The Clairvoyants

by Karen Brown

  26

  I awoke shivering and sore. I had no memory of having sex, but I felt as if William had scraped my face with the beginnings of his beard. Through the ice-covered windows, light came in tinged an eerie blue. William moved around the apartment. He had emptied the bureau drawers, had slid out the drawers themselves, and was now meticulously returning the drawers and the clothing. If he’d spent the night dismantling the entire apartment, had he found the loose cedar plank and, so, the portfolio? When he had finished refitting the drawers and putting the sweaters away, he pulled the bureau out from the wall and ran his hands down the back and discovered Mary Rae’s necklace. He held up the plastic bag and the light shone through the amethyst pendant. He met my gaze.

  “You look like you’ve been turned to stone,” I said.

  “You’re awake.” He flushed.

  According to my mother’s travel clock, it was eleven a.m. William sat on the bed. His face seemed entirely changed. Even his eyes were altered, the gold-colored warmth in them gone, as if he were somewhere else and dealing with a dire circumstance—not sitting with me on the edge of the bed we’d shared as a married couple these past months.

  “Remember when you called me Galatea?” I said.

  He unzipped and rezipped the plastic bag’s fastener. “I do,” he said. But it wasn’t enough to bring him back to me.

  He held the bag toward me. “Hey, what is this?”

  His voice sounded earnest, almost gentle, as if coaxing me to confess.

  “I found it in Geoff’s car,” I said. “I know I shouldn’t have taken it. It’s probably one of his friends’. But it was so pretty.”

  William watched my face, like an interrogator, like Detective Thomson, whose eyes were always assessing.

  “Why did you hide it?” he said.

  The weight of him tipped the bed and drew me toward him, but I resisted. “I know it’s stupid. I wanted to keep it, so I hid it. It’s a habit I’ve had since I was little.”

  William shifted and the bedsprings groaned. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, Del would take everything of mine,” I said. “I had to hide things from her.”

  “You shouldn’t have to hide this.” He slipped the necklace from the plastic bag. “Put it on.”

  He leaned forward, and his hands slid around my throat to fasten the clasp.

  “What if it’s one of the girls’?” I felt the cold of the stone and thought of it held between Mary Rae’s fingers.

  “Just say you found it.” He stood and looked down at me. “It looks pretty on you.”

  I pushed myself up on my elbows. I felt a wave of weakness pass through me, and then a trickle of something slip into my underwear. I slumped back down. Could I ask him if we’d had sex?

  “Are we still going to Buffalo?” I said.

  He ruffled his short hair, almost in frustration. “We’d need to leave now, before it gets too late.”

  I again tried to lift myself from the bed, but exhaustion seemed to have settled in my limbs. “Why am I so tired?” I said.

  I had so many questions I wanted to ask him. I wanted to move forward, past the lies we’d told each other. If we’d had sex, was everything forgiven between us? But his half of the bed was cold, the sheets like ice. My thinking was muddled. Some part of me understood that his persistence in seeking the portfolio only meant he wanted no one to see the images, and that he had something to do with Mary Rae’s death. He placed a roll of film in his camera.

  “I have to dress,” I said, closing my eyes.

  “You’re already dressed,” he said. “Just get up.”

  It was true I was still in my clothing from the night before, though my jeans were undone. “Why don’t we go later?” I said. “Or tomorrow?”

  But he was already out the door. His boots on the stairs echoed back at me. He was loading the car. And then below in the foyer, Del asked him what he was doing, and I knew she would call everyone, and the flasks would be filled, and the picnic lunch packed, and I would be the one left behind. I forced myself from the bed and gathered my camera, my cell phone. I put on my coat. In the mirror by the door my mouth and chin looked raw. I no longer had any interest in going to the asylum. I wished I hadn’t mentioned it. I thought of him touching me in my sleep—when I was most vulnerable, stripped of all of my masks. Could I still love him despite everything? I wasn’t going to let Del take away my chance to decide.

  I made it down the stairs and out to the curb where Geoff’s car was parked. I crawled into the backseat, leaned my head against the door. I awoke lying at a slant, an awkward position. The tires on the road made a humming sound. Telephone poles passed against a bright blue backdrop spotted with clouds, one after the other in a kind of loop. The car radio was tuned to a classical station. On the floor near my feet was William’s camera bag. I felt a surge of panic, and William looked over at me from the front passenger seat.

  “She’s awake,” he said.

  I struggled to sit up. Mary Rae’s pendant slid cold against my neck. “I fell asleep,” I said.

  “Again,” Del said. She took one hand off the steering wheel and flipped the radio off.

  I looked through the back window. “Where’s Randy?” The road ribboned out behind us, dark and empty.

  “They couldn’t come,” Del said. “It was too last minute.”

  “Alice was all excited about it,” I said.

  “Randy couldn’t drive—his car broke down. Alice’s mother, Erika, is back in town. Then the others changed their minds. They got drunk last night and they’re too hungover.”

  “The trip should have been canceled if no one wanted to go,” I said.

  “That’s what I said.” Del slowed the car for a stop light. She flicked on the turn signal. “William said you told him we had to go in honor of Great-aunt Rose.”

  I wasn’t going to admit I had only a vague memory of ever getting into the car, but it felt like a betrayal to have told him about Great-aunt Rose. Something wasn’t right.

  “I changed my mind,” I said.

  I thought Del exchanged a look with William. “We’re almost there,” he said. Up in the front seat they seemed like a conspiring couple.

  Del kept both hands on the wheel as if fearful of letting go.

  One afternoon when we were teenagers, I’d begged my father for a driving lesson, and Del had insisted on coming along. She’d driven his car at the time, a little MG, into a split-rail fence at the end of the road, denting the fender and scratching the hood. Our father had been furious and had refused to give either of us lessons after that. I’d resented Del for all the things she’d ruined for me, as if she’d ruined them purposely. But had she, as she’d admitted, simply pushed on the wrong pedal?

  The plows had been out in force, and the sun shone on the banks of snow. I had a terrible headache, and everything seemed overbright. Even the recent past seemed strange, a place of events I could not accurately recall.

  “You don’t have your license,” I said. And then, “Don’t push on the wrong pedal.”

  In the rearview mirror, Del glanced back at me with a small smile.

  William rattled off details about the old asylum. It had been designed by Dr. Thomas Kirkbride. The idea was to have separate wings, so that the insane could be grouped by level of madness. Metal doors would block the wings from each other. Each wing would have its own sitting room.

  “Why separate them?” I lowered myself back onto the seat and lay down, so I wouldn’t have to look at the two of them.

  “These places were built to help people get better,” he said, “not to make them worse.” I sensed he might have essentially called me stupid. He didn’t seem to have an abundance of patience. I wondered how the three of us might be separated, into which wings we might be housed. And how was it that William appeared not to know anything about the necklace? Lying in the backseat of Geoff’s car, like a transported body, my suspicions of William’s connection to Mary Rae’s death were jum
bled. What confused me was her calm—the look on her face as she’d stood listening to him at the porch party that first night, her quiet plea at the encampment. Could victims still feel that sort of longing for their murderers?

  For the rest of the drive I fought sleep. The world passed in a blur. Del and William’s conversation was oddly fragmented. By the time we arrived at the asylum, the sky had been overtaken by building clouds.

  “See the way they’ve planned the grounds?” William said, as we drove past scattered patches of denuded trees—beech and hickory and stands of white birch. “The idea was that looking out at the trees would ease troubled minds. This is Olmsted’s work, the man who planned Central Park.”

  “Olmsted had designed the Institute’s grounds in Hartford, too.” I’d read that in the brochure about the place, though the rest, about Gene Tierney and the electroshock therapy, the lobotomies, had been excluded. The building ahead of us was dark brick and turreted in a heavy Gothic style.

  “It looks like a castle,” Del said, turning the wheel.

  “Jane Roberts thought the Institute was a home for unwed mothers,” I said. I laughed, but the color rose in Del’s cheeks, so I left the topic alone.

  William leaned forward—his voice was tight and alert, giving Del directions to a lot some distance away, bordered by woods. We parked and approached the place on foot through the trees. Up close we saw the missing panes of glass, the “No Trespassing” signs, the barred windows. Crows filled the beech branches and dotted the snow, black and noisy.

  “How will we get inside?” Del asked.

  She dragged behind us, and I fell back in step beside her. “Are you sure you want to go in there?”

  The sun came in and out of the clouds, a weak splattering of light on the brick walls, the poor leafless trees. The crows scattered overhead.

  “We may not be able to get in,” William said, his camera bag slung over his shoulder. “But I read online that it’s still possible.”

  Del and I followed William around the buildings to a place in the back. There was a loading dock with rusted railings, and near its base a hole, once grated, that William knelt down beside and examined with the flashlight he’d pulled from his bag.

  “Here it is,” he said.

  We’d drop through the hole into a corridor in the basement. It was a risk to do this in daylight, but William had explained to us on the drive that photographs with natural light were best. “And who’d want to sneak into an old asylum at night?” he’d said, chuckling.

  William seemed to have regained some of his old enthusiasm. He put his hand on my neck and tugged me in to kiss—a gentle press of his lips on mine.

  “Come on,” he said. He went first, then called up to us to climb through. “It’s not that far a drop.”

  I peered over the edge, and Del took hold of my coat sleeve. “What are we doing here?” she said. Her gaze was drawn to the necklace.

  “Why do you think I’m here? I’m here because you’re here. You didn’t have to come, you know.”

  William called out again. I pulled my arm away from Del and stepped to the edge of the hole.

  “You’ll be OK,” William said. His flashlight left a circle on the floor below.

  Del took the necklace in her hand. “Where did you get that? Amethyst is a February birthstone.”

  And then I foolishly slipped down into William’s arms, my face pressed to his chest. The smell of mildew was sharp, as if it had infused his jacket. He called up to Del, and she appeared at the top, outlined by the gray sky, the reeling crows.

  “Maybe I’ll just sit in the car,” Del said.

  William raised his hands in the air, annoyed. “Sit in the car, then.”

  He slung his camera bag over his shoulder and pointed the flashlight ahead. “Let’s go.”

  As we walked off, Del’s voice echoed down the passage. “You’re really leaving me?”

  We would go through the underground corridors, William said, until we found stairs to the upper floors. It was no warmer inside than out. Our breath formed airy clouds in the semidarkness. We followed the funnel of William’s flashlight. Now and then, he’d move the beam slowly over the walls—the brash graffiti, the huge overhead ducts—and I began to feel trapped. The malaise of the night before overtook me again. I hadn’t eaten all day, and it seemed as if I were treading through waist-deep water.

  I clutched my camera, slung around my neck. The sharpness of its metal body grounded me. We found the stairs soon enough and climbed two flights to the second floor, where enough light came in through large windows at either end of the corridor that we didn’t need the flashlight. We passed from one wing to the other, our feet crushing fallen plaster. Beneath a layer of dust, the wood floor still shone with polish, but pieces of the walls, strips of paint, littered the way. Many rooms still held beds, their iron frames rusted, their mattresses’ plastic covers disintegrating. The windows looked out over the benevolent stands of beech, the sweep of snowy lawn, but through iron bars.

  William was busy taking photographs as if he had an agenda, and he didn’t pay much attention to me. I followed him and waited in the hallway as he slipped into an octagon-shaped room lined with window seats. The windows were gone; the snow piled on the floor and the plaster had given way to the lathing and the brick beneath. William’s camera clicked and whirred. Here patients opened letters from home to learn that a sister had given birth, that the cornfields were planted, that a brother had bought a new car. I followed him into the room and waited until he lowered his camera. The snow on the floor was crosshatched with animals’ prints.

  “Charles Wu told me about a grand staircase in the administration wing,” I said. “He said that in one abandoned hospital people had found pills in bottles and patient records—Rorschach results, and drawings and notes.”

  “Charles seems to be well informed,” William said, raising the camera, looking back through his lens. “Usually they were people who just couldn’t fit in anywhere—depressed people or alcoholics. Some had nervous disorders, and families couldn’t take care of them.”

  He lowered the camera. “I think the doctors meant well. They just didn’t have the best treatment options.”

  If Del had been there, she might have told us what an inpatient’s life was really like.

  We were not as lucky as the trespassers Charles Wu had heard of. This hospital had been almost cleaned out, and things left behind were no longer of use. But in one room I found a shoe, and in another a paper with someone’s handwriting. A wheelchair moldered in the hallway, its vinyl seat torn. We passed an open space that held a stage with tattered curtains, rows of upholstered seats blooming yellowed batting. In the lockup ward the doors had small, square mesh viewing windows. I pictured poor Great-aunt Rose in a place like this, and I began to feel guilty about Del, waiting in the car. William changed his film and pocketed the roll. Then he let the camera dangle by its strap. Our cloudlike breath fanned out around our heads.

  “You’re not taking any shots,” William said.

  I pointed my camera at him and took his photograph. “You’re taking enough for both of us.” On the wall immediately behind him someone had written a poem in a shaky hand. “Look,” I said.

  From too much love of living,

  From hope and fear set free,

  We thank with brief Thanksgiving

  Whatever gods may be

  That no man lives forever;

  That dead men rise up never;

  That even the weariest river

  Winds somewhere safe to sea.

  “Too bad that isn’t the end of it,” I said. I thought of Mary Rae.

  I sensed that William wanted to add something, but he turned away. “Let’s find that staircase for you.” By the time we reached the administration wing and its grand stairway, the huge arched window over the main entrance, the elaborate woodwork that made the place seem like a hotel or a resort, it was dusk. The light had faded too much to photograph without
a flash. The stairs curved down to the dim foyer below. It was gray beyond the high windows, and we could hear sleet tapping on the glass. Soon it would be completely dark.

  “Well, here’s your staircase,” William said. “The one your friend told you about.”

  “It’s too dark,” I told him.

  “Of course it is.” His voice was bitter and annoyed. He stood with his hands on his hips. Other than the kiss he’d given me at the corridor entrance, and his catching me in his arms as I dropped down, he hadn’t touched me. I’d spent the hour and a half we’d been there staring at the back of his corduroy jacket. I felt uneasy.

  “The state should charge admission and offer a ghost tour,” I said.

  Except there were no ghosts. The building was just an old ruin. The dead appeared in the Big Y supermarket, not in the places we expected. They couldn’t be courted or sought out. William put his camera back around his neck, his movements quick, irritated. There was nothing else to do but leave. I missed Del and Alice and the others. The flasks would have come in handy, the picnic lunch.

  “We should have come with everyone else,” I said.

  “I came to make you happy,” William said. He composed his features so that, in the dim light, I could almost believe him. “But you’re never happy, are you? It’s impossible to please you.”

  He kicked a piece of debris on the floor and it skittered toward the stairs and thumped down each step.

  “Why are you so angry?” I said. The sleet tapped at the windows. The tension in the air was a sort of haze made of secrets.

  “Just tell me what you did with it,” he said. He seemed at the end of his patience. Had he thought that if he accompanied me here he might somehow win me over, ease the whereabouts of the portfolio from me?

  “It’s in your office.” I took a few steps away from him.