FOUR KINGS: A Novel Page 2

  “Yes… I think so,” I say. I was still a kid then — nine years old when we finally left France behind and sailed across the Channel, first to England, then to the United States.

  “Hmm,” Dr. Waters muses. “That much is promising. I believe we are dealing with a limited memory loss, specifically related to the trauma you experienced. During our sessions we will work through those older memories to see if we can help you regain the newer ones. I will help you overcome this, Anaïs; you have my word. It is very important you heal and regain your memory, because… we need you to testify,” Dr. Waters says. “Or, to be more specific, Mr. Duval — the Assistant District Attorney, that is — needs you to testify. It’s the only way to put your stepfather’s assailant behind bars.” Marie-Jean’s words return to me: the lawyer, testify, court case. Everything begins falling into place.

  “I’m the only one who can testify? Is my stepfather…?” I cannot bring myself to say the next word.

  “Oh — no,” Dr. Waters rushes to add, “your stepfather is not dead. I’m sorry if I frightened you; I should have mentioned his prognosis sooner. We doctors are trained not to get our patients’ hopes up, you see. Your stepfather is alive… but only just barely, and that is why I didn’t mention it sooner. I’m afraid he is in a comatose state. Do you understand what that means, Anaïs — when I say, a comatose state?”

  I nod, slowly, mechanically. I’m not a child; I understand what a coma is. I just never thought anyone I loved would be trapped in one. “He is stuck in a sleeping, catatonic state,” I say.

  Dr. Waters smiles, pleased that I understand this much.

  “Precisely. His brain activity is believed to be very low,” he explains. “We can’t begin to guess when he’ll wake up. It could be a day, a week, a year — several years, or… never. That is the honest truth. This trial matters to the community, and we need you to testify because he cannot speak for himself.”

  “And I’m the only one who saw the shooting?”

  “We think so, yes.”

  “But…” I hesitate, trying to think of how to phrase the biggest question of them all, the one that weighs so heavily on my mind. “But I’m still so confused… how did I end up here? And how will I testify if I can’t even remember that much?”

  Dr. Waters clears his throat. “All very good questions, Anaïs. I’m proud of you. Your brain seems to be sharpening itself on the whetstone of reality and mental acuity once again.” He lightly twists the tips of his walrus moustache and shifts in his upholstered swivel chair. “You see… we don’t know the sequence of events exactly. We know you were home with your stepfather. We know the hurricane was imminent, if not in fact upon you both at the time. We know someone shot your father, and we know you tried to administer physical aid. We also know you were struck upon the head — perhaps by the assailant, or perhaps by natural causes owing to the hurricane, of course. But after the blow to the head you seem to have suffered a break with reality. You were found wandering the French Quarter, your clothes torn and blood caked about your head, screaming at the top of your lungs. You weren’t speaking English. You weren’t speaking anything anyone might easily recognize, if it was even a language at all.”

  Dr. Waters looks at me, carefully inspecting my face as I take all this in. Do I remember any part of what he describes? I rack my brain. No, I do not. There is nothing there. Instantly, a sensation of sadness and desperation descends upon me. I understand all too well that if I can’t remember, I won’t be any help in a court trial.

  “The police were called, and it was they who picked you up and brought you here. You ought to be grateful — they had quite enough to do in the aftermath of the hurricane; the storm blew through the city only a little over a week ago now, and most wards are still a mess, quite frankly. The city is in need of a great deal of repair. But nonetheless, when they found you, the police took the time to help you, question you, and bring you to me.”

  It is evident I am supposed to feel a sense of gratitude for being deposited in an asylum. “The man on trial — who is he?” I demand. Suddenly I am full of anger, of a sense of betrayal.

  “One of your stepfather’s employees,” Dr. Waters repeats. “At the jazz club.” He looks at me. “He has been arrested and is being held without bail; do not fret. You are safe here, besides. But I cannot hand your own memories over to you like a bouquet of flowers, Anaïs. You must earn them back yourself. You must be well in order for Mr. Duval to make his case before the jury.” He pauses, and a strange expression passes over his face — and expression that sets me on edge. “We have talked things over — Mr. Duval and I — and he has impressed upon me the importance of your testimony, and the fact that I might be called to vouch for your mental health. And so, I am prepared to authorize whatever variety of treatment a case like yours might require. I am under strict orders to make you well, and I intend to keep my word.”

  I have no idea what any of this means, but it makes me nervous. Dr. Waters has, it would seem, complete control over my immediate future. I cast a wary glance back to the shrunken head where it hangs.

  “Alas, my dear, for the time being, we should get you settled in here, and the nurses will need to transfer you to the girls’ dormitory. We will be seeing quite a lot of each other in the coming days, but this is the first lucid exchange we’ve had to date. I think for a first interview, it went quite well, don’t you?”

  He looks at me with an expectant expression, his walrus moustache twitching, but I haven’t the faintest idea how to reply.

  “Yes, indeed: I can see you are growing fatigued. We have overwhelmed you with information. Nurse Kitching?” he calls. The door swings open and the nurse who was folding bandages in my room when I woke up reappears. “Take Anaïs back to her room, and see to it that she gets some rest before you transfer her to the regular dormitory. If she is to be deemed a suitable witness for the court trial, Judge Lefevbre has required I sign an official affidavit guaranteeing she is of sound mind and body no later than the 13th of this month.”

  “October 13th! That is only two weeks from today.”

  Dr. Waters nods solemnly.

  “I see, Doctor. Of course,” the nurse replies, helping me back into the ancient wooden wheelchair. She begins to wheel me out of the room, when Dr. Waters snaps his fingers as though remembering something.

  “Oh! And Nurse Kitching?”

  “Yes?”

  “Please alert Chester Duval that the psychotic mania has finally subsided and that Anaïs is lucid and ready to talk — he’s the Assistant D.A. making the case against the criminal who shot Anaïs’s father, the one who’ll want to prep her for the witness stand. Also, alert Anaïs’s next of kin that she’s up and about, too, while you’re at it.”

  “My next of kin?” I ask. My mind draws a blank. I may have developed a blank space in my memory as of late, but there are still some things I remember quite plainly. As concerns kin, there is my father, but he is long deceased. There is my mother, but she is sadly deceased as well. My stepfather adopted me for his own, when he was far from obligated to do so — a true hero.

  “Why, your stepfather’s fiancée, of course,” Dr. Waters says in a matter-of-fact voice. “I believe she will want to see you at once. She has been asking about you.”

  My blood runs cold. My stepfather’s fiancée. Yes. I remember there was something to do with her, something very upsetting.

  My brain struggles to summon the details, but to no avail. Nurse Kitching continues to wheel me away from Dr. Waters’s office, and away from the only source of any answers I’ve been offered so far. It occurs to me that the worst kind of nightmare is the one you can almost-but-not-quite remember.

  CHAPTER 3.

  Back in my room, Nurse Kitching orders me to take a nap.

  “While you rest, we’ll get your regular accommodations ready. I’ll fetch you and take you to your new bed once it’s been prepared, and then from there we’ll show you to the
game room to introduce you to the other girls you’re to bunk with in your assigned dormitory.”

  I look at her, slightly alarmed by this proposition.

  “I’m not to stay here?”

  “In the North Wing?” she exclaims. “I should hope not. This is a hospital wing. We only keep very sick patients or else very violent patients like yourself here, usually in isolation, so they won’t do harm to others.”

  My eyes widen. She shakes her head and pats my knee over the scratchy wool blanket.

  “Oh, you weren’t so bad as all that, but you certainly were out of your mind, that’s for sure — kicking and screaming and tearing at your own clothes. Who knew what damage you might do? But now… now, you seem to have snapped back! The brain can be so resilient, and thank goodness for that, eh?” She pauses for a moment, crosses her arms, sighs, and looks at me. “You don’t want to stay here, do you? In this room, all by yourself?”

  “No,” I say, shrugging. “I suppose I don’t.”

  “That’s right,” she nods in approval. “You’ll be happier in the South Wing. We’ll get you settled into the regular population there. You’ll like it.”

  Something about her cheerfulness unnerves me. I can’t help but wonder about this “regular” population. I climb into bed and lie down.

  I remain there, my mind ticking through an endless pile of half-formed questions as I stare at the water-stained ceiling — but for over an hour, I can’t sleep. I am relieved when Nurse Kitching returns to collect me. I hear the squeak-squeak-squeak of the wheelchair before she steps into the room, and perk up. This time there are two orderlies with her, both of them dark-skinned, heavyset men with stoic expressions.

  “Hop in,” Nurse Kitching commands.

  “I don’t need the chair.”

  She smiles — a tight, strained smile. “I’m afraid it’s not optional.”

  A few moments later, as Nurse Kitching rolls me through corridors of the North Wing, I begin to comprehend the logic behind the chair, the burly orderlies: There are violent patients here. I hear them wailing, and beating the walls from within locked rooms. It makes my skin crawl. We take a long, winding path to traverse from North to South Wing; the corridors unfold in the manner of a veritable labyrinth.

  We pass through several secured gates, weary-faced guards standing watch at each set of chain-link doors. The gates are arranged in pairs, like locks in a canal system. At some point, the orderlies split off, and eventually we come to what I presume is the South Wing of the asylum. A lower security, female-only ward, Nurse Kitching informs me.

  “These girls have their troubles, too,” she says, “but are mostly harmless.”

  We enter a long dormitory room lined with beds — twelve on each side, twenty-four in total. The room is unoccupied at present. Nurse Kitching tells me everyone is in the common room, and she’ll take me there next. She rolls me over to a freshly-made bed, the sheets and blankets still emblazoned with sharp wrinkles from where they were previously folded up and kept in tidy rectangular stacks.

  “This is your bed, Anaïs,” the nurse says. “And here is your footlocker,” she gestures to a small trunk at the foot of the bed. “You’ll have everything you need, and I don’t expect you’ll stay very long.” She looks at me and smiles. “You’ve had something terrible happen to you, sure, but the doctor says you’re not quite like the others. This needn’t be your permanent home, and I sincerely hope it isn’t. Just think of it like… just think of it like summer camp.”

  I have never been to summer camp; “camp” carries a very ominous meaning as far as I’m concerned, but I don’t bother telling Nurse Kitching that. She shows me the contents of my footlocker: Seven pairs each of underwear and socks, three hospital gowns and one long-sleeved cardigan. They are so very plain, all of them hospital-issued. After the nurse helps me don the cardigan (I am not particularly cold, but for some reason I cannot stop shivering) she wheels me down yet another long hallway and into what I presume is the common room.

  It is the largest room I’ve seen yet, a wide, high-ceilinged, big-windowed room, with a great variety of tables, chairs, and desks. In one corner, a boxy television squawks, a Woody Woodpecker cartoon flickering on the snowy, black-and-white screen. No one seems to pay it much mind. Teen girls and grown women alike caper about the room, lounging on sofas, playing games over the tables, coloring with crayons, drooling and laughing and talking, and — in some cases — singing ridiculous songs at the tops of their lungs. An elderly female patient sashays around the room throwing strings of glass Mardi Gras beads at the other women as though she herself were a parade float rolling down Bourbon Street. Some of the other patients cheer her, while others stare right through her with blank expressions. This is it, then, I think to myself. This is “the bin” — as in, the Looney bin — and I’ve been pitched in with all the rest. I am more than a little horrified to find myself here.

  “How about we sit you down on that nice sofa there?” Nurse Kitching says, selecting a small couch, seemingly at random. The sofa is unoccupied save for one girl who appears to be around my own age. “That’s Ellen there — she’s in the bunk next to yours.” She helps me out of my wheelchair and onto the sofa, beside “Ellen” — a girl who is busy sucking on a hank of her own hair.

  “Ellen?” Nurse Kitching prompts, in that queer, friendly-yet-not-friendly-at-all voice, “Spit out your hair, please, and say hello to Anaïs. Anaïs is new here, and doesn’t know anyone — wouldn’t you like to be her friend?”

  Ellen refuses to acknowledge us. Her eyes are a startling pale gray, her long dank hair a washed-out blonde color similar to my own. She continues to suck on her hair and stares straight ahead with that supremely disinterested, vacuous look that cattle often have as they chew their cud.

  “Well, truth be told, Ellen’s not one much for words,” Nurse Kitching chuckles. “But you’ll find there are plenty of nice girls to talk to if you just take the trouble to introduce yourself around. They may strike you as odd, of course, but I assure you this lot is generally harmless, give or take an outburst here and there; there’s really no need to be afraid. Let’s see now…” she says, scanning the room. “In the dormitory you’ve been assigned, there’s Lucy, Veronica, Susan, Marsha, Sharon, Tabitha…”

  She goes on naming names, pointing around the room, but I’ve gone numb. All I can think about is all the familiar faces I miss: my father, my mother, my stepfather… I think about the storm, too… all the information I can remember, and all the information I’m told I can’t remember. How did I get here? I certainly never pictured myself in a place like this.

  “Hmm, I’m not certain I should leave you alone just yet,” Nurse Kitching says, scrutinizing me where I sit. “Do you promise to make an effort to settle in?”

  “Don’t worry,” I assure Nurse Kitching, hoping she will simply go away. “I’ll be okay here. I just want to sit for a minute. It’s a bit overwhelming.”

  She nods and smiles her plastic, red-lipstick smile and disappears with the wheelchair going squeak-squeak-squeak all the way across the room, through the doorway and down the hall to some undisclosed place — some room they keep as a wheelchair depot yard or what-have-you. When Nurse Kitching has finally gone I realize I have been holding my breath, and exhale a huge huff of pent-up air. Ellen registers none of this, distracted and evidently content with the flavor of her hair. I look at her, studying her closer. She is indeed somewhere near my own age — likely fourteen or fifteen, I’d guess — but between the hair sucking and her brooding pale eyes, there is a dazed quality about her that puts me in mind of a newborn infant. Her fingernails are chewed down to ragged, bloody nubs. Her complexion is pink from over-scrubbing, and a trickle of drool runs down the outer corner of her mouth where she teethes upon the matted paintbrush that is her own lock of hair.

  I sit, staring at my own hands and fingernails, trying to think, trying to remember. The other patients begin to notice my presence i
n the room. Some grow curious about me, and come over to ask me my name. One asks me my shoe size, squints and frowns, and writes my answer down in a small notebook — though why this is, I hardly know. Some of the women seem quite normal, others seem inexplicably focused on seemingly inconsequential details, others cannot carry on a rational conversation, and still others — like Ellen — are almost entirely catatonic.

  Eventually, I get up to stretch my legs. I do a lap around the room, observing my new surroundings. There is a steady hum of chaos. A few of the artistically inclined patients who have occupied themselves with coloring crayons are quite talented, their masterpieces intensely vivid and disturbing. That is all there is to do in this room: Draw, watch television, play games. Most of the games and puzzles are missing pieces — not that this lack matters, for none of the women are playing any of the games by their proper rules. I stand next to a table of women playing cards, observing their game. Whatever they are playing, they’ve kept the Jokers in the deck. A middle-aged woman slips the Jack of Hearts into the open pocket of my cardigan, gives me a naughty, flirtatious smile, puts a finger to her lips, and whispers, “Shhh,” then giggles and shoos me away from the table. Now I know how game pieces go missing.

  I go to the window hoping it will perhaps help me get my bearings. Outside I glimpse the usual telltale signs of Louisiana: a clearing bordered by live oaks and swamp cypresses, the branches bearded in Spanish moss, rich yellow-green scum on a stagnant pool of water, a small hospital graveyard near the woods. I see no suggestion of the city; we must be some distance outside the urban heart of New Orleans.