Blue Asylum (22 page)

“The lake,” Wendell gasped. He was holding his stomach, he was laughing so hard. “He owned the lake.”

“You know what?” Bernard grabbed the bottle and took another gulp before continuing. “I don’t make much at my job, but I’ve been saving my money for ten years. In another ten I’ll have enough for my own plantation. One of those rice plantations like they got in the Carolinas. I’m gonna have fifty slaves. I’m not talking about Negroes either. Frenchmen. I hate the damn French.”

“Damn French,” said Wendell, laughing again.

Bernard stared at him for a moment, then laughed too. He clapped Wendell on the back and drank some more brandy. He wiped his mouth, looking thoughtful. “Can I ask you something?”

“What?”

“What’s it like to get your hand bit off?”

Wendell took the bottle back and drank so it would help him think. He squinted, looking out at the sea where the invisible beast still lived. “It just felt like a good hard tug.” He held his bandaged hand up to his face. “I can still feel my fingers.”

“Really?” Bernard’s voice was full of wonder. “Can I see your hand?”

“What do you mean?” He turned his hand. “It’s right here.”

“Without the bandages.”

Wendell hesitated. He’d been looking the other way when they changed his dressing.

“Please?”

“All right.” Wendell began to unwrap the bandage. Bernard leaned forward, watching so intently he lost his balance and would have pitched forward into the sand if he hadn’t thrown out his hands to save himself. “Oh, oh,” he said, balancing again. “Damn sand is rolling tonight.”

Wendell peeled off the last layer of cotton and the two of them stared at his hand, which abruptly ended just above the knuckles, the stumps bruised and swollen over a mass of black stitches. The thumb, though whole, was a sick grayish color.

“My God,” Bernard breathed, passing his hand back and forth through the space where the fingers were supposed to be. “Took ’em clean off, didn’t the bastard?”

“I don’t think he meant any harm. He was just hungry.” He started to wrap up his hand again and lost initiative, tossing the bandage aside and lying back in the sand, his eyes turned toward the shifting firmament. “I don’t blame that fish or shark or whatever it was.”

Bernard drank from the bottle and held it upside down. Two drops of brandy ran out and fell into the coarse fabric of his pants. “You know what you should do? Get an alligator to bite off your foot.”

Wendell blinked. The stars moved in the sky like the pieces of a fast, crazy game of chess. The sand was soft as a pillow beneath his head. “Why would I want to do that?”

“So when people ask you how you lost your hand you can have a backup story. I mean, the hand’s a good story but people are gonna get tired of it sooner or later.”

Wendell considered this. “What do I do when people get tired of the alligator story?”

“Get a loggerhead turtle to bite you in the ass.” They burst into laughter, rolling back and forth, thrashing the sand, the sea crawling up a little closer, frothing and retreating. They kept on laughing, but suddenly Wendell staggered to his feet.

“Where are you going?” Bernard asked.

“I’ve got to feed my lamb.” Wendell took a step, lost his balance, and fell in a heap.

The doctor waited until Mary went to bed, then took the precious junonia shell, still wrapped in his handkerchief, to Wendell’s room. He stood at the door and knocked twice with a tentative knuckle. His son had run off so fast after dinner that he hadn’t had a chance to give him his peace offering, and now the anticipation was killing him. He rapped again, a bit harder.

Finally he turned the knob and opened the door a crack. “Wendell?” he whispered, pushing the door open wider to reveal a darkened room that smelled of dead sea creatures. He searched by moonlight for his matches and lit a tallow candle, moving it around the room, taking in all of Wendell’s treasures: the shells and the turtle carapaces, sea anemones, crab claws, arrowheads, dried sedge, alligator teeth, butterfly wings, broken pieces of pottery. A small island’s worth of entertainment. Wendell’s bed was still perfectly made. The doctor tried the window. It was unlocked and slid open easily.

He stuck his head out the window and saw the footprints in the sand below. He sighed. Wendell had escaped, and he was so desperate for the boy’s forgiveness he knew he couldn’t sleep without it. He left the room, closing the door gently behind him. He had noticed a breeze when he looked out the window and prayed the midges were not so bad tonight. Just to make sure, he quickly applied a layer of rose oil to his hands and his face and the back of his neck before he stole out the door.

He could not find Wendell outside in the courtyard, nor on the beach—although, had he looked more closely in the direction of the dock, he would have noticed him sprawled face-up in the sand next to the dock guard, the froth of an incoming wave crawling up to his feet.

The doctor went trooping down the beach the other way, calling Wendell’s name. How strange the name suddenly sounded when borne by the breeze. He was desperate to find him. He wanted to tell him how he felt when he saw him lying on the beach with blood everywhere, how pale he looked sleeping in the infirmary, his hand bandaged tightly, his fingers stolen by some warm water current. He wanted to tell him he’d gone back outside to the beach to the place where the blood had dried in the sand. He’d covered it up and smoothed it over while sweat and tears ran down his face. Most of all, he wanted to apologize for disparaging the miracle of the priest.
Wendell,
he wanted to say,
I just don’t know. I don’t know anything.

He went to the cottage to get the kerosene lantern and set off for the gumbo limbo tree in which he was sure Wendell lurked, wounded and sullen under the full moon. He passed the citrus grove and the short expanse of sawgrass and cacti, moving into the forest of mangrove and buttonwood, down the old Indian trail.

So many things he’d forgotten to tell Wendell came back to him now—how his father took him bird hunting and made him shoot a goose, and how he’d shut his eyes and aimed away from it and pulled the trigger and shot a tree and his father shouted at him,
Shoot the goose! Shoot the goose!
But he never did shoot that goose; he was afraid of his father but dreaded killing something more, and he even secretly named that goose, in defiance. His father, that hard-boiled, scrappy Brit, never thought a whole lot of Henry, considered him whiny and weak and girlish, and had left him his shotgun when he died, as an insult.

He slogged through dried bracken, vines catching around his ankles, grasshoppers fluttering near his knees, a lizard crawling down his arm. He pulled it away by the tail.

When he arrived at the gumbo limbo tree on the old midden mound, he set the lantern down and peered up into the inky blackness of the branches.

“Wendell?” he called softly. “Are you there?”

He reached into his pocket, unwrapped the junonia, and held it up in the flat of his hand. “Look what I’ve got.” He didn’t know if Wendell was there. He couldn’t tell. Would he have to go up after him? He stood still, as though any sudden movements would send his son skittering up further into the tree or whooshing out into the night like a startled owl.

“Wendell.” On the day his boy was born, pink and wrinkly and writhing in the daylight, all twisty and upset, so new to the world, Mary wanted to name him James, after her own father. But he had won. Wendell was his grandfather’s name, his gentle Quaker grandfather who had helped establish the York Asylum.

“Wendell.” He held the precious shell up high in the air. “Look here, son. For you, Wendell.” He kept saying the name out loud in the darkness. Proudly, fiercely. Not his father’s son. Not his wife’s son. His son.

Wendell. Wendell. Wendell.

At the appointed hour, Iris and Ambrose left the office and descended the winding stairs, their movements cautious, as though the entire universe were booby-trapped to those stairs and the slightest provocation would set off a tree-bursting, magma-spewing, star-crumbling explosion. At the bottom of the stairs, they found the foyer deserted. Ambrose opened the door and waited for Iris to step outside first. They were still shy around each other, uncertain of the procedure of courtship under conditions such as these.

They moved quickly over the sand, shrinking from the moonlight that should delight all lovers, but they were on the run. Small dark shapes moved from the high-tide line to the ocean surf—tiny loggerhead turtles on their quest for the horizon. She and Ambrose stepped around them. Wendell had told her most of them would die, and that the area between the dunes and the waterline was treacherous and filled with predators. Now Iris was alert for predators herself.

As they approached the dock, they saw Wendell and the dock guard passed out in the sand, faces toward the twinkling sky, the empty bottle of brandy between them. The dock guard’s arms and legs were akimbo. He mumbled something and turned his head, revealing a sand-covered cheek.

Iris knelt by the boy. “Wendell,” Iris whispered, “are you ill?”

“He’s drunk,” said Ambrose, nodding at the empty bottle.

“Oh,” Iris whispered. “He did it for us, didn’t he?” She stroked his face. Wendell slept with his bad hand over his good one. The light from the sky illuminated his mangled hand without its bandage, and Iris paused, leaning in close to study it, horrified by the way the fingers ended in stubs and stitches.

“We can’t just leave him here,” she said.

“There’s nothing we can do,” Ambrose answered. “Now let’s go, before the guard wakes up.”

“I wish we could take him with us.”

“He belongs here.”

“No one belongs here.”

She picked up his bad hand and kissed it gently between the knuckles. “Good night, Wendell,” she whispered, and arranged his hands the way she’d found them. She rose and brushed the sand from her dress. Ambrose untied the canoe and helped her in and pushed off, jumping in with a hollow sound that made the dock guard stir briefly, do a half-pushup, and then collapse again. The water was smooth and glassy, every bit of the night sky reproduced upon it in exquisite detail, creating two night skies, one of ether and one of saltwater. Ambrose paddled slowly as they drifted through the pass that separated Sanibel from its sister island. Iris looked back at the man and the boy and the courtyard and the asylum looming in the near distance. Soon the matron would discover her room. The cell of a crazy woman. Furniture rearranged, sheets pulled off the bed, clothes strewn about the room, ceramic pitcher broken on the floor, water spilled into a shrinking pool. Even the watercolor of a pear had been tilted on the wall so that the stem of the fruit pointed defiantly toward the window. She had left a beautiful wreck, and the picture of it she’d taken in her mind thoughtfully included the matron, framed in the doorway, hand over her mouth.

“We’ve done it,” she said. “We’ve escaped.”

Ambrose nodded.

Their canoe glided out of the pass and into the sound, into a newer, wilder world, the coast tangled with the prop roots of red mangroves. A wolf howled from the darkness of the thicket.

Ambrose kept paddling steadily. She lay back and watched the stars as the boat moved through the water. She decided that of all the moments of her life up until now, this was the perfect moment, perfect sky, perfect sea. This journey toward an unknown shore. She fell asleep and awoke to a hard rain. Ambrose quickly paddled into a copse of red mangroves, and they took shelter under the leaves, their bodies huddled over their bag of sugar, protecting it from the rain as though it were an infant child.

At eleven o’clock that night, a nurse opened Iris’s door for bed check. She squinted in the darkness, moving closer. The bed was empty, the sheets piled on the floor. She rushed to tell the matron, who lit a lantern and inspected the room herself, finding a wreckage of tipped-over chairs, rearranged furniture, and artwork defiantly atilt. The matron did not so much scream as bellow, a hybrid roar of buffalo and sea monster that brought the night nurses running. In the men’s wing, a similar scene was playing out when Ambrose’s bed was discovered empty, though his room was orderly and his bed neatly made.

A guard knocked on the door to Dr. Cowell’s cottage five minutes later. His trip to the sulking tree had failed, and he was already in his nightclothes and dozing in his living room chair, the junonia shell still held in one hand. He answered the door sleepily, testily, but was shocked into wakefulness by the news. He threw on his clothes and rushed out into the light of the full moon.

The pieces of the puzzle fell together quickly, once the tale emerged that his own son, Wendell, had falsely told the male and female attendants that the escapees had night appointments at the office. Dr. Cowell listened with utter shock. Wendell. It could not be. He knew the boy was angry with him, but to betray him so utterly, so damningly . . . He pushed the thought out of his mind. He had lunatics to catch.

He charged out to the beach with a small battalion of guards and attendants. A storm was coming, and the air was still. They discovered Bernard passed out next to the dock, the canoe gone, and more puzzle pieces falling into place. Dr. Cowell leaned down and grabbed Bernard by the collar, shaking him as sand flew out of the drunk man’s hair and clothes.

“Where are they? Where are they?” he demanded.

But Bernard was too brandy-soaked to offer any information of value. He opened his eyes a slit, mumbled something about enslaving the French, and passed out again.

Thunder rolled in the near distance and the first drops of rain of the coming storm fell on the doctor’s face. By the time he made it back to the cottage, the rain was coming down in sheets and had already soaked his clothes. He went straight into Wendell’s room. His son lay on his back, dead to the world. Dr. Cowell caught a whiff of brandy and frowned.

“Wendell!” He seized him firmly by the shoulders.

The boy did not move, and for a frozen moment the doctor thought he might be dead. He put his ear to Wendell’s chest and heard his steady heartbeat. Relief washed over him.