Lost Hearts | Excerpted Work

I remember only in moments, soft crescent recollections, how I ended up in this place. They’re memories that have gone cold now, lost in some pit of my glowing body. I ache to reach them, to feel the uneven copper edges of a recollection I’ve nearly lost. My time here is spent wishing endlessly for their return. Hoping that a face, a ghost, a voice will return to me somehow. These stone walls have proven too thick to let a thing in. The walls of the asylum hide things. They will eat any remembrance left in a body, anything that has even a soft-shelled chance of escaping that bedrock well it’s caught within.

This place eats the body slowly. It will curl your fingertips, touch them to the soft underbelly of the knuckles, the edge of the palm. Mauve crescents will form where nails touch the cup of the hand, swelling around near broken skin. Doors here open like mouths, narrow and black. The stone walls are wet. They drip at night, pooling along the edges of each hallway, each room, pressing shallow divots in the concrete between each archway. The cold and damp curls beneath the skin, touching those bones not yet gone numb.

The women here are cold, too. Their eyes are a pickled grey, like that of ghosts at rest. They seem to have gone beyond death in this place, left to nothing but spectral casts moving like blue mirages through stone hallways.

At night, I cannot sleep. I can only dream, eyes open, of the country I knew beyond these grey stone walls. In the darkest corner of my cell, there is a stone carved with four names.

James, Amelia, Sylvia, Jane.

—

The low light of the moon touches the girls’ lace bedspread like two fingers against a pulse. A hovering that is idle and tame. Beneath it, their bodies swell and cave in slow, deep breaths that expel against their quilted pillowcases. Their gentle mouths hang parted, two velvet roses, quiet and breathless in sleep.

My hand moves over Amelia’s back, tracing the flowers embroidered into her thick cotton nightgown. She’s a deep sleeper; I feel it in the weight of her breath, the heave of her body. She is the slowest to wake in the mornings. Sylvia’s hand lays against her sister’s waist, her thin fingers splayed over the ridge of her hip.

Their bodies remind me of wax figures as they lie there, soft oil shells of beeswax and honey. The moon lights their faces, tilted up to the moon, twin chests that rise and fall with each sleeping breath.

Downstairs, Jim sits in the living room with a newspaper open across his knee. The light of the fireplace licks up the arms of his wingback chair, curling around the lip of his pant leg. From the top of the stairs, I watch the glow against his hand, bleeding amber through the glass of brandy that sits at his wrist. His eyes move carefully over the paper, rimmed by his copper wire glasses.

I descend quietly, my feet padding silently across the wooden floor behind him.

“The girls are finally asleep.”

I rest my hand on his shoulder, and he leans into it. The hair at the nape of his neck brushes my knuckles.

“Good, good,” Jim says, turning then and reaching for my hand. “Won’t you come sit?”

He pats the arm of the chair and tugs me over. I sit, one leg crossed over the other, listening to the crack of the fire at our feet. It’s golden, sharp.

“Tell me about your day,” I say to him. I find I want to hear it, to listen to him speak.

“Oh, no different than any other,” he tells me, reaching to place his hand on mine. It’s warm, the weight of it. “Tom came by the office to deliver files from the new agency today.”

There is a part of me that wants to reach out and touch him, hold his hands between my own, press my face into his neck, kiss the space beneath his ear. There is a part of me that loves him still, irrevocably, indefinitely. But there’s a space between us that I cannot seem to bridge, to reach across, to close. It is infinite and wide.

“I think I’ll see Jane tonight,” I tell him. “The children are with her mother this week.”

I watch Jim take a slow, calculated sip of his brandy. An unnatural breath wracks my body beside him. I wonder if he can feel it.

“She hasn’t been herself lately,” I press on, fingering the fringe of a throw pillow. “I fear for her.”

“Jane is an odd woman,” Jim says. “There’s something there—a reservation, a hesitation to settle, it seems.”

There is a break between us. A fog hangs upon the air above that hesitates to clear. I don’t want to talk about this now. I want to draw a line between Jim and Jane, tow a distance between them, stalwart and calcified.

Jim lifts his hand to graze the thin line of my jaw. He presses to my chin the coarse pad of his thumb. “Jane will be alright, my love. Let slip that anxiety in your eyes.”

I let the curve of my head drop against his shoulder. The gap between our chairs feels small now. Something dim lights in the cask of my chest, being small but alive, and in this moment, I wish with a desperation so bitter and lonely, with it a cold and aching desolation in my gut, that our love were simpler than this. It’s been complicated, compromised, though he could never know it. I want to love naturally, honestly, painlessly.

I want to be guiltless. I want to be shameless.

But I am neither. I am a truant and a fraud, through and through, I am, I am. A wicked woman, they will say, one day, born to weak, vile bones.

Lifting my head from his shoulder, I press a tender kiss to the space between his eyes. I ache for this tenderness. As I pull away, there is a brazen innocence in his face, an artlessness that consumes me.

“Go on now,” he says, “before it gets too late.”

—

A salient breeze crouches beneath the trees in Hanson Park at night. It bites the dried edges of leaves and wisps up into the small pockets of my winter coat.

There’s a bench beneath a glowing street lamp, anchoring orange shadows beneath the hedges. It’s made of old pine that’s begun to crack, revealing the color of cremini mushrooms beneath. The cold air rests gingerly upon it, raindrops hovering across the hardwood, a damp dew that rests. I lay my scarf down over the seat of the bench and sit. The cold forms itself to the shape of my skirt, clinging to the fabric.

I find waiting to be a delicate game. It’s a fragile thing. A thing to be shattered. A red string pulled taut against the veil of a bright and glinting moon.

I dally restlessly, anticipating the soft tapping of Jane’s footsteps upon the vacant sidewalk. This is our spot. Where we meet, on occasion, to glimpse the edge of our own impassable horizon. The time stretches slowly as I linger, pulled outward, a closed tap that drips. I despise it, this waiting that I must endure before Jane’s cherub face will round that corner.

I remind myself that we are not doing anything out of the ordinary; not particularly, at least. If a policeman were to round that same corner, see me sitting on this frigid bench alone, he may question nothing at all but the hour at which I’ve chosen to be here. He may ask me what I am doing, alone, in the cold. He may offer to walk me home. I imagine his words in my head, a meter by which I count, impatiently waiting.

Alright, ma’am?

How about I walk you home? Wouldn’t want anything to happen to you, would we? Come on, now.

Would he know our house? Perhaps he would know Jim. This isn’t such a large town. I imagine Jim laughing beside the officer at the local pub, shooting back a swig of his favorite brandy, one hand clasped tightly around the policeman’s shoulder, laughing, hollering into the hull of men around him. I wonder what my husband would say, if I appeared on our doorstep with a policeman behind me, a careful hand placed at my back. I wonder about Amelia and Sylvia. What would they think of me then? If they knew where I was, what I’d been doing, I wonder if they would recognize their mother behind my weary eyes.

A figure appears from behind the wall of shrubbery ahead of me. I see a rounded head atop broad shoulders, a slim waist that pours into a sturdy frame. There’s something that moves in my body at the sight of her, touching with soft, swollen fingers the incandescent lines of my heart. I feel it at my throat.

“Jane,” I whisper, moving to stand from the bench.

“Please, darling, sit,” she says, smoothing the back of her dress as she sets herself beside me. “Have you been waiting long?”

“Not at all,” I say. My voice is soft and swelled. I feel in it a soft fog, or a welling of dust.

There’s a cavernous longing inside my body, looking at the arched curve of her neck, wishing to touch my palm to it, to draw her in to me. I still don’t recognize the desperation in my mouth, the soft ache that reaches from my stomach to hers.

“Tom is asleep,” she tells me, her voice low beneath the wind. “I don’t know how long it will last for. He’s started waking in the middle of the night now, with the resurrection of his damned insomnia.”

I touch the top of her hand. The muscles beneath press to my palm like dried flowers. She turns her head to look at me, her eyes inky and wide. A cold blush reaches up through her cheeks.

“I put valerian root in his dinner,” she says. I feel a sharp pang grip my heart. I touch the soft shell of her knee. “I don’t know if it will take. Or how long it will put him out for.”

Her face contorts into a stony, bitter expression. Beautiful and bleak.

Looking at her, I want to bend my head and lean into the cusp of her body, press the top of my forehead against her shoulder. I want to touch the calloused curve of my thumb against her lower lip, endure this ghosted velvet that may, if ever, electrify me.

“Jane, lovey, listen to me,” I say, tracking the sallow motion of her eyes from my chin to my mouth to my eyes. “Don’t think about that now. We’re here, together, right this moment.” I can hear the breath caught between her lips. I feel it too, between my own. I want to touch her, bring her face to mine, lie my cheek against the swell of her beveled chest, press my palms to hers. I want to hold her.

A small and waning smile lifts my face, and her eyes glisten, slow and soft.

“I’m here,” I say, “and so are you. Even if only for moments at a time.”

She lets the moment hang in the air, delicate and breakable, to taper between us. “They’d eat us alive if they knew about us.”

“Please, Jane…Don’t think that way.”

“But it’s true, isn’t it? Look at us. What we’re doing. You know what could happen if we were found out.”

Again, a heavy silence falls between us. I attempt to quantify it, hold it like water between my hands, feel the weight of it there.

“That can’t matter,” I whisper. “You know we can’t allow it to.”

A simple sigh lifts from her parted lips. She reaches for my hand and laces her fingers through mine. It feels warm, a soft blaze alight in the bleak and bitter night.

“You know, lovey, this was never anything I imagined for myself.” I let my head slip slowly to lean against hers, shoulder to shoulder, ear to ear. It’s effervescent, immaculate. Intimate.

“As a child, my mother would lay me to sleep each night with a tale of my wedding day. Always so convoluted and blue, and never the same. All but one fact, which remained constant. My charming, dashing husband-to-be, standing at the end of the aisle.

“The way we imagined ourselves, Emily. I thought it could be so simple. But with us, I…I fear we’re burning the altar, love.”

There is a force that bends me forward. Heedlessly, I reach to take her face, grasping her soft and blooming cheeks as my lips catch the sweet swell of her mouth. To kiss her is to breathe. It’s the lilt of a songbird down between my teeth. She graces me, soft and sweet, with the smell of honey beneath her hair.

“Emily,” she mumbles, her mouth against mine.

“Jane.”

There is a moment then, in which we both know what we’ve done. What we have become.

“Listen to me, lovey. I’m afraid too. When I think of you, I feel…peace. I feel light, darling. But then I think about what thinking about you means. And what is this? What are you, to me? Am I, to you? Where do I go in my head when I think of you?”

Looking down, I trace the hard line formed between our coupled fingers. “You’re everywhere, Jane. I look at Jim, and there is so much guilt. It eats away at me, and what do I do with that? What can I ever do with it? All…All I can think about, Jane, is that when midnight falls, I might sit here on this bench with you. Looking at the night stars around your head. And I’m unafraid.”

The night slips apace through our loose hands, as sand through a sieve. I hold her hand in my lap, rested upon my knee, memorizing the juncture between our palms, the fray of her knuckles beneath my own.

The quiet of the night is blanketing. It’s suffocating, sitting beside her with the taste of her mouth on mine.

“Talk to me,” I murmur. The taste of her mouth is still fresh in the well beneath my tongue. “Tell me about your day.”

A small smile lifts her lips as she looks at me, and it’s innocent and natural. There’s an endurance of friendship that ghosts her eyes, silent and swimming.

“Sophie’s teacher sent a note home with her today,” Jane says. Her voice is sweet and balanced upon the cutting breeze. “She wants to submit one of Sophie’s poems to a competition. It’s a small thing, just between the fourth grade classes.”

I don’t say anything. I watch the way her mouth moves as she speaks, forming careful shapes that melt upon the air. I want only to listen to her, take her voice and carve it into the shape of my body, lay it beneath my skin, to hold onto, forever.

“Though Tom doesn’t think it’s worthwhile.” Her sweet voice falls to a whisper then. “He thinks it isn’t worth her time or energy. What good would it be to raise her hopes that way? It isn’t sustainable, he told me.”

“What does Sophie think?” I ask. The tips of my fingers trace the pattern on the skirt of her dress. Flower arrangements in violet and cream.

“I wonder if it matters at all. She is only eight. I guess she can’t know what she wants, really.”

“But she can know what she likes,” I say. A slow, weary rush forces itself between my ribs – a gnawing, snarling thing.

I feel Jane’s body slip farther into mine, as a crumpling of paper, and the sensation in my chest begins to wilt. With it, her shoulder presses harder against my own.

“What faith does he have in her?” I say softly, brushing my hand across her face. I close my eyes and open them again. “A child can love a thing without becoming the thing itself.”

Jane tilts her body away from mine and looks up at me, her eyes moving slowly over my face. I touch the corner of her mouth, trace down to the curve of her bottom lip. “She needn’t be a poet,” I whisper, touching her hair, tucking it behind her ear. “But she can still write.”

“I’m sure you’re right. You are,” she says. “But Tom is punch-drunk over this, you know.”

Jane lifts her hand to my neck. Her hand is warm, despite the bitter cold. Her eyes are glowing green, bold. She touches the center of her palm to my cheek, moves her thumb across the curve of my brow.

I wish nothing more than to tell her everything then, here, in this moment. There are words tucked away in the folds of my body that won’t ever come to light, nor taste air, nor touch the wet slope of my mouth, even. I am holding her hand, and that must be enough. I am feeling the soft fall of her breath upon my shoulder, and that must be enough. I am resting my head against hers, and that must be enough. It must be enough, for now.

My walk home is solemn and cold, as is any moment when I must part from her. I feel the tickle of her hand across my palm, still, lit by the passing of her fingers through mine as we stood from the frigid park bench.

I hold my coat tightly around the slight frame of my body, bent against the cold. There’s a coarse and biting breeze that clips my cheeks, nipping quietly at the skin until it burns.

I envision what it might be like to walk her home. To be undaunted, unafraid. I imagine holding her hand, tracing the ridges of her knuckles, the shoulders of our coats brushing against each other. I wonder how close I could be to her. What might it feel like to walk in her orbit, close enough that wisps of her hair might brush against my cheek, whistling the smell of twilight into my mouth.

The whisper of her imagined body, in stride beside mine, presses a glowing light between my hands. I close my eyes for a moment, standing still, imagining the shape of it all. There is a whisper in it, a ghost, welling beneath my tongue.

I round the corner, and the house stands against the black sky, tranquil and dark, save for the soft light of the lantern above the door. Beneath it, a thin plaque that reads, Smith & Co. I look down at my feet, centered in the glowing orange spotlight of the streetlamp above my head, and trace their solid shape.

I don’t want to walk up our path nor through our door, into the foyer, into the dark. I want to stand here. Still. Let this night last. I want to keep it in my hands, pressed into the hearts of my palms, with her.

But I don’t stay. I let it go. I walk up our path to the door, turn the knob, and push it open to the thick, black foyer.

—

These dormitory beds are made of iron. The frame is rusted at its joints, which leaves curls of burnt orange soot puddled at each seam. A set of gray cotton sheets wrap around the thin, lumpy mattress. It’s made taut like an army bed, made hard to pass inspection.

The dormitory is damp at night. It creeps between the sheets and lies beneath my back. I feel as if a splash of ice water has pooled in the soft craters of the bedsheet. Nighttime in this place is strangely quieting. In its silence is the feeling of floating upon an ocean, raftless, naked. It is ash sinking into water. A damp that tastes of charcoal and salt.

An orderly trails the edges of the room, carrying a cattle prod on a belt around her waist. It clicks against her thigh as she walks; a dense tapping that swallows her footsteps. Ta-ap, ta-ap, ta-ap. Her thick body moves between each bed, occasionally allowing her prod to clink against the metal of a bedframe. When it’s yours, there is a jolt that shoots through your spine from top to tail, as if she’s placed the metal tip right at the nape of your neck and pulled the switch.

At times there are soft whispers between us, a moving of the mouth without sound, empty murmurs that float. I wish I had a friend to confide these silent miseries in, but the thought of such a thing here is a rampant daydream. There are two women at the northern edge that I have heard whispering before, seemingly sweet, but only once or twice. I wish I could slither along the cold stone floor, curl beneath their beds, lay my hands to the bedsprings, and breathe out some sweet whisper, too.

Instead, I spend nights here lying face up atop my sheets, a corpse in waiting, listening to the breath seep in and out through the space between my lips. There are times, brief and fleeting, when I think of Jim as I lie here. I imagine that space in our bed where I used to sleep. I don’t wonder if it’s empty still, for what a fruitless endeavor that would be. What I imagine is the brush of his nightclothes against my arm, my hip, the bristled edge of my thigh. I imagine my own nightclothes, not the canvas sack I sleep in here, but a satin nightgown, white, pink, or periwinkle blue. I think about the rustling of the sheer silver curtain above our windowsill. On summer nights, we kept the window open. The shuffle of the trees, a crow’s call from its burrow deep in the branches, lulled me to sleep those nights.

A whisper beside my bed pulls me from reverie. “I know why they brought you here.”

Her voice hits my ear like crumpled metal.

I don’t turn my head. To look is to lose, they say. Do not entertain nonsense.

I wonder if this—the talking, the looking, the whispering—is the nonsense they warned us against. Could this be it, really? Is this all there is?

“You’re a filthy broad, honey. That’s why they brought you here.” She gasps, and a hacking cough follows.

“You’re a rotted woman, you are. There’s nothing behind them eyes, is there? Not a damned thing, I’ll bet.”

I don’t say a thing. I feel a curling beneath my skin that smarts, cloying at the muscles that wrap my arms. The feeling of her eyes moving over my body feels like ashen coal dragging over me, a soft incineration of the flesh. Perhaps I am dirty, like she says. Perhaps there is a rotting beneath my skin. A composted soil soaking up the fresh blood of my body. But what of it matters at all? I am here, yes, but so is she. We are in this place together, we are, and there isn’t a damned thing about that which will ever change.

Her name is Betty. She lies beside me each night in her prescribed bed. Her body seems cold and dense. There are times when I have imagined touching it, her. That. The supple veins beneath her pale and peeling skin, the bones that lift from her wrists, nearly mangled, with the imprint of restraints that never seem to fade. Her eyes roll backward in her head as she sleeps; they don’t close.

I watch her sometimes, my hands shoved beneath my back, and notice the feathered dusting upon her grey lashes. I wonder what landed Betty in this wretched place. Might she be truly mad, really and awfully off her rocker? Might she have murdered her mother or sister, father, brother? Perhaps she was responsible for those mad killings down South, seven years ago. Or, I wonder, might she have committed arson, or maybe it was something small—perhaps she only mentioned a ghoul lurking in her closet, a mere incident of trickery in the lights that she could not put down. I wonder if it might be the thing that put me in this place, too. If somehow we might have the same rot in our gut. I wonder why she lays here, beside me in this ironclad asylum, and it lulls me. Not to sleep, but somewhere jaded at least. Perhaps she’s crazier than I am, or perhaps it’s all too relative. Perhaps it’s meaningless.

I don’t know the answer. I wish that I did.

—

The house is silent as I slip through the front door. I take my coat off and hang it on its hook in the dark. I untie my shoes, pull the laces loose, set them as softly as I can on the wooden floor. I remove my sweater, draping it over my left arm. I move as quietly as I can, afraid to wake even the dust mites beneath the carpet.

In the living room, I pick around the room to take up the pieces of the evening left behind. The empty brandy glass that Jim has left, the unfolded newspaper, the slippers beside his chair. This nightly routine, an erasure of the evening from this room, has become muscle memory to me.

At the top of the stairs, I lean against the doorframe of the girls’ room, watching the soft swell of their bodies. They can only be made out as shadows, two lumps of black upon black, but I stay to witness it still. I wonder what it is they dream about. Small fluttering images, floating places with soft and feathered edges, their small heads adorned by flower crowns. Dreaming, perhaps, of a kitten or a dog, small things of joy, girlhood wrapped around their heads like wreaths.

As I watch, I want to touch the soft curves of their foreheads, push the soft tufts of auburn hair from their sweet cherub faces. I want to trace the thin flowers on the quilted bedding. I want to lace my fingers through theirs, draw lines down their narrow backs. I want to hold them in my hands, carry their soft bodies against my breast, the way I used to. I want their heads, soft and pink, tucked into the nook of my arm, their small mouths babbling soft murmurs, even the dribble of spittle down their soft, velvet chins.

I open the door to my own bedroom quietly. In it is a whisper, a ghoul, wafting above our bed. Jim is fast asleep, his body a limp shadow in the dark too, stiff beneath the duvet. The way he sleeps is small, stagnant. He is still and lonely. As always, he lies straight and narrow, leaving the quilt on my side undisturbed. There is something endearing about it, really. He doesn’t move or speak, he doesn’t snore. He is quiet, soft. Always.

Sleep doesn’t come easily to me. I lay beside him, silent and counting, and I think of Jane, and I think, and I count, and I think of Jane. It’s difficult to breathe without gasping, grasping at my swelled chest. So I lay here beside him, a heart cleaved open, wide awake and choking.

I want to touch him. To trace the outline of his brusque body with my fingers, ghost my hands over him, press my palms to the soft crevices of his stern shape. I want this want to be innocent, virtuous, without scandal or remorse. It’s anything but, really. I am full of it, of him, of this want to want him the way I should, the way I could, if only I were some natural, rational woman.

Beneath my hands, his body loses its shape, deforms, and in its place lies Jane. Her body is bold, understated, colored in places, hinted only by rose perfume. I breathe her in. I feel an urge to kiss her, heavy, heady. I press my mouth to the space beneath her navel. It’s soft, delicate. My eyes close, and I press my lips to her skin. It’s gruff, coarse. I open my eyes to Jim’s shirt lifted to his chest, my mouth pressed to his stomach, breathing him in. I look up to his face and count the slow, measured breaths that escape him in even snores.

I crawl up the mattress to lay my head on my pillow. I turn away from Jim to watch the slow tide dark sky outside the window. Small stars glitter between the shifting clouds, like limescale left to a beach.

Each night I do this, aching and hollow, wishing for something to be different. A change or revolution in my weak little life. Yet, amidst it all, some deep and coarse unconsciousness that aches. In it is a coveted black that inches over my body to take me, quietly, away...