not going to sue. She wasn’t old enough for Medicare. Most places wouldn’t have taken her at all.”
The administrator in blue scrubs propped open the door to C4–38 for them, then hurried off to answer a ringing phone.
Audrey stopped short in the doorway. She could smell her mother. Winston cigarettes and cheap, baby-powder-scented pink perfume. There were two beds. A heavyset woman wearing Betty’s orange-and-black geometric muumuu sat farthest from the door. Her hair was a wild white tumble.
“Oh!” Audrey cried. “Momma?”
The woman turned, and Audrey saw she’d been mistaken. This was not Betty. Her skin was too pale and her face too long. Thick dandruff crumbs dusted her shoulders. “Who are you?” Audrey asked.
The woman took some time to answer. Coarse white whiskers poked out from her chin, and her eyes were doped-up vacant. It was possible she wasn’t even stoned on meds. A whole generation of these older patients had been lobotomized, and a lot of them wound up in institutions for the rest of their lives. Back in the forties, doctors across the country had shoved ice picks into the corners of their patients’ eye sockets, then scraped wing-shaped pockets into both temporal lobes, leaving them incontinent, childlike, and occasionally, soulless. Brain abortions, all the rage. Even Rose Marie Kennedy got one.
The woman turned to her. Audrey noticed the white scars in the corners of her eyes and shivered. Yeah, lobotomy. “We lived here together, in this beautiful place,” she said with a dreamy smile.
“My mother? That’s her dress.” Audrey pointed.
“There’s television here, and black walls where nothing scary ever happens, and that sweet air you like so much. You can stay here forever, Lamb. All you have to do is build it. She’s waiting. We all are.”
Audrey swallowed once, twice, three times. She patted her left leg with her left hand, her right leg with her right hand. Looked at the adjacent empty bed, upon which a pile of Betty’s shapeless muumuus were neatly folded. Next to that was a bric-a-brac of odd items in a box. Effects.
“What did you just say?” Audrey asked. The woman smiled, but didn’t answer.
Audrey fought an impulse to shake her. She felt something warm, and jumped. It was Saraub’s hand on the small of her back.
“Siamese twins belong in Siam,” the old woman said.
“What?” Audrey asked, remembering vaguely her dream.
The woman grinned wider. Something in her expression was knowing, and not so empty, after all. Her pupils were dilated and dark. They reminded her of the man in the three-piece suit. Of The Breviary.
Audrey turned away. Wiped her eyes. This was no time for hysteria. “Don’t talk to me, old woman,” she muttered.
“Come on,” Saraub said, and steered her to the empty bed. It was stripped down to the mattress. She took a breath and lifted the stack of papers from the box. On top was her birth certificate. Audrey Rachel Lucas, it said, which was funny, because she’d never guessed that she had a middle name.
There was a photo album, too. Audrey’s throat made a sound. A laugh or a cry, or something in between. The first page of the album displayed a clipping from the Columbia University Record (how had she tracked it down?) describing her New York Emerging Voices Award in Architecture. The next page, a double-sided list of city names in Betty’s hand, with numbers beside them:
Yuma: 7
*Sedona: 8
Des Moines: 8
*Torrington: 8
*Scottsbluff: 9
*Cheyenne: 9
Fort Collins: 9
Oberlin: 9
*Plainville: 10
*Trenton: 10
*Maco: 10
*Ladysmith: 10
Winnona: 10
Epworth: 11
Cascade: 11
Belle Place: 11
Muscatine: 11
Leavenworth: 11
Lockney: 11
Carlsbad: 11
Mescarolo: 12
Las Cruces: 12
Duncan: 12
Clifton: 12
Maricopa: 12
*Yuma: 12
*Sedona: 12
Solana Beach: 13
San Clemente: 13
Blythe: 13
Prescott: 13
Winslow: 13
*Grand Junction: 14
*Aspen: 14
*Lincoln: 15
*Sioux City: 15
*Spenser: 15
*Mason City: 15
*Rochester: 15
Hinton: 16
Cedar Rapids: 16
Hannibal: 16
Ashland: 17
Marshaltown: 17
Fort Dodge: 17
?18–20?
*Omaha: 21–31
It named every place they’d lived for more than a week. It took her a while to figure out the numbers, but eventually, she understood. They represented the age Audrey had been while they’d lived there. The ones with stars denoted the happy occasions, and the ones with frowns, the miserable ones. Funny that Betty had noticed that some had been sad and some happy. She hadn’t guessed her mother could distinguish the difference.
On the next page of the album, she found something she hadn’t seen in a very long time. Her second-grade class picture. Sloppy bangs she’d cut herself, and a blue dress that Betty had sewn. The glossy corners of the photo were worn to paper, as if Betty had carried it in her wallet every day for the last twenty-seven