I’m going to be sick. If Alex is correct, my mother is here, behind one of these terrible doors—so close that if I could rearrange the particles and make the stone melt away, I might put my hand out and touch her. Closer than I ever thought I would be to her again.
I am filled with competing thoughts and desires: My mother cannot be here; I would rather she was dead; I want to see her alive. And filled, too, with that other word, pressing itself underneath all my other thoughts: escape, escape, escape. A possibility too fantastic to contemplate. If my mother had been the one to break out, I would have known. She would have come for me.
Ward Six consists of just the one long hallway. As far as I can tell, there are about forty doors, forty separate cells.
“This is it,” Frank says. “The grand tour.” He pounds on one of the very first doors. “Here’s your boy Thomas, if you want to say hello.” Then he laughs again, that awful cackling sound.
I think about what he said when we first entered the vestibule: He’s always here, nowadays.
Ahead of us, Alex does not respond, but I think I see him shudder.
Frank nudges me sharply in the back with the barrel of his gun. “So what do you think?”
“Awful,” I croak out. My throat feels like it has been encircled with barbed wire. Frank seems pleased.
“Better to listen and do as you’re told,” he says. “No use ending up like this guy.”
We’ve paused in front of one of the cells. Frank nods toward the tiny window, and I take a hesitant step forward, pressing my face up to the glass. It’s so grimy it’s practically opaque, but if I squint I can just make out a few shapes in the obscurity of the cell: a single bed with a flimsy, dirty mattress; a toilet; a bucket that looks like it might be the human equivalent of a dog’s water bowl. At first I think there’s a pile of old rags in the corner too, until I realize that this thing is the “guy” Frank was pointing out: a filthy, crouching heap of skin and bones and crazy, tangled hair. He’s motionless, and his skin is so dirty it blends in with the gray of the stone walls behind him. If it weren’t for his eyes, rolling continuously back and forth as though he is checking the air for insects, you would never know he was alive. You would never even know he was human.
The thought flashes again: I would rather she be dead. Not in this place. Anywhere but here.
Alex has continued down the hall, and I hear him draw in his breath sharply. I look up. He is standing perfectly still, and the expression on his face makes me afraid.
“What?” I say.
For a moment he doesn’t answer. He is staring at something I cannot see—some door, presumably, farther down the hall. Then he turns to me abruptly, a quick, convulsive shake.
“Don’t,” he says, his voice a croak, and the fear surges, overwhelms me.
“What is it?” I ask again. I start down the hall toward him. It seems, all of a sudden, that he is very far away, and when Frank speaks up behind me, his voice too sounds distant.
“That’s where she was,” he is saying. “Number one-eighteen. Admin hasn’t coughed up the dough to get the walls patched, yet, so for now we’re just leaving it as is. Not a lot of money around here for improvements. . . .”
Alex is watching me. All his control and confidence has vanished. His eyes are blazing with anger, or maybe pain; his mouth is twisted into a grimace. My head feels full of noise.
Alex holds up his hand like he’s thinking of blocking my progress. Our eyes meet for just a second and something flashes between us—a warning, or an apology, maybe—and then I am pushing beyond him into cell 118.
In almost every way it is identical to the cells I’ve glimpsed through the tiny hallway windows: a rough cement floor; a rust-stained toilet, and a bucket full of water, in which several cockroaches are revolving slowly; a tiny iron bed with a paper-thin mattress, which someone has dragged into the very center of the room.
But the walls.
The walls are covered—crammed—with writing. No. Not writing. They are covered with a single four-letter word that has been inscribed over and over, on every available surface.
Love.
Looped huge and scratched, just barely, in the corners; inscribed in graceful script and solid block lettering; chipped, scratched, picked away, as though the walls are slowly melting into poetry.
And on the ground, lying curled up against one wall, is a dull silver chain with a charm still attached to it: a ruby-encrusted dagger whose blade has been worn down to a small nub. My father’s charm. My mother’s necklace.
My mother.
All this time, during every long second of my life when I believed her dead, she was here: scratching, burrowing, chipping away, encased in the stone walls like a long-buried secret.
I feel, suddenly, as though I am back in my dream, standing on a cliff as the solid ground disintegrates underneath me, transforms into the sand in an hourglass, running away under my feet. I feel the way I do in that moment when I realize that all the ground has vanished, and I am standing on a bare blade of air, ready to drop.
“It’s terrible, you see? Look at what the disease did to her. Who knows how many hours she spent scrabbling along these walls like a rat.”
Frank and Alex are standing behind me. Frank’s words seem to be muffled by a layer of cloth. I take a step forward into the cell, suddenly fixated on a shaft of light, extending like a long golden finger from a space in the wall that has been chipped clear away. The clouds must have begun to break apart outside: Through the hole, on the other side of the stone fortress, I see the flashing blue of the Presumpscot River, and leaves shifting and tumbling over one another, an avalanche of green and sun and the perfume of wild, growing things. The Wilds.
So many hours, so many days, looping those same four letters over and over: that strange and terrifying word, the word that confined her here for over ten years.
And, ultimately, the word that helped her escape. In the lower half of one wall, she has traced the word so many times in such enormous script—LOVE, each letter the size of a child—and gouged so deeply into the stone that the O has formed a tunnel, and she has gotten out.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Food for the body, milk for your bones,
ice for the bleeding, a belly of stones.
—A folklore blessing
Even after the iron gates clang shut behind us and the Crypts recedes in the distance, the feeling of being penned in on all sides doesn’t go away. There’s still a terrible, squeezing pressure in my chest, and I have to struggle to suck in full breaths.
An ancient prison bus with a wheezing motor carries us away from the border, to Deering. From there Alex and I walk back toward the center of Portland, staying on opposite sides of the sidewalk. Every couple of feet he swivels his head to look at me, opening and closing his mouth, like he’s pronouncing a series of inaudible words. I know he’s worried about me, and probably waiting for me to break down, but I can’t bring myself to meet his eyes or speak to him. I keep my eyes locked straight ahead of me, keep my feet cycling forward. Other than the terrible pain in my chest and stomach, my body feels numb. I can’t feel the ground underneath me or the wind zipping through the trees, skating past my face; can’t feel the warmth of the sun, which has, against all odds, broken through the terrible black clouds, lighting the world up a strange greenish color, as though everything is submerged under water.