THE SAD BUILDING loomed enormous. We crested the hillock, toward the light, and at first could see nothing but more sky down the other side. A hundred yards down the slope, we broke out of the trees, into what had obviously been a large lawn, a field now, its long grasses swaying in the hot sun, the desperate saw of crickets all around. Wildflowers were scattered through the grasses—flashes of pink, purple, and orange in the bleached ripples: coneflowers, cosmos, calendula, coreopsis. And the air, so long moist between the trees, smelled dry, a late-summer smell of safety.
The long grassy stretch—broken here and there by wispy saplings—ended in steps leading to a stone patio. We’d come up the back. Instead of the circular drive, the portico and the garages, we were confronted by banks of darkened windows, like eyes in the three-story, U-shaped brick facade, as if the building were an almost human monster. On the ground floor, on the wings at either side, we could see brown-painted metal doors. But in the middle of the U—its basin, if you will—stretched a span of French windows giving onto a terrace, and there, just for a moment, you could picture the rich man’s residence the house had originally been: you could imagine the French doors ajar, curtains fluttering in the breeze, on the terrace a few tables shaded by large parasols, and a house party of elegant men and women drifting, holding china teacups or smoking cigars. Then you noticed the heavy padlocked chain that ran through the doors’ institutional bars, rusty but still newer than the general disintegration at first suggested. Some poorly scrubbed blue graffiti stretched along one wall. We could make out GO CAVALIERS—our high school ice hockey team—and MOTHERFUCKERS.
“Lunchtime,” I said. When we reached the patio—strewn not only with leaves but with shards of glass and strips of roof tile, with crushed beer cans and cigarette butts—I slapped myself down on the top step, the house behind me and the hairy green forest we’d come out of in front of me, and I opened the backpack on the smutty stone ledge. I laid out the tea towel from my mother’s clean kitchen, and on it I placed the items one by one: the carrot and cucumber sticks; the hard-boiled eggs with their little sealed packets of salt filched from diners; the sandwiches wrapped in foil; the Camelbak of lemonade, the one of iced tea, their ice cubes long melted after our trek.
While we ate, Cassie stalked the terrace, squinting in at the windows, grasping her sandwich with both hands in her distinctive way, made slightly comical by the fact that one hand was a gauzy paw.
WHAT DID WE know about the asylum? Not much. It had been built at the turn of the last century by a textile merchant named Ebenezer Otis, to house his collection of Asian art. His mills were in Lowell, his city house was on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston; but this, outside Royston, was his country estate. The fortune was lost in the Crash of ’29, and the house and the art had to be sold. Some giant vases, ivory dragons, and lacquered chests were acquired by the Peabody Essex Museum, where a couple are even on display.
The state ended up buying the property at a discount price—where were the Otis descendants today? In condos on the outskirts of Gloucester?—and after leaving it empty a few lean years, they converted it to a women’s mental asylum, the Bonnybrook. I guess there was that brook, at least. It housed up to forty-five women at a time, stricken with a gamut of complaints—depression, mania, schizophrenia, addiction. According to the official records, many got better and went back to their real lives.
Time passed, views changed, laws and funding with them. By the late 1980s it was seen as unsalvageable, and by ’93, the Bonnybrook was shuttered, forgotten. Part of the same parcel of land as the quarry, it was sold to a consortium that then couldn’t agree on its fate—whether to refit it as apartments, or restore it as a mansion hotel. Word was, there’d been a dragging lawsuit. It had been padlocked and empty longer than I’d been alive.
I imagined that the building carried the sadness of the women who’d been trapped there, the anorexic teenagers and the young mothers who heard voices and the old women shattered past repair by their tragedies. I didn’t see them—there was no visible mass of ghosts peering out of the hollowed windows—but I couldn’t help but feel they marked the territory.
Cassie didn’t feel that way at all—quite the opposite. She wouldn’t be put off. I trailed after her as she walked the perimeter and climbed a rickety fire escape, fruitlessly rattling the windows in their frames on each floor.
When we reached the front of the house, its broad circular drive long overgrown and its crumbling stables off to one side, she counted the entrances—six ground-floor windows, three visible doors—and divided them between us. As I tugged halfheartedly at a bolted knob, I heard the tinkle of glass breaking. I looked to see Cassie curiously bent, her ear against a window and her paw to the frame, her good arm stuck up inside its shattered pane like she was birthing a calf.
“Are you fucking insane?”
She didn’t turn her head. Her tongue stuck out between tight lips, the way it did when she concentrated in math class, but she paused long enough to say, “It’s going to work, Juju. I’m going to get it.” And after a minute more of trying, “I didn’t break the window, you know. It was already broken. I just knocked the bits sticking out along the edges.”
“Tell that to the jury.”
“Christ, what’s wrong with you?” She stuck her tongue out again, twisted and fiddled. And paused again. “Can’t you see this could be ours? Our own world, a real world, that we found, and we made, and we kept? Our real secret?”
When she put it that way, I suddenly understood. The mansion looked different, no longer a house of sorrows, or a hideout for drunk hockey players from the high school, or a possible flophouse for escapees from the penitentiary up the highway. I could see it: the Bonnybrook as a magical place we could invent, the two of us, and have as ours, the way we’d thought of it before I saw it, a stage for our best imaginary adventures. Like seeing the hot sun and the crickets as a gift, like the bright wildflowers, instead of as a sinister menace. Like we had the power—Cassie and I, the two of us, twelve years old—to make anything into what we wanted it to be.
I said, “Let me try. My arm is longer.” Cassie and I looked at each other, almost smiling but not, a kind of mutual Mona Lisa look. She extricated her good arm, careful not to nick herself on any protruding fragments, straightened and stepped away, crunching broken glass on the gravel as she went.
I took Cassie’s place and folded myself like a strange origami, my cheek pressed against an unbroken pane and my neck stretched flat along the rib of the window, and my left arm, my writing arm—I always thought, faintly guiltily, my better arm—up inside the house, squirming and reaching.
The air inside the house was cooler, fresh on my skin. I could feel the lock, but I wasn’t able to reach quite high enough to flick it from one side to the other.
Cassie started to laugh.
“What?”
“Did I look like that?” She made a crazy face.
“It’s hard.”
“You don’t need to tell me.” She laughed again, light in her bird bones like the wind in the grass.
“It’s not going to work.” My sweat left a film on the window when I pulled away.