To kill yourself in an asylum is a thing easily done.
Plenty who wished to stay alive found themselves dying of neglect, while those who prayed for death woke each morning to the sun’s rays filtered through greasy windows. Grace had thought through her options more than once; to slide beneath the freezing waters during a treatment while the attendant’s back was turned or to simply cease eating.
But Grace had sat through many sermons by her father’s side, heard about the perils of hell and the fiery brimstone that surely awaited her if she took her own life. She doubted that hell was hot and sulfuric. Instead, she imagined it was comfortable and smelled like her own bedroom. If fear kept her from ending herself, she’d be neatly deposited back between those sheets, as confining as any chains. An ethereal hell or the one she’d already lived through were her options. Croomes twisted Grace’s wrist, bringing her thoughts back to the body she was stuck in for the moment.
“My, my, but you do walk pretty,” Croomes said. “Not a bone out of place on you. Forget balancing the book, I bet we could put a whole bookcase on your head, couldn’t we? You look like a picture in one of them lady’s magazines, except for that bit.” Croomes flicked Grace’s pregnant belly as they turned the corner to the baths. “Nothing much ladylike about that, is there?”
Grace had buried the urge to speak so deeply that most words from others meant nothing, but Croomes’s voice always crept through the safe fog she’d veiled her mind in, demanding to be heard. Grace set her jaw and went to a tub already half-filled with freezing water. Miss Marie was dumping buckets over another patient, but moved to help Grace take off her shift.
Marie offered her a hand as she stepped over the porcelain rim, and Grace took it, leaning heavily on the girl’s arm as she lowered herself into the frigid water. Though she’d forsaken sound, she couldn’t stop her teeth from chattering.
“Right then, help her on into the tub. Let’s see if we can find some scented soaps while we’re at it,” Croomes said, crossing her arms. “’Course, Marie here would be wanting to make sure you get through everything safely. Did she tell you she’s taking your baby?”
Grace’s head jerked at the words and her wide eyes met Marie’s, who flushed and turned to hiss at Croomes.
“What’d you have to go and do that for? No need to upset the girl.”
Croomes produced a half-smoked cigarette from her pocket, struck a match on the stool, and lit what was left of it. “You going to pour it over her head, or am I?”
“I will,” Marie said, fetching her bucket from the other tub, where the patient’s head lolled to the side, lips blue. “Though I don’t know as I see much of the point of it.”
“And where’s your medical degree, I’ll ask you? Heedson says it’s too much heat in the brain that makes them crazy, and so we douse ’em.”
“If that’s the case, this girl here should be talking normal as you or me right now. She’s as cold as the dead.”
Croomes blew smoke out of her nose and watched as Marie poured the first bucketful over Grace’s head, the water loosening the pale bun and turning it into dark streaks that clung to her skin. “This one’s as cold as the water she’s sitting in, down past her bones and into her soul. Nothing wrong with her brain. It’s her heart that’s got no life in it.”
Grace sat, letting the water numb her skin and apathy numb her ears as Croomes rose from her stool. “I’ve got Cracked Pat to tend to. Never comes to her treatments without my special encouragement.”
“I’ll finish here,” Marie said as Croomes walked past Grace’s tub. “No need for you to trouble yourself.”
“No trouble,” Croomes said, digging her fingers into Grace’s bun and pulling out the pin that held it in place, sending the loose hair cascading down her shoulders. “I’ll make sure this gets to its rightful owner,” Croomes said, lifting a hank of Grace’s dripping hair and grinding her cigarette out on the pale expanse of her neck.
Words boiled in Grace’s stomach as she clenched down on the pain, her teeth grinding together to keep from rewarding Croomes’s cruelty by crying out. Marie gasped but cut it short at a glare from Croomes. “Anybody hears about that, I’ll know