Was he drunk? I would have said, when speaking to him, probably. Once I got into his truck, I could have told you with absolute certainty, yes. Even with Bessie panting her hot dog breath between us in the front seat, I was bathed in the reek of him, cigarettes and booze fumes, like he sweated it out through his pores. I didn’t mind. That probably helped me out a bit, that he was drunk that way; it made our dreamlike journey seem even less real, like he was dreaming it too.
I wasn’t afraid, to get into Rudy Molinaro’s truck at 5:20 on a Saturday morning in April, still in the dark, nobody knowing what we were doing or where we were going. I wasn’t one bit afraid. All I can say is that I trusted him, drunk and lonely as he was. Because of Bessie, I trusted him; because of all the time and love he’d given to his sick mother. Because he was the opposite of cruel, and he didn’t really know how to think of what he wanted. It didn’t occur to me until much later, after it was all in the past, that in those hours I could have been—in some other circumstance, I could well have been—terrified.
We didn’t say much, in the fug of the cabin, on the ride over to the asylum, vents blaring hot air, Bessie’s panting our version of dialogue. Rudy was kind of panting too, or at least breathing noisily, as though every airway that could be stuffed up, was. His face shone in the reflected dashboard lights, almost clay-colored. I too breathed through my mouth, on account of the smells.
“It’s a good idea to look, I figure,” he said eventually, after chewing a while on his cheek. Bessie licked her lips as if in agreement and yawned, making a squeak in her throat like an unoiled hinge. Her teeth loomed close to my ear.
“Just seems that way,” I agreed. My hands were clasped in my lap, as if I were in church. And then, except for the vents and the breathing and the sound of Bessie maneuvering her saliva, we fell quiet again.
Rudy got down from the truck to unlock the giant padlock on the main gate at the road. I don’t know what I’d thought—that we would bushwhack in from the quarry in the twilight?—but I hadn’t pictured us arriving along the central driveway. The truck bucked and rolled, even at ten miles an hour, branches scraping and snapping at our sides. No vehicle had traveled this way in a long while. The headlamps jounced crazily, illuminating now a hummock of dirt, now the broken path ahead, now a tangle of trees. The Bonnybrook rose suddenly before us, around a bend in the track, its haggard hulk black against the bruise-blue, just-leavening sky.
From outside, it didn’t appear that anything had changed in the years since Cassie and I had been there—the much-debated construction projects had apparently never broken ground, had remained imaginary. But that didn’t mean that nobody had set foot there, or that time hadn’t further ravaged the ruins. From a distance, it looked as though more windows were broken, more shutters missing or dangling. More graffiti spread along the walls. When Rudy turned off the truck, his headlights stayed on, blaring at the chained main entrance that Cassie and I had bypassed long ago. Rudy reached across in front of me and took a large silver flashlight out of the glove compartment. I could almost feel its weight in his hand. He grunted as he hopped down to the ground. Bessie flew over him, landed weightlessly. She sniffed the air, ears pricked; and decided not to bark. Whatever rustled in the bushes was beneath her notice. I wished I knew her well enough to embrace her rusty scruff, to throw myself at her mercy.
Rudy waved the torchlight around the Bonnybrook’s face, the effect that of a spotlight in a disco. “Where’d you say you went in?”
“I’m not sure that I said.” I led him toward the dining-room windows.
“It’s trespassing, you know.” He said this without apparent judgment, a simple observation. “It’s against the law.”
“We were just kids,” I said.
He grunted, and paused to rub an eye. “But you knew that,” he insisted.
“I guess we did.”
THE FRENCH WINDOW we’d gone through, more decrepit than it had been, was barely there at all; just a frame. Rain had destroyed the parquet floor inside, and it buckled like waves in a small harbor. Broken glass glinted everywhere underfoot. The room felt different, somehow: I realized, as Rudy shone his light from side to side, that everything that could be removed—anything moveable—was gone. There was nothing in the room but itself. Even the wagon-wheel light fixtures had been yanked from the ceiling, leaving behind broken plaster and dangling wires.
“Where to?” Rudy knocked his head from side to side as if it was a pointer. “Which way?”
“I think upstairs. I’m sorry.”
The Bonnybrook made its own songs, creaks and pops and a series of high-pitched whines as the wind passed through it. Outside, the day’s light began to bleed over the horizon, but in the asylum’s front hall you wouldn’t have known: without Rudy’s flashlight, we would have been in blackness. He shone it jerkily around us: dust motes drifted in the air; the rutted floor had been stripped of its boards by salvagers; the balustrade itself, the flowered stained-glass window—all had vanished. There were no longer any glamorous ghosts; even the ghosts had fled. All that was left was the cold smell of damp, as of the earth reclaiming its territory. The stairs rose skeletal before us into the darkness.
Bessie, apparently unruffled, whined slightly and started climbing.
“All right, girl. If you say so.” The air around us hung as thick as matter. I was so grateful for Rudy’s presence, in his minor cloud of booze and tobacco stink, that I put my fingertips to the back of his down coat, just lightly, so we were connected as we climbed.
I HAD KNOWN in my marrow that she would be there. I had known from the moment I woke up. Maybe I had known from the moment I saw Nancy. Cassie was my best friend; we made each other. Bessie found her within a couple of minutes—Bessie, who took off at a trot as soon as we reached the second story, not waiting for us trepidatious humans, not looking back. We could hear her toenails clatter along the floor, and the rhythmic thud of her too. We could sense her digressions, into one room, a circuit, into the next, the hollow jangling of her tags. We followed slowly, Rudy waving his torch in the gloom, though he didn’t need it by then.
“She’ll be here, Rudy,” I said. “You’ll see.”
His grunt was noncommittal. The day was dawning, gray-blue, seeping now even into the dark inner hallway, cold shafts of low light. This seemed suddenly less surreal, and less real too. In what childish fit of insanity had I orchestrated this? As if it were all a game or a story, as if she would do as I imagined her—as I willed her—to have done?