A-Splendid-Ruin(57)
She grabbed her hand in shock, then screamed. “She hit me! She hit me!”
Nurse Costa moved more quickly than I expected. She was stronger than she looked too; she pushed the girl away and then twisted my arm hard enough to bring tears. “That’s not how we play here.” She released me when she caught sight of the button. “What’s this? Gold, is it?”
“It’s mine,” I managed.
Costa ignored that, picked up the button and dropped it into her apron pocket. “Go on now. Keep your hands to yourself.”
She bustled away.
Again, the woman on the floor spat. She shouted, “Look out! Strap ’er down! Look out!” over and over again until some of the others began to throw pillows and shoes at her. She ignored them all, and soon there was a pile of things scattered about the floor. Nurse Costa kept playing cards. The woman near the fire only rocked and moaned, and another woman cawed like a crow at irregular intervals, each time making me jump.
I could not stay here. I could not spend another moment here.
But then another nurse came in—long-faced Gould. She was not unpleasant, like Costa, but wearily efficient as she divested me of my clothing. She had obviously done this many times before. She took my burgundy skirt and striped waist, my yellow ribboned combination, stripping me in front of the others before giving me a coarse, stinking nightgown. Prior to bed, I was told to use the toilet, which was so incredibly loathsome that I could not bear to stay longer than it took to relieve myself. The room was airless, the only window high and painted shut. The floorboards warped from frequent flooding but not frequent cleaning.
“You’ll get used to it,” Gould told me in a tired voice, but her expression made me doubt it.
The nurses made the rounds with a bitter-tasting sleeping draught. I was going to refuse it until I thought it might be better to be drugged into an oblivious sleep, and I swallowed it without argument.
The medicine made me feel drunk and stupid, but at least then I cared nothing about the condition of the bed and the sheets. They didn’t turn off the light, and I had to bury my face in the ill-smelling pillow, and the noise continued, not just in this room, but from every corner of the asylum. It reverberated through the walls, rumbled through the floor. How could one sleep with such restless noise, such a burning light?
But despite all that, I must have, because at one point I was shaken brutally awake. I blinked and stared blearily up into a face that was inches from mine, a grimacing, distorted face—the red-haired woman who’d been sobbing by the fire.
“Get out,” she snapped. “You’re in my bed.”
I could not make my thoughts cohere.
“You’re in my bed! Get out of my bed!”
“Calm down, Josie,” said the nurse wearily from what sounded like a far distance.
But then Josie’s hands were around my throat, squeezing, strangling. I tried to pry them loose, but I was drugged and she was preternaturally strong. I could make no sound. I could not shove her off. I kicked and flailed and she did not budge and I could not breathe. The room began to go black around the edges.
I heard a snap! then a scream. Suddenly the vise around my throat was gone, and Josie was cowering, the nurse beating viciously upon her head and shoulders with a leather strap. Josie put up her hands to ward off the blows, whining, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I won’t do it again. I won’t—”
Another blow smacked against Josie’s lower back. She screamed and rolled on the floor. Other patients murmured and twisted in their beds. Costa blew a whistle, and minutes later Gould and O’Rourke came in, looking resigned.
“Looks like it’s the hoses for you again,” sighed O’Rourke as they plucked Josie off the floor—literally plucked her, as if she weighed nothing, when I’d been unable to budge her. The bruises on my throat burned.
“Go back to sleep now, all of you,” ordered Costa as they took a whimpering Josie out.
No, none of this could be real. I hugged myself, trying to still my shaking. I was not here.
But I could not make myself believe that, and even the chloral could not help me find my way out of this nightmare.
Josie was brought back hours later, soaking wet and shivering. They strapped her to the bed, where she keened softly until the relentless ringing of bells at five thirty, when the world outside was only a swampy miasma of dark.
I was groggy and stupid. There was no dawn here. There would never be dawn. We were yanked to our feet, the beds stripped of their filthy sheets so we could not crawl back in between them. We were given shapeless gray dresses to wear, not much different than our nightgowns. By then I was so used to the fetor that I could not tell if they too reeked, but I recoiled at obviously stained underwear until the nurse—one I hadn’t seen before, whom the others called Findley, shrugged and said, “Dr. Madison won’t like that,” and called to the other nurse to make a note in my file. I could not afford for the doctor to think poorly of me. I relented with gritted teeth.
I went with the others downstairs, to the room with the long tables I’d seen on my arrival. They and the benches flanking them were scarred, but there were pictures on the wall, framed paintings of peaceful landscapes and placid waters. No one spoke. The silence was punctuated only by the clank of spoons on bowls of lumpy, tasteless oatmeal, and the shuffling of inmates being led in and out.