1959
Elodie tries to lift her head off her pillow, but it feels like bricks. The pill they give her at night turns her into a zombie the next day. She rarely feels awake. Instead, the world unfolds through a foggy slow-motion filter. She knows from the nuns that the pill they give all the patients is called Largactil. Some of the older girls in Ward B call it the lobotomy pill. Even though Elodie is only nine, she already knows what a lobotomy is from a girl named Nora. Nora was transferred from the epileptic ward last spring. When she arrived at Ward B, Elodie wasted no time asking her about Emmeline.
“She hasn’t spoken since the lobotomy,” Nora said matter-of-factly.
“What’s a lobotomy?” Elodie wanted to know.
“It’s when they stick an ice pick into the front of your brain to make you less violent,” Nora explained. “They do it all the time at the surgery.”
Elodie gasped, not believing it could be true. She ran to Sister Alice—the only semihumane nun on the ward—and tugged at her habit. “Is it true they stick ice picks in patients’ heads to stop them from being violent?” she asked, breathless.
“What are you babbling about, Elodie?”
“Nora told me Emmeline hasn’t spoken since she had the lob . . . lob . . . the thing where they make a hole in your head—”
Sister Alice sighed. “A lobotomy is a perfectly respectable operation,” she explained. “With the dangerous patients, there’s no other choice.”
“But Emmeline wasn’t dangerous—”
“If you mind your business and stay out of trouble,” she warned, “you won’t need to get one.”
That afternoon, Nora was chained to a pipe because of her “big mouth.” She blamed Elodie and never spoke to her again, right up till she was transferred to another ward.
Elodie lies motionless on her cot, still groggy and dry-mouthed. In some ways, she’s grateful for the Largactil. Although she hates how it makes her feel during the day—slow and foggy and dim-witted—it does dull the pain immediately before falling asleep and upon awakening. In those few minutes of docile stupefaction, when her thoughts are a blur and her mind barely conscious, she can forget. Everything has a hallucinatory quality—the other patients, the nuns, the hopelessness of her incarceration. The Largactil at least neutralizes the despair for a while.
I’m not crazy, she reminds herself. I’m not crazy.
The lights go on and the girls rise from their beds. They shuffle to the washroom, brush their teeth, and splash cold water on their faces, trying to shake off the effects of the drug. The best that can be said about Elodie’s days at Saint-Nazarius is that she doesn’t mind her current job sewing bedsheets in the basement. Her first job was cleaning the bathrooms on all the women’s wards. Floor upon floor, toilet after toilet, she did that for the better part of a year. When she heard from one of the other girls that there was a job sewing, she lied and said she knew how. Somehow, she got away with it. By observing the other sewers—and with the help of one of the old-timers, a kind epileptic named Marigot—she was able to pick it up fast enough to keep her job. Apparently, she has a knack.
After breakfast and prayers, Elodie makes her way down to the basement—her refuge—and sits down at the sewing machine. It doesn’t bother her to sit for hours at a time without a break; the back pain is a luxury compared to how scrubbing floors and toilets made her body ache. Besides, there are worse jobs, like carrying the dead bodies out to the cemetery behind the hospital. Patients die at Saint-Nazarius almost every day—not just the old ones, but children, too. Word travels fast through the wards, filtering down from the older girls to the younger ones. In this place full of secrets, there are no secrets.
She gets to work sewing her quota for the morning—a dozen sheet hems an hour, two dozen by lunch break—letting her mind wander to the hum of the machine. She loses count of the sheets as they pile up beside her, but somehow the correct amount always gets done. Sister Calvert’s bell clanging next to her ear startles her out of her daze.
So goes the monotonous routine of her days. Lunch is some kind of brown meat drowned in thick, clotted gravy. Dessert is always a smudge of molasses on the plate. Afterwards, it’s back down to the basement, where she is expected to meet her afternoon quota—the threat of a transfer always looms—followed by more indiscernible mush for dinner and then back to her ward to rock mindlessly in the creaky chairs with the real crazies.
By nighttime, when the nun on duty stops at her bed to dole out the Largactil, Elodie takes it with a mix of dread and relief. She’s grown to like it when her lids get heavy and her head starts to float, the precise moment when reality falls away.
Tonight, her last conscious thought before peaceful oblivion is, Oh, there’s the moon.
She wakes up shivering and disoriented, her bed soaking wet. It’s still dark and everyone is asleep. She’s aware of a pungent vinegar smell. It takes her a few minutes to realize she’s peed the bed.
For a long time, she lies in her own urine, contemplating how she’s going to navigate the maze of beds to the bathroom. Her row is the farthest from it, and she’s still semidrugged. When she finally has a strategy mapped out in her mind, she slides off her cot, strips the sheets, and rolls them into a ball.
She creeps carefully along the narrow space between the wall and the first row of cots, but she’s still very groggy. Her legs aren’t doing what they’re supposed to—they feel like cooked noodles—and the room is spinning. The Largactil is powerfully immobilizing, but she uses the wall to steady herself. What she hadn’t counted on was the strewn boot sticking out from under one of the cots.
The boot is supposed to be in the cubbyhole at the entrance to the dormitory; every girl has her own cubby—a small shelf above a hook to keep her precious few belongings—but leave it to Elodie to trip over a stray boot and go flying across the room. Had she been more alert, she might have been able to stop herself from falling so hard; instead, she reaches out for something to hold on to and winds up knocking over one of the metal nightstands. The nightstand and the lamp go crashing to the floor, the glass of the bulb shattering around her.
She can hear some of the other girls rousing. What’s happening? Who’s there? The light suddenly comes on, and Elodie is momentarily blinded. Her knees hurt and she can see she’s bleeding from the broken bulb.
When she looks up, Sister Ignatia is towering above her, frowning. Short and stocky as she is, from Elodie’s vantage point on the floor, the nun is a giant. “What happened?” she roars.
“I had to go to the bathroom,” Elodie murmurs. “I couldn’t see.”
“It smells like you already went to the bathroom.”
Elodie tries to hide the wet sheets with her body.
“You’ve woken everyone up.”
“It was an accident,” Elodie says. “I tripped over someone’s boot.”
“Are you trying to get someone else in trouble?”
“No, Sister. It was an accident.”
“You should have been more careful.”
Elodie can’t hold back a rogue sob that escapes her lips.
“Go wait for me in the bathroom,” Sister Ignatia tells her. “And take off that soiled nightgown.”
“But I didn’t see the boot!” Elodie cries, unable to control herself. “This isn’t fair!”
“Fair?” Sister Ignatia says, her lips pulling into a frightening smile. “May I remind you that you are a patient in my hospital? I am your judge, and I judge not only your transgressions today, but all of your sins, as well as the sins of your parents. Now go and wait for me in the bathroom.”
Elodie scrambles to her feet and scurries off to the bathroom. She removes her nightgown and stuffs it into the sink with her sheets, running hot water over the whole pile. Shivering and exposed, she wraps her arms around her bare chest and crouches down to generate some body warmth.
Sister Ignatia enters the bathroom carrying a large bucket of ice. Her demeanor is calm. She dumps the ice in the tub and shoves Elodie into it. Elodie tries to be stoic, but it’s freezing and she starts to wail.
Sister Ignatia reaches for the large wooden scrub brush under the sink—the one they use for cleaning the floors—and scrubs Elodie’s thighs until her flesh is raw.
“That should do it,” she mutters with satisfaction, and then she holds Elodie’s head under the tap. “Next time be more careful.”
Before leaving, she tosses a clean white nightgown at Elodie.
The door swings closed behind her. Alone at last, Elodie climbs out of the tub and puts on the nightgown. “I’m not crazy,” she whispers to her reflection in the mirror.
If she stops repeating it to herself, she may forget.