The Burning Girl Read online

  Knowing all this and how she felt about him, I should never have brought it up the way I did, as if I didn’t understand what he meant to her. She didn’t mention it again, but it was one of those events that was little and big at the same time.

  We made our way home for grilled cheese and chocolate shakes, then we filled a plastic basin and gave each other pedicures until Bev came to pick Cassie up. I painted Union Jacks on her toes—I’d watched a YouTube video on how to do it—and they came out well except on her baby toes, where the nails were too tiny.

  She couldn’t do anything nearly so fancy for me because of her hand, so she just painted my toes dark blue and I stuck on little silver star stickers. My feet looked like the night sky.

  THE NEXT DAY we returned to the quarry. We packed a picnic lunch so we could stay longer, maybe even all day. My mother, in the middle of writing an article, wasn’t paying much attention, but I told her we were going for a hike in the woods and might be gone a while.

  “Don’t go near the highway,” she said, which was absurd, because the quarry was on the other side of town from the highway. “And take your cell phone in case you need me.”

  “You got it.”

  “You know you can count on us, Mrs. Robinson,” Cassie said.

  We didn’t stop at Bell’s, and we didn’t stop at the Rite Aid, and when we passed the high school, Cassie gave Beckett the finger from too far away for him to see—“Just a precaution,” she said.

  “Like warding off vampires with garlic,” I said.

  Turning off the road into the woods, up the trail to the quarry, was like stepping into a dream. Sweat ran down my spine between the hot backpack and my skin, and my fingers, striped red and white, were twice their normal size, but the shade and the rustling leaves made the heat bearable, and the rippling light shot wavery spots of sun onto unexpected patches of bark or mounds of leaves. The vegetation, green- and brown-smelling at the same time, filled our nostrils. The woods were at once very quiet and not quiet at all: things popped or flicked or thudded, birds chirped and hooted, the breeze spoke through the leaves. We stopped to listen, and Cassie pointed out that when a car passed back on the road, it sounded like a great wave at the shore.

  As we approached the quarry, we could hear voices and the sound of splashing. Not buoyant kid splashing, boys doing cannonballs, but sedate splashing, and quiet, grown-up voices. Old Mr. Kirschbaum and his wife, we realized as we came near the water’s edge. Originally Austrian or something, they were formal and a little scary. He had a pointy gray beard and smoked a pipe—he didn’t have the pipe that day—and wore a blazer even in the summertime, so it was surprising to see him in a bathing suit, his saggy old man’s bosoms speckled with white hair. His elegant wife, Adele Kirschbaum, who taught piano to the talented kids like May Hwang, wore a black one-piece and an old-fashioned custard-colored bathing cap with a strap under the chin. When we arrived, she was swimming up and down, a careful matron’s breaststroke that didn’t involve putting her head anywhere near the water. (As Cassie said later, “What’s the crazy cap for, then? A fashion statement?”)

  Cassie and I hung back in the trees. I started to whisper but Cassie put her finger to her lips. We both knew that Mr. Kirschbaum would be a stickler for rules—he was old, wasn’t he, and, crucially, Austrian—and he’d know that neither of us belonged to the quarry club. My mother had written an article a couple of years before decrying the private membership of what she felt should be public spaces, spaces in nature; so anybody who knew who I was (which the Kirschbaums would, being patients of my dad’s) would know that the Robinsons didn’t belong. As for Cassie, she just wasn’t the sort. They’d know that by looking at her. One of those things we were too young to know we knew, but we knew it just the same.

  We froze for what seemed like minutes, then Cassie tapped me on the arm and began, with exaggerated steps, to retreat backward into the undergrowth.

  “Around,” she mouthed, without making a sound. “Around to the asylum.”

  At first I only got “around.” I was trying to keep my eyes simultaneously on her, behind me, and on the Kirschbaums ahead, who might hear footsteps, or the splutter of our stifled laughter. But as Cassie said later, “Couldn’t you tell just by looking that he’d be deaf? And she had that cap over her ears—probably so she wouldn’t have to hear him. Because you could tell just by looking that he’s an a-hole too.”

  Which was mean, but I laughed anyway. Laughter was the point of so many things we did together. Cassie made everything funny, like her giant tiptoeing back toward the road, her silly staring face, holding her forearms up like a kangaroo, her dressed hand a bright-white blob in the muted colors of the forest.

  “Better be careful,” she hissed when she thought we were far enough back. “For all we know, he might be a hunter. Might think my paw is a deer’s tail, and shoot.”

  “Might,” I said, “or your hair, for that matter.” How conspicuous she was; how completely she failed to blend in with our surroundings. “But he won’t. More likely to turn us in to Rudy and let that dog eat us for dinner.”

  “A dog already ate me for lunch,” Cassie said. “I don’t want to be dinner too.”

  We stood for a moment, able to discern, still, the muted sounds of the Kirschbaums talking—it wasn’t English they spoke to each other, you could tell without hearing the words—as they continued to slip smoothly through the water.

  “What now?” I asked. The backpack containing our lunch stuck moistly to my shirt.

  “It’s obvious, right? Picnic at the asylum.”

  “The asylum?”

  “Duh!”

  “But I’m so hot.”

  “Everything happens for a reason, my mom always says. Asylum first, swim later. They can’t be here all afternoon. Do you think that lady sunbathes?”

  “But we don’t know where the asylum is. I don’t know if it’s such a good idea.”

  “Crap, Juju. That’s crap. Scaredy-cat. Wriggly Robinson, wriggling out of the fun, afraid of getting in trouble.”

  “Am not.”

  “Scared of ghosts, are you? Boooo!” She made a taunting face. “Are you up for it, Scaredy, or do you need to run on home?”

  “Whatever else,” I said, “I’m not a scaredy-cat. Let’s go.”

  There were no signs. At my insistence we followed the trails rather than setting off blind through the trees. The red-dot trail turned out to be a loop, and brought us back to the quarry on the other side of the parking lot twenty minutes after we left. The Kirschbaums’ crimson Prius was still parked between two Norwegian maples. We followed the blue-triangle trail for a while before Cassie protested, “This one’s uphill. Think about it. If we went back out to the main road and followed it to the turn-off that goes down by the asylum, there’s no hill between here and there. This can’t be right.”

  I was tired, and getting hungry. The backpack weighed on me. “We don’t know what we’re looking for,” I said. “Maybe we need to ask one of the older kids and come back another day.”

  “Who do you know who’s actually been there? Not just bragged about it, but been there?”

  I shook my head. It was a bit of a myth, like the drowned boy in the quarry. If you drove past the asylum from the road, you couldn’t see anything but the long stretch of high stone wall, and the padlocked gates with the sign: NO TRESPASSING. What you could see of the drive behind the gates was straggly and overhung with branches, the gravel sprouting waist-high bursts of Queen Anne’s lace and goldenrod. It wouldn’t have surprised me to learn that nobody we knew had ever really seen the building: it was the sort of thing you wished you’d done, without actually wishing to do it.

  “There’s only the green trail left,” Cassie said. “I vote we go back to the parking lot, take the green trail, and then we’ll see.”

  “I vote we eat.”

  “It’s not like you’re not going to get your lunch. I’m just suggesting you try harder for it.”

 
; Cassie could be affectionate and scornful at the same time, and I always felt that if I wasn’t careful, the scorn might win out. So we returned to the parking lot and set off down the green-square trail. The Prius was still there.

  THE GREEN TRAIL proved messier and more confusing than the other two—fewer unchanging rocks, more diverse foliage, and muckier too. Pretty soon we were picking our way alongside a brook. Not especially large, the brook made a pleasing gurgly sound. A ribbon of clear water in a small gully, passing over piles of debris and winding blithely around others, it looked as though, like Miss Buono, our social studies teacher, it might vary a lot in size depending on the season. I made this point to Cassie, and then said, “Right now, it’s August, and both the stream and Miss B are in bikini season: skimpy.” Which made Cassie laugh—there’s something hilarious about the word “skimpy,” if you repeat it over and over. But she couldn’t resist saying, “No matter what the season, Buono’s butt is big.” And we were snickering about Miss B’s butt when Cassie pointed out a flattened log across the stream, upon which someone had piled three large, flat stones.

  “What’s that then?”

  “Not the path. The next green square is on that tree up there.”

  “It’s not the path, but it’s a path.” If you looked on the other side of the stream you could pick out the traces of a path winding off through the woods. Not marked, but worn, and not worn only by a single set of feet. It looked like nobody’d been down it in a while, but I could tell that excited Cassie all the more.

  “I’m sure that’s it,” she said.

  The forest lay very still.

  “Who put the stones, do you think?”

  “Who cares?” Cassie replied. “They’ve been there for ages. Look—moss.” The little pile of stones was dotted with near-luminous lichen, in starburst patterns.

  “Okay. Let’s go.” I stepped onto the log, which gave slightly beneath me, soft and rotted by damp. It didn’t break.

  “For real?” Cassie’s eyes glittered, and it occurred to me that all along she’d expected me to stop us. She’d goaded and teased me, made out like I was a wimp; but she also relied on me to keep us safe.

  “For real,” I said.

  The path, such as it was, would seem to come and go, and the greenery overhead became more dense, the sun more obscured, as if we were going ever deeper into the woods. I tried to trace a mental map—we turned right at the broad rotted stump, we bore left where the two maple trunks had grown intertwined, we kept the water behind our left ears and its gurgly sound came near, and retreated, and came again. I knew I’d have to reverse these signs on the return (turn left at the rotted stump), and worried that I’d get muddled. I even pulled some pages from the little notebook in my pack and impaled them on branches along the way—like Cassie’s white mitt, they’d stand out, I thought, in the swimmy green.

  THE SAD BUILDING loomed enormous. We crested the hillock, toward the light, and at first could see nothing but more sky down the other side. A hundred yards down the slope, we broke out of the trees, into what had obviously been a large lawn, a field now, its long grasses swaying in the hot sun, the desperate saw of crickets all around. Wildflowers were scattered through the grasses—flashes of pink, purple, and orange in the bleached ripples: coneflowers, cosmos, calendula, coreopsis. And the air, so long moist between the trees, smelled dry, a late-summer smell of safety.

  The long grassy stretch—broken here and there by wispy saplings—ended in steps leading to a stone patio. We’d come up the back. Instead of the circular drive, the portico and the garages, we were confronted by banks of darkened windows, like eyes in the three-story, U-shaped brick facade, as if the building were an almost human monster. On the ground floor, on the wings at either side, we could see brown-painted metal doors. But in the middle of the U—its basin, if you will—stretched a span of French windows giving onto a terrace, and there, just for a moment, you could picture the rich man’s residence the house had originally been: you could imagine the French doors ajar, curtains fluttering in the breeze, on the terrace a few tables shaded by large parasols, and a house party of elegant men and women drifting, holding china teacups or smoking cigars. Then you noticed the heavy padlocked chain that ran through the doors’ institutional bars, rusty but still newer than the general disintegration at first suggested. Some poorly scrubbed blue graffiti stretched along one wall. We could make out GO CAVALIERS—our high school ice hockey team—and MOTHERFUCKERS.

  “Lunchtime,” I said. When we reached the patio—strewn not only with leaves but with shards of glass and strips of roof tile, with crushed beer cans and cigarette butts—I slapped myself down on the top step, the house behind me and the hairy green forest we’d come out of in front of me, and I opened the backpack on the smutty stone ledge. I laid out the tea towel from my mother’s clean kitchen, and on it I placed the items one by one: the carrot and cucumber sticks; the hard-boiled eggs with their little sealed packets of salt filched from diners; the sandwiches wrapped in foil; the Camelbak of lemonade, the one of iced tea, their ice cubes long melted after our trek.

  While we ate, Cassie stalked the terrace, squinting in at the windows, grasping her sandwich with both hands in her distinctive way, made slightly comical by the fact that one hand was a gauzy paw.

  WHAT DID WE know about the asylum? Not much. It had been built at the turn of the last century by a textile merchant named Ebenezer Otis, to house his collection of Asian art. His mills were in Lowell, his city house was on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston; but this, outside Royston, was his country estate. The fortune was lost in the Crash of ’29, and the house and the art had to be sold. Some giant vases, ivory dragons, and lacquered chests were acquired by the Peabody Essex Museum, where a couple are even on display.

  The state ended up buying the property at a discount price—where were the Otis descendants today? In condos on the outskirts of Gloucester?—and after leaving it empty a few lean years, they converted it to a women’s mental asylum, the Bonnybrook. I guess there was that brook, at least. It housed up to forty-five women at a time, stricken with a gamut of complaints—depression, mania, schizophrenia, addiction. According to the official records, many got better and went back to their real lives.

  Time passed, views changed, laws and funding with them. By the late 1980s it was seen as unsalvageable, and by ’93, the Bonnybrook was shuttered, forgotten. Part of the same parcel of land as the quarry, it was sold to a consortium that then couldn’t agree on its fate—whether to refit it as apartments, or restore it as a mansion hotel. Word was, there’d been a dragging lawsuit. It had been padlocked and empty longer than I’d been alive.

  I imagined that the building carried the sadness of the women who’d been trapped there, the anorexic teenagers and the young mothers who heard voices and the old women shattered past repair by their tragedies. I didn’t see them—there was no visible mass of ghosts peering out of the hollowed windows—but I couldn’t help but feel they marked the territory.

  Cassie didn’t feel that way at all—quite the opposite. She wouldn’t be put off. I trailed after her as she walked the perimeter and climbed a rickety fire escape, fruitlessly rattling the windows in their frames on each floor.

  When we reached the front of the house, its broad circular drive long overgrown and its crumbling stables off to one side, she counted the entrances—six ground-floor windows, three visible doors—and divided them between us. As I tugged halfheartedly at a bolted knob, I heard the tinkle of glass breaking. I looked to see Cassie curiously bent, her ear against a window and her paw to the frame, her good arm stuck up inside its shattered pane like she was birthing a calf.

  “Are you fucking insane?”

  She didn’t turn her head. Her tongue stuck out between tight lips, the way it did when she concentrated in math class, but she paused long enough to say, “It’s going to work, Juju. I’m going to get it.” And after a minute more of trying, “I didn’t break the window, you know. It was alr
eady broken. I just knocked the bits sticking out along the edges.”

  “Tell that to the jury.”

  “Christ, what’s wrong with you?” She stuck her tongue out again, twisted and fiddled. And paused again. “Can’t you see this could be ours? Our own world, a real world, that we found, and we made, and we kept? Our real secret?”

  When she put it that way, I suddenly understood. The mansion looked different, no longer a house of sorrows, or a hideout for drunk hockey players from the high school, or a possible flophouse for escapees from the penitentiary up the highway. I could see it: the Bonnybrook as a magical place we could invent, the two of us, and have as ours, the way we’d thought of it before I saw it, a stage for our best imaginary adventures. Like seeing the hot sun and the crickets as a gift, like the bright wildflowers, instead of as a sinister menace. Like we had the power—Cassie and I, the two of us, twelve years old—to make anything into what we wanted it to be.

  I said, “Let me try. My arm is longer.” Cassie and I looked at each other, almost smiling but not, a kind of mutual Mona Lisa look. She extricated her good arm, careful not to nick herself on any protruding fragments, straightened and stepped away, crunching broken glass on the gravel as she went.