The Bright Unknown Read online

  Dedication

  For Joann, my dear grandma-in-love,

  and for Kelly, who understands so much

  Epigraph

  “I am out with lanterns, looking for myself.”

  Emily Dickinson

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1990: Gravel Paths

  1937: These Bright Walls and the Dark Story They Tell

  1928: An Angel to Watch Over

  1937: Dry Bed of Grass

  1990: Overexposed

  1932: All Dust and Ashes

  1933: Misunderstood Brighton

  1939: House of Lies

  1939: Bright-Yellow Canary

  1939: Deliver Us from Evil

  1990: Black, White, and Bright

  1939: Heaven Backward

  1939: Doorways

  1939: Undeveloped

  1939: Patient

  1940: Where I Come From

  1990: Find the Light

  1941: Every Key Has a Lock

  1941: Pandora’s Call

  1941: Till Death Do Us Part

  1941: Waking Up Dead

  1941: Lightning

  1990: The Memory of Wind and Birds

  1941: Gone

  1941: Metamorphosis

  1941: A Long, Dreamless Moment

  1941: There Is No Grace

  1941: I Never Knew You

  1990: Questions Without Answers

  1941: Stranger, Stranger

  1941: Chase Yourself

  1941: Father

  1941: I’m Not Dead

  1990: Love, Nursey

  1941: Unbright

  1941: Welcome Home

  1990: From Dark to Light

  1941: Rose-Colored Glasses

  1941: Not an Angel

  1941: Behold the Crux

  1941: When It Rains

  1941: Fancies and Fears

  1990: Evolution

  1941: A Family

  1941: The Sirens’ Call

  1941: The Mentalist’s Call

  1990: Shifting Light

  1941: Stay

  1941: Invisible Cages

  1941: Unmasked

  1941: Disturbed Places

  1941: Pieces of Myself

  1990: Safe and Free from Violence

  1941: Something Pretty like Hope

  1941: One Bright Window

  1990: All Because of Grace

  Discussion Questions

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise for The Bright Unknown

  Other Books by Elizabeth Byler Younts

  Copyright

  1990

  Gravel Paths

  I’m not sure whom I should thank—or blame—for the chance to become an old woman. Though as a young girl, sixty-seven seemed much older than it actually is. My knees creak a little, but I still have blond strands in my white hair.

  I have watched the world grow up around me. I was old when I was born, so it seems. Was I ever really young? I’ve been around long enough to know that progress is a relative term. What is progress anyway? A lot of damage has been done in the name of progress, hasn’t it? But then I have to think, where would I be without it?

  Not here.

  There are a few other surprises about making it to 1990. We are still firmly living on planet Earth, the Second Coming hasn’t happened, despite predictions, and devices like the cordless phone are at the top of many wish lists for housewives. Another surprise is that housewives aren’t so common.

  I haven’t taken much to technology myself and still use a rotary phone. But I did receive a ten-foot coiled cord as a gift. Recently I heard a girl say the words old school, so I guess that’s the new way to say what I am. There’s something funny about having a new way to say old-fashioned.

  When you have a childhood like mine, being considered out-of-date is a compliment and means I’m among the living. There were times I never expected to live to be this age. Many women of a certain age would love to move back the hands of time and remember the days of their youth. But I’d rather let them become as dull as my old pots and pans—they carry the nicks and dings from use over the years, but no one remembers how those wounds happened and the flaws don’t make them useless.

  When I step outside and squint at the June sun, I’m caught off guard by the brightness. The sun and I are old friends, and she greets me with a nod as I walk beneath her veil of heat. The walk to my mailbox that’s at the end of a long drive has been part of my daily routine for years. Sometimes I amble down the natural path twice, just for the fresh air, but mostly to remind myself that I can. I don’t take freedom for granted. The gravel drive almost didn’t make it when we first moved in. My kids wanted us to pave it to make it easier to bike and scooter. But I didn’t like the idea of a strip of concrete dividing the green mowed lawn of our yard from the grasses that grew wild and untamed on the other side of the driveway. That path between the feral and the tame is dear to me and too familiar to let go of.

  The grit from the stones beneath my soles is a safe reminder of where I come from. Painful memories sometimes rise off other gravel paths—some narrow and dark, and others that weren’t there till I made them with my own two feet. My driveway reminds me of the freedom I have to come and go as I please. Things were not always this way.

  The mailman waves at me from the other side of the road as he lowers the flag of a neighbor’s mailbox. I wave back and don’t look before I cross. This road is as isolated as my memories.

  I throw a glance inside my aluminum mailbox before I shove my hand inside. The occasional critter sometimes can’t resist the small haven in a storm—and we had a doozy last night. The stack of mail looks lonesome, so I wrap my hands around the contents and pull them out. The arthritis in my wrist flares and I wince.

  I shut the box, then turn back toward my home. A rubber band wraps a Reader’s Digest around the small bundle of white envelopes and fluorescent-colored flyers. I flip through the mail to try to force out the throb that remains in my wrist. Electric bill. Water bill. A bright-yellow flyer announcing a new pizza joint in town with a coupon at the bottom for Purdy’s Plumbing. The cartoon scissors that indicate to cut along the dotted line have eyes and a smile. I don’t resist smiling back.

  Underneath the pile is one of those big yellow envelopes. A bulky item inside carries the shape of something too familiar, but I don’t want to name it. A chill washes over me. Shouldn’t a woman my age be prepared for surprises? The last time this kind of bewitchment caught me unawares I was nothing more than an eighteen-year-old girl—frightened and alone. Learning too much all at once. Trapped inside gray concrete walls. Feeling the loss of my last bit of innocence, which had been tucked somewhere behind my heart but in front of my soul—guiding it, guiding me.

  But I didn’t lose myself in that Grimms’ fairy-tale beginning. My over forty years of marriage made me a survivor of unpredictability. I’ve crawled through the shadow of death delivering my babies—reluctantly inside the frightful walls of a hospital no less—and became a woman amending her own childhood through motherhood. But this envelope brings me a certain dread that I cannot explain. The contours of the contents. I don’t want to open it, even though my entire life has been in anticipation of this.

  I consider pushing the package into my apron pocket along with my garden shears and the one cigarette that’s waiting to be smoked on my front porch—a habit I started in 1941 and stopped trying to quit in the 1950s. It is only one a day, you see.

  But I’m seduced. I turn over the envelope. The name in the corner isn’t familiar, but the town in the return address boasts that my nightmares are not
dreams but memories after all. The handwriting appears businesslike and feminine.

  My gaze travels to the center. It’s addressed to someone I shed long ago—so long ago it’s almost like that girl never existed. My mother, who’d been a lost soul, gave me the name—sort of. A question mark is scribbled next to the name—the post office doesn’t know if it really belongs here. But it is me. This much I know, and I wish it weren’t so. After a few deep breaths I pull out my garden shears and slip them through the small opening in the corner with shaking hands. How I do it without cutting myself, I’m not sure.

  My suspicions are correct. When I tip the envelope over, a 35mm film cartridge falls into my hands. It’s old, almost fifty years old, in fact, and it’s warm in my palm. That eighteen-year-old girl named on the envelope cries a little, but she’s so far under my concrete skin it doesn’t even dampen my insides. I long ago wished I could forget it all, but the voices from my past are stronger than my present. What am I supposed to do now?

  The resurgence of guilt, shame, and pain—the bards of my heart—croon at me. I toss the film roll and it lands on the edge of my gravel path between blades of grass.

  Who sent it?

  Where did it come from?

  I look into the envelope and see it’s not empty. Before I can bat away my impulses, I pull out the small folded piece of paper. The even and balanced script handwriting reads:

  Brighton,

  I have the rest of them if you’re interested.

  Kelly Keene

  Kelly Keene. I don’t know her. Why does she have the film from my dark years? I look back at the ground, and the cartridge stares at me as it lies prostrate there on the gravel and grass. The exhumed voices from within it speak in my ears. They’ve never been far away. They’re always in the shadow or around a corner. A reflection in a darkened window. Their voices bend over my shoulder, their ghostly faces look into my arms full of children and grandchildren, and the memory of their smiles reminds me how far I’ve come and the strength it took to always take the next step forward.

  And yet the whisper of voices also calls to mind a promise I’ve left unfulfilled. The burden of this guilt nestles next to my soul. Though shrouded in grace, it knows the entwining paths of peace and despair.

  For decades I’ve kept these voices to myself. But this film begins the sacred resurrection of these forgotten souls, and with them comes the unearthing of my past.

  1937

  These Bright Walls and the Dark Story They Tell

  The flossy gray clouds outside mirrored the blandness inside the walls of my home. The window made me part of both worlds. One I watched and coveted. The other I lived in. Neither was safe.

  I flipped through the diary I’d received four years ago on my tenth birthday, and in each entry I noted the dreary weather on the top line. But I didn’t need a journal to remember further back than that, since somewhere in the reserves of my mind I was sure I remembered the day I was born—and every rainy birthday since. On that first April morning the storm had pelted the window. The xylophone of sounds was muffled by the press of my ear against my mother’s warm breast. I’d imagined all the details of my birth for so long that I was sure they were true, but I would never really know. And my mother would never be able to tell me about those moments because long ago her mind had hidden so well that no amount of searching could bring her back.

  A sigh slipped into my throat. I swallowed hard, and the air landed like a rock in my stomach. I breathed my hot breath on the window, then traced a heart. My fingertip made a squeaking sound against the cool glass pane.

  I focused past my finger. Not even a single speck of sun lined the edges of the trees in the far horizon across the road and field. A field I’d never stepped on because it was on the other side of the gates. I was told the grounds where I lived mimicked what neighborhoods looked like. Only I’d never seen a real neighborhood, so maybe that was a lie. The only green grass I’d ever stepped in was the grass that grew on the property of the Riverside Home for the Insane.

  I smeared away the heart with angry fingers and lightly tapped the glass, making a dull clink sound.

  I looked around behind me before opening the window as far as it would go. I grabbed the iron bars and pressed my face into the opening. I stuck out my tongue to catch a few raindrops. The coolness jetted through me.

  “Girl,” said a voice from behind me. I pulled back and bumped my head on the window frame. “If Nurse Derry catches you doing that . . .”

  Nurse Edna Crane—Aunt Eddie, as she insisted on being called—had been in the room right after I was born, slippery and squirmy between my mother’s thighs. It was Aunt Eddie who’d fixed in my mind the visions of my birth—the low-hanging clouds and the mist from outside crawling indoors and clinging to the walls like ivy vines curling to catch a glimpse of new life. Me. And to think it was in a place where life usually ended instead of began.

  Aunt Eddie walked past me and shut the window. She grunted when she turned the lever at the top, then swore and stuck her finger in her mouth. The latch was fussy, I knew. I’d worked on loosening it off and on for an hour. I’d woken a mite past three when my mother began with her fit, and I couldn’t find sleep again after that. When Mother had quieted, though, I’d tiptoed from our room and started in on the window knob. I hadn’t broken the rule of not leaving the second floor, but I needed air. The dewy world beyond the window was thick with it. The fresh, rain-soaked whiffs were suffocated in the stale spaces of this place. It was more than simply moist and dank and smelling like rot, more than the decay of daft dreams, more than misery joining the beating of hearts. It was death itself. The scattered remains of us—the barely living—our eyes, ears, hearts, and souls lying like remnants everywhere.

  The older nurse squared my shoulders and tried to fix my hospital gown and hair. I knew, however, that I was nowhere pretty enough to be fixed. Weeds bloomed, but that didn’t make them flowers.

  “Your dress is wet, and how on earth have you already mussed your braid?”

  My dress? It was a hospital gown, only Aunt Eddie always called it a dress. The sigh I’d swallowed away earlier whispered at me, begging to be released. I ignored it, and it flitted away.

  “Got it caught in the windowsill. There’s a nail.” I pointed to the window.

  “This won’t do. When your hair’s not done, you look like a dirty blonde at a whorehouse, but when it’s all done and pretty—now, you could go to church with that kind of braid.” She’d braided my hair before bed, but it was messy when I woke.

  I let Aunt Eddie pull my French braid out and tried not to wince as she tucked the strands this way and that way. She combed down my fine flyaway hair and pulled it harder than ever, making slits of my eyes. To please her I smoothed down the gown—a used-to-be-white shift with snaps up the back, though a few had gone missing years ago. Nurse Joann Derry, whom I called Nursey, took it home one day and made it fit my narrow shoulders, since they were made for bony grown women. Their pointy, emaciated shoulders could keep anything up. Nursey did this as often as we were issued new clothing, which was usually once a year.

  Last year she had to find me a different gown for a few days while she worked out the stain from my first curse from my issued one. I’d just turned thirteen. The saturated red mark on my gown and bed and the stickiness between my legs hadn’t been a shock to me. Before my mother was sterilized—a procedure doctors thought would help her melancholia depression and psychosis—I was always the one to clean her up because Nursey was charged with nearly a hundred other patients and had little help. Nursey had given me Carol’s gown; she’d died only the week before and was barely cold in the graveyard out back. Her family hadn’t claimed her body. Now she’d just be C. Monroe on a small stone marker. Wearing a dead woman’s gown was commonplace around here, but knowing who’d worn it last left me with the heebie-jeebies.

  I’d stayed in bed for most of the first day of my curse, and my friend Angel had assumed I was dyi
ng when I wouldn’t go out for a walk through the orchard and then to the graveyard where we’d memorized every headstone. Nursey gave him an explanation, though I don’t know what she said. Later he told me she’d mentioned my burgeoning womanhood and hormones, something we’d learned about when she gave us a few biology lessons.

  Nursey had believed my step toward womanhood deserved something special, and when she brought my institutional shift back to me, she surprised me by turning it into a real dress. Her smile lit up when she pointed out something called a Peter Pan collar and the ruffles at the hem. When I put it on I spun around like I did when I was little, before I understood that it wasn’t normal for a child to live in an asylum.

  I cried when the hospital administrator, Dr. Wolff, refused to let me keep it, claiming he’d already made too many exceptions when it came to me. Nursey said we shouldn’t push our luck—whatever that meant. Luck? Me? Luck would be the chance to run away and buy myself as many ruffled dresses as I wanted and wear a different one every day. Maybe fall in love and get married. Maybe even be a mother.

  Maybe. Someday.

  By now, at age fourteen, I knew that being a resident of the Riverside Home for the Insane was not how everyone else in the world lived. But it had been my life since birth. None of the doctors’ diagnoses—feeble-minded, melancholia, or deaf mute—could be used to describe me. I didn’t even have a bad temper. All my friends had these labels, and I was familiar with them, but they didn’t apply to me. Neither were they used on my best friend, Angel—he was just an albino and didn’t see well.

  My poor mother was bewitched with voices and demons, and my father never cared enough to rescue either of us—or even visit. He was our only ticket out of this asylum because he was our next of kin. But today, on my fourteenth birthday, the fresh air outside tapped on the windows, taunting me, willing me to make a run for it. But what about my mother? If I left, wouldn’t I be as bad as my father? I didn’t want to be bad.

  “All done.” Aunt Eddie patted my shoulders and spun me around to get a good look. My distorted reflection stared back at me through her pooling eyes. I was a plain girl with too big a name. It hung over my identity like the issued hospital gown drooped on my shoulders. But it was the only thing my mother had ever given me.