It was easy to believe, on a day like today, that the island owned a separate sky than the rest of the world. The purest blue available in the universe. And the whitest clouds. She walked barefoot in the sand, hiking up her dress. She cast back a glance to see her footprints trailing out behind her. Yes, she was still real and still solid. A human being with weight and mass, one who could leave depressions in dry sand. She noticed a flower that looked like yellow jessamine growing out of the dunes and thought of Winchester, for at this moment, that same flower would be blooming along the fence in her father’s yard. She’d grown up with yellow jessamine, but by the time she’d married Robert and moved away, she’d taken it for granted. Now the memory of it made her ache. Rows and rows along a fence post she could follow all the way back home. In order to stay sane, she would have to take stock of things familiar, like the Big Dipper she glimpsed through her bars at night, a constellation from childhood that had stayed with her, like a permanent tooth.
Other patients milled about, looking for shells, or wading ankle-deep in the water. One old woman, barefoot and in a yellow dress, held her arms out in front of her, swaying in the sand. Eyes closed, head tilted back. She had the smile of someone who has just tasted the perfect grapefruit. Iris watched her, intrigued. The old woman didn’t look demented. Just too happy to be well.
“She’s dancing.” Iris turned to see Lydia Helms Truman standing before her in a white sundress and matching bonnet. The small, green-eyed woman was as immaculately groomed as the night she’d swallowed her ring. She nodded at the woman, who had begun to turn in slow circles, her feet marking out a circular pattern in the sand. “Her husband of forty years, the love of her life, died of pneumonia several winters ago, and she cannot admit the loss. He is real to her, plain as day, as I am to you. She will not touch her food unless another plate is set down for him. Strange thing, madness, isn’t it? It tortures some, soothes others. She looks happy, doesn’t she? I could only have wished for such happiness in my own marriage. Perhaps I erred in choosing a visible man, when it’s the invisible ones who are sweetest.” She smiled at Iris, who found herself smiling back. The woman sounded so eloquent and reasonable, so full of gentle humor, that Iris was momentarily lost in confusion, imagining for a split second that perhaps she had been mistaken, that her memory had been faulty . . .
“I have something for you.” Lydia reached into her pocket and drew out a silk handkerchief. From the handkerchief she removed Iris’s ring. The amethysts glittered in the sunlight.
“I heard you were missing a ring. I found this in the day room. Does this belong to you?”
Iris shook her head. “No, no.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes! I am very sure.” She backed away from Lydia’s proffered hand and moved past the dancing old woman down the beach. She walked quickly until she had made a good distance from the two women, then slowed her pace and followed a meandering trail left by a gopher turtle. The urge to flee rose up inside her, clear as a voice calling over water, and she remembered the flight from her husband, traveling over broken ground, fording rivers so the dogs would lose her scent. Making progress in the nighttime. Taking cover in the day. Stealing meat from smokehouses. She looked over her shoulder and spied two male attendants in the back of the courtyard, They talked earnestly to each other, unmindful of the milling souls. And she thought to herself, I can just keep walking. Warm sand under her feet. A sharp clean scent blowing down from the citrus groves higher on the beach. Morning glories still open on the dunes, hermit crabs dragging their shells.
She would worry about food and money and clothes later. Right now, just one foot after another. She walked faster and faster, her breath growing jagged, a salt rush in the back of her throat, palms sweaty. So many footprints now separating her from the others.
A hand on her arm.
She froze.
A quiet, Southern drawl in her ear. “Ma’am, I think you’ve lost your way. Perhaps you’d like me to escort you back.”
Iris let her breath out. She’d been caught. She followed the guard back silently. Lydia and the old woman were gone. The guard left her in the courtyard, shooting a warning look over his shoulder as he walked away. She rested her elbows on the low stone wall and looked out at her footprints, the ones going away and the ones coming back, accompanied by the prints of the guard’s heavy brogans.
“It’s not so easy, is it?” A familiar-looking boy with straw-colored hair stood on the wall, wearing faded overalls rolled up to the knees. She studied him only a fraction of a second before she placed him. That was the boy who was fishing with the chef when she first came to the island. Up close she could see the freckles on his face, and two pinprick black scabs on his cheek.
“No, it’s not.”
“Even if you get past the guards, it’s dangerous out there. Alligators and rattlesnakes. Wild pigs, too. And some people say there are still pirates hiding out on this island. And if the pirates or the gators or snakes or the pigs don’t get you, the mosquitoes will eat you alive.”
She liked the way the boy addressed her, without the studied distance of the nurses and attendants. She scanned the beach again, where the wind was calm and her footprints were still perfectly formed.
“Has anyone ever escaped?” she asked.
“Somebody tried just last year. He collected feathers and made himself a set of wings. He jumped off the top of the asylum. Landed on his head and broke his neck. He’s buried out back. My name’s Wendell.” He stuck out his hand.
“Iris Dunleavy.”
They shook.
“Sorry, I’ve got sticky hands,” he said. “Taffy.”
He looked about twelve. His accent was strange. She couldn’t quite place it. He motioned her to follow him and walked to the edge of the water. He stood watching the waves coming in and out, adjusting his position so that the water never lapped beyond his toes.
“Are you crazy?” he asked.
The question flew at her so open and direct that it took her aback. “No,” she said after a moment.
“You must be crazy, because you’re here.”
“You’re here, too.”
“I’m here because my father runs this asylum.”
“Your father is Dr. Cowell?” That explained his strange accent. A vague lilt. Something handed down from Britain.
“Yes. I am his son. Help me look for shells.” He moved into the tide line, scouring the sand as she watched. “Best time is after a storm.” He picked up a shell and showed it to her. “See this? It’s a coquina. It’s common. What you really want to find is a junonia. It’s brown with black checks. It is the rarest of all. I’ve only seen them in books.”
He dropped the shell and went back to searching, intense and quiet, bent low to the ground, his hands clasped behind his back.
She caught up to him. “Tell me. How long are patients kept on this island?”
He shrugged. “Depends. Some people stay forever.”
“Forever?”
He nodded. “It’s a very long time.” He straightened and stared up at the sky. “But how did they know you were crazy? What exactly did you do?”
“I told you, I’m not crazy.”
“My father thinks you are, and so you must be.”
“Your father is wrong.”
He looked somber. “My father is never wrong.”
That night she found a shell on her windowsill. The color of a peach. Perfectly smooth. She wondered how long he’d searched the tides to find it. She held it in her hand, up to the moonlight that came through the window and left the shadows of the bars across the stone floor.
Some people stay forever.
The next day, as she milled around the courtyard with the others, the sharp gazes of nurses and guards taking away the feeling of leisure, she saw Ambrose sitting at the checkerboard table. Looking at him now, so calm and contemplative, hands at rest, face shaded by his hat, it was hard to believe the madman he’d been just a few nights before, screaming and calling for the doctor and wrestling the guards. She surprised herself by walking up and sitting down across from him. He looked at her, and she caught a glimpse of something in his eyes she recognized. Some tiny thing swirling in that young infinity that makes a human life. A thought, or memory. It had no shape or color, and yet instantly it registered. The ghost of kinship.
“You’re Mr. Weller.”
He stood awkwardly, removing his hat to reveal a mass of black, uncombed hair. “How did you know?”
“I was informed by an acquaintance, who later swallowed my ring.”
He stared at her, then chuckled. “She swallowed your ring?”
“Yes. The same night you—”
He stopped laughing. “Yes. That night. I’ve taken my meals in my room since then. Dr. Cowell believes I’m ready to try open dining again.” He fiddled with a checker piece. “I’m very sorry if I frightened you.”
“No harm done.” She put out her hand. “I’m Iris Dunleavy.”
She studied his face as they shook. He had the look of a man who had just risen from a sickbed, all pale and tangle-haired, razor stubble thick on his cheeks.
He noticed her looking and touched his face. “I’m sorry I haven’t shaved. They won’t let . . . I’m not supposed to . . .”
“You look fine.” A grasshopper materialized out of nowhere, briefly alit on a stacked pair of red checkers, then bounced away, vanishing as fast as it had appeared. She liked watching the grasshopper come and go. The universe pulped into that simple moment.
“Were you in the war?” she asked.
“Yes, I fought in the Stonewall Brigade . . .” His voice trailed off, and Iris almost apologized for raising the subject. “But Dr. Cowell says I mustn’t dwell on it. Instead, I’m supposed to think of the color blue. Sometimes it fails me. But I’m growing stronger, day by day.”
The whole idea seemed stupid to her. But she said nothing. He was so fragile, and she did not want to disparage anything he believed in, even a color.
“Dr. Cowell says you have to be the master of your own remembering,” he said.
“That sounds like something he’d say,” she said, trying to keep her voice neutral. Master of her own remembering. And yet the doctor did not believe her memory. It was copper next to her husband’s gold.