It is the first thing Isabel and her mother notice when they open the door to her room: a single sheet of paper placed neatly in the center of her hospital bed.
“This is weird.” Isabel picks up the paper. “It’s four poems.”
Katherine reads the titles over her shoulder. “‘Loneliness,’ ‘Sleep,’ ‘Death.’ They’re so sad.”
The fourth is a short poem titled “Lark’s Song.”
My song is not easy to hear.
Melody.
Music, not.
My song is my voice.
My voice is not easy to hear.
Perhaps that is why no one listened.
The poem is followed by five words in tiny writing: “Don’t be afraid of laundry.”
“What on earth does that mean?” Katherine asks.
Isabel drops the paper and, without a word, hurries out of her room and down the hall of the unit.
It’s too late. I know it. It’s too late.
Isabel turns the corner just as the orderly is slamming up against the locked door. It moves but is not quite open. The orderly stands back and then hurls himself up against it once more, pushing it wide enough to slip in. Isabel is directly behind him. She hears nurses coming in their direction.
“Where’s the light switch?” His voice, full of urgent frustration, is close to her in the darkened laundry room.
“It’s on the right, I think. Not the left,” Isabel answers as she tries to reach around the door. There is something blocking her way.
The light comes on and Isabel screams.
Lark is hanging from the metal air duct. Her face is purple, her eyes bulging and bright red with broken blood vessels. She had tied her sheets together and moved the dryer directly underneath the pipe so she could step off it into oblivion.