A/N: Hi, um, sorry I took so long to update. My power was out for like a week thanks to Sandra Dee, then school started happening again and it was all a mess. Anyway. Now you have a new chapter. Please review if you like it, and if you don't like it, stay away. JK. Constructive criticism is always welcome.
After Cat finds her ticket there is no question between the girls that they are going. If this had been before her parents and Trina, Tori would have so many questions about this, she would be trembling, she might not even go. Of course Tori's not thinking properly now and it's all she wants, this fantasy of this manor. Cat has started to wonder if she's gone truly psychotic, lost everything like Colin lost everything, like Tori is a fantasy she just made up and these train tickets are part of it. That would explain hers just sort of appearing in the ground. She asks one of the doctors, her primary doctor Dr. Ryan, if he can see Tori, too. Dr. Ryan just stares at her and tells her that Tori is very much real. Cat believes him, because she's pretty sure that they don't encourage people to have imaginary friends. Colin had a couple of imaginary friends, long past the time that he was supposed to. They went away when he sailed through high school, and then they flickered back in and out once he came back from France. Cat thought it was fun, when they were little, because Colin's older and most older brothers don't like to play pretend with their little sisters. She felt lucky; she never thought there was anything wrong with him, not until after the war.
Tori has started mumbling to herself, which Cat hardly notices because almost everyone she knows mumbles to themselves. She does it, too, sometimes, but usually she sings instead of talks. Her mother liked – well, Cat supposes she probably still likes it – old jazz music from the '20s and her father always sang cowboy songs, and Cat likes those, but her favorite is Show Boat. Tori doesn't sing when she mumbles, which Cat thinks is a shame because she likes Tori's voice when she hums the old lullaby at night after she believes Cat's fallen asleep, after she believes Cat can't hear her. Tori wouldn't sing Show Boat, because you can't dance to it. Cat guesses that Tori would like swing, but she doesn't know, because they don't ask each other about that kind of thing. But the doctors, the doctors – they've noticed Tori's mumblings and grumblings, so quiet no one knows the words. It makes them giddy, they think she's finally starting to accept the reality of her situation, to process it. Cat knows better, because of their secret. That's how she knows she and Tori are friends, because they have a secret together. She and Colin had a lot of secrets, none of which Cat remembers anymore. This bothers her some nights, and she'll stay up late, scribbling on the wall with charcoal until something comes out. In the morning the orderlies shake their heads, wash off the words, steal Cat's charcoal, shove her into more therapy sessions with Dr. Ryan and his head in his hands. Then in about a month they think she'll be alright this time, give her charcoal and a warning, and wait for her to write again.
"Are you ready?" They aren't give coats, not in their rooms, so Tori has put on all three of her white outfits. It looks funny against her skin and her hair, but Cat can't say why she thinks this. She doesn't know.
Cold has never been a problem for Cat, so she only has on her regular gown. But three pairs of socks, because her toes get chilled and then they feel like they might fall off, and Cat doesn't want to lose her toes. Colin knew people in the war who lost their toes in the snow. "Yes."
"You'll be cold."
"I know." Cat flings their tied-together bed sheets out the window and into the back yard. There's a fence around the asylum, but Cat's old roommate taught her where she'd cut a small hole into it, one covered by the bushes and branches that lived under the barbed wire. When Colin saw a concentration camp in France, he said there was barbed wire around that fence, too, a fence so long that your fogged-up breath clouded the end of it. He would draw it on paper sometimes after dinner, loops and loops and loops that looked more like a telephone cord than a line of barbed wire to Cat.
They've already gotten the bars of the window with a screwdriver that Cat's old roommate had gotten from one of the orderlies she was fucking. The bars came off easy, attached to the windowsill with a couple of hinges. Cat put the screwdriver back in its hidey-hole, a secret compartment in Tori's dresser between the final drawer and the bottom of the furniture. Cat's old roommate had fucked one of the orderlies into making that for her.
Tori knots the end of the sheets around her bed post, leans out the window. "It doesn't go all the way to the ground."
"We don't need it to." Cat sticks her head next to Tori's and points to a marble ledge on the window below them. Next to the ledge is a long black drain pipe with perfect stepping stones, rings around the circumference where it's been bolted together. Tori shivers as she realizes what they're about to do.
Cat slips out first, shimmies down the sheets and onto the ledge. She leans over to the pipe, and for a moment her stomach catches like she's about to fall, but her tiny fingers grip the pipe enough for her to swing her legs over. Holding steady she walks her down, down, down. The metal is slippery under her hands, and chilly. Cat wonders about Colin's stories, about how she never thought to ask if people lost fingers in the snow, too, or if they lost them from something else, something worse. She knows people must have lost fingers – it was a war, and that's what a war means: people lose things. Even the winners, they lose something on the way. Cat presses her body flush against the pipe, angry protests from the goose-bump surface of her skin, but she keeps going. Above her the pipe begins to shake from Tori's weight now pressing on it, and Cat almost panics, her whole body feels like it's in pieces and she can only control one bit at a time, and that won't be enough because she's slipping away, slipping away, and Colin's not there and it's not pretend –
"Cat!" Tori hisses. But – no, not a hiss, Tori's same old voice in the same old tone, just a little louder. "Why did you stop?"
"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to." Cat takes shallow breaths and turns them into deep exhales, her legs shaking as she forces herself to go on. At least there's no wind tonight.
When her feet finally hit the ground, Cat runs over to the fence and picks her way to through the rose bushes next to the daisies, pokes around at the bottom of the metal until she finds a piece she can lift. Without hesitation she wriggles her tiny frame through the gap and falls out on the other side on her knees.
Tori joins her much more gracefully a few moments later, side-stepping a still supine Cat to breath on the ground outside, the free ground. "Cat," Tori says, "you're bleeding."
Cat looks down at her arms, which are indeed zig-zagged with tiny cuts and scrapes and even one long scratch that goes from just after her wrist to just before the inside of her elbow. But she's not bleeding, they're the kind of cuts that squeeze out one or two drops of blood and then shirk away, or the kind that go red around the edges and just look like they might bleed if you push on them too hard. "I guess I got them from the roses." Cat gets herself up off the ground and looks over at Tori, Tori who is already walking ahead of her, Tori who got through the roses with no cuts and no scars.
"We won't have to go back," Tori says as though this has just occurred to her. "No matter what happens at the manor, we still don't have to go back. We're already out."
Cat has been thinking of this during the whole walk into Elroy as she shuffles behind Tori. They haven't been singing, like Colin used to whenever he and Cat would walk in the farms around their hometown. Well, Colin whistled, because he couldn't sing but he could whistle better than anyone Cat has ever known. "What would we do if we got out?"
"We could get jobs. It doesn't have to be in Elroy, we could go wherever we want, as long as it's not back there."
"I might want to go back."
"Why?"
"What's that supposed to mean?" Cat thinks of Bethany and the garden and Marge and Dr. Ryan. She thinks of the hard floors and her knitting and the pills that swim down her throat every morning. For the first time she notices that Tori has a small bag – or, really, a handkerchief tied at the top and weighed down with something square. No matter what, Tori was never going to go back. Cat thinks this is stupid, because she's only been their a little while, not long enough to know if she might like it.
Tori doesn't respond to Cat's question and simply continues down the road. One car has driven by during the time they've been walking, no more than that. Elroy's not a very rich town, and it's also small, so most people don't bother with having a car at all, especially when there's a train that goes to Buckworth, where they have a steel factory that most of the men in Elroy work at. One of the men at the asylum, Terry, used to work there until one day he just started to pick up the pieces of steel, heave them on his shoulder, and aim them at people while he made gun noises. Cat likes Terry, and she knitted him three pairs of socks, because he's the only man in the asylum who has been to France. But they're not friends.
Elroy is an hour walk from the asylum, though the tiny lights can be seen when there's still twenty minutes left of the walk to go. It's orange, which is something Cat has always found funny about lamps in the darkness. Like it's always Halloween at night, if you're at the right place. Elroy is orange and hazy with one big spot of white, probably for the only gas station in town, which Cat remembers because her mother stopped to fill the car up there before they continued to the asylum. As far as she can recall Elroy has a sweets shop, a big restaurant with a few rooms to let, a post office, a bank, and a feed store. There might be other things there, but Cat could only focus on so much as they moved through the town. She's sure there must be a church or two tucked away behind the shutters of the houses, a graveyard keeping watch over Elroy's dead. She missed those, on the way in.
"What do you think the mansion will be like?" Tori asks. "Have you ever been to one?"
"Once," Cat says. "My brother danced naked in front of one and we had to go pick him up. Then the mansion people invited us inside so they could yell at us."
"It won't be like that," Tori says. "I bet it will be nice. We lived in a good house, but it wasn't a mansion."
Cat thinks about how friends are people who share secrets, and who is a person who has many secrets that they don't share? Is there a number of secrets you have to share to have it mean something, to be more of a friend than a loner. Cat doesn't know. She doesn't think she has any secrets, but those are the worst kind. Colin didn't think he had any, but he had many that they just couldn't stop spilling once they got started. They spilled all out of him and ruined the carpets and the couches.
"We're here," Tori says, but she doesn't stop walking, because they're not quite there, not yet. They've hit the outskirts of Elroy. On their right is the white light of the gas station sign, a convenience store behind the array of pumps with a man's face settled in its window. Tori catches his eye and immediately looks down, while Cat just keeps on staring. They're too far away to make out any of his facial features. He doesn't seem too bothered, too angry, too upset with them for walking down the middle of the street so late at night, and dressed like they are. Cat shivers.
Between the two of them Tori seems to keep up the chatter. She's never been to a town like this before, isolated in her big house in her big suburb. Tori only knew her next-door neighbors, Cat knew everybody, even the people she wasn't supposed to know and the people she wished she didn't. The chatter barely registers to Cat, the way Tori talks like she's never believed in towns like this before. Like they existed as little pit-stops for weary travelers to pick up some gas, some food, some rest. Like she didn't realize the people who pumped the gas and served the food and watched over the resting slugged home at the end of the night to live what little of their lives belonged to themselves. Cat imagines her father back at his candy store in Collingswood, slipping an extra lollipop into the bags of his tiniest customers, her mother doing a stealthy sweep of the aisles. She imagines what they would do if the world worked like Tori thought, if they would just freeze at closing and shake awake an hour before opening. That might have been better, Cat thinks, for her and Colin – it might have saved, well, it might have saved her. It wasn't their parents that broke Colin.
Cat looks around for the church she knows has to be in Elroy, because they're in Nebraska and there are churches everywhere in Nebraska. When she lived with her parents they went to church every Sunday, and Cat loved being able to wear her prettiest dresses, ones that had to gather dust until church and holidays, because Cat was too wild, too dirty to wear them to school. They wouldn't be pretty if she wore them too often, her mother said. Sometimes Cat had to leave church early, because she couldn't sit still and the pastor wouldn't let her walk around while he talked. She never understood this; she still listened to him, and couldn't he see that she heard him better when she was moving? Besides, wasn't being idle something the devil liked? If Cat was walking around she could walk just a little, just a little faster, and he'd never be able to catch her. Idle hands, the older she got the more idle they were, because they wouldn't let her run around anymore, it's why she's the way she is. They looked at her body and they said that it was time for her to grow up.
"I haven't been to church since the accident," Tori says, pointing. Behind the tailor's store on their left is the tippy-top of a steeple, just a bit of a cone and a cross bearing down over the main street of Elroy.
"I used to like it," Cat says. "But I went once in the asylum and it was different."
Tori nods and puts her hand on Cat's arm. This motion stops Cat in her tracks. Tori's hand is warm and soft and small, and it's been a long time since Cat's been touched without "Come on, Cat, we need to go this way," or "If you just settle down, Cat, it won't hurt so much." Colin's last hug; her mother didn't touch her when they said goodbye, except to squeeze her shoulder. Cat had little red marks there from her mother's long nails for a few days afterward.
And they stay there like that, two sets of eyes on a hand on an arm. Cat clears her throat twice. "Tori...what are you – "
"I don't know, I just..." Tori shakes her head and takes her hand off. "Let's keep going."
They make a right turn off the main road into a little residential street, it could be Cat's own. There's even a toy truck in one of the yards exactly like the one Colin used to have, more paint chipped and one wheel missing, but it's so much like Colin's. When the next-door neighbors' cat had kittens, Colin and Cat put them in the back of the dump truck and drove them amongst the weeds.
"Look," Tori whispers, nudging Cat. At the end of the block is the ruins of the train station. Columns stand up like they once supported a roof that's no longer there, bits and pieces of it scattered across the deck. Trees stand opposite the station, Elroy's tiny oasis of civilization dissolving into the unknowns of Nebraska wilderness, the railway tracks serving as a barrier. The whole thing is not nearly as intimidating as Cat expected it to be – in fact, it's sort of peaceful, like the train station has served its purpose and is now in a nice retirement. No more feet treading on its back and no more weight held up by its bones, just its skeleton left to look at the forest. Cat thinks this doesn't sound like a bad way to end her own days.
Their own footsteps are soft on the wood. Tori clutches her handkerchief bag closer to her chest. Cat pulls her ticket from her pocket and runs her fingers over and over and over it. She waits for Tori to dig hers out of her bag and together they step to the edge of the platform, their tickets waving in the sudden wind.