Ashes Beneath Her: A Northern Michigan Asylum Novel

by Erickson, J. R.

  “Are you an only child?”

  “Yes and no.” Orla thought of the wooden crib in her parents’ attic engraved with the name Cillian. “I had a brother. My mom had him when I was five, but he only lived for a few days.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Orla sipped her wine.

  “It’s sad, in a mysterious way. Like when you’re walking through a graveyard and see a child’s tombstone. But I was young when he lived and died. I have no memory of it. Do you have any siblings?”

  He shook his head.

  “I don’t think my parents planned for any children. I was an accident.”

  “A happy one, I’m sure.”

  He shrugged.

  “Maybe.”

  His comment surprised Orla. She wasn’t exactly bosom buddies with her parents, but she’d never doubted their love for her. Even her mother, who often drove her nuts with her constant fretting, loved Orla to near suffocation.

  “How did your father die?”

  Spencer shook his head.

  “I don’t know. A heart attack, maybe. One morning my mom found him dead.”

  “Had he been ill?”

  “Not that I’m aware of, but she doesn’t like to talk about it. I’ve accepted that I’ll never know much about him or his death.”

  “She doesn’t talk about him as a man? As a person?”

  “He was a dentist. She met him when she got a root canal in Chicago. He liked to golf, and he liked to read. That about sums up what I know.”

  Orla started to ask another question, probe the mysterious dead father, but she noticed the grim look in Spencer’s eyes and closed her mouth.

  He swirled the wine in his glass, and then looked at her conspiratorially.

  “Tell me the worst thing you’ve ever done, Orla.”

  She paused at the abrupt change in topic and tried to conjure a list of the bad things she’d done in her life.

  “I once ran over a chipmunk with my bike. It was horrible. I crushed him, and I kept riding. I couldn’t stand to look back and see what I’d done.” She chuckled and looked at her wine. “I’ve never told anyone that. This wine must be going to my head.”

  “A chipmunk. I think if that’s the worst you’ve done, you’re in good shape.”

  “And you?”

  He leaned back on the couch and draped an arm behind her shoulder.

  “I wrecked my mom’s prized possession - a 1964 Aston Martin. I wrapped it around a tree.”

  Orla watched the little smile on Spencer’s lips. He held an expression of guilt coupled with exhilaration. It was a strange sight, and Orla set her glass on the table.

  “Did you get hurt?”

  “No. Miraculously according to the doctors, but… well, I knew I wouldn’t get hurt.”

  “Did you plan it?” Orla asked, goosebumps rising on her arms.

  He looked at her, his eyes glassy, and then blinked. His normal gaze returned, and he laughed.

  “Of course not. I’d have to be crazy to do something like that on purpose.”

  He reached out and touched her long black hair.

  “You’re stunning,” he said.

  Orla smiled, tucked her hair behind her ear.

  “Thanks.”

  He leaned in and kissed her. His lips were soft and warm, and she felt him holding back. When he pulled away, he slipped his hand into hers, pausing and looking down at her hand.

  “Why the gloves?” he asked.

  She blushed. It wasn’t the first time someone had asked. Intimacy always ended up there.

  She started to offer her rehearsed response - dry skin, etcetera. Instead, she told him the truth.

  “Sometimes, if I touch things with my hands, I receive impressions.”

  He looked at her curiously.

  “Impressions?”

  Something in his face stopped her. She had been ready to reveal all, but quickly pivoted, choosing the safer, more sane response.

  “Just tactile sensations, you know? Like every ridge and bump. I can’t describe it, but it’s unnerving. I keep them on to reduce that.”

  He nodded and studied her gloved hand.

  “Can I refill you?”

  She shook her head.

  “I think I’ve already passed my limit.”

  “A lightweight.” He stood and took her glass.

  Something had changed between them. Orla couldn’t place it, but the near-revelation with the gloves had closed off some part of Spencer.

  “Listen, I’m not trying to be fresh, but do you want to spend the night?” he asked, turning on the faucet and putting the glasses in the sink. “I can drive you home. I don’t mind at all. I was just thinking about driving up to Leelanau State Park for a hike tomorrow. I thought you might like to join.”

  Orla glanced toward the clock over his refrigerator. It was going on midnight, and the drive back to town would take forty-five minutes. She wasn’t tired. She imagined they could stay up all night talking, and she’d wake refreshed when the sun peeked over the horizon. But then she remembered his look when she talked about her hands…

  “Sure,” she said. “On the couch, though. This will suit me fine.” She patted the leather sofa.

  “Not a chance.” He shook his head. “You get the bed. I’ll take the couch.”

  * * *

  Orla stepped from the door of the carriage house. Flowering trees and high, dense bushes shrouded the building. It was a beautiful spot. The sun slanting through the branches made her want to step out, press her face into the soft petals of the pink flowers on a nearby bush.

  Spencer had left to pick up pastries and coffee, insisting she take her time waking up, have a shower if she’d like.

  Dark pink flowers, heavy and sagging from the lattice, wound up the garage’s side wall. Orla heard the frenzy of bees as they hovered over the fragrant flowers.

  The rain left a sparkling sheen on every surface.

  She looked at the huge oak tree, whose roots rose and fell within the green grass, and imagined an enormous bark-colored octopus reaching out from a secret sea hidden beneath the earth.

  Slipping off her gloves, she tucked them in her jeans pocket. At the flowers, she cupped the fleshy petals, savoring the sensations. Warmth spread through her hands.

  The driveway was a menagerie of glittering stones. As she walked, she stared down at their shapes and colors. Pausing, she reached down and picked one up, turning the stone in the sun, watching the dazzle of light off its sharp surfaces. She reached for a second and a third. It was the fourth that rocked her. She hadn’t been paying attention, simply plucked one from the ground, and the moment her fingers grazed the object - not a stone at all - a terrible vision tore across her mind.

  A young woman stood on hands and knees, bleeding from a head wound and staring at her own bloody teeth knocked from her mouth by a terrible blow.

  As the image vanished, Orla lurched backwards, almost toppled over, but managed to shuffle her feet and stay upright. She looked at the tiny, hard item in her hand. It was not a rock, but a tooth, perfectly intact. A molar.

  The sound of feet crunching over gravel brought her back to the moment. A woman stepped into the glare of the sun.

  Orla stuffed the tooth in her pocket, her stomach a soup of nausea. Fear had not yet arisen. The shock of the vision still lingered, overwhelming her other senses. In her mind’s eye, she saw the girl who’d been struck - blonde hair falling over her battered face, destroyed by… a rock, yes, Orla thought someone had hit her in the head with a large rock.

  The woman who’d walked from the main house had not seen Orla. She was middle-aged, her dark hair neatly pinned up, and she wore dark slacks and a navy blouse. Dark lipstick lined her small, thin mouth.

  “Excuse me?” The woman’s voice stopped her cold.

  Orla looked up, struggled to meet the woman’s cold stare.

  “Are you Spencer’s friend?”

  Allowing her hair to fall over her face, Orla nodded a
nd pretended to look at the flowers. She took a few steps backwards into the driveway and bolted. She’d get to the road and hitch a ride back into town. The tooth hung heavy in her pocket, though she knew it weighed nothing at all.

  “Wait,” the woman commanded.

  Orla’s legs wanted to keep running, and for a minute they did. It took all her willpower to slow and turn.

  The woman walked toward her. Orla realized she should say something, apologize for taking off, but her mind could not find a suitable excuse.

  “Spencer is always in such a rush. Won’t you join me for breakfast?”

  Orla swallowed and shook her head.

  “I better not. I forgot about some sewing I’m supposed to have done. Let Spencer know I’ll call him. I’ve really got to run.”

  The woman took a step closer, still smiling, and then another.

  “Where’s your car, dear?”

  Orla’s mouth hung open.

  “I don’t live far,” she lied.

  “You have such beautiful hair. May I?” The woman was right in front of her now, reaching out a pale, slender hand.

  Orla’s eyes bulged as she watched the hand as if were a tentacle. She wanted to slap the woman’s hand away, turn and run, but the woman had sunk her hand into Orla’s hair. Orla saw the woman’s other arm slip from behind her. She held something that glinted in the sun. Orla stared, perplexed, as the woman’s hand lifted, hovered, and plunged a syringe into Orla’s neck.

  Orla shrieked and wrenched away, but the woman depressed the syringe. Whatever it contained rushed into her body.

  Orla fled, not down the driveway, but into the dense forest that butted it. She fought the branches away as they snagged her hair and face. She’d barely gone a few steps when her legs gave out and she fell into a tree, wrapped her arms around the trunk, but could not hold herself up.

  Darkness descended like a wave. It fled down the sky, erasing the trickle of sunlit blue. It washed over the trees and swept Orla away.

  8

  Hazel

  Hazel shuffled her tarot deck. She spread the cards fan-like on the dark blanket beneath her and gazed at the sparse early morning traffic from her front porch. It was her morning ritual. Draw four cards, one for each girl in the house, and slip them under everyone’s respective coffee mugs.

  For herself, she drew the six of cups. The card was not a surprise. Her mother’s birthday was less than a week away. She would have been forty-six that year, but she’d never seen forty-three. Ovarian cancer had stolen her from the world, not quietly, but with a roar after months of near-constant pain. In her final days, a drugged haze was the only existence her mother could tolerate. The cups were cards of emotions; the six of cups spoke of nostalgia, romanticizing the past. Since her mother’s death, Hazel had found herself weepy-eyed in July, wanting to do things she and her mother used to do, hoping to keep her memory alive.

  She pulled the second card for Bethany - the ten of wands. Bethany occupied the room across the hall from Hazel. She was two years her junior at eighteen, newly graduated from high school, and intent on living independently from her parents. She worked two jobs, one as a waitress, the other babysitting a family down the street. The card made sense. Bethany was pushing to stay ahead of things, falling into bed exhausted most nights.

  The third card went to Jayne, the wanderer. At twenty-one, she’d already lived in Thailand, California, and a series of cities along the East Coast. She’d left home at fifteen years old with nothing but a backpack and hitched her way around the world. She was a restless spirit and had a lot in common with Orla, their fourth roommate, who occupied the attic room at the top of the house. Jayne received the Hermit card - part of the high arcana. Hazel laughed and shook her head.

  “Not likely,” she murmured. The card implied that Jayne needed to fold in, spend time at home, deepen into silence and stillness. Hazel drew the Hermit card for Jayne at least twice a week, but Jayne never heeded its call. She said she intended to embody the hermit when she reached ninety and settled into a farmhouse filled with cats and marijuana plants.

  Hazel shuffled and drew the fourth and final card, studying the image of the half-man, half-goat with black wings. It was the Devil card, a strange harbinger for Orla, who genuinely lived in the light. The Devil represented the shadow - a darker side of the self, or of another. Hazel sensed the card did not represent Orla at all. An omen, perhaps.

  Hazel tried to remember if Orla mentioned any conflicts at work, anyone who might be deceiving her. She didn’t think so.

  The morning before, Orla had given Hazel a quick wave goodbye as she pulled her bike from the shed. She’d pedaled off, her canvas bag of library books slung over her shoulder. Hazel hadn’t asked where she was headed.

  Usually, the four roommates reconnected over dinner. They took turns cooking each night, but Hazel went out to dinner with her boyfriend, Calvin, the night before and missed their communal meal.

  Hazel carried the cards into the kitchen, made a pot of coffee, and pulled each girl’s mug from the cupboard. Orla drank from a brown mug decorated in orange and green flowers. Hazel’s eye lingered on the card as she slid it halfway beneath the mug. She took her own coffee and returned to the porch.

  * * *

  “No Orla?” Hazel called, watching Bethany and Jayne on the porch swing, drinking their coffee and talking.

  Hazel stood in her garden, pulling handfuls of weeds up by the roots and tossing them to the side.

  Orla typically woke up before the other two girls, shortly after Hazel. It was nearly ten a.m., and no sign of her.

  “Nope,” Jayne said. “She wasn’t here for dinner last night, either.”

  “I haven’t seen her since breakfast yesterday morning,” Bethany added.

  “Did she say where she was going?” Hazel asked, brushing her dirty hands on the skirt she wore in the garden. It was a light, cottony fabric, dark-colored with big pockets to drop vegetables into. Orla had made it for her.

  “Nope, I slept late yesterday,” Jayne said.

  Bethany nodded her head.

  “We talked in the morning about the book she was returning. God’s eyes or something,” Bethany said. “But I didn’t ask about the rest of her day.”

  “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” Hazel corrected. She had recommended the book to Orla. “I think I’ll run up and check on her,” Hazel told them, walking to the house and taking the stairs two at a time.

  The doorway to the attic lay at the bottom of a second, narrow stairwell. The door was ajar - strange, since Orla closed it when she went to bed.

  Hazel knocked on the door before calling her friend’s name.

  “Orla?”

  No answer.

  She crept up the stairs, not wanting to wake her on the chance she’d been out late and decided to sleep in.

  Orla’s bed stood beneath a window overlooking the garden. Her bed was rumpled; typical. She only made her bed once a week, after she’d stripped and washed the sheets and replaced them with clean.

  It was obvious Orla had not come home the night before. Hazel gazed around the room. A book lay spine-up on Orla’s bedside table next to a half-glass of water. On one side of the room, her sewing table stood beneath the slanted ceiling, a swath of olive fabric next to the machine. The room was neither messy nor clean, a certain organized chaos that Orla thrived in.

  Orla had moved into the house a year and a half earlier. She attended Northwest Michigan College, taking general studies courses but had little interest in school.

  Hazel picked up a yellow bandana on Orla’s nightstand.

  In white stitching, she read Memory Keeper.

  She had her own bandana with those words sewn along the edge. Orla had made them a year earlier, in July, as they approached the dual anniversaries of Hazel’s mother’s birthday and death-day.

  It was a pact they’d made just months after Orla moved into Hazels house. They’d been awake long into the night often those first few mon
ths. It was like dating someone new; they wanted to discover everything about one another. For the first time since her mother’s death, Hazel had found someone she could genuinely confide in. She and Orla clicked.

  Hazel remembered that balmy summer night, sitting on the porch, crying into a glass of raspberry wine, as she revealed the story of her mother’s death to Orla. Orla, in turn, revealed her strange gift.

  Hazel had slipped her mother’s wedding ring into Orla’s hand and she had cried when she held it.

  “Your father bought this in Scotland when he was stationed there…” Orla had murmured. A little smile played on her lips and then her mouth turned down. She touched her belly and winced. “The pain, your mother was in such terrible pain, but,” she looked up at Hazel, her eyes shining, “you brought her the most indescribable joy, Hazel. She was not afraid in the end, but she despaired to leave you behind.”

  Hazel had taken the ring back and marveled at the gold band before slipping it into her pocket.

  “Sometimes, I miss the memories most of all,” she had said to Orla. “My mother told me the stories of our life together. We talked about what we’d done and seen. She kept the memories alive. Now that’s gone. I have no one to remember her with.”

  Orla had been reclining on the porch against the little wooden rail, but she scooted to Hazel and wrapped an arm around her back.

  “I will be your memory keeper, Hazel. And you can be mine. Tell me your stories. In time, they will become my stories, too.”

  And the following summer when July approached, Orla had come down to breakfast one morning with the bandanas - ordinary colorful bandanas with that reminder stitched into the fabric: Memory Keeper.

  Hazel held the bandana to her heart, for a moment, and then returned it to the table, before slipping out of Orla’s room.

  As the day progressed, Hazel tried not to worry about Orla, but looked up eagerly each time the front door opened. It was always Jayne or Bethany. In the afternoon, her boyfriend Calvin walked in. He looked a little hurt when her excited face turned to a frown as he breezed into the kitchen holding a potted plant.