They drive with the car windows down and a sweet wildflower breeze blows in from the meadows beside the highway, Cynthia in the back and Stella in the front. Swirls of clouds frost the sky into an upside-down blue cake. Her father constantly looks in the rear-view mirror at Cynthia, speaking with her for almost the entire drive. She’s just had her stitches out and her scar is a bright red line on her tanned skin. Stella knows they’ve forgotten she is in the car. When she coughs they both jump, and then go back to their conversation about poor farms and lunatic asylums.
“The main purpose of our research expedition today is to visit the old graveyard and see if it’s even there anymore. It’s supposed to be on the banks of the Cornwallis River. If we have time, on the way back we’ll stop to see the sanatorium. It closed in 1975 but there are still a few buildings left. Tuberculosis was a terrible disease and no one even remembers it anymore. We so quickly forget.”
Stella scribbles and doodles in her sketchbook. Her father turns on the radio, twiddling the knobs until he finds a station playing something old-fashioned. She thinks her father is too sentimental. He is the melancholic type, the nostalgic kind, her mother always said. “You’re listening to Jazzland,” the announcer says as the song finishes and another begins. Stella’s father begins humming and drumming on the steering wheel. He’s showing off for Cynthia, who is smiling and humming with him from the back seat, as though nothing at all had happened to her in that grand old drawing room at Cedar Grove. As if the attack . . . the assault had never happened. Stella can’t stop thinking about it, but it seems Cynthia has forgotten. Or is able to secret things away inside her mind in a way Stella doubts she ever could.
They pull off the main highway and drive on a secondary one that Stella’s father explains was the old post road, the stage coach road. Jericho County Care Centre. The sign is simple, discreet. Stella’s father drives down the narrow road and at the end they see a modern hospital sort of building, not something out of his pictures of Victorian brick hospitals or Edwardian cottage-style hospitals, although it is set in a sprawling acreage.
“You see, Cynthia . . . and Stella . . . back when they built hospitals in the country, they believed fresh air and nature, a view, could restore. It’s a misperception that it was all about isolating patients and hiding them away.” Stella has heard this so many times and now she has to listen again while he tells Cynthia how the poor farm was a place of servitude and poverty-shaming.
Stella’s father has the strangest look on his face, his voice quiet and thin. As he parks, he consults a fold-out map. “Now this would have been where the original cottage hospital was. They made it into a nursing home after they built the new hospital. And then they tore it down.”
The road continues to the west and then disappears behind some high bushes. He points to the left. “That’s where the poorhouse would have been.”
They get out of the car and walk down the road. It dips north. “I’m sure it’s this way.” Stella’s father pulls out an old compass. He’s out of sorts, oblivious to the North Mountain, a man without his bearings. “This was my father’s. He was the same as Frank’s father, always out at Mercy Lake, avid outdoorsman. He wanted me to be tough and hardy. I bet you didn’t know I could use one of these.” Her father shakes the tarnished brass instrument like it’s a tambourine. “Judas Priest, it’s supposed to show us true north. Maybe it’s broken.”
Neither Stella nor Cynthia point out that he has probably just broken it now. Stella sees Cynthia wink at her and she tries not to giggle.
Birds chirp and butterflies flit about like bursts of confetti.
“Well, I’m sure it’s here somewhere,” Stella’s father says as the dirt trail gets even narrower, ending in a meadow at the bottom of a hill. There is another trail through the high grasses. The blades ripple and shake, a whispering, louder and louder. Her father forges ahead and the girls follow. Stella hears the river but she can’t see it. At the top, the grass is trampled down. “I imagine the residents come out here for enjoyment and peace. They’re the only ones who remember it, aside from us.”
Stella doesn’t point out that most people in the centre probably don’t walk this far back into the woods. There are no plaques. Stella follows her father and Cynthia to the sea of short, numbered concrete markers. At the north side, through the leaves, there are bits of blue water, the red muddy riverbank half exposed.
Stella has wanted to confront Cynthia the whole day, to scream at her in front of her father that she’s a liar, but of course she can’t do this, because she’s the one who started the lie in the first place. Cynthia is also so sincerely kind to Stella, trying to bring her into the conversation. “I wouldn’t have known anything about this, Professor Sprague, if Stella didn’t talk about your work all the time. I wish my father was a historian.”
What bothers Stella is that she believes Cynthia. Her sentiment is absolutely genuine. If it is a technique she’s learned to wield for watchful adults — she has perfected it, probably from carefully hiding for safety, hiding to trap them. But how, at such a young age, Cynthia is so seamlessly able to blend fact and fiction, Stella has no idea.
Seaward.
Periwinkle, Shell and Flower.
Now
They drove up the Mountain, the bicycles in the back of the cab, the four of them squished into the front of the truck. Seraphina twiddled the radio knob until “O Fortuna” poured from a classical
