Chapter Eighteen
Summer days lingered long, delaying nightfall as if the heat and humidity made the setting sun as sluggish as the rest of us. What I needed to do would best be done wrapped in the cloak of night, but I couldn’t wait. If I wanted answers, I needed to walk across the street in daylight.
Nora always said that having a schedule made things easier; you didn’t have to think as much. The list told her what to do each day. “Easy peasy,” she always said. While that may have been true, schedules also created predictability, a fact I would use to my advantage.
I had long since surrendered the cleaning schedule, and that day I decided to also give up taking Miltown. I didn’t like the way it made me feel, even more tired and further removed than normal. Henry thought the drug was exactly what I needed. He seemed to think it was making me better. So I couldn’t tell him that I didn’t want to take it anymore. Sometimes secret- keeping is done for survival.
I kept another secret from Henry and all the others: I needed to get back into Bitsy’s house, into that room, to see what she was hiding in there. To see if something in one of those boxes could explain what Gary had said to Henry. What he had offered him. What could happen to me. So while the sun rose toward midday, I waited for the wives on Twyckenham Court to head to the grocery store. Then I took the spare key that Emily had given me before she moved on to a different neighborhood. I walked across the street and I let myself in.
When I was a child, I slipped out of the house too many times to count, but this was the first time I had snuck into one. The house was eerie in its silence: the ugly couch waiting for someone to come rest on it, the butterfly wings on the kitchen wallpaper frozen, the stares and smiles in the photographs paused in time, watching me as I tip-toed down the hallway. I avoided the spot in the floor that creaked in our house—a habit, not a necessity. I felt the air thicken, my breathing turned shallow, as if the house was warning of an intruder.
Perhaps I should’ve taken Miltown that morning, if for no other reason than to calm my nerves and racing heart.
The hinges let out a subtle moan as I opened the door. I didn’t need to be quiet, but I still tiptoed as I brushed past boxes and walked to the desk. The sun spilled through the curtains as dust danced in the rays. I had left the article on top of the desk. When Katherine had surprised me, I hadn’t had time to tuck it beneath the other papers. I expected to find it where I had left it, but it wasn’t there.
I lifted stamps and recipes, Bitsy’s calendar and address book. I moved aside her stationery and even looked under the desk lamp, but the article wasn’t anywhere. I opened the top desk drawer and riffled through pens and pencils, old envelopes and half-used erasers, but still no article. I looked through each drawer but came up empty.
Littering the floor behind me as I searched were the stacks of boxes— watching, waiting, calling to me. When I couldn’t find anything in the desk, I turned to see them. Each box had a name written on it: Gary, Jake, Larry, Ellen.
I pulled the Ellen box from the pile, lifted the lid, and found the article right on top.
“Ellen Craske took her life in her Knollwood home Monday afternoon,” the first paragraph reported.
I scanned the article, searching for information, glancing over the words
before I needed to get out of there. The article didn’t mention that she had left a note or given an explanation for what she’d done, but near the end, it said, “She left behind her husband, William Craske; daughter, Katherine Craske, and sister, Elizabeth Betser.”
Her daughter? My stomach dropped as I thought of the story Nora had told, that the woman’s child had been in the house when she taped up the doors and turned on the gas. The story broke my heart when I thought of a nameless, faceless child, but now I could picture her and my heart shattered even more.
I dug deeper in the box, finding pictures of Katherine as a baby, the ones that had been missing from the Betsers’ hallway. There she was with those wise eyes even as a newborn. I looked at that baby in her mother’s arms, the mother with the same distant stare as her sister, the baby looking just like both of them. And then I heard a car door close.
I ran to the window and looked out. Nora was next door, taking groceries from her trunk, and Hatti was pulling into her own driveway. My time was up. I needed to get out of there before Bitsy came back. But I still wanted to know more. I put the lid on the box and put it back on the pile.
That’s all I meant to do. If I had stopped at that, I would’ve made it, but then I saw the name on another box: Medical. And it called to me. I needed to know what was inside, but the box was at the bottom of the pile. I looked out the window and didn’t see Bitsy, so I moved the boxes quickly, not wasting time with being orderly. Finally, I reached the one I wanted. I pulled off the lid to find a paper labeled Discharge Form. Bitsy’s name was typed out on the first line. My eyes raced down the paper, sprinting to find answers.
Diagnosis: Depression
Medical Condition: Treatment-Resistant
Procedure: Lobotomy
Prognosis: Compliant Behavior
That day during cards as we had talked about the horror of the story we had read about a woman whose mind had been severed, we hadn’t known that a woman like her was sitting among us. I thought of Bitsy’s short sentences, her distant glares and vacant stares. My body shook with the realization of what had happened to her.
On the last line of that page, scrawled next to “legal consent,” was Gary’s name. He had given permission for them to alter his wife, but had he asked her first?
Another car door closed. I hoped it was Hatti, but when I looked out the window, I saw Bitsy and Katherine exiting their car in the driveway. I put the lid on the box and made it to the door as I heard the garage door open and Katherine ask about lunch. “In a minute, dear,” was all Bitsy said.
I had to get out of there while she was in the kitchen putting away groceries, so I slipped back down the hallway, again avoiding the creaking spot just in case. I made it to the front door and pulled it open with a whisper.
The sun burned my eyes as I stepped outside and began to pull the door closed, slowly, quietly. I took a deep breath for what felt like the first time in minutes. As the latch nearly caught, I began to turn to walk down the stairs, hoping to cross the street with no one noticing, hidden in the plain sight of daylight.
But the latch didn’t catch.
The door pulled against me.
The knob slipped out of my hand.
And Bitsy said my name.
My heartbeat began to thrum in my ears and pulsate in my temples as sweat raced to the surface of my skin.
“Bitsy!” I said too loudly.
“What’re you doing here?”
That was a fair question. And how was I going to answer it? Bile rose in my throat as I thought of what had been done to her. How had she felt before and after? Did she miss the person she was before? Did she remember who that even was?
Maybe Bitsy wasn’t that unique. All of us are evolutions of ourselves, changing over time as the calendar moves forward. Who we are when we leave this world is not who we were when we entered. So when I looked at Bitsy and tried to figure out how to explain my presence on her front step, I wondered if I knew a bit of what she’d experienced. My mind might not have been altered by an outside interference, but was I the same person I had been before?
“I was stopping in—”
“To get your dish?” Bitsy said before I could think of an excuse.
“Yes.” Thank God!
Her eyes squinted at me as my armpits began to feel damp and sticky. But she didn’t make a move. She stood paused in time. That poor woman, I thought. Perhaps this was a side effect of the procedure.
“I was about to knock”—the words started before my mind had formulated a response—“when I noticed the door was ajar. I remember Emily saying she had problems with this door sometimes. It wouldn’t latch quite right.” I couldn’t stop myself from talking. “You better have Gary take a look at that.”
Then my mind caught up. “Now that I think of it, perhaps that explains your missing cat.” Yes! That was it! “Maybe she walked right out the front door.”
The mention of the cat did the trick. Bitsy looked down at the ground, too focused on what she had lost to wonder why I was really there that day. But I wasn’t thinking about Luna. I was wondering who this woman used to be.
And who I might become if Gary helped my husband find a cure for his
latest problem: me.
