Katie swallowed hard, but the tightening in her throat wouldn’t be budged.
Maybe.
She kneaded her clammy hands in her lap. Or is this fear? Probably.
The fact she would have to make a life-changing decision, and soon, was nearby. Still unseen, but chugging relentlessly down the tracks toward her.
“Katie? Katie Knepp?”
Katie shook her head and looked at Nellie, who peered across the table with wide, wondering eyes.
“Are you alright, love?”
She licked her lips, but it didn’t do any good. They were much to dry. “Yes, I am—I’m fine.”
“Would you like to hear about life in a madhouse while you enjoy your duck dinner?”
Katie smiled. “I would love to hear about it.”
A few white-coated waiters appeared from the shadows as Nellie sat back in her chair. “It was easy to have myself committed, and the process, as a whole, didn’t take much time at all.”
Katie laid her silverware across her plate carefully and leaned forward.
“All I had to do was act out of sorts in public.”
“Out of sorts?” A waiter’s quiet voice ventured. “You mean attacking people without cause?”
Nellie smiled. “No. Never violent, though that would have worked, I’m certain. But for me, I acted different. Simply different.” She ticked her fingers as she spoke. “Talking to myself. Not remembering my name. Claiming to be from a different country. Speaking a different language.”
The brown-skinned waiter shifted his weight and looked down.
Katie spoke. “Where did you pretend to be from, Nellie?”
“I sprinkled my answers with Spanish in my countless identical interviews. I told them I was from Cuba.”
Katie nodded, though she had no idea where Cuba was.
“On the ride across the ocean from the hospital in New York where they deemed me hopelessly insane, to the island where the asylum was located, the emotion aboard lacks proper description.”
Noises in the depot dining room died off, as though a plague swept through without warning. Katie held her breath.
“Hopeless,” Nellie whispered. “The bed where they forced the invalids to lie and endure the trip...rancid. Terror as the mainland grew small and the island grew larger. The women aboard knew they would never leave, and if my editor hadn’t arranged for my release in ten days, I would have been chilled with hopeless terror too.”
“What happened when you arrived?”
“There were no carriages to meet us. Now, we were no longer patients. We were prisoners. Hopeless, helpless, and at the mercy of people who acted as though they hated us.” Nelly glanced from face to eager face before she continued. “We walked from the dock to the asylum. When the stench hit us...”
Against all her raising, Katie interrupted Nellie. “The asylum had a stench about it?”
“No. The stench was from the kitchen.”
As if on cue, someone’s stomach rumbled.
Nellie continued, her voice taking on a somber tone. “What they served was not food. Buttered bread and tea.”
“That doesn’t sound too terrible.”
Nellie smiled a tight smile. “Despite not having anything else to eat for three days, I couldn’t eat it. The tea...was pink water.”
She let that sink into the minds of her audience before she continued. “My bread smelled of feces and often had whole spiders baked into it. If it was even baked. If the prisoners had been allowed to talk, we would have agreed that sour dough was probably set aside to harden into an inedible brick before being served to us.”
A few groans roiled up from the crowd. “But the butter...the rotten slime they called butter...made my ‘food’ come back up the first time I could bring myself to try it.”
Somebody hiccupped a wet hiccup.
“The women who had been there awhile were stealing other women’s food, tea, and everything. That’s how starving they were. And the weekly, humiliating, freezing baths...”
Katie’s hand covered her open mouth.
“A crazed woman stood in the tub filled with icy water with a bar of soap, which was used to scrub each of us, one after the other. When we were done, we were all dried with the same towel, and some women had weeping cysts on their bodies. It didn’t matter.”
Nellie continued. “The threadbare clothes we were forced to put on did nothing to keep out the ever-present chill, but made it worse. Then, the nurses would open the windows to let in the frosty air. Some women froze to death, some begged for death but the sweet release didn’t come for them during my ten days in hell.”
Tears pricked Katie’s eyes, but she wasn’t sure why.
“Enough of that sadness,” Nellie told the silent café. Her chipper voice did nothing to mask the dull sadness that had welled in her brown eyes. “We won a million dollars on behalf of the New York asylum patients, for their betterment. Now, onto a new project—beating the fictional literary record of circumnavigating the globe in eighty days.” She paused for intensity. “We shall do it in less!”
A raucous cheer broke the suffocating tone that had befallen the lot of them. The door leading to the train platform creaked open as the cheers died down. “Ten minutes to boarding time, Miss Bly.” The promise of fame lit the plump conductor’s rotund face.
