by Chaz McGee
He was lying to Connie. I was sure of it.
‘If you ever need anything, you know I’m here, right? You’re always welcome at our house, or you can call me any time if you just need someone to talk to. It would just be between us. Not even Michael has to know.’
I thought for a moment Adam might start to cry at Connie’s unexpected offer of help, but his exceptional self-control won out. He managed to say, ‘I know. Thanks.’
I left them to their waiting and went to check on Michael. He was sitting with his therapist, Miranda, in a sunny corner room. Michael was sitting a few feet away from Miranda and staring at his feet. His self-consciousness was painful to watch. I knew it was wrong to eavesdrop on my son, and another part of me knew that if I listened long enough, I would only hear something else I didn’t want to hear. But I had to know that my son was going to be OK. I had to know that he realized how many people loved him, and that he was there at Holloway because they loved him.
‘He’s, like, the only guy at school who bothers to listen when I talk,’ Michael was telling Miranda. ‘Most days, I go all day with him being the only one I talk to. Or, at least, the only one I talk to who actually hears what I’m saying. And I can tell the other kids are talking behind my back sometimes, but not Adam. I’ve seen him stick up for me and once he took a swing at this jerk for saying something bad about my father.’
‘So he’s your friend?’ Miranda asked. ‘He sounds like he’s your friend to me.’
Michael shifted uneasily. ‘Yeah, I guess. Don’t you think it’s kind of gay and all to be so close to another guy?’
Miranda’s answer was immediate. ‘No, I don’t think it’s kind of gay and all. I talk to a lot of people as part of my job and I find that the happiest of them have friends like the kind of friend you have in Adam.’ She looked at him in silence for a moment. ‘Michael, no one should go through life alone.’
‘My father did,’ he said.
‘But your father did not go through life alone by choice,’ Miranda explained. ‘He just lost his way. When that happened, he left the ones who loved him behind. I don’t think that he meant to, though.’
I was grateful to her, both for comforting my son and for putting into words a regret I had not been able to express. She was right. I had been lost and wandering for so much longer than the past year.
‘Our time is up,’ she told Michael. ‘Do you want to stay longer today? I have the time.’
He shook his head. ‘Adam is coming by to see me and my mom took the afternoon off to bug me.’
He and Miranda laughed.
‘Tomorrow, then,’ she told him. ‘I’ll be here for you.’
Michael nodded his thanks. When he left the room, he looked visibly lighter and his step seemed more confident. I guess sometimes all people need is for someone to listen.
Michael greeted Connie and his friend with some embarrassment, aware he had more visitors than most of the other kids in the unit. Michael had never been the kind of kid who wanted to be different.
Adam felt his discomfort. ‘Come on, man,’ he said. ‘Let’s get some fresh air.’
Michael cast an anxious glance at his mother.
‘I’ll be fine,’ she assured him, waving them away. ‘Cal’s going to stop by. I’ll spend some time with him.’
The two boys left the oppressive atmosphere of the unit behind. I could feel his friend Adam’s anxiousness radiating off him. He had come bearing bad news.
‘What is it?’ Michael asked as they hurried down the steps.
‘Wait until we get outside,’ Adam mumbled. Whatever it was, he was trying to put it off.
Michael’s anxiousness grew as they walked over the lawn that linked Holloway’s units and created the illusion, if you could ignore the security fences penning in the criminally insane, that Holloway was nothing more than an expensive resort.
Finally, Michael could take it no longer. He pulled up short in the middle of the lawn and turned to his friend. ‘Just tell me,’ he said.
‘You know the girl they found by the river?’
I could feel the fear starting to bubble up in Michael. ‘Yeah. Everyone has heard by now. Everyone on the unit is saying it’s someone who was let out of Holloway too early, that she killed herself.’
Adam shook his head. ‘No, man. It wasn’t anyone from Holloway.’ He hesitated. ‘It was Darcy.’
‘Darcy?’ It was a single word, but in those two short syl-lables, Michael managed to convey disbelief, instant devastation and something akin to panic. I could feel the bottom drop out of his world. I could feel him spiraling down into the darkness. The girl had meant a lot to him. He swayed, as if he were dizzy.
His friend reached out to catch him. ‘Michael?’ Adam’s voice rose. ‘Are you OK? Can you hear me?’ He looked panicked, as if Michael’s distress was too much for him to deal with.
‘I have to go back inside,’ Michael mumbled, waving his friend away. ‘I need to be alone. I need to talk to someone.’ He hurried off before Adam could follow him. He left behind a sense of words unsaid that was palpable in the air.
He was hiding something from Adam. I knew it – and I think that Adam knew it, too. Adam stood, alone on the vast, green lawn, and stared after my son, emotions racing through him with such intensity that I could not pinpoint any one. I felt confusion and jealousy and fear move through him as he struggled with his thoughts, but his thoughts were interrupted when a familiar voice bellowed at him from across the lawn.
‘Light a fire under it!’ a gruff voice bellowed out. ‘Move it now or you’re walking.’
Adam’s father stood at the main entrance to Holloway. Behind him, through the gate, I saw a red pickup truck idling at the curb.
Adam pulled his emotions back under control, something he did so well it was starting to frighten me. What would happen the day they all came out again? He turned his back on Michael and trudged resolutely toward his father.
I followed. I had found a connection between Darcy Swan and Holloway – and maybe even Otis Parker. I needed to know more about this boy. He was closer to my son than anyone else in the world. And I knew enough about kids to know that, where Adam went, so too would go my son.
TWELVE
By the time we reached the truck, Adam’s father was already at the wheel. His flannel shirt had grease stains on it and he wore a baseball cap pulled so low that you could not see his eyes. His jowls sagged and were peppered with gray stubble – it was a look I knew well. He was barely holding on until he could get to the bar and start drinking again. I felt a flicker of unease in my gut at the reminder of what I had been, but something else, too: the air around me grew heavy. Adam and his father were a doomed combination. It was as if the light contracted and shrank away from the truck that held them. There was an irreparable rift between them, one fatal to a father and son.
Adam hopped in beside his father and neither spoke. I did not like the feeling of apprehension that the two of them together inspired in me, but I wanted to know more. I climbed into the truck and found a spot directly behind the bench seat, where the smell of the father’s boozy sweat and the lingering odor of his cigarettes wafted over me as he pulled away from the curb. To think that had once been me.
‘What the hell’s the matter with you?’ the old man demanded of his son. ‘You look like someone just shot your dog.’
Why had he gone there? I wondered. Somehow, I doubted that Adam had a happy pet ownership history.
‘A rumor went around school today,’ Adam mumbled, moving as far away as he could from his father. He rolled down his window and leaned out of it, seeking the refuge of cold air against his face as his father accelerated on to the highway.
The father actually sounded interested. ‘What kind of rumor?’ he asked.
‘That the girl who got murdered yesterday was Darcy,’ the boy said. ‘Turns out it was true.’ Unlike my son, Adam did not feel so much sad as resigned. As if he had always known that Darcy’s life would e
nd like this, that neither one of them would ever have a lick of good luck, not given where they had come from.
‘Who the hell is Darcy?’ his father asked.
‘Seriously? She was only my girlfriend for a year.’
‘You mean that tease from a few doors down?’ his father asked. ‘The one with the huge tits just like her mother? Just like her grandmother, too, come to think of it. I went to high school with the mother. She was a slut, if I recall.’
The thought of that creature terrorizing a high school with his greasy looks and ill-temper chilled me. Thank god I had not known him then.
‘Her name was Darcy Swan,’ Adam said and he managed to infuse every syllable with hatred so thick I was astonished the father did not pick up on it. ‘And she wasn’t a tease.’
The father pulled into the fast lane and shot past a series of cars, more interested in trying to beat a black Cougar than he was in trying to console his son. ‘If it makes you feel any better,’ he finally said, ‘her life wasn’t going to amount to much anyway.’
Adam propped his feet up on the dash and stared at his boots. He started to chew on a fingernail, noticed that he had already gnawed the cuticles down to the quick, and dropped them into his lap again. ‘Yeah, dad, that makes me feel so much better.’
His sarcasm was wasted on the old man.
‘How the hell is your friend doing anyway?’ the father asked suddenly. I realized with distaste that he was talking about Michael.
Adam glanced over at his father, surprised that he had asked. ‘He’s OK. His mother is there a lot and he agreed to stay there for a couple more days, at least, to see if it makes him feel any better.’ I knew just what the poor kid was thinking: it sucked to be in Holloway, but at least Michael had people who cared for him and who noticed what he was going through.
‘His mother being that snooty blonde bitch that drops him off at the house sometimes?’
‘Don’t talk about her that way,’ Adam said, taking the words right out of my mouth. ‘She’s done more for me than you ever did.’
‘That still doesn’t make her any less of a snooty bitch. Thinks she’s better than us.’
Adam just shook his head. He wasn’t going to take the bait.
His father slowed and turned off the highway on to a winding side road. The kid looked up in alarm. ‘Where are we going? I’ve got homework. I have that big test tomorrow.’
‘Relax. I’m just checking out a club the guys down at the bar turned me on to a few weeks ago. I’ll only be a minute. You can stay in the truck and study if you need to.’
Yeah, because studying in the dark is so productive. He was truly Father of the Year.
They pulled up in front of a low-rent bar I’d never seen before, which was no surprise since places like this tended to flare up like cold sores in our town. They were usually fronts for laundering cash from drug dealing or illegal gambling operations and were popular with people from a few states up because they brought in a good cash flow. By the time the IRS got on to them, the doors would be padlocked and the owners long gone, having happily opened up shop somewhere else. This version was called The Pussycat Lounge and it was housed in a building that looked like it had once been a self-storage unit. They’d slapped a neon sign above the door, but the walls were corrugated metal and there were no windows to be seen. A real charming place to take your son.
His father hopped from the truck and slammed the door behind him without another word to Adam. He headed for the front door like a heat-seeking missile and I knew it was going to be a hell of a lot longer than a few minutes before he returned.
Adam knew it, too. He jumped from the truck and went to the rear bed, where he unearthed an enormous toolbox from under a small mountain of scrap metal and broken tiles, then rummaged around inside it until he produced a large flashlight. Back in the truck, he wound the seat belt strap around it to make a miniature lamp above his shoulder, pulled a book from his knapsack and began to concentrate on the questions in front of him.
I could feel his mind gradually settle, the agitation leaving him as he zeroed in on the complicated formulas that filled the page from top to bottom. He had an amazing ability to tune out the world around him. I was starting to think that was a very good thing indeed. Maybe it would get him out of this place one day.
THIRTEEN
I spent that night in Lily’s room, watching her look out over the darkness of the great lawn. I often kept her company at night, in part because I was fascinated by the dark landscape that filled her mind. It did not seem fair that such a young child should have to carry the burden of those terrible sights.
Lily seemed particularly restless that night. She wore elastic pants and kept pulling the waistband out before letting go. It would make a snapping sound and a red line soon formed around her middle from her obsessive tugging at it. Her lower lip was red from where she had been scraping her top teeth against it for hours. I did not know if it was her illness or the medication that made her repeat the gestures over and over.
She stood at the window for hours and only she knew what she saw. The thought of her spending another sixty years like that was dizzying. I would have chosen even my otherworld existence over such a fate. Just standing with her was mind-numbing.
I was considering leaving to check on my son when Lily grew agitated and began to flap her hands up and down like a bird trying to fly. She looked around and seemed surprised to find herself alone in her room. She rushed to the door and flung it open so hard that it banged against the wall behind it. I followed her as she ran out into the hall and dashed to the far end, where a bored aide was leaning back in a chair, half-asleep, his feet propped up on the desk.
‘A monster, a monster!’ she cried, banging her fist on the desk.
The aide jumped up with a start, knocking over his chair. He looked panicked and then angry when he realized that it was just Lily. He fought to make his voice soothing. ‘It’s just a nightmare, little one,’ he said. ‘Did you take the medicine I gave you?’
‘It’s real,’ Lilly insisted. ‘I saw it. It was a big one.’
‘Let me walk you back to your room,’ the aide said soothingly, grabbing her shoulders and guiding her down the hall. She went unwillingly and he had to push her a few times. Lily could be like that. She was little, she was stubborn and she was sure of the things she saw. The aide locked the door of her room as he left. He did not want Lily disappearing on his watch: her escapes were legendary.
She resumed her vigil at the window and I stayed with her, unwilling to leave her in her distress. Her attention to the darkness never wavered. She stood staring out at the monsters only she could see until the sun finally rose over the horizon.
Sunrise changes everything and it was no exception that day. As the first rays cleared the hill behind Holloway and sent fingers of sunlight creeping across the lawn, I saw a crumpled shape slumped beside the brick of the courtyard fountain. The shape had barely registered as a human being when Harold’s screaming began.
‘Harold Babbitt sees a dead man!’ he cried as he dashed across the lawn, making a beeline for his unit. ‘Harold Babbitt sees a dead man!’
I knew Harold had been out walking, as he often did at daybreak, hoping to spot some of the rabbits that lived among the bushes on the edges of the lawn. He must have seen the same shape that caught my eye and marched over to investigate. He had wasted no time sounding the alarm, but Harold was always announcing his discoveries. No one paid attention at first.
Still shouting, ‘Harold Babbitt sees a dead man,’ he reached the long-term building, flung open its doors and began shouting bloody murder. Soon, a stream of nurses, aides and curious patients ran out to see if Harold had actually seen anything or was simply suffering another episode.
I beat them to the fountain. Harold Babbitt had indeed seen a dead man. I did not know his name, but I recognized his face – it was the red-haired orderly who had fought with Otis Parker the day before. He was sprawled acr
oss the brick walkway in front of the fountain, his legs bent at unnatural angles. His body had been propped on its side and his broken legs folded into place to make it look as if the aide was trying to run backwards.
Like an old-time cartoon. One someone my age or older would have seen.
Since I have begun my wandering life, I have borne silent witness at many a crime scene. Murders almost always leave behind a mixture of the same feelings – surprise, betrayal, fear, rage, and shock – albeit in different proportions each time. These emotions hang in the air and entwine around me in my twilight world until, gradually, they fade away, I think because the victim has moved on, taking the last vestiges of life with them. But I had never felt a crime scene quite like this one. I could sense urgency, a trace of love and then . . . nothing. Nothing at all.
I tried to put it all together. It was as if the orderly had gone from being here to not being here, all in a millisecond, with no time to struggle and no time to reflect on what he was leaving behind.
Yes, that was it. The red-haired orderly had not known the attack was coming. He had never even heard his killer approach. He had been hit from behind, his neck broken in an instant before he dropped like a stone to the courtyard below. The killer had lingered long enough to break his legs after death and to arrange them in their strangely mocking position. That odd touch had been clinical and, to the killer at least, necessary. But the killing itself had not been a murder of passion. It had been one of expediency. Someone had needed him gone – and I was certain it was either Otis Parker or his partner.
Then I wondered if the red-haired orderly had been Otis Parker’s partner. Had he killed Darcy Swan and been killed by Parker in turn to keep him from betraying their connection?
No, I did not think so. There had been nothing between the orderly and Otis Parker but a mutual hatred. It had been pure and absolute. There were no secrets binding them. Besides, how could Parker have done it when he was locked up in the maximum security ward?