Chapter Twenty-Eight
That night, through blurred vision and a tranquilizer haze, I sat alone in my room and fiddled with a thread on Esther’s blanket. I tried not to listen to the sounds outside my door, the footsteps and the carts wheeling by, the cries and the shouts, the collective sigh of surrendered people.
I wished for a distraction—a radio to drown out the sounds, Luna to comfort me, Wesley to tell me a story about his day. I sat on the bed, the chill cutting through my feet, making me long for my slippers. My eyes begged to close, my body ached for escape, but I couldn’t settle enough to sleep. As the night hours ticked away, I clung to the cotton blanket, stroking the white rabbit emblazoned onto the fabric. It reminded me of another rabbit.
When I was about ten years old, one of our spring kittens had uncovered a rabbit nest and injured one of the babies before I could get to it. The mother moved the others elsewhere, but left that one behind. Mama told me that rabbits sometimes have to leave the suffering to save the others. It seemed to me that sometimes humans did the opposite, abandoning the healthy for the hurt.
I wouldn’t let go of that baby bunny. I carried it around, insisting she was sleeping. I remembered holding that little one, keeping the cat away, running to Daddy to show him what I’d found, begging him to let me bring the little one inside, to care for her and bring her back to health.
“Oh, Lucy.” That’s what he said, with a sigh and with the first syllable of my name drawn out, not the name Henry had given me, but the one Daddy
had chosen for me, named after his nonna. “My little light.” That’s what he’d say some days, but on that day, he sighed my name and told me that nature belonged outside. Then he took that little sleeping bunny from me and placed her gingerly into his coveralls pouch. “I’ll find her a new home,” he told me.
I remember now. I remember how he promised me that. I kissed the little baby on the white stripe across her forehead and then I let her rest in Daddy’s pocket. When I asked him at dinner that night where she was, he said she’d gone on home.
I imagined her home, a house underground, similar to ours, but sized for a rabbit family. I imagined the reunion, the happiness her mother and siblings must’ve felt when she hopped into the house and they all welcomed her back.
But now I knew differently. Now I understood that she hadn’t been sleeping. My rescue came too late, and her home was a world well beyond our farm.
Despite my efforts, love, and hope, she didn’t survive.
I tugged on the thread of the blanket as I thought over the last weeks, how I had heard Esther cry. How I had sat in her room and rocked her. How I had taken out my breasts and nursed her. If I closed my eyes, I could feel her. If I inhaled, I could smell her. If I listened, I knew she would call to me.
I kept pulling until the blanket’s smooth edging began to detach. And I kept going. I kept pulling so that it came apart, just like me. My hands ached, my joints stiffened as I demanded they keep going, keep tugging, keep tearing apart the thing that had lied to me.
A nest of pink formed on the floor, the satin tickling my bare toes as the asbestos tile cooled my feet. I should’ve brought those slippers, though I hadn’t even been the one to pack my suitcase. I could ask Henry to bring them for me. But that would require planning; that would mean realizing that I would need to stay there longer than I wanted to.
I needed to get out of there. I needed to get back to Wesley. I needed to be
in my home, the one with the squeaky hallway, the obnoxious dishwasher, and the back patio with my only companion, Luna.
Here, bars blocked the windows. I don’t remember them being there when we visited Georgie. Maybe they were. But they weren’t necessary then.
Those patients were not at risk of opening the windows and choosing the ending of their stories. At that time, most were bedridden. Some in iron lungs. Most clinging to life and hoping for healing.
Now the patients might’ve seen healing in a different way. A dangerous one. One that required restrictions, confinements, bars to keep them physically safe when mental soundness wasn’t an option.
The more my fingers felt that familiar fabric, the more the memories came.
Not the false ones. Not the delusions. But the reality of how that blanket— that silly piece of material that had cost a book of green stamps—had always been empty, how it had never held Esther. How I had never held her.
I thought I had. My arms tried to tell me that they knew her, but now my mind told me otherwise.
I dropped the blanket onto the pile of satin binding, creating a mound of tangled nothingness on the frigid sanatorium floor. I left it there as I lay down, tucked my legs into myself, and closed my eyes. But I didn’t rest. I remembered.
