The Last Time I Lied(60)

“After this, I might make a quick stop at the library. I need a place with good Wi-Fi to catch up on work emails,” I say, aiming for breeziness, as if the idea has just occurred to me.

I guess it works, because Theo doesn’t question the idea. Instead, he says, “Sure, I’ll meet you there in an hour.”

He remains in the idling truck, watching. This gives me no choice but to keep up the ruse and hurry into the drugstore. Since I know it’ll look suspicious on the return trip if I’m not carrying a bag from the place, I spend a few minutes browsing the shelves for something small to buy. I settle on a four-pack of disposable phone chargers. One for me and each girl in Dogwood. Franny will never know. Even if she does, I’m not sure I care.

At the cash register, I notice a rotating rack of sunglasses. The kind with a tilted mirror on top so customers can see how they look in the dime-store shades. I give it a spin, barely eyeing the knockoff Ray-Bans and cheap aviators when a familiar pair whirls by.

Red plastic.

Heart-shaped frames.

I snatch the sunglasses from the rack and turn them over in my hands, remembering the pair Vivian wore the entire ride back to camp that long-ago summer. I spent the whole drive wondering what she was thinking. Vivian said little during the return trip, preferring instead to stare out the open window as the breeze whipped her hair across her face.

I try on the sunglasses and lift my face to the rack’s mirror, checking how they look. Vivian wore them better, that’s for damn sure. On me, they’re just silly. I look exactly like what I am—a woman approaching thirty in cheap shades made for someone half her age.

I toss the sunglasses onto the counter anyway. I pay with cash and stuff the disposable chargers into my backpack. The sunglasses are worn out of the store, slid high up my forehead to keep my hair in place. I think Vivian would approve.

Next, it’s on to the library, which sits a block back from the main street. Inside, I pass the usual blond-wood tables and elderly patrons at desktop computers on my way to the reference desk. There a friendly librarian named Diana points me to the nonfiction section, and soon I’m scanning the stacks for 150.97768 WEST.

Astonishingly, it’s still there, tucked tightly on a shelf of books about mental illness and its treatment. If the subject matter didn’t already make me uneasy, the title certainly would.

Dark Ages: Women and Mental Illness in the 1800s by Amanda West.

The cover is stark. Black letters on a white background. Very seventies, which is when the book was printed. The publisher is a university press I’ve never heard of, which makes it even more baffling as to how or why Vivian learned of its existence.

I take the book to a secluded cubicle in the corner, pausing for a few steadying breaths before opening it. Vivian read this book. She held it in her hands. Mere days before she disappeared. Knowing this makes me want to put it back on the shelf, walk away, find Theo, and return to camp.

But I can’t.

I need to open the book and see what Vivian saw.

So I fling it open, seeing on the first page a vintage photo of a young woman confined in a straitjacket. Her legs are nothing but skin covering bone, her cheeks are beyond gaunt, and her hair is wild. Yet her eyes blaze with defiance. As wide as half-dollars, they stare at the photographer as if willing him to look at her—really look—and understand her predicament.

It’s a startling image. Like a kick in the stomach. A shocked huff of air lodges in my throat, making me cough.

Below the photo is a caption as sad as it is vague. Unknown asylum patient, 1887.

I turn the page, unable to gaze at the image any longer, just the latest person who could bear to look at this unnamed woman for only a brief amount of time. In my own way, I’ve also failed her.

Skimming through the book is an exercise in masochism. There are more photos, more infuriating captions. There are tales of women being committed because their husbands abused them, their families didn’t want them, polite society didn’t want to see them. There are accounts of beatings, of starvation, of cold baths and scrubbings with wire brushes on skin that hadn’t seen daylight in months.

Each time I find myself gasping at a new horror, I realize how lucky I am. Had I been born a hundred years earlier, I would have become one of these women. Misunderstood and suffering. Hoping that someone would figure out why my mind betrayed me and thus be able to fix it. Most of these women never enjoyed such a fate. They suffered in sorrow and confusion until the end of their days, whereas my madness was temporary. It left me.

The shame is another story.

After a half hour of torturous skimming, I finally come to page 164. The one Vivian noted in her diary. It contains another photo, one that fills most of the page. Like the others in the book, it bears the same sepia-toned fuzziness of something taken a century ago. But unlike those images of anonymous girls imprisoned within asylum walls, this photograph shows a man standing in front of an ornate, Victorian structure.

The man is young, tall, thick of chest and stomach. He boasts an impeccably waxed mustache and a distinct darkness to his eyes. One hand grips the lapel of his morning coat. The other is slid into a vest pocket. Such a pompous pose.

The building behind him is three stories tall, made of brick, with dormer windows on the top floor and a chimneylike turret gracing the roof. The windows are tall and arched. A weathervane in the shape of a rooster rises from the turret’s peaked roof. A less showy wing shoots off from the building’s left side. It has only one floor, no windows, patchy grass instead of a lawn.