“Is she sick?” I ask with concern, partly for Charlotte and partly for me and my unborn child. I don’t want to catch whatever Charlotte has and endanger my baby.
“She’ll be fine,” Nurse Andrews says easily, pulling up the bedcovers over Charlotte. “She had a procedure. She just needs to rest for a few days.”
Charlotte does not cry herself to sleep that night.
•••
When the room stirs to the seven o’clock morning alarm, Charlotte does not awaken like the rest of us in the room. Her blanket is half on and half off, and a thin line of scarlet low on her abdomen peeks through her nightgown. It looks like a slender trail of blood.
“It’s the gas,” Lenore says when I get up to make sure Charlotte is okay.
“Beg your pardon?”
“That’s why she’s so sleepy. It’s the gas.”
“What gas?”
“The gas for when they cut you.”
“When they... what?”
“When they cut you,” Lenore says, and she grabs Ruth’s hand and the two of them start to leave the room for the toilet.
“What do you mean, ‘when they cut you’?” I call after them, and the mumbler, still abed, yells at me to shut up.
I want to stay until Charlotte opens her eyes, but I’m sent to breakfast with the rest of the room. It isn’t until I get back to the ward after the lunch shift that I see Charlotte is awake, but she is still in bed and still in pain, so I don’t ask her what happened.
But a few minutes after I sit down in my own bed, she suddenly says, “My mother said they were going to take out my appendix,” and the sound of her voice is a yellowed beige.
“Oh.”
I have heard of people needing to have their appendix taken out, but only after having been sick with terrible stomach pains just before. That’s how doctors know the appendix has to be removed. But Charlotte hadn’t been in pain. Had she? And when had she talked with her mother? “You want me to get a book for you to read while you get better?” I ask her. “I can get one from the library in the dayroom.”
She shakes her head. “I don’t like to read.”
Three days later, Charlotte is gone. I return to the ward after outdoor time and the bed next to mine is stripped and the nightstand empty. I hope it is because her mother came for her. But none of my roommates know if that’s what happened, and when I ask Nurse Andrews, she tells me I don’t need to concern myself with other people’s situations, only my own.
Mrs. Crockett comes to see me the next day, before I start my lunch shift.
“I think you’re ready to begin your therapy sessions with Dr. Townsend,” she says. “It was important that you become acclimated to your new surroundings first, but now that you have done that, we can begin in earnest the process to help you get well.”
I don’t know what she means. Therapy sounds like it could be painful. Most things involving a doctor are. “Will it hurt? Are there needles?”
Mrs. Crockett smiles. “Not usually. Many of your therapy sessions will be just so that Dr. Townsend and you can talk.”
“Talk.”
“Yes. Your sessions with the doctor will play a significant role in you getting well, more than anything else you will do here. Are you ready to take the next step?”
It’s as she’s asking this that I realize Dr. Townsend will want to talk about the colors. It’s why I’m here and not at a home for unwed mothers, isn’t it? He thinks something is wrong with me. My parents told me this could happen, warned me that if I was not careful it would, and so had told me to tell no one. And what did I do? I told Truman, thinking I could trust him. Apparently I also told Wilson, though I don’t remember it. Somehow Celine learned of what I said and then told Mrs. Grissom. How else can Dr. Townsend know about them?
I don’t see how talking about the colors will help me get out ofthis place. Dr. Townsend told me that first day that he understood a great deal about what some people can see that others don’t, but unless he sees the colors, too, he can’t possibly understand them. And I could tell by the way he asked me about them that day that he doesn’t. I decide I will tell him it was a childhood prank gone too far, a selfish, foolish way to get attention from my parents. From Wilson. From Truman. I will need to be convincing.
“Yes, Mrs. Crockett,” I reply. “I am ready.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” the matron says. “The doctor would like to see you Tuesdays and Thursdays in the afternoons for an hour right after your shift in the kitchen. One of the orderlies or the nurse on duty will see to it that you are escorted to the fifth floor at that time.”
I spend the rest of the day, and into the night as I lie in my bed waiting to fall asleep, practicing how I will tell Dr. Townsend the colors had all been a game.
