Not only was it real, but it is now worse. Dr. Townsend is no longer interested in just recording what I see when I hear sounds or what colors my mind has assigned to numbers and names and places. Now he wishes to remove the colors from me in every form that they appear. During my sessions, when the doctor produces sounds and I describe the colors I see, he gives me a tiny electrical shock—enough to startle me, enough to hurt. It does no good to pretend I am sick to avoid my therapy sessions, because I am brought down anyway. It likewise does no good to tell Dr. Townsend I don’t like the shocks, that they hurt me and frighten me.
“But this is how we will cease the colors from appearing, Rosie,” he says in reply to my protests.
“Why must I stop seeing them?” I answer. “They’re not hurting anyone.”
“On the contrary,” Dr. Townsend says solemnly. “They’re hurting you. Why do you think you’re here?”
The plan to escape is consuming my thoughts. The bigger the baby grows, and me with it, the less I am able to imagine hiding myself in that grocery delivery truck. Plus, the paid kitchen staff never lets the residents who work in the kitchen unload the truck. Nor do they let us anywhere near the door when the truck is being unloaded. Belle was right that my plan has major flaws.
Belle’s insistence that she is coming along well on her own scheme is my only hope. At night when the other women in our room are asleep, Belle updates me on her progress. She has switched jobs three times to scout out the best options. After flirting with nearly every orderly and male staff member, including Stuart—and despite me asking her to please leave the boy alone—Belle has decided to work solely on the custodian’s unassuming assistant, a lanky, pimply faced young man named Rudy.
The plan is to have Rudy come to believe that Belle has fallen in love with him. That will be different from seducing him, Belle tells me. If all Rudy thinks Belle wants is a quick whoopee in the broom closet, he might easily oblige. But that won’t get us out. He has to believe instead that Belle is mad for him and that he and Belle should run away together. But first she has to make him think spiriting her out of the institution is his idea.
“It will happen,” Belle quietly assures me as we lie in the darkness one night. “I’m already halfway there with him.”
“But how will I escape with you?”
“I’m going to tell him that it’s very important that no one suspects him of helping me,” Belle explains. “So on the night of the escape, he won’t even be here. He will have given me his keys before leaving for home, and he’ll be the last of the day workers to clock out so that he can leave the gate latch unlocked. He doesn’t have the key to that. I’ll escape that night, with you, of course, although he won’t know that part. He’ll think I’m going to meet him at the bus station in Santa Rosa in three days’ time. I’ll have told him that if he waits three days to join me, they won’t consider him an accomplice because he’ll still be right here when they start looking for us. And even if they should suspect him and they search his house, they won’t find me. He will up and quit that third day, and he’ll come to the bus station, where he will expect to find me, but I won’t be there. We will be long gone.”
I have to admit it is a good plan and seems nearly foolproof, but I feel bad for the janitor’s assistant.
“Isn’t it a bit cruel to Rudy, though?” I ask.
“And what about what has happened to us?” Belle says. “Isn’t that heaps more cruel? Rudy will get over me. I guarantee it.”
For the rest of May, I watch Belle carefully to make sure she isn’t being too obvious in her pursuit of Rudy. Belle’s plan is our only plan, and the nearer the time draws for the baby to come, the more important it is that nothing happens to thwart it. We simply have to escape before I deliver. Belle continues to be coquettish around other men besides Rudy—including Stuart—so that if anyone notices her flirtatious behavior, it will not appear that she has singled him out.
I can see that Stuart is now infatuated with Belle and is practically addicted to her attentions. Her constant whispers to him that he is such a handsome fellow who will soon be breaking hearts have worked on him like a love potion. Belle sees it, too, but thinks nothing of it. She is used to boys and men being smitten with her. One more doesn’t matter. Stuart will often look for ways to be in the dayroom and on the lawns without his father present so that, I’m supposing, he can hang about wherever Belle is and not have his father notice. I’m glad he is being sneaky about it.
Stuart has also noticed that I am Belle’s closest friend at the institution. He comes to me in the dayroom one day to ask if I know when Belle’s birthday is, as he’d heard Belle mention she has one coming up, and he wants to get her something, something in secret. I answer truthfully that I don’t know, and then I gently tell Stuart that Belle is a girl who is not likely to settle down with just one person, that she likes many people all at once and that he deserves the affection of someone who cares for only him. He seems to understand what I mean, but it makes him sad and he walks away from me sullen.
I am afraid he will go to his father about his feelings for Belle. Extra attention thrown Belle’s way could foil our plan. But as it turns out, Belle is already on Dr. Townsend’s mind, and not because of anything having to do with his son. In my next session, the doctor begins not with stimuli and shocks but by telling me that he is concerned that I spend too much of my free time with Belle.
“Belle is no one you want to be influenced by, Rosie,” Dr. Townsend says. “She could easily derail your progress.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“She’s here for a reason, just like you. You need to be careful.”
“Careful of what?”
“Of listening to and being manipulated by what she says. Belle is, among other things, a pathological liar.”
I remember Belle telling me that she hadn’t been believed when she said she’d been raped by her mother’s cousin. Her mother had called her a lunatic. Sex-crazed. A liar. Apparently Dr. Townsend doesn’t believe her, either. But this other word he used—pathological—is strange to me.
“I... I don’t know what that is.”
“A pathological liar is someone who lies compulsively and for no reason that benefits them,” he says simply. “Most people who lie, like you did to me when you first came here, do so because they think telling the lie will benefit them. They think it will keep them out of trouble or help them avoid an embarrassing situation. They don’t particularly like lying; they don’t make a practice of lying. They do so only at times, because they think they must. Pathological liars lie habitually, and they absolutely do make a practice of it. And for no apparent gain.”
I feel my mouth drop open slightly. Is it true, what Dr. Townsend is saying? Has everything Belle told me to this point been a lie? The rape when she was thirteen? All those men she said she’d been with? Her plan to get us out? Is none of it true?
“Is everything she says a lie?” I hope he cannot hear the ribbon of dread in my voice.
“Not everything. But you can’t assume she’s always telling you the truth, because she’s likely not. You are probably a good influence on her, so I’d rather not relocate her to a different ward. But it concerns me that you spend so much time with her. If I have to move her, I will. But I am hoping you will adjust how you spend your free time. Will you do that?”
I will myself to calmly answer him. “Yes, of course. Thank you for telling me.”
Dr. Townsend doesn’t mention anything about Stuart’s having come under Belle’s spell, or even Belle’s excess flirtations of late, and I hope it is because it has been obvious only to me, and only because I’ve been watching Belle so closely. In fact, the conversation about Belle quickly ends as the doctor proceeds next to unbox his noisemakers and electric shock apparatus.
