THE KITCHENS, the storerooms, the dining rooms, the bedrooms, the lounges, the bathrooms—those rows of bleak open shower stalls, with their stained puce tile and twisted shower heads like Cyclops eyes—the echoey hallways, the staff quarters somehow cozier than the rest even after almost twenty years of decay, rooms that still had the moldings and trim, the built-in shelves and wainscoting of the original mansion, the floors still wooden rather than tiled—all of these corners we charted, together, sometimes shouting loudly to hide our fear, sometimes gripping each other by the arm and walking on tiptoe, like when we heard a squirrel foraging and thought it was a person, or the ghost of a person.
Together Cassie and I confronted the asylum and our terror of it, and by the end of the third afternoon, it felt familiar, almost familial, and we ran in the corridors, our feet slapping, and laughed and called out and even parted company—we could, we did, on that third afternoon, play, as we’d initially planned, and she pretended to be the young lady of the manor, and I was her suitor, and she disappeared upstairs and I gallantly pursued her with rhyming couplets, an eligible bachelor of yore come calling, until she advanced coyly to lean over the banister and I lured her down to the lobby with my blandishments. Or again: I was a psycho, completely off my head, unable to remember who I was or where I was from, estranged from myself and a prisoner in Room 7 of the Isolation Ward, where—convincingly, I thought—I curled on the floor in a ball and rocked and wailed so loudly that Cassie could find me, setting off from the lobby in an elaborate version of hide-and-seek, and when she found me, she was my long-lost sister, and she sat beside me and held my hand, and by singing our favorite songs brought me back to myself, recalling to me our shared childhood and our dog, Sheba, and our parents, CIA agents tragically killed on the same mission that had come close to exterminating me, the trauma of which had stolen my memory entire, and left me floating alone and delirious on a raft off the coast of Maine, which was how I came to be here at the Bonnybrook, just a few miles from my beloved childhood home, to which Cassie would now safely return me.
We’d done the Greek myths in school that year, so we knew the basics, and we acted out some of those too. She was Jocasta; I, Oedipus. I was Agamemnon; she, Clytemnestra. She, Heracles to my Deianeira.
The time came that we felt free, running and shouting as if we owned the place. So we were lucky to be up in the wards when Rudy pulled up the drive in his truck one early afternoon, with Bessie in the flatbed, her paws up on the side and nose to the wind, barking. Her barking alerted us; we pulled ourselves to standing and peered from either side of the window in our chosen room (Number 7, with a useless black sink, in which we’d piled wildflowers picked in the field), looking down at the tops of their heads. Bessie knew we were there. She may even have known where. I could have sworn she pricked her ears and glanced up at me, paused for a second in the crazed tattoo of her barks. But Rudy was lazy, or tired—the air so hot and humid—and simply rolled down the window so Bessie could hear him yell at her. He told her to “shut the fuck up”: “Nobody’s interested in your goddamn squirrels.”
Along with his shouting and Bessie’s barking, we could hear the thud of loud ’80s music—Bruce Springsteen, maybe? Something my dad liked—and I knew Rudy was in his own world, not in the real world, maybe imagining he was still young and had all his teeth, when he drove a girl around maybe, if he ever did, with that same music blaring. And because he could see the girl, and see his youthful self, and hear his youth in the melody, there was no way he’d see the decay and detritus that was really in front of his eyes.
Still, we felt shaky long after he drove back down the driveway and disappeared, raising dust off the gravel, Bessie still yammering full bore in the back. We stopped shouting after that, and stopped clattering. If Rudy could appear out of the blue—we hadn’t heard him coming—then anybody else could too. Bit by bit the ghosts of former inmates and escaped convicts and the nastier elements of the Cavaliers hockey team slipped back into our minds, and in the next hour the Bonnybrook became frightening again, as it had been when first we approached it. Our games stopped being fun, and we packed up our stuff early to head out, subdued, muttering to each other about the thunderstorms forecast for later.
The next day, Friday, it rained heavily. Bev dropped Cassie off with a particular plump fuss and flurry—“I’ve got to run. I’m due at Abe Peterson’s and he won’t get his morphine till I get there. The night nurse missed her last round, so he’s been without since midnight. And it’s bone cancer. Imagine that, would you?”
“I’d rather not,” my mother replied, shepherding Cassie in and Bev back out the door. Later, at the dinner table, she said, “Why, if she was in such a hurry, did she even get out of the car? To come rain in our front hall for a bit?”
My dad smiled, weighing his quinoa and cranberry on his fork. “Bev likes a show,” he said. “She doesn’t think it happened if nobody was there to see it.”
This sounded true, and made me wonder what other traits that sort of person might have. It made me wonder whether I was that sort of person myself: I always liked to imagine an audience. When I wrote in my diary, I couldn’t imagine that the only person who would read it was me; but the whole point of a diary was to record the things you didn’t want anybody else to know. Maybe, I sometimes thought, the other reader was simply your older self, the same you, changed by time. This bothered me too, because what was a self, a person, if she could be so changed—as changed as an abandoned building, say? What could we rely on then, besides the rocks in the quarry?