“I helped her escape. Well, mostly my friend Kent helped her escape.”
“Your boyfriend?” Jude asked remembering what Lucy had told her.
Barbie offered a half smile and rolled her eyes.
“We called each other that, but it was a ruse. Kent is gay. Was. Kent was gay.” Barbie took her glass and swished the ice around before taking a long drink.
“He lived here with me except when he was working in the asylum, and then he came home on days off. We’ve lived together since we graduated from high school. Everyone assumed we were together, and it was safer for him if we didn’t correct them. I didn’t care either way. I date here and there, but commitment’s never been my thing. Kent made all that easier. My whole life, in fact.” Her lower lip quivered, and she stopped it between her teeth.
“I’m sorry about Kent,” Jude said, noticing for the first time the men’s flannel shirt hanging over a chair. Other remnants of him trickled through the kitchen too - a pair of worn loafers by the back door, a baseball cap hanging from the coat rack.
Barbie sniffed and shook her head.
“I was there the day Kent’s mom died. We were ten years old. Kent told me his mom was bringing us Popsicles and then we could walk across town to Georgette Hanson’s pool. It was one of those scorching summer days in August when you start to look forward to falling leaves and hot cocoa.”
Jude listened, not sure what Barbie’s story had to do with her own mother, but understanding when the damn broke, you let it flow - eventually all the water would run by.
“A policeman drove up Kent’s driveway. We were sitting in the grass braiding dandelions stems. Even when we were little Kent liked… girl things. He loved flowers and dancing and brushing my hair. I didn’t understand gay and straight then, but I felt more comfortable with Kent than I ever did with the girls I went to school with. The policeman got out and walked up to the door. When Kent’s dad answered, he took his hat off and held it over his chest, and I knew what that meant. I’d heard my Nani Elda tell the story of my uncle Freddy’s death in the second war. Kent didn’t seem to understand. He ran over and asked the policeman to take us for a ride. His dad slapped him right across the face.”
Barbie touched her own cheek and winced.
“It was so terrible. His dad didn’t cry, but sort of rocked on his feet until the policeman took him inside. Kent followed them in, and I waited for an hour in the yard, sweating, scared, but I had to wait. I knew I had to wait.”
Jude wrapped her hands around the glass of tea; the cold perspiration coated her fingers and palms. She thought of the day she learned her own mother had died. Gram Ruth’s harsh angry words and then emptiness, as if for a few moments the entire world stopped revolving. The memory hung suspended in Jude’s mind. She felt as if she looked at it glinting off the blade of a pendulum swinging back and forth, back and forth.
“When Kent came out he was crying and red in his face. He laid in the grass and wailed. It was his fault, he said. He demanded those fucking Popsicles and now his mother was dead.”
Barbie finished her glass and rose for another. This time when she held up the bottle, Jude nodded.
“Just a pinch.”
Barbie poured her a glass and returned.
“That experience bound us. Kent never got over it. The guilt tortured him. Until,” she paused and took a drink, “he met your mother.”
Jude frowned, swallowing her own gin and sinking deeper into her hard-backed chair as the blaze lit her stomach.
“My mother?”
Barbie nodded. “He heard about your mom around the ward, Sophia the Seer - a few of the orderlies called her though that name didn’t quite fit, he said. People claimed she spoke to the dead. He didn’t exactly believe it, but when he first told me about her, he had that dreamy look in his eyes. He would never bring it up though because he was terrified that his mother was angry with him. But then one day when he took Sophia’s pills to her room, she told him that his mother didn’t blame him.”
“And he believed her?”
Barbie smiled. “She told him much more than that, secret things that existed between him and his mom. He never doubted for a moment that your mother saw and spoke with his. He acted different after that day, Jude. His whole life became lighter.”
Jude didn’t know how to respond. The stories of her mother’s mediumship brought her to the edge of life‘s mysteries. Mysteries she’d spent a lifetime denying. Jude lived in a rational, practical world. She didn’t want to believe in ghosts - let alone her mother’s ability to see them.
“Your mom, Sophia, didn’t belong in the asylum. Kent didn’t know everything, but one particular doctor had taken control of her care when she was first admitted. The doctor did experiments on her.”
“Experiments?” Jude said the word, and it seemed to grow huge and ugly and wash the whole room in darkness.
Barbie nodded. “Kent snuck her out in the early morning when it was still dark. I waited in my car on the other side of the woods. He had laid a trail with bits of cloth so she could find her way. I took her to a cabin that Kent owned a few miles outside Traverse City.”
“When? When did all this happen?”
“Twelve days ago.”
Jude clutched the edge of the table. Lucy had been telling them the truth. Her mother had escaped. She lived!
“So, she is alive?”
“Yes. And the morning Kent freed her, he died in the hospital.”
“And you think someone murdered him?”
“I know they did. The hospital is calling it an accident while implying that your mother did it.” Barbie shook her head bitterly.
“Where is she now? Still at the cabin?”
Barbie’s face fell and Jude waited for the blow.
“I went to see her two days after the escape. I told her about Kent, but she’d already sensed it. Dr. Kaiser must have followed me. He showed up with a group of police searching for her. I helped her out a window, and she ran for the woods. That’s the last I’ve seen her.”
Chapter 24
September 1965
Hattie
Hattie stood before her full-length mirror. She’d started in a simple white dress with yellow flowers Gram Ruth bought her from a boutique years before. Hattie had never worn it. It looked too much like the frilly baby dresses Gram forced her into in the years after her mother died.
“She didn’t die,” Hattie reminded herself out loud. “They stole her.”
She shrugged it off and left it in a pool on the floor, putting on a dress Jude had given her, a hand-me-down.
The orange mini dress fell well above Hattie’s knees. Sleeveless with a white collar, her long pale arms seemed octopus-like jutting from the brightly colored fabric. It was all wrong on her, likely a perfect fit on Jude, but Hattie pulled down the hem with no luck and set about braiding her long blonde hair.
Hattie had seen Jude wear the dress with high boots or stylish heels, but Hattie owned only a pair of nude high heels that Gram Ruth had bought her, and the scuffed white flats Hattie wore whenever she wasn’t barefoot. She slipped on the heels and walked the length of her apartment feeling gangly and awkward.
“Better not,” she huffed, kicking off the heels and sliding into her well-worn flats. Hattie admired all things of beauty, but fashion had never made its way into her consciousness. Over the years she had tried a handful of times to mimic Jude’s sleek way of dressing, but shopping exhausted her, making clothes seemed impossible, and she didn’t much care how she looked.