He rose on trembling legs and looked in the second drawer of the dresser, then the third, until he found a white robe he could pull around himself. Then he stepped out into the hall. The light coming through the windows was greyer now, filtered by clouds, but it had the pale brightness of morning.
He walked into the foyer and heard a quiet hum of voices from the dining room, which he ignored in favour of ascending the curving staircase. On the landing at the top, he found a set of double doors that were locked and sealed with an electronic keypad. Glancing back over the banister, he drew out of sight when two orderlies crossed below. Then, checking carefully, he snuck back down and dodged into the hall on the far side of the lobby from the patient rooms.
There were fewer doors here—one to the right and another ahead. When the door ahead opened, Jacob slipped right, relieved when the knob twisted easily in his hand. He shut the door behind himself and looked at the office he was so familiar with: the desk, the chairs, the filing cabinet, and—most importantly—the phone. It was an old plastic office phone, spiral cord dangling. Its grey was grimed with years of use. It was the most beautiful thing he’d seen in ... he wasn’t sure. Weeks?
He picked up the handset and held it to his ear, his hand shaking.
There might have been a sound in the hall; he flashed a panicked look at the door and dialled the number for home.
“The number you have dialled is a long-distance number,” a woman’s recorded voice told him primly. “Please hang up and—” He jammed his finger on the release, then lifted and tried again, this time with a one in front.
He heard it ring once, twice, then— “The number you have dialled is no longer in service,” said the same woman. He thought she sounded inordinately judgmental that time.
He did hear a sound in the hall. Footsteps went passing by. He jammed his finger into the phone again and stared longingly at the door. It had no lock. For a wild instant, he wanted to wedge a chair under the knob, but the chairs were too low, and all he needed to do was make one call.
He gritted his teeth and dialled Stevens’s cell phone; his hands were trembling. He hit the seven instead of the six and had to stop and try again. He wanted to puke. His mouth tasted like a steel brush.
The phone rang once, and then again.
“Hello?” The voice was tired but familiar.
Jacob could have cried. Instead, he hissed, “Stevens!”
There was a pause.
Jacob said again, “Stevens! It’s me!”
“...Jacob?” Stevens sounded incredulous.
“You have to come get me!”
There were footsteps in the hall again. Jacob tried to keep his voice to a whisper, which was difficult when he could hear it breaking. He wanted very much to go home. With one familiar voice, the ever-present need of it rose up, broke in a wave, and threatened to drown him.
“They wouldn’t tell me—are you all right? Where are you?”
“I don’t know. A house. This is long distance.”
The doorknob turned.
“They drug me,” Jacob blurted. “They think I have an uncle—”
The door opened; he saw the woman with the glasses and the tight bun, an orderly just behind her. He wanted to duck down behind the desk, as though it would help. Her eyes were already flaring open in angry shock.
“Jacob—” Stevens was saying something.
“Trace the call and call the cops—call a lawyer!” The phone was yanked from his hand; Jacob was slammed against the desk, his face pressed down against the cheap wood veneer. He tried to struggle, and someone twisted his arm cruelly behind his back; he cried out, but they didn’t stop. The woman with the glasses was yelling something out in the hall.
He felt the prick in his arm, and then everything went away.
Time got fluid again after that, but he wasn’t dreaming like before. He was strapped to the bed. There was a plastic guard between his teeth and there were electrodes taped to his skin. They shocked him with them. He felt his muscles lock; his jaw clamped down. He couldn’t scream. He could only stare at the ceiling and pant half-breaths through his nose.
“Patient is uncooperative and delusional” was what he heard. There were comments often repeated to him: “This is for your own good.” “It’ll be over soon.” “Your uncle will be disappointed to hear about this.”
I’m sorry, he wanted to tell them. I’m sorry. Make it stop. I’ll be good. I’ll be good. He couldn’t tell them. His teeth were closed tightly on the plastic. Sweat was wet and cold on his skin.
“Tell me about your uncle,” a woman said, and then the electricity came arcing through him. The straps cut into his skin. He bled and he cried. More than once, he felt the warmth of urine spreading down his thigh. He couldn’t keep from shaking.
They fed him with a tube.
They shocked him some more.
When they finally unstrapped him, he didn’t know what to do. He lay there, trembling and paralyzed with disbelief, while a man said, “You can go now.” After a while, they put him in a wheelchair and pushed him out to the garden. It was a light sort of frigid: not bitingly cold, but there was a thin layer of snow on the ground, like foam on the short waves of the grass.
The orderly tucked a blanket around Jacob’s shoulders, and Jacob wanted to laugh—he could feel it lurking at the back of his throat, harsh and barking—but he only said, “Thank you.” His voice rasped. He sounded like a stranger.
He felt a hand pat him on the shoulder—as though the orderly were sympathetic, as though he cared. Again, Jacob didn’t laugh. He only wanted to. He sat quietly until the man went away and left him alone. He was enjoying the bracing sensation of the breeze on his face.
It occurred to him to wonder about the girl. The garden seemed empty without her.
He thought about it for a while. Eventually, he pushed himself up; it wasn’t easy. He fell back into the chair the first time, and the second. On the third try, though, he stood with the blanket clutched around his shoulders, then he turned and shuffled carefully back down the path and through the doors. No one stopped him, though when he made his painful way into the lobby, he felt the eyes on him.
He shuffled down the hall where the patient rooms were, and he stared somewhat helplessly at the whiteboards with the printed names: Larouche, Richards, Pereira, Shepard. Three or four more, further down. He realized he didn’t know Verity’s last name.
It was daytime, so the doors were unlocked and open. He looked in the first room and saw only an empty space identical to his own, complete with dresser and cot. There were no straps.
He stopped to lean against the wall and breathe. He ached all over.
He found her in the second room. There were straps on her cot, but she was just sitting on it, her back to the wall and her arms wrapped around her knees. He was starting to know the way she curled in around herself, staring forward, eyes shifting slightly to watch something he couldn’t see. Her left shoulder twitched upward, then dropped, and he knew she knew he was there.
“God, I’m tired,” he told her. She had a bruise on her neck and angry red marks on her wrists. He knew those. His arms looked much the same.
Jacob lowered himself to sit next to Verity, carefully and with some hissing of breath. He slid back on the narrow cot and slumped against the wall. He didn’t touch her, but he looked at the scabs on her arms. He could see where her fingers had scratched.
“Thanks,” he said. “For trying.”
For a minute, he didn’t think she was going to respond, which was all right; he had his eyes half closed for a nap when he saw her chin jerk. It could’ve been a spasm. He took it as encouragement. Taking half the blanket from his shoulders, he draped it over her. She didn’t look, but she fingered the edge of it.
“This place is sixteen kinds of lawsuit.” Jacob did close his eyes. It was nice, there on the cot with the girl beside him. No one was shocking him. He didn’t have any pieces of plastic wedged between his teeth. “I�
�m not sick. Or I wasn’t sick. Maybe I am now. Do you feel sick?”
Verity didn’t answer.
“You’re a hard person to have a conversation with. Anyway, this isn’t what I figured I’d be doing at eighteen. I think I’m eighteen. I hope it isn’t nineteen already. How old are you?” His voice was a rusty ruin, but he was enjoying the sheer luxury of talking.
He gave her a little time to see if she’d answer. When she didn’t, he continued, “I was gonna travel. Maybe make things. Maybe sell the company eventually. I have money, you know. I just don’t know what I want to do with it, or—I wanted to try things out. Be a butcher. A baker. A candlestick maker. Whatever. What did you want to do?”
He was expecting silence. He was not offended when it came. He was busy adjusting his half of the blanket.
“It’s okay if you don’t know, either. You can come with me, when we get out of here. I think—maybe if we just keep our heads down. If we just give them what they want.” There was an edge of desperation to his own voice that Jacob found foreign. He could hear the echoes of his own aborted screams. He swallowed. “Maybe if I just sit tight and take the pills, my uncle will come for me. And I’ll ask him to take you, too.”
There was such a relief to saying it. He felt hope bloom in his chest, warm and sweet. He tilted his head back against the wall and let himself smile for what felt like the first time in weeks. His muscles ached and his temples were throbbing and the stubble on his face was long and itching, but they could get out, if they just waited. If they just did what they were told.
Verity’s hand closed over his. Her fingers were small and cool. Startled, he looked over to find she was watching him. She had shadows under her eyes, and her lips were chapped and bitten, but her gaze still had that unexpectedly grey clarity. She said, “You don’t have an uncle.”
Jacob paused. “Oh. Yeah. You’re right.”
He sat there with the girl’s hand on his and turned his palm up, curling his fingers over hers. He continued to sit when his breath caught in his throat; he heard his own voice, an inarticulate sob. It would have taken him off guard, but he was too tired. He felt like he was back in the chair, in the straps; he could only shake while the tears welled in his eyes and ran streaming down his face.
He wasn’t entirely sure whether Verity drew him down or whether he was only permitted, but he found himself wrapped around her, his head in her terryclothed lap and his arms around her waist. He wept. He could do nothing but weep.
He felt her stiffen, and even in the midst of his ragged anguish, he would have moved away, maybe managed some sort of gasping apology, but before her rigid discomfort had time to register, he also felt her relent. She touched his shoulder. Her hand brushed slowly and quite tentatively across his hair, without rhythm, as though carefully measuring the texture of each strand.
He clung to her and cried. The walls around them were sterile and cold.
A week later, the lawyer came.
thats enough
What?
thats enough the lawyer came it ended
Is this part not okay?
stop asking its never okay it burns i see the paper on fire i feel it on my skin the wrists the soft part
Like that’s not a worrisome comparison. Sorry. I’m trying to get it right.
just keep going it cant sit here forever i cant sleep because its crying its important though just finish it
15
Province of Ontario
Psychological Evaluation Report—Confidential
Patient: Richards, Verity Amelia
Date of Birth: June 3, 1982
Supervising Physician: B. N. Nichols
Date of Evaluation: October 16, 1991
Patient has history of treatment for multiple diagnoses (see attached). Poor verbal ability, failure to engage socially, little eye contact. Can react catatonically to excessive audiovisual stimulation. Suspected autism, possible early onset schizophrenia.
Patient has been enrolled in public school system but struggles with both social requirements and academic material. Recommend continuing current course of medication. Also recommend transferring patient to temporary residence in children’s hospital, awaiting more permanent psychiatric placement; mother consents and indicates she is ill-equipped to deal with Verity’s special needs in a home environment. Patient requires constant supervision and is prone to hallucination. Home care is likely to result in continued safety hazards and disruptions to routine.
Performance on intelligence tests indicates low IQ (<70). Chance of future recovery unlikely, if not impossible. Long-term goals should centre on stabilization and control of symptoms.
DECEMBER
Verity knows people are yelling at her. The words smell like an electrical burn.
She is surrounded by the maelstrom. There was a table in front of her for a while, plain stainless metal; she had concentrated on a long dented scratch in its surface, but then a smear of red obscured her vision and she lost track.
Now she sits and rocks, back and forth, though she cannot hear the chair and there is no rhythm to the world around her. She stares at a whirl of cinnamon anger and tries to will her way past it, seeking some hint of the familiar. She isn’t certain how much time has passed since the city went dark and she lost herself in the snow holding a stranger’s sleeve.
When she sees the brittle Morse code of the tap-tap-tap against her palm, she could weep with relief. She doesn’t. It is a pattern she knows, though, and she can think of touch and separate the sight of it from the sensation on her skin. She sits in chaos and clings to the single familiar thing until she can resolve the room around her.
A particle board desk solidifies before her, and she closes her fingers around Jacob’s hand. He stops the tapping and jerks away.
“Vee, what the fuck?” He is behind her. His voice is stiff.
She doesn’t answer.
“I know you can hear me. What the fuck. Where were you? You just leave in the middle of the night now?”
She says, “I’m sorry.” The air is taut with his anger; braided within, stretched almost to snapping, she can see the fierce delicacy of his unspoken terror. She wants to apologize again, and doesn’t; she thinks they are not alone, though she is having a hard time making sense of the world past the desk. She is sitting. The metal table is gone and her hands are free. She has an impression of badges and antiseptic. The room seems oddly dim.
As she has that thought, a white flash rings in her ears. She loses the table, the anger, the feel of the chair—the moment she almost panics, she feels Jacob’s fingers on her palm again, tapping. She fixates on the familiar pattern.
“—the damn flashlight out of her face! Look, how long was she here before someone even called me? I’m her legal guardian. You can’t just keep her here.”
“We just need her to answer a few questions.” It’s a woman’s voice, cool and unforgiving. Verity sees a uniform stripe and a flash of police shield. The officer puts the flashlight down on the desk and then leaves, shutting the door behind herself.
The room is small and sterile. The desk is a smooth expanse unmarred by paperwork. Verity is sitting in a metal chair with worn padding. There’s a tall plant in one corner, and a painting on one wall that is studiously, blandly abstract. Verity sighs. “Hospital smell.” She is grateful to find herself still in her own sweater and jeans. She can feel Jacob’s frustrated stare crawling on the back of her neck.
“Ms. Richards.” There’s a strange suit still present—a man, blond- and-silver hair, eggshell skin, incongruously bushy sideburns. He has kind eyes, but his mouth is pursed; the flashlight carves deep crags in his face, lighting his chin as though he were telling a campfire horror story. He sits at the opposite side of the desk, setting a briefcase in front of him. “This is a hospital evaluation room. My name is Joseph Graves. Mr. Shepard has called me in as your attorney in this matter. Rest assured, anything we discuss here is confidential.”
She knows
he means it because the words taste like oregano. Verity tries belatedly to catch Jacob’s hand again, but Jacob has already pulled away. He stalks to a far corner of the room and leans there in the shadows, arms folded. He’s glaring at her. She wants to meet his eyes, but as hard as she tries, his tension streaks ruby. She knows he has crossed his arms so his hands won’t shake. His restraint vibrates across her cheek.
“Ms. Richards.”
Verity licks the taste of cold from her lips and casts her attention back to the lawyer. She watches the mottled whiteness of his fingers on the files he is drawing from his case. “Yes,” she says quietly. “I hear you.”
“Are you okay? What the hell?” Jacob hasn’t moved, but his voice is a whip. She can see it lash the desk.
Graves inclines his head. “I understand you saved a man’s life tonight. The police would like more details, but I’m told you were unresponsive. Were you in shock? Did you know him?”
It takes Verity a long minute to gather her words in the right order. “No. He had a dog.”
The lawyer’s pause is nearly infinitesimal. Only a twitch of his right eyebrow betrays him. “Did he collapse before you found him?”
Graves’s voice is patient, even interested. Verity looks at the plant in the corner. She suspects it is plastic. She can taste it in the back of her throat, ragged and a little rusty. She shakes her head.
“Ms. Richards. I’m here to help you. The officers who found you have been very concerned—partly for you and your friend, but also for the trail of blood they found leading onto the river.”
“Hang on,” interjects Jacob, “What?”
“Well, that’s why we’re here. It’s not illegal to help a man who fell in the snow. I’m told there was a trail of footprints, though—three people—and a significant amount of blood by a large hole that had been cut in the ice. I understand they found clothing as well.”
In Veritas Page 23