Blue Asylum (19 page)

What if they were all wrong? Every man in this story?

And what if he, Henry Cowell, had also been wrong? Wrong about her, about women, about madness, about everything? All his life he had lived in fear of being wrong. And now the wrongness felt strangely liberating.

If he was wrong, he could love her.

He put up her file and retrieved his thesis from the middle drawer. Put the thesis on top of her file. The paper that had brought him fame and wealth and respect. An idea entered his head, so wrong, so destructive, so insane that it grew immediately, breathed into itself, nursed itself, raised itself from a cub to a beast in the blink of an eye. And Dr. Henry Cowell felt, for the first time in many years, the joy of madness, not of the seized and the broken and the haunted, but of a boy, that demented voice that tells him to jump in a river or build a fort out of sticks or attempt to follow a bear to its cave. That madness—extinguished by learning and time and responsibility and a shrill voice in his ear night after night—had returned.

He knelt in the sand, shaking with excitement. The breeze was so quiet that the papers of his thesis, which lay in front of him, didn’t flutter. Next to the doctor was an empty Mason jar he’d pilfered from the kitchen.

The waves pounded before him. Fish jumped in the distance. A rustle in the sedge behind him turned out to be a raccoon darting out of sight. This was the hour of furtive creatures. When rules slept and even gravity loosened its hold.

He took out a match, struck it, and held it to the corner of the thesis. The dry parchment had made for an excellent career but now made even better tinder—the flames spread across it, a perfect yellow, a sun whose path could not be shaken.

Dr. Cowell looked in the mirror and straightened his cravat. His eyes were red from lack of sleep and the smoke from the fire. He combed his wiry hair, which was less manageable than usual today. He frowned, went to a small cabinet, and hunted through his wife’s toiletry items until he found her macassar dressing. He scooped out a small amount and applied it to his hair. He ran the comb through it and studied himself in the mirror. His hair looked a bit greasy, but at least it seemed smoother.

Mary was slumped in the recliner, drinking some tea, and he gave her a kiss on the cheek before walking out the door. Next to the cottage was a small dagger plant. From behind this dagger plant he drew out the Mason jar, which was filled with the ashes of his thesis, and a little sand. Had Eleanor Beacon been nearby, she would have noted that his sacrifice did not just involve himself but that innumerable microscopic things had died in the inferno. He shook his head. Why was he thinking like a crazy person? He held the jar up to the light and admired the contents. What a perfect gift for Iris. So eloquent, so sacrificial. So elemental. Sand, ashes, passion. The very basic gear in the kit bag of the universe.

Iris was his second-to-last appointment of the day. As the hour of the fateful conference drew near, time began to crawl. Finally came the hour of their meeting, and he opened the office door and ushered in Mrs. Dunleavy, who looked drawn and pale. He gestured to her chair, took his own, and began to speak, haltingly, as she stared past him. He had, perhaps, not listened to her closely enough, or approached her with an open mind. He was stammering, not making any sense, when out of nowhere she burst into tears.

He stopped, astonished. His heart began to pound; he was thrown into confusion. He knew better than to think his words had caused her sorrow. He was simply in the room, drawing the same air that she drew upon to fuel her wracking sobs.

“Wait, now,” he said. “Whatever is the matter?”

She lifted her head, gathered herself for a moment, and shot him a look of pure hatred. “I’m trapped here. I thought I could leave but I cannot!”

“But wait, what makes you say that?”

“You wouldn’t understand.” She wiped her eyes.

“Yes, I would. You would be surprised, Mrs. Dunleavy, at how well I understand you.”

He reached down next to his feet toward the Mason jar filled with ashes, but she began to cry again, burying her face in her hands, compelling him to leave his desk and kneel by her chair.

“Mrs. Dunleavy . . . Iris . . . ,” he said, touching her shoulder.

Her hand shot out and pushed him away. The tears in her eyes had turned them bright green. “Leave me alone!” she cried. She jumped from her chair and rushed from the room, slamming the door behind her.

He stared after her, wounded. He was not sure whether it was his touch or the invocation of her first name that had caused her violent reaction. Numbly he picked up the jar full of ashes, but it slipped from his hand and broke on the floor. Ashes and sand scattered. He tried to pick up the broken glass but he punctured his finger and it began to bleed. He found a sheet of paper, gathered the catastrophe—paper, ashes, sand, and blood—and deposited it in the bottom drawer of his desk, overcome with grief.

That paper had been his life. Somehow, he’d thought it made him important, as though God could pick him out of a crowd. Now he had no paper anymore. He had nothing. He was nothing. And he was collapsing into something very tiny, some creature Eleanor Beacon would pity. The loneliness. The joylessness of his life, of his routine. Iris Dunleavy thought she was trapped. He was trapped. And it had been quite tolerable before she’d come along, but now everything seemed so much worse in the light of knowing her and not knowing her. Things that had merely caused him unrest now tormented him outright. What he had never been, what he could never become.

By the time his last appointment of the day came in, he was struggling not to weep.

The blind man fumbled for his chair. Dr. Cowell dabbed at his eyes and grasped at the threads that defined himself. He steadied his voice and asked the man how he was, which was usually all it took to get him to talk about the woman who haunted him, whose scent could still be found everywhere, even among the blooming marlberry of the island, breaking through salt spray and summer watermelon and the rotting carcasses of fish left after a storm or the bracing freshness of lemon juice.

As the man launched into the latest variation of his lovelorn tale, the doctor was astonished to find himself not just listening to his words, but moved by them. He could feel the man’s pain so exquisitely that his hand rose to his own heart, and he almost had to tell the man to stop, he could not bear it anymore, this tale that circled in on itself, that had no ending but another sad beginning every dark morning when the sun streamed in his window and warmed the blind man’s face, and he awoke to the odor of his solitude. The doctor bit his lip. He was coming apart, this man moved him so, and if he didn’t stop himself he would go through this building, room by room, in his mind, and feel the things all of the people within them felt. These doomed souls, these trapped men and women.

When the appointment was over, the doctor staggered out of the building, drained and broken. All the patients were back in their rooms, preparing for dinner, and but for a few wanderers here—asylum staff, or fishermen, or the tanned old man who lingered by the pier with no discernible business at all—the beach was largely empty. The sun low in the sky. A breeze against his face. He stepped out in the sand, felt its peculiar gravity as he slogged toward the dock, his shadow out behind him. Looking back, he found his shadow was impossibly thin and tall, the legs high as palm trees. He felt so very strange. His feet were too heavy. He thought Sunday was a wolf. He was a mote in a dusty universe. He wanted to swallow smooth, tiny objects like mourning rings and stones. And what about pigeons? What if each pigeon actually had a name and no one ever said it?

He shook his head, trying to will himself back into the man he’d been last week.

He trudged to the end of the dock and sat down. There, his feet dangling over the water, he began to weep. His aching over the woman was attached to the pain of other things, things too large and vague and smoky to even be described. Through his tearstained eyes, he saw the sun, larger and rounder and more golden than it had ever been, sitting just a few feet above the horizon line of the sea, throwing down a white gleaming path all the way to his feet. So narrow and defined was that sparkling path, made of shadows and water and dying light, that he felt he could walk upon it, all the way to something yellow and hot enough to burn away his misery.

Stop it, you fool,
he told himself, not like a command but in the same broken voice he’d heard so often, from so many.

When Dr. Cowell did not arrive at the supper table, Wendell was dispatched to look for him. He found the door of his office unlocked but the room empty. Looking out the window and scanning the beach, he saw, to his surprise, someone the approximate size and shape of his father sitting alone at the end of the dock.

He went out to the sand to investigate, taking off his shoes to make his chore more pleasurable by the inclusion of cool sand against his feet. He dropped the shoes and left them behind, spreading the fingers of his good hand to the breeze. He still felt the fingers of his right hand too, and if he did not lift his bandaged hand and see the stump for himself, he would have believed those phantom digits were still whole and unhurt and capable of grabbing a cookie or a starfish.

He stepped onto the dock and began the long walk out to his father, stretching his good hand out to admire its shadow, its long reach onto the calm, flat water. Ever since the accident he had felt giddy with the presence of God and had reveled in his restored sanity. The terrible curse removed in the harshest and yet the fairest way, a way for which only God could be forgiven. As he approached his father, he realized with shock that the older man was weeping.

He had never seen his father in such a state before. He stopped behind him, his right knee hovering close to his father’s left shoulder, wondering what to do. The answer came to him in a tingle that rushed down his body like the light across the water. He had been carrying the secret within him since that miraculous day he had thrust up his hand and felt the gold of a melted cross in the chest of the priest.

Wendell knelt down next to his weeping father and whispered the precious story into his ear.

The doctor said nothing, his shoulders steadying as he listened. Wendell felt exhilarated at the thought that his story had dried his father’s tears. But then the doctor turned his red eyes to his son.

“Wendell,” he said, his voice hard and even, “that’s just a silly legend. You were delirious. Of course you thought you felt a cross.”

Wendell stared at his father. All the good feeling drained from him. His missing fingers ached again. He turned and ran back down the dock, up the beach, past his shoes, as the sun slid into the sea.

All was lost. Iris knew she couldn’t leave Ambrose here on this island. Thus, she would be trapped here indefinitely with the man she loved, barred from speaking to him. Their orchard had burned to the ground. The apples were scorched and the trees blackened.

In the afternoon she forced herself to indulge in a few minutes of swimming, so sick was she of crying in her room. She had just waded into the warm water with the others, in her bathing gown, shuffling her feet so as to warn the stingrays, when she heard a splash behind her. Such an indelicate entry into the water could only come from a boy or a colt. She turned around. Wendell’s pants were soaked to the knees. His eyes were cold and his mouth was set.

“I will help you escape,” he said. “Both of you.”

She didn’t know what had happened to change the boy’s mind, nor did she want to know. The answer had been given. And now it was late at night and he stood before the bars of her window as they talked about the plan in whispers.

“We don’t have any money,” she said.

“I don’t have any money either.”

“Can you steal us a bag of sugar? That’s worth at least forty dollars, now that the embargo is on.”

“Sugar is very precious to the chef. But I’ll try.” He paused. “I could also try to steal a bottle of laudanum.”

“Why would we need that?”

“For Ambrose. In case he has a spell.”

“He doesn’t need laudanum anymore,” she said, noticing the hard tone in her voice and correcting it. “I’ll take care of him.”

Wendell looked uncertain but nodded.

“Are you going to steal the keys to our room?” she asked.

He shook his head. “That would be impossible. Only two people have copies of those keys. The matron and the head guard. They keep them on their person at all times. There’s only one way for you to escape.” His voice had a confidence she found reassuring. “They have room check every night at eleven o’clock. And there are guards at all hours in both wings. The only possible way of escape is to steal away after dinner, instead of going back to the rooms.”

“But where would we go?”

“To my father’s office.”

She raised her eyebrows. “I don’t understand.”

“I have a key. Father gave me one because he’s forever sending me to the office to fetch things for him. I will tell the nurse on the women’s wing that Father has called you to his office after dinner.”

“What for?”

“It has been quite a while, but he will go through periods when he schedules sessions at night. Usually when my mother is being especially difficult.”

“I see.”

“And I will find a guard in the men’s wing and pretend that my father has called Ambrose. You will both go to his office and wait there. When the time is right you can make your escape.”

“I’m afraid of the forest. The alligators and the snakes.”

“You won’t be going that way. You’ll go by sea. They won’t think to look by sea until it’s too late.”

“By sea? How?”

“You’ll take the chef’s canoe. He’ll be angry, but I’ll help him build a new one. My father always said we were going to build a canoe together, but we never did.”

“Isn’t there a guard at the dock all night long?”

“Bernard. He’s a very mean man, but I know he has one weakness.”