The Lost Girls of Willowbrook

“An escaped mental patient was not hunting children and dragging them back to the tunnels beneath the ruins of the old tuberculosis hospital to sacrifice them for Satan. It was just easier to believe in the boogeyman than to acknowledge that there were so many evil people in the world.”

This passage highlights The Dual Nature of Imagination, as Sage rejects her fears even though they are partially accurate. The final sentence is one of the novel’s key insights: that real-world horror is worse than fiction.

“But his eyes were cold and calm. Secret-hiding eyes. Sage knew that pictures, just like people, could be deceiving: one moment in time captured on film, everyone looking happy and perfect when the camera clicked—then a minute later, bickering and stomping out of the room. Or yelling and screaming and hitting.”

The description of the threat in Alan’s eyes relates to the theme of Deceptive Appearances. Alan’s ability to keep Rosemary’s existence hidden from her sister for years shows his cold-hearted nature and his lack of concern about his stepdaughters. The sentence fragment “secret-hiding eyes” emphasizes the importance of eyes as a revelation of character, which foreshadows Sage’s detailed attention to the eyes of other people throughout the novel.

“The graffiti reminded her of the tunnels below the crumbling tuberculosis hospital, the names and gang logos and pentagrams scrawled on the walls where high school kids gathered to drink, do drugs, and scare the shit out of each other with stories about Cropsey. Even without the horror stories, she’d always hated going into the tunnels, where the ceilings and walls could collapse at any second and bury her alive.”

The tunnels beneath the now shuttered tuberculosis hospital and Willowbrook are symbolic of graves and connect to the theme of The Danger of Secrets. These spaces are isolated, unmonitored, and thus dangerous; Sage experiences abuse in the tunnels at the hands of Willowbrook staff when they drag her to the wards, while Rosemary is murdered there.

“Definitely she’d imagined decrepit buildings with barred windows and overgrown yards. Even barbed-wire-topped fences and uniformed guards. But Willowbrook looked more like a college campus than a prison, where things were cared for and a person could find peace and quiet. […] Sitting back in the bus seat, Sage breathed a sigh of relief. No matter what happened next, at least Willowbrook wasn’t as horrible as she feared.”

The contrast between Sage’s expectations based on the exterior of Willowbrook and the reality of its treatment of residents is part of the novel’s interest in Deceptive Appearances. Her assumption that the outside of the buildings predicts their internal workings makes her dismiss clues about the institution’s true nature, such as the prison-like intake area and the complaints of a family about their child’s care.

“This was no school. It was a nightmare, a dumping ground for the broken and insane and unwanted.”

The novel uses outdated and offensive language about people with mental illness to highlight the prejudices of its time and to show the prevalence of ableist stigmatization of cognitive disability. This passage recalls the earlier characterization of Staten Island as another dumping ground. The image of children in residence at Willowbrook as trash intensifies the emotional gut punch of their mistreatment.

“The chaos reminded Sage of a painting she’d seen of hell, the sinners of the world tangled together like fish in a net, some missing arms and legs, some being eaten by demons, all bleeding and crying and screaming. Bulging, vacant eyes in emaciated faces, giant heads and wasted bodies.”

There are several allusions to Christian hell and Satanism in the novel. This allusion to one of the paintings imagining punishment in the Christian afterlife by 16th-century Dutch artist Hieronymus Bosch shows how far Sage’s imagination must travel to find something to compare the reality of Willowbrook to: It’s so horrific that the only thing that rivals it is a literal depiction of hellish torments. More upsettingly, while Bosch was trying to illustrate the eventual fate of sinners, the sufferers at Willowbrook are innocents.

“Something about his eyes made her pause. They were calm and cold, like Alan’s, but murkier. Predator eyes.”

The comparison between Wayne’s and Alan’s eyes connects the characters as abusive male figures, antagonists with power and authority over Sage. Equating calmness with predatory behavior foreshadows the revelation that the seemingly placid Eddie is a killer later in the novel.

“Her imagination was running away with her. This hidden room might look like the perfect hiding place for a mental patient turned serial killer, but that didn’t make it true.”

This is the second instance of a veiled reference to Cropsey that accurately describes Eddie, foreshadowing the novel’s climax and offering clues to the truth at Willowbrook. This quote also connects the motif of Cropsey with The Dual Nature of Imagination, as Sage again rejects the foreboding conjured by her fears.

“‘Norma said it was Cropsey.’ As soon as the words left her mouth, she regretted them. Cropsey was nothing but another rumor. Deep down she knew that but being at Willowbrook made the unthinkable seem real.”

The Dual Nature of Imagination reflects how challenging it can be to accept reality. Sage denies her own suspicions, dismissing them as “rumor” and “unthinkable,” but the passage suggests that Willowbrook might make “the unthinkable” not just “seem real” but actual reality.

“The memories helped until she was forced back to reality to eat ground-up mush or avoid a conflict with another resident. Each time she had to pull herself from inside her head to reenter the cruel abomination of Willowbrook, and the realization that Eddie might not help after all, a desperate sadness swept over her, so profound it made tears swell in her eyes and she felt physically ill.”

The solace offered by the imagination is just as damaging as Sage’s tendency to discount her intuition to her detriment, as it often senses danger that she is not conscious of. Here, having to acknowledge that the pleasant memories are gone is as painful to her as dismissing her fears is comforting.

“She was facing out toward the passageway, blue eyes wide open, as if she were sitting there waiting for them. Despite the fact that it had been chopped off to mere inches, the strawberry-blond hair was as familiar to Sage as her own. She knew the slim legs and long fingers, the dimpled knees and slender toes. It was as if she were looking at own body.”

The description of Rosemary’s body intensifies the connection between Rosemary and Sage as alternate versions of each other. Sage sees herself so fully in Rosemary that the body becomes a metaphor of the death of Sage’s innocence and childhood.

“How long had it been since she and Eddie found Rosemary’s body? Two hours? Four? A day? A week? Panic gripped her, then she reminded herself that her imagination was probably making it feel longer than it actually was.”

Sage’s interior monologue is often filled with doubt and questions. Just as she is trapped in an atmosphere of uncertainty, so too are readers offered misleading clues that Sage might be experiencing delusions or hallucinating; one of the novel’s red herrings for its mystery plot is that Sage has imagined the whole idea of Rosemary—or is possibly Rosemary herself. Moreover, Sage’s tendency to reassure herself that her imagination is wrong demonstrates her characteristic rejection of her instincts.

“Within the confined, gruesome world of Willowbrook, none of that mattered. Every minute and every hour, every day and every week jumbled together into one constant horror.”

The loss of time described here shows the intensity of the isolation of neglect in Willowbrook; trapped in its walls, residents lose many aspects of their humanity, including their sense of their lives as chronological progression. Sage’s experience of losing time while confined shows one of the many less obvious abuses perpetrated on people institutionalized in abusive places like Willowbrook.

“She’d walked under the stars at midnight while drinking wine and felt that bottomless hope of a world full of possibilities. She’d fallen in love and made love to a handsome boy. It was more life than most of Willowbrook residents had ever experienced.”

The contrast of typically aimless occupations of non-institutionalized teens with the inherent hopelessness of Willowbrook’s residents highlights the consequences of the abuse in the facility. While Sage believes she may never escape, her imagination offers her memories of a life that can comfort her, privileging her over her new peers. At the same time, when the novel reveals that Tina was confined to Willowbrook after a burn injury, the reader sees how close Sage herself was to a similar fate: Her stepfather could easily have put her away for the harmless waywardness depicted here.

“When she neared the grapevines and sumac where the cops were still digging, she slowed. What if it was a little kid? What if the cops had stumbled upon a graveyard of Cropsey’s—or Wayne’s—victims? What if the dog was wrong, and it was nothing but a dead deer?”

The questions in this passage intensify the importance of The Dual Nature of Imagination. Sage’s mind offers her both positive and negative visions of what the dog could have found. Though Sage knows, at some level, that it must be Rosemary’s body, her imagination offers her alternatives to try to escape the reality she is about to experience.

“At long last, she was getting out of Willowbrook. It felt like being rescued after a thousand days lost at sea. But she’d soon too many movies where things went wrong at the last minute. She wouldn’t believe the nightmare was over until she was on the other side of the gate.”

This passage foreshadows the climax of the novel. The reference to movies hints to the reader that “things [will go] wrong at the last minute,” heralding Sage’s return to Willowbrook in the following chapters.

“Except, except…She had wanted to save her sister more than anything in the world. She’d wanted to find out where she was and make everything up to her, to apologize for not knowing she’d been sent away, for not coming to see her, and for not helping her get better. She’d been naïve and hopeful and bold. How could she fault herself for that?”

The use of ellipsis in this passage symbolizes the relationship that Sage has lost with her sister—so much time that they could have had together is unrecoverable. Sage regrets going to Willowbrook, but the ellipsis and the questions she asks herself offer an embedded argument that Sage’s choice will result in justice for Rosemary.

“What if he was out to get her? Coming for her, to cut her throat and shut her up? She craned her neck and peered at the man as they drove past, then sat back again and let out a sigh of relief. It wasn’t him. Her imagination had run away with her.”

Sage’s paranoia on the drive through the city highlights The Dual Nature of Imagination. The error she makes here is one of identification, not classification. A serial killer really is out to get her, but this predatory man is not the dangerous rapist Wayne—Wayne has become another of the killer’s victims, in a sick sort of justice.

“She shook her head. He was right. If the people in charge could find a way to cover up two killings, they’d do it in a heartbeat. Residents died from abuse and medical experiments at Willowbrook all the time, which was pretty much the same thing as murder, so Rosemary’s death would have little effect on their conscience.”

The coverups at Willowbrook illustrate The Danger of Secrets. Because the leadership of Willowbrook wants to conceal their other wrongdoings, the murder of residents is also hidden, allowing a murderer to go free and to continue his predatory behavior.

“It was nearing 3 a.m., the darkest hours of the night, full of strange shadows and sinister secrets. But no deranged killer with a bald head and tattooed arms was waiting for her outside. Not that she could see, anyway.”

The juxtaposition of accuracy and inaccuracy in the passage—which readers will only retroactively understand once Eddie’s identity is revealed—demonstrates The Danger of Secrets. Sage is right that there is no one “with a bald and tattooed arms waiting for her,” but the “killer” is accompanying her home.

“A perfect day to return to the nightmare of Willowbrook. The only thing missing was thunder and lightning. No. She wasn’t going to think like that. She’d made up her mind back at the police station to be brave. She wasn’t returning as a patient. She was free and sane and everyone knew it now. At least she thought they did.”

Sage’s self-doubt is a character trait throughout the book—here she convinces herself that she won’t be readmitted to Willowbrook because she has chosen to be brave and come here of her own accord. However, even within her self-reassurance, she doubts that everyone genuinely believes she should go free.

“Unless. Unless…She started to shake. Unless she’d imagined the whole thing. Unless being locked up in Willowbrook had unearthed the hidden parts of her brain that were twin to Rosemary’s. Unless her head was full of ghosts too.”

The repetition of “unless” and the use of the ellipsis connects Sage and Rosemary as possibly more than identical twins. Readers are given the possibility that Sage also has mental illness, has hallucinated Rosemary, or is Rosemary herself. The formal elements of this passage encourage the reader to consider each of these red herrings as a misdirection away from the novel’s real antagonist and culprit.

“The fact that no one cares how they die makes it easy to do what I do. That’s why the residents need me. I want Willowbrook shut down, but I don’t see that happening. And no one leaves here unless they die. That’s why the residents think of me as their angel of mercy.”

Eddie’s defense of his murders reveals his need to be seen as caring, rational, and powerful. The passage also evokes The Danger of Secrets because Eddie is taking advantage of an abusive system to hide his own crimes.