Chapter Twenty
One early Sunday morning there was a rapping at Ava’s window, as if sparrows were doing their best to get into the house.
It was so quiet that every sound echoed.
Lilith House felt abandoned and dark, a place where anything might happen.
Birds at the window, ashes in the chimney, water in the tap running black.
Ava tossed off her blanket and got up from her bed.
When she looked out, there was her grandmother in a dowdy coat standing on the other side of the fence, signaling to her.
They hadn’t spoken since Ava discovered the truth about her father, and now she couldn’t quite imagine what could cause her grandmother to come all the way to Cambridge.
If she hadn’t felt she had lost everyone dear to her, she might have pulled down the shade.
Instead, she quickly slipped on jeans and a black sweater and went out, with Jack following.
The dog was already growling, even before Ava and her grandmother stood face-to-face. “Why did you come here?” Ava asked.
“To talk to you,” her grandmother said.
“If you wanted to talk to me you should have done that while I was growing up,” Ava told her grandmother. “I’ve been looking for my father, and it seems you’ve done your best to keep me from ever finding out anything about him.”
“I know you’re angry that you didn’t know the truth about your father,” Jeanne Abbot said. Her eyes were red, as if she’d been crying.
“And what about my mother? Will you tell me who she was?”
“I was only protecting you,” Ava’s grandmother said.
“Well, stop it!”
“That’s why I’m here. I need you to come with me now,” Jeanne Abbot said. “It’s your father. He’s better.”
“My father?” Ava said, incredulous. “My father drowned in the Charles River.”
“No,” Jeanne Abbot told her. “We told you that to protect you. He’s been in the hospital all this time. He’s been in a deep coma, for it seemed unlikely that he’d ever be well, but now he’s back. We’ve had a miracle. We are walking through a world of miracles, Ava, and we don’t have time to waste.”
Mrs. Abbot linked her arm through Ava’s and brought her to a waiting taxi.
Once they’d gotten in, Mrs. Abbot leaned forward to give the driver an address in Lexington.
As soon as the taxi pulled away, Jack began chasing them, but the taxi didn’t stop.
“Keep going,” Mrs. Abbot commanded. “Don’t slow down. ”
Ava felt dizzy with confusion. “How can he be alive? I saw the obituary.”
“It’s what we told the newspaper so he could have peace. The same is true of his gravestone.”
“But he’s a ghost. His spirit sits on my bed when I’m sleeping.”
“Don’t say that!” Mrs. Abbot gripped Ava’s arm even more tightly and shook her. “You stupid girl. Are you trying to call up black magic? Do you think I don’t know the witchery you practice? That’s the reason. I have to do this. For your sake.”
“Do what?”
“Whatever I have to.” Jeanne Abbot’s voice was softer than usual.
Ava’s heart was pounding. Had this woman ever been anything but insincere? She looked out the back window; Jack was still chasing after them.
“You need to stop the taxi.” Ava felt pins and needles, the sort of fear that pinched.
“We have no time for that,” Jeanne Abbot informed her. “We’re on a schedule.”
Ava couldn’t see Jack anymore; the car was driving faster, and he hadn’t been able to keep up. Soon he’d be wandering the streets in the dark. “Why should I believe you?” Ava asked her grandmother, She felt as though she were still in a dream. “You lied to me before.”
“I’m your grandmother, and we are blood relations, whether you like it or not. I’ve always wanted the best for you, even though there is something amiss with you, just as there was with your mother. I curse the day my boy met her, and I always have.”
“What was so wrong with my mother?”
“It’s better not to know what you came from” was her grandmother’s guarded response.
Be prepared, don’t be swayed when the woman who had always lied to you begins to cry even if you’ve never seen her do such a thing in all your life.
If you look closer you’ll see there are no tears.
Crocodile tears. Crocodile mother. Put your finger on her cheek and feel how cold she is, then you’ll know a lie for what it is.
But Ava did not know. She might have questioned her grandmother further, but they had come to a wooded campus and were driving on a crooked road.
The area looked bucolic, but people in the neighborhood knew it was a hospital, and not the sort they would ever wish to go to.
As the taxi headed up the twisting drive, it was possible to spy a row of red-brick buildings on a hill.
Here was a psychiatric hospital created with the belief that those who were ill in spirit and in mind would find solace in a restful country setting.
Ava followed her grandmother to a building, where they were buzzed inside.
Once they were in the corridor, the door clicked shut and locked with an echo.
Ava’s first thought was that she should not be barefoot.
She had no idea that the hospital had begun as what was then called an insane asylum, for such terms weren’t used anymore.
All the same, she could feel grief in the air, a spiderweb of sorrow.
“I don’t think I should be here,” she said.
Her grandmother continued to grasp her arm, saying, “We have to wait for the doctor. This is all for the best. I don’t want you to go down the wrong path.”
All at once, Ava feared her grandmother’s announcement that her father was alive was a blatant lie. “He’s not here, is he?” she asked, but instead of answering, her grandmother looked away. Ava hurried over to speak with a nurse at the check-in desk.
“Can you help me?” Ava was in a panic; cold as ice and yet sweating as if in the grip of a fever.
How mad did she look with no shoes and her hair in tangles?
She didn’t even have her purse. “They said my father was dead, but he isn’t.
They printed an obituary and pretended to bury him, but he’s alive.
And they won’t tell me where he is or who my mother is. She may be a witch.”
Ava was stuttering as she spoke, her fear causing her to be almost incoherent. The nurse gave her a skeptical look, particularly when she mentioned that her mother was a witch, a not uncommon delusion. The nurse signaled to two orderlies, who approached and stood on either side of Ava.
“Okay, let me understand,” the nurse said flatly. She gave the impression that she was someone who’d heard just about everything. Every excuse, every fear, every fantasy. “Your dead father is alive, and your mother is a witch. Is that what you’re telling me?”
The nurse had begun to take notes, and she spoke to Ava as if she were a four-year-old, and that was when Ava knew she shouldn’t have said anything at all. This was some form of punishment. Sure enough, she looked over her shoulder to spy her grandmother being let out the locked door.
“Wait for me,” Ava cried. She tried to follow but was grabbed from behind, her sleeve pushed up so she could be injected with a tranquilizer. “Don’t you dare,” Ava said. But it was over and done. She fell to the floor amid a haze of muffled voices, and the world turned dark.
Ava awoke to discover she’d been carried down the hall and was in a room with more locks on the door, locks she couldn’t open with an incantation because the shot they had given her, a large dose of Thorazine, took away her power to escape.
She begged and pleaded and told them who she was, and the orderlies snickered, laughing over how she claimed to be a witch.
Miss Witch, they called her. Abracadabra, they said.
Night fell before Ava realized she’d best stop fighting.
She stayed where she was, in a chair overlooking the vast lawn, waiting for the light.
There were the crows on the grass, or were they only black stones?
She felt dead inside, dead and buried, without memory or magic.
The idea of her father being alive had been a trick to get her here.
Did her grandmother think this was what she needed?
To be shocked into being normal, drugged into forgetting the secrets she’d stumbled upon?
That talk about her father had been a lie told for only one reason: to get her into the taxi.
The nurses assured her that her grandmother just wanted her to get well and not think she was a witch and not believe in black magic.
She had always wanted her to be an ordinary girl, hadn’t she? Didn’t they all?
One of the nurses who had a kind nature came to brush her hair after it had been clipped short.
She claimed that many people came here and improved after treatment, some of them brilliant and creative, professors and students and artists.
She vowed that Ava would get better, too, but Ava still had enough of the sight to see inside other women in the common room; she saw the tragic stories they carried in silence, the children they’d lost, the men who had threatened them.
Maybe the Lilith Society had only served to inflame what was nothing more than a troubled mind.
Apples on windowsills, white paper crows, leaping from trees and never falling, black blood, a love that would last beyond time—all of it seemed like a story to her now, a fairy tale spun into a web of lies.
A wolf on the lawn was howling and she could sleep only when they gave her the shot.
“Close your eyes,” a nurse said to her. “Have sweet dreams.”
But her dreams were a dark jumble, red boots in the mud, women being chased across the Cambridge Common, apples that were rotten when you cut them in two, men who walked away without looking back, an eleventh finger chopped off in a doctor’s office.
Don’t cry, the doctor in her dreams said in a stern tone.