A-Splendid-Ruin(56)

It would be all right. I could manage a night here. I had not slept for nearly two days. I was exhausted and weepy. Tomorrow, I would start the battle again, well rested. A night would not kill me.

She led me down the hall, and motioned for me to precede her up dark painted stairs. On the next floor, she said, “To your right, dearie.” The dimly lit hall ended at a dormitory with at least ten beds, most of them holding women in various states of undress. Some stared blankly into space. One stared out the barred window. One woman banged her head against the wall. Another sobbed helplessly. Still another sat on the floor, shouting, “Look out! Look out, I tell you!”

A woman sitting on her bed, braiding her hair into a dozen tiny braids, drawled, “Shut up, Millie.”

Millie snapped back, “They’ll take you first, you stupid whore!” and then spat on the carpet, which was muddied and frayed and curling at the edges, before she launched back into her shouting.

I stepped back. Mrs. Donaghan pushed me forward. The stench made me gag: stale urine, damp and mildew, the stinking rot of fabric, and again unwashed skin and hair, a miasma of close breath and sweat. The floor sucked at the soles of my boots.

“Wait—” I clutched at the doorframe. “This isn’t . . . this is not . . . You can’t mean to put me in here?”

The nurse, a large woman with green eyes, who sat at a small table by the door, looked up from her cards and laughed. “Oh no, missy, we got a nice plush room for you down the hall. All the a-coot-trah-mints.”

“Be kind, O’Rourke,” said Mrs. Donaghan mildly. “How are things today?”

“Not bad.” She nodded toward the woman on the floor. “Millie shut up for an hour.”

“Ah, that’s good.”

“But Costa’s late again. She was supposed to be up here ten minutes ago.”

“I’ll find her as soon as I get this one settled,” Mrs. Donaghan said. “This is May Kimble. Dementia. Murdered her aunt.”

“What? No!” I burst out.

They both ignored me.

Just then, a petite, dark-eyed nurse came hurrying into the room, smoothing her skirt and plumping her dark hair.

“You’re late, Nurse Costa,” Mrs. Donaghan warned.

“There was a fight in the toilet. We need to have another discussion about the Third Ward.” The newcomer narrowed her eyes at me. “Who’s this?”

“May Kimble. Dementia and murder,” O’Rourke said casually. Then, to Mrs. Donaghan, “Eight is open.”

Mrs. Donaghan frowned at Costa, but said nothing more about her late arrival. The matron led me to one of the beds in two parallel rows. This one—not mine, I would not believe it—was against the far wall, between two others, and some distance from the window, so the stink of perpetual damp gathered with that of everything else.

“Here you go, Miss Kimble,” she said, not unkindly. She turned to go.

I grabbed at her. “You can’t leave me here.” They were all looking at me. The woman on the floor spat again on the carpet and picked at her teeth. The stench dizzied with its foulness. “You don’t know who I am. I’m a . . . a—” What was my father’s name? “I don’t belong here—”

“So you’ve said.” Mrs. Donaghan gently unpried my hands from her arm.

“Please. Any other place. Please.”

“Now, dearie, I don’t want to have to strap you down. Be good, won’t you?”

One of the others laughed. The woman on the floor began to chant, “Strap ’er down, strap ’er down,” and the others started in as well, laughing and cackling, taunting. I backed up against the bed, uncertain, afraid, in the middle of a nightmare from which I couldn’t wake, and Mrs. Donaghan left.

I sat on the edge of the bed. The thin mattress sagged beneath me, and I caught a whiff of it, unwashed sheets, a rank damp I did not want to explore any further.

A woman with loose and tangled red hair crawled to the grate by a nearly nonexistent fire, huddled into a ball beside it, and began to sob so loudly and brokenly that her entire body shook.

The spitting, cursing woman—Millie—shouted, “What you got to cry about, bitch? I’ll show you what to cry about!”

The nurse at the door kept playing cards.

I understood why that woman curled into a ball because I wanted to do the same, to close my eyes and wish away the last few hours, the last few days. I wanted to take it all back, to pretend I’d never followed Goldie, that I’d never heard my aunt’s warnings, or Dante LaRosa’s, that I hadn’t read my mother’s letter. I take it all back. I want it the way it was. Make it the way it was.

My eyes watered from the stench; I unbuttoned my coat and fumbled in my skirt pocket for my handkerchief. Instead I felt the button from my uncle’s vest. I drew it out, rolling it in my fingers. I wondered how exactly it had come about. An accident? Had she grabbed at him and he tried to save her? Or was it something else? Something else. I pressed the button hard, imprinting it into my fingers, the reminder of my life, of who I was, taking solace from its materiality as I’d once taken solace from my drawings—gone now, in Ellis Farge’s office. No don’t think of that. I had bigger questions now than Ellis and Goldie and what their connection might mean.

A girl came over to me, barely a girl, skeletal, with dark hair so tightly braided it slanted her brown eyes. She stood too close, her shapeless gray skirt brushing mine. “Pretty,” she said, plucking at the jet trim on my coat. Then, “Pretty,” again, plucking harder. “Pretty.” Digging her nails beneath it, trying to rip it loose. I slapped away her hand instinctively. The button fell onto the mattress.