The Burning Girl Page 5

  I took Cassie’s place and folded myself like a strange origami, my cheek pressed against an unbroken pane and my neck stretched flat along the rib of the window, and my left arm, my writing arm—I always thought, faintly guiltily, my better arm—up inside the house, squirming and reaching.

  The air inside the house was cooler, fresh on my skin. I could feel the lock, but I wasn’t able to reach quite high enough to flick it from one side to the other.

  Cassie started to laugh.

  “What?”

  “Did I look like that?” She made a crazy face.

  “It’s hard.”

  “You don’t need to tell me.” She laughed again, light in her bird bones like the wind in the grass.

  “It’s not going to work.” My sweat left a film on the window when I pulled away.

  “It’s got to work,” Cassie said. “We’re going in.”

  I peered in the window. We stood outside a big common room, with fancy moldings on the ceiling and wainscoting waist high. The plaster was crumbling and in places mold bloomed, giant flower paintings along the walls. A dozen folding chairs stood stacked in rows against the far wall and old paint cans rusted in piles next to a swing door. The air in the gloom was hazed with dust, and the floor—once fancy parquet, the kind you might find in a ballroom—was strewn with debris, with plaster crumbs and plastic bottles and what looked like a layer of dried mud. From the ceiling hung two wagon-wheel chandeliers, ugly, clunky things surely acquired cheaply to replace whatever had originally been in the house. A long buffet bar extended along the far wall next to the chairs: the dining hall.

  Cupping my eyes against the window, I could almost see the institutional room with its stacks of damp fake-wood trays, and stringy-haired, shiftless girls barely older than me lined up before steaming vats of baked beans and soggy broccoli, some hideous perversion of summer camp, where you didn’t get any care packages and nobody came to take you home.

  I could see too the parquet sparkling beneath the crystal chandeliers that once had hung from their sunburst moldings, and the flickering wall sconces along the walls, this diffuse and inconstant light illuminating, again, the faces of girls—and boys—not so much older than me, but in a different life, one of spangled baubles and velvet dresses, the young men in dinner jackets, a jazz band installed in the room’s back right corner where, I could swear, a dais had been placed precisely for them. Instead of the plastic-paneled buffet bar with its red heat lamps, long, cloth-covered tables bore silver tureens of punch, and pyramids of petits fours and chocolate strawberries, and behind these stood a quiet row of young men and women in dark uniforms—the staff, attending to every whim of the North Shore’s gilded youth.

  Just a big abandoned room, almost empty, but like Cassie, I understood now that we had to go in. I suggested breaking the windowpane above the broken one. That would put the window latch firmly in my fingers.

  We knew we were crossing a line. This went further than trying a joint with Devon Macintyre down in the cemetery at Luna’s end-of-school party back in June; or than Cassie filching a twenty from her mother’s wallet to buy a jumbo bag of Skittles and Big Gulps of Coke at the multiplex, when Bev had expressly forbidden us to. This was law-breaking: the sign on the gate out at the road did say NO TRESPASSING: TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED, and we were already trespassing and were about not just to enter but to break and enter. But it felt necessary, like we didn’t really have a choice.

  I made Cassie stand far back while I broke the window, because I didn’t want any glass to bounce up and hit her, and I didn’t want any fragments to get in her bandage. She stood by with the otherworldly look she’d worn when we crossed the field. A look, if you like, of destiny.

  WHEN WE’D CLIMBED through the opened window Cassie whooped—a testing sort of whoop, louder at the end, that echoed in the hollow room. Then she spun in circles, arms outstretched, leaving swirling marks along the dusty floor, whooping the whole time. I fussed about a glass cut along my elbow—not deep, but I squeezed out a little rivulet of blood that I wiped with my finger and sucked. My mother always told me that if you don’t have disinfectant, you want to make sure the cut bleeds cleanly, to wash the germs out. So that’s what I did first.

  We pushed the swinging door to check out the kitchens: two big rectangular rooms, laid end to end, with black-and-white checkerboard flooring like at my house, but miles of it, like something out of Alice in Wonderland; and rows of stainless-steel counters dulled by years of filth. Cassie tried the taps at one of the industrial sinks, but nothing came out, which was just as well, as it would have flushed the complex spider’s web spun across the sink itself. We opened some cabinet doors—not metal but painted wood, or once-painted wood, and when we left them open the doors dangled drunkenly on their hinges—but found nothing except a clutch of stiffened paintbrushes and an ancient empty gallon plastic Coke bottle.

  “People have been here.” Cassie pointed to some sticky rings in the dust on one of the countertops. “Before us.”

  “Not for a long time.”

  “Do you think the Coke is from when they moved everything out, twenty years ago? Or from last year, when, say, DeLouis Runyon was hiding out here?” DeLouis Runyon was a high school junior from Worcester, famous because he beat up his math teacher, also his hockey coach, and ran away before the cops got him. He was missing for seventy-two hours and then turned himself in. Nobody knew where he’d been exactly, or they weren’t saying. But he hadn’t been at the Bonnybrook—we were too far from Worcester. Most likely he’d been in his girlfriend’s garage.

  “Last year? I doubt it. But maybe not so long as twenty years. Remember the chains on the doors at the back? They’re newer than that. So maybe they had a problem with people, you know, coming in a while back, like five years or ten, and put the locks on then.”

  We both considered the crazy number of days in which this building had stood empty, how on any one of them—far more days than either of us had been alive, though not quite as many as all of our days put together—in this house anything could have happened; and most strangely of all, how on most of those days, even almost all of those days, nothing had. Sure, kids like us had broken in before, and hung out drinking on the patio, and maybe a few times some nut had spent a night here. Maybe even half a dozen nights. Imagine someone had even lived in the Bonnybrook for a month: that would still leave seventeen years and eleven months, well over six thousand days and nights of total silence, a once-human habitation uninhabited, given over instead to spiders and chipmunks and robins and potentially the occasional fox. It overwhelmed, in the way the night sky overwhelms when you lie on your back in the grass and stare at it, at all the tiny points of light, and imagine the unimaginable distances between those stars and Earth, and how long even the light has taken to get to your eye, so long that maybe the star that emitted that light is already, in actuality, long gone.

  “I vote we see upstairs first,” Cassie said.

  In the front hallway, we peered up the staircase at the big stained-glass window with its lilies in a vase and crimson tracery, only a few panes knocked in, their bright fragments scattered on the wood floor. Someone had pulled up boards, leaving rutted gaps underfoot; but the newel post at the bottom of the stairs had proven too sturdy for the thieves—its carved finial was the size of my head, a great once-polished ball of patterned flowers and vines, a vinery traced all up the banister and the length of the balustrades as well.

  “Can’t you see the grand ladies coming down?” Cassie breathed at my ear. “In their evening dresses?”

  “Sure I can,” I said, and it was true, I could. “And right behind them, do you see the crazy girls in blue smocks with their hair sticking up anyhow and wild eyes? Do you see them too?” I gave a great cackling laugh that resounded up the stairwell, an evil madwoman’s laugh. “That’s the noise they’re making—can you hear it? It’s wicked loud.”

  “Don’t.” Cassie pressed my arm. We both looked up the stairs
at the dust motes drifting in a shaft of sun across the landing. We could feel them with us—I knew she did just as much as I; and they too were our sisters. “Don’t.”

  To be in that ruin with Cassie—it was such a particular feeling that I have had nowhere else. If ever I have it again, I will recognize it, like a long-lost scent, and that afternoon and the ones that followed will return to me, in all their visceral intensity. The Bonnybrook was at once the most unlikely, vivid experience of our lives up till then, and like a dream—a dream, miraculously, that Cassie and I dreamed in tandem, touching, hearing, and feeling together. The asylum was darkened by the traces of its pasts; made titillating, even scary, by its silences—but made safer too by our sharing it. Being in the Bonnybrook was like being inside both Cassie’s head and my own, as if we had one mind and could roam its limits together, inventing stories and making ourselves as we wanted them to be.

  IT TOOK US almost half an hour to get back to the quarry parking lot, walking at a good pace, sweating all over again. The Kirschbaums were nowhere in sight, and it was too early for the after-work swimmers. The quarry lay still as a plate, the water black in the shadows. I lobbied again for a swim, and although Cassie wasn’t having it—what good was the water to her mittened paw?—she grudgingly agreed to wait, to let me dive in for just a minute.

  I stripped to my panties and bra—one I really liked a lot, with a neon-green-and-brown leopard pattern and some neon lacy trim—and I plunged off the rocks without even dipping in a toe. The smooth cool of it came as a total surprise to my body, a shock, and my swift stroke across the breadth of the quarry made my nerves tingle like sparklers.

  Cassie dangled her feet, her face turned up to the sky and her eyes shut, like she was praying, and when I paused, treading water, against the far bank, and looked at her, she glowed, tiny, fragile, in the dappled late-afternoon light.

  AFTER THAT, Cassie and I went every day to the asylum. We packed our picnic, hiked through town, and then through the woods, along the green trail over the brook, past the cairn of lichened stones, up the hill and over it into the field of flowers, to the manor. The hardest thing was not telling my mother. I’d never been in the midst of anything extraordinary and kept it hidden. I’d told her when Jake Brenner tried to make out with me when we slow-danced at Hester Lee’s party in the sixth grade. I’d told her when Andrew Dray brought weed to Cassie’s church youth group’s summer luau. I’d told her about my yearlong crush on Peter Oundle. She knew how to say the right thing and not pry, to wait for me to want to talk and let me explain what mattered without passing judgment.

  It wasn’t hard for Cassie, who never confided in her mother. Bev Burnes wasn’t reliable; she was moody and weird in spite of her perma-smiles, and even if she seemed cool about something, it didn’t mean she’d stay cool with it, and weeks or even months later she could throw it back in Cassie’s face, or blab like it was nothing. Cassie had learned the hard way not to trust her mother.

  WE VENTURED DAILY up the grand staircase to long corridors of almost identical rooms, in which torn blinds still dangled at the cracked and smeary windows, or in which sinks encrusted with desiccated black slime hung askew from the walls, their taps useless. A few cells had kept their metal bedsteads, long stripped of mattresses, slats like broken keys, legs buckled, rusted into some sort of dinosaur artwork. We marveled at the occasional bursts of bright mold across a bedroom wall—orange, watermelon, lime—where seeping damp had encouraged a new life form. We wanted to take photographs—my new cell phone, a birthday present, could take pretty good pictures—but we knew better.

  “No evidence,” I warned as we pored over the mildew flowers in their resplendent bloom, and Cassie grabbed at my backpack, to show she wanted my phone. “We can’t leave any evidence, anywhere.”

  She stopped, blinked, about to protest, and then nodded. “No evidence,” she whispered back at me solemnly, then laughed. “It’s no mistake that you get all A’s, Juju my friend. The girl thinks ahead.” If my mother found photos of the asylum on my phone, we’d be grounded for weeks. We had to do this old-style. The way it had been for centuries before our time: no one must know.

  We explored what had been the lockdown ward—the Isolation Ward, we called it, to ourselves—the wing that stretched out above the dining room, behind two strong metal doors that no longer shut properly, a corridor along which each cell had its own reinforced door with a little sliding window, like in prison, and within each bedroom, the windows squinted out small and high and barred, with chicken-wire mesh in the glass behind the bars.

  “This is where they put the real loonies,” Cassie said.

  “How crazy did you have to be, I wonder. What kind of crazy?”

  “And if there were enough people who were that kind of crazy to fill up all these rooms”—there were about fifteen of these little cells along that forlorn corridor—“then where did they go?”

  I didn’t have a clue. In twenty years, they couldn’t all have died—but even if they had, the world wasn’t getting any less crazy. So the dying generation of crazies was being replaced all the time by new crazies, a rolling population of lunatics as constant as the tides. Unless it wasn’t individuals that changed but society itself: they changed the laws, they closed the asylums, and suddenly the crazies weren’t crazy anymore. Maybe when society changed it was decided, somehow, that they never had been crazy; it had all been a category mistake.

  What would it be like to have been locked up in one of those cells for weeks or months or even years, only to discover that you’d never really been a lunatic at all, and could just as easily—if only the world had been a bit different—have been home in your bedroom all along?

  That would mean that you couldn’t be sure about things. Better to believe that sane people were sane and crazy people were crazy and you could put the two types of people on opposite sides of a wall and keep them separate, clean and tidy. Without that, where did the lunatics go? Where had they gone? Were they among us? Were they us?

  THE KITCHENS, the storerooms, the dining rooms, the bedrooms, the lounges, the bathrooms—those rows of bleak open shower stalls, with their stained puce tile and twisted shower heads like Cyclops eyes—the echoey hallways, the staff quarters somehow cozier than the rest even after almost twenty years of decay, rooms that still had the moldings and trim, the built-in shelves and wainscoting of the original mansion, the floors still wooden rather than tiled—all of these corners we charted, together, sometimes shouting loudly to hide our fear, sometimes gripping each other by the arm and walking on tiptoe, like when we heard a squirrel foraging and thought it was a person, or the ghost of a person.

  Together Cassie and I confronted the asylum and our terror of it, and by the end of the third afternoon, it felt familiar, almost familial, and we ran in the corridors, our feet slapping, and laughed and called out and even parted company—we could, we did, on that third afternoon, play, as we’d initially planned, and she pretended to be the young lady of the manor, and I was her suitor, and she disappeared upstairs and I gallantly pursued her with rhyming couplets, an eligible bachelor of yore come calling, until she advanced coyly to lean over the banister and I lured her down to the lobby with my blandishments. Or again: I was a psycho, completely off my head, unable to remember who I was or where I was from, estranged from myself and a prisoner in Room 7 of the Isolation Ward, where—convincingly, I thought—I curled on the floor in a ball and rocked and wailed so loudly that Cassie could find me, setting off from the lobby in an elaborate version of hide-and-seek, and when she found me, she was my long-lost sister, and she sat beside me and held my hand, and by singing our favorite songs brought me back to myself, recalling to me our shared childhood and our dog, Sheba, and our parents, CIA agents tragically killed on the same mission that had come close to exterminating me, the trauma of which had stolen my memory entire, and left me floating alone and delirious on a raft off the coast of Maine, which was how I came to be here at the Bonnybrook, jus
t a few miles from my beloved childhood home, to which Cassie would now safely return me.

  We’d done the Greek myths in school that year, so we knew the basics, and we acted out some of those too. She was Jocasta; I, Oedipus. I was Agamemnon; she, Clytemnestra. She, Heracles to my Deianeira.

  The time came that we felt free, running and shouting as if we owned the place. So we were lucky to be up in the wards when Rudy pulled up the drive in his truck one early afternoon, with Bessie in the flatbed, her paws up on the side and nose to the wind, barking. Her barking alerted us; we pulled ourselves to standing and peered from either side of the window in our chosen room (Number 7, with a useless black sink, in which we’d piled wildflowers picked in the field), looking down at the tops of their heads. Bessie knew we were there. She may even have known where. I could have sworn she pricked her ears and glanced up at me, paused for a second in the crazed tattoo of her barks. But Rudy was lazy, or tired—the air so hot and humid—and simply rolled down the window so Bessie could hear him yell at her. He told her to “shut the fuck up”: “Nobody’s interested in your goddamn squirrels.”

  Along with his shouting and Bessie’s barking, we could hear the thud of loud ’80s music—Bruce Springsteen, maybe? Something my dad liked—and I knew Rudy was in his own world, not in the real world, maybe imagining he was still young and had all his teeth, when he drove a girl around maybe, if he ever did, with that same music blaring. And because he could see the girl, and see his youthful self, and hear his youth in the melody, there was no way he’d see the decay and detritus that was really in front of his eyes.

  Still, we felt shaky long after he drove back down the driveway and disappeared, raising dust off the gravel, Bessie still yammering full bore in the back. We stopped shouting after that, and stopped clattering. If Rudy could appear out of the blue—we hadn’t heard him coming—then anybody else could too. Bit by bit the ghosts of former inmates and escaped convicts and the nastier elements of the Cavaliers hockey team slipped back into our minds, and in the next hour the Bonnybrook became frightening again, as it had been when first we approached it. Our games stopped being fun, and we packed up our stuff early to head out, subdued, muttering to each other about the thunderstorms forecast for later.