Blue Asylum (21 page)

Dawn broke soft and clean on that island of shell and marl and current. It was a day like any other, one more day in a season when marking the days was difficult, since the balminess was resolute and the birds were attuned to the tides, the tides to the moon, and the moon to the lunatics, under their crazy spell, waxing and waning in accordance with the fluctuations of their madness and the depth of their passions. A group of terns had gathered at the edge of a calm sea, and a single raccoon, caught after daylight, skittered out of the dune vegetation and into the forest, leaving behind a loggerhead nest full of ruined eggs, shells broken and half-formed turtles spilling out in the sand. Morning glories opened on the dunes. A fisherman tossed out his line. A wet anhinga sat on the beach, drying out its wings. In the mangrove swamps, an alligator surfaced, a lizard jumped for a branch and missed, and a lamb woke up crying for his mother.

The blind man could not see his room fill with light, but the rising heat released the odors of the island, even the ones that existed only in his mind. The smell of the woman who haunted him came through the bars of his windows. The bullet had damaged one of his tear ducts, so that it leaked at inopportune moments, and evidently it had cried in his sleep, cried over an unremarkable dream, and now his face was sticky to the touch.

Morning arrived as it always did for the old woman who refused to be a widow. She turned on the bed and kissed her husband on the cheek, then smoothed back his white hair. He mumbled something. A few more kisses would bring him to life. Her imagination was so perfect that the form his body made under the sheet was a faithful replication, and she kept the rose from the top of his coffin and threw the rest of his funeral away.

Dr. Cowell awoke next to Mary. He did not want to get up. Doctor, father, husband, dreamer. He had failed at everything. For the first time in many years, he was not sure how to begin the day. Where he belonged in it. He was heartbroken and destroyed. His boy wasn’t talking to him and neither was his wife.

Iris had slept fitfully, a rhythm that recalled the haystack and meadow sleep of her nights as a fugitive, when something as simple as a drop of dew forming on the face or a star going out in the back of the universe could trigger a sudden waking. By the time the light came in she’d been up for hours, pacing her room. What if something terrible happened? What if they were caught, or lost at sea?

She chose the same dress she’d worn when she arrived on the island. She had washed it in her basin several times, so that it had lost the scent of doomed cattle. She would worry about other clothes later. The bag of sugar would fetch money for food and shelter. She would have time for vanity when other needs were filled.

Ambrose was running out of blue. Blue tears, blue windmill in a Dutch painting, blue teacup, old blue horse in an open field. He grabbed the bars and soaked in the blue sky, all of it, drinking in the blue like his last drink, he gulped and gulped and gulped. He did not know if he would make it, but he knew his victory or failure started from within, and he could not think of Seth anymore, could not think of what he’d done to his friend; he had to go forward, forget, forget, the sky hurt his eyes, he shut them tight, face pressed to the bars,
I love you I love you I love you.

The doctor’s last patient came in at midafternoon. The man had terrible fears that his penis would fall off in his sleep; that all his math schooling had been off by one digit and everything was subsequently wrong, including the time of day; that he had accidentally buried his mother when she was not quite dead; that the staff urinated in his cucumber soup. He was afraid of certain sounds. He was afraid of wading in the ocean, sure that the seaweed would come alive. He was afraid that all the spiders he had killed in his life had joined forces and were waiting for him behind a tree. He knew these fears were delusional, and yet the feeling was so real and so insistent. His feelings were stronger than his thoughts. That was the problem . . . The man looked over at something on the doctor’s desk and gasped. “Where did you get that?” He pointed at a spiral shell with brown checkered marks.

“I found it on the beach. It’s odd, isn’t it?”

“Don’t you know what that is? That’s a junonia! A rarity! I’ve only seen one in my life!” The man’s eyes filled with light, and all the insanity went away for an instant, leaving him with the face of a boy.

“It’s special?” the doctor asked.

“Indeed!”

After the man had left, Dr. Cowell studied the prize. Now he had a gift for his son that no one else could offer him. He took out his handkerchief, breathed on the shell, polished it, and held it to the light.

Iris followed the matron out of the dining area and down the hall. Time had passed so slowly, but at last the day was done, and she’d been summoned to the doctor’s office. She watched the broad back of the matron, her severe gray curls held back by a hairnet. She would never have to follow the matron again, or listen to her hateful voice, or look at her cross expression. In the coming years, her stout body would be ground up by the hours and days and years, into the gruel of forgetfulness.

The matron sighed deeply at the bottom of the spiral staircase, shooting back a hateful look at Iris, as if it were her fault that the doctor worked on the second floor. With a deep breath she began the slow ascent, gripping the handrail. When she was near the top, Wendell came out of the office and breezed by them down the stairs, saying coolly to the matron: “Father says send her on in.”

With that the matron stopped in her tracks and turned around. She breathed heavily from her labor.

“You know the way,” she told Iris gruffly.

Ambrose was standing just inside the office, wearing cotton pants, brogans, and a long-sleeved shirt and vest. He’d taken off his jacket and put it across the back of his chair. He held his slouch hat in his hands. His hair was neatly parted and his cheeks were smooth, the angles and shadows of his face so strikingly handsome that she stopped for a moment, shy, admiring. She closed the door behind her.

“Perhaps you should lock it,” he said.

She turned the lock in the door and they were safe. They stood a foot apart from each other, unsure what lovers do in a situation like this. Do they kiss, do they touch? Are there whispered things to be said? Neither had any idea, so finally each just took a seat across from the other, their knees nearly touching. Outside the window the sun went down, dragging all manner of shadows down the beach, bending the shadow of a palm tree to intersect with that of a wading crane. They sat in the empty office and watched the sun’s trek into the sea’s horizon, halving itself, then leaving only its orange tip arranged like a cap over the water, turning from yellow to orange to red.

They lit the oil lamp in the doctor’s office so that anyone approaching could see a light inside and assume a session was ongoing. They didn’t speak. The diplomas on the walls had gone dark, as had the blueprints of his building.

She remembered something. “Wendell said he would leave the bag of sugar under the desk.”

Ambrose crouched down to search for it. “Here it is,” he announced. He lifted the sugar onto the desk, bent down again, and picked up a brown bottle.

“What is that?” she asked.

He held the lamp to the bottle so she could read the label by its light.

LAUDANUM
.

A pang in her chest, instantly. “I told him we didn’t need that!”

Ambrose hesitated. “Maybe we should take it. Just in case.”

“You don’t need it. You have me. I promise you, I will keep you well and safe.”

He set the bottle on the desk and shrugged. “The doctor will probably need it when he discovers we are gone.”

Her smile was wasted. It was outside of the penumbra of lamplight and couldn’t be seen in the dark.

Wendell kept his eyes downward at the dinner table, afraid his plans would be revealed in his eyes.

“Stop eating so fast, Wendell,” Mary said. “A little girl who went to my school when I was a child strangled on a Christmas ham. Her mother had urged her, countless times, to eat more delicately.”

His father said nothing. A small object wrapped in a white handkerchief sat next to his glass of water. On any other night, Wendell’s curiosity would have been aroused. Now he merely glanced at it before he stood up.

“Where are you going?” Mary asked.

“I have to work some math problems for class tomorrow.” Wendell headed to his room. He closed the door and waited, pacing in the fading light. After the sun went down, Wendell opened his window and slid out of it, his bare feet coming down in the sand. He knelt and began to dig with his good hand. His fingertips touched the neck of a bottle and he pulled it out of the ground and knocked the sand off the label. It was the chef’s good brandy. He’d stolen it from the kitchen that morning and prayed the chef would not notice. He had tried it once, out of curiosity, and found it terrible. He had no idea why the chef was so enamored of it, but since it played an important role in the plan for the evening, he carried it carefully as he crept down the beach, the liquor turning amber under the moon. Mullet jumped out on a still ocean, dark shapes in the light.

He stopped halfway to the dock and stood there in the tension between carrying out the plan and stopping it, let it pull at him until it hurt too much. He enjoyed this in a grim way, pretending he still had a choice when he had already given the choice away.

He kept walking. The brandy sloshed in the bottle. He could see the dock up ahead, Bernard slouched in a wooden chair, arms folded. How many nights on this island had been just like the others, divided only by a falling star or whether a raccoon darted left or right or which breed of bird started off a quarrel about a fish?

Bernard scowled as Wendell approached him, and the scowl was suddenly familiar, almost comforting. This man had scowled every day of his life and would scowl into eternity, like the sun rising in the east. A boy who does not have the right or the means or the parents to enjoy a constant smile must make do with other constancies.

“What do you want?” Bernard demanded.

“Nothing.”

“You can’t take the canoe.”

“I don’t want the canoe.” Wendell kept his voice calm. He’d rehearsed this moment and was thrilled, listening to himself, at how dignified and manly he sounded. He’d swear his voice had dropped a half-octave.

“It’s my birthday today,” Wendell lied.

Bernard crossed his arms. Nothing was interesting about a boy under full moonlight. A pirate? Yes. A woman? Yes. A boy? Bernard stared out at the sea.

“The chef gave me this.” Wendell held up the bottle. The light picked up a yellow slant in the center. Bernard turned his head. His eyebrows rose. His nostrils flared slightly.

“Brandy,” he whispered.

“It’s Peruvian.”

“You can’t get brandy for your birthday. What are you, thirteen, fourteen? Brandy is a man’s drink.”

“That’s why I came out here to drink it with you. I hear you know your brandy.”

“Damn right.” Bernard motioned to the ground next to him in the slightest gesture of invitation. “The chef didn’t give me anything on my birthday. Here after all this time guarding his damn boat.”

Wendell sat down in the sand and unscrewed the bottle cap. He took a deep sniff at it, making a face as its odor traveled up his nose and stung his sinuses, which, after a moment, swelled pleasantly.

“You’re not gonna tell your father on me, are you?” Bernard asked.

“Why would I do that?”

Bernard motioned to him. “Go ahead, then. Take the first drink. It’s your birthday.” A note of friendliness had crept into his voice.

Wendell shrugged and tilted back his head. The brandy slid down his throat and hit his stomach in a golden bitter burst, as though a ship whose cargo was molten gold had just crashed on the rocks inside him. It was uncomfortable at first. But a feeling of wellness soon spread throughout his body. He actually felt the warming of his heart. He took another quick slosh and passed it to Bernard, watching the older man’s vocal cords pulse three times as he drank. Bernard finished with gusto. Brandy ran from the corners of his mouth. He wiped his face with his shirtsleeve.

“Goddamn, that’s good brandy. Too bad it can’t be your birthday every day.”

Wendell took the bottle and drank again, a longer, deeper drink. His turmoil at his situation was draining away, replaced by a dull serenity, one that inspired a short, watery laugh.

“What’s so funny?” asked Bernard.

“Nothing.” He handed the bottle back to him and they passed it back and forth in silence, listening to the birds argue and the mullet jump, comfortable in their silence. The brandy was talking for them, spreading companionship and greater understanding, and what a shame one could not take that bottle and empty it on top of the war, let blue run together with gray so the resulting muddy color would be the uniform of I don’t give a damn, and each side would lay down their weapons because in the end, nothing was worth fighting for.

Presently, Bernard hoisted himself out of the chair and sat down heavily in the sand. “My back is going out. I’m getting old. I can still give a woman the what-for though, make no mistake.”

“Me, too,” said Wendell, who hadn’t really been listening.

Bernard held on to the bottle and drank again. “I had a wife, you know. From Suffolk County.”

“What happened to her?”

“Run off with another man, the sow.”

Wendell nodded. “Sow,” he said. He took another drink, held the bottle to the moonlight, and noted, with sadness, its declining contents.

“I was a good husband. She didn’t think too much of me ’cause I wasn’t a wealthy man. That’s why she left me for a dentist. God knows how many healthy teeth he pulled on his way to his four hundred acres. He owned the damn lake. Wouldn’t let anybody fish in it.”

Something about a man owning a whole lake was funny to Wendell.

“What the hell are you laughing about?” asked Bernard.