Nightingale Page 3

  Hobby.

  If you were selected, you got to attend a month-long writing retreat on scholarship, in upstate New York. You got to have your own private cottage that was within walking distance of a large building where you could eat and converse with other writers. You got to drink scotch and smoke cigarettes and spend as much time as you wanted holed up in your cottage writing.

  You are so adorable.

  June had not yet had the courage to fill out the application until now—hadn’t even decided for sure that she wanted to try until tonight. She spent two hours poring over the application, making sure every hand-written answer was as perfect as she could get it, responding to essay questions and writing prompts on the lined paper space provided in the packet. June spoke every sentence out loud both before and after she wrote it on the paper, carefully considering it in combination with the ones that came prior before moving on.

  Publishers? With an odd story about aliens from outer space?

  She hoped her desperation came across without sounding unhinged. She hoped her talent showed itself in the voice she used to answer the questions. She hoped her idea of applying as J. Hardie instead of June Hardie would be enough to mask the fact that she was a woman. If they knew the truth, they’d never consider her for the final prize.

  When she was finished, June slept through what little was left of the night and well into the afternoon. Mom and Dad didn’t even bother her about it, when she came into the kitchen for orange juice far past lunchtime. They must have still been pleased with her for another night of successful schmoozing. If only they knew! After she finished her juice, she got dressed and brushed her teeth and took the thick sealed envelope to the mailbox, lifting the little flag for the postman to notice.

  She stayed in the living room until she saw the mail truck pull up and the white-uniformed man remove her application from the box. She watched through the window as he stuck it in a bin in the truck, and then it was off. She was able to relax then, knowing for sure nobody had intercepted the envelope.

  Now all June had to do was keep on going as she had been, however they needed her to until she heard back. She knew she shouldn’t have gotten her hopes up, but she had anyway. With one split-second decision, she’d taken control of her life.

  And now, several months and many boring dates with Robert later, wearing the green dress that matched exactly how she felt inside, June Hardie ate her breakfast and thought all about that night with Robert, how they’d never talked about it again, how they’d never repeated it. Obviously, she never showed him, or anyone, pages from her story again. If she hadn’t heard from the writing program people yet about her application, she doubted she ever would, but she could still try her luck with publishers once it was finished.

  Now that the business partnership was a done deal, June thought she was probably going to break up with Robert, sooner rather than later. Mom and Dad would be upset, she knew, but what did they expect to come out of this arrangement long-term? High school graduation was approaching, and it was time for her life to begin.

  “There’s a sale on pork roasts,” Mom said from where she stood, still washing dishes at the sink. “We should run in and buy a few for the deep freezer.”

  “Sure,” June said, miserable at the idea of cooking and cleaning all day. “Whatever you say, Mom.”

  the institution

  June wasn’t sure how much she’d slept, if at all. It seemed that a nurse opened the door to her room every ten seconds for “checks,” causing June to nearly jump out of her skin and her dead roommate to grunt in her sleep. Why did they have to check in so damn often? As if she or the dead girl could somehow sneak away from this impenetrable fortress of iron and stone.

  “Up and at ’em, girlies,” the nurse bellowed from the doorway, her hair pinned into a bun that was far too small for her head. “Meds in five, new girl. Breakfast after.”

  June’s roommate sat up and stretched, looking nervously over as if unsure whether or not she could trust June.

  “Good morning,” June said, still flat on her back. “You snored for literally the entire night.”

  “Sorry,” the girl grumbled, looking over the edge of her bed for her slippers. After she swung her legs over and slipped the slippers on, she stayed sitting on the edge of the bed, clearly waiting for June. June couldn’t tell if she liked or disliked this.

  “You’ll wait for me, but you won’t tell me your name?” June asked, begrudgingly sitting up and getting her own slippers on. “Doesn’t make much sense to me.”

  “Dead girls don’t have names,” the girl shot back, sputtering, much more upset than June expected or intended. “It doesn’t fucking matter what my name used to be. Stop asking about it. You’ll never know.”

  June frowned. “But I do know it. I just wanted you to be the one to say it to me.”

  The girl froze, and June could see the gears turning in her head as she tried to figure out if June was lying or not.

  “It was on your chart, which was next to mine on the door,” June said, not sure why she was picking the scab that was this obviously fragile and imbalanced girl. The words kept coming out, even though she wished she could just have the strength to shut up and get her nerves calmed some other way. “Your name is Eleanor.”

  Eleanor’s face reddened then. “Yeah.” She got up and made her way to the door, stopping to look over her shoulder at June. “Are you coming or what? They get really cranky if you don’t show up for meds on time.”

  “I don’t have any to take,” June said, and Eleanor rolled her eyes and walked out.

  It took June a moment to gather the courage to stand. Were they really supposed to go straight out there, without prettying themselves up first? It felt like the sort of thing that would make Mom fall over if she knew. At least in this place June wouldn’t have to follow those standards anymore. It seemed to be the one silver lining out of the situation—no more pork roasts, no more lipstick, no more folding Fred’s and Dad’s laundry. Her mother would have to do it all by herself. Not that June had ever been much of a real help.

  The thought of her mother made June’s stomach pinch into a horrible knot. What had happened to her mother? Her real mother, not the eerie duplicate that had tried and failed to seamlessly take her place. June thought of the story she had written, thought about the aliens, always taking people away and changing them and trying to put them back as if nothing had happened. But nobody was ever quite right after coming back. Something had been taken away from them, permanently, something very important.

  “Good morning, Nightingale,” the thing who had been pretending to be her mother had practically sung out to June yesterday morning, when she had come down for breakfast.

  And then June had screamed.

  Outside the room, there were several women in a disjointed line that came to a head at a station protected by huge panes of thick fake glass. Behind the panes stood three nurses, their outfits so white, crisp, and perfect, their caps pinned in place over their carefully styled hair. June looked around at everyone outside of the glass, with their tangled hair and their sweat-stained garments and their grungy slippers. It didn’t feel right that the nurses were so clean; it made June feel unworthy, unequal, animalistic.

  This is all just one big zoo, June realized. Those nurses don’t care that we’re humans. They’re just herding us.

  A tiny flower of dread bloomed within June’s stomach when the tallest nurse, the one in the middle with the low blond side bun and cherry-red lipstick, made direct eye contact with her and held it for what felt like thirty full seconds without blinking. There was something unsettling about the nurse; familiar, like June had seen her somewhere before. Then, as quick as the awkward moment had arisen, the nurse turned and disappeared into a hallway behind the station.

  “Cadence,” the monotone voice of one of the remaining nurses called from the windo
w. A woman who looked to be about forty strode up to the window and took a small paper cup.

  “Cypress,” the nurse called out again, then, a few moments later, “Dominguez.”

  June watched as everyone claimed their medication. She was suddenly overwhelmed by the curious notion that none of these women were sick at all. They all looked so much more normal than they had when she had first arrived yesterday.

  What even was normal, though?

  And when June thought about it, everyone who had looked strange to her yesterday had done so as a direct result of the hospital: the shivering, naked women in the bathtub; the women who were leaned against the wall with cigarettes in between their fingers, looking doped beyond this world. As June remembered all these things, she spotted an older woman crouched beneath the counter of the nurses’ station, peeling pieces of drywall away from a crumbling weak spot and eating them, her medication cup empty beside her on the floor.

  Shame on you for judging any of it, June scolded herself as she waited patiently to see if her name would be called. There’s no such thing as normal, anyway. You can’t tell by looking at someone if they’re well or not.

  Was she herself well?

  “Hardie,” the nurse called, and June flinched as if being poked. “June Hardie.”

  June stepped up to the counter, spotting her roommate, Eleanor, looking at her with victory painted on her face. Told you so, she mouthed playfully, and June made an effort to ignore her. The pill was the strangest looking that June had ever seen: an extremely large, clear, smooth capsule filled with what appeared to be blood. Of course it wasn’t blood, though, June thought as she shakily raised the paper cup to her mouth. Your imagination is just on overdrive.

  Why was she being given medication without having seen a doctor first? Maybe the pills were more like vitamins?

  She thought back, momentarily, to the time she’d let Robert read her story. How he’d sounded when he read the part about the aliens out loud. With shock and grotesque intrigue.

  He hadn’t even made it to the part where the girl’s eyes were removed, suctioned harshly from their home and laid down to rest, by their roots, on her cheeks, hot and wet and heavier than she ever would have thought possible. The girl in the story was certain she was about to die, especially when she could hear the awful scraping of the space creatures’ tools inside her orbital sockets.

  June recalled writing the girl’s internal monologue.

  I felt a change happening. I thought that the change was death, but no end ever came, no darkness to welcome me, no release from the terror of knowing I would never see my home, my planet, again.

  Once the sample of her brain was collected and her eyes were back where they belonged, everything had looked different.

  “Hey.” A whisper jolted June from her thoughts. Eleanor was standing near her, peering at her curiously. “What are you thinking about? Looks like it was something real bad.”

  June realized that the paper cup with the large red capsule was now empty. She frowned at the sight; she didn’t remember taking the pill, only bringing the paper cup up to her mouth.

  “They’re big pills, but they go down easy enough,” Eleanor said, following June’s gaze. “It’s only your first full day, and you’re already swallowing it dry? Impressive.”

  So, that must have meant that June had swallowed the pill, even though no matter how hard she stretched her mind, she couldn’t locate the memory of having done so. All she knew was that she had been lost in her story, again. Losing herself in her story was her favorite way of feeling better. And she would rather remember anything other than what had happened to land her in Burrow Place.

  “Breakfast is this way,” Eleanor said, linking her arm through June’s and pulling her gently toward a room where all the other women were headed. “I keep telling them that dead people don’t need to eat, but they keep making me. If I don’t, they...” Her voice faded away, her breath quickening.

  “It’s okay,” June said gently. “If you don’t mind me asking, when did you, um...die?”

  “Three years ago,” Eleanor replied. “It was very sad.”

  The main room narrowed into a hallway, not nearly as wide as the one that connected all the bedrooms. Every table, every chair, was identical. There were already people sitting down to eat, all of them wearing the same housedress and sweater as June. Across the room, standing in the corner with a clipboard, was the nurse who June had noticed earlier, with the side bun and the red lipstick, her cap still pinned in place. She’d stared at June then, and she was staring now.

  “Have you ever noticed that these nurses look kind of fake?” June said, following Eleanor to the line. “I mean, they look like they’re out of a film. It’s strange. It’s like they’re wearing costumes.”

  Eleanor turned back to her, and in all seriousness, said: “They are.”

  June had to blink for a moment at that one. “What?”

  “It’s not a real hospital,” Eleanor whispered. She nervously looked to the nurse with the red lipstick. “Not the kind it’s supposed to be, anyway.”

  June stayed quiet for a moment, unsure how to respond. She realized she didn’t know how much she could trust Eleanor—if her strange new roommate thought she was dead, how trustworthy could she be? She gathered a plastic bowl, filled with oatmeal and topped with raisins and nuts, and took a little paper cup filled with milk.

  The tables were more crowded than June would prefer.

  “Damn,” Eleanor said, her eyes scanning the cafeteria. “My friends are surrounded with no empty seats. We’ll have to eat over here and meet up with them afterward.”

  Across the room, a pretty girl with long hair bellowed to Eleanor to bring her a dirty gin martini. Eleanor laughed at the request and shot the girl a wink. June followed Eleanor to a table at the opposite end of the cafeteria, and they ate mostly in silence. After breakfast was finished, the girls went back to their room to find freshly folded clothing on their now-made beds.

  “Shouldn’t they have us make our own beds?” June wondered aloud. “This isn’t a hotel.”

  “They always do little things like that,” Eleanor said. “They like to keep watch over everything, make sure nobody’s hiding any secrets.”

  June followed her roommate down the hall to a bathroom that looked like it was supposed to be all white but instead took on a sickly, buttery-yellow sheen. Grime gathered in between tiles that felt unpleasantly warm beneath June’s thin, already worn slippers. There were no doors or any partitions to separate the toilets from one another, nor were there any shower curtains or bath mats. In the corner was a bucket that was filled with used sanitary pads.

  “Should that be out?” June asked, eyeing the bucket, feeling her stomach turn at the mixture of the chlorine and old blood smells in the enormous, overheated bathroom. Eleanor shrugged and brushed her teeth at the long trough sink. Eventually, June followed suit.

  “What do we do now?” she asked later, when they joined the chaos of the recreation room. “Where are all the doctors and nurses?”

  “They only take us when they need us,” Eleanor answered, making her way to a group of girls gathered in the back of the room. “Until then, we wait.”

  the institution

  Eleanor lead June over to a set of couches arranged in front of a television, where five other girls all sat.

  “Be right back,” she said, leaving June to fend for herself among the rest of the girls. June had a brief moment where she felt the stark social pressure that came with being the new addition to an already well-established group.

  The girl sitting closest to June, the one with the long, soft-looking brown hair, introduced herself as Lauren.

  “I’m here because I like eyes,” she said. “I’d like to be an eye doctor someday.”

  June paused, unsure how to answer. Why would liking eyes land
someone in Burrow Place?

  “My own eyes can see things that aren’t there,” Lauren continued, and June understood then. “I can also tell by looking at someone what their eyes have seen. Sometimes, anyway.”

  June smiled, rather liking the idea of Lauren’s supposed talent. “What have my eyes seen, then?”

  Lauren smiled back and locked eyes with June, but almost immediately the smile faded into a pained grimace. “Something that I find strange,” she mumbled, her fingers nervously lacing over themselves, “is that we’ve all seen the same impossible thing. Even you.”

  “‘Impossible’?” June asked, but Lauren wrapped her sweater around herself more tightly and turned away.

  “Sometimes I’m even able to tell what your eyes will see, even if they haven’t seen it yet,” Lauren answered, sounding troubled, looking at June once again but keeping her body turned away. “Don’t worry. I won’t tell them what’s in store for you.”

  June shifted uncomfortably as Eleanor returned carrying a long, flat box: a board game.

  “Let’s play Monopoly,” she suggested. “That way you can get to know everybody. It’s the original version, too.”

  The last time June had played Monopoly, she had taken all of Fred’s money, and he’d pretended that he’d let it happen on purpose, enraging June, and Dad had made her give some of the money back to him. She didn’t particularly want to play right now, because to play a game in a place like this just felt wrong, but what else was she supposed to do?

  “I always thought it was so silly that they didn’t have a game piece shaped like glasses,” Lauren said, choosing the top hat instead. “But, what can you do, I guess.”

  “I want to use the ship token,” a small girl with white-blond hair insisted, placing the game piece on the starting square and sitting cross-legged beside Lauren. “And I want to buy a hotel on Boardwalk.”