Page 57 of Unwell
Her room was at the end of the hall.
I knew it before I touched the door. The air leaked through the gap beneath, sour and metallic, faint but undeniable.
Iron.
Blood.
The door creaked as I pushed it wide.
Inside, the air was colder and heavier. Words gouged over every wall, carved deep enough to splinter plaster.MY BABY. MY BABY. ELIJAH HELP.The phrases etched across every surface. A plea. A curse.
Pink ribbons fluttered in the musty air. Tangled in heaps across the floor, and knotted around nails hammered into the walls, stuffed into drawers that burst with their weight. Many were stained dark with old blood, stiff and crusted, their sweet pink dulled.
Opening a stiff dresser drawer, I found bundles of shorn blonde hair, the ends cut ragged. Long and tied neatly with pink bows. Cuttings arranged like trophies. Did she cut it off herself, or did someone do it to punish her?
Tears sprang at the devastation in her room. At the years of torment covering every inch. My heart broke for the child Ginny had been.
On the bed, a teddy bear slumped. Its seams had been cut open crudely and restitched with red thread. A symbol of softness amongst all the destruction. It crunched as I picked it up. My hands shook as I pried it apart, wondering what secrets it held.
Polaroids spilled out.
Dozens.
Babies. Tiny and swaddled, their faces pink and wrinkled. Healthy.Alive.
Newborns, no older than a few days. Each photograph framed by the same crumbling walls.
Robert, grinning like a proud father. Robert, holding a baby against his chest. Robert, with his arm around Ginny, her face pale and vacant. Her hair cut short and her dress askew.
So many tiny babies. With Ginny and Robert getting older, but the babies never ageing. Always brand new.
They fluttered across the floor as I dropped them, spinning like dead leaves.
The room tilted.
‘Oh God,’ I whispered, clutching the wall for balance. My heart hammered so hard it ached.
He’d lied about it all.
He’d told me it was only one pregnancy. Only for me. That it was for us. But he had lied.
Ginny hadn’t lied.
Not about the babies.
Not about Elijah.
The words carved into the plaster seemed to grow around me. MY BABY. MY BABY. ELIJAH HELP.
But where had the babies gone?
Adopted? Sold?
A sob choked me as I wrapped my arms around myself, trying to keep myself from falling apart completely. Ginny was in the asylum because she was truly unwell, but it was Robert who’d broken her overthe years. Forced her to have babies and then taken them away.
If he’d taken them, where were they? Certainly not in our home.
I needed answers.
