“Everything is under control here,” I said to him. “Go back to your duties. I’m going to count linens.”
He left, giving me what he must have thought was a knowing look. I stood in the hall for a moment, gathering my strength. I walked away without looking back to see whether Jack Yates was watching me, but when I’d sat down at the nurse’s desk, the list of linens in front of me, the gaping doorway to the darkened stairwell behind me, I pulled the bottle from my pocket and looked at it.
A full bottle of pills. A locked door. A man who had attempted suicide before.
It was as if, I thought, someone thought Jack Yates better off dead.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Hours later, when the soft light of dawn had finally appeared, I sat on the edge of the bathtub in the nurses’ lavatory, slowly unbraiding my hair. I was nearly shaking with fatigue, and the only thing I wanted more than my bed was a long, hot bath.
Nina and Martha had gone on duty, and I was alone. I opened the taps on the tub as full as they would go. I felt filthy, rank with dried sweat, and a decade older than my twenty years.
I let my hair fall and undid the braided knots one by one, tugging gently, working my fingers through the strands. The motion of it, the slow repetitiveness, started to soothe my wild brain. Too much had happened, even though for the quiet remainder of the night I’d counted linens as the wind moaned on the darkened marshes outside the window.
Now dawn had come again. I thought it would be a warm, pretty summer day. I turned the taps off and listened to the last drops of water. The nurses’ bathroom wasn’t half as luxurious as the men’s. The tiles were plain white and there was only a simple sink, toilet, and bathtub good enough for the use of children, overlooked by a narrow window now glowing pink with early light.
My nerves were still ragged, and they had not forgotten the terror of that other bathroom. But this room was quiet. There were no sounds in the walls. The air was not sharp with fear in here. This was just a bathroom, the house just a house. An English home at the start of an early-summer day.
I stood and dropped my nightdress, then stepped naked into the tub. I tried to remember the last time I’d had a long, hot soak in a bath all to myself and couldn’t. Well, then, there was one small advantage to living in the leftover riches of the Gersbachs.
I pulled my knees up, sank my shoulders under the water. I was too thin. My body was already narrow, boyish, but I could see the lines of my ribs. My hips were only a little rounded, my legs longish and thin with muscle, my breasts small. None of it mattered to me. I never looked at myself, not really.
I plunged my head under the water and scrubbed at my scalp. The memories came worse with my eyes squeezed shut; I saw that pale, shirtless figure walking to the stairs, and Archie’s face as his hands flew up, and even poor Somersham as he vomited into his water jug. I saw my breath cloud in that stairwell, heard my voice echo off the walls. I heard Archie say, I won’t go.
I pushed back up with a gasp. I dashed water from my eyes and stared at the ceiling. This was not just a house. It was quiet now because it chose to be, because it dozed. It left this bathroom alone because this room did not interest it. It let me sleep for now because it chose to.
Never turn your back on danger, Kitty.
Something was going on, something outside of normal rationality. Something mad. And I couldn’t leave, which made things simple. I’d have to stay and face whatever it was. I pressed my hands to my eyes. This thing had not bested me yet, but it had come close. I was tired, so tired of doing everything alone.
Jack Yates’s jaw had been rough and hot when I’d touched it. I could still feel the scrape of his stubble against the pads of my fingers. He’d listened so calmly as I’d cried, letting me stay in the dark. My skin prickled at just the thought of him, curious and aware, as if my body was imagining what his hands would feel like.
You didn’t tell him everything, I reminded myself, and pulled the plug, letting the water spiral down the drain.
? ? ?
I was six years old when my father first hit me. I was pulling myself up the arm of the sofa, pretending to be a mountaineer, when I’d looked up to see his hand swinging toward me, as large as the moon. As I’d lain on the floor, my face stinging and a jolt ringing up my tailbone, as I bit back a cry—for even then I’d known better than to make a noise—what registered first was not pain but surprise. It had been so fast, so random. Did that happen? I’d thought stupidly. Did it really?
Over the years, long past when it should have vanished, that surprise had been constant every time. My mother was most often the target of my father’s anger; she had it worse than either me or Syd. We were nuisances, slapped casually out of the way with a muscled arm, but something about my mother infuriated my father, no matter what she did. She simply made him angry. And when she finally left, when I was thirteen—ran away with a man from the local soap factory, like a bad theater melodrama that no one would ever want to see—my father turned that anger on me.
He hit me while Syd was out. He called me names, disgusting and crude, when Syd couldn’t overhear. He twisted my arm behind my back, his fingers digging into my skin, silently when Syd was in the next room, and told me if I screamed, he’d kill my brother. If Syd noticed my black eyes, he never spoke of it. I didn’t blame him, and I didn’t ask for help. It was I who made my father angry: the way I looked like my mother, the way I was growing into her body, the way my lower lip curved like hers. I infuriated him. There was nothing anyone could have done.
The morning after Syd went to war, I stood in the kitchen frying two eggs on the stove. My father came in behind me on silent feet. He took the back of my neck in a viselike grip, bent me forward, cracked my forehead on the edge of the counter hard enough to bleed, and threw me to the floor. My arm hit the handle of the pan and the hot eggs and grease went flying, splattering the wall.
“That’s for leaving my socks on the dresser,” he said, and left the room.
I lay on the linoleum, thinking that the eggs were ruined, wondering whether he’d be angry because they’d been wasted. I absently wiped the blood from my forehead. And then I realized: The surprise was gone. I lay on the floor and felt nothing. And something heavy coiled in my stomach, something that was almost fear and almost anger. You are going to die this way, it said. Perhaps not today and perhaps not tomorrow, but this is how you will die.
The year that followed was the worst of my life. Syd had gone to France and vanished; we had no idea whether he was alive or dead. My father drank. He put a knife in my mouth and threatened to cut out my tongue; he held my hand under hot water until it scalded; he pulled me screaming from under the bed one night, not knowing or caring when my hand caught on a bent nail and the skin ripped from the base of my thumb almost to my wrist. He told me that if I ran, he’d find me, no matter where I went; he’d find me and kill me, dump my body. I believed him. I had no other family, no money, no friends, and nowhere to go.
I could have married, I supposed. I was fifteen, and the local boys liked to catcall as I walked down the street in my ill-fitting dress. But by then I knew men were as dangerous as snakes. If I married one of them and he was the same, then what? Then what?