I looked up the Pre-Raphaelites in the art history library. Some of those women looked a little strange and when I read about the models I learned that one of them died from an overdose of laudanum. Her name was Lizzie Siddal. There’s a picture of her lying in a flower-covered pond, looking up through the water with dead eyes, that made me feel queasy. I read that the painter made her lie in a bathtub of cold water while he painted it and she got sick from the chill.
“You have to suffer for your art,” Libby says.
Sometimes I think Libby is trying to suffer. She hardly eats and I hear her throwing up in the bathroom sometimes, which makes me feel like I have to throw up too. She barely ever leaves Main Hall, and she huddles in those oversized shirts and sweaters of hers—I think they’re Clive’s—and sleeps through her classes.
I’ve been so worried about her that I went to the infirmary and talked to one of the nurses there. Nurse Landry. She was really nice. She’s a small-town girl like me and just a few years older. After I told her about Libby she asked me how I was adapting to college and I told her that it was hard at first making friends but it was much better now that I was friends with Libby. She said Libby was really lucky to have a friend like me and I told her she had it all wrong. I’m the lucky one. Libby’s turned me into a whole new person.
Chapter Twenty-Three
This is what I find out from Edith’s file: On December 10, 1971, a newborn male infant was found in the dumpster outside of the Vassar College infirmary. The on-call nurse saw Edith Sharp, a nineteen-year-old sophomore from Fredericksburg, Virginia, deposit the baby in a dumpster. When the nurse questioned her, Edith said that she’d given birth in her dorm room and that she had taken the baby to the dumpster to get rid of it because she thought there was something wrong with it. She became agitated when asked who the baby’s father was and had to be sedated, after which she was taken to Vassar Brothers Hospital and examined by the psychiatrist on call. Believing that she was Lizzie Siddal, model and mistress of the Pre-Raphaelite artists, she told the doctor that she’d been made to lie in a bathtub full of ice water. She’d made a drawing of herself giving birth in the bathtub.
The drawing was attached to the file. When I looked at it I instantly recognized Edith’s drawing style. Here she had taken a painting by John Everett Millais of Ophelia drowned in a woodland stream, flowers scattered on the water’s surface, and reinterpreted it so that the woman is in a bathtub and a baby, still attached by the umbilical cord, is lying on her chest. It’s a disturbing image but even more disturbing is the picture underneath: the same woman in the bathtub but with the baby floating over her, attached by a long red string, along with other body parts—ears, eyes, a heart—also attached to the woman in the tub by red strings.
Like the red ribbon that Edith wore around her wrist and the red yarn she had strewn around the rec lounge yesterday.
At Vassar Brothers Hospital, Edith was diagnosed with borderline schizophrenia and transferred to the Crantham Psychiatric Center. The admitting notes, made by Dr. Bennett, confirmed the diagnosis.
Patient continues to harbor delusion that something was wrong with her baby, representing a dissociative break with reality. Patient continues to search for the lost baby, convinced that it is alive.
I turn back to the original report from the hospital in Poughkeepsie. It doesn’t say whether the baby in the dumpster was found dead or alive. I look up from the file, thinking about that, and find myself staring at the pictures on the wall. They’ve been layered on top of one another like a collage. A red line—like Edith’s red yarn—catches my eye. I get up and peel away another picture to uncover the rest of it. It’s a painting of a woman lying naked on a hospital bed. Blood stains the sheets beneath her bent legs. She holds a handful of red threads that attach to a half-formed fetus, a snail, a severed torso, exotic flowers, and some kind of gray contraption I can’t identify. I recognize the face of the woman on the bed, though, from a million tote bags and coffee mugs. It’s Frida Kahlo.
I look back at the picture in Edith’s file. It’s less disturbing when you realize that she was mirroring a painting she might have known from her college art history classes.
As I’m staring at the picture I hear Edith stirring. I quickly put the file away. Edith blinks at the room for a few minutes, then looks at me. “I think we missed breakfast in the cafeteria,” she says brightly.
My stomach growls as I’m reminded of how long it’s been since I ate. We’ve got no money. Where are we going to find food?
“Good thing we’ve put in supplies,” Edith says. She reaches under the bed and pulls out a red plastic bin full of candy bars and bottles of water. I’m afraid the candy will be moldering remnants left over from the seventies but when Edith hands me one I see that it’s a protein bar with a recent sell-by date. I eat it gratefully and wash it down with the bottled water.
“Edith,” I ask, “who got all of this?”
“My roommate,” Edith mumbles through a mouthful of granola bar. “She buys it all at the college store because she doesn’t like going to the cafeteria anymore.”
“Do you . . . um . . . see your roommate bring it here?” I ask. How do you ask someone if they’re having hallucinations?
“Of course, silly . . . only . . .”—Edith looks confused for a moment—“only she hasn’t really been herself
