“It was six patients with two staff, which is our standard procedure. The group went to the lake that day. Unfortunately, one of the patients had a meltdown of some sort.”
Of some sort? I wondered if he knew the exact details, even now. Blaisdale seemed like a hands-off administrator if I’d ever seen one.
“In the middle of the hysterics, Mary insisted she had to go to the rest room. The outhouse building was right there, so the counselors let her go. Mistake, but it happens. No one knew at the time that there were entrances on both sides of the building.”
“Obviously, Mary knew,” I said.
Dr. Blaisdale drummed a pen on his desktop several times. “At any rate, she disappeared into nearby woods.”
I stared at him, just listening, trying not to judge, but it was hard not to.
“She was a model patient, had been for years. It took everyone very much by surprise.”
“Just like when she killed her kids,” I said.
Blaisdale appraised me with his eyes. He wasn’t sure if I had just insulted him, and I certainly hadn’t meant to.
“The police did a major search—one of the biggest I’ve seen. We left that job to them. Of course, we were eager to have Mary back, and to make sure she was all right. But it’s not the kind of story we go out of our way to p
ublicize. She wasn’t—” He stopped.
“Wasn’t what?”
“Well, at the time, we didn’t consider her any danger to anyone, other than herself perhaps.”
I didn’t say what I was thinking. All of Los Angeles had a somewhat different opinion of Mary—that she was the most vicious homicidal maniac who ever lived.
“Did she leave anything behind?” I finally asked.
“She did, actually. You’ll definitely want to see her journals. She wrote almost every day. Filled dozens of volumes while she was here.”
Chapter 112
A PORTER, MAC, who looked as though he lived in the basement of the hospital, brought me two archive boxes filled with tape-bound composition notebooks, the kind a child raised in the fifties might have used in school. Mary Constantine had written far more in her years here than I would ever have time to read today. I could requisition the whole collection later, I was informed.
“Thanks for your help,” I told Mac the porter.
“No problem,” he said, and I wondered when it was, and how, the response “you’re welcome” seemed to have disappeared from the language, even up here in rural Vermont.
For now, I just wanted to get a sense of who Mary Constantine was, particularly in relationship to the Mary I already knew. Two archive boxes would be enough for a start.
Her cursive was tidy and precise. Every page was neatly arranged, with even, empty margins. Not a doodle in sight.
Words were her medium, and she had no shortage of them. They slanted to the right on the page as if they were in a hurry to get where they were going.
The voice, too, was eerily familiar.
The writing had Mary Smith’s short, choppy sentences, and that same palpable sense of isolation. It was evident everywhere I looked in the notebook.
Sometimes it just seeped through; other times, it was right on the surface.
I’m like a ghost here. I don’t know if anyone would care whether I stayed or left. Or if they even know I’m here at all.
Except for Lucy. Lucy is so kind to me. I don’t know that I could ever be as good a friend to her as she is to me. I hope she doesn’t go anywhere. It wouldn’t be the same without her.
Sometimes I think she’s the only one who really cares about me. Or knows me. Or can see me.
Am I invisible to everyone else? I truly wonder—am I invisible?