The first time, Sophia had been thirteen and less than a month living with the Porters. By then she knew Jack, but he was still the tall, handsome son of her warden and Ruth had made it very clear he was off limits to the unruly barefoot Sophia.
One morning as she climbed into one of the many barn attics, she felt a sudden hot slash across her throat. Sophia fell from the ladder and sprawled on the dirt floor feeling a rush of hot sticky blood flowing into her throat and down her shirt. She started to scream, assuming that somehow, she had cut her throat except the sensation had left her. Only a dull aching where her head hit the floor remained.
Sophia had gingerly touched her intact throat and known someone had murdered a woman in that barn. Decades, maybe centuries earlier, but a man had cut her throat and left her to bleed to death on the dirt floor.
She shook the image from her mind and concentrated on the man in her room.
“How can I help you?” she asked.
“It is I who will help you,” the voice said, and the most wonderful sensation of warmth settled over her as if he had wrapped her in a blanket and hugged her through it. She closed her eyes and bit back the tears.
Every ounce of her body ached. Tied down the day before with cold, wet sheets, she’d lain for hours shivering until Dr. Kaiser’s nurse Alice released her, gave her a white paper-thin nightgown, and sent her to bed without supper.
At some point, she had lost track of the years and the other patients were of no help. One might say 1962 and another 1948 and yet another 2073. No one knew except the staff and the doctors told them to keep the date and the time of day to themselves. It disturbs the patients, they justified.
Sophia once watched a woman ask an older nurse for the date. She thought it might be her son’s birthday, she said. When the nurse refused, the woman grew upset, resorting to begging. Finally two orderlies, burly men with mean eyes, rushed into the room and removed the young woman. Sophia did not watch further, but she heard the woman scream and cry for her son, Jeremy.
Sophia thought of her own children every day, every hour, every minute. She imagined Hattie’s delicate hands drawing pictures and Jude’s infectious laughter. Peter had loved to play scrabble, for hours he could string together letters - docile, celestial.
Hardest of all were thoughts of Jack. Jack who had not written, called, or visited - ever. Jack whose plan to fake her death could not fail, his confidence sweeping her into another monumental mistake.
Jack who was dead.
Sophia knew because she saw him. He did not come to her in the institution as other apparitions had.
She saw him in a dream. They walked along a deserted country road. A stream of black crows followed them landing in the trees above, spitting angry shrill cries. Sophia clung to him, but Jack unwound his fingers and when she looked into his face, she saw most of his flesh had fallen away. White gleaming bone protruded from his chin, his eye sockets, the cavity of his nose. She had awoken at the asylum, screaming. Her beloved Jack had left her forever.
Dr. Kaiser closed the door behind him. Sophia listened to the sharp click as the lock slid into place. He sat on the end of her bed and regarded her through eerie blue eyes.
“I am hearing interesting stories about you, Sophia,” the doctor said, pulling a black pen from his pocket and rubbing his thumb along the pricked point.
Sophia blinked and pushed deeper onto her bed though the small cot left little space for retreat.
The latest treatment, administered two days before, had left Sophia exhausted and terrified. She remembered Kaiser with his latex gloves and long needle. Sweating and sick, but ravenously hungry, she had clawed at the restraints placed across her arms and legs. Eventually she fell into a deep sleep, a coma, she overheard the nurses say after.
“The insulin therapy may not be strong enough for your psychosis,” Dr. Kaiser continued. His eyes shone, and he smiled hungrily as he continued to massage his pen.
“I won’t tell the stories anymore,” Sophia said, willing to tell the doctor anything to avoid another dose of insulin. “I got carried away.”
It was a lie. When she had told Ellen her dead husband never left her side, it had been an enormous relief for the troubled patient. Sophia knew Ellen would keep her secret. But there were other patients. Patients who sat and drooled and stared into nothingness, but they listened and heard and told. They played the part of the fool to gather information, which they passed to the doctors for lenience and favors.
Sophia knew better than to speak in the presence of other patients, but that day Ellen suffered. She chewed her fingers and screwed her eyes tight whenever a loud noise sounded. Sophia only wanted to soothe her, to offer her a bit of hope from the other side.
Sophia woke to darkness and groped for the bedside light. Her arms felt heavy and her legs, like bags of wet sand. She tried to turn her head and peer into the room, but something rigid held her head in place. Breathing rapidly, she attempted to blink the darkness away, noticing that her straining chest also felt confined. Slowly, agonizingly, the memory of her whereabouts returned. The State Hospital - The Northern Michigan Asylum for the Insane.
Still, that did not explain the straps and the vice around her head. Who had bound her and why? She thought back to the previous night and remembered the nurse Alice arriving with her pills. She took them, crawled into bed and then nothing. A sedative then?
Minutes crawled by. She listened for voices, dripping water, footsteps - any sound at all. Someone had moved her to solitary. It was the only explanation. In her own room, light, even on the darkest nights, crept through the window. Only in solitary were all the senses deprived. Her heart rampaged within her inert body and she wiggled her fingers and toes to have some sense of autonomy.
She blinked and felt tears stream from her eyes. Her mouth felt gritty and dry and she longed to direct a tear toward her lips. She tried again to turn her head but found no give in the thick leather that drew across her forehead and chin.
“Somewhere over the rainbow,” she began to sing. It hurt her throat and made her desire for water almost unbearable, but she did not stop. “Way up high, there’s a land that I heard of once in a lullaby. Somewhere over rainbow the skies are blue. And the dreams that you dreamed of, really do come true.”
As she sang, she cried harder. The song transported her back to early motherhood. She sat rocking Jude in a chair that Jack had salvaged and refinished for her. It stood beneath the window in their bedroom, softened with a checkered quilt. Jack would hold Peter in bed while Sophia, Anne then, nursed and rocked her beautiful baby girl. Jude’s awe-filled brown eyes would watch her mother with that all-encompassing love that makes motherhood both so divine and so fragile.
“Yes.” A voice - honeyed, yet venomous - slithered across the room and turned Sophia’s body to stone.
She stopped singing and crying at once.
“Get it out. Release the demons within you Sophia. I hear their strangled cries, they want to be free.”
She could not see Kaiser, but knew he sat close. She had not heard his breath or detected even a trace of him when she first woke up, but he had been there for some time. Not watching her in the darkness, he too must be blind in the blacked-out room. What then? Waiting for her to wake up? Waiting to see what she would do or say if she thought herself alone and confined?
Sophia clenched her eyes against the tears that continued to flow. She hated him then more than ever before - hated him for polluting the memory of her daughter - hated him for whatever sickness drove him to hurt those he had been entrusted to care for. Every muscle in her body drew taught against her restraints and she knew that if he released her in that moment she would do her best to kill him with her bare hands.