Page 25 of Counting Backwards

She looked back at me for a moment and then settled back into her seat.

“If they try to deport you for speaking up,” I said, keeping my voice firm, “I will move heaven and earth to protect you. I promise you that.”

She brought her hand to her mouth, rubbing her bottom lip, but her eyes didn’t move from my face.

“Look,” I tried again, “do you think you could just ask around, see if some of the other women might be willing to come forward? Anonymously, or with the power of a group together?”

She finally began nodding slowly.

“I guess I could talk to some of the others, the ones that are still here. But I’m not promising anything. It’s not up to me to decide what they want.”

After the guard came back to retrieve Denise, I took a moment to jot down a few more thoughts. As I stood and collected my things, the blond nurse I’d seen on my last visit rounded the corner holding a clipboard. She slowed her pace as she reached me.

“Hey,” she said, glancing behind herself and then scribbling something onto a paper on the clipboard. She tore the note from the clipboard, folded it quickly, and thrust it out toward me.

Before my brain could even catch up to what might be happening, I took the crumpled paper from her. I looked down at the note in my hand, where a name was scrawled in blue ink. When I looked back up, the nurse was already scurrying away, continuing down the hallway as if the interaction had never happened.

10

Carrie

September 1924

I named my daughter Vivian Elaine Buck. She came into the world hollering like she already knew about all the misery that was yet in store for our little family. Mrs. Alice and Mr. John tried to send me to the Colony, where my ma was, but the Colony wouldn’t take women who were with child. Instead, I had to stay with a woman they hired from outside of town until the baby came. And then, just three weeks after Vivian was born, they sent me straight to the Colony like they’d wanted from the first.

About six months had passed since the day they came and pulled me away from my tiny baby girl. It took three of those men to get me into the car, what with the way I was carrying on, but they did finally overpower me. Every day since then, I wished for Vivian so hard. I could still remember what my sister, Doris, had been like at six months old, how she’d sat in my lap and smiled at me, pulling on my hair. I wondered if in the six months I’d been at the Colony, Vivian had grown pudgy like Doris had been, if her hair had grown at all, if her chin got slick with drool when she smiled. As I stared hour after hour out the window of the dayroom,the place they brought us out to “socialize” with the others at the facility, my thoughts stayed always with my daughter.

“Carrie.” My ma was sitting across from me at the chipped game table.

I turned back to her, waiting to see if maybe she had some new sage words to lift my battered spirits. But we’d already talked the topic to death, so I didn’t expect too much. Plus, Ma had never been a sentimental woman, and the years she’d spent at this awful place, the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, had hardened her all the more. Sometimes she just shut herself off from the world around her, like she didn’t even know anyone else was there. Those times, you could be talking right to her, snap your fingers in front of her face, and she wouldn’t even blink.

But she was having one of her good days, playing games with me that afternoon. We were dressed in the same long gray dresses they gave all the patients, the fabric of hers more worn than mine. I’d only been using the clothing for a few months, but she’d been wearing that same dress for years. I couldn’t hardly guess how often they might replace a thing like that. Maybe not ever.

I watched as she fiddled with the set of dominoes someone had left at the table. Even when she was acting clearheaded, the look in her eyes was duller than when I was a girl.

Ma was still husky, her shoulders broad above her heaving bosom, but she seemed so much weaker than I remembered her from my youth. Maybe it was how her long hair had gone all gray, the coarse braid down her back making her look like an old lady even though she was only thirty-five by then. But all that time in the facility, surrounded by abandoned women and boredom all the livelong day, I suppose that takes its toll on a person.

She didn’t like to watch me mooning over my baby girl, staring out that window with my face drawn and sad all the time.

“It’s almost funny, don’t you think, Ma?” I asked. “The price of me getting back together with you is being away from my child. Like I can’t have you both at once.”

“She a pretty girl?” Ma asked.

This was something she asked me most days of the week. Whenever I started talking about my feelings, she would turn the conversation. Always asking if my girl was pretty. I knew Ma thought if she herself had been born with a different face, a slender body, blond hair, maybe she could have had a happier life. Instead, she ended up living with a railroad worker who barely made enough to support us before he up and died, leaving us with nothing but debt after.

“Miss Buck.” One of the nurses approached our table, and Ma and me both looked up at her.

“We still got sixty-seven minutes,” Ma said, pointing at the clock on the wall behind me.

“Yes, you do,” Nurse Williams answered, a prim smile on her face beneath the white nurse’s cap pinned to her shiny hair.

I wondered where it was that this rosy-cheeked woman went home to at night, how it felt to come and go from a place like this.

The nurse put a hand to my shoulder, and a wash of alarm took me over. I don’t know how I knew, but something inside my bones told me more bad was coming for me soon.

“It’s time for you to visit with Dr. White,” the nurse said, mentioning the same man I’d met when they first brought me to the Colony. I still got angry each time I remembered how he asked me all manner of ridiculous questions that day. There I was, still crying about being separated from my baby girl, and he wanted to know if I could tie my shoes, did I know the year, and such. He told me that because I could answer his questions, I’d be allowed to room in the outer part of the Colony, where the women with more skills were kept. Male patients, I’d learned, were kept to theother side of the property. There was also a separate ward designated for the “lunatics and idiots,” where I didn’t have to go. I’d not seen the doctor since that day. I worried that if I was going back to him now, it meant more bad tidings. But then I had the happy thought that maybe it was just the opposite. Maybe my dread was misplaced and I was about to get out.

“You’re not getting out,” Ma said.