Nightingale Read online

  “Ambitious,” Eleanor said, choosing the thimble for herself. “And of course you’d choose the ship. Would you like to tell June why you’re here, Cassy?”

  The girl wrinkled her nose. “Not really. Does June want to tell me why she’s here?”

  Cassy may have been small, June thought, but she was fierce. “Nobody has to tell me anything,” June said, trying to sound nonchalant.

  “Oh, but of course we do,” Eleanor insisted, shooting June a reassuring grin. “We’re all here for a reason, aren’t we? Might as well get acquainted.”

  Eleanor had said last night that there were never any new girls admitted. Surely that couldn’t have been true, but on the other hand, it was obvious that they were all fascinated by June. Cassy may have been playing it cool, but June could see it in her eyes, just like she could see it in the rest of their eyes: they were curious about her.

  She felt her cheeks warm as she sat down opposite Cassy and chose the iron as her game piece. “I, uh...” She cleared her throat and tried again. “My parents got replaced. By duplicates that looked exactly like them. But it wasn’t them.”

  “That sounds horrible,” Eleanor said, sounding like she meant it, and the other girls nodded in support. It filled June’s heart with unexpected gratitude. To have somebody believe you about something so unbelievable...June appreciated it very much. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” June said casually, not wanting them to think that she was hogging all the attention. She wanted to get to know them just as much as they clearly wanted to get to know her.

  “What’s your name?” she asked one of the other girls from the group, the one who had told Eleanor that she wanted a gin martini at breakfast. The girl curled the ends of her long braid in her finger and regarded June.

  “Jessica,” she said. “And this one—” she wrapped her arm around the girl sitting next to her on the couch, the one with dark bangs that went straight across her forehead, like a flapper from the roaring twenties “—is Adie.”

  “It’s nice to meet you,” Adie said, offering June a tip of the head. “I could tell at breakfast that you were super nervous because your eyes were shifting around far too much. Don’t let the nurses see you act that way, unless you want a dose of something awful.”

  June nodded back, grateful for the information. “Thanks for telling me.”

  “Of course.” Adie seemed so warm, like one of those people that just radiated with motherly love and wisdom. She was comforting to be around. “Glad to have you on board, June.” She winked.

  June had now met all of Eleanor’s friends, except for one—a girl who had been working furiously away in her sketchbook all this time.

  “I’m Simpson,” the girl said as if reading June’s mind, too absorbed in her drawing to look up. “It’s a pleasure to have you join us in this special little circle of Hell.”

  June looked around the room at all the other patients; many of them were chatting or reading or listening to the radio or watching television, but nobody else seemed to have access to any sort of art supplies such as a sketchbook.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Simpson said, and June noticed that the girl had raised her eyes from the paper for a brief moment. “I get to draw because it’s part of my treatment. They’re always encouraging me to draw as much as I can.”

  If one of the treatment options is drawing, June thought, then maybe I’ll be all right after all.

  Simpson went back to her sketchbook. Too curious to resist, June moved to try and catch a sneaky glimpse of what Simpson was working on. The girl noticed June leaning over and playfully pulled the sketchbook toward her chest to hide whatever was in it.

  “Come on,” June encouraged, a small smile pulling the side of her mouth up into a curl. “Whatever it is, I can guarantee you it’s better than any stick-figure mess I’m capable of doing.”

  Simpson returned June’s half smile and handed the sketchbook to June. As she flipped through the pages, she gave out a little gasp of delight.

  The drawings were violent and thrilling and weird, blood splatters and butcher knives and long-haired women with enlarged, hairy limbs and wide eyes and red mouths. The images blended together, surrounded each other, multiple scenes playing out on single pages.

  “So, what is it that you can do?” Simpson asked as June marveled over the drawings. The other girls seemed very keen on hearing the answer.

  “What do you mean?” June looked around and then returned the book to Simpson, who immediately opened it up again and continued working on the newest picture, which showed a woman’s severed head in a birdcage.

  “Lauren told you all about her special talent,” Simpson continued as she dragged the tip of her pen across the paper in smooth, wavy flicks to fill in the woman’s hair. “And I can talk to dead people in my sleep.”

  “I can hear things that others can’t,” Adie added glumly. “It’s like these weird, ticking noises that I can’t figure out one bit. It’s almost like it’s some sort of language that I’ve never heard before. And it’s always talking to me! If only I could understand it, maybe it’d tell me something useful.”

  “If you do start understanding it,” June said, “tell it to let us know what the hell is going on around here.”

  “For real,” Eleanor added.

  “I’m a time traveler,” Cassy blurted randomly from where she’d been sitting in silence. The other girls broke into smiles.

  “At least, that’s what we’ve all decided her talent is,” Simpson said with a little laugh. “It’s the only thing that makes sense, don’t you know.”

  Her eyes flitted up—wanting to gauge June’s reaction to her joke, no doubt.

  “Oh, of course,” June answered, grinning. “Oftentimes when something doesn’t make sense, I realize that time travel must be to blame.”

  Eleanor laughed then, and June decided that she liked Eleanor so much more when she wasn’t high on drugs and cackling at June in the dark. She seemed to have forgiven June for finding out her name. “Tell her, Cass,” Eleanor said. “What happened to you.”

  “I was on the greatest ship in the world,” Cassy said, her smile fading as her eyes unfocused into the memory. “And it sank. My parents were killed in the rush to get off. My baby sister, who was six, she and I were floating and holding on to debris and waiting for help.” She paused. “She...ran out of strength. She drowned.”

  “Oh, geez,” June said, suddenly feeling awful about making the joke. “I’m so sorry to hear that. Truly.”

  “That’s not the kicker.” Jessica pulled a cigarette from the pocket of her housedress, lifted it to her lips and lit it with the matches from a nearby coffee table. After a long drag, Jessica held the cigarette in front of Adie, who leaned forward and eagerly pulled on it herself. June was shocked that Jessica was speaking about such a tragedy so flippantly. “Tell her the kicker, Cass.”

  “The kicker—” Cassy said, then stopped to clear her throat “—was that while I was waiting for one of the damned lifeboats to come back and help, everything went black, just like that.” She snapped her fingers. “And I could hear the sound of rushing water, but I didn’t feel wet anymore. I felt dry, and when I opened my eyes, I was here in Burrow Place.”

  “That’s still not the kicker,” Jessica insisted impatiently, blowing out a huge puff of smoke and leaning forward to help organize the Monopoly money. “Stop holding out on her.”

  June couldn’t believe there was more to the story. Already her heart was so heavy with pity for Cassy and her poor baby sister.

  “The ship I was on,” Cassy said. “It was the Titanic. In the year 1912.”

  June accidentally let out a nervous but sharp Ha! Cassy’s face darkened, and June felt horrible. What if Eleanor had made that same sound when June was sharing about her parents?

  “I’m so sorry,” she rushe
d, but already Cassy was smiling again.

  “Your face made it worth it, I guess,” Cassy said. “Also, from what I can tell, my special talent is way cooler than yours.”

  “You’re not wrong,” June said. “But to me, the real question is: If we have all these wonderful secret talents, why aren’t we using them to get out of here?”

  She had meant it as another lighthearted remark to ease the tension from her gaffe, but the girls looked at her like she was stupid.

  “You think we know how to control it?” Simpson smirked. “Don’t we wish! Also, not sure how talking to a dead person could help anybody get out of here.”

  “And my thing only happened that one time,” Cassy added, crossing her arms over her chest. “Even then, of course Nurse Joya and the doctor don’t believe it really happened.” She paused. “But at the same time, it’s almost like...they do believe it. They just don’t want me to think they do. Do you guys ever get that at all?”

  The other girls nodded. “Yes!” Lauren said, finally letting her anxious hands drop to her sides. “And what’s even more strange is that the more they want to know about it, and the more they prod for information about it...the less it happens.”

  “Yes!” Eleanor and Adie exclaimed in unison.

  June couldn’t understand how believing your parents were replaced by replicas was a special talent in any way. It’s the only thing that had ever happened to June that could compare to the wild stories of these other girls. Maybe it was a good thing she’d been roomed with Eleanor—thinking you’re dead wasn’t much of a talent either.

  “What’s your talent, Jessica?” she asked, suddenly eager to start playing Monopoly. She was beginning to feel out of place again.

  “Like I’ll ever tell you!” Jessica said, and June couldn’t tell if she was joking or not.

  “She sculpts things,” Simpson said, and Jessica shot her a glare. “With pieces of trash that she finds lying around. She sculpts body parts that aren’t human. There’s a whole bunch of them hidden under her bed, according to Cassy.”

  Now Jessica was glaring at Cassy, who June realized must be Jessica’s roommate.

  “Sorry,” Cassy said, shrugging, then reached forward and rolled the dice.

  Maybe writing was June’s talent. It seemed boring compared to talking to dead people in your sleep or being able to hear someone speaking an unknown language in your head, but it had taken a peculiar and almost otherworldly grip on June back when she’d been in the thick of it. Oh, how she missed her story!

  “Whatever you’re thinking about right now,” Jessica said to June, her cigarette hanging limply between her lips, “make sure never to tell them about it.”

  They may have been an unsettling bunch, but June herself could easily be considered just as unsettling, with her darting eyes and paranoia and tendency to get lost in her own mind. She decided that she liked the girls Eleanor hung around.

  With the exception of Cassy’s ridiculous Titanic story, none of the other girls talked about their lives before Burrow Place, nor did they mention what they wanted to do when they got out someday. Most patients did get out, right? They had to, June decided. They were all so young. There was no way this was it for any of them.

  June considered with great sadness how long some of the other patients must have been at the institution, some of them as old as eighty. The building had been around since the late 1800s, if June wasn’t mistaken, more than enough time for spans of lives to come and pass. Even Eleanor had said that she’d “died” three years ago... Had she been here that entire time? What had her life been like before?

  “They tried to put one of those worms in me again,” Simpson mumbled out of nowhere, while she was moving her piece along the edge of the board. She lifted her hand to her head gingerly, as if taking care around an injury, but her head looked fine. Slowly and gingerly, the girl’s fingertips probed her scalp a few times before she stopped and wrapped her arms around herself. “They’re hiding them in my bed, beneath the sheets. They’re going to schedule me for a lobotomy. They’re going to get it in then. I just know it.” She began to cry.

  “Lobotomy?” June burst out before she could help herself. “They don’t do lobotomies in this facility. There’s no way—”

  All the girls looked at June then. Their faces said it all. This hospital was the kind that drilled holes into your head, shoved ice picks into your brain through your eye sockets to scramble things around until you were no longer yourself. To truly imagine going through it—the feel of it! The sound of it!—ignited a dizzying amount of fear in June that she could feel all the way down to her bones.

  “I—” June’s voice caught in her throat. She realized her hands were trembling. Simpson continued to cry. The girls all leaned over to pat her on the back before continuing with their game.

  “Hey,” Eleanor said, clearly anxious after Simpson’s worm comment. “Can I ask you something?” Then, without waiting for a response: “Do I smell to you? Like decomposition?”

  The other girls were not fazed by this. Eleanor waited for June’s answer, eagerly, desperately, and June had no idea how to react. When a few seconds passed, Eleanor reached up and manically scratched a place behind her ear, then smelled her fingers.

  “No,” June said blankly. “Of course you don’t. Come on, Eleanor. Surely you understand that you’re alive?”

  But Eleanor didn’t answer, only gazed wistfully at the Monopoly board. This was only the beginning, June knew, and the more time she spent here, the more disconnected she was feeling from everything that had come before this.

  Maybe it’d be better that way, for everyone.

  There were two truths in June’s head right now, but the thing about them was that one couldn’t be true without the other being false. She couldn’t figure out what was what.

  The first truth was that she was in a hospital, a place built and intended to help her, improve her health, give her her life back, or at least what little of one she’d had before. If she was here, surely that meant that she should be here. This wasn’t supposed to be a nightmare house: it was supposed to be a place built to make people feel better.

  The second truth was that there was nothing wrong with June, and there was nothing in this place that was right. The nurses acted strange, the pills looked strange, the protocols and policies were strange. Maybe she just needed to talk to a doctor, let him see that what had happened was a mistake, that they shouldn’t be inspecting June but rather her parents.

  It was them that something was wrong with.

  June realized she was shaking again. She remembered something from a newspaper months before that had left her feeling ill even at the time: an illustration depicting a lobotomy, and beside it, side-by-side photos depicting a woman before and after the procedure. Her face in the second photo was completely different. There was an eerie emptiness that dimmed her eyes, like something had been taken away that could never be given back.

  Like she had been punished.

  No, June thought, a lump forming in her throat. That isn’t going to happen to you. It isn’t. Surely that kind of thing is saved for the more severe cases. When she saw her doctor for the first time, June would make sure not to say anything that might lead him to think she was one of the more severe cases, nothing about time travel or brain worms. At the same time, she felt a yearning to be truthful, to properly convey to somebody else just how terrifying it had all been, make them learn it, make them feel it. Because whatever was going on, it was real, and it was big.

  Then again, the girls had told June that it wasn’t in her best interest to tell the doctor the truth. She didn’t know what to do anymore.

  Please, June begged of the universe, closing her burning eyes and bringing her knees to her chest, not caring if the other girls were all staring at her with their mouths open as she rocked gently back and forth. Please just let so
meone help me.

  the institution

  When June’s name was finally called to see the doctor, everyone in the room got very quiet, watching her as she hurriedly scuffed her way across the massive recreation room. She wondered how much longer she could stand to wear the damned slippers. Her feet felt itchy and hot, and she was desperate to rip the slippers off, but the occasional smear or slick on the floor compelled her to leave them on.

  June searched frantically for clues inside her head, grasping for anything that might explain how the steady decline of the past year could have possibly taken such a hairpin of a turn, away from the dark place in her head, where she’d once felt sure she’d be trapped forever, and into this sickly lit facility instead.

  All that buildup she’d felt gathering since she’d started writing her story and dating Robert, that excruciating pressure that had promised something big was going to happen, that knowledge that there’d soon be an equally massive relief whenever she finished it—it simply could not have been leading to this, to her parents being replaced, to herself being locked away. June had been so sure there would be something great in store for her if she could just get out of that house, her destiny awaiting. Her story had been the thing that was supposed to lead her there.

  There had to be a mistake of some kind.

  She’d been the black sheep of the family since she was young, there was no doubt about that, and sure, she’d been a little blue for the past handful of years, but had there ever been any real warnings that either her mind was about to break or that reality was? Were what happened the night before she was admitted and her parents being replaced like they had been the next morning just symptoms of a mind that was actively breaking apart? No. In June’s deepest gut, she knew she believed it was the other way around. Something had already been broken. Her parents being replaced was a warning that awful and unexplainable things were real. She had to be careful in this place. She had no idea what could actually be going on.