you think about it, bluebirds really do sing. You can’t help but feel bad for the Queen, though. How was she supposed to eat a pig’s heart? A lamb’s is much better.”
The elevator pinged. Audrey hadn’t been listening. She’d been thinking about this woman’s bony fingers that squeezed too tight, just like Betty. She’d been imagining lopping them off from the wrist and watching her howl in shock, then feeling bad about that, and blinking her eyes to make the image disappear.
“What about a lamb?” Audrey asked.
The metal door pulled back. “Well, then I’ll see you soon.” Loretta dropped her slow-gait routine, and leaped, spry as a disco fiend, into the elevator. She smiled at Audrey like she’d gotten away with something as she pulled the metal cage shut. “Buh-bye!”
30
I Hate You!
Audrey turned toward 14B and shook her head, as if cleaning it out: what had just happened? The carpet beneath her wobbled. No sleep last night and pills today. Had the lithium precipitated an hallucination? Had that Agnew article existed at all? She was so tired she was dizzy.
She trod over hula girl, poor hula girl. Even her lightbulb was smashed. The door opened without a key. The light that shone through its crack made two triangles inside the hall, dark and bright, juxtaposed against each other.
She squinted. Hadn’t she locked it? She couldn’t remember. But she always locked her doors. She lingered over the threshold. A part of her was tempted to sit in the common hall and wait for morning. But Clara’s sweatpants—she had to change out of them. And Wolverine needed water. And her wallet. She took a breath, and plunged in.
Her broken ballet flats tap-tapped along the fifty-foot hall. She slipped them off as she walked and noticed for the first time why her feet had been so cold all day. Rainwater had seeped through the hula-girl slashes in her shoes.
In the den, everything was how she’d left it. The clothes a loose carpet. The air mattress deflated. The piano shone prettily, and she immediately thought of Saraub singing an off-key “Heart and Soul”: I fell in love with you madly! Silly man, he’d sang it like a joke, but he’d meant it for real.
She went to the turret first. Out the window, the M63 opened its doors. Half past one on a stormy Tuesday morning. Passengers spilled out, and umbrellas blossomed like funereal flowers in the swelling rain. She pressed her nose against the stained glass. What if this place wasn’t haunted at all, and this specter she was running from was herself?
“It’s-after-us-Lamb!” Betty had cried that afternoon in Hinton almost twenty years ago. Her hands had dripped blood on the white diamond kitchen floor. In Audrey’s memory, the perfect version of herself, she’d been at school all day. But the truth was, she’d been drinking stolen Canadian Mist behind the restaurant where she washed dishes, then she’d stumbled through town on rubbery legs. When she found Betty with that knife, she’d still been drunk. Not so surprising that Betty hadn’t seemed to recognize her at first, given how different she must have looked from that clean-cut little girl she’d once been in Wilmette.
Would the doctors put her in a straitjacket if she checked into Bellevue? She’d be trapped, just like Betty? Would Bethy from the office find out and spread the news like holy-roller gospel: “Audrey Lucas is NUTS!” Her eyes watered at the thought. Bellevue was surrender. She didn’t want to live if it meant sharing Betty’s fate. Because the damage in that CAT scan hadn’t happened overnight. No, it had taken years for the meds to bore those holes into her mother’s mind. And the thing is, if you lose your soul that slowly, does it still belong to you?
She decided then. She’d pack her things and leave tonight. She’d take care of herself, like always. If this was all in her head, well, time would tell. But the first step to finding that out was leaving The Breviary.
That was when she noticed that the turret ledge was bare. Where was Wolverine? She surveyed the room. The thing that caught her eye was too disturbing to decipher, so she focused instead on the torn clothes rustling near the heat duct like pigeons’ feathers. At the edge of the air mattress, two pairs of shoes lined up like waltz partners, perfectly even. Her soiled pants, which she’d forgotten to soak or even fold, lay on the floor. A three-foot-long rebar with red