In the front hallway, we peered up the staircase at the big stained-glass window with its lilies in a vase and crimson tracery, only a few panes knocked in, their bright fragments scattered on the wood floor. Someone had pulled up boards, leaving rutted gaps underfoot; but the newel post at the bottom of the stairs had proven too sturdy for the thieves—its carved finial was the size of my head, a great once-polished ball of patterned flowers and vines, a vinery traced all up the banister and the length of the balustrades as well.
“Can’t you see the grand ladies coming down?” Cassie breathed at my ear. “In their evening dresses?”
“Sure I can,” I said, and it was true, I could. “And right behind them, do you see the crazy girls in blue smocks with their hair sticking up anyhow and wild eyes? Do you see them too?” I gave a great cackling laugh that resounded up the stairwell, an evil madwoman’s laugh. “That’s the noise they’re making—can you hear it? It’s wicked loud.”
“Don’t.” Cassie pressed my arm. We both looked up the stairs at the dust motes drifting in a shaft of sun across the landing. We could feel them with us—I knew she did just as much as I; and they too were our sisters. “Don’t.”
To be in that ruin with Cassie—it was such a particular feeling that I have had nowhere else. If ever I have it again, I will recognize it, like a long-lost scent, and that afternoon and the ones that followed will return to me, in all their visceral intensity. The Bonnybrook was at once the most unlikely, vivid experience of our lives up till then, and like a dream—a dream, miraculously, that Cassie and I dreamed in tandem, touching, hearing, and feeling together. The asylum was darkened by the traces of its pasts; made titillating, even scary, by its silences—but made safer too by our sharing it. Being in the Bonnybrook was like being inside both Cassie’s head and my own, as if we had one mind and could roam its limits together, inventing stories and making ourselves as we wanted them to be.
IT TOOK US almost half an hour to get back to the quarry parking lot, walking at a good pace, sweating all over again. The Kirschbaums were nowhere in sight, and it was too early for the after-work swimmers. The quarry lay still as a plate, the water black in the shadows. I lobbied again for a swim, and although Cassie wasn’t having it—what good was the water to her mittened paw?—she grudgingly agreed to wait, to let me dive in for just a minute.
I stripped to my panties and bra—one I really liked a lot, with a neon-green-and-brown leopard pattern and some neon lacy trim—and I plunged off the rocks without even dipping in a toe. The smooth cool of it came as a total surprise to my body, a shock, and my swift stroke across the breadth of the quarry made my nerves tingle like sparklers.
Cassie dangled her feet, her face turned up to the sky and her eyes shut, like she was praying, and when I paused, treading water, against the far bank, and looked at her, she glowed, tiny, fragile, in the dappled late-afternoon light.
AFTER THAT, Cassie and I went every day to the asylum. We packed our picnic, hiked through town, and then through the woods, along the green trail over the brook, past the cairn of lichened stones, up the hill and over it into the field of flowers, to the manor. The hardest thing was not telling my mother. I’d never been in the midst of anything extraordinary and kept it hidden. I’d told her when Jake Brenner tried to make out with me when we slow-danced at Hester Lee’s party in the sixth grade. I’d told her when Andrew Dray brought weed to Cassie’s church youth group’s summer luau. I’d told her about my yearlong crush on Peter Oundle. She knew how to say the right thing and not pry, to wait for me to want to talk and let me explain what mattered without passing judgment.
It wasn’t hard for Cassie, who never confided in her mother. Bev Burnes wasn’t reliable; she was moody and weird in spite of her perma-smiles, and even if she seemed cool about something, it didn’t mean she’d stay cool with it, and weeks or even months later she could throw it back in Cassie’s face, or blab like it was nothing. Cassie had learned the hard way not to trust her mother.
WE VENTURED DAILY up the grand staircase to long corridors of almost identical rooms, in which torn blinds still dangled at the cracked and smeary windows, or in which sinks encrusted with desiccated black slime hung askew from the walls, their taps useless. A few cells had kept their metal bedsteads, long stripped of mattresses, slats like broken keys, legs buckled, rusted into some sort of dinosaur artwork. We marveled at the occasional bursts of bright mold across a bedroom wall—orange, watermelon, lime—where seeping damp had encouraged a new life form. We wanted to take photographs—my new cell phone, a birthday present, could take pretty good pictures—but we knew better.
“No evidence,” I warned as we pored over the mildew flowers in their resplendent bloom, and Cassie grabbed at my backpack, to show she wanted my phone. “We can’t leave any evidence, anywhere.”
She stopped, blinked, about to protest, and then nodded. “No evidence,” she whispered back at me solemnly, then laughed. “It’s no mistake that you get all A’s, Juju my friend. The girl thinks ahead.” If my mother found photos of the asylum on my phone, we’d be grounded for weeks. We had to do this old-style. The way it had been for centuries before our time: no one must know.
We explored what had been the lockdown ward—the Isolation Ward, we called it, to ourselves—the wing that stretched out above the dining room, behind two strong metal doors that no longer shut properly, a corridor along which each cell had its own reinforced door with a little sliding window, like in prison, and within each bedroom, the windows squinted out small and high and barred, with chicken-wire mesh in the glass behind the bars.
“This is where they put the real loonies,” Cassie said.
“How crazy did you have to be, I wonder. What kind of crazy?”
“And if there were enough people who were that kind of crazy to fill up all these rooms”—there were about fifteen of these little cells along that forlorn corridor—“then where did they go?”
I didn’t have a clue. In twenty years, they couldn’t all have died—but even if they had, the world wasn’t getting any less crazy. So the dying generation of crazies was being replaced all the time by new crazies, a rolling population of lunatics as constant as the tides. Unless it wasn’t individuals that changed but society itself: they changed the laws, they closed the asylums, and suddenly the crazies weren’t crazy anymore. Maybe when society changed it was decided, somehow, that they never had been crazy; it had all been a category mistake.
What would it be like to have been locked up in one of those cells for weeks or months or even years, only to discover that you’d never really been a lunatic at all, and could just as easily—if only the world had been a bit different—have been home in your bedroom all along?
That would mean that you couldn’t be sure about things. Better to believe that sane people were sane and crazy people were crazy and you could put the two types of people on opposite sides of a wall and keep them separate, clean and tidy. Without that, where did the lunatics go? Where had they gone? Were they among us? Were they us?