by Lesley Kagen
Viv, on the other hand, was passing the time until the patients showed up by torturing us for refusing to spy on Aunt Jane May after we’d heard her leave through the screen door in those high heels the night before.
“First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes Auntie and Uncle Walt with a baby carriage. Va-va-va … voom,” she was chanting over and over. Frankie and I knew she would pull something like that and had agreed beforehand that we wouldn’t rise to the bait, so Viv had to resort to other tactics to extract her pound of flesh. She gnawed on her fingernails that were already bitten to the wick—a habit she knew Frankie and I found revolting—and when we didn’t react to that either, she started whining, “What’s takin’ them so long? I’m hot and hungry, and I’m tired of—”
“And you know what I’m tired of ?” Frankie jabbed her finger into Viv’s chest. “Stop buggin’ us or I’m gonna shove you off this branch!”
“Then I’ll climb back up and scratch your eyes out!”
Frankie pointed to her nubby fingers and snorted. “With what?”
When they lunged at each other, I stiff-armed them apart and said, “Knock it off! Look! They’re comin’ out!”
I was thrilled to see one of my favorite patients float out of the hospital first that afternoon. Nowadays, Florence Willoughby would have made a fortune in the stock market or had her own cable show, but in 1960 she was institutionalized after telling her family and friends that she could foretell the future, which was what I needed to talk to her about.
Florence was able to predict all sorts of things—near and far. She knew that an orderly’s wife was going to have a baby months before he himself did. The previous summer she’d told us there was going to be a big plane crash in Indiana in March, and there was. And she’d recently told the girls and me something that had tilted my world off its axis: “Dark forces are gathering around the three of you,” she said in a hushed voice. “A raven-haired woman will come to protect and guide you, but beware. Evil lurks on the horizon. Take heed, little ones.”
Frankie was too logical to believe Florence and called her predictions coincidences, and I think she might’ve reminded Viv too much of her spooky, superstitious granny, so they made circles around their ears and laughed off the warning Florence had given us. But I didn’t. Aunt Jane May telling us to watch out for lurking evil was bad enough, but the both of them? It was eating at me.
I’d always taken a back seat to Frankie’s high IQ and Viv’s cunning, but I was beginning to think that maybe I wasn’t such a dumb chump after all. I seemed to know things they didn’t. Things that didn’t rely on brain power or craftiness. I had my mother’s light eyes, and I’d been told that my storytelling ability got passed to me from my grandfather Rufus Mathews, who was known to spin such a spellbinding yarn that those who listened appeared enchanted. But I might’ve inherited something else from that side of my family, too. I was starting to believe that I had been born on the right side of the blanket—the same way Aunt Jane May had. The gift felt like a new friend that would take some time to get to know before I trusted it, but it was speaking to me loud and clear, and I was finding it difficult to ignore. I loved Aunt Jane May, but she wasn’t all that approachable. I didn’t feel comfortable asking her if what I was experiencing was the same thing she did, but I thought what I’d begun to call the “little voice” might be identical to her ability to know things that she seemed to pluck out of thin air.
“Here comes Roger,” Viv said.
Roger Osgood looked like a big cherub. He had a sumptuous head of curly dark blond hair and the longest eyelashes I’d ever seen. Because he spent most of his time in the yard tending the small flower garden he’d been allowed to plant, he made a beeline for it after he left the building. He was always so well-mannered and gentle that when I saw him that afternoon, I wondered for the hundredth time why he’d been committed to Broadhurst. Jimbo acted peculiar whenever Roger’s name came up, and would only tell the girls and me, “He’s one of those who bats for the other team.” We knew there had to be more to Roger’s story than an interest in baseball, but whenever we tried to press Jimbo further, he’d get an enigmatic smile on his face that let us know that he’d reached the end of his story, and he’d go into the house for another bottle of beer.
A young woman, Karen Loomis, a slip of a thing, who rocked and sang lullabies to an invisible baby she called Carl, came strolling through the door after Roger.
Frankie’s favorite patient, Teddy Ellison, marched out after Karen. All Catholic kids were taught about Father Damien and his colony in Molokai, so before Jimbo explained to me that Teddy was suffering with an obsessive compulsive disorder, I thought he was a leper because his hands bled and were so raw. But other than soaping and rinsing his fingers a ton of times every day, and treating the other patients like they were rooks or knights and the recreation yard was a chess board, his mind was very sharp. Once upon a time, Teddy had been a world-class chess champion, and when Frankie expressed an interest in learning the game, he taught her how on a set she’d lay out on our side of the fence.
Harry Blake was the last to empty into the yard that afternoon. He’d arrived in the fall. The girls and I were back to school by then and didn’t spend time with the patients, so we hadn’t known him that long. But he was so charismatic that we quickly developed a deep affection for him and felt like we’d known him for years. Viv adored Harry most of all because, just like her, he was green-eyed and able to make just about any cockamamie idea sound plausible.
From her spot next to me on the branch, Viv said, “Holy shit on a shingle.” She ripped the binoculars out of my hand. “There’s a new patient!”
“What?” I said. “Where?” I hadn’t seen anybody in the yard who hadn’t been there yesterday and I wanted to get a closer look. “Gimme the binoculars back.”
“Get your own.”
“Those are my own.”
“Tough titty.”
Because Broadhurst had been built as a home and not a hospital, space was at a premium, and cures didn’t happen overnight. There was little patient turnover, but a lot of turnover in staff, which was why I leapt to the conclusion that instead of getting locked up on the third floor, Wally Hopper must’ve been accidentally released in the yard by one of the new employees who didn’t know the rules yet. Or maybe letting that homicidal maniac mingle with the less disturbed patients was another one of Dr. Cruikshank’s innovative treatments that my father thought was the antithesis of “first, do no harm.”
Killing children was Hopper’s specialty, and the Hanging Tree was just a couple of yards away from the wrought-iron fence that Mr. Willis had pointed out at the emergency meeting was mostly decorative and a piece a cake for Hopper to climb.
I was about to tell the girls to run for their lives, when it occurred to me to ask Viv, “Is this new patient male or female?”
Her answer was a saucy grin.
“Is he … ah … carrying a pink pillowcase?”
Soon as she sighed, “Only in my dreams,” I knew that it couldn’t be Hopper. Viv was very hormonally revved up, but she wasn’t blind.
Aunt Jane May had used Hopper’s picture in the newspaper as a visual aid during one of her “mark my words” lectures about taking rides from strangers. That’s how he’d gotten his hands on the young Gimble sisters. He watched them walk home from St. Sebastian School in Milwaukee every day and waited to approach them until the time was ripe. His patience was finally rewarded when a thunderstorm came up out of nowhere one afternoon. He was wearing a Roman collar when he pulled his car up to the curb and told them to get in, and those two little Catholic girls wouldn’t think of disobeying a priest. After Hopper asphyxiated them with pink pillowcases at Michael the Archangel’s behest, he left their desecrated bodies on the steps of their church.
“Sweet Mother of God and Erzulie, bless their tiny hearts,” our Catholic and voodoo-believing aunt told us as she withdrew from the pocket of her apron a St. Christopher
medal and the small brown cloth bag that contained herbs, stones, and special charms—her gris-gris. After she set them both atop Hopper’s picture in the Milwaukee Sentinel, she told us, “You girls ever find yourselves in a position to choose between gettin’ struck by lightning or jumpin’ into an automobile with a man who looks like something a dog would drag out from under a porch after a flood, I heard electrocution isn’t a bad way to go.”
With Hopper no longer a concern, I searched the recreation yard further for whomever Viv was seeing. When I still saw no one that fit the bill, that’s when it hit me that there was no new patient. She knew how excited I’d be, and she dreamed him up to get back at me for refusing to chase after Aunt Jane May when we’d heard her leave the house in those high-heeled shoes with cleats.
Furious at Viv for making me feel like a glass-half-full half-wit again, I delivered a sharp elbow to her ribs and said, “New patient, my foot. I’m not fallin’ for your—”
“There is someone new,” Frankie said, rushing to Viv’s defense. “You just didn’t see him ’cause he’s been playin’ peekaboo from behind Harry Blake’s back. Don’t take your eyes off him.”
As usual, I did what the brains of our operation told me to do, but when a boy who looked to be about our age stepped out from behind Harry Blake, I wished I hadn’t.
Afraid the girls would tease me to no end, I’d never told them how I’d lie awake some nights in the hideout, trying to slow my racing heart and thoughts down. Most of the stories that popped into my mind were fun adventures that the girls enjoyed falling asleep to, but sometimes the stories that came to me were dark and confusing and didn’t seem so different from some of the bizarre tales the mental patients told us. That, combined with the little voice I was hearing in my head, made me wonder sometimes if my screws were loose, too. The only way I’d found to reassure myself was to run my rosary through my fingers and recite on every bead, “Kids don’t go crazy, only grown-ups do … Kids don’t go crazy, only grown-ups do,” and the new patient had just ripped that comforting ritual out from under me.
Viv handed the binoculars back to me and said, “Focus in on his right eye, and while you’re at it, see if you see him doing anything else really weird.”
Of course, she wasn’t asking because she was fascinated by peoples’ inner workings, the way I was. Seemed like all Viv had on her mind that summer was boys and she’d been so quick to jump the gun—kissing Norman Wilkes at the Rivoli—that I wouldn’t be surprised if she was experiencing love at first sight again. The patient who’d been hiding behind Harry Blake was just her type.
I’d noticed that girls our age tended to be attracted to boys who resembled their fathers, so Viv usually went in for wan, fragile-looking ones. The kind who looked like her undertaking pa, who was so pale that he resembled the deceased at a funeral more than those that filed past the coffin. I wasn’t enamored with the opposite sex yet, but every once in a while I did think that tall, sturdy boys, like Doc, were kind of cute. Frankie didn’t know what her father looked like, so I thought that’s why she thought boys were loud, stank like ditchwater, and were dumb as dirt.
Viv nudged me. “So?”
I’d gotten caught up in rumination and had forgotten what she’d asked me. “So … what?”
She let loose one of her long-suffering Irish sighs, then said to me like I was deaf and dumb, “Do you see him”—she pointed at the new patient—“doin’ anything else nutty”—she circled her finger around her ear—“besides winking”—she pointed to her right eye that was blinking like the caution light on the edge of town—“and squeezin’ the stuffing outta that raggedy bunny?”
The boy didn’t appear to be muttering to himself, and he wasn’t walking in circles or staring off into space. Not shouting out chess moves or cradling an invisible baby or ranting about brain-sucking space creatures either. But he was winking more than normal, and gripping a stuffed, one-eyed bunny to his chest, which seemed like an odd thing for a kid about our age to do, but who was I to throw stones? There were nights I couldn’t fall sleep unless I held Jazzie, the rag doll Aunt Jane May had brought on her first trip from Wildwood. Viv would often nod off with the tattered satin of her favorite baby blanket pressed against her freckled cheek. Even our tough cookie, Frankie, still sucked her thumb some nights.
Giving Viv a taste of her own medicine, I said, “No, I don’t see him”—I brought my hand up to my eyebrow and did my impression of an Indian scout searching for a wagon train—“doin’ anything else nutty”—I pantomimed cracking open a peanut and tossing it in my mouth—“but you can’t always judge a book”—I withdrew one from an imaginary shelf and pointed to the front of it—“by its cover.”
She cocked her head and looked at me like she had no idea what I was getting at, so I tried a more direct route. “He looks okay from here, but that doesn’t mean anything.” You’d run to the other side of the street if you saw some of the patients heading your way, but most of them looked like any Tom, Dick, or Harry Blake. It wasn’t until you tried to have a conversation with them that you’d realize how tortured their minds were. “We need to talk to him to know for sure.”
Thinking that Frankie might have additional information, I asked her, “Did Jimbo say anything to you about a kid gettin’ committed?”
But Viv didn’t want a second opinion from romance-hating Frankie, and she told her so.
“If you’re gonna say that Jimbo told you he’s got some kind of incurable craziness, you can sit on a screwdriver and rotate you … you—goomba.”
Frankie flicked her fingers under her chin and hissed at Viv, “And you can baciami il culo, you stupid Mick.”
Suggesting that Viv should kiss her ass in Italian meant that Viv had no choice but to fire back one of her Celtic curses. More poetic than scary, the curses amused Frankie, so Viv would get even hotter under the collar and nothing good ever came of that.
“May the north wind always find your ugly face, Frankenstein,” Viv said, and in one smooth move she swung down from the branch.
Frankie laughed and called down to her, “Where do you think you’re goin’?
“Biz said we should go talk to the kid!” Viv said and took off at a gallop.
“Not today!” I yelled as she veered toward the path that’d deliver her to our visiting spot behind the fence. “We’re goin’ to the drugstore to—”
“I’m gettin’ my brown cow!” Frankie shouted.
“You are a brown cow!” Viv yelled back.
“We’re not comin’ after you this time!” Frankie threatened.
“Yeah! Get back here!” I insisted, but only because Frankie expected me to back her up.
I was secretly thrilled that Viv had taken off, because we’d have to go after her, and I’d get the chance to talk to the patients I wanted to.
Tomorrow we’d have to skip our visit to the hospital because we’d be celebrating America’s birthday, and I didn’t want to put off asking Florence about the dire prediction she’d made. I was tired of staring at every “raven-haired woman” in town, wondering if she was the one who’d “protect and guide” us from the evil that was lurking on the horizon. I’d come up with a likely candidate in Sophia Maniachi, but I wanted to know for sure.
I also had something important to discuss with Harry Blake.
And, truth be told, I wanted to meet the new patient almost as much as Viv did. Sure, he looked about our age, but I was secretly hoping he was an extremely short man like Tiny Tommy, who ran the carousel at the County Fair carnival, or Mr. Ellison, who used a stool to see over the counter of his jewelry store. I hadn’t seen any wrinkles on the patient’s face or stubble on his chin through the binoculars, but if he introduced himself to us in a deep, husky voice, I’d still be able to chant on my rosary beads, “Kids don’t go crazy, only grown-ups do,” when the stories that made me feel like I belonged on the other side of the wrought-iron fence drifted into my mind.
I finagled myself off the branch and
yelled up to Frankie, “Don’t be so mad.” I reached for the binoculars she was dangling toward me. “I think wantin’ to meet the new patient is kinda like what she did over at the Rivoli when she kissed Norman Wilkes. She can’t seem to help herself. Maybe her granny’s right. Maybe she really is possessed by an evil spirit.”
Frankie leapt down and landed beside me. “I don’t give a flying Fudgesicle if she is or not. I’m sick and tired of her runnin’ us ragged.” She took two giant steps toward her bike. “I’m going to Whitcomb’s and gettin’ my brown cow. She’ll come back.”
I thought Viv would turn around when she noticed we weren’t hot on her trail, too. She talked a good game, but she counted on Frankie and me in a way we didn’t count on her. She’d curse and vow the worst kind of vengeance when she caught back up to us, but she’d been behaving so capriciously—what if this time she didn’t?
The path Viv had disappeared down encircled the dense woods that were the hunting ground for the bad boys captained by Elvin Merchant. It was him and his second in command, Herman “Dutch” Van Heusen, that I was most anxious about her encountering. But a few of the kids who hung out at Whitcomb’s counter had reported seeing the Summit Witch gathering ingredients for her supernatural stew in that neck of the woods, too. If Viv bumped into her, she’d panic and could hyperventilate to the point of passing out.
And even if she did make it safely to our visiting spot, she might do something else we’d all live to regret. She was so eager to meet the new patient that she might get too close to the fence. He might’ve looked like Casper Milquetoast, but what if he was a pint-sized Dr. Jekyll chomping at the bit to claw his way out of his meek exterior? He could thrust his hands through the black bars and choke Viv, gouge her eyes out, knock her teeth down her throat, or heaven only knows what.