Chapter Thirty-Eight. Kathleen, 1964
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Kathleen felt so tightly wound she could snap at the slightest touch.
Being awoken abruptly in the middle of the night brought back horrific memories, stemming from when she was fourteen years old and her mother had a new boyfriend, one she claimed was the love of her life.
The boyfriend—Mac, who worked at the filling station—complimented Kathleen’s long, silky hair, and visited her in the middle of the night under the pretext of making sure she was asleep.
He had never committed the worst act, but he touched her in the darkness, stroking his fingers up and down her arms and legs.
“Are you awake?” he would whisper. “If you are, that means you’re enjoying this as much as I am.”
She’d known he was capable of worse, and her gut told her that he wanted her to fight—to struggle while he subdued her. It would excite him. So she lay perfectly still with her eyes closed, enduring the violations until Mac tired of her mother and moved on.
Kathleen shuddered. She hadn’t thought about those wretched nights in a long time. She’d believed they were firmly in the past, but right now, she could almost smell the scent of gasoline Mac’s skin always carried.
“Quickly, girls, you’ll find fresh notebooks and pencils by the sides of your cots. Write down everything you can remember from your dreams,” Dr. Trimble instructed them.
Kathleen wasn’t a teenager anymore. But she felt equally helpless here in the basement of the library.
Blinking against the piercing light shining from the unadorned bulb hung between the bunks, Kathleen did her best. Her hands were shaking, so her cursive wasn’t as neat as it could have been, but she captured the essence of her dream before it faded.
It was a terrible dream.
Kathleen was alone in the library basement in her stiff white uniform.
The basement of her dream hadn’t been cleaned.
Dust coated the counters and floors, and a dead mouse lay by the radiator.
She could hear Dr. Trimble’s disembodied voice repeating: “Four more times.” Even through her dream, she felt the grip of terror.
A certain luminescence had distinguished the dream, making it so vivid and realistic. Logically Kathleen knew she was safe, but emotionally, she felt as fragile as her fourteen-year-old self.
“What time is it?” Helen asked, her voice scratchy.
“Time doesn’t exist here,” Dr. Trimble said. “In this place, you must free your mind from the constraints of your everyday lives.”
“Where is my baby?” Ivy whispered, her hands frantically patting her bedsheets.
“Honey, she’s with Dr. Trimble’s wife,” Kathleen replied. “Don’t you remember?”
“Oh, of course,” Ivy said, blinking.
Dr. Trimble collected the notebooks, reading each of the entries. When he picked up Kathleen’s, however, he suddenly grew still.
“Have you had many dreams that foretold the truth?” he asked Kathleen.
Only bad ones, she thought. She’d dreamt about Mac before he arrived—not him exactly, but recurring nightmares of fear and helplessness in her darkened bedroom.
It was hard to tell a fib with Dr. Trimble staring down at her from beneath his heavy brows. “I think so,” she replied.
“Marvelous,” he breathed. “Girls, you need to go back to sleep now.”
He lumbered toward the front of the basement, and after a moment, the aroma of freshly brewed coffee wafted toward Kathleen, filling her nose.
She could hear Dr. Trimble pouring a cup from the percolator he’d brought, then settling into a chair that groaned beneath his weight.
The clack-clack of his typewriter keys. The burnt vanilla aroma of his tobacco.
There were four of them and one of him, yet he seemed to fill this entire structure.
Kathleen compulsively tucked in her sheets as tightly as possible, like she had as a teenager, checking and rechecking them.
Finally, she managed to drift off.
What felt like only minutes later, sharp lights and a blaring noise awoke her again. And again. A total of five times throughout the night.
Four more times, Kathleen thought. Did I foretell what was going to happen, or did I give him the idea to wake us up a total of five times tonight and demand we write down our dreams?
When morning finally arrived, the women were bleary-eyed and disoriented.
“I’m more worn out than if I hadn’t slept at all,” Ivy said, her voice hoarse and scratchy.
“Maybe we can steal a nap today,” Betty told her.
Kathleen went to the bathroom and fixed her face the best she could. By the time she finished, she’d banished the demons of the night.
“I’m going to check about breakfast,” she told the other women. “We missed dinner. Surely he needs to let us eat.”
“Some fresh fall air would be good for all of us,” Betty said. “Maybe we can walk to a diner.”
“Then we could change out of these uniforms, too,” Helen said. “I feel so strange wearing them.”
But on the long table in the common room, Kathleen saw five trays that she recognized as coming from the Marquis cafeteria, filled with pancakes and fruit.
Dr. Trimble must have ordered the trays to be delivered here. Perhaps his wife had picked them up and left them outside the door so that she didn’t interfere with the pristine conditions of his experiment.
However the food had arrived, it made one thing clear: The girls weren’t leaving. They were essentially his prisoners.