The Address(64)

But being with the other women was a consolation. Natalia pulled her over to sit with her at breakfast and insisted Sara eat her own piece of bread. “We must build you back up. You look like a ghost.”

Sara dutifully nibbled at the hard crust. “What happened to Marianne?”

Natalia shook her head. “They took her away. I hoped maybe you were together.”

“She won’t last long.”

“Enough about her. You must fatten up. No more jumping in to help. That is only punished around here.”

“I know. I realize that now.” As she said the words, part of her humanity eroded away.

Natalia patted her shoulder. “Don’t blame yourself. This place is broken, bad. Stay alive. That’s all you have to do.”

Eat, sleep, and breathe. If only it were that simple.

“The good news is we haven’t seen Nurse Garelick since. We think she was sent somewhere else.”

After the first hour of sitting, her panic began to rise like a fast-moving fever. She wanted to run like Marianne had, to dance, to move.

She had to figure out how to manage this if she was going to survive. She’d read about monks in Asia who sat for hours and days at a time without moving. They’d lower their breathing until it was almost like they weren’t alive, and somehow reach a transcendent state. How odd to think that they did it voluntarily, as a way of life.

Maybe if she had something to focus upon. She considered her girlhood, the hours she’d traipsed the long paths that wound through meadows and wandered barefoot in the sand along the ocean.

She settled on her mother’s vegetable garden and, in her mind, explored it inch by inch. The golden ring of marigolds that kept the caterpillars away. The gangly stalks of Brussels sprouts, the squat cabbages all in a row. At one point, she picked up the heavy fragrance of the lilac bushes that stood along the far fence. The time flew by instead of crawling.

Soon, instead of dreading the hours of sitting, she looked forward to the daily session as a way to escape the dreariness of the asylum. To replace the weak winter light that seeped in the barred windows with the image of a sun-drenched bed of pansies.

After three weeks, Natalia linked arms as they stood at the end of a session. “I looked at you and you seemed so peaceful. Like you were off somewhere else.”

“I was, in a sense.” Sara filled her in and, after the next time, Natalia described her own ruminations—of her mother’s vegetable garden in Tuscany. “We left when I was five, so I didn’t think I’d remember much, but it all came back. Even the taste of a fresh tomato.”

On their walk together, each would take a turn sharing where they’d traveled during the day’s session. They described in great detail their favorite dresses, songs, and books, and as the weather improved, Sara’s outlook did as well.

As long as she spent the time looking backward and didn’t think too far ahead, the panic in her throat remained a flutter instead of a roar.

By the end of June, the ice and snow was a distant memory, as were her days at the Dakota and the hope that Theo might come to her rescue. To her astonishment, the baby had survived Nurse Garelick’s onslaught and was active, especially at night. A few days earlier, she’d swapped dresses with one of the women in her ward who’d lost a good deal of weight from the terrible diet. The new dress draped around her with plenty of room to spare. Natalia had given her a pointed look as they went into breakfast but hadn’t asked any questions.

During the weekly bath, she used a towel to cover herself as she dipped in and out of the dirty water left by the other women. No one changed the water in between inmates, so if a woman got stuck at the end of the line, it was a brown soup. But Sara deliberately hung back so the previous occupants of the tub would be busy dressing and she could do her ablutions without an audience.

One bright morning, she and Natalia waited with the others to get their daily work assignments.

“Mrs. Smythe and Mrs. Fabiano.” The nurse checked their names off on her clipboard. “Report to the mat factory.”

Natalia and Sara shared a look of wonder. The factory was a move up, for the more docile and well-behaved patients. Sara stifled a squeal until they were outside, walking with the other women to the building that housed the workplaces: scrub brush making, mat making, and the laundry. The orderly pointed to a large, sunny room at the back, where rags had been piled on top of wooden tables. “The others will show you how.”

“At least we won’t have to work with lye anymore,” murmured Natalia.

Sara’s hands were raw from the soap, and she imagined the jar of hand cream that once stood on her bureau at the Dakota. She could picture it perfectly in her mind, the pretty label covered with faded roses. Hopefully, Daisy had been able to take it so it hadn’t been wasted. The thought made her sad. What had happened to her meager possessions? Had the spoils been divided up among the housemaids? Or had they been summarily tossed out or burned in the furnace?

“You all right?” asked Natalia.

When Sara’s thoughts ran away like this, the darkness in her head would begin to grow, like a tumor. She pointed in the direction of the worktables. “Imagine, we even get our own stools to sit on.”

“Like a queen’s throne.”

They sat at a table near the window, and one of the women guided them through the process of ripping the rags into long shreds, coiling them up before stitching them around and around to create an oval. Sara reveled in holding a thread and needle in her hand. The only sign that this was an asylum versus a true factory was the quiet gibberish that occasionally erupted from a few of the women.