Mist upon the Marsh: The Story of Nessa and Cassie (19 page)

“Hi,” said Embie. “What’s your name?”

“I already told you her name,” said Cassie.

“No, you didn’t.”

“Her name is Nessa.”

Embie frowned, and looked to Nessa. “You don’t know how to talk?” she said.

“Embie!”

“It’s all right,” said Nessa. “I’m sorry, Embie. I should have answered you.”

Embie nodded in concession, but still appeared still somewhat skeptical.

“How do you know my sister?” she asked.

“I met her at the diner,” said Nessa.

“What diner?”

“You know where I work, Embie,” said Cassie.

“No, I don’t.”

“Don’t you remember Wiley’s Diner?”

“No.”

“I sometimes forget what she knows, and what she doesn’t,” said Cassie to Nessa.             

“What who knows?” asked Embie. “Who are we talking about?”

“No one, Embie,” said Cassie. “Never mind.”

Embie crossed her arms over her chest, and made a pouting face.

“How was your week, Embie?” said Cassie.

The skeletal countenance fell into an expression of serious thought; and in the process, shed its childlike petulance.

“Nothing,” she said finally. “Nothing, nothing. There’s nothing to do.”

“I thought Miss Harper was going to take you to see a movie?”

“Was,”
said Embie. “She
was
going to. For good behaviour.”

“So I take it you that didn’t behave well?”

Embie smiled in rather a sly fashion, and then hid her face in her hands. Cassie attempted to pull them away, so as to see her sister’s face more clearly; but the boney little hands were like vices.

“I want you to behave yourself this week,” said Cassie. “Embie – are you listening to me?”

The young woman dropped her hands, pulled her long hair over her face, and then began to hum.

“Embie?”

The humming grew louder, and louder; till finally Cassie drew back the hair from her sister’s face, and held it to the sides of her head with both hands. Embie ceased her humming; crossed her arms again; and looked defiantly into her sister’s face.

“You listen here, Embie,” said Cassie. “I want you to behave yourself this week. I don’t know why you’ve been being so very bad – but Miss Harper wrote me twice last month, and told me that if you don’t stop, she’ll have to send you somewhere else. I don’t have the money, Embie, to send you anyplace else. And besides – you don’t want to leave Miss Harper, do you?”

The girl’s face twitched slightly, just enough to demonstrate that she registered Cassie’s words; and that those words rang true. But Cassie added, just for good measure:

“You don’t want to come home and live with Mama, do you?”

Embie’s face filled with a cold, stark terror. She fell forward against her sister’s shoulder, and began to sob.

“Will you be a good girl, Embie?” asked Cassie, smoothing back the girl’s frazzled hair. “Will you be good, so that you can stay here with Miss Harper?”

The girl nodded fervently.

“All right, then,” said Cassie. “All right, Embie. You don’t have to be afraid. Don’t worry – you don’t have to see Mama.”

Embie breathed a visible sigh of relief, and laid herself back against the wall. She looked, for a little, to the windows, and lost herself there for a moment. But finally she swung her head towards Cassie, and asked, “Have you seen Joe?”

Cassie sighed. “We talk about this every week, Embie. Joe doesn’t live here anymore.”

“Have you seen Joe?”

“No, Embie. I haven’t.”

“He’s been asking for you. Every day, he asks for you! I tell him, Joe, she’ll be here on Friday. She comes every Friday. But he only keeps asking for his song, the song you always sing him. You know the one?”

Cassie nodded.

“Well, sing it for him, will you? He won’t leave me alone!”

“All right, Embie. I will.”

The girl let out a great, heaving breath. “I haven’t seen him in a while,” she said. “I think he’s hiding in his room – but he keeps yelling through the wall, just the same. Look in his room, before you leave.”

“All right, Embie.”

Without another word, the girl slid down the wall, and dropped her head onto the thin pillow. She closed her eyes.

“That’s my cue,” said Cassie, rising from the bed. “Time to go.”

Nessa preceded her through the doorway; and so she hung back for just a moment, to look at Embie once more. She lay in quite the same position as she had, when Cassie first entered the room. Her breath seemed to rattle, and draw shallow into her chest, as if disturbed by some dream that she was already unfolding behind her eyes.

Cassie blew her a kiss, and left the room.

~

There was a wide, park-like area behind the hospital. In it were three large picnic tables, for days of fine-weather lunching, surrounded by groups of plastic lawn furniture. One thing to remember: in a mental institution, it matters not whether you sit inside or out; for you shall always be sitting on plastic. It is easier to clean; harder to break; and, when the latter advantage proves not so advantageous after all, much cheaper to replace.

Cassie and Nessa rode the elevator in silence. When they reached the ground floor, Cassie exited first, and directed her footsteps just as she always did, towards the park-like area. She sat in her customary place: the last picnic table in the row, at the very end, on top of the table with her feet on the bench. From there she turned her face towards the fifth-floor windows. Granted, from her present place she had no sight of Embie’s room; but she knew that there was an identical room, there behind the window that she watched; and she knew that her own sister’s room lay directly across the hall, and that she lay still the same way Cassie had left her; and that she would most likely lie that way all day.

Cassie felt the table shake gently, as Nessa sat down beside her. Yet she kept her eyes on the window for some time more, and showed not the slightest sign that she was even aware of Nessa’s presence.

But Nessa said nothing. She only sat, still and silent, for quite as long as it seemed that Cassie wished her to.

“I’m not sure,” Cassie said finally, “why I wanted you to know. So don’t ask me.”

“I wasn’t going to,” said Nessa.

“Well – only in case you were.”

“But I wasn’t.”

Perhaps another five minutes of silence. And then:

“Do you have any thoughts?”

“Concerning what?” asked Nessa.

“Concerning, you know what.”

“No, I don’t.”

Cassie brought her fist down forcefully against her knee. She felt the pain of the flesh; the beginnings of the bruise.

“Don’t do that,” said Nessa, snatching Cassie’s hand up in her own.

Cassie got to her feet, and walked away from the table.

“Cassie. Cassie! Wait.”

Cassie turned around, and saw Nessa hurrying along after her. She drew alongside her, and they began to walk together.

“How long has Embie been here?” asked Nessa.

“For six years.”

“Why?”

“That’s none of your business.”

“You’re right.”

There was a small patch of trees behind the park-like area, formed in a thick circle about a quarter-mile wide, and just so much deep. Cassie walked for a little round the boundary, and then stepped in amongst the trees. She walked directly to the centre of the little wood,  where she knew there to be a high, wide tree stump, which was raised upon a little knoll of earth. Here she sat, and looked up at Nessa.

“When Embie was ten,” she said, “our father started hurting her. He – well – I suppose you can just use your imagination; because if you can imagine it, then he probably did it.” She drew a shaking breath. “She never told me. Of course, she never told our mother either – but she wouldn’t have cared, anyway. She was too scared of Daddy ever to say anything, even if she suspected. But I was only twelve! I hardly even knew about that sort of thing – so how was I supposed to help her?”

Nessa sat down on the stump, but remained silent.

“I didn’t find out till the next year,” said Cassie. “One day, I walked into mine and Embie’s room – and I found him there with her – on
my
bed. I ran to Birdie, but she was too drunk to hear me. I remember, I yelled into her face for a long time; but her eyes just kept sliding back and forth, and she kept leaning forward and forward in her chair, almost as if she could see that I was talking, but was too far away to hear the sound. Finally she just fell on the floor, and went to sleep. I ran into the street, and started screaming. Ettie Parsons, an old woman who lived next door, came out to see what all the noise was about. I told her what I’d seen; but this angry look only came across her face, as if she couldn’t believe what I was saying. She asked me, how I ever could have had the nerve to say something like that about my daddy? So I started to scream again, but she only clapped her hand over my mouth, and shoved me back inside my house. She warned me if I didn’t hush up, she’d call the police. And so it dawned on me; and I ran to the phone, and called 911.”

She was quiet for a moment, and only sat looking down at the ground. It was clear she was pondering, whether she really wished to continue with her narrative; but finally she said:

“A police car and an ambulance showed up at the house. But by that time, Daddy had cleaned himself up, and put Embie straight. They were both downstairs, watching television. I remember just staring at them, sitting next to each other, like nothing had happened at all. Then the policeman knocked on the door. I opened it, and told him what had happened, because I didn’t know what else to say. The paramedics were just standing there, twiddling their hands, looking annoyed that there wasn’t anything for them to do. The policeman came in, and shook my father’s hand. Then he looked down at Embie, and asked her, was she all right? Had anything happened, that she might want to talk to him about? Of course she said no! Daddy was sitting right there beside her!”

She wiped the tears from her face, and shook them down into the dirt. “I remember the policeman looking at me, like I was some sort of criminal. He gave me a lecture, on ‘the severity of prank telephone calls to the police department.’ I told him, I begged him not to leave; my father was lying! He only shook his head at me, tipped his hat to my father, and went out the door. I looked out through the window, till he had driven away, with the ambulance behind him.

“After that night, I didn’t know what to do. Nothing changed. Things kept on the way I suppose they had for a whole year. I could get Embie to tell me that much, when I asked her. But she’d say no more about it. There was no one to tell, no one to call; because everyone thought I was a liar. I did what I could, and kept at my father, trying to keep him away from Embie. But how much could I do? I told teachers at school, the counsellor, the principal. But they had all heard from Officer Barnett, and none of them would listen to me. It went on for three more years – until finally my father got sick of it, of me and Embie both. Well, me first – he kicked me out, and I went to stay with Bobby-Ray.” She peered up at Nessa, holding her hand in a sort of salute, to shade her eyes against a beam of sunlight shooting down through the tree branches. “I told you about Bobby-Ray, didn’t I?”

“Something of him,” Nessa said quietly.

“Well, anyway,” said Cassie, dropping her hand and her eyes simultaneously. “I was sixteen then. Daddy kept Embie for a while longer – wouldn’t let me near her. But finally she – well, I suppose – she just cracked. One day she came home from school, went up to her room, and just started hollering and hollering, breaking everything in sight, kicking anybody who came near. By nightfall, there was a whole crowd in her room – Mama and Daddy, the neighbours, the doctor. The doctor managed to get her in restraints, and took her off to the hospital. Mama called me, on account of the fact she was drunk as usual, and wanted to go home. Daddy was already gone. So I went and picked her up at the hospital, took her home, and went back to Embie.”

Here, her countenance shifted into something that was, perhaps more than anything else, simply confused. “She had never given a damn before,” she said. “But when I went by next morning, to tell her I was taking Embie with me to Bobby-Ray’s trailer, I found her in the kitchen. Daddy was lying by the stove, with a hole in his head. Mama was sitting by the refrigerator, with a gun in her hand. She was babbling so loud, I couldn’t make out a word of what she said – but I took the gun from her, wiped it clean, and put it in Daddy’s hand. Then I called the police. One ambulance took Daddy away; and another took Mama. Took her to the same place, actually, that they took Embie.” Another shift: from confusion, to pain. “No one told me they were going to take Embie. When I went back to the hospital, she was gone. I asked them where she was.” She turned her head, and looked through the trees. Just visible were three picnic tables, standing dwarfed before that massive structure, whose shining windows were like eyes. “Baton Rouge Mental Health Hospital, they said. Mama got out in a week. Embie never did.”