MY FIRST BREATHS come guttural and convulsive, like those of a drowning victim finally breaking the surface. But what surface?
Where am I?
The air feels steamy, ripe with the sour tang of damp woolens, diesel, and Naugahyde. I’m definitely in a vehicle. Can feel a rumbling, a sickening sense of motion—and a jagged, ringing pain between my ears, like someone’s wedged a piece of flint deep inside my brain. I want so badly to escape it, to slide back down into the dark and its painless sleep.
But then I hear her. The voice in my head. She’s vigilant and pushy. Issuing her orders like some surly fairy godmother:
Eyes open, this is not the time for sleep.
You’ve got things to do. Important things.
Such as? But like me, the voice appears to have no answers. Just that vague things-to-do edict she won’t stop repeating.
So I open my eyes—
But all I see is a roiling blur of color and shadow, bobbing and weaving across my field of vision. I try to will just a piece of this dizzying sideshow into focus, the swirling mass of red, blue, and green inches from my face, concentrate till at last the image comes clear:
My plaid dress peeking out from under my winter coat.
My sluggish eyes drift slowly across it till they come to my red purse, the one with the shiny gold clasp shaped like a clamshell. My hand is clutching it so tightly my knuckles are bloodless white. I try to relax my hand’s death grip but find I have no power over my fingers. My head’s no different. It’s slumped against a window, and with each bump in the road, my temple beats painfully against the rattling glass, and I am powerless to stop it.
Why the hell can’t I move?
What’s happened to me?
Urr-creeeeeek! The sound of grinding gears reverberates painfully inside my tender ears, interrupting my alarm. And its distinctive tortured shriek tells me something: I’m on a school bus.
And not alone. There are voices, female voices, coming from the front of the bus. I nudge my eyes that way and see a half dozen students. They’re dressed like me: I can see the bottoms of their dresses showing beneath their long winter coats. While I watch, one of them, a squirrelly brunette, pops up out of her seat. There’s a manila tag hanging from a string around her neck like she’s a rug being shipped to some far-off destination. “My family never said we’d be going on a trip,” she complains in a chirpy voice while she absently twists a lock of her long brown hair around a finger.
“Siddown before I come back there and make you,” the driver yells. Harsh, even for a school bus driver—and as the girl sinks back into her seat, I drag my eyes to the fogged-up window for a hint of where the man is taking us.
That’s when I see the bars.
Bars on the windows. Not a school bus.
I put a pin in my alarm. Use the adrenaline now barreling through my frozen body to focus. Outside it’s sleeting, and we’re driving parallel to a tall wrought iron fence whose pointed uprights stretch into the gray distance like an army of black spears. The bus’s gears groan into downshift and it slows, turning into a driveway and stopping in front of an imposing gate flanked by tall brick columns.
A man in a slicker emerges from a small building just inside the gate, and as he goes to unlock it, my eyes drift back to the brick column, squint to make out the words on its bronze plaque through the steamy glass: HANOVER STATE PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL.
These women are mentals?
Then why am I on this bus with them? I’m not a patient. I’m … I’m …
And I wait for an answer, but nothing comes.
Why the hell can’t I remember who I am?
I need to get off this bus—!
“The Lord always provides a way,” says someone behind me. I can just make her out two rows back and across the aisle: a woman with auburn hair divided into two braids who’s staring at me with a look of crazed enthusiasm. Grade school hairstyle aside, she’s old, close to twenty-five—just about at her quarter hour.
As the bus rumbles back to life and begins ascending the long, curved driveway, the woman darts across the aisle and slides, saddle shoes first, into the seat beside me. “I told them all God would save me from this place, bring me back to the trains. Someone has to watch over them, signal the Lord when it’s time,” she says, then examines a hank of my hair. “And just look at the perfect lamb He’s sent to do it.”
Lamb?
She reaches out with both hands, touches my ears, then pulls them back to examine the scarlet slick now on her fingertips.
My blood.
“‘For the life of a creature is in the blood,’” she says to the heavens, “‘and I have given it to you to make atonement for yourselves on the altar.’”
Leviticus 17:11. Crazy lady knows her scripture. And apparently so do I.
The woman continues her talk of God, trains, and plans, and I’m trying hard to follow her fervent whispers, but there’s a problem: little black spots are beginning to spread across my eyes, the ringing in my ears is growing, and my shoulders are getting so heavy …
I said not the time for sleep! the voice scolds.
And I fight like hell to stay conscious, but no amount of flight or fight’s going to stop the gathering darkness, and as the woman in braids pulls the red purse from my steadfast fingers, I slip down into the velvety black.