Before I Wake (4 page)

Arden watched from the window of the 757 as it came in for a landing at Yeager Airport in Charleston, West Virginia, the airplane wheels making jarring contact with the ground.

That morning, Arden had bummed a predawn ride to Roswell from her coworker, Linda. From there, she’d taken a bus to Albuquerque International Airport, where an indirect flight left her with two hours to kill in Cincinnati before the last leg of her journey.

That had been the easy part. Now she had to get to Madeline, a West Virginia town that made Artesia look like a metropolis. There were no airplanes to Madeline. Few buses. From experience, she knew any kind of transportation to that remote locale was sporadic and tended to turn what should have been a two-hour drive into an all-day adventure. Renting a car seemed the logical choice.

Approaching the baggage carousel, she spotted a young man with curly blond hair holding a sign with Arden’s name printed across it in large Magic Marker letters.

They’d sent someone to pick her up.

She gave the kid a goofy
here I am
wave.

His mouth opened and he bobbed his head and grinned in acknowledgment. He lumbered over, still displaying the sign, realized what he was doing, and dropped it to his side. “Hey.” He held out his hand. “I’m Eli.”

He had a firm but damp grip.

He stared at her for too long, with an expression Arden would call hero worship if she didn’t know better.

She had to recheck his sign to make sure her name was really on it.

Her bag shot out of the hopper and she moved into retrieval position.

“Yours?” Eli grabbed the handle of the large green duffel as it came around, letting out a loud, surprised groan as he hefted it from the carousel to the floor.

Eli was one of those tall, thin, geeky types who was all skinny legs and arms. He wore jeans and a two-tone orange T-shirt that was too small. Ten years ago, he would have been into Dungeons and Dragons.

“Sorry it’s so heavy.” She didn’t have much in the way of belongings, but when everything you owned went into one bag, that bag could weigh a lot. “Here.” She grabbed the nearest handle. “You get that end; I’ll get this one.”

Together, the bag between them, they shuffled awkwardly toward the exit doors.

His vehicle was a small, rust-tinged, cream-colored station wagon of some sort, the back plastered with band decals. Mostly Emo bands like Dashboard Confessional and Alkaline Trio.

They hefted in Arden’s bag. Eli tossed in the sign with her name on it, slammed the back door, and they were off.

Five minutes into the drive, they hit the hilly, rural landscape of West Virginia, driving down a narrow road that twisted back on itself, winding through thick stands of trees with warning signs that looked like question marks.

Arden checked her watch, hoping her Dramamine hadn’t worn off.

“You should have been here two weeks ago.” Eli braked for a hairpin curve. “The colors were awesome. But then it rained and now it’s over.”

It was a gray day, the tree trunks black and glistening, their branches stripped except for a few of the more tenacious varieties. A deep layer of fallen yellow leaves covered the ground. Arden could smell the humid, mulched-earth scent seeping through the air vents.

Eli was nervous and talking too much.

He told her that he and his friends worked at the Hill doing odd jobs, trying to make money for college. He told her that people there were expecting her, and that someone would show her around and give her the scoop on everything once she arrived.

“My friends and I… we aren’t involved in TAKE. We’re guinea pigs for an unrelated, unaffiliated side project.”

“What kind of project?”

“Listening to music to see if it improves memory. Stuff like that.”

She nodded. He was so young. So enthused and energetic.

About Daniel’s age…

She’d tried to call her brother a few times. She’d picked up the phone and dialed. Dialed
that
number. A number from her past. From a world and a life that no longer existed.

The first time, she couldn’t speak. She opened her mouth, but nothing came out—while Daniel was on the other end, getting more annoyed by the second.

The next time, she was told the number had been disconnected.

I’ll just go there
, she’d thought. To Lake County, Ohio. It would be better to go there. Better to see him face-to-face. Because a phone call wasn’t enough. A phone call wouldn’t fix anything.

It can’t be fixed.

You can’t fix it.

He can’t fix it.

Done is done, and dead is dead.

Not her thoughts. Someone else’s. Remnants of Albert French lingering in her brain.

She sometimes thought of French as something smoky, something that curled around in her skull, settling deep into cracks and crevices, into places where ideas and egos liked to hide…

Eli’s prattle was a hum in her ear, no distinct words that she could turn into pictures in her head. Worse than white noise, but not as bad as Muzak.

Then the signs came.

MADELINE 20 MILES

The signs made it real.

MADELINE 16 MILES

When they reached the five-mile marker, she sat up straighter, her body tense and bent slightly forward.

Five miles in rural West Virginia were like twenty somewhere else. Arden had forgotten that. Forgotten how long it took to get from point A to point B.

Forever and never.

Especially when your heart was racing and you didn’t want to arrive at your destination.

They topped the last hill.

There was the town. There was Madeline. So cute and cozy and innocuous. Red brick and church spires peeking out from behind clusters of trees.

The scene would make a nice greeting card.

The town had been laid out in a deep valley surrounded by hills. A teacup, residents liked to say, the distance from rim to rim only a few miles.

Sheltered. Protected. Isolated.

Her gaze shifted across the valley to the bluff overlooking the town.

The asylum stared back, causing her heart to jump.

She put a hand to her chest, and felt the rapid, erratic pumping.

Am I breathing? I don’t think I’m breathing.

She opened her mouth and inhaled, then exhaled.

There. Better.

Eli made a left turn, taking a new bypass around town, heading straight for the Hill.

If Arden were driving, she would pull over. Stop.

Hadn’t she just left New Mexico a couple of hours ago?

She checked her watch. Not a couple of hours. Eighteen. Eighteen hours since she’d stood under a velvet-black star-filled sky, breathing refinery fumes.

This was a bad place.

She’d known it before, but now that she was here, now that they were circling up the steep drive, the tires on the wet brick pavement making a jarringly familiar humming sound. It took all of her willpower to keep from jumping out of the car.

Everything was happening too fast. She had to slow things down. She had to distract herself.

She spotted a man dressed in a plaid jacket walking a black Lab with a red nylon lead.

Dogs. Would her life ever be that normal again? Dog normal?

Maybe a cat would be better than a dog. More than one cat, so if she went away for a few days the cats could keep each other company.

But I really like dogs
….

But dogs were much needier. They expected things of you. They wanted to make you happy, and didn’t like it if you stayed in bed all day. Cats, on the other hand, loved nothing better than a bed day.

Dogs
like to play
.

Arden couldn’t see herself playing. Couldn’t see herself tossing a ball, then talking in a high-pitched, enthusiastic voice when the dog retrieved it.

Had she actually done that? Yes. Yes, she had.

Eli’s voice brought her back to the reality she was trying to escape. “Do you remember this place?”

His question made her wonder how much he knew about her. “Yes.”

The visual impact of the Hill was an imprint that had never blurred, never faded. Bleaching hadn’t been able to remove it from her mind.

The asylum was massive. More like a town, or at least a large campus. At its zenith, it had boasted landscaped gardens with fountains, swans, and geese where the townspeople came to picnic on weekends. The brick for the buildings had been fired on site, dug from the very clay they now drove over.

Eli swung the car in the direction of the main building.

Five stories tall, with grand pillars and a sweeping staircase, it looked like something from the Natalie Wood weeper
Splendor in the Grass
.

Mom loved that movie.

Don’t think about her. Especially not here.

This main architectural wonder was called Building 50, which never made sense to Arden, since it was the biggest structure and the center of everything. You’d think it would be called Building 1. Here it seemed that the larger the number, the greater the importance.

The asylum was part of a therapeutic movement that took hold in the nineteenth century. During a short span of time, close to two hundred mental hospitals sprang up in small towns around the United States. The stunningly beautiful and serene structures and grounds were designed by Thomas Kirkbride, a visionary and leader in the health-reform movement.

Everything was visually aesthetic. Or had been at one time, before drugs became the main avenue of treatment and patients were kicked out on the street and hospitals closed, condemning the buildings to years of neglect.

Tall, thin panes of glass pressed down from above, at once imposing and grand, every window frame different in style and covered with ornate wrought iron, dwarfing and overpowering a person of stable mentality.

On either side of the main entrance were what had once been separate wings for males and females. Beyond that, a person would have once found buildings that contained the blacksmith’s shop, power plant, bakery, upholstery shop, doctors’ offices, and a separate hospital that had boasted a maternity ward and surgery.

Later in its history, the Madeline State Lunatic Asylum became the Madeline Mental Health Center, but most locals just called it the Hill.

Serene
would not now describe the grounds that had once been referred to as an oasis for the mind and spirit. The place was bustling. Dust-covered construction trucks were parked at odd angles. Scaffolding and thick, semitransparent plastic had been set up over outer walls and windows. Men used hammers, chisels, and drills to remove old cement and replace it with new.