I Remember You

by Elisabeth de Mariaffi

  Madness, Eric had told her once. Madness follows you like a dog.

  There was no stream here, no woods, no sharp sound. Just her own rough breath. She flexed her wrist, allowing the light to sweep the yard in an arc.

  Up in the main building there were only three lights still burning. There was nothing behind her at all.

  * * *

  The floors inside the entry were polished stone. She bent down and took off her shoes so that she would not make any noise, then slipped the flashlight into a shoe and carried it along like that, a glow coming through the leather at the toe. There were a few steps up and then a door off the landing. As she came through, she heard the sharp tap of another woman’s shoes, but it receded into the distance, heading away from the residence. Halfway across the lawn, she’d imagined Eric, up in his office window or his lab, looking down at her, but there had been no shadow there and no curtains. There were nurses, she supposed, awake at all hours, but not many.

  She was at one end of a wide hall.

  Long doors lined the left side of the corridor, each with a transom window overhead, a half moon, now darkened. Every door open, at least a crack. The hall was broad enough that Heike could have lain down three times between one side and the other: fifteen feet across or more. She’d come up the side stairwell, and from here she could see the stairs from the main entrance where they opened out to a central foyer, and a light from a doorway there, on the right-hand side. The nurses’ station. The tick-tack of shoes she’d heard must have ended up there.

  She moved down the hall in her bare feet, her shoes and flashlight in one hand and a bit of her skirt wound around the fingers of the other. The thin drone of a radio made a tinny echo against the stone floor. The night shift, sitting in their lit room. They were listening to Benny Goodman to stay alert. Heike stopped briefly before each threshold to make sure that inside there was no nurse completing her rounds, no one about to pull back the door and surprise her.

  She crept closer. Something else now over the sound of the radio, a steady pounding. She would have said a hammer, or the dull butt of an axe. The stump of footsteps, if the stepper were a giant. She pressed against the wall. The air inside the building was no less oppressive than outside, and she stopped for a moment, trying to catch her breath. An ammonia smell, cleaning fluid or soiled sheets or both, mixed with the humidity and the scent of whitewash. Her stomach turned, the hall wavering before her. The odour reminding her of something. For a moment she felt surrounded by a different sound, sheer, a papery rustling. Shuffling. She shrank into her bones, working at her breath, each inhalation cutting out shorter than the last.

  Nothing: the moment passed, lifted away. She took in a long, deliberate pull of air and let it out again, counting to five in her mind. An odd sort of déjà vu.

  Down the hall, the pounding continued. No voice cried out. She remembered Eric saying that in the old days they’d kept the inmates chained to the basement floor. They did not do that now. The thump grew louder as she moved along, and Heike leaned just slightly left, enough to push the next door a crack wider.

  The room held six beds, each with a curtain strung around it, although not all the curtains were pulled shut. An old woman lay in the bed next to the window, restless. Heike waited to hear the sound again. The room was darker than the hall, and she let her eyes adjust.

  She blinked. She could see now that she was wrong: the woman was in fact not much older than Heike herself—perhaps thirty—but ragged around the mouth and eyes, and it gave her a hard look. Her arm lay at an odd angle, and Heike realized that she was restrained by a wrist to the bed. It was her leg that was making the noise: not because she was seesawing restlessly against the frame, but because she was kicking it, solidly beating at it with an ankle, harder and harder.

  A wooden cross hung on the wall over each mattress, suspended there with a loop of twine.

  Heike was standing just inside the doorway now, the door pushed wide on its hinges and her back close against it, the spell of vertigo from the hallway coming back to her. Where the ambient light from the hall reached the white walls, they swam. It was as if there were an animal just beneath the paint, and it had run from one side of the room to the other, making a weird ripple. She would have liked to sit down.

  The place was not strange to her.

  The curtain at each bed, the little cross, the room’s tall, skinny windows: all of it so much like the room she knew from her last stay in the convent. After the accident, when they’d placed her with the elderly nuns for lack of a room among the noviciate. A thin perspiration at her brow, her lip, on the back of her neck. Her knees buckled and she put a hand out, catching herself against the door. She wondered for a moment if here, too, there was a garden just outside the window, if there were chapel bells at first light and in the evening.

  From another bed, someone moaned and snorted, and Heike jerked to one side, her heart kicking up, but the patient was asleep, her hair cut short and bristly against the pillow. Her wrist also tethered to the frame of her bed. The women’s floor.

  When Heike lifted her eyes again, a child stood staring back at her.

  She froze, dumb with surprise. Too small to be a nurse, the girl stood maybe ten feet away from her and did not move. She was gauzy-looking, her hair untidy and luminescent. A little bride, all in white. No, of course not. In her nightgown. A capped sleeve slipping at the shoulder. Behind the girl, the room stretched back, larger than Heike had originally thought; she could see the posts of a dozen beds now. She drew in her breath. It couldn’t be a child. A patient, then? Next to her in the bed, the first woman pounded her leg again and then again, faster, the sound of it coming on like a warning. An alarm, pealing out.

  It was a moment before she realized her mistake. The row of tall windows lining the exterior wall of the room, the glass lit by the same ambient glow coming down the hall from the nurses’ station. Against the black of the outdoors, the girl in white was just Heike herself. A mirror image, slightly unfocused in the dark. Her own white dress slipping off her arm; she raised a hand to fix it, watching the girl in the window do the same. When she moved to the left, her body blocked the light and the girl in the glass disappeared. In her wake there was only the afterimage, shadowed deep grey and expanding out like a dark star.

  It was here that she’d recovered, after Harry’s death. Not Switzerland, not the convent at all. In this room, or one very like it. She remembered now, lying on her side, a stain on the wall by the window where water had seeped in after a storm, a long, deep crack in the paint that snaked its way almost to the floor. The paint peeling back, lifting away around it. Instinctively she brought a hand to her chest, expecting to recoil or find the contact strangely painful, but her body was her own, compact and easy and soft.

  She stepped out of the room. Even the hallway was now familiar. She looked down at her bare feet, her shoes still in one hand, and flexed and curled her toes. They’d given her slippers. Paper slippers, strung with thin elastic. The sound of her own feet an echoed whisper, a sheer rustling, as she’d walked down the hall. A nurse at her elbow, pushing her along. Miss. It will be good for you to walk, miss. Walking helps you heal.

  Heike pressed her cheek against the cool of the wall. She tried to take in air, long and slow. The light, the smell, everything working together. She was dizzy with it.

  It was here she had been a patient, here that she’d first met Eric.

  In bed, the woman kicked her beat, trying to do damage. The radio kept on. Heike heard the slide and slam of a heavy file drawer in the office. She pushed off the wall before she’d really regained her equilibrium and moved away from the noise, afraid. Up the central stairway before anyone should come out in the hallway and find her there. More sure than ever now: she’d come here looking for Eric, not knowing she was only coming back to the start.

  At the head of each banister, the wall rose like a column, the plaster carved with vines and fruit, a false Continental opulence that mus
t have been popular when the building was designed. At the second floor she stopped and peered down to where light spilled out the open door below. The radio cut out for a moment, and she heard their voices then: only two nurses were sitting up overnight. Heike waited, breath held, but no one entered or left the room. She turned and kept going, trailing her hand over the plaster decor, up to the next landing. The ceiling stretched high above her, the tops of the doors arched as though every office were a ballroom.

  On the third floor, the radio could no longer be heard. Eric leaned in the doorway of the one lit room. He’d seen her coming, after all.

  20

  I’ve been waiting for you.

  Eric stepped toward her. He’d been leaning in the doorway, and the new movement seemed to throw him off, his body weaving a little, almost as though they were standing on a boat. Heike froze at the top of the stairs, unsure of whether she’d really seen him falter, or whether it was her own light-headedness at work, a visual trick. She wondered for a second if he’d been drinking.

  — Eric. She took a breath. Please, Eric.

  He was wearing something on his arm, a new watch. The shiny face of it flashed at her. She flicked off her light with a thumb.

  Eric shook his head.

  — There aren’t any children here, Heike. No children at the asylum.

  There was a low groan from somewhere behind her, or overhead. For a moment she allowed a thought: some heavy-jawed animal, whatever she’d felt outside on the lawn, slouching up the stairs behind her before dropping back to wait. Dogging her. She glanced over her shoulder, but the stairwell behind her narrowed into vacant darkness: the turret she’d seen from the ground.

  When she looked back at him, Eric was standing straight and tall, his strange unsteadiness gone.

  — Doesn’t that upset you? You won’t find him here. Daniel. He paused, looking at her curiously. Or have you found him already?

  She’d crept closer as he was talking, her hand resting now on the wall near where he stood. A smell of bleach through the place, and underneath it something else, a body smell, sweat and urine and staleness, stronger down on the ward but laid down even here like a soft, wet film, like skin. The plaster almost sweating beneath her fingers.

  — Maybe I came here to find you.

  Eric’s face twitched, just for a second, as though there’d been a flash of bright light.

  — What about your friend Dolan? He is still your friend, is he? You haven’t fallen out?

  He rubbed at his wrist.

  — Let me past you, Heike said.

  — Am I your friend again?

  — I said, let me past.

  Eric gestured for her to move by him. The shift made him falter again; she was sure of it this time, his eyes wavering and then landing, refocused. This disequilibrium unsettled her: could he be doing it on purpose? He braced himself against the doorjamb but did not allow her any more space. When she tried nudging her way through, he swung back so that her body brushed against him as she went, and he caught her waist and held her there and ran a hand down along her hip.

  Her breath skipped. Standing close to him, the heat seemed to double over on itself. Her scalp prickled with it, a fine sweat breaking at her hairline. She pushed against him, but he didn’t move or let her go, and she stiffened and turned her face away, trying to give herself some air. There was no smell of booze on him.

  — Daniel. He shook his head. Daniel, Daniel.

  He was trying to rattle her, every time he said the name.

  Heike glanced back at him and then away. On the other side of the door, the room was spare and open. A wide desk, the chair with its back to the window, and another chair as well, rose-coloured, the upholstery threaded and worn. No curtains, but a set of thin-slat wooden blinds, pulled all the way up, the toggle dangling from a cord. The windows were all closed.

  — You have no time for anyone else. It’s amazing that you ever let him out of your sight at all. He was chiding her, both affectionate and mocking, the way a child might poke at a pet. Something very small.

  She pushed against his arm again, and this time he released her so suddenly that she almost fell into the room.

  — Your songbirds miss you, he said.

  — Do they?

  She recovered herself and tried to put a little space between them. Eric followed behind her. She could feel him there.

  — The crows came and set up shop. They chased them all away, all your pretty birds.

  She turned to face him:

  — Sometimes things go wrong.

  For a moment she heard the same creak again, from overhead. Something padding across the floor in the turret, heavy and quick. Pacing. Heike looked at Eric, but he did not seem to have noticed the noise. She held her face still, listening. If she was anxious, she did not want to make a show of it.

  He was fussing with his wrist. She saw now that it was not a new watch he was wearing, just a glass watch face taped down against the skin.

  — What have you got there?

  He held the arm up, and she could see a thin sheen of liquid floating just below the glass, the rainbow blues and greens like an oil slick.

  — There’s a tremendous market for drugs that need only cursory contact with the skin. Or there will be.

  Heike frowned. He said:

  — Doesn’t seem to have much effect: so far I don’t feel a thing. It’s a shame. There’s a general I know who controls some very interesting purse strings.

  — You’re testing something.

  — Something to drop from the sky that’s not a bomb. You should like that idea.

  She remembered waking up after Eric’s mistaken doses, her limbs lax.

  — It sounds like a bomb that you strap to your skin.

  — I only take a little taste. It wouldn’t make you sick, anyway, not physically. Make you see things. That’s the idea: a nightmare drug. In wartime, we could make it rain down like water. Imagine, whole cities, every person with the thing they fear most come to life—they’d gouge their own eyes out before we ever got a soldier on the ground. He shook his arm out, dismissing it. But like this? Perfectly safe. It’s candy. I might see some bright colours, if I’m lucky. He liked her attention. Think of my work like a candy factory, he said. I have to be able to describe the flavours, don’t I?

  Heike turned her back, trailing her fingers against the spines on the bookcase as she moved away.

  — It’s just that enemies can change so quickly, she said. And friends, too. Of course, I suppose you lost your best guinea pig. She looked back at him, nodding toward his arm. I hope you are being careful with yourself.

  — I thought it was Daniel you wanted.

  — Stop saying that. She turned to look at him: Stop saying his name. Her voice shaking, despite herself.

  She stepped toward the window. The air was close and heavy. She wanted to pull up the sash, but the window’s height stopped her, the gravel walkway below swimming back and forth, three storeys down. Eric must have watched her from here, she realized. The flashlight beam playing ahead of her as she came, a firefly’s path in the dark. It embarrassed her to think of this, how easily he’d tracked her approach. Her gaze widened, searching the ground for whatever she’d felt there, beside her in the shadows.

  A dog, she’d thought, or something bigger. Something black and wild.

  Outside, the weather pressed down like a hand, clouds dense and almost green against the night sky. She felt feverish. In the silence, the ceiling groaned again overhead.

  She pulled up the window all at once.

  There was no rush of fresh air. The humidity rolled in like soft tar, and the scent of mushrooms, a forest smell. The heat would not break until the storm did. The heat playing tricks.

  She turned back to Eric.

  — I felt it, you know. That day we went to Dolan’s, the first time, with John and Arden. You were shaving, and you filled the bath for him. I felt you were capable of something. That you were dan
gerous.

  She set her bag down on the desk and clicked the catch, drawing out her cigarettes. When she tucked them away again, she pulled out both his journal and the photograph she’d taken from the house, of herself leaning on the rail in back of their city apartment on 86th Street, the metal steps of other people’s fire escapes zigging and zagging off the buildings behind her. The cigarette made her head light and clear.

  Eric hesitated and then jerked a hand toward the journal, where it lay on the desk, but the movement was strangely clumsy. Heike swiped it back.

  — At first I thought you’d stolen him from me. That you had him hidden at the house, or else here, locked away. She took a step toward the window again and began flipping through the pages. But that doesn’t make sense, she said. Because you’d have to look after a child, and a child cries and is hungry and is cold. A child needs too much. She stopped and pressed the book against her belly like a shield. I even thought maybe you’d killed him. Daniel, she said. To punish me.

  Hard work to keep her voice steady, and it came out raw and stubborn, low in her throat.

  — Tell me. Tell me how you were studying in Switzerland and found me at the convent.

  Eric moved toward her, measuring his steps.

  — You’ve never understood how very sick you were.

  — I was hysterical. Isn’t that what you like to say?

  — You’re hysterical now.

  Heike held the book out to him, and he snatched it.

  — Take it. She stubbed her cigarette against the window ledge and left it there, looking out at the darkness. It was in the nighttime, she said. Wasn’t it? My accident. I don’t remember everything, but I remember that. I remember the dark. She picked up the crushed end of the cigarette again and rolled it between her fingers, then tossed it through the window, out onto the lawn below. My accident, she said. The car hit us both, not just Harry. The car hit me, too. She turned to look at Eric: You thought I’d never remember. But I do.