve always been a little claustrophobic.
I jerk my head back but my hair is too entangled. Fighting back hysteria, I wriggle my hand out the window and feel along the window frame to where my hair is caught. I think it must be snagged on the rod or the lock but it’s tangled in the wood itself, which feels rough and sharp-edged. As if the window had grown teeth.
Don’t think about teeth, I tell myself as I untangle my hair from the sharp, splintery wood.
One of the mothers from group had shared this dream: I dreamed I was pregnant and my baby died inside me. Only it turned into a zombie and started eating its way out of me.
That’s absurd, Laurel had scoffed, babies don’t have teeth in the womb.
Which did nothing to stop that image of a fetus gnawing its way out of my womb from haunting my dreams.
My hands are bloody and sweat-slicked by the time I free myself (I think of Dr. Bennett’s withering observation of E.’s hands—as if she could have had a manicure while in the asylum!), my face streaked with tears. I’ve lost a handful of expensively colored and highlighted hair showing brown at the roots. There are splinters under my fingernails and a long scratch across my cheek. My reflection in the window shows someone who’s been through a street fight. I look like the lunatic of my imaginings.
I glance away from that frightful apparition, down at the offending window. Strands of my hair still hang from the splintered wood. Peter would never have tolerated such shoddy workmanship. And even though Sky doesn’t come up here—can’t come up here—I hurriedly pull my stray hairs from the wood. As I do, I see how my hair got caught. There’s a long crack in the wood that looks like it was once repaired with wood putty. The putty shows white against the wood where the paint has worn away. I can clearly trace the crack back to where the rod is clamped into the window. There’s a deep hole just to the side that’s been filled with putty, as if the rod had been ripped out once and then reaffixed to the unbroken wood. As if someone had shoved the window open and broken the restraining rod in order to jump out.
Billie’s story is true.
At least the part about E. jumping. I’m not sure about the part where she survived and got better.
WHEN I GET back downstairs I page
