by Lesley Kagen
I grabbed Frankie’s arm and said, “We gotta go after her. Merchant or the witch or the new patient … what if they hurt her?”
“I hope they do!”
“Frankie!”
“Fine!” She dropped her bike in the dust and stuck her fist in my face. “But when we catch up to her, don’t you dare stop me from knockin’ some sense into her boy-crazy head or you’ll be eatin’ a knuckle sandwich, too.”
She didn’t fool me. Her anger was shielding a heart full of worry and hurt feelings. She was far out in front of me when we ran down the path that skirted Founder’s Woods, and when we didn’t catch up to the girl whose hand she’d reach for in the middle of the night and whose hair she’d ruffle so tenderly, I heard her whimper, “Please, Jesus.”
Heaving like race horses going neck and neck, the two of us ran through the pine woods and burst into the clearing next to the wrought-iron fence. I was scared we’d find Viv gasping for breath after a run-in with the Summit Witch or nursing a bruise inflicted by the bad boys or the new patient, but what we found instead stopped Frankie and me in our tracks.
If I hadn’t been out of my mind with fear, I would’ve burst out laughing, because there Viv was in all her glory. Like she was waiting to be discovered by a Hollywood talent scout, she was posed against the fence like a pin-up girl. Smiling like Rita Hayworth.
When she batted her lashes and purred, “What took you so long?” Frankie roared, “Goddamn it all!” and got Viv in a half nelson.
I didn’t go easy on her either. I gave her a vicious noogie and called her a brat, and that fight could have gone on longer and would have had we not been interrupted.
“Greetings, Earthlings!” Harry Blake announced from the other side of the fence. “Got cookies?”
Chapter Twelve
Harry Blake’s sandy hair was trimmed into a tight crew cut, but the girls and I hardly ever saw it on account of his shiny hats. Some days the tinfoil would be fashioned into a stove-top model like President Lincoln’s, or he might show up at the fence wearing a sailor cap shaped like Popeye’s. He was also fond of French berets and would sometimes greet us with “Bonjour!”—but only if he was feeling jauntier than usual.
That afternoon, Harry was wearing a fedora and he looked like a movie detective on the job. He was a handsome man when he stood still long enough to let you get a look at him. His green eyes darted like minnows in the creek, and his nose looked like it belonged to an English king, except for the bump on the bridge. That always made me wonder if he’d been unable to dodge a punch despite being up on his toes all the time, which, considering his mental state, he sort of had to be.
Shortly after we’d made his acquaintance, I’d asked Jimbo, over a plate of Earl Spooner’s excellent onion rings with blue cheese dressing, why Harry Blake believed everyone was out to get him.
“Most folks feel safe in the world most of the time, Bizzy,” he explained, “but a paranoid person sees danger everywhere. Harry can’t stop himself from looking over his shoulder and waitin’ for the other shoe to drop.”
Thinking how awful it must be to not have best friends that you trusted with your life or a safe place to hide out, I dipped a crunchy onion into the creamy dressing and said, “But Harry mostly gets worked up over those space aliens trying to snatch his brain and Bigger’s poisonous cooking.”
“Yeah,” Jimbo said with a sad smile. “Those are his bugaboos.”
During one of our visits, Harry had told us that he’d been receiving “extra-strong vibrations” from the outer-space creatures he called the Mondurians and aluminum foil was his only defense. He’d tried to steal some from the hospital kitchen, but Bigger caught him. She told us that if she ever saw him skulking around again, “I’ll take my rollin’ pin to him.”
Unlike her, the girls and I really liked Harry and wanted to do all we could to make him better. We pooled our pennies, bought him his own roll of Reynolds Wrap at the five-and-dime, and kept it hidden in the woods, should he need reinforcements. And after he told us that the hospital food was deadly, Viv started stealing shortbread cookies from Aunt Jane May’s jar and passing them to him through the fence.
Believing that Bigger was slipping poison into his food might’ve been a reaction to her being stingy with tinfoil, but no matter how many times we tried to explain to Harry that she was a dear friend of ours who’d never do something like that, he remained adamant and unconvinced. We probably would’ve had more success convincing him if we could’ve told him that we were living proof, but she’d made us swear not to tell anyone that she fed us peanut butter and marshmallow sandwiches. That’s how the girls and I knew how the hospital was laid out. On the days her bunions bothered her and Bigger needed help peeling potatoes and such, she’d tell Jimbo and he’d pass it on during our afternoon visit. After the patients headed back inside, we’d climb the part of the wrought-iron fence that ran behind the hospital, and she’d let us into the kitchen. Not through the rear door, mind you, but the Greer door.
Bigger started calling it that soon after Mr. Ralph Greer, who’d been institutionalized for what Jimbo called “payin’ too much attention to his privates in public,” crawled past her and the Wonder Bread delivery man when they were chatting over coffee one afternoon. He hid among the fluffy loaves in the truck parked outside the bay door. Bigger still cracked up over the look the delivery man had on his face when he showed up an hour later and shoved his stowaway back into the kitchen still holding onto his “little dickie sandwich.”
Ralph Greer was the man Frankie and I’d smiled about when Doctor Cruikshank had assured everyone at the emergency meeting that none of the patients could escape from Broadhurst. Of course, the psychiatrist didn’t mention his escapade to the worked-up crowd that night, but not because he was hiding something. He didn’t know what Ralph Greer had done because Bigger never reported it to the head of the hospital. Only an idiot or a Catholic would confess something that’d get her fired and our friend was a smart Baptist who prized her job.
After Harry showed up on the other side of the black fence that afternoon wondering if we had any cookies, I quit giving Viv a noogie for running away from Frankie and me, and said to him, “Hey, there! I got something important that I need to talk to you about.”
Aunt Jane May had been giving me a really hard time about the shortbreads disappearing from her jar at a “gluttonous rate.” Viv wouldn’t listen to me when I told her to quit stealing them, so I came prepared that afternoon to convince Harry once and for all that Bigger wasn’t trying to poison him.
I reached into my back pocket and withdrew the speech I’d written the night before. But before I could say word one, Viv passed Harry three cookies through the fence, and like they were the price of admission, he launched into a description of his latest tussle with the Mondurians that I had no problem picturing on the Rivoli’s silver screen.
Frankie was held rapt by Harry’s recounting of the evil space beings that appeared in his room in the middle of the night with the sole purpose of turning his brain into mush, but I found myself puzzled that afternoon, not for the first time. During most of our visits, Harry acted and sounded as genuinely unbalanced as the other patients, but every so often I’d be reminded of Viv putting on one of her little performances. I never mentioned that observation to the girls because I was sure they’d tease me endlessly for thinking something so whacky, and I couldn’t completely blame them. Who in their right mind would pretend to be mentally ill? That alone would make them certifiable.
Viv was nuts about Harry and would usually hang on his every bizarre word, but, like me, she had something else or, I suppose I should say, someone else on her mind that afternoon. She was looking past Harry and focusing on a spot mid-yard where Jimbo was talking to the new patient. He was ticking something off on his fingers, probably getting him up to speed on the yard rules, I thought: “No touching the fence, no picking or eating flowers from Roger’s garden, no peeing or spitting—especially on the o
ther patients.” And most importantly, when the school bell affixed to the side of the hospital started clanging, he was to stop whatever he was doing and line up outside the door with the other patients—pronto!
After Jimbo finished reading the new patient the riot act, he did exactly what Viv had been praying he’d do. He patted him on the head and pointed him in our direction. A chunk of my heart was still hoping he was a tiny man, but the closer he got, there was no denying he was a boy about our age. Paler and thinner than he looked from afar, he wore his white-blond hair much longer than any of the boys in our grade, and he didn’t move anything like them either. Experiencing growth spurts and not used to the new skin they were in, they were clodhoppers, but as the new patient came across the yard, he moved like he was climbing the steps of a haunted house.
I was surprised to find myself growing more excited to meet him with each hesitant step he took, but not surprised that Viv’s eagerness had shifted to agitation. Considering how close the kid had stuck to Harry Blake when he’d been released into the yard, I suspected that she was worried Harry’s more familiar presence would outshine hers and she never was one for sharing the spotlight.
“And in conclusion,” Harry said as he ended that afternoon’s story about the outer-space aliens, “I got away from them again last night, but …” He looked down at a part of the fence about fifty yards to the right. He’d been stopping there before he came to visit with us to have an animated conversation with no one we could see, so we figured he was trying to convince a Mondurian to go back to their own planet and leave him be. “It’s just a matter of time before those slimy devils show up again.”
“Sooner than you think,” Viv told him in her most ominous-sounding voice. “I saw one of them slinking behind the hospital not more than ten minutes ago.”
Up on his toes and all ears, Harry said, “Just the one?”
“That’s all I saw, but ya better watch your back,” Viv told the man who never needed that reminder. “You should go hunt it down before it turns invisible and jumps into your ear like that one did last week.”
Harry tugged his aluminum fedora further down on his forehead and got a battle-worthy look in his eyes. “Don’t go anywhere,” he told us. “I’ll be back for more cookies after I dispose of that outer-space garbage.”
Soon as he took off toward the back of the hospital to search for the Mondurian, I wanted to say something to Viv about how mean that was, but I knew she’d just laugh it off because she was in the grip of boy craziness.
Frankie and I had roughed her up pretty good during our scuffle, and in an attempt to make herself more attractive for the new patient, Viv scraped the dusty sweat off her arms, fluffed her pixie cut, and resumed the glamour-puss pose we’d found her making when we burst into the clearing.
“How do I look?” she asked with puckered lips.
“Like a movie star,” I hurried to say before Frankie could say, Like a hussy.
When patients first approached us, they’d stand back and spend some time looking us up and down, trying to gauge if we were friends or foes, or if we were really there at all. But when the object of Viv’s newfound affection finished his journey across the yard, he didn’t do that.
He came right up to the fence, threw back his puny shoulders, and said, “Good afternoon. It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance. I’m Ernest Joseph Fontaine, but everyone calls me Ernie. I’ll be twelve next month, but I don’t need any presents. I love dogs and knitting, I’m a good dancer, and I’m a lot stronger than I look. I can mow a lawn, shovel a sidewalk, and”—wink … wink—“I’m so quiet you won’t even know I’m there.”
Chapter Thirteen
Sometimes patients with physical manifestations of their illnesses—bleeding hands, shaking, rocking, yelling, or singing softly to an invisible baby—could manage to conceal them long enough to engage in a conversation with us, but you’d still know something was wrong with them. Their words would be nonsensical like Harry Blake’s or frantic like chess champion Teddy Ellison’s were when he got wound up about rooks and knights, or their mouths would go so dry they’d sound like they’d been lost in the desert for forty days and forty nights.
But the boy standing in front of the fence that afternoon didn’t fit that mold.
He did wink an awful lot and sounded stilted and out of place when he’d introduced himself, as if instead of standing in the recreation yard of a mental institution, he was in the front of a classroom reading an essay entitled “My Good Qualities.” But he was well-spoken, his mouth didn’t go dry, and his sentences made sense—except for that part about loving to knit and dance. Those weren’t hobbies any boy I knew would get caught dead doing.
Because he didn’t come across like any of the other patients we’d met or I’d read about in Doc’s medical books and files, or seen in the movies, I had no way to judge his state of mind. Was he only up to his ankles in lunacy or was he in over his head?
Further intrigued, but anxious to keep Viv safe until I could determine how off-kilter the boy was, I stepped up to the fence, told him our names, and did exactly what I’d been scared she was about to do. I violated one of the rules Albie had made us swear to uphold before he’d given us permission to visit. We were never supposed to discuss a patient’s condition with them, but I asked the kid, “What’s wrong with you? Other than …” I mimicked his winking eye.
He lowered his head, toed the grass with the tip of his sneaker, and replied, “My mom and dad were killed in a car crash two months ago.”
Heartbreaking, certainly, but even though it might feel like you’ve lost your mind after someone you love with your whole heart and soul passes over to the other side, grief was not considered a mental illness. Not unless the boy experienced the kind of profound sadness that’d imprisoned Katherine Broadhurst in a pit of despair. Was that why he’d been committed? Had he grown so desperate to be reunited with his parents that he’d tried to take his own life before the Lord could?
Only, he wouldn’t have been allowed out in the yard with the first-floor patients if he’d tried to hang himself or stick his head in a gas oven. He would’ve been turned out later in the afternoon with the more seriously disturbed second-floorers who’d tried the same.
While I continued puzzling over the boy’s condition and Frankie further sulked about being kept from her brown cow, Viv was preparing to use one of the “helpful hints” she insisted on torturing us with after we turned the lights out in the hideout. “Lucky for you two looks aren’t everything,” she’d say, though on a scale of beauty Frankie was a ten, I was an eight, and she languished around a five. “According to Ladies Home Journal, even if you’re butt-ugly, you can still get a boy interested in you. Ya just gotta have something in common with them. Biz, you should be on the lookout for one who likes to write stories and talk to mental patients. And hard to believe,”—she flicked Frankie on the leg to get her attention—“but the article said doin’ crossword puzzles and thinking a dumb game like chess is fun could even put stars in a boy’s eyes.”
And I guess Viv thought death would do the trick, too, because she aimed her best puppy-in-a-pet-store look at Ernie and said, “I’m so sorry your parents kicked the bucket. My family is in bad shape, too. My ma’s got a kind of leprosy and is hangin’ by a thread, my father owns a funeral home so he’s around tons of dead people all the time, and my granny’s knockin’ on death’s door.”
Malarkey.
Her mother had psoriasis caused by the peroxide she used on gals after she convinced them their husbands would appreciate coming home at night to a blond bombshell. Viv’s father did own the only funeral home in town, but my father was very good at keeping people alive and wasn’t supplying Mr. Cleary with a “ton” of customers. And telling the boy that the Grim Reaper was about to pay a visit to her granny? She wished.
I shouldn’t have, but I couldn’t help but appreciate Viv’s galling performance. After an afternoon so fraught with fear and tension, i
t was a relief to see her doing what she did best, and I elbowed Frankie in get a load of her gesture. Unfortunately, she did not find Viv’s attempts to find something in common with the boy funny in the least.
Frankie got a death grip on Viv’s shoulders and told her gruffly, “Happy now? We need to get to Whitcomb’s. Say goodbye.”
Viv squirmed out of her hands and said to Ernie so pleasantly that I thought Frankie might knock her block off, “As you were saying before we were so rudely interrupted, you’re an orphan?”
“Yeah, from St. Jude’s.” Wink … wink. “In Milwaukee.”
Oh, I knew where it was.
St. Thomas’s Ladies Auxiliary had decided last Christmas that it’d be in keeping with the season if some kids from the junior choir sang carols to “the poor unfortunates.” Frankie and Dell were trimming Jimbo’s tree that night, and Viv feigned a stomachache. I didn’t want to go without them, but Aunt Jane May pressed a pair of red mittens into my hands and said, “Buchanans put the needs of others before their own. The bus is leaving in fifteen minutes. Don’t let the door hit ya in the backside on your way out.”
Can’t say exactly what part of Milwaukee St. Jude’s was in, but the bus pulled up in front of a two-story house that stood out on a block of nicer homes like a poor relation in a family Christmas photo. A snowman with stick arms stood in the front yard, but it had no nose or mouth. And when we came through the door of the orphanage, it wasn’t the smell of a pine tree that greeted us, but the stink of ammonia. The orphans appeared well fed but looked love starved, and after we sang the last refrain of “Angels We Have Heard on High,” a pigtailed girl put her hand in mine and begged me to adopt her. I threw up twice on the ride back home.
Losing his mother and father and then having to live day in and day out in that rundown house full of other heartbroken kids only to find out that a mental institution was the answer to his prayers is what might’ve driven the boy standing in front of us crazy. It certainly made me feel sorry for him, but Frankie was having none of it.