The Yearbook (23 page)

He did not answer but paused for a second or two before continuing his work on the telephone. She was sure, then, that he had been listening, and that the mention of the reserve room had struck a chord. She felt a thrill, and continued more boldly.

“We have to get out of here,” she whispered.

Lola then began in earnest to think up a plan. She would have to steal a keycard from one of the nurses. They clipped their cards to their belts, or hung them on straps around their necks. The belts were the easiest targets. She'd wait for a commotion—there were several minor riots every week, usually stemming from a disagreement over the television channel—and seize the opportunity to unclip the keycard. Then, sometime deep in the night, she would make her escape with Peter. They would run down the hill to the employee parking lot. If nobody was around, Lola could hotwire one of the cars on the spot. If it seemed risky, they could walk for a while before trying again somewhere else.

Alone in her room, she rigged up a simulation, using a playing card attached by a hair clip to the sleeve of one of her shirts. She practiced stumbling, bumping up against the sleeve, and the quick pinch of thumb and forefinger that would release the card. After several dozen practice runs, she thought she could do it without being detected.

On a weekday in mid-December, Lola woke up and looked out her window. The sky was a bright, shocking blue. It gave her courage. Today was the day she would tell Peter the plan. He might not respond, but she knew he would listen. She had noticed the way his pupils sometimes dilated when she spoke, or how a foot would start to tap. She was convinced that he listened to everything she said, and would follow her instructions.

She put on her vintage dress, and feeling free already, entered the common room. Her eyes went straight to the corner table where Peter always sat. But he was not there. She looked around and then she saw him, sitting on the couch in the corner next to a middle-aged woman, a visitor. She was holding his hand, and he was talking to her. He was talking! An overnight bag sat next to him on the couch. Dr. Schultz sat in a chair across from them, nodding and smiling.

Lola approached them. She was confused and afraid. What did they want with Peter? What were they doing to him? Near the couch, she stopped. The woman visitor looked up, and then Dr. Schultz did.

“Peter?” Lola said.

Dr. Schultz stood and touched Lola's arm. “This is Brian Snyder, Lola, and his mother, Mrs. Snyder, from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.”

Lola was too shocked to move. “He can talk?” she said.

Mrs. Snyder put her arm around her son. “Brian has a rare form of autism, combined with a condition called selective mutism,” she said. “He does talk, but only to certain people. There are only four or five people he will speak to.”

Brian turned toward his mother. “That's the girl I told you all about. The girl who thinks she's a time traveler. She thinks I'm one, too. She's so crazy.”

Brian's voice was high and raspy, like a rusty spring, nothing remotely like Peter's. A terrible, desperate anger filled her. She wanted to grab this imposter by the throat and shake him. This was not Peter Hemmings. How could she ever, ever, in a million years, have thought so?

His face wasn't the right shape at all. He was shorter than Peter, and his hair was straight. Her mind had made him into Peter. Her mind had done it all. Only her mind! She turned to run, but Dr. Schultz had her by the arm. She wrenched away and heard the rip as the entire sleeve came off her lavender dress at the shoulder. She fled, but the un-Peter's high, weird giggle followed her, rising above the other sounds in the room.

In the days that followed, Lola spent hours and hours in the yellow therapy room. Dr. Schultz already knew her secrets; she had learned them from Mrs. Snyder of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Brian Snyder had a superior memory, common to people with his disorder, and he had told his mother verbatim every single story that Lola had whispered across the table.

Dr. Schultz was fascinated by Lola's case, and dove into it. She was writing a paper on Lola for the next state conference; it would be ideal, the doctor thought, if Lola could make some significant strides in her therapy before the paper's deadline in the spring. The report would have all the more impact then, and might even generate interest from a book publisher.

Lola could not fight anymore. She put on the old jeans without a belt and the sneakers without laces. She threw the rag of a dress into the trash and took the medicine she was given. She could not deny that she had believed with all her might that Brian Snyder was Peter Hemmings. And if she could believe that, how much else of what she'd experienced had been a hallucination? Like crazy people everywhere, she'd been convinced of her sanity.

The doctor had tried to help Lola see how it had happened: It was the strain, she'd said, the terrible strain of returning to Ashfield, the place where her mother had died. Emotions long submerged had caused her to yearn for her home again, but home was gone and she had reached into her imagination for a replacement.

“It's an understandable reaction,” Dr. Schultz said one afternoon a week after Brian Snyder's departure. “But escaping into fantasy isn't a positive reaction to stress. It might feel good while it's happening, like drugs or alcohol, but in the end it's pulling you further and further away from a healthy life.”

Dr. Schultz offered Lola a piece of hard candy in a bowl shaped like Santa's sleigh. Lola took one and played with the wrapper but didn't eat it. It had begun to snow again, and the psychologist's window was a square of pure white, like a blank slate. Lola was marveling again at the power of her own fantasy but was pestered by all the things she'd seen in the past that were verifiably real.

“But Peter Hemmings was a real person,” she said. “And so was Whoopsie Whipple, and Thumbtack and Virgil. They're all in the yearbook. They're all real.”

“We keep coming back to that, don't we?” Dr. Schultz said. She got up from the sofa and wandered around the room, stopping to pluck a couple of dead leaves from her ficus tree. “The county might have their birth and death certificates. We might be able to find something out about who they were. It could help you to see how different the real people were from the fictional characters you created from the portraits.”

Lola toyed some more with the candy. She felt as if her head wasn't attached to her body. She'd often felt that way since she started on her regimen of medications.

“What about my cap? My cap was on the chair,” she began.

“An object was on the chair,” the doctor corrected, then sat down at her computer and hit a few keys. “I've been looking over your story in a lot of detail, Lola, and a number of interesting things jump out at me.”

“Like what?” Lola said dully.

“You said that when you first met Peter, you felt you'd seen him before, that strong jaw, that wavy hair. You recognized him because you had seen him before, in the yearbook. You added the voice, gave him a personality.”

“But I'd barely skimmed through the yearbook then. I couldn't have recognized him.”

“There's so much we unconsciously see, take in, without realizing it. We focus on the objectives of our daily lives: the traffic light that tells us to stop, the store clerk who's asking us for a credit card, a ringing telephone. But everything else in the background does register on us. Our subconscious collects everything and uses it. We think dreams, fantasies, ideas, come from some other dimension, some magical place, some special inspiration, but they come from material that has all been put before us, the scraps of our lives and feelings.”

“If I can overlook that much information, then I'm the least observant person in the whole world,” Lola said. She unwrapped the candy and sucked on it. It tasted disappointingly of herbs.

“You found that strange compartment in the library with the glass bottle, and then the first thing that happens in your time-traveling world is that the girl finds something in the little compartment, right?”

“Yes,” Lola admitted.

“And then, when she talks to you by the punch bowl, what's the first thing she asks you?”

“I forget.”

Dr. Schultz scrolled down the long report.

“She asks you if you are a member of the Temperance League. And one of the books you'd just been reading before you fell asleep, wasn't it an old book about temperance?”

“I think it was,” Lola said.

“Your quick scan of the yearbook told you what the front of the school looked like in 1924. It told you that the mermaid fountain once had a head. It told you what the band looked like, how the gym was decorated, how the students dressed.”

Lola thought of the mermaid. She wished they'd get it over with and tear her down instead of just leaving her there year after year, decapitated.

“You didn't leave the school with Peter that night. Do you know why?”

“I went back to get my knapsack.”

“No. You couldn't leave with Peter, because you didn't have the information to do so. You didn't know what stood outside the school. You didn't have the ingredients to make that world, to create the streets of the town, the cars and houses. Not until you met Jean Bryant and looked at her books.”

“Miss Bryant was nice to me.”

“Only
after
Miss Bryant showed you that book about the Wrigleys did you begin to imagine that you went to the Wrigleys' home. Your bedroom there was an idealized version of the room you shared with Danielle Anderson. Right down to the same tree.”

Dr. Schultz had criticized Miss Bryant all week long. In her estimation, the old crackpot had left Lola alone with pneumonia in a drafty attic, and encouraged her mental breakdown with talk about invisible audiences and holes in the skin of time.

“She told you about a champion pole-sitter, brought down by bad weather.”

“Mr. Bill Penfield,” Lola mumbled.

“And then what happens? You imagine a friend, atop a pole, brought down by bad weather.”

“Struck by lightning. She fell from the top,” Lola said, “but survived.”

“Impossible, see? And think about this: The only 1920s film you had ever heard of was the one playing when you went on your date.”

“
The Sheik
,” Lola interrupted. “Valentino.”

“You understand now that it wasn't a coincidence. Not at all. You saw what you knew about.”

“But—”

The doctor looked up. “Yes?”

“How come I know what happens in that movie?”

“You'd seen it.”

“No. I'd never seen a silent movie.”

“You did. When you were too little to remember. But the subconscious never forgets.”

Lola's head had floated even farther away than usual, and seemed to be hovering somewhere over her left shoulder. Her eyes felt heavy. She wanted to sleep.

“I guess you're right,” she said.

The medicine made Lola drowsy and stupid. But it also brought on a kind of numbness that could almost pass for peace. The struggle she'd waged was over. Now that she'd gone crazy like her mother, she didn't have to worry about everybody waiting for her to do so. She only had to take the medicine and follow the routine laid out for her by Dr. Schultz and the nurses. It wasn't hard to do what they asked, to shuffle from one activity to the next in her laceless shoes.

Lola climbed the stepladder to place the star atop the Christmas tree, and on Christmas Eve she joined the other carolers—she no longer called them “nuts”—to tour the other wings, spreading cheer.

They strolled first through Wing C, the disabled wing. Nurse McDonald led the carolers, dressed in a Santa hat and giddily playing the role of an orchestra conductor; she was new to Hillside, young, and still enthusiastic about her job, the picture of efficiency with her crisp white smock and neat blonde hair.

Lola was pleased that the group's performance had brought smiles to a few faces. It was a good thing she was doing, a sane, real, kind thing. Her job was to carry a basket of candy canes but make sure not to give them to anyone at risk of choking.

Dark had fallen by the time the carolers arrived at Wing A. Some of the old people smiled at the carolers, some cried a little, perhaps remembering other Christmases when they were still able to participate in life, and a few of the more lucid ones sang along.

“Great job, group,” the nurse-conductor sang out, brimming with Christmas cheer. “We're gonna be heading back now, but let's make a special stop here to see Mrs. Ryan. She didn't feel much like leaving her room tonight, but she's a very special lady—one hundred and four years old last month.”

Mrs. Ryan was propped up in her bed and opened her eyes when the carolers entered in full song:
Jingle bells, Jingle bells, Jingle all the way
.

Mrs. Ryan was like a tiny white bird, Lola thought, with her cottony tuft of hair standing straight up on her head. She watched the carolers, but her neutral expression did not change; it was hard to tell how much she was taking in. The room was small and stuffy, and Lola found herself smashed up against the wall under the television.

“Merry Christmas, Mrs. Ryan,” Nurse McDonald shouted as the performance concluded. Mrs. Ryan seemed to nod slightly, and then closed her eyes. In the disorganized exit that followed, a stray elbow knocked Lola's basket of miniature candy canes and they shot out in all directions on the slick hospital room floor. The carolers dove for them, creating a sudden chaos that the nurse hurried to quell.

“Everybody up off the floor, please,” she sang, clapping her hands. Marsha, the pink-haired kleptomaniac, was stuffing two handfuls down her pants. “Lola, you go ahead and pick up the candy canes and rejoin us in the multipurpose room. Everybody else, time for cocoa and cookies.”