to light and guard

chapter three

Over the following week, Lana learned one thing about Mary Eunice: the woman knew damn well how to keep a house. "You're not my maid, Sister," she had said more times than she cared to admit. Mary Eunice found everything dirty in the house and cleaned it. She vacuumed every other day. She scrubbed out the tub and the toilet and the sink. She swept and mopped every tile surface. She did the laundry—both the clothes that they had dirtied and the ones that had gained a musty smell from hanging in the closet while Lana was incarcerated. She made up the bed every morning. Lana couldn't keep track of everything that she had done to improve the appearance of her house, but Mary Eunice had appointed herself the housekeeper, and no matter how Lana dissuaded her, she continued her craze of tidying up.

She's bored, Lana knew, and she's keeping herself busy. With the comfort of another presence so nearby, the reprieve she found in a warm body sharing a bed with her every night, she had begun to write her book. Mary Eunice didn't disturb her except to feed her, which seemed to happen almost every two hours like clockwork. With each meal brought to her, Lana found herself crippled by guilt, frustrated that she allowed Mary Eunice to wait on her hand and foot—frustrated that Mary Eunice wouldn't stop.

It didn't help that Mary Eunice had a knack for choosing Wendy's clothes. Several times, Lana had bitten her tongue, halfway through calling out the wrong name. Tears sprang to her eyes at the thought, and Lana set her jaw, staring hard at the blank piece of paper before her while she waited for them to disappear. She had typed, "Chapter Two," and nothing beneath it; her eyes wandered from the keyboard to the telephone and back again. She said she would return my call by noon. Nerves quelled in Lana's stomach, and she pushed back from the table. A watched phone never rings.

"Sister?" An earthy smell boiled from the kitchen, and Lana took her empty glass and headed into the room where Mary Eunice stirred a pot of peeled potatoes, having begun to cut them into uneven chunks with a fork. "Oh, that smells delicious."

"Thank you." Mary Eunice pushed her long sleeves up to her elbows. She had tied her hair back in a loose ponytail. "How's the book coming?" She spooned out a fair portion of butter, and after she stared at it, she scooped out a little more.

Lana grinned watching Mary Eunice's generous serving of butter. As it melted, she dumped in flour as well, whipping it into a paste. "It's... difficult." The admission caused her to nibble on her bottom lip. "Maybe it's too soon. I could always go back to normal stories. Newspaper articles. Tell people what they want to hear."

"Do you want to do that?" The innocent, probing tone to Mary Eunice's voice caught Lana off guard. A candid discussion of her career felt misplaced; she had always made a point to leave her work in the office, to allow Wendy their evenings to share the stories that had happened during the school day. Lana would confess that Wendy easily had the more interesting job. She loved hearing Wendy's stories about the funny things the kids had said, loved supporting the school teacher through difficult parents and coworkers, loved helping her grade tests when she procrastinated too long on them.

Forcing herself to gaze into the pot of half-done soup, Lana swallowed the budding lump in her throat. Stop. Stop thinking of her. "I don't know." A quiet confession breathed from her lips. Blue eyes landed on the side of her face. "I have to do something. I can't sit here and waste away. And the money won't go far." Shelling out a hundred dollars on an abortion isn't exactly helping matters. She squashed the bitter thought.

Mary Eunice poured some milk into the soup and increased the heat on the burner. "I think you should do what makes you feel happy and safe." With an absent look upon her face, she continued to stir the pot. "Not that you asked for my opinion." Smiling, she looked back to Lana, quizzical, awaiting a response, but her eyes still held that nervous glimmer, the fear that Lana had used on her first trip to Briarcliff to gain herself admittance to the asylum.