Chapter 9 Nancy
NINE
NANCY
The car felt smaller than usual; the air stifling with Robert’s cloying cigarette smoke.
I tapped my fingers against the worn leather bench seat, the sound irritating even to me.
Still, I couldn’t stop. Her face kept flashing into my mind, taunting me.
Ginny, so pale and slight, hanging behind my closed eyes like a ghost in the asylum window.
Why couldn’t I get her out of my head? I’d had sorrowful patients before. Poor souls who I wished I could spirit out of the crumbling walls.
Yet, she persisted in my thoughts. As visceral in her absence as the acrid smoke invading my nose.
‘She shouldn’t be here,’ I said. Robert’s eyes twitched, ignoring me. ‘She seems perfectly fine. Wellard isn’t a home for unwed mothers. She should be with her family.’
Robert exhaled. His nose made that whistling noise that forever grated at my nerves. We’d been so in love once. But the last six or seven years had brought a distancing. Likely because I was a failure of a wife. Couldn’t even catch a bun in the oven.
‘Maybe her family didn’t want her,’ he said with a shrug.
The thought was unfathomable. Sweet, lovely Ginny. How could her family not want her, even in her condition? Seeing the heartbreak on her face made me want to gather her up and steal her away.
‘Surely they love her?’
His fingers gripped the wheel too tight, whitening at the knuckles. He once hung on every word I said, swallowing them down between desperate kisses.
‘No one loves a loose woman.’
I snapped my gaze to him, heat flaring in my chest. ‘Maybe not. But Wellard still isn’t the place for her. You know what they do to people in there…’
His lips twitched. He looked far less disgusted than I was. ‘If she isn’t crazy going in, she soon will be. Don’t pity her, she probably brought it on herself.’
The harshness of his words made my stomach turn. I imagined Ginny’s hands wrapped over the swell of life. So young, and in such despair, yet still maternally protective.
‘What’ll happen to her? To the baby?’
Robert shrugged, eyes fixed on the road ahead. ‘It’ll be adopted out once she has it. Or given to the father. Or her parents. If no one wants it, I’m sure Marney will find a use for it.’
How could he be so callous when we’d lost so many of our own? So many lives I’d barely even imagined before filling my toilet with scarlet. My nails dug crescents into my palms.
‘But that’s what she’s afraid of,’ I whispered.
‘Who cares?’ Robert pressed his cigarette into the ashtray as we approached the asylum gates, his jaw clenching. ‘She’s just another patient. You know we can’t get invested.’
But I am.
Her sweet sapphire eyes had hooked their claws into me, exposing a raw part of me I’d tried to hide for years.
So often I’d strapped together my broken pieces, hiding them from everyone as I soldiered on.
But each loss had shattered me anew, every time the shards got smaller and sharper and harder to hold together.
Ginny carried life inside her as if it wasn’t a miracle.
And while jealousy pricked amongst the sharp talons, it gave way to worry.
‘Easy for you to say,’ I sighed, softer now. ‘You don’t have to see the way she cries to be free. Cries for her child.’
‘Just stop messin’ with things that are none of your business.’ He drove on, radio droning with monotone voices. The finality in his statement spoke volumes.
If Ginny had no one else to help her, then I’d have to step up.
To protect her from the monsters lurking among Wellard’s crumbling walls.