Only the Beautiful, page 16
As I lie in the bed hearing the sounds of the institution coming to life, I know that my parents were right to fear the colors. They are dangerous. A dim memory of my father praying at my bedside when I was little comes to me. He pleaded with heaven for a miraculous favor. For the colors to leave his daughter. He was afraid for me. People will always distrust what they don’t understand. And what they distrust, they cannot love.
My father didn’t get what he asked for, but nor had he promised anything in return. I would do better than he had. I would offer something I loved more than life itself in return for my request.
I close my eyes. “I have failed everyone,” I whisper. “I know I have, but, God in heaven, in your great mercy, I ask for this one thing. I will give up my child to be someone else’s daughter if you will promise not to give the colors to her. Please don’t give them to her. Let this sacrifice of mine pay for what I’ve done and what I’ve failed to do. Please. I give my Amaryllis to you if you will do this one thing for me. This one thing.”
I pray this request again as a nurse comes into the room and releases me from the straps.
I pray it as I eat the soup and bread they bring to me.
I pray it for the five days I am in the infirmary recovering from my injuries and my surgery.
Dr. Townsend comes to see me on the sixth day, and he seems surprised and pleased to see me sitting up in bed, without the restraints, and eating my lunch.
“I’m so very glad to see how much you have improved since I last saw you,” he says.
“Yes,” I reply with little inflection. “I’m feeling better.”
He is watching me carefully. I can see the doubt in his eyes.
“I have made my peace with what you did to me.” My voice sounds older, like I have aged twenty years in the days between the attempt to escape and now.
“I think that’s wise. Very wise,” Dr. Townsend says. “Dr. Melson says you can return to the third floor if you like. To a different room, though.”
“All right.” I shrug. I don’t care about getting off the second floor; I don’t care that I’ll be in a different room on the third floor. I only care about my one prayer being answered.
“Perhaps you’d like to be wheeled out onto the lawn for some sunshine and fresh air.”
“All right.”
He gazes at me for several long moments before telling me he’ll arrange for an orderly to take me down. I don’t care that he stares in doubt at me. I only care about the prayer and the bargain I have struck.
After lunch, an orderly is dispatched to bring me down in the elevator in a wheelchair to the back lawn. Women loll about in the generous summer sun, some in little groups talking to one another, but most are sitting alone or standing alone. I do not see Belle.
“Is here okay?” the orderly asks as he wheels me under the shade of a sycamore.
“It’s fine,” I say. “Thank you.”
He leaves, and I look out over the grass, past the people, to the horizon beyond the fence. As I do, I whisper the memorized prayer. I am still saying it when someone crosses in front of me and stops.
It is Stuart.
“I’m sorry about what happened.” The boy looks and sounds tense with remorse. “About what I did.”
I stare at him a moment. “I suppose you were only doing your job.”
“Still,” he says. “I’m sorry. I should’ve held Belle back and let you go. I was just . . . mad at her. I was so mad at her I wasn’t thinking. I should’ve let you go.”
“I don’t know,” I say dully. “Maybe it’s for the best. Your father doesn’t think I’d be a very good mother. He’s probably right.”
We are quiet for a moment.
“They’re taking her today,” Stuart says a moment later. “Your baby. They’re taking her to some orphanage. I can find out which one if you want.”
I close my eyes a second to steel myself from reneging on my pact with the Almighty. We have an agreement as far as I’m concerned. I mean to keep my end.
“Thank you, but no, Stuart,” I say, eyes open again. “My daughter needs a home with a mother and a father who will care for her and provide for her. She deserves that.”
Stuart is quiet again. He seems disappointed, as though his finding out the name of the orphanage and passing on the information to me would have relieved him of some of his regret.
“Would you do something instead for me?” I ask him.
Stuart says nothing and waits.
“Would you make sure everyone knows my daughter’s name is Amaryllis? Will you make sure it’s written on the papers that they send with her? Her name is Amaryllis.”
“Ama . . . ?” The word is foreign to him.
“Amaryllis.” I spell it for him. “It’s the name of a flower. A very beautiful one.”
“I’ll make sure.” He turns and leaves me.
That night, when I go to bed in a different room in a different hall, I can feel that Amaryllis is gone from the nursery, gone from my life.
Tears slide down my face and into my mouth as I lie in bed—next to a new girl—and whisper the prayer.
* * *
• • •
When two weeks have passed and I have recovered sufficiently from my injuries and surgery, I begin working in the kitchen again and I return to morning classes. I spend my days doing what is asked of me and reading whatever I can get my hands on in the library, and my nights in my bed reminding God in heaven of our agreement. I wonder about Belle, where she is, and if she ever gives me a thought. I wonder if she has used the little silver key for herself and taken the money in Truman Calvert’s safety-deposit box. I didn’t tell her the name of the bank in San Jose, but has Belle been able to find out which one it is? Was it always her plan to take the travel bag and leave me stranded without it? I don’t want to believe that could be true. In my darker moments, when I miss Amaryllis the most, my thoughts tell me that Belle has betrayed me. But in the morning, I tell myself that surely she has not.
Dr. Townsend is no longer interested in “curing” me. Since he has been unable to eliminate the colors, the therapy sessions no longer consist of sound makers and electrodes but detailed questions and experiments about my other senses—what I taste on my tongue when I pat a dog or what I smell when I see a photograph of a clock. He seems disappointed that the colors are the only tangling of the connections in my brain, but he keeps at it, writing down every one of my answers even if the response to a given stimulus is no response at all. We also begin to have conversations about my readiness to reenter the world as a responsible adult who keeps her bizarre colors from being a burden on society—his words. It is a condition of my future release that I be able to hold down a job, live independently, and stay out of trouble.
“You’re not going to just be shown the door when you are deemed ready to live outside these walls,” he says to me one morning just before my eighteenth birthday. “You will be discharged under the state’s care into a situation where your progress will be monitored both at the licensed home where you will reside until your twenty-first birthday and at a place of employment that shall be arranged for you. I will decide when you are ready to make that transition to life outside, whether it’s this year or the year to come or the year after that. Once you have proven yourself fully capable of living your adult life without making foolish and harmful decisions, you will be released from custodial care, ideally on your twenty-first birthday. But that depends on you. Everything you do the next three years matters, Rosie. Be smart with your choices. Don’t do anything to spoil it.”
Three more years. Three.
His words are too much to contemplate. The heaviness of them has a color all its own, a shade of purple so dark it is nearly black. I leave the therapy room for my shift in the kitchen weighed down by those words and their dense hue.
The thought of possibly three more years in this place has sapped all strength from me, and it’s with immense effort that I put in my work hours in the kitchen for lunch. I decide I’ll head up to my room after the meal and lie down. I don’t care who frowns on me for it. When the serving line is finished and I start to dish up my own plate, the nurse who brings the residents’ mail during the lunch hour comes to the serving window.
“You’ve got a package, Rosie,” she says, handing me a small cardboard box with my name on it and no return address. It is the first time I have received anything in the mail, and the nurse who gives me the package studies me as she hands it over. The package, postmarked from Santa Barbara, has already been opened.
I look up at the nurse as I take it.
“We have to check incoming mail and packages,” she says. “It’s the rules.”
I lift the top of the small box. Inside is a tissue-wrapped bundle no bigger than a few saltine crackers stacked atop each other. Underneath it, there is a note on a folded piece of paper. I open it and read, Happy Birthday, Rosie! Hope you don’t mind I smoked the cigars. See you around . . .
I unfold the tissue paper and see that it isn’t ordinary tissue paper that the bundle has been wrapped in but a letter on onionskin paper. It’s Helen Calvert’s Christmas letter with the instructions on how to care for the amaryllis. I see her words to me and the words she penned to her brother, Truman.
I am right where I want to be.
Snuggled in the folds of Helen’s letter is my mother’s cloisonné pendant and the little silver key resting on the same chain. I clutch the necklace to my chest as tears prick at my eyes. Belle hasn’t forgotten me, nor has she taken what Truman left for me. Belle wouldn’t have sent the key if she had. I don’t care that the savings I had in the cigar box aren’t in the package, too. Belle needed that cash to stay free, to get to Santa Barbara. It is enough just to have my mother’s necklace and Truman’s key.
“We’ve a pretty good idea who that’s from, you know,” the nurse says.
I have nothing to say in response. It’s been three months since Belle escaped and there has been no word from her or about her. I am glad she can easily pass for someone over the age of twenty-one.
“Belle’s mother is concerned about her,” the nurse continues. “She shouldn’t be out on her own like this with no one to help her. She was getting good care here.”
“Was she really?” I say with only the slightest challenge in my voice.
“Yes. She was.”
“I don’t know where she is.”
The nurse exhales with a frown and shakes her head. “You should let me keep that necklace locked up for you in the administration wing. It looks expensive.”
I fit the clasp at the back of my neck and let the pendant and key slide on the chain down my throat to rest beneath the top button of my dress. “No, thank you. I’ll not be taking it off.”
“Suit yourself, Rosie. If it gets stolen, you can’t fault the hospital.”
“I’ll not be taking it off,” I say as I put Helen’s letter into my pocket.
The nurse shrugs and walks away with her little cart and her emptied mail basket.
I am not interested in eating anymore, and I do not want to head to my room, not now that I have the key and my mother’s necklace and Helen’s letter. I can see my future again, for the first time in too many weeks. A promise of a new life still awaits.
I go to the door that leads to the back lawn, even though an early autumn chill has settled over the yard.
As I step outside, I breathe in the cool air, drawing it into my lungs and relishing the tang of its wild taste. Air can’t be fenced or kept back or held in. It goes wherever it wants.
Air is free.
Someday I will be, too, though not soon enough. There doesn’t seem to be any way of getting to San Jose before my twenty-first birthday unless my next placement is with someone who will allow me some freedom. But that is not likely. I was caught trying to escape the state’s care. Freedom of movement is likely not something I’ll be trusted with again. Still, Truman Calvert has to know where I was taken. Has to know I still have his key and his secret. Celine and Truman both have to know I will not be stuck like this forever. Have to know the smartest thing Truman can do is leave that four thousand dollars in the safety-deposit box untouched. That money is mine. He paid for my silence with it. It is mine.
I now have five things that belong to me. The sun every morning, the cloisonné pendant, the silver key, Helen Calvert’s letter on how to care for an amaryllis, and the bargain I made.
Six things, actually.
I still have the colors.
18
OCTOBER 1939 TO OCTOBER 1940
I measure the long, bleak months between my eighteenth and nineteenth birthdays with little victories that most likely go unnoticed by everyone around me.
In February, I mark without despair the second anniversary of the accident that robbed me of my family, and in June, I survive the day of Amaryllis’s first birthday with only two short episodes of weeping, both of which I am able to hide from the staff. In August, I pass a proficiency exam that allows me to receive a modified diploma from the local school district.
There has never been another letter from Belle. No one mentions her name anymore. It’s almost as if she was never here. I’m thinking if she was caught, even if she was sent somewhere else, Dr. Townsend would tell me, if only to assure me that what he predicted—that she’d be found—did indeed happen. I miss her, but I’m glad she is still free, still in possession of everything inside her body that belongs to her and no one else. I want to believe she has found someone who truly loves her for who she is and not just her stunningly beautiful body. I want it so much I start to think it’s true.
As summer begins to wind down, there is finally talk of releasing me to a group home in the coming weeks, provided I continue with my progress. Continuing to progress is Dr. Townsend’s way of saying I must remain resolutely compliant—as in, no more escape attempts—and exhibit no highly charged emotional outbursts or bouts of melancholy, as well as zero resistance in my therapy sessions.
I manage these expectations, all while overhearing from time to time the nursing and kitchen staff speak in quiet tones about the ongoing war in Europe and whether or not the United States will get involved. I have learned from these hushed conversations that Germany has already invaded Poland, France, Holland, and five other countries. I’ve heard that Jewish men, women, and children in those countries are being persecuted in the most inhumane of ways. I’ve even heard the cook and the grocery deliveryman talking one day about the thousands of children who have been transported out of countries where the persecution is the worst, sent away on ships—without their parents—to England.
“Those little ones are veritable orphans,” the cook said. “They don’t know when or if they will see their parents again. Nobody knows.”
The deliveryman replied that these Kindertransports, as the newspaper called them, would stop because England is now at war with Germany. The last group of children left by ship from a Dutch port in May, one day before Holland surrendered to the Germans. There will be no more transports of children across the North Sea to England.
“Any child still in Europe will have to live through the hell of war, just like their parents will,” the deliveryman said.
“If they can,” the cook replied.
I saw ribbons of pastel yellow and gray when the cook and the deliveryman were talking about those children, pulled from their parents’ arms and taken to a foreign land where they knew no one or even the language spoken there. I ached for those children. I ached for Amaryllis. I ached to feel my own mother’s arms around me.
On the day of my nineteenth birthday, a Saturday, Mrs. Crockett comes to my room just after breakfast and tells me Dr. Townsend has a surprise for me and wants to see me in his office. She also has a button-down dress on a hanger over her arm. Red polka dots on a field of yellow cotton.
“The dress is a birthday gift from Mrs. Grissom. Isn’t it pretty?”
“Mrs. Grissom?” I haven’t heard the woman’s name mentioned since the day I arrived at the institution. Not a single time.
Mrs. Crockett cocks her head. “You remember her, don’t you?”
“Of course I remember her. She brought me here. I haven’t seen her since.”
“Oh. We’ve seen her, dear. Every four or five months, she stops by to talk to Dr. Townsend and get an update.”
“Why doesn’t she ever talk to me?”
Mrs. Crockett smiles. “She doesn’t need to, Rosie. We fill her in on your progress. We’re all pleased with how you’ve come along. Very pleased. Go ahead and put on the new dress. I think you’ll be glad you did. And then I’ll take you down. As I said, Dr. Townsend has a nice surprise for you.”
I step out of the plain blue day dress that all the female patients wear and slip on the new one. It smells like it has just come from the store. The fragrance is one I haven’t experienced in such a long time. The buttons feel slick in my fingers.
“Shall we go, then?” Mrs. Crockett says brightly when I am finished.
I follow the matron out of my room, out of the C wing, and down the stairs to the first floor. Mrs. Crockett uses her key to open the door to the administration wing, and we step inside. The last time I was in that hallway, it was the middle of the night, Amaryllis was in my arms, and Belle was opening a closet door to fetch my travel bag.
We walk down the hall toward Dr. Townsend’s office. As we pass the records room, I catch a glimpse of Stuart inside it. I only see Dr. Townsend’s son on occasion now that he is involved in sports at school and practicing every day after class. We have not spoken much to each other in the year that Amaryllis has been gone. In truth, I think Stuart has avoided me the last fifteen months, perhaps because regret over what happened on the night of the attempted escape still haunts him. He must still wish he’d allowed me and my baby to flee. I’m not sure I still wish that anymore. I have protected Amaryllis the only way I could with the bargain I made. Wishing to have her back isn’t part of the deal. Stuart glances at me as I pass him, and he raises a hand in greeting.
