THIRTY-SIX
I was happy I wasn’t Dolly, driving up to the cluster of austere, small-windowed brick hospital buildings from another time. Everything so neatly lined across the front—narrow windows, roof edges. All topped with what looked like a dome.
I thought of my mother—during the twelve years I knew her—compared to this, the place where Dolly’s mother had spent most of her life.
In my head were good memories of long, thin fingers gently brushing my face as my mother lay between blue sheets, sick in her bed. And gray eyes, echoing the colors everywhere in her room; the eyes narrowing to happy lines when I ran in after school to hug her and rattle on and on about my day.
And a voice that maybe I remembered or maybe only reflected my father’s memories, but I knew that voice could say my name in so many different ways: joy, love, disappointment, laughter.
This was all Dolly had of hers, an icy institution and a web of lies Dolly’s confusion would probably never work through.
We said nothing to each other as we parked in the lot beside the biggest of the buildings and walked in—one behind the other—to ask for the director.
Yes, we had an appointment . . .
We were ushered into an office as warm as the building was cold.
I liked David Heilman. He stood to greet us, his back to an ochre-colored wall with a huge copy of Monet’s
Water Lilies
behind his desk. He shook our hands and smiled and waved us to comfortable upholstered chairs.
Dolly handed him the court order she’d folded and slipped into the breast pocket of her wrinkled blue shirt.
“Officer Wakowski.” He took the paper, looked it over, then leaned forward, setting his elbows on the desk. “How can I help you?”
“It’s about Audrey Delores Thomas. I called . . .”
He nodded. “I knew Audrey well. Everybody here was happy to see the new medication help her the way it did. Almost a miracle, how she went from a delusional state to as close to normal as she has the possibility of ever being. The Audrey I, at last, got to know in her remaining days with us was a very pleasant and loving person. Of course, I wasn’t here when she first came to Oakwood, but that was thirty-three years ago. None of us were here then. I have only our records to go on and they tell a very different story of Ms. Thomas’s state of mind.”
“She had a mother. Cate Thomas.”
He nodded. “From what I’ve been able to ascertain from the files, Mrs. Thomas was kept apprised bimonthly of her daughter’s condition. We’ve had different addresses for her, but never had any of our letters returned, as far as I know.”
“Could I get a list of those addresses?” Dolly said.
“I take it you have good reason for asking.”
Dolly nodded. “Cate Thomas was murdered recently. Letters from here were found and that was the first anyone knew of Audrey’s existence . . .”
I interrupted. “Well, not of her existence, Dolly. Everyone believed Audrey was in France. Cate said she’d joined a religious cult over there.”
Dolly nodded toward the director. “I’m investigating Cate’s murder and all of this is a surprise to everybody who knew her—that Audrey was confined here.”
He nodded sadly. “Many family members choose to hide the existence of a loved one in long-term mental care. That’s changing somewhat, but not fast enough.”
He sat thinking a minute. “After Mrs. Thomas was told Audrey was improving and might possibly be released, she did write me a letter that wasn’t quite . . . well . . . what I expected.”
“Like . . . what’d she say?” Dolly asked.
He frowned. “It seemed she had her reservations about Audrey’s ability to function on the outside. Well, actually she was adamant about it, though I called her to assure her Audrey was doing wonderfully. After all, two doctors, other than the doctor assigned to her here, attested to her ability to rejoin society.”
“Why’d Cate want to stand in the way of her kid’s getting out of this place? I don’t see . . .”
“I suspect it was because Audrey would never answer Cate Thomas’s letters. Never thanked her for gifts. Without that resolved, well, I’m sure Mrs. Thomas had grown embittered over the years.”
Dolly turned to me. “That’s why we didn’t find letters from Audrey to Cate.”
I didn’t say anything. It was as if Dolly’d split herself in two—one treating these two women as strangers, the other wincing just beneath the surface.
“Did Cate ever visit here?” She turned back to Mr. Heilman.
The man slowly shook his head. “I’ve got a record of only one visit. That was back in the 1980s. It seems it didn’t go well and Mrs. Thomas was asked not to return until there was significant change in Audrey’s condition.”
He cleared his throat, then moved a file in front of him to a far corner of the table.
“It was never certain, according to Audrey’s files, what the problem between the women was. Her current doctor, who signed her out, thought it was due to a harmless quirk in Audrey. Something, no doubt, going back into her past. The doctor thought, as Audrey improved, that she had a good handle on that quirk. There were no more outward manifestations of it. Though I have to say, Audrey’s . . . eh . . . special quirk had become almost a humorous aspect of her disease. A small thing, but here, at the hospital, I have to say—in our defense—that we do look for humor where we can find it.”
“What was this ‘quirk’ that worried Cate?” I leaned forward to ask.
He waved a hand. “Audrey was always pregnant. Pillows, towels under her skirts, whatever she found to fortify her fixation. Sad, in a way. What with her history. But pregnant she stayed for most of her thirty-three years with us.” He smiled as if we would get the joke. “Before she was released, the court-appointed panel that examined her were told about the fixation and decided that, as a delusion, this was a harmless one. It was felt Audrey hung on to the idea to counter something from her past and that once she was out in the real world the idea would simply fade.”
Dolly made notes on the pad she’d laid in her lap. She pretended to read her jottings, gathering herself, then asking, “Why was she brought here to begin with?”
Dolly still called the woman “she,” never letting on Audrey Thomas was her mother. At first I was surprised and then I thought I understood. Something about professional objectivity, maybe even something of her own embarrassment, maybe part of the anger she’d held in, still aimed at the woman.
“I have the complete file,” the director said, pointing to stacks of folders, old blue boxes that must have held more files, and then battered files held together with cord. “It’s all chronological, though it looks a mess. You have to understand—thirty-three years. Many different doctors. Many directors. Social workers. But I can easily pull out the initial diagnosis and the circumstances surrounding Audrey’s hospitalization.”
“I’d appreciate it.”
He drew one of the stacks toward him. He stopped. “Oh, and don’t let me forget, we found some things after Audrey left. We’ll be returning them to her—when we get an address . . .”
He untied the cord on one of the stacks of folders and let the cord fall to the table. He checked one file after another until he had the date he wanted. At first he read to himself, nodding from time to time.
“You can read it, if you like,” he offered to Dolly. “There’s a police report attached. Evidently Audrey’s initial breakdown was severe. She’d just had a baby. Her husband dropped her off at the hospital, in labor, and left, never returning to get her, though she fought with the hospital—that was Grace Hospital, in Detroit—not to put her and her baby out on the street.”
I wanted to reach out to Dolly, who’d been that baby, but I didn’t dare touch her. She sat so still. The look on her face was cold; her skin was pale.
“What was the police report about? She cause trouble at the hospital?”
The man read through the report then shook his head. “No, that wasn’t it. It seemed she ended up at a Detroit motel, something arranged by Social Services. She was alone, except for her baby, of course.
He read on. “People in a room close to hers heard sobbing and screaming and called the motel manager. He called the police.”
I wanted to say “Poor woman” but didn’t dare, though I felt it deeply and wondered if there wasn’t even a single dark corner of Dolly’s mind that was melting just a little.
“When the police got there they had to break down the door.”
He read on.
“Seems Audrey Delores was in the bathroom. She’d filled the bathtub to overflowing and was kneeling beside it. She had her baby’s head under water, trying to drown the little girl.”
Everything stopped in the room; there was only the drone of the man’s voice, reading from a file, saying words that didn’t affect him. Eventually Mr. Heilman sensed our alert stillness and looked up for a brief second, then down again as he continued to read and interpret.
“She was in a catatonic state when they brought her here after first being taken to Detroit Receiving. Her eventual diagnosis was schizoaffective disorder.” He looked up. “Later, as diagnosis, treatments, descriptions, and clinical names became more precise, that diagnosis was combined with comorbid anxiety disorder.”
We didn’t make a sound. I couldn’t. I imagined Dolly’s mind bumping to a halt.
The man sensed something more than official inquiry going on when he glanced at Dolly’s face. She’d paled to a shade far beyond her usual pasty look. Her eyes were huge. She sat without saying a word, tight hands crossed in her lap.
After a while, Mr. Heilman cleared his throat and looked over at me. “This seems to be something of a shock, I’d say.”
I nodded. “Awful thing.”
“Some women break, especially after having a child. To be deserted, no money, no home, no family . . . add that to a fragile psyche to begin with, and postpartum depression, perhaps.”
In a voice that came out small and suppressed, Dolly only asked, “What happened to the baby?”
He frowned over the report, then another official report attached to it. “I believe Social Services took the child. After that . . . it doesn’t say.”
“But where was Cate Thomas?” Dolly’s voice was harsh. “Why wasn’t she there for her? Why didn’t Cate take the baby?”
“Maybe she never knew about the pregnancy. Families can be . . . well . . . If there was trouble over the marriage, perhaps. Who knows?”
The man looked disturbed, catching on that this was far more than a disinterested officer of the law he had in his office. All he said was, “She’s not mentioned until later in the files.”
He cleared his throat uncomfortably. “But . . . eh . . . those things we found in Audrey’s room. It was a stack of letters from her mother. She’d hidden them in her mattress. One of our cleaning staff discovered the letters when she turned the mattress and found a bulge on one side. They’d been inserted through a slit. I don’t know why she didn’t take them with her.”
“Many?” I asked, thinking thirty-three years of letters had to be hard to sleep on.
“A few. They seem of recent vintage.”
“Can I have them?” Dolly said, not really asking a question.
The man shook his head. “I can show them to you but they remain Audrey’s property. She might come back to claim them.”
Dolly sat up straight. I knew the stance. She was about to argue with the man. I broke in, “We’d like to see them. There might be something that would help.”
“I suppose so,” he said and nodded. “Because of . . . I mean, Audrey’s mother’s manner of death. And this judge does say I’m to help in any way possible.” He tapped the court order on the desk.
He pulled a small stack of letters, held with a large metal clip, from a file behind him and handed them to Dolly.
“You’ll have to read the letters here in my office,” he said.
Dolly gave them to me. I shuffled quickly through the envelopes. All were addressed to Audrey Thomas, followed by a ward number, and then the address of the hospital.
“I need to know where she went when she left here,” Dolly said, turning back to the man. “You mentioned something like a halfway house.”
“Well, yes.” He nodded. “Because she’d been out of society for such a long time. There are places, paid for by the state, which provide a kind of reentry school for long-term patients.”
“Teach them how to drive, do they?” Dolly asked.
He nodded. “Or reteach them. Help them get a license. Show them changes since they first got sick, and help them adjust to things from drugstores to movies to TV programs to new foods and eating out in restaurants. Our culture changes fast these days. Changes that might seem small and easily managed to us can be huge to people catching up all at once.”
“I’d like to talk to Audrey,” Dolly said. “Could I have the address of this place she went to?”
The man’s face changed. His eyes shut down. He drew in his chin and stared hard at his hands, laid flat on the table. “Well, after hearing from you I called over there, just to have them prepare Audrey for a visitor. But it seems there’s a problem.”
Dolly, as if not able to comprehend another shock to her system, said nothing, so I jumped in. “What kind of problem? Isn’t she doing well?”