The Cassandra Page 11

  My hands parted from my wrists and hovered near Stanley’s face. His eyes swelled shut. His throat empurpled. His front tooth fell out. Welts exploded like blue flames on his flesh; lacerations ripped open. My disconnected palms fell on his shoulders and he flinched. A raft slid into the water of my thoughts. The stream of images parted around it, giving space for me to warn him, slowly and clearly,

  “They’ll very nearly kill you, later tonight, after supper.”

  He tried to pull away from me but I couldn’t let go of his shoulders. I needed him to listen. The rattlesnake tongue clicked and hissed.

  Beth took hold of my arm, shaking it at first gently and then more wildly.

  “Milly,” she said. “Milly, let go of him.”

  “She’s gone mad,” Stanley said. “Get her off me.”

  “Listen to me,” I told him desperately, “I’m trying to save you. Don’t go out tonight, stay put—”

  Once, as a girl, I’d complained to Mother, No one believes me. I’m only trying to help them.

  Mother had chided me. No one wants your doom and gloom. Why don’t you say something nice for a change? You make it so easy for people to hate you.

  Stanley’s battered ghost-to-come gaped at me as though I were diseased. Blood poured down his jaw but no one else saw it. Between us hung the thin fabric of the vision, as sheer as it was assured.

  “They’ll beat you half to death.”

  Stanley backed away from me.

  “Don’t be scared of me,” my snake tongue hissed. “Be scared of them.”

  Gordon and the other men watched me, their expressions curious, uncomfortable. If they sensed the truth of my words, they didn’t admit to it. Between us Stanley bled and swelled.

  Beth put her arm around me, peeling me away from the group. She led me in the direction of the encampment. The shroud of my vision lifted. When I looked over my shoulder, Stanley’s face was returned to its present state, unmarred, unharmed. Regardless, the rough fists of the future waited for him.

  “Mildred,” Beth said, and the lack of my nickname worried me: I was no longer an adorable pet. “I’m taking you to the clinic.”

  How could I explain it to her, without sounding mad?

  It’s not what’s the matter with me, it’s exactly what’s right.

  “They’ll hurt him, Beth,” I told her. “It’s the truth.”

  “If you don’t stop, they’ll make you leave Hanford,” she said. “You can’t act like this here.” Then, following an exasperated pause, “It’s like you want it to happen, Milly. It’s like you were planting an idea in their heads.”

  It felt like a finger had reached into my gut and struck a hard chord there; I vibrated with unease and annoyance. I wasn’t sure if I could trust Beth. I looked at her for a long moment, pleadingly. The rattlesnake in my mouth loosened, relaxed. My tongue became again a neutral organ.

  “I’ll stop,” I told her, even though I wouldn’t stop, didn’t want to. “I’ll do whatever you say.”

  She hurried me along as if she hadn’t heard me, but when we reached the clinic she held the door open for me and said, “I only want what’s best for you,” and I was relieved to hear the affection in her tone.

  Sometimes the only way to get on someone’s good side again is to agree with everything they ask of you.

  “I want that for you, too,” I said, but saying it made me realize that I didn’t know what best for you meant, and I didn’t think Beth knew, either.

  * * *

  We were in the clinic for over an hour. The clean coolness of the room, the stillness of the air, shushed my inner workings, at first to a murmur and then to a simple hum in my mind. The room smelled of camphor. I closed my eyes and slept a little, lying on the gray sheets of a thin and creaking cot. Beth left me alone for a time, managing to track down Tom Cat just as he caught the cattle car to Unit B. She sent with him a note to Dr. Hall, saying I was ill.

  “He was very worried for you,” Beth said when she returned.

  “Dr. Hall?” I said, surprised.

  “Tom Cat, silly.”

  Beth squeezed my hand. I rose onto one elbow and then the other to smooth my cotton percale day dress and then resettled myself on the stiff cot.

  “Don’t you need to work, Beth?”

  “Soon. Not before I speak to Dr. Harrington, Milly.”

  I was relieved to hear her call me Milly again.

  “You’re better than a sister,” I told her. I said it purposefully, trying to reestablish myself in her mind as a refurbished Annie.

  I thought of Martha, too, recalling how cruelly she had sneered at me when I’d broken my wrist—You deserve it, you deaf idiot—having fallen from a tree that she’d warned me not to climb.

  “I’m a friend,” she said. “And I love you, Milly. I hate to see you in pain.”

  “I’m not in pain,” I told her.

  “We’re all in pain,” Beth said dismissively.

  I assured her I was not, but my insistence seemed to bother her. She half-turned away from me. I admired the sensuality of her profile, the long line of her nose, her smooth forehead, the sweep of her eyelashes, her pretty, downturned mouth, her charming ear with its elegant pointed tip, the strength and sculpted beauty of her shoulder in its brown cable cardigan. I thought of her green nightgown, now in Gordon’s possession. What would she say if I told her about the theft? I relished withholding a secret from her.

  The doctor entered and Beth greeted the older man eagerly. Beside her, he appeared short and wrinkled and cantankerous, with the aspect of a gargoyle.

  “Dr. Harrington, this is my friend, Mildred Groves,” she said. “She works for Dr. Hall.”

  “You don’t say,” Dr. Harrington said. “I hear he’s an intelligent man.”

  “He is,” I rushed to say. “The smartest person I’ve ever met.”

  Beth ignored this small talk. “Mildred is very tense. I worry for her nerves.”

  “Women are like this, you know,” he replied lightly. “It shouldn’t cause too much alarm.”

  Beth looked at me quickly and then back at the doctor. “She had a very upsetting interaction with some friends. She’s wound up. And not just today,” she said. “She’s had other episodes. Sleepwalking, for example.”

  “Sleepwalking, yes, I see.” Dr. Harrington withdrew a pen and a small tablet of paper from his breast pocket and scribbled down what Beth said into it. Or is it what Beth says, I wondered. Perhaps he was writing Remember to set out the laundry tonight or Buy butter at the grocer. Maybe he wrote, Woman with amazing powers arrives at Hanford and transforms all of our lives.

  “Yes, but not normal sleepwalking, Dr. Harrington. She wanders outside, to the riverbank. She nearly drowned in the Columbia. And she thinks she sees things, she starts talking crazy—”

  Dr. Harrington smiled gently and patted her arm. “Now, now, Mrs. Green, let’s remain calm for our friend’s sake, please.”

  Beth glowered for a moment, considering this, but then bit her lip and nodded. She was curvy and perfect in her day dress and sweater, and when Dr. Harrington touched her arm, his fingertips lingered against the flesh of her wrist.

  “Now, Miss Groves,” he said to me, kindly, “how are you enjoying your work here at Hanford?”

  “It’s going very well, thank you,” I said.

  “And where is your family? How are things back at home?”

  “They’re in Omak,” I said. “Happy as pigs in mud.”

  “And are they very proud of you?”

  I began to say yes but then I corrected myself.

  “As much as they possibly can be. I send them the largest portion of my check every month. It’s more money than they’ve ever had.”

  “She ran away,” Beth interrupted. “She left her mother and her sister, both. They’ve given her a very hard time. After her father died, she was her mother’s lone caretaker. The poor child. To know only mortality and death…”

  “I had a wonderful con
versation with Mother recently,” I said, which was really only a partial lie, because it really was a good conversation, as far as conversations with Mother went, “and she asked me to come home for the holidays.”

  I didn’t add that she wanted my return to be permanent.

  “And you would like this?” Dr. Harrington pressed.

  “I can’t go,” I said. “I’ll be here working,” I went on, measuring my tone to sound quite sane, “and I like it that way. I don’t want to go home. I love it here. It’s a marvelous place, wouldn’t you agree, Dr. Harrington?”

  The doctor looked at me crossly and then shook his head, indicating that he was not the one on trial. “Tell me, Miss Groves, how do you like the strong winds we have here?”

  “I have no trouble with the wind,” I said. “She and I get along just fine.”

  “Lots of good men and women have left because of the winds. They can make a person feel trapped. But you don’t feel this way?”

  I shook my head, no.

  “And how are you tolerating the rudimentary lodgings?”

  “I find them quaint and comfortable,” I said.

  “The long work hours? Are those taxing for you?”

  “Caring for Mother was far more taxing, Dr. Harrington. You would understand if you met her.”

  “And have you felt any discontent at all since arriving? Any wish to leave?”

  “The opposite.”

  I want to stay here forever.

  Beth took up my hand and laced her fingers through my own.

  “Maybe some valerian would help her, Doctor? Something to calm her nerves?”

  “I’m perfectly calm,” I said.

  “I think valerian would do nicely,” he said. “This is a classic case, of course, of hysteria brought on by strain.”

  “But I’m not strained,” I said. “The opposite, really. I’m freer than I’ve ever been.”

  “Sometimes,” Dr. Bell said smoothly, “we trick ourselves into believing we’re well, but that’s when cracks appear in our behavior.”

  I considered this silently. It unnerved me, to be told this, as if I didn’t know myself in the slightest. At any moment I could reveal myself as my own enemy. Three years ago, after I’d pushed Mother into the river, I’d catch myself staring obsessively at my hands, worried about what they might do to others or to myself. I sat on them whenever I could, certain that if I let down my guard they would shoot up and wrap around my own throat.

  “In ‘The Princess and the Pea,’” I said suddenly, “the girl just needs the pea removed.”

  Beth laughed at this, uncomfortably. “She has an astounding mind, doesn’t she?”

  The doctor, however, seemed to understand me perfectly. “It’s a charming analogy. We just need to find the pea,” he said, smiling, “and pluck it out.”

  I liked this idea very much. It satisfied me, that the problem could be that simple.

  The doctor continued. “I must inform you that anyone not of sound mind will leave Hanford on the instant, Miss Groves. I’m afraid I will need to report any signs of mania—”

  “My mind is as sound as a gong, sir,” I insisted. Sounder, I wanted to add, bigger, louder, brassier. “I’ve been overtired is all.”

  I was at risk of being sent home. I threw an irritated look at Beth. She, too, was stunned. She mouthed the word, “Sorry,” at me. I understood that she wanted to help me, not to get rid of me, but I was angry, nonetheless. I swallowed my irritation. I needed to remain calm until we left the clinic.

  “She hasn’t done anything worth reporting,” Beth said in her professional nurse’s tone. “I would tell you, Dr. Harrington, if I thought otherwise. She’s strained, as you said, and she has these intense dreams. I thought if anyone could help her, it would be you.”

  I noted the flattery and its intent, but Dr. Harrington only nodded and continued bitterly, “Women patients and their moods. I see dozens of you a year. It’s been the biggest headache of girls joining the workplace, this extreme sensitivity. All that ‘Rosie the Riveter’ toughness is lost on the average girl. Meanwhile the good men are off dying in battle, all while you fuss and complain here on the home front.”

  He continued his harangue until Beth carefully interrupted him and asked again for some sort of helpful prescription.

  “Of course,” he said. He gave me a stern look. “Miss Groves, if I see you back here, I’m afraid it will be for the last time. For obvious reasons, we can only have the sanest minds working here. That’s how important this work is for the war effort.”

  “You won’t see me here again,” I promised. “Not even for a common cold.”

  He smiled and patted my knee.

  My work here was only beginning. I belonged here. The whole of me belonged here, including my visions, especially my visions. I gave him my sanest, kindest, most convincing smile.

  I left with a bottle of valerian and a diagnosis of common female hysteria brought on by sleeplessness and rattled nerves. The sun blazed but the air was cold and dry like the inside of an icebox. Beth waved with some concern from the clinic’s haphazardly constructed porch. She looked like a perfect little doll settled within a crude toy village. I waved good-bye to her and smiled brightly to reassure her, belying my frustration.

  I’m right as rain. Don’t worry your pretty little head.

  JUMP

  The vision collected me from where I slept on the cot, hooking into my shoulders with her harpy’s talons and dragging me first across the room of gently snoring women, pushing against the barracks door, and then over the chipped gravel sand of the desert so that the skin on the tops of my toes tore and bled. The vision had been gathering strength for some time. I didn’t fight her. I was relieved she was here. She’d plucked out the eyes of the guards so that they couldn’t see me. They laughed and joked together over a flask of beer, unaware that their eyes had been replaced with chewed-up mulberries. Their sight was useless now; otherwise they would have cried out, pulled me free of the harpy’s hooks, returned me to the barracks, and scolded me in tones of incredulity. But mulberry eyes, sweet and dumb, see nothing. The vision croaked and opened up her wings and we flew the short distance to the bluff overlooking the river.

  Snow fell in fragments of fine white thread. The vision flapped her wings and my line of sight sharpened. I was released onto the icy earth, a glittering reflection of the firmament. Out of the wintry shadows slowly floated the heron, clever shape-shifter, the yellow circle of her eye staring at me from the side of her tapered face.

  The wind was less angry tonight; she played gently with my hair and knocked lightly at the bell on my ankle. The heron came forward and stabbed at my leg, bloodying it, catching the ribbon in her beak. The ribbon came loose; the bell fell away. I was relieved to be free of it, but I warned the heron that Beth would be very angry with her.

  The heron gazed at me flatly. As if she matters at all.

  The wind stilled, agreeing. Above us gleamed the white avenue of the Milky Way, carving a path through the heavens from nothing to nothing. It reminded me of Mother’s old white head scarf, tied loosely around her hair. I saw her face then; the stars were her age spots, the lined cliffs of White Bluffs her throat. The Columbia was the black blood coursing from her body, an unending menstruation.

  It was primordial and breathtaking.

  The heron flapped her wings where she stood, gathering my attention. Her beak pointed east, toward the water.

  A woman emerged from the river, shoulders dripping, picking her way up the steep side of the bluff. A baby was wrapped to the front of her chest. She neared a vertical rock wall and rather than find her way around it, she stepped directly onto it, her spine now parallel to the river. I cried out, certain that she and the baby would fall backward, but her feet adhered like a spider’s to the stones. She glided up the wall, face to the sky, backside to the water, and then crested a ledge and edged toward me, perpendicular again, her face unreadable in its exhaustion.

 
; The skin sloughed away from the soles of her feet in pale leaves. I scrambled along the ridge and begged for her to sit down on the uneven outcropping, and she did so, gratefully, with a pained moan. Her clothes hung in shreds around her body, as though torn apart by a storm of knives.

  “What’s happened to us?” she asked, confused, in a language that was not my own but that I could understand perfectly through the vision’s soft filter.

  I began to say, “I don’t know,” but the heron squawked and I fell silent.

  I heard the heron’s calm voice in my head then, and I repeated, “It was the boy made by men.”

  The words I could give her, even if I didn’t understand their meaning.

  The baby nursed at the woman’s bare breast. Mother thought nursing women were foolish and abnormal, but I leaned in, finding such nuzzling babes darling, symbols of protection and hope. But his face, to my horror, was stabbed through with shards of glass, and he bled profusely from his eyes and nose.

  I looked up at the mother in alarm.

  “I was on a bus,” the woman recalled, loosening the wrap a little to give the baby more room, “and a man offered us his seat. I accepted it, sat down. There was a loud sound. A queer smell. The next thing I knew, I was outside. The bus was ruined, on fire. I looked down at my son, and he smiled up at me. He couldn’t feel the broken glass in his face.”

  He’ll die tonight, said the heron.

  “But he can’t,” I protested.

  The heron plunged on her tall legs away from me. Something near her moved in the grass and in one deathly swift moment she speared it. An animal screamed.

  “He’s sucking the poison out of me,” the mother said, “so that I can survive.”

  The heron, behind her, lifted a large rabbit from the grass, bloodied, stunned, and tossed back her head to draw the body farther into her maw.

  “Your poor child.” I offered to hold the baby for the mother and she shook her head.

  These last few hours between mother and child would be excruciating, precious.