To this day, I don’t know if I remember it right or made it up, but the name Bale stuck and so did his story.
We had different monsters. Mine was my icy anger. Who wouldn’t be angry after being locked up all their lives? Bale’s was his love of fire. If fire didn’t exist, I thought Bale would have been a normal boy. But a world without fire didn’t exist any more than a world without air. Would Bale love me, understand me, if fire didn’t consume him like it did?
I knew Bale loved me from the first time he saw me have an episode. He was no stranger to anger. And when I was feeling it, the sensation was so strong, it took over my whole body, making me hot and cold all at once. I was never sure if it was better to hold it in or let it out. Fighting against it felt like holding my breath. There was no way the anger wasn’t coming out eventually, and my head always hurt from the pressure. Most people usually ran in the other direction when I exploded. But not Bale. He stood right next to me. He didn’t touch me. He just stood patiently until I was done. When I stopped seeing red, and the intense, all-consuming wave of anger subsided, and everything in the room finally quieted down, he held my hand. That was when I fell in love with him, too.
I wanted my hand in his from that day to forever. Even if he did break it in two places eventually. Because no one really understood what it was like to live with this kind of rage and pain, like fire and ice, inside you. No one but us. And no matter what ward we were in, we always found our way to each other. Again and again. He made this place a home. Without him, Whittaker was the same thing for me as I’d always thought it was for everyone else: a prison.
I stood in the hallway of Ward D, staring intently at the back of Bale’s head, willing him, begging him, to turn around. To look at me now.
He didn’t.
Vern gently cupped my arm to get me to keep moving.
“Please … just a few more seconds,” I pleaded.
She shook her head. “Child, if we could actually cure things by staring long enough, Whittaker wouldn’t need to exist.”
Begrudgingly, I continued down the hall toward the visitors’ lounge.
“You know you’re going to have to forgive your mother eventually,” Vern said.
I shrugged. Mom had said she loved me. And despite all my problems and her committing me to an insane asylum my whole life, I believed she did, in her way. But after Bale broke my wrist, Dr. Harris had recommended that he and I be separated, and Mom had agreed. She took away the one thing that made Whittaker more than just survivable. He was my only friend. I could not forgive that. I hadn’t even tried to.
Vern was still looking at me for a real answer about my mother, but I just shrugged again. Around me the hallway was growing cloudy, but the colors were more vivid than before. My footsteps felt lighter. My Happy dose was working.
“Well, you’ll have to. Maybe not today. But soon,” Vern said.
“Why?” I bit back—unapologetic.
“Because you only have about three people in the universe to talk to, Snow. And technically Dr. Harris and I are paid to.”
I looked sharply at her. She laughed.
“You know you’re my favorite, Hannibal Yardley.”
That was my nickname because of the biting. She named me after a character who had a penchant for killing and cannibalism in a violent movie we weren’t allowed to see. Coming from anyone else, the nickname would have elicited a toothier response and a bit of blood. But from Vern, I took it and kept on walking.
3
As we turned the corner to the visitors’ lounge, I could see the tapestries and high-backed, overstuffed armchairs where the asylum patients met with their parents once a month. It looked like a drawing room from one of those public television period dramas that Vern liked to watch. Only at Whittaker, the lamps were nailed down to the floor and tea was served lukewarm in paper cups for safety.
Mom was looking at her phone when the guard buzzed us through the double doors. She put it away quickly as if it were contraband. She didn’t like to remind me of the things I didn’t and couldn’t have. We did not have cell phones at Whittaker. We had an ancient cordless phone in the common room that was monitored by the orderlies. Mom stood up and hugged me when I approached, wrapping me in her arms. She smelled of cinnamon and lemon, probably from her morning tea.
I didn’t hug her back.
Behind me, the door clicked shut. Vern was giving us privacy, although the big mirror on the wall betrayed the fact that we were always being watched.
“You look happy today, Snow,” Mom said, running her fingers through my hair as we sat down across from each other.
Ora Yardley was perfect and beautiful in every way. So much so that every time I saw her, I wondered how we could be from the same DNA. She had the same blond hair as me, which she inexplicably decided to dye auburn, and she had a perky nose that would make a cartoon princess jealous. Today she wore a sleeveless pale-pink sweater dress that skimmed over her curves and showed off her pale porcelain skin. Still, her eyes were my eyes: brown and deep. Her lips were my lips: full, with a tendency toward pouting. But hers were constantly, politely, upturned at the corners while mine went the other way.
Mom continued to stroke my hair. Like Vern, she said it had gone white from the medication I was given at Whittaker. But the way I remember it, my first streaks showed up the day after I walked through the mirror—before the doctors had figured out what drugs to give me. I remember looking in the mirror when I woke up in my new room and there they were.
“Honey, I wish you’d just let me do something about it,” Mom tried again.
I pushed her hand away. “I like them.”
“Honey,” she began again, but she stopped when I pulled away completely.
“I brought you something.” She smiled, giggling a little as she reached beneath her chair and pulled out a box. It was plain white and unwrapped, and had likely been searched before I got there. The ribbon was the tiniest bit askew, which was odd, because my mother was all about perfection. But I tore into the bow all the same. Not because the box was pretty, but because it was from my mom. Because it was new. Nothing was new at Whittaker.
Inside the box was a pair of pale-blue mittens. They looked homemade.
“Winter is coming soon,” Mom said. “I wanted you to have something new for your walks with Vern.”
Mom’s smile deepened with the apparent hope that she had picked the right gift. Something to make everything better. Something to bridge the gap between us. Some part of me leaned into her at times like this. I was so close to melting. So close to forgiveness. But I thought back to the day when she and Dr. Harris had made the decision that changed my life.
“I’ve talked it over with Dr. Harris, and we’re in agreement on this,” she had said, sitting across from me in the same chair she was in today. “We think that it’s best for you and Bale to be kept separate.” She had made the decision so easily, like she was insisting on making me wear a helmet for riding my bike, not taking away the love of my life.
I had gotten angry too many times to count, and I felt it again now, the anger bubbling to the surface, but Happy did its job for once and tamped it down. I focused on the mittens in my lap.
“Thanks,” I said.
“You’re so welcome!” Mom clapped her hands. To her, my not throwing the mittens across the room meant that the gift was a success. When she smiled wide enough, I could see the faint white mark on her cheek pinch. It was the only imperfect thing about her, and it was because of me on the day everything changed. She’d been reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and I had taken it literally and tried to walk through the looking glass with my best friend. But I didn’t remember that day at all.
I learned from my dad that Becky, the girl I pulled through the mirror, and her family sued us, and we had settled. I never saw her again. But I still wondered about her. My scars had faded over the years, but they were still there, reminding me of how and why this all began. I wondered if Be
cky was out in the world with her scars, too.
When I first got to the institute, I thought that it was a punishment, a time-out for bad behavior. I sometimes wondered if my parents had just accepted Dr. Harris’s diagnosis that day or if they knew when they dropped me off at Whittaker that it was forever.
Mom chatted on about Dad and the house, a place I had not seen in eleven years and couldn’t care less about. And a dad who came every other month and on holidays. She must have noticed I was being distant, though, because she suddenly said, “Honey, I know you think that you and Bale are Romeo and Juliet, but this will pass.”
I felt my anger notch up a bit, but my fingers started tapping against the leg of my pants and I swallowed down the rage. Mom gently removed the box that the mittens were nestled in and put it on the nailed-down coffee table. She studied me as she leaned back into her seat and re-crossed her legs.
“You think it’s love, but it’s not. I know what it’s like to feel passion and think that you can change someone.”
I perked up despite myself. Mom wasn’t talking about me anymore. She was talking about herself.
“You tried to change Dad?” I asked. My mom was my mom, but my father was a different story. He was a stranger. Dad could barely handle seeing his crazy daughter on a bimonthly basis. Most of the time I had trouble understanding why they were even together, let alone imagining what Mom had tried to change about him.
“Not Dad,” she countered, her voice a little faraway as if she were lost in a memory.
I never thought of Mom being with anyone else.
“The point is you can’t change Bale. He’s sick, honey. He broke your wrist and that will never be okay.”
I closed my eyes, and my fingers tapped against my legs, almost of their own volition. I was getting angrier and itched to sketch something. I needed to calm down, or I would get thrown in solitary.
“When they called me to tell me that he had broken your wrist, I was so scared. Bale’s not well.” Mom’s eyes filled with tears. She reached out and put her hands over mine, stopping my finger taps entirely.
“Does that apply to me, too?” I asked pointedly.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, if Bale can’t get better, that means I can’t, either. Right?”
“That’s not what I meant,” Mom faltered. Her lips formed a thin, tight worry line.
“But it’s what you think.”
“It’s not. I know it’s hard for you to believe, but everything I do is out of love, including protecting you.”
“Then love me a little less,” I said without missing a beat. I didn’t know why I said it.
“Impossible,” she said automatically.
I crossed my arms and glared at her until she started to deflate.
She gazed at me for a long beat, shoulders hunched, before looking at the mirror on the wall to signal Vern. Our twenty minutes were up. Vern was in the room within seconds.
“Vern, I’d love to see Dr. Harris before I go.” My mother bit her lip, and she had a faraway look that I had seen on The End of Almost when characters were thinking of things that they shouldn’t, but ultimately would, do.
Mom cried a little as she hugged me good-bye. I don’t even know if she realized I never hugged her back.
I had a secret, though. I still loved her even though I never ever showed it. But Mom never stopped visiting, never stopped talking, never stopped trying, and I suppose if she had I would have hated her for real then.
I couldn’t let her in. I couldn’t survive in here if I did. I would have gone soft with longing for what I once had: a pretty little room perfect for a five-year-old me and a mother who stroked my hair at night. We couldn’t play mother and daughter in here, until she was ready to take me home and do it for real out there.
“I’ll walk you, Ora,” Vern said. She told the orderly at the desk to look after me. Then she grabbed a sketch pad and some charcoal and placed them on the coffee table in front of me, next to my new mittens.
“Now, don’t get into any trouble.” Vern wagged her finger at me.
But for me, it was impossible not to.
4
I had started to sketch last night’s dream—the tree and the thing in the water—when Magpie appeared in the doorway, fresh from a walk around the grounds. Her orderly, a short Jamaican woman named Cecilia, let her into the visitors’ lounge without noticing me there. She had no doubt gone for a smoke break and Magpie wasn’t a runner or violent so she probably thought nothing of leaving her alone. But Magpie did antagonize others. Especially me.
Magpie was wearing coral-pink lipstick today. It didn’t quite match her olive-brown complexion, but thieves couldn’t be choosers. The coral was the same shade that Elizabeth, the nurse at reception, wore. How Magpie managed to lift it off her was a bit of a mystery, considering that I’d never seen Elizabeth cross the line between the private and the public quarters.
Magpie’s actual name was Ophelia. But her nickname came from her penchant for taking things. Magpie didn’t just steal physical things. She stole secrets, too. Sometimes I thought that maybe she had all that junk where her soul was supposed to be.
“Not so tough without your firebug?” she taunted.
While she was talking, she twisted her shiny black hair into a knot. I knew I shouldn’t let her get to me, but I couldn’t stop myself sometimes. Okay, most times. And Magpie usually deserved it.
I’d seen the look on her face when she had stolen something and watched the person look for it, all the while knowing that the missing item was rattling around in her pocket or hidden under her bed. Gleeful. Evil. Magpie had the same look now as she spoke about Bale. Even though she had nothing to do with our separation, she still enjoyed toying with my loss.
“Shut it, Magpie,” I snapped. My fingers curled into my palms. Come on, Happy. Work your magic. But it was as if the effects of the pill were burning away as my anger rose.
Magpie’s expression turned suddenly coy. Like she knew something I didn’t. “Well, let me know if you need anything. I can get anything that anyone wants. Anything.”
I didn’t know where she was going with this. Magpie spoke in riddles sometimes. And depending on my mood, I decided whether or not to play.
She pulled out a packet of matches and tossed them from one hand to the other. Her wicked smile was back, and it was clear she was waiting for me to connect the dots.
I’d always wondered how Bale managed to set fire after fire at the asylum. I always blamed careless orderlies. But Magpie was saying that she could and possibly had given as well as taken.
The anger I’d been holding in since I’d seen my mother boiled over. I felt it inside me like icy-hot flames licking their way up my chest and fighting to get out. I lunged at her with a scream, fury taking over. I grabbed her hair and yanked as hard as I could, but then something weird happened. I expected her to yell or push back. Instead she stopped in her tracks. Her mouth opened, but no sound came out. She fell to the floor and lay completely still.
“Very funny. I am not falling for this,” I said, looking down at her seemingly lifeless form.
She did not move.
I knelt down and touched her arm. Her skin was cold. Her lips were blue. Her eyelashes looked suddenly frosty white.
“Hey, not funny,” I said again. I was considering doing mouth-to-mouth or chest compressions—not that I knew how to do either, but I’d seen it on TV.
Magpie’s eyes blinked open. She looked at me both pleadingly and accusingly at once. Her gaze shifted from me to the door.
The White Coat at the desk who was supposed to be watching me was engrossed in a People magazine. I got up and yelled for him.
“It’s Magpie! I …” My voice trailed off.
“What did you do?” he demanded as he ran over.
I looked down at Magpie, prostrate and unmoving in the center of the floor. Her eyes fluttered once more before they closed entirely.
5
/> “Aren’t you supposed to take me back to my room?” I raised my eyebrows as Vern led me into the common room.
“Just because you went all Hannibal on Magpie doesn’t mean I have to miss what happened to Kayla Blue,” Vern explained, plopping us down on the plastic chairs in front of the common room TV. She was referring to Rebecca Gershon’s daughter on our favorite show, The End of Almost.
On-screen, Kayla Blue was crying her eyes out. She had just told River that she wasn’t the woman he thought she was. His angular face registered confusion as she explained her complicated past to him. But within minutes he was back on one knee, proposing to her. The speed of his understanding and his forgiveness was kind of beautiful. The certainty of his love was something to be envied even if it was just a story. I found myself leaning in.
All of us at Whittaker learned things from television, because that was the closest thing we had to school and boys and prom and friends. But we didn’t know what happened between the commercial breaks or after things faded to black. I knew there was a difference between reel life and real life, but the television taught me everything I knew about kisses and dates and broken hearts and family dramas—sometimes all wrapped up in a bow within half-hour or hourly segments.
Kayla Blue had just said “yes” when Vern got a text on her phone. I couldn’t read her expression. Was it about Magpie?
“Is she … ?” I asked, not quite sure how I felt about hearing the answer. I had wanted to hurt her but not badly, and I certainly didn’t want her dead.
“Now you care, Yardley?”
I didn’t have a defense, exactly, so I shrugged. I was a master at shrugging.
“Looks like Magpie is going to make a full recovery. She was paralyzed temporarily. But she seems to have regained the full use of her extremities. Toes wiggling. Eyes rolling. She’s back to herself.”
I can’t say that I felt relief. But a wave of something came over me just the same.