Zachary laid down his fork, unable to pretend that he was interested in his steak anymore. “She also said that when she took him there, when she had to go home and leave him behind… she felt relieved.”
Kenzie looked at Zachary, her eyes traveling over his face like she was reading a book. “That sounds pretty normal too. He was probably exhausting to take care of. Getting bigger and harder to control. Maybe even violent.”
“Yes. He was. She said she feared for her other children.”
“And herself, even if she didn’t say so. Even a child can hurt you when they’re in a rage. More so when it’s a teenager who doesn’t understand how much damage they could do.”
“Yeah.” Zachary looked down at his plate. He picked up his napkin and dabbed at his mouth, covering up the grimace he couldn’t check.
“What is it?” Kenzie asked, when a few minutes passed in silence.
“Nothing. It’s nothing.”
“I think I know you well enough by now to tell you’re upset about something. Why don’t you tell me about it before it builds up into something worse?”
He tried to swallow a lump in his throat. Kenzie let him sit and stew for a while longer. Her eyes went to the photos and she picked through them with two fingers, moving them around. She didn’t point out anything suspicious.
“My mother,” Zachary said finally. “I told you that she didn’t want me. She had me put… into a place like that.”
Kenzie put her hand over his. “Oh, Zachary…” She shook her head. “I still don’t understand how she could have done that. I really don’t. I don’t think that any child deserves to be locked up for making a mistake. And that’s what it was. A mistake.”
“I did things I knew were wrong. I knew, and I went ahead and did them anyway. I wore her ragged. She couldn’t manage all of us. It wasn’t just her. I never lasted long in any foster family; no one could manage me. No matter how many meds they put me on, no matter how much therapy I did, I always ended up back at places like that.”
“But you made it. You’re okay now. You turned out alright. You might have had the childhood from hell, but you’re not a child anymore. Everything turned out okay.”
He wondered if she really thought that he was okay. Whether he could pass as normal to her. His past always plagued him, floating in his peripheral vision, clouds of darkness that threatened to overcome him the moment he let his guard down. People could tell, even if they didn’t understand what it was about him. They could always tell that he was different.
He swallowed hard. “I just couldn’t help wondering, when Mira said that, how my mother felt when she told the social worker to put me away. I always wondered if she regretted it. If she ever felt the least bit sorry about breaking us up. Abandoning us like that. But what Mira said she felt…” Zachary struggled mightily to keep his cool and not allow his voice to crack, “…was relief.”
Kenzie’s hand squeezed his more tightly. “I’m sure she felt all of the other things that Quentin’s mom felt too. Guilt. Regret. Sadness. No parent wants to institutionalize their child.”
“She did.”
“She said she did. But I’ll bet she cried.”
Zachary thought about this. She thought about all of the times she had screamed at Zachary or his siblings. Hit them. Punished them unfairly. She hadn’t been exaggerating when she told the social worker she was at the end of her rope and couldn’t do it anymore. He had done that to her. Had she regretted it? Had she cried, once she was out of sight? Once it was all over and she could let down her guard? He honestly couldn’t picture it. The last thing he had seen of her was her unrelenting anger.
“I don’t think she cried,” he said finally.
But Mira had.
Chapter Three
A
fter parting ways with Kenzie with a friendly peck on his cheek and nothing more, Zachary headed back to Mario Bowman’s apartment. All was quiet; Bowman had left the light on for Zachary in the living room and had already gone to bed.
Bed.
Zachary’s mind was a storm of thoughts and questions about the case, impressions from the evening, and the intrusive flashes of memory from his own past. There was no way he would be able to go to sleep without help. In the bathroom, Zachary took out his prescription bottles one at a time and set the pills in a neat row. Two sleeping pills. One anti-anxiety. One antidepressant. His hand hovered over the non-prescription bottles as well. An over-the-counter antihistamine? Stress vitamins? Valerian?
The reason he hadn’t had anything to drink at the restaurant was because he had known what was coming. He had known that he wasn’t going to be able to settle down for bed. That his emotions and the memories had all been stirred up and there was no way he was going to be able to sleep without an aid. Several aids.
He left the rest of the bottles. He would go with the pills he had already selected. He knew that he could take all of them together. He had before. And the combined punch would, he hoped, let him forget Quentin’s haunting face and get a few precious hours of sleep before he was again pacing the room.
He swallowed the pills dry and checked the time on his phone. He would give his body half an hour to start to absorb the pills before lying down. Then he would be able to sleep, or get some semblance of sleep. He went back to the living room and turned the TV on, volume low, and tried to lose himself in a sitcom. But he didn’t even know what he was watching, much less follow the jokes. He just stared at the screen filled with silly, joking people, and tried to let it all expand to fill his brain and push out all of the other pictures and impressions that crowded in vying for his attention.
At the half hour mark, he did as he had planned and lay down on the couch, pulling the blanket up over himself and closing his eyes.
For a long time, he lay staring at the back of his eyelids, amebic red and black, searching for peace. He could feel the sleeping pills working, slowing his heart rate and breathing, dulling the thoughts but not silencing them. The knot of anxiety loosened, and he tried to push himself the last few inches toward sleep.
Then he was dreaming. He saw himself in a cell at the institution Mira had put Quentin into. The Summit Living Center. He had never been there, but he had been enough places like Summit that his brain filled in the details. A bunk attached to the wall, immovable. A stainless steel toilet affixed to the wall, equally immovable. No sink. No desk or counter. No lamp, just the bright fluorescent overhead lights. No windows. Only the narrow rectangular window set into the heavy steel door that kept him locked in the cell. Zachary went to the window. Except he wasn’t Zachary. He was Quentin. Zachary wasn’t sure how he knew the difference, but he knew he was not in his own skin. He was in Quentin’s body, at Summit, looking out into the hallway.
At first, he closed his eyes. He didn’t want to look through the narrow window. He knew what he was going to see. But the dream went inexorably on and he was looking out the window, into the hallway, watching as they brought another resident to the cell next to his. It was a girl. A young girl, blond and pretty. Or she would have been pretty if she hadn’t been a kicking, screaming, spitting ball of arms and legs thrashing to get away from the guards.
Her screams went on and on. He didn’t know how she could keep screaming her throat raw like that. The noise hurt his ears and he covered them up, trying to block it out, groaning himself with the pain of the noise drilling into his head. And then the noise stopped abruptly. He rose to his feet. He hadn’t realized that he had been crouching low to the floor, waiting for the assault of the noise to pass over him. But then it was gone, and he was drawn back up to look out the window of the door, as if he were a puppet on a string.
The girl was on the floor. She lay face down, unmoving. One of the guards was hitting her with a balled-up fist, and the other was sitting on her. Her hands were cuffed behind her back, but they still continued to assault her as if she were fighting back. He reached for the door, wanting to hammer his fists against it and shout
at them to stop. But the door was too far away. He couldn’t find it with his fists. And when he tried to shout, he was voiceless. Nothing came out. He had to tell them to stop it. To leave her alone. Didn’t they see that she wasn’t moving anymore? Even the rise and fall of her breath had stopped. He raised his head and howled wordlessly, soundlessly, impotently.
The voiceless scream was so violent that it woke Zachary up. He clutched at the cushions of the couch underneath him, trying desperately to feel them. To ground himself there in the apartment, on the couch, instead of far away in the institution, helpless in a detention cell, powerless to help himself or anyone else.
He knew the girl’s name. Knew because he had seen her before, almost thirty years previous. He had watched the police take her down. Seen them beat her into submission, manacle her wrists, kneel on her until she was silenced and no longer fought against them. She had been no older than he was. Ten or eleven. No threat to the security and police.
In real life, they had realized something was wrong. They had gotten up, rolled her over, and made sure that she had started breathing again before taking her away to the police station to be booked for assault after biting one of the guards.
Annie.
Like Quentin, she had been autistic. That had been how she was differentiated from any other Annie. Not as Annie Sellers. Not as blond Annie or little Annie. But as autistic Annie. It had been her title and her identity at the home. And everyone knew about her tantrums and behavioral problems. They knew how difficult she was for the staff to control. Maybe she didn’t belong there. Maybe she should have been in some specialized treatment facility instead of a home for unwanted children. Bonnie Brown was a stopping place between foster care and juvenile detention. They didn’t need a judge or a conviction to lock the children up. Zachary, Annie, and dozens of other kids whose crimes ranged from ADHD to autism to psychosis and sadism.
“Annie.” Zachary said it out loud. It had been a long time since he had dreamed about her.
He’d never forgotten her, but he had been able to banish her from his dreams for a number of years.
But she was back, and he was vibrating, shaking with anger and impotence over the way she had been treated. He had pounded on the door all of those years ago. Pounded on the door and screamed and gotten himself a beating for misbehaving.
She had started breathing again.
That time.
When Bowman came out in the morning, Zachary was pacing up and down the living room rug.
Mario Bowman, balding and potbellied, not yet in his police uniform, leveled a look at Zachary. “You’re going to wear a path in my carpet.”
“Yeah, sorry… I just couldn’t sleep.”
“Do you ever sleep? You’re up when I go to bed. You’re up when I get up. That’s if you’re here and not out on surveillance. You’ve heard how important sleep is to your health, haven’t you?”
Zachary sighed. “You know I would if I could.”
“I know, bro. That’s why I worry about you.”
“I got in a few hours last night.”
“A few being…?”
“I don’t know. Three hours, maybe.”
“Not enough.”
“So, I’ll sleep better tonight. That’s the way it works, isn’t it? You’re short on sleep one night, so you are tired and get a better rest the next.”
“I’d agree if I hadn’t actually seen your sleep habits over the past few weeks.”
Zachary entered the kitchen ahead of his friend and pressed the button on the coffee maker. They both stood watching it while it pottered and bubbled away, a thin stream of coffee eventually starting to fill the pot.
“You were out with Kenzie last night?” Bowman asked, smothering a wide yawn with the back of his hand.
“Yeah. Had dinner at Old Joe’s. It was good.”
“The two of you sharing anything more than photographs and coroner’s reports?” Bowman suggested, giving him a sly, sideways look.
Zachary shrugged uncomfortably, watching the coffee pot as if it were the most important thing in the world. “We’re going slow. She’s… well, Bridget kind of spooked her. And we’ve had… a few other rocky places. I don’t think she’s ready for a serious relationship, and I’m not really the hit-and-run type.” His face heated up. Zachary scratched the back of his neck, turning away from Bowman slightly to hide his flush. “So right now… it’s mostly business. Friendly, but professional.”
“I think she’d go for you, if you were willing to work at it a bit.”
The coffee maker was finally dripping its last and Zachary moved in with his mug. He filled both his and Bowman’s, while a few stray drips hit the hot plate and sizzled. Bowman was the guy who knew everyone’s likes and dislikes and how to get things done by sending a little sugar—or caffeine, or alcohol—the right direction. If he thought Kenzie might be swayed in Zachary’s direction, there was every possibility he was right.
“I’m willing to work,” Zachary said cautiously. “If it’s actually going to go somewhere.”
“Did you at least get through dinner without being interrupted by Bridget?”
Zachary nodded. He took a sip of his coffee, still too hot for him to drink. “Yes. Thankfully.”
Bowman grinned. “A date always goes better if the ex doesn’t show up raging. Even if it is just a business date.”
Zachary blew on the surface of the coffee. “You have no idea.”
Chapter Four
T
he morning was clear and refreshing and Zachary had enjoyed the highway driving. He was sorry to arrive at his destination and have to get down to work. Sitting in the parking lot, he studied the building before entering. It looked like a hundred other facilities. Like a school or a small hospital or Bonnie Brown or one of the other places that he had gone for school or therapy or to live for a few months. A squat red brick building, sprawling as different wings and phases had been added on. Dr. Abato’s assistant had given him driving directions and instructions as to how to find the visitor parking and the right door to enter so that he wouldn’t be wandering around clueless for an hour. It was a good thing, because he suspected he could quickly be lost in the twists and turns of the building. That would not help his investigation.
There was a tap on his window, and Zachary turned to see a security guard standing there looking in at him. His heart immediately started pounding like he’d been caught doing something he wasn’t supposed to. He’d had experience with security guards at places like Summit. They hadn’t been pleasant. Zachary rolled down his window.
“Sorry, am I in the wrong place?” he asked. “Dr. Abato’s secretary gave me directions, but if I ended up in the wrong parking lot…?”
“No.” The guard shook his head like Zachary was an idiot. “But you’ve been sitting here in your car for a long time. Thought something might be wrong. Do you need assistance?”
“No. Sorry. Just thinking and getting myself prepared.” He pulled out his key, opened his door, then realized he needed to roll his window back up. He reinserted the key into the ignition, feeling a warm flush on his cheeks. He rolled the window up.
The guard stood over him as if he might be trying to get away with something.
“Sorry.” Zachary wasn’t sure what he was apologizing for. He wasn’t doing anything wrong by sitting in his car.
“We get some real kooks around here,” the guard said, one hand still resting comfortably on the butt of his taser. “People who don’t think there should be facilities like this, that people with disabilities should all just be at home somewhere.” He tsked and shook his head. “Not like these kids have anywhere else to go.”
Zachary tried to swallow the lump swelling in his throat. “No,” he agreed.
The guard hitched up his heavy utility belt and watched Zachary lock the car. He walked beside Zachary toward the double doors Dr. Abato’s secretary had directed him to.
“You a reporter?” the guard asked.
“No.” Zachary mentally assessed himself. What would make the guard assume that he was a reporter? “No, I’m just here for a tour.”
The man grunted. “Most of the strangers I see back here are reporters. You’re obviously not a parent.” He chuckled.
Again, Zachary considered himself as if he were standing in front of a mirror. What about him said, ‘not a parent?’ He was certainly old enough. At forty, he could have a child of any age up to twenty. He was still wearing his wedding ring; the guard had no way of knowing that he was divorced. What was there about him that said he wasn’t a father?
“No,” he admitted, “no kids.”
The guard stopped at the doors and nodded to Zachary. “Well, enjoy your tour, then.”
Zachary went in. He couldn’t restrain a backward glance once he was through the doors, and saw that the guard was still standing there watching him. Making sure he got where he was supposed to be going. Zachary walked up to the reception desk and introduced himself to the sour-faced, middle-aged woman in a nurse’s smock that was sitting at the computer.
“He’s expecting you,” the woman acknowledged. She picked up her phone and pressed a button. After a short pause, she announced Zachary’s name, then hung up. “He’ll be right out.”
Dr. Abato was a younger man than Zachary had expected. He had dark, well-groomed hair and wore a dress shirt and tie under his white lab coat. As Zachary got close enough to shake the doctor’s hand, he saw that the man’s lean face was faintly lined; older than he looked at first glance.
“Mr. Goldman, a pleasure to meet you,” he said pleasantly. “I’m always happy to accommodate anyone who wants to learn more about the facility. We’re quite proud of the work we do here.”
Zachary nodded and pulled back from the handshake. Dr. Abato was just a little too jovial and held on a little too long. It felt false. Like a camouflage. He wasn’t sure if Dr. Abato remembered the reason that Zachary was there to tour the facility. That he wasn’t a reporter or the parent of a prospective resident, but a private investigator looking into a death that had occurred there. Could Abato have forgotten something like that?
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