The Asylum - 2

    Abigail wouldn't talk to anyone for the first week. I don't blame her, either. Anyone who looked at her for more than a few minutes could see she'd been through hell. She moved very slowly and deliberately, as though moving at all was a struggle, and her eyes, wild and huge, never seemed to blink, even though she didn't seem to be looking directly at anything. She made no sound, even when it was clear that it hurt to move, she barely ate, and she didn't let anyone touch her. Anytime anybody got close, she'd become a wild animal, biting and scratching until she was left alone.

    Like I said, I was fond of her, and I knew what would happen to her: it was 1943, after all. Nowadays, a shrink will talk to you about feelings and self-understanding, using medication as a last resort. Fifty years ago, schizophrenia was as big as AIDS is now, and no one knew anything about how to treat it other than shock therapies, insulin comas and scalpels. I had a feeling she wasn't insane -- horribly neglected and abused, but not insane. Just scared. I thought if she had enough time, she might come out on her own. But, doctors are doctors, and nurses are nurses, and at the end of the day my job was to do as I was told, and not talk out of turn, and that's just what I was going to do. My husband (God rest him) was off fighting the Nazis at the time, and I had two kids to look after, so I wasn't going to risk it just to be some kind of troublemaker. Times were tough enough already.

   Then again, I couldn't let the poor girl's brain get poked and prodded, or cranked full of chemicals and zapped until she wet herself, or screamed, or worse. There had to be a way to get through to her, and I had to do it before the orderlies put her in a straightjacket. 

    When I explained that to her, it didn't seem to register at first. She didn't move, or look up or do anything -- but she didn't get upset when I sat down next to her. She didn't react at all, as if she had no idea I was there, until I did something really stupid. 

    I touched her. 

    Just a light graze on the back of her hand, mind you, but it was enough that she scratched me so fast that I didn't even know what had happened until I saw the blood oozing down my arm. When I looked up at her in shocked surprise, her expression was unlike any I've ever seen; her breath was steady and calm, but her eyes, flashing a brilliant green, were the cunning, bestial eyes of a predator that would not hesitate to kill me if she wanted to. She didn't look angry, though -- she looked...

    I didn't touch her again. The next day, I sat in a chair across from her instead of beside her. I didn't tell the doctors what Abigail had done, because I didn't want her to be taken away for something I did wrong (touching a patient was a huge no-no for nurses), and when asked, I would tell people I cut my hand at home. I didn't mention it to Abigail either, and while it never happened again, I was always careful not to get too close.

    A couple of days later I went to check on her. It was still dark, and for all her strangeness, she slept perfectly through the night most of the time. It was as if the minute the sun went down, she went down with it -- so when I went to her room and found it empty, I didn't know what to do at first. Standard procedure was to lock down the asylum until the wayward soul was recovered, but no one liked it because the alarm was deafening, and it caused pandemonium with the patients. There were no rules in place for much -- the head Doctor (Byrne, I think his name was) insisted we sound the alarm whenever a patient wasn't accounted for, but the nurses and orderlies all agreed to avoid that bloody chaos whenever possible. If a patient was off where they shouldn't be, we all agreed to take up to an hour to locate them before we told Dr. Byrne, making as little commotion as possible.

    If it hadn't been for that unspoken agreement, I never would have paused beforehand to look around, and I wouldn't have seen Abigail standing barefoot in the grounds, standing perfectly still in the morning twilight, her face tilted up toward the sky. As I watched her out there, of course the other nurses came to rubberneck, asking me all kinds of questions, you know: what's she doing out there, how'd she get outside, that type of thing. They all knew Abigail was my favourite, and I guess they must have thought I had answers for them, but I really didn't know what to say.

    I had no more insight than the rest of them, because since scratching my hand, Abigail hadn't done anything at all other than gaze out whichever window was closest, as if longing for something that could only be found outside. I did know that having the whole nursing staff clustered in front of the window when the doctors came to do rounds, there'd be hell to pay.

    "Everybody go back to work," I muttered, not taking my eyes off the girl in the yard, "I'll go get her."

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© - Jackson Cambridge, 2015.