Stan’s been telling everyone that I’m crazy and suicidal. So if I really did kill myself everyone would think, “Oh, poor Laurel, we should have seen it coming.”
When what we all should have seen coming is that Stan is planning to kill me and make it look like I killed myself.
Chapter Nineteen
A week goes by and there’s no sign of Ben. I begin to wonder if he ever believed me at all.
Or maybe I imagined the whole conversation. I remember Ben Marcus saying that this place could drive a sane person insane. Take those watercolors on the walls in the lounge. From a distance they looked like ordinary landscapes—the kind of thing you’d see in a country inn—but I’ve been looking at them more closely and they’re not so ordinary. They’re all of the same view, for one thing, of that bench where I sat with Ben Marcus with the hill and the tower in the distance. In some of the paintings the bench is empty and then in some there’s a young woman sitting on it, and in a few there’s a man and a woman. It’s in the paintings with both figures that the landscape gets a little odd. The trees seem to be moving, like there’s a wind thrashing them about, but when you look closer you can make out figures in the trees, writhing men and women who look like they’re in the throes of passion . . . or madness. I doubt the staff has ever looked at them closely enough to notice or they wouldn’t keep them on the walls. There’s something weird about the tower too. It grows taller in the later pictures and emits a weird light. In one of the pictures there’s a giant eye on top of the tower as if the tower itself is watching the couple on the bench. The most disturbing picture is the one in which only the man remains on the bench. But the woman isn’t gone. If you look closely you can find her body parts littered among the foliage.
I wonder if the painter—“C.S.,” he signs himself—was crazy to begin with or if he became crazier as he stayed here. Being surrounded by crazy people makes you feel like there’s no solid ground, no baseline of sanity to balance your own thoughts against. It’s like trying to hang a shelf on a wall that’s crooked. Nothing lines up.
I can see the frantic desire to make things line up in Edith’s increasingly chaotic sketches. She has become obsessed with drawing The Marriage of the Virgin over and over again, seeking to find balance in the classical proportions of the Renaissance master. At first she satisfies herself by drawing diagonal perspective lines from the figures in the foreground across the paving squares to the round temple. “See,” she says, “they’re all connected.”
Then she decides that the temple should be taller and the people smaller. As the temple grows into a tower the woman in the window becomes more distinct. I can see now that she’s holding something in her arms. “She needs to be connected too,” Edith says, drawing lines from the central window in the tower to the figures in the foreground. She still calls them perspective lines but I think she means to represent the sight lines of the woman in the window. They look, though, like rays of light emanating from the tower. As if the tower had become a lighthouse and the woman in the window its beacon. Perhaps she’s gotten the idea from the watercolor of the tower with an eye atop it.
The scene in the foreground changes too. The crowd of suitors and handmaids disappears, leaving only two figures, who are no longer Joseph and Mary, but are instead two women. One holds a baby; she is offering it to the other woman, who is wearing an outfit that looks like an old-fashioned nurse’s uniform.
“Who’s that?” I ask, pointing to the nurse.
“Nurse Landry,” she says. “She’s nice.”
I haven’t met a nurse named Landry here, or any that are particularly nice. I point to the man who stands in between them. He is a bearded old man, like the priest in the original painting, but now he brandishes a meat cleaver in his hand.
“Who’s this?” I ask.
“Solomon,” Edith tells me, plucking at the red ribbon on her wrist. “He’s telling the women that he’ll cut the baby in two if they can’t agree who’s the mother.” I shiver. It’s getting far too cold to be out on the terrace.
“Of course, it’s only a trick to find out who the real mother is,” I say.
Edith looks up, her green eyes so piercing on this gray, overcast day that I can almost see rays of light shooting out from them like in the picture. “Is it?” she asks.
The next day it snows and I’m relieved to have an excuse not to go out on the terrace to sketch with Edith. Instead Edith sits at a card table, covering page after page with pictures of women and babies and men with cleaving knives. She steals glue from the arts-and-crafts table and hangs the pages up on the windows. Then she steals red yarn from the knitting circle and strings yarn from picture to picture, creating an intricate spider web. She strings yarn from the landscapes on the wall to her pictures too.
“Don’t you see,” she says, when I try to lead her away, “they’re all connected—the tower, the baby, the man . . . here, hold this—” She hands me a ball of yarn and walks around me in a circle. When she’s wrapped me up she goes on to one of the other patients and when he tries to stop her, she darts around the room, trailing red yarn behind
