The chapel was located in the back of the entrance hall, behind the Virgin Mary and below the Stairway toHeaven. Hidden, almost as if the architect who designed the building knew what the place was about, what atrocities it'd witness. Secluded, as if the architect was ashamed of the part of the building. I'd never knew it existed. In fact, the door was so camouflaged with the wall and shadows around it, that you'd see nothing unless you looked up close. The chapel, the only reminder that the asylum was built and managed in the name of the Lord.
I stood in the door way, on the opposite side of the big cross, where Jesus Christ bowed his head. The faint moonlight came through the large windows, which was enough for my eyes to observe the place.
"I must admit," I said, "I'm having a hard time believing you actually brought me in here."
Mary turned around. "I beg your pardon?" Her voice, even in a murmur, echoed.
"A gay person here in your, what, holy place, sanctuary." I spoke in a quieter tone. "Right? I thought you hated that stuff."
She thought for a second. "I firmly believe that our door should be open to everyone, regardless of who they are. We offer shelter and bread to murderers and thieves. I don't see why we shouldn't do the same to homosexuals."
She turned her face towards one of the decently big, non-tainted windows. The light shone upon her golden bangs, and in her eyes, the moon gave stars. As she walked, the thick carpet on the aisle muffled the clicking of her heels.
I followed and sat beside her, at a safe distance, on one end side of the third row from the front.
"Besides," she said. "I only brought you here because this is the only place you could see the sky in peace."
She looked at the moon again, and I followed her gaze. It seemed, somehow, a bit smaller and further, than the moon I remembered. They say the skies get higher in autumn.—I'd never really understood why people think that. But, right now, after weeks of captivity, it really did look high.
"Does Jude share the same sentiment?" I asked. "About sheltering gays, I mean?"
"I don't know." She shrugged with her gaze on her fingers, fiddling in her lap. "I hope she does, but even if she doesn't, it doesn't change how I feel."
The wolves howled again.
"You're full of surprises, you know that?" I said. "One moment you are this little blind, helpless puppy, and another blink, and you are an entirely different girl when I least expect it. Someone who's a little more . . . rebellious, letting me out of my cell, brushing Jude off and whatnot."
Her eyes locked with mine, sort of weary, sort of dispirited.
"I like it. I'm not accusing you of anything, okay?" I said. "I like the sparks, the fire in you when you drop all the benevolent façade and just glare. It gives you humanness, I think."
"I don't glare."
"You did with me, in the bakery this afternoon. You wouldn't stop glaring at me after I . . ." After I blatantly called you an emotionally neglected child.
The picture was fresh in my memory. Her eyes flared, like one of those paintings that seem to follow you whenever you move. She looked at me and me only, relentlessly, poor bread dough enduring her excessive attention. "May I offer to upgrade your eye-fucking to a three-way?" Spivey's vulgar laugh barely reached my ears.
She didn't come close to me during the shift, or after it, but I could feel her heat even across the room, burning my skin at an excruciatingly slow rate. She was like the winter sun.
I ran my fingers through my greasy hair. "I was thinking about you tonight, what I said to you."
She looked down. I thought I saw her grip on the crucifix tighten.
"It was unfairly harsh," I said, "and unnecessary. Unnecessarily harsh." I sighed, and it resonated in the deserted chapel louder than I'd expected. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said those things just because I could."
Her eyes rose from her lap, and stared at me, wide-eyed, but not quite in the same way as her glaring. Perhaps, the same staring when she found me—or I found her—in the woods the fateful night. Baffled, bewildered, as she stared.
"I hope you forgive me," I said. "But I understand if you don't want to."
Then, the corners of her lips turned upward slightly, as though she was trying to determine whether to smile or not. "You are . . ." She bit her bottom lip. "Full of surprises, Miss Winters."
I gave an innocuous tilt of my head.
"I never imagined I'd occupy your mind like that." she shook her head. "I never imagined you'd care about me like that."
"I'm not as conceited as you might think."
She laughed—actually laughed—with her cigarette-stain-free teeth illuminating in the dark, shrugging her shoulders, ducking her head a little, as if she was being tickled. It wasn't loud or carefree, though, like a baby would do. Instead, it was the kind of laugh that echoed inside you, pulled a gentle grin out of you. Irresistible and radiant.
I realized, it was the first time she ever smiled in front of me.
"Yes, I know that now," she said.
I raised my brows. "So you admit you thought me arrogant?"
She tightened her lips, and allowed the silence to take over for a second or two. I saw her eyes stare into space. They were blank, as she seemed to immerse herself in recollection.
"At first, I did." Her voice was soft. She turned her head away just a little. "The way you sniffed around, and the way you continued to act like you owned the world even in your hospital gown . . ."
"Well, Superman is still Superman without his cape."
She gave a tiny smile, reserved. Her hand rose to toy with her crucifix again. "You're right," she said. "But I was so foreign to your kind that I don't think I was seeing things without any prejudice."
"My kind? Gays, you mean?"
There was hesitation, and her gaze slowly drifted away. "Confident people," she said, "is what I meant . . ."
"Oh."
"But, I can't deny that it troubled me, too. Your . . . sexuality. I regret my shallowness now, because you were so much more than the one simple word."
"It's nice to be reduced to your sexuality once in a while." I shrugged my shoulders. "You get to be locked up in an insane asylum if you're lucky."
She smiled and grimaced simultaneously, which made her appear to be on the verge of tears. But there were no tears in her eyes, as she took a slow, deep breath. "How could you stay so confident? Where does it come from?" It sounded like she was just talking to herself.
"It's just who I am, I guess," I said.
Her eyes rose, and met mine. Just for a split second. "I envy you," she said. "I wish I had a fraction of what you have."
"It's never too late."
"But I don't know how to." She shook her head, her voice wavering. "I never learned to be that way."
I love your cocky attitude, Lana, but you make me feel painfully inadequate.
Wendy, who owned my heart for the last five years, was such a frail-souled woman. Problems—tiny inconveniences I wouldn't exactly call such—used to upset her. At least once a month, I'd find her sobbing in distress, crumpled tissues in her hand, in the bed. She'd have a thick blanket covering her tousled mocha hair and the rest of her thin figure, like it was her fortress.
It was job-related issues more often than not. Men made advances to her as soon as they learned she wasn't seeing any man, absolutely oblivious to the reality inside the closet. Women offered their sorry smiles, as she revealed her singledom, and proceeded to set up blind dates for her. Her reluctance was mere shyness in their eyes. And kids—the little demons in her precious class—did what kids do. Mimicked their adults, without much awareness of the toxicity of their words.
I think that's what got her the most, the kids. She loved them like her own.
"C'mon, honey, you know better than to listen to those morons," I one day said, tucking a strand of her hair behind her ear. "They are nothing. They're like those nameless villagers in Shakespearean plays who have no purpose other than to fill the empty spots. And you— You're the Portia, you're the Beatrice, you're the Viola."
And Wendy sniffed once, raised her eyes to me, and said—
"You were right, Miss Winters," Mary said.
"About what?"
She ducked her head. Behind her the stars were disappearing outside the window, the high redbrick walls re-emerging on a white-blue canvas of sky. Birds took off from one of the high trees. And as they did, Mary sighed. I saw her eyelashes tremble.
"About you— About me being afraid of you," she said. "From the moment I first saw you. I was— There's something about you . . . so many things I don't have, I can't have." She drew a deep breath. "You exist, and somehow the world starts to exist for you."
"I'm not sure if I follow."
Dry laughs escaped her lips. "I'm not making any sense. I'm so sorry."
"No, don't be." I sat up so I could look into her face. "Keep talking, maybe I can keep up."
"Oh, but it's boring. I don't want to bother you."
I tried to hold her hand, or wrap my arm around her shoulders. Something. I don't know why. All I knew was that somehow I felt like she needed it. Some kind of physical contact. To feel the warmth of another person's skin. But part of me feared, if I ever did touch her, she might assume there was a non-innocent intention.
So, I kept my hands in my pockets, and told her it was nonsense. Whatever her story was, it was surely more interesting than having to listen to Dominique on end. Then, although she remained doubtful at first, she began to speak, a sentence at a time, sorting out her thoughts as she went.
"I was an accident," she said. "That's what she used to tell me when I was a child."
"Who is she?"
"My biological mother. My parents didn't want me, they weren't married to each other. As I grew up, she never told me anything else about my father. Then, she died when I was twelve, and I was sent to Pen state to live with my father. And his wife. And their daughters."
"I'm sorry to hear that."
She smiled. "They changed my last name to theirs, so I wouldn't feel left out." She shook her head. "I was Mary Eunice Bishop until I was seventeen." Her voice got one octave higher, as though it was the most ridiculous name ever.
"Were they ever mean to you?"
She paused, lifting her head, staring in the vague direction of the pulpit. "They were genuinely the kindest people I'd ever known. So different from the mean step-family archetype. They did everything they could to make me feel comfortable in their house."
"Their house . . . but not your house?"
She looked at me, with her wide eyes, and remained silent like that. I could hear her inner voice repeating my words, over and over again, trying to make sense of them. She moved her head slightly, but didn't quite give me a nod or a headshake.
"You never felt home," I said.
"Kindness isn't always the same thing as love," she said. "Sometimes, kindness without love can be stifling." Then she hung her head, like she was ashamed, of her own words, of her life. "I always wished I could go back to being a McKee, even if I stayed an orphan."
For the first time, I felt sorry for her.—I'd felt sorry for her, for her naiveté. I'd had pity on her. But it didn't prick my heart then, not like this.
"You're a McKee now, aren't you?" I said.
She gave a nod.
"Do they know you are here?"
She shook her head.
"Did you run away?"
She, this time, nodded slowly. "I stayed there for five years. I wish I'd come here sooner."
Five years is such a long period of time, too long to spend feeling like you're a burden on someone's shoulders. It's a unique kind of guilt, feeding off your insecurities, infecting the very core of who you are. It consumes you. It becomes you. An inevitable spiral, with a death grip around your wrist as it drags you down the drain. And at the bottom of it for her was this hellhole, another drain waiting to swallow her whole.
"How long have you been here?" I asked.
"Almost five years," she said.
Her eyes darted to the world outside the window. She took a sharp breath, and the ghost of the sound disappeared down her throat. The blues of the sky were becoming brighter by the minute. There would be no clouds in the sky today. I studied her face, and wondered what her eyes were seeing. The birds, the trees, the white reflection of the sun on the walls—or the last five years flying by in front of her.
"Another five years of—" she gave me her frowny smile— "love-deprivation."
I hesitated. "You know I only said that to spite you."
"But you were right," she said. "I never felt truly loved. You didn't know the details of my life, but you still saw through me."
I wished I was a better liar, but I wasn't. There was no room for halfhearted solace, and even if there was, I didn't think that was what she was looking for.
I stared down at my feet that rested under the seat in front of me, clicking my toes like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. But my shoes were neither red nor sparkly, nor did they magically bring me home. They were originally white, with yellow and grey stains of God-knows-what. They were already like that when they'd handed them to me, which eloquently told how much they cared about inmates' sanitation. I wondered how many people had worn them before me, and what became of them.
Mary's black heels moved out of the corner of my eye. I looked up. She was standing and looking down at me with that stare.
"I need to get you back to your cell," she said. "People will be up soon."
"So soon? I thought we had more time."
I stood up anyway, walking sideway like a crab between the two rows of seats, stopping once I reached the aisle. Her unblemished hand slid across the backrests, as she walked in the same manner, steadying herself.
"Yes, but look, this is what you wanted, isn't it?"
"What do you mean?" I said.
"You said you were bored, and—" She abruptly tightened her lips, and gawked at her hand on a chair. "I mean, I wasn't bored, talking to you. But I obviously cannot speak for you."
I smiled at that. "You kept me quite entertained."
"Really?" Her eyes looked up at me through her bangs, as she chewed on her lip. "But I was only talking about myself. How could that be entertaining?"
"Sure, it wasn't exactly what I expected," I said. "But I'm glad you did, y'know?"
"You are too nice, Miss Winters." She smiled her sad smile again.
I stepped closer to her. "It was more than I could've ever wished for," I said. I lifted my chin in the direction of the door. "God knows I would've spent the rest of the night staring at the ceiling in my bed if it wasn't for you."
Then, soft chuckles escaped her lips. "I thought you didn't believe in God."
And I found myself looking at her with the same smile as hers. "Well, look at you, smartpants, pulling my gay leg for the heck of it."
Her giggles slowly died down. She looked down, as her fingers fidgeted. But her smile remained there, the light of early morning falling upon her face, making her look like a real-life statue of the Virgin Mary.
"Thank you, Miss Winters."
For what, I didn't know exactly, but I nodded anyway.
She turned around and opened the door. We walked down the soon-to-be-busy halls, obeying the no-talking rule. Although the sunlight was illuminating the vast place, it looked no less depressing or menacing. The light only created darker shadows. Even on the statue of the Virgin Mary.—She looked as though she was judging us, in silence, telling me that I had been seen.
Mary Eunice didn't so much as to glance at me. She hung her head, shrinking her shoulders, tensing up even at the sound of her habit rustling. And when we got back to my cell—the ward was still dead quiet—she finally looked up. The sparks were gone with the night.
I let the weak, helpless girl lock the door.
