The Bright Unknown Read online

  “There’s a town hall meeting next week, and I was calling to invite you.” She pauses. “To personally invite you.”

  Her emphasis on you makes me squint, as if the tiny movement will make me figure out her intentions through the phone cord.

  “Ma’am,” the voice says. My pause is too long.

  “I’m a little confused, Miss Keene. I don’t live in Milton, but even if I did, since when does anyone get a personal invitation to a town hall meeting?”

  “You’re right.” She hesitates for a moment, and I open my mouth to give her a piece of my mind for the cryptic package and the invite. What I really want are my film cartridges. They are my belongings. “There’s a proposal up for discussion that I think will interest you. I don’t want to make you uncomfortable, Mrs. Friedrich, but since you spent so many years at the Riverside Home for the—” She clears her throat and doesn’t finish—but I do . . .

  Insane.

  “I assumed you might have an opinion about it being torn down to be made into a community center,” she finishes.

  “Please do not call here again, Miss Keene.”

  “Wait.” I can hear her even though my hand hovers over the cradle of the phone. I put the receiver back to my ear.

  “No one else knows.” The young woman’s voice is urgent and almost nervous. “I haven’t spoken to anyone about you—about the photos or about your real name. I was asked to help catalog the items in the buildings. Mostly we found old suitcases and medical files. But then I came across the film . . . and a few other things.”

  She pauses as if she’s trying to find the words. But I know there’s nothing more intriguing and mysterious than undeveloped film. I am hard-pressed to see the wrong in what she’s doing.

  “I see,” I respond. “Have you developed the other cartridges?”

  “No—of course not,” she says quickly. “I didn’t think it was my place.”

  Okay, so I am dealing with a saint. Admirable. Maybe. I’m still unimpressed by anyone holding my cartridges hostage. But I want them more than I’ve wanted anything in a long time.

  “Not much of a reporter, are you?” I gave up using tact a long time ago.

  “Well, I’m not really a reporter. I answer phones.” Her laughter is a little too honest. She’s nervous, so I get direct with her.

  “What do you want, Miss Keene?”

  “I wanted to get your film to you.”

  “And why don’t you just mail the rest?”

  “I’d like to meet in person. And I think you might have an interest in what’s happening with the buildings. Maybe you’d like to see them again—before they’re gone.”

  I am not sure if she is intentionally trying to elicit guilt or if there is some hidden motive, but regardless, learning that the buildings are being torn down without a word from those of us who lived in them—my hand goes to my chest.

  I tell her I’ll think about it and then we say goodbye. And I will think about it. Though I can’t see myself doing anything but requesting the film canisters from her, developing them myself, and adding them to my collection—a collection that may forever be in a secret album almost as hidden as my mental vault of memories. My mind takes a snapshot of what it would look like to have my pictures and life plastered all over the local papers—out there for everyone to see and read about. I don’t know where to put that in the boiling cauldron of my brain.

  I imagine my children learning more about me in a newspaper than I have told them. They know the general timeline of my life, but not the specifics. Not the dark parts. They don’t know much about my mother, and what they do know might compare more to the somewhat innocuous Mrs. Clause, when really she was more like Rochester’s wife. Only my closest friends, who are few, know these same facts. I suppose because I am well-adjusted, digging for more details never seemed necessary to them. Since most church and PTA ladies are happy with the veneer of our lives and not the underbelly, I’ve let them see the easy-to-understand parts of my life. But the truth is that many of the decisions I’ve made—like getting married, having children, getting an education—have been because I wanted to confront and outbrave what was expected of me. And I think I did that.

  I hope my former photography students never have the same motivation for taking photos as I did all those years ago. I am not sure that the idea of snapping an image means the same thing to them as it did to me. To capture a moment in time that otherwise would be lost and muted was no small thing in the gray, dull world of my youth. I didn’t take pictures to remember all the good things that happened in my life. To put them in an album. To share with others so they could participate in my reminiscing. I took pictures to document the evil that had been done. The moments in time no one wanted to live and that no one should’ve lived in or died in.

  But to share them? They are too private. Too identifying. Too sacred.

  1932

  All Dust and Ashes

  Mickey’s gravestone was at the end of the row. A row I knew well.

  A. Robinson.

  E. Ward.

  Then came M. Randall. Mickey Randall. My Mickey. The one who had taught me to jump rope, to read, and to be very quiet when any visitors were in the ward and I wasn’t to be seen. The one who had given up her spot in Mother’s room for me. One of the first to rock me to sleep. She’d been one of the many women who had been brought to the hospital because she was too sad to get out of bed and care for her own children. No one had ever come back for her. By the time I was born, she was over fifty and had spent over twenty years in the hospital. She was a fixture on the ward.

  She was like me, though. Forgotten and left behind by someone outside of the walls.

  “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Rest in peace, my friend,” Lorna from down the hall said. Her gown rippled in the sunny breeze, and I could see the form of her skinny legs.

  “What does that mean?” I choked out. “Dust and ashes?”

  My ears were hot and felt like what red looks like. They rang a little, so I focused on Lorna’s mouth, which was moving—but why couldn’t I hear what she was saying? I looked from Lorna’s old, gray-hued face to my hand that was being squeezed by Nursey’s. My nine-year-old hand looked so little in her red-chapped hand. My eyes traveled up from our hands, up her arm, to her white-cuffed sleeve, and then to her face. She looked at me, and I realized I couldn’t hear her either.

  My lungs inhaled and inhaled and inhaled. But I couldn’t get enough air. My gaze rested on the turned dark soil in front of me. Mickey was under all that dirt.

  She was in heaven now.

  Nursey had told me that the morning before. I asked why, because I didn’t understand what she meant. Rosina had explained to me that the graveyard was not heaven. So why would Nursey say that Mickey was in heaven? Then she told me things about souls and spirits and bodies and death. I didn’t like it.

  My chest ached. And I remembered that this was how Mickey died. She had an ache in her chest that was so bad that she couldn’t breathe anymore.

  I pounded my chest and felt all of my body full of sadness and gray stir up like a pot of Joyful’s watery stew. My skin felt stretched under the strain of keeping all the ache inside. It needed to get out of me somehow.

  But how? Would it eventually seep out of me—out of all my open spaces—or would it crack my skin open and give me those stretchy scars like Mother had on her belly?

  Angel stood in my view now—between my eyes and M. Randall. He didn’t need to say anything for me to hear him. He was crying and then my face was wet too and there was a lot of screaming and scratching and hair pulling—all things I did to myself.

  Everything hurt if I quit and then Angel—who had grown much taller than me—wrapped himself so tight around me I couldn’t move my arms. He pulled me down to the ground and wrapped his legs around me too.

  At first I struggled, and Nursey tried to pull him off. I felt restrained, like I’d seen Nursey do to Mother. But when my skin wasn’t tingling or re
ady to burst anymore, I realized the good Angel was doing. He was helping me—saving me—from exploding into all the dust and ashes Lorna talked about.

  “Brighty.” Nursey’s voice finally cut through all my noise. “Slow down and breathe.”

  She said it like she thought I could just do it. But I couldn’t. It wasn’t as easy as all that.

  “All things bright and beautiful,” Angel began, quoting the song I’d learned long ago. It calmed me. By the time he was on his third go-around, I was able to breathe out the words with him as I was tucked away inside the arms of my guardian angel. Nothing could hurt me now.

  1933

  Misunderstood Brighton

  I hadn’t been outside in weeks. My view of the outdoors was masked by the cardboard and newspaper Nursey had put over my bedroom window to try to keep out the icy drafts. The hospital was always cold in the winter—colder than cold. The ice crystals formed in pretty designs on the inside of the windows, but it also made us all shiver at night. The outside light made the inside bearable, and without it all I had were these four walls. This left no space for the stench to seep out, so we breathed the air of what smelled like the dying remains of once free and joyful lives. At least the winter had a heavenly appearance, with its fluffy and white dreams cast everywhere. But also like heaven, it was out of reach to me.

  I was ten now, so I knew the graveyard wasn’t heaven. When people died, their bodies went under the ground but their souls went to this magical place called heaven. That’s where people sang and floated around with the angels. Rosina said the streets were gold and the gate was made of pearls. It sounded as fanciful as Wonderland, but instead of the Queen of Hearts, God lived there. I asked her once to tell me what rabbit hole I needed to fall through to find it, and she said, “Only through death, chica,” and then she crossed herself. It made me wonder why we cried when somebody died and they got to go to heaven. Shouldn’t we cry because we have to stay?

  At least when it was this cold, mean old Dr. Wolff would allow the staff to provide old sweaters and bathrobes to the patients who wouldn’t peel them off right away or destroy them—or pee on and soil them. Mine, as usual, was oversize, but it was warm. I still wasn’t allowed out of my room much, but Nursey made sure that Angel could visit often—his nurses had to agree too. He would run through the basement tunnels, stop by the kitchen to pilfer a few bites of food, then come to my room. Mother was usually sitting in the dayroom or in some therapy, like the rest of the patients. So we had the room to ourselves. We didn’t have anyone who taught us anymore. We just learned on our own now. And played games and made up stories, like what we would be when we grew up and what sort of house we’d live in someday. Our days were slower and slower when it was wintertime.

  “Nursey’s going to be upset if you keep pulling at that cardboard.” Angel followed rules better than I did. “You ruined the first one and remember how cold you were until it was replaced.”

  I sighed and slumped down on my bed. He was right, as usual. He hunched over a book with his magnifying glass so he could read. He’d changed so much since we’d first met. He was so tall now, and his voice had plunged like a raindrop. It made him sound much older and smarter—like he actually knew what he was talking about.

  Maybe he did.

  “Remember when Betsy played in the snow?” I said and jumped on my cot, making it creak like Lorna’s knees, upsetting his reading. When we read Understood Betsy recently I felt I’d found a friend. Betsy had had a strange upbringing too—not as strange as mine—but she eventually had a family. Maybe I would too.

  “Nursey promised us we could on the first snowfall,” he said.

  “Do you think she’ll actually tell us when it snows, though?” Nursey was more like a mom than Mother in a lot of ways, but I started to wonder about some of the things she told me, like that I couldn’t leave this dirty hospital unless someone came to get me even when I was all grown up because of something called laws. Surely when I was older I could just leave. Angel too. Why would we have to stay?

  “It’s only November and I can see out my windows.”

  He put his fat science book down on our stack of schoolbooks. Besides science there were a few novels and poetry books, math, and a dull McGuffey Reader.

  “I don’t know why any of this matters if what Nursey says is true and we’ll never be allowed to leave.” This frightened me and made me feel like my body was full of tears and like I wanted to scream. Like all the sadness and meanness inside of me were wrapped together.

  When Mickey died last year I’d had my first real fit. That’s when things changed. I hated living at Riverside, and someday I would leave—no matter what Nursey said. I looked at Mother’s empty bed and imagined leaving her behind. Or maybe she’d be in heaven by then. H. Friedrich would mark her spot. I took a deep breath.

  Things were different for Angel and me too after he’d wrapped himself around me like a camisole jacket and held me as tightly as he could. It felt safe.

  Angel pushed our books to the back of the wall under the bed in the heavy silence my comment had created. He was around thirteen now, and while we’d seemed the same age for a few years, we didn’t anymore. He wasn’t scared like he had been when we met, and he smiled all the time now. But there was something in his eyes that was less playful somehow.

  I understood it, really, but I stuffed it far down to my toes—otherwise I was sure Mother’s sort of sadness would creep in through my skin and be my sadness too. I loved Mother, but I didn’t want to be like her.

  Angel slid himself out from under the bed and smoothed down his summer cloud hair. It fell on his even whiter forehead and to his nearly invisible eyelashes. He tilted his head to look at me, and I knew he wasn’t sure why schooling mattered either.

  But he gave me a smirk, then sat with me with his arm around my shoulders.

  “If Nursey says schooling matters—even in here—then it does. Even with the laws, I think she’ll get us out of here someday. She’ll figure something out,” he said. “I think.”

  I didn’t say anything. I was only ten, yes, but I wasn’t sure I believed him. I did have fantasies of my father rescuing me, even though he’d never visited or written me. I didn’t even know his name or what he was like. What would it be like to be with him instead of Mother? I didn’t like to think on that too long, because she needed me. I was glad that every night I could see her thin form and know there had been a time when we were one. Maybe she knew me then.

  “When we’re adults, she’ll help us get out, and Dr. Woburn does almost anything she asks.” His hope kept him talking and smiling. “Surely he’ll help if she asks.”

  “I’ve seen them kiss.” My face wrinkled up.

  “They’ve been kissing for a while. You’re only now noticing it?” He lay back on the bed, so I did too, and we stared up at the ceiling.

  “Do you think we’ll get married someday?”

  “To each other?” He sat up and his eyebrows reached his hairline.

  “Gross.” I slapped him and he fell back down next to me.

  We were quiet for a moment.

  “I think they’re going to get married,” I said.

  A few hours later, Nursey breezed in after her shift. She sent Angel back, brought me my tray of disgusting dinner, and then I did what I did every night: I complained about eating alone. She reminded me that it wasn’t healthy for me to eat in the ward cafeteria. “Remember when I had to pry a patient’s hands off of you.”

  But that didn’t stop me from remembering that everything had changed since Mickey’s funeral when I’d had a fit. She was afraid I was becoming like them. Like the incurables.

  It wasn’t quite my bedtime when she tucked me in as tightly as a thin blanket could tuck. She sat on the edge of my bed, and her eyes were so big and blue, and I felt five years old again. It reminded me of how I used to tell her almost daily that I wished she was my mother. It wasn’t because I didn’t love my actual mother but because I kn
ew if Nursey was my mother she wouldn’t have to leave me every night and I would have a real home.

  “Can you be my mother?” I asked her again, even though I felt guilty because I was old enough to know the answer.

  “Brighton,” she started.

  “Never mind.” I turned over and faced the wall.

  The door creaked open—I didn’t have to look to know it was Aunt Eddie bringing Mother. Nursey got up and put Mother to bed, turned off the light, and returned to me.

  “You know I love you like you were my own.” She rubbed my back.

  “Why can’t you take me home?” I turned to face her. “I know about adoption. I read the entire A encyclopedia.”

  “It’s not that easy. And besides, I’m not married. A woman like me can’t just adopt a little girl. And you’re not an orphan.”

  I looked over at Mother. She was staring straight up at the ceiling. That wouldn’t last all night, but it would for a few hours. She’d had surgery a few months ago that was supposed to help calm her. It was called sterilization. I knew it meant she wouldn’t bleed anymore and could never have another child.

  The surgery didn’t change anything, though.

  “I wish I was like other girls and lived in a real house with a real father and mother.” This wasn’t new.

  I returned my gaze to Nursey. Her eyes were shiny.

  “Don’t marry Dr. Woburn.”

  “What?”

  “You’ll leave me if you do.” My lungs squeezed tight.

  “I won’t ever leave you.”

  She said it like she meant it, but she didn’t say she wouldn’t marry him. My hand banged my chest, trying to force my breathing to calm.

  “I won’t marry him. I’ll never leave you.” Even though she whipped those words out of her mouth like a syringe of insulin to calm a patient, her eyes left mine. And her quiet was darker than the room.