In the darkness of our room, I can’t see how or if Belle is affected by talking about this. She doesn’t say anything for a few seconds.
“So why are you here?” Belle finally asks, seemingly unmoved.
I decide in that moment to tell Belle how I wound up at the institution. I like having a friend, my first in years. True friends are honest with one another, aren’t they? Belle has been honest with me; I will be honest in return. She doesn’t seem like she’d be put off by me having an odd ability, so I tell her about the colors. And I tell her about the accident that took my family from me, and how the Calverts took me in and made me their maid. I don’t tell her exactly how I came to be with child—just that I made a mistake with someone—but she doesn’t seem to care about specifics.
“Damn,” Belle says when I am finished. “But... but that doesn’t explain why you’re here.”
“The colors are why I’m here. It’s not normal to see them, and that makes me not normal.”
A moment of silence passes between us. This is when I think she will ask who the father of my baby is. But she doesn’t. I am beginning to understand sex means nothing to her other than a means to an end.
“So is it nice? Being able to see colors that no one else can see?” she says.
The question makes me smile. It is the kind of response I was hoping for from Belle. But the very next second, I am saddened by it. Truman had a reaction not so very different from this when Wilson’s prodding got the better of me and I finally confided in Truman that day we were walking in the vines. I can’t help but think he must have told Celine even though I’d told him not to.
“Most of the time it’s nice. Beautiful, even,” I tell her. “Not in here, though. Here they think something is terribly wrong with me. Dr. Townsend won’t leave me alone about it. Every session I have with him, he is playing sounds and asking me what I see. Sometimes he puts wires on my head. I wish he’d just stop. The colors don’t hurt anyone.”
We are quiet again, and I am thinking perhaps Belle has fallen asleep, but then she sighs and murmurs, “God, I would give anything for a cigarette. I’d scale the wall if I had better shoes.”
“Would you really?” I ask.
“Right this minute.”
“I’m going to escape.” The whispered words pop out of my mouth before I can consider if Belle is completely trustworthy to hear them.
She doesn’t say anything right away. “How are you going to do it?” she replies a few seconds later.
“I don’t know yet, but I got that job in the kitchen so that I could pay attention to when deliveries come. I’m thinking maybe I can sneak into a delivery truck.”
“Hmm. That could work. Maybe. But are you ever near that truck?”
“Well, no. I haven’t figured out how to do it yet.”
“I suppose the staff takes in the deliveries? And the truck only comes during the day?”
“Yes.” I can see what Belle is thinking, that my plan won’t work. “I have to try, Belle. I have to.” My voice is growing louder. “They’re going to take my baby from me. I have to try.”
“Shh, shh. Of course you do. You just need a better way, I think. Where do you plan to go when you get out?”
I choose my next words carefully. “I have money. In a safety-deposit box in San Jose. I have the key for it in my bag that is locked up downstairs. It’s on a necklace that was my mother’s. No one here knows about it.”
“How much?”
I hesitate. “A lot.”
“Really?” Belle’s quiet tone brightens. “Where’d you get it?”
I pause a moment. “It was given to me.”
“Why were you in San Jose?”
“I wasn’t. But it’s there.”
“You’ve seen it?”
“No. But it’s there.” Ithasto be there.
Another moment of quiet passes.
