Bucks County, Thanksgiving 1970

Marlise still hid and threw away food, but she seemed well enough to Dr. Lance by Thanksgiving—up to nearly 90 pounds—to make the trip to Bucks County for the long holiday weekend. Since Silas had no place to go (his parents were living abroad somewhere, Montreaux, he thought, or perhaps visiting his sister the gallery manager in Paris), Marlise had convinced Maurice to consent to Silas’s coming along for the holiday. What’s one more? Maurice had said, but Marlise heard the fatigue and smoke in his voice as it crackled through the receiver of the ward’s hallway payphone.

It had been a bad idea. By Friday evening, Silas had discovered and smoked an entire dime bag belonging to the son of Maurice’s current wife, Sylvie, and was later caught with his hand up the shirt of one of her daughters in the master bedroom linen closet. Hearing about this pained Marlise. What was Silas to her? Brother? Caretaker? Antic force? Who or what was she to him?

But before that, before Maurice had driven them both back to The Institute on Saturday, earlier than planned, there had been that bitingly cold Thanksgiving Day afternoon when Sylvie, on her last legs with Maurice, and who apparently had some kind of guru back in London, had gone up to a rocky field behind the house to spray-paint a labyrinth onto the dun grasses. First she had tied red ribbons in various trees and shrubs to symbolize her unmet spiritual wishes and future desires, but while she was mapping out her labyrinth, following directions from a sheet of paper and pointing a can of rust-red spray paint at the ground, pacing out her steps, a herd of cows that had busted loose from a neighboring farm had circled her. Their breath chuffed the air, their scrutiny sullen. Terrified, she began to call for help.

By the time Maurice, Silas, Marlise, and some stepchildren and neighbors had gathered at the hilltop, Sylvie was in a heap, sobbing on the ground. A few yards off, a calf chewed placidly on one of the red ribbons as the rest of the herd mulled about in steam, mud, and piss. “Look, Maurice,” Sylvie spat out, syllable by syllable, her fit of weeping arrested by the embarrassed stares of the onlookers. “At least the fucking labyrinth is completely clear. At least the bitches didn’t shit in the labyrinth.”

“Shit in the labyrinth” became Marlise and Silas’s code phrase after that. Most of the formulations were his idea. Formation of the United States Environmental Protection Agency as Oyster Creek Nuclear Facility opened 40 miles from Philadelphia? Shit in the Labyrinth. Someone taping “out of order” signs on all the payphones during the Institute Christmas party (Silas pretended to make several loud and querulous overseas calls to his parents, just to show he wasn’t fooled)? Shit. Philly Police Commissioner Rizzo raids the Black Panther Offices and strips their “black asses” in the street? Shit in the Labyrinth. Silas, beautiful Silas, small and compact but full of lips with long, lustrous hair, Silas of the breath-taking, hairless chest, Silas of the racing mind, heading for the basement shock rooms? Shit. Marlise, unformed, sprung into a parentless, impoverished, unsupervised limbo while still in the helpless throes of self-starvation? Shit. Shit in the effing labyrinth.