Asylum by Jeannette de Beauvoir Read Free Book Online

when the lights were put out at night, all you could hear was the chattering of hundreds of sets of teeth. No one slept much, not when it was that bitter, and several of the youngest children died, and we couldn’t even bury them because the ground in the small graveyard beyond the chapel was frozen under six feet of snow.
    So as you can well imagine, when spring came, it was cause for celebration.
    Something was going on, though, and we all knew it; we just didn’t know what “it” was. There was an undercurrent of something among the sisters, and more than once voices were raised behind closed doors—something expressly forbidden. I suppose that should be some comfort to me, shouldn’t it? The fact of there being a rebellion? The knowledge that some of them, at least, tried to protect us?
    I suppose I should be grateful. But it’s hard to see beyond what happened, and feel anything at all.
    That day … Every detail is etched in my mind as clearly as if it happened yesterday. I am the small child standing in line, looking lost. What I didn’t know was that I was standing at the edge of a cliff, about to topple over.
    They never told us what was happening. Perhaps I blame them the most for that. There was no announcement. There were no reasons given. There was only Sister waking us up before dawn, urging us to dress in the dark.
    When the buses were full, they pulled away from the convent, and as I looked back, all I saw was Sister Mary Martha sobbing into her hands.
    On the bus, we just kept going and going, from the outskirts of the city through Montréal itself, then, slowly, the scenery changed, and what I was looking at was more desolation and more isolation as we bumped along what turned into a country lane.
    When we finally stopped, it was after going up a long driveway. In front of us stood a tremendous gray building that wasn’t altogether different from the one we’d left; large and imposing, its stone walls sweeping up several stories with rows and rows of windows, all of them in a line, wings flung out from a central staircase and entrance. There were words carved into the stone above the doorway, but I didn’t know how to decipher them. “Where are we?” I whispered to Marie-Rose, the girl sitting beside me.
    She shook her head. “I don’t know.”
    I raised my voice. “Can anyone read?”
    One of the boys—Bobby it was—spoke from the back of the bus. “Cité de Saint-Jean-de-Dieu,” he said. “That’s what it says.”
    Which told us exactly nothing.
    The bus’s engine had stopped and it was getting a little warm inside. The sun had come up and was shining directly in our faces over a field across the road. Finally a sister—not one we knew, and wearing a different habit from “our” sisters—got onto the bus and stood there facing us. “Your attention, children!”
    Most of the chatter subsided.
    “My name is Sister Catherine,” the nun said. “And this is your new home. You’ll need to learn the rules and do what the sisters and their helpers tell you. If you do that, you will have a good life here.”
    A wave of whispers as we all consulted each other, feeling grounded not in this woman’s words but in the familiarity of the other children, of knowing each other in this strange new place.
    And that was the beginning.

 
    CHAPTER FIVE
    There was trouble at home.
    I could hear it as soon as I turned my key in the front-door lock. Claudia’s wailing voice, then Lukas, sharp and angry. And Ivan, trying to be soothing.
    Welcome home, I thought grimly, then raised my voice cheerfully. “Hello! Anybody here?”
    Lukas arrived almost immediately from the back hallway. With his tousled dark hair and his brilliant blue eyes, my eleven-year-old stepson looked a lot like the posters his sister put up in her room of baby pop stars, though she never seemed to notice the similarities. “ Belle-Maman! Dad said you’d be late!” Lukas seemed, on the whole, rather glad that I wasn’t.