Feeling their fear, the looming shape of the attendant entered the room like she was drawn to it. Every spine straightened against the bench… but Neddie’s.
Edwina, who never spoke, signaled to Neddie to pay attention, and Ragno pounced.
“Stop! Stop that home signing. Now!”
Edwina was not allowed to use any hand signals that hadn’t been taught by the school. It was a strict rule—all the rules at the institution were strict, and there was nothing Ragno loved more than strictly enforcing them—and she continued to berate Edwina, the torrent of ugly words coming fast. Edwina cringed, burying her hand in her skirt, and Rose squirmed against Maxine.
Maxine again pressed her thigh up against her sister’s, knowing that any movement might catch the attendant’s eye, and whatever horror was in store for Edwina might become theirs, so she had to stop Rose from crumbling.
Ragno drew in a breath, and Maxine hoped it was over. It wasn’t.
“Speak!” Ragno howled into Edwina’s clenched face.
Rose placed her hand on her heart and began to tap. Four times. Four times. Four times.
“There’s nothing wrong with you. Absolutely nothing wrong with you!”
The woman was having a second wind. “Do you hear me, girl?”
No one ever used their names here. You were either “girl,” if they were angry with you, or “dear,” if they weren’t.
“If it was up to me, I’d throw you in the back with the others. You don’t belong out here. I’d toss you—”
Maxine stopped listening as she felt warmth seeping along her thigh and, after another moment, wetting her entire underside. She quickly scooted as close to her sister as she could, caring less about movement and more about containing the situation. But a heartbeat later Dottie, who sat on the other side of Rose, leaped from the bench, the edge of her skirt soaked through, and Rose’s sobs were quickly eclipsed by the tirade of furious yet gleeful cries from Ragno.
Maxine bowed her head under the weight of Ragno’s rage, clasping Rose’s hand in utter defeat while Rose broke down into shuddering howls as the two girls sat together in the steam of Rose’s piss.
Ragno raised her hands and smacked them together three loud and distinctive times. A call for silence. The sound of the three claps was so ingrained in the girls that even Rose stopped sobbing and allowed the release of only a few snuffling sounds mixed with high-pitched sorrowful squeaks that she couldn’t control. Ragno stood over the girls like a statue, triumphant.
“It is time for periodic excusing and bed,” she announced. “Everyone may line up but you two.” Her eyes fell on Maxine and Rose, not that there was anyone in the room who didn’t know exactly who she meant.
The girls lined up against the wall, no one looking back at the two left on the bench. Not even Alice. Especially not Alice. But Ragno wasn’t done.
“The two of you will sit in that piss until it’s cold. And if you move at all while I take these girls to do their business like humans, you shall sit in that piss all night long.”
The woman glared at them, waiting for a reaction. Maxine gave her none. This seemed to rally Rose, and only the smallest snuffling escaped her. The show of strength was too much for Ragno, who walked straight for the girls and clapped again—one, two, three times—an inch from their noses. Maxine couldn’t help thinking how the claps were very much a “home sign,” because this was their home. The word “home” might bring up visions of warmth and familiarity, but in its essence it really was just a word to describe the place where you lived. This was Maxine’s home. It was Rose’s home. It was Alice’s home.
Rose collapsed onto Maxine, broken. And Ragno, satisfied, turned and led the line of girls out of the day room.
She would be back soon, and so Rose would need to stop soon, but not now.
“Did you finish peeing, Rose?” Maxine asked gently. “If you didn’t, you can now. While she’s gone. It’s all right. It’s just piss, Rose.”
Maxine rubbed Rose’s back like you would a child vomiting into a basin, and Rose sobbed more softly, holding on to Maxine while she released the rest of her bladder. Maxine did the same, knowing Ragno would come for them after periodic excusing, and therefore their only choice was to urinate here or in their cots. Better here, where their dresses might soak it up. Dresses they would soon change out of.
After Rose finished, she sat up, and Maxine picked the driest corner of her skirt and wiped her sister’s face.
Rose balked at the gesture. “I don’t want piss on me,” she complained.
It was a ridiculous statement, and the two girls couldn’t stop from breaking out in smiles. Rose even let out a short giggle. And then they became quiet.
Maxine’s eyes flicked back to the window and the long sweeping driveway to the gate, which no longer conjured up images of country houses with tremendous hearths and a bed full of dogs. It had been a good twenty minutes since the police wagon had driven through it. If the police had been stopping at the dormitory, they would have been here by now. The girl would not be sleeping here tonight. Could home also be a small, cold, bed-less prison cell in the Back Ward? If so, then the girl was on her way home.
Maxine set her eyes on the wall across from her—as she was supposed to do, as Rose was doing—and thought about her previous home, the one sitting nine miles east from where she and her sister sat in cold piss on a hard bench. She did not have the realization that this home hadn’t been very much different from the one she now occupied. Hard and cold. Instead Maxine did the thing she was absolutely best at doing: she drifted off into a dream—of visiting day at the institution, an event that happened but once a month, with the next one coming up soon. It might be the day when her mother showed up. The day she finally came for them. The day she forgave Maxine.
The day Maxine and Rose went home.
London’s head throbbed where the gun butt had smacked her. The pain hadn’t been helped by her head slapping the metal floor as the driver of the police wagon had sought out every bump in the road on the way back to the institution.
The wagon’s brakes squeaked the vehicle to a stop. The back doors swung open. This time the cops didn’t wait to see if she’d climb out on her own—not that she would have. They reached in and dragged her out by her feet. London let them. She would fight when she had to; wasting energy now was useless.
The sun was setting. How long had she been knocked out for?
They walked her roughly into the building. Not the same one she’d been brought to the day before but a bigger one, much bigger. She stumbled along between the two cops, finding it difficult to walk when she was cuffed. They were met by a nurse and two women attendants. London sized up the women, and quickly determined that this was not the time to make a run for it if the cops uncuffed her.
The cops had gone as far as they would. One of them signed a sheet of paper the nurse held in her hand, and the other removed London’s cuffs and shoved her at the attendants, needing one last show of power to prove his dominance. London stumbled into the women’s arms, but the cop’s sentiment was lost on her as she focused her attention on her present surroundings.
Leaving the nurse at the door, the two women led London down a series of hallways. This building was darker and dirtier than the one she’d been in the night before with the girls. It also smelled worse. London had lived in enough tenements to be overly familiar with the stench. Piss and shit. The walls were yellowing, many of the bulbs were out in the hallway lamps, and although there was no actual garbage strewn in their path like inside the tenements, the floor was both gritty and sticky at the same time. The group passed rooms that looked uninhabitable, but from the coughs, moans, and shuffling sounds emanating from them, it was clear that they had occupants.