The Bright Unknown by Elizabeth Byler Younts

Author:Elizabeth Byler Younts
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2019-10-21T16:00:00+00:00

1990

Questions Without Answers

I need to wash myself. Wash the dirt and sweat that are clinging to me from that place. The place that has too quickly become familiar again. All the ghosts. The voices. The fear.

I don’t want to remember it.

I don’t want to do this project with this woman. I don’t want to be the person I am. I don’t want to be Nell or Brighton or Doc’s wife.

I want to be a plain, old regular human walking on planet Earth who doesn’t have anything special about me.

The phone is ringing when I rush into my hotel room. Doc and Kelly Keene are the only ones who know where I am. But I can’t talk to anyone right now. If it’s Doc, I’ll call him back later. When I am ready to talk about it. Will I ever be? The ringing phone starts to sound like those birds again—the birds from the asylum property calling me by name. The sound reminds me of who I am and how they heard my first cry, my first giggle, my first fit of anger, all of my firsts. And how I am responsible for Mother’s death. Did they hear her falling? Would they answer the questions I’d had my whole life? Did she cry for help? Did she hum her song? Did she say my name?

I press my eyelids tightly together upon my twisted wonderings.

I am cold. I am shivering. I rush to the bathroom and pull off all my clothes, and like my son when he was young I let them fall on the floor. I turn on the shower and sit on the floor of the bath. The water comes out so cold it takes me back, so far back that it feels like yesterday. I reach up and turn the knob. After another ten or fifteen seconds the warmth coats me. I lean against the back wall and let it run over me. The pressured water feels like needles, anesthetizing me. My eyes are still closed, which means I can see everything from those years. If I can only open them I will return to this hotel room—this life, Nell, the person I am now—and let go of that other hurting girl I used to be.

Breathe. Breathe. Slowly. Deeply. All things bright.

I do what the voice from deep within me tells me to do. But gasp when I realize the voice isn’t my own. It isn’t Doc’s either. It is Nursey.

When was the last time I’d called her that?

I cry and I sit there for a long time. In short intervals the phone rings again—a dozen rings and then silence. After five or ten minutes it rings again.

I get ahold of myself, but it might’ve been thirty minutes or two hours. I don’t know. I haven’t felt this sort of attack in a long time. But it has brought something out of me that couldn’t wash down the drain, so it still covers me like an invisible shroud.

I dry myself, get dressed, and comb my soaked hair.

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