I could’ve asked her what she planned to do with French poetry, but I couldn’t stand the smell of smoke a minute longer. I spend all my time in the art history library, where they hang copies of the slides we’re supposed to know for the midterm and final. After every class there’s a whole slew of new pictures hung up in a long hallway. The girls line up chairs all in a row so you can sit in front of each one and test yourself. If you have a friend you can test each other. I don’t have anyone to test me, though.
If you’re on your own you have to decide when it’s time to get up and move to the next chair or the girls behind you get annoyed. It’s like musical chairs, only instead of music it’s dates and painters and temples and churches. I had a dream last night that I was sitting on the line and when I got up the girl to my right wouldn’t give up her chair and the one to my left had already taken the one I’d been in but when I went to step back out of the line I saw we were all balanced on a narrow bridge between two buildings and below us was a bottomless pit. Then one of the girls said, “You don’t belong here,” and gave me a shove.
I woke up screaming and there was Libby, lying awake, staring up at the ceiling, smoking. “Who’s Cal?” she asked.
Chapter Twenty-One
Edith leads me to a doorway I’ve always assumed was a broom closet, but when she unlocks it I see it’s a stairwell. It smells like cigarette smoke and sex.
I hesitate to follow her. As scared as I’ve been here these last few weeks, the hospital has become my routine, an orderly place where I know what to expect. Once I enter this door I may never get back.
But Edith is pushing me through. I hear why; the squeak of rubber on linoleum heralds an approaching orderly. Edith has timed our exit perfectly to get us to this door in between rounds.
Edith draws the door closed behind us, holding the lever so that it doesn’t make a sound. I have just time enough to admire her skill before we are plunged into darkness.
I follow Edith down the stairs. When she stops at a door I’m pretty sure we’re not on the ground floor yet, and sure enough, when she unlocks the door I can tell right away from the carpet and soft yellow walls and the creepy paintings that we’re on the floor with Dr. Hancock’s office. “What are we doing here?” I whisper.
“We have to get your record from the dean’s office to find out what they’ve done with your baby.”
I try to stop her. I know where my baby is—a hundred miles away in Westchester with my lying, no-good husband. But she’s already creeping down the hallway, one hand on the wall trailing over the framed paintings. I follow, anxiously peering under doors for a telltale scrap of light that would reveal a late-working doctor. What if Dr. Hancock is here? But no, he said he commutes from Garrison.
At the end of the hall Edith has paused in front of the painting of the disembodied eye. “This is when it happened,” she says.
“When what happened?” I whisper, afraid that the paintings are triggering her psychosis the way that drawing the tower had. What will I do if she starts to fall apart here?
“When Solomon took his ax to us,” she says. “When he cleaved us apart.”
“You mean when Solomon said he’d split the baby in half?” I ask.
She nods, her eyes glassy in the dim fluorescent light.
“But remember? He doesn’t do that. The real mother says she’d rather give up her baby and that’s how he knows she’s the real mother and he gives her back her own baby.”
Edith gives me a look like I’m the simpleminded one. “We tried that,” she says with heavy patience, “but it didn’t work. They still cut us up in little pieces.”
I shiver at the image. This is what years in a mental hospital must feel like to Edith: as if a bunch of all-powerful men had taken knives to her poor bewildered brain and cut it into little pieces. This is how I’ll feel in twenty years if I don’t get the hell out of here.
“We’re still whole,” I say, laying my hand over Edith’s. “And my baby is still out there somewhere.”
Edith nods and squares her jaw. “And so is ours,” she says, taking the keys out of her pocket. They are each wrapped in red yarn. She selects one and opens the door to Dr. Hancock’s office like she’s done this before. How many times has she escaped, I wonder as I follow her into the office, only to come back again? Why should the outcome of my escape be any better?
Because you’re not crazy.
I’d like to agree with Laurel, but the fact that I’m hearing her voice undermines her message.
Edith finds the key to the filing cabinet in Dr. Hancock’s desk and opens the middle drawer. “Here’s mine,” she says, plucking out the pale-green folder. “It’s just as I thought. Nurse Landry has taken our babies to the tower.” She shows me the drawing that she herself made earlier today, the one that Dr. Hancock demonstrated as proof of my corrupting influence. This is how madness works, I think, it’s a self-perpetuating loop. One delusion proof of another, the crazy voices confirming the crazy theories—
Don’t forget to get our file, Laurel says.
I pull out the file labeled Laurel Hobbes. Our file, I think as I stick it in the waistband of my pajamas. I’ve started thinking in the first person plural just like Edith. I suppose
