Mary
God help me, I told her the truth. I did want to forget. And for a while I nearly managed it. Or the White Coats did, in their mercy, with the help of chemicals pushed into my veins almost around the clock. For a time, I had no memory of the tortured screams, the loathing and accusation in a young boy’s eyes, the blare of lights and sirens as they came screaming up the drive.
Too late—dear God, too late.
But that wasn’t until later, at the hospital. Before that I could only watch from a distance as my life came apart thread by thread. He was so still when they carried him out, so still and . . . unrecognizable. I did that. It was true. I knew it was, but I never meant—
Oh God, I wanted to go to him, poor dead boy, to peel back the dead-white sheet and shake him awake, to say I’m sorry, so terribly, terribly sorry. But they had already strapped me down, were already pushing me into the back of the ambulance. And then there was only the hollow shrill of sirens and the sickening flash of red light as they took me away.
A full week passed before they withdrew the sedatives and let me drift back to the surface, back among the living and a world where everything was black and empty, where I had become a monster, a killer, strapped to my bed like an animal. I ask to please see the boy and then to be allowed to die. I was denied both.
For seven years, long after the straps were gone, I was punished with that awful night, each morning when the sun slanted through the iron bars at my window, and I realized where I was and why, each afternoon as I sat in the day room, staring at the others and wondering how many of them had killed a child, and each evening, as I lay down and closed my eyes and heard the plaintive screams of that poor dying boy.
Tuesday afternoons were the worst. That was my day to report to the office of some White Coat or other, always precisely at two o’clock. Each week, I would be reminded by at least one fellow inmate to paste on a smile, to lie and say I was getting better. Only I never smiled, and I never lied. I wasn’t like the others, you see. I didn’t want to get out. I had nowhere to go, nothing left in the world to entice me toward freedom. I was afraid. Afraid of the dream. Afraid of myself. Afraid of what I might do if they let me out.
And then one Tuesday, after a rather unpleasant episode in the day room, and a new regime of experimental medications, one of the White Coats suggested the lightning to me. Electroconvulsive therapy, he called it, which was apparently enjoying something of a renaissance. It sounded terrifying, the vengeance of the Lord administered in a controlled and sterile environment. I didn’t care. By then I was well acquainted with the Lord’s vengeance. When the White Coat warned me that long-term memory loss was a potential side effect, I signed his sheaf of papers without reading a word.
It worked for a time, or at least partly. I woke feeling like a jigsaw puzzle with some of the pieces missing, fragments of memory fitted in where they didn’t belong, others continually shifting, so that it was impossible to pick them up and examine them. Eventually, though, I realized it wasn’t like a puzzle at all, because lives are not still. They change and flicker, like a moving picture, but now mine had some of the frames cut out. I wondered if they would come back, or if I even wanted them to. Would they knit together like broken bones, flare back to life like a fire not quite quenched?
I missed my princes. Gone, all gone.
Through my fault.
Through my fault.
Through my most grievous fault.