After lunch, an orderly is dispatched to bring me down in the elevator in a wheelchair to the back lawn. Women loll about in the generous summer sun, some in little groups talking to one another, but most are sitting alone or standing alone. I do not see Belle.
“Is here okay?” the orderly asks as he wheels me under the shade of a sycamore.
“It’s fine,” I say. “Thank you.”
He leaves, and I look out over the grass, past the people, to the horizon beyond the fence. As I do, I whisper the memorized prayer. I am still saying it when someone crosses in front of me and stops.
It is Stuart.
“I’m sorry about what happened.” The boy looks and sounds tense with remorse. “About what I did.”
I stare at him a moment. “I suppose you were only doing your job.”
“Still,” he says. “I’m sorry. I should’ve held Belle back and let you go. I was just... mad at her. I was so mad at her I wasn’t thinking. I should’ve let you go.”
“I don’t know,” I say dully. “Maybe it’s for the best. Your father doesn’t think I’d be a very good mother. He’s probably right.”
We are quiet for a moment.
“They’re taking her today,” Stuart says a moment later. “Your baby. They’re taking her to some orphanage. I can find out which one if you want.”
I close my eyes a second to steel myself from reneging on my pact with the Almighty. We have an agreement as far as I’m concerned. I mean to keep my end.
“Thank you, but no, Stuart,” I say, eyes open again. “My daughter needs a home with a mother and a father who will care for her and provide for her. She deserves that.”
Stuart is quiet again. He seems disappointed, as though his finding out the name of the orphanage and passing on the information to me would have relieved him of some of his regret.
“Would you do something instead for me?” I ask him.
Stuart says nothing and waits.
“Would you make sure everyone knows my daughter’s name is Amaryllis? Will you make sure it’s written on the papers that they send with her? Her name is Amaryllis.”
“Ama...?” The word is foreign to him.
“Amaryllis.” I spell it for him. “It’s the name of a flower. A very beautiful one.”
“I’ll make sure.” He turns and leaves me.
That night, when I go to bed in a different room in a different hall, I can feel that Amaryllis is gone from the nursery, gone from my life.
Tears slide down my face and into my mouth as I lie in bed—next to a new girl—and whisper the prayer.
•••
When two weeks have passed and I have recovered sufficiently from my injuries and surgery, I begin working in the kitchen againand I return to morning classes. I spend my days doing what is asked of me and reading whatever I can get my hands on in the library, and my nights in my bed reminding God in heaven of our agreement. I wonder about Belle, where she is, and if she ever gives me a thought. I wonder if she has used the little silver key for herself and taken the money in Truman Calvert’s safety-deposit box. I didn’t tell her the name of the bank in San Jose, but has Belle been able to find out which one it is? Was it always her plan to take the travel bag and leave me stranded without it? I don’t want to believe that could be true. In my darker moments, when I miss Amaryllis the most, my thoughts tell me that Belle has betrayed me. But in the morning, I tell myself that surely she has not.
Dr. Townsend is no longer interested in “curing” me. Since he has been unable to eliminate the colors, the therapy sessions no longer consist of sound makers and electrodes but detailed questions and experiments about my other senses—what I taste on my tongue when I pat a dog or what I smell when I see a photograph of a clock. He seems disappointed that the colors are the only tangling of the connections in my brain, but he keeps at it, writing down every one of my answers even if the response to a given stimulus is no response at all. We also begin to have conversations about my readiness to reenter the world as a responsible adult who keeps her bizarre colors from being a burden on society—his words. It is a condition of my future release that I be able to hold down a job, live independently, and stay out of trouble.
“You’re not going to just be shown the door when you are deemed ready to live outside these walls,” he says to me one morning just before my eighteenth birthday. “You will be discharged under the state’s care into a situation where your progress will be monitored both at the licensed home where you will reside until your twenty-first birthday and at a place of employment that shall be arranged for you. I will decide when you are ready to make that transition to life outside, whether it’s this yearor the year to come or the year after that. Once you have proven yourself fully capable of living your adult life without making foolish and harmful decisions, you will be released from custodial care, ideally on your twenty-first birthday. But that depends on you. Everything you do the next three years matters, Rosie. Be smart with your choices. Don’t do anything to spoil it.”
Three more years. Three.
His words are too much to contemplate. The heaviness of them has a color all its own, a shade of purple so dark it is nearly black. I leave the therapy room for my shift in the kitchen weighed down by those words and their dense hue.
The thought of possibly three more years in this place has sapped all strength from me, and it’s with immense effort that I put in my work hours in the kitchen for lunch. I decide I’ll head up to my room after the meal and lie down. I don’t care who frowns on me for it. When the serving line is finished and I start to dish up my own plate, the nurse who brings the residents’ mail during the lunch hour comes to the serving window.
“You’ve got a package, Rosie,” she says, handing me a small cardboard box with my name on it and no return address. It is the first time I have received anything in the mail, and the nurse who gives me the package studies me as she hands it over. The package, postmarked from Santa Barbara, has already been opened.
