Nightingale Read online

  That’d sure make it easier to run away, she thought, trying to console herself. But again her brother’s words came back to haunt her: You can’t even take care of yourself living at home. Would June be able to thrive out on her own? As much as she wanted to say yes, a horrible, heavy shadow of doubt draped itself over her like a blanket.

  Stupid Fred, June thought, squeezing the raw hamburger mixture like it was a heart she wanted to still. Stupid life.

  “That is quite enough,” Mom said, setting a loaf pan beside the bowl. “Transfer it into the pan. See how I’ve greased it with butter? Make sure it’s spread evenly on the top.”

  June did as she was told, and then her mother wrapped the pan in plastic and set it in the refrigerator beside the gelatin mold. “We’ll put it in the oven in about forty-five minutes,” Mom remarked as she shut the fridge door. “That way it’ll be ready about twenty minutes after they arrive. It’s the perfect amount of time for some drinks and appetizers.”

  “What appetizers?” June moaned, not even caring that she was showing her displeasure. “We’ve been preparing for company all day, Mom. Do you really think they’ll care if there isn’t something to snack on while they drink their scotch?”

  Mom looked over at June, disappointment painting her face, and already June regretted opening her big fat mouth. Just deal with it, she reprimanded herself and then apologized to her mother, blaming her mood on a headache. She was lucky enough to be excused anyway, although it didn’t feel quite right as she dragged her feet through the living room to the stairs. She could feel Fred’s glare burning into her back as she went up from where he still sat before the television.

  In her bedroom, she stared at her face in the mirror without blinking. She looked at the dress her mother approved of, all the lavender and the tiny cheery birds. What Fred had said had gotten her thinking. Did Robert know her, or didn’t he? She definitely subdued herself whenever they saw each other, or went for their boring drives and dates. She didn’t really act differently. She just didn’t act all: she simply sat and listened and nodded.

  But that night when she’d shown him her story, he had read it, glimpsed behind that curtain to see the part of her that was as vulnerable as it was possible to get. He had seen her brain naked. He had seen her body naked. They had connected, even if he had ruined it in the end by opening his stupid, condescending mouth. She hated him. She wanted to be rid of him.

  But she also didn’t.

  June didn’t want to be someone who didn’t understand herself. Her forward-thinking brain, her most prominent voice, stubbornly insisted that she was meant for something special, that she was an especially strong and independent human who had the ability to throw all the pressures and worries of the world into the wind in order to live freely and happily.

  It should have been easy to kick Robert to the curb. It should have been easy to like the idea of chasing him away with her natural personality. What did she care? She had confirmed to herself many goddamn times that she did not, in fact, have any sort of real love for Robert.

  Then what was this desire to be liked? To be wanted? To let her father and mother tell her how to run her life, tell her who she was, tell her who she should be? You need to learn to be a better young woman, Mom had said. June wished with all her heart that she could just understand why she wasn’t good enough. She had a bright mind. She loved things with all her heart, and she let herself feel things. And she felt the need to do something great. But nobody understood that. Nobody!

  It was unfair. Rage-inducingly so.

  June took the pillow from her bed, went into the furthest corner of her large closet, knelt down on her knees, and screamed as loud and hard as she could, using the pillow to muffle the sound and make sure nobody heard. And when her breath had run out, she took a quivering but massive breath to fill her lungs and screamed again.

  Minutes later, she returned to standing before the mirror. All traces of powder were gone from her face, and her mascara gathered in nasty smudges beneath her eyes, which were bloodshot and glazed. She took a cold washcloth she wet in her bathroom and wiped all of it off, taking care to remove every last trace, leaving her skin red and raw and stinging. She was about to turn and throw the washcloth into a pile of dirty clothes in the corner when she saw something on her face that she hadn’t ever noticed before. June stepped up to the mirror and peered forward, her nose nearly touching the glass.

  There, directly beneath the bottom lash lines of both eyes, were long, single strips of what appeared to be scar tissue. Using the tip of her pinkie finger, June touched the rough little lines, completely at a loss as to how they could have gotten there.

  Suddenly, she remembered the part in her story where the heroine’s eyeballs were removed, her orbital sockets scraped, her sanity cracked. For a brief second she could actually imagine it, see it, feel the cold metal table beneath her naked body, hear the creatures’ tools scrape, scrape, scraping away.

  June backed away from the mirror so violently it was left rattling against the wall. Panting, she scurried around, gathering powder and rouge and mascara and eyebrow pencil, a hair brush, the unopened bag of plastic curlers.

  Time to get ready for dinner, she thought, breathless even though she hadn’t spoken, ignoring the open closet door and the memory of what she’d just been doing in there. Time to show them that they’re wrong about me.

  the institution

  After June fled from the doctor’s office, she went straight back to her room, unable to face the recreation area after everything that had just happened. Something wasn’t right in this hospital. The way Nurse Joya spoke for the doctor, the way the doctor peered at her silently like an insect in a jar, the way they’d both cackled as June ran out in fear.

  Even worse was imagining what could possibly come next. Nurse Joya had said the treatments were going to start immediately. It may take a few tries and a few different methods, but believe me, we are fully equipped to handle you. June shuddered and hugged herself, her eyes burning as she reached the doorway to her room at last.

  Eleanor was reading a book in bed, the cover tattered and stained.

  “Do you see scars beneath my eyes?” June demanded, shutting the door and rushing across the room to the mirror. Eleanor sat up quickly, letting the book fall forward onto her chest.

  “What do you mean?”

  “My eyes,” June repeated, putting her face up to the mirror until her nose touched it. She ran her fingers along the skin beneath her eyes, studying the fine lines, unable to figure out what she was looking at. “Does it look like there are scars underneath them?”

  She thought of how it’d felt to write the part in her book where the heroine’s eyes were removed, and she flinched away from the mirror. Scrape, scrape, scraaaape.

  Eleanor, fascinated, scrambled off the bed and came close to June. “Hold still,” she commanded, and leaned in as though she was going to kiss June. Right before their lips might have touched, she paused, staring with narrowed eyes at the area beneath June’s bottom lash line. “There are definitely two lines...but they look so thin, thin enough to just be wrinkles.”

  “Identical wrinkles on each side?” June whispered, and their eyes met. It was then that June saw exactly how she’d look to someone outside, completely paranoid and at home in a place like this. “What’s happening to me, Eleanor?”

  “Don’t call me that,” Eleanor whispered, her eyes wide but her gaze soft. She swallowed. “And I don’t know. You’re definitely alive, though.”

  “So are you,” June mumbled, turning away from her roommate at last, looking back at the mirror. “But...maybe we won’t be for long.”

  “I’m already dead.”

  The door to their room burst open, causing both girls to jump. Nurse Joya appeared, pushing a tall but compact metal tray on wheels, an array of tools and multicolored pills assembled over the top.r />
  “Here you are,” she said with a toothpaste-commercial smile. “You scurried off so quick there before, Junebug. You didn’t give us any time to get your first treatment rolling.”

  June’s hands went all tingly. Eleanor quietly returned to her bed and began reading again, or at least pretended to.

  “What’s the treatment?” June managed, remembering the sound of Nurse Joya’s laughter mixed with the doctor’s when she’d fled the office. The nurse’s very presence paralyzed June with terror.

  “Just some medicine,” the nurse said, rubbing her cherry-red lips together as she picked up a large syringe. “Lucky for you, I was about to make my rounds anyway. Otherwise I might have been a little grouchy about you running off. Sit down.”

  June sat on her bed, trying to keep her breathing steady. Don’t fight her. Don’t draw unnecessary attention to yourself. The nurse was making rounds—that meant the tray contained things for multiple girls all through the hall. At first June had thought it was all for her. Nurse Joya finished preparing the syringe and came to stand beside June, pulling the tray along behind her. She wiped at the crook of June’s arm with a cold, wet cotton ball, then took the syringe and sank the needle into June’s vein. All the time this was happening, June was trying to resist allowing it, but found that all she could do was sit there.

  The amount of liquid in the syringe was so little that June didn’t understand how it could have any effect on her. She sucked in a tiny breath through her nose as the needle came out, feeling scared and vulnerable to what would come next. She couldn’t stop thinking about the women she had seen staring into space when she had first arrived, and she hoped and prayed that whatever she’d just been given would have a different effect.

  Another question rose within: How exactly would they determine that she was what they considered better? They hadn’t done any real tests on her, had just talked to her for a few minutes and made her feel funny. If all they had to go on was her word, then...was it possible she could get herself out of here immediately?

  But Mom and Dad aren’t themselves, she thought, and that’s when she realized that she was smiling a wide, wide smile. Apparently a little went a long way when it came to the medication in the syringe.

  “There we are,” Nurse Joya said, giving June’s knee a little pat. “That should reset your brain nicely.” She then turned toward Eleanor. “And you’ll be receiving the same exact thing, my illusive little corpse-baby!”

  June’s smile melted into a frown as she watched the nurse clean Eleanor’s arm and stick it with the same needle that she’d just used on June.

  “You’re not supposed to do that,” June said without thinking, feeling her thoughts flow through her like never before. “You can’t share a needle like that.”

  Nurse Joya met June’s eye with a glare that was so intensely pointed that for a moment her eyes appeared to become nothing but gaping black holes dripping down her face. It’s the drugs, June thought in panic, raising her trembling hands to her mouth to keep from screaming.

  “You’ll both be out of here in no time,” the nurse said after a moment, the holes on her face growing larger, nearly reaching her mouth. “We’ll get you feeling right as rain.”

  “Right as rain,” Eleanor repeated from where she sat, looking at June as though she had something more to say.

  Nurse Joya began to whistle and pushed the cart back toward the door. Once it was out in the hallway, she turned back to them. “Toodle-oo!” she exclaimed, closing the door to their room with a loud, resounding bang.

  “What did she give us both the same thing for?” Eleanor demanded right away, bringing her knees to her chest, the book sprawled forgotten in the sheets. “I haven’t even had an appointment in four days!”

  “Hospitals don’t do this,” June said, noticing now that the pockmarks in the wall appeared to be breathing. “This isn’t right, this can’t be right, they don’t work like that—”

  “I think those are scars under your eyes,” Eleanor said, staring hard at June. “What happened to you? What could have made scars that thin?”

  Scraaaape.

  “Nothing.” June shook her head back and forth, not wanting to allow herself to get carried away. “Nothing has ever happened to my eyes.”

  “Something’s happening,” Eleanor whispered, looking at her hands. “To me.”

  From outside the room came the sound of people screaming. Not the usual outbursts by patients, but something bigger, more serious. It reminded June very much of the screams that came from the crowd at the circus when she was ten, when a man in a suit and wide-brimmed hat had started shooting a pistol at random into the crowd.

  “What is that?” Eleanor demanded, and June was relieved to know that her roommate could hear it, too. “Is there a fire?”

  Both girls rushed to the door, only to find that it was locked.

  “Hey!” June screamed, losing her cool and jiggling the doorknob as if she could break it by sheer force of will. “Let us out!”

  Dull thumps rose up amongst the screams—the sound of many slippered feet running full speed through the recreation room and hallway. June whimpered, and both girls stepped back.

  All at once, the screams and footsteps fell silent. Eleanor began spinning in circles, her arms held out. “Nothing can happen to us while we’re in here,” she said in a funny voice, like she’d had a handful of scotches. “Whatever is happening out there, it’s bad.”

  June listened hard, her forehead growing damp with sweat. She suddenly couldn’t tell if she was hearing things on the other side of the door or not and was overwhelmed with the desire to lie in her bed, so she did so. She knew she had the right to be appalled, totally outraged at the behaviors of the hospital. Someplace there is surely a medical board that would shut the whole place down if they knew.

  But what if...the things that replaced Mom and Dad had brought her here on purpose? What if they’d known it wasn’t a real hospital? But June had always seen this place from a distance as a child, resting on top of the hill behind the main road like a great stone dollhouse bolted to the earth with ivy. It certainly wasn’t new. But at the same time, she’d never known anybody, either personally or by proxy, who had come here to stay. Not that she knew of, at least.

  Across the room, Eleanor’s dreamy haze appeared to come to a sudden end when she started shrieking and slapping at herself, as if she were being attacked by an army of unseen ants. June willfully ignored her, afraid of being pulled into the hallucination secondhand somehow, letting the voice inside insist over and over again that she’d be okay.

  Except that with every repetition of the phrase, the voice became deeper, more ragged, angry. You’ll be okay, it growled, sounding like a monster hiding in a cave. You’ll be okay, it roared, in between the sound of gnashing teeth.

  It occurred to June that the voice was lying.

  Think about happy things, a different voice suggested, one that sounded a lot more like herself. Think about writing on a Saturday afternoon, gazing out the window from your bedroom, while a thunderstorm booms outside, all while Mom cooks up some fried chicken downstairs, and the smell is lovely...

  If June closed her eyes, she could almost take herself there. In the house, the room dim from the heavy dark clouds that blocked out the sun. Her story in front of her, somehow unfinished, even though she’d finished it the night before she was sent to the institution. She thought about how things had ended for her heroine, brutal and unspeakably horrifying but beautiful at the same time, peaceful in a strange way, just right.

  Necessary.

  “We’re going to the drive-in,” Eleanor said from somewhere nearby, and June kept her eyes closed. “We’re going to see a movie about sisters who murder people and turn the meat into food.”

  “Shut up,” June said unkindly, filled with rage that her tenuous good vibe was falling apart becaus
e of Eleanor’s stupid, ugly comment. The air felt like it was squirming against June’s face now, making it harder and harder to lie still, and when she couldn’t stand it anymore, she sat up and opened her eyes. Get me out of here!

  There, on the wall that Eleanor’s bed was pushed against, was a strange little hole that hadn’t been there before, something between a cave tunnel and a crawl space. This is what it feels like to hallucinate, June thought, completely fascinated. She crawled off the side of her bed and over to the hole in the wall like a warm, fleshy spider, her hair hanging down over her face.

  June couldn’t believe how real the tunnel looked—she could see that it sloped slightly downward for maybe twenty feet before taking a hard turn to the right. The space was lined with dreary gray stonework that looked damp and cold. She reached her hand inside the space, expecting the wall to stop her hand, and nearly screamed when her fingers brushed against the stone instead.

  The air in the tunnel was significantly cooler than in the hospital room—how was that possible? Visual hallucinations were one thing, June knew, but the fact that she was able to reach into the tunnel wasn’t something she could get her head around.

  “Eleanor,” June said, moving her hand around the moisture-laden air in the tunnel. “Come here. You need to see this.”

  “I can’t move” came Eleanor’s breathless reply. “I won’t move. The ants won’t let me. All I can hear is the baby crying. Please make it stop crying...”

  June was about to tell Eleanor to snap out of it when she heard a peculiar sound coming from inside the tunnel—the sound of something wet, crunching and ripping, very faint, very far off. Without thinking about what it meant or what consequences might come of it, June crawled into the hole. She looked back only once, to make sure the opening didn’t disappear once she was fully inside. But the hole leading to her hospital room was still there, the ugly white light shining awfully bright behind her.