“I can talk. So that’s good.”
“Yes. It seems like everything is operating normally, but they’ll be wanting to do a lot of tests over the next few days.”
Zachary let go of Kenzie’s hand and brought his fingers up to his eyes to examine them. They were tender and reddened.
“They’re burned.”
Kenzie nodded. “The electricity will leave your body however it can. Feet and fingertips… anything in contact with ground… kind of like if you were struck by lightning.”
Zachary closed his eyes and for a while was just drifting, dozing a little. Kenzie shifted.
“Don’t go,” Zachary told her. “Stay here.”
“I’m staying. I just thought maybe I’d move to the chair.”
“No, stay here. Where I can see you.”
She gave him a tolerant smile. “Fine. For a few more minutes.”
“Are they closing Summit down?”
“Closing them down?” Kenzie gave him a puzzled frown.
“Now that people have seen what’s going on there.”
Kenzie shook her head. “People already knew what was going on there. The aversives, I mean. Quentin’s death and Tirza’s kidnapping, that’s different, but that wasn’t operating under Summit’s auspices. It was a couple of bad apples. And they’ve been arrested.”
“They got… the man? The guard?”
“Steiner. Yeah. They got to him before he’d heard about your broadcast, luckily. Caught him off guard, so to speak. They’re both being charged, and they’ll go away for a long time. You ensured that by recording Clarissa’s confession. But as far as Summit’s operations go… nothing is changing.”
“But the kids! They can’t use the stun belts on children—”
“And they won’t. They never were in use. They were only being used as a prototype, to try to develop Summit’s phase-three device.”
“But they can’t just keep ramping up the power. Lovaas said that they would just keep getting acclimatized to the next level of pain, and then they’d have to increase it again. It doesn’t end. Not until it’s so high that children are being permanently injured or killed.”
“They’ll never get a higher-voltage device approved. The FDA is already threatening to ban the use of the phase-two device. It’s okay; you don’t have to worry about them using something that is going to cause permanent harm.”
“Tell that to Margaret.”
Kenzie raised an eyebrow. “Margaret?”
“All of the autistic adults who have PTSD or other problems because of therapies like ABA. And Tirza and others who are abused because they’ve been trained so well to do whatever they’re told.”
“I don’t think you can put the blame on ABA. Those things are going to happen no matter what therapy you use. Or even if you didn’t do anything at all.” She put her hand over his again. “I think that you’re seeing what you are… well, because of your own experiences. You’ve had some experiences with institutional abuse and therapies that you don’t feel helped you. So you’re naturally more sensitive about it… more sympathetic to others who have gone through it too.”
Zachary’s vision wavered. He tried not to get stuck in the past. He was in the hospital with Kenzie sitting beside him. Probably thinking what a putz he was for putting himself in harm’s way. For being so weak. Women like Kenzie liked a strong man. She wanted someone she could have a good time with. Not someone who was always wrapped up in saving the world and failing miserably. Kenzie wasn’t like Bridget, looking for someone to fix. He liked Kenzie for being a strong, independent woman. But could he ever be the kind of man she was looking for?
“You can’t put the blame for all of the things people with autism go through on the therapies they’ve done. Think of how much worse off they’d be if they hadn’t had therapy.”
“But we should listen to the people who know. The people who have been through it.”
“They’re really not the best qualified to judge,” Kenzie said gently. “They’re… well, looking at it through the lens of their own experience. Distorted. I think the ones who are the best qualified to judge are the professionals. And the parents, who have seen how far therapy has brought them. These people can’t remember what they were like before therapy, when they were little children. They can’t judge where they would be if they hadn’t ever had it.”
“So the autistic adults are all wrong? What about the ones who have autistic children of their own, who see how much less stressed their children are when they’re not being forced into therapy?”
“Of course they’re less stressed if they’re not being taken out of their comfort zones. But that means they’re not being forced to progress, either. It’s like we talked about before… sometimes therapy is painful. But that doesn’t mean it’s bad or unnecessary. Places like Summit offer an important service. Just think of where those people would be without it.”
Zachary closed his eyes. He thought about Quentin and the life he’d lived in the two years before he died. Away from his home, his family, and his friends. Shocked into compliance. Zachary could understand why the therapy had worked to begin with. The shocks Zachary had received had kept him on the floor, even when he knew his life depended on getting up and escaping Clarissa. He tried to imagine how ‘agitated’ Quentin had been those last few weeks, when sixty or more shocks in a therapy session had not been enough to control his behavior.
And Tirza. Not controlled by shocks, but still conditioned to accept whatever abuse Clarissa and her clients inflicted on her.
Angel, his own parents being trained to hurt him, with nowhere safe to escape to.
Trina laughing and writhing on the floor, her skin burning under the electrodes.
And little Ray-Ray, his quiet hands forming a silent plea.
Stop.
Just think of where they would be without Summit Living Center.
Epilogue
Z
achary saw a movement out of the corner of his eye and turned his head toward the door of the hospital room, startled. He pushed himself up slightly from his slumped position.
“Mr. Peterson!”
“Lorne,” Mr. Peterson corrected with a laugh. “I’ve told you, you’re old enough to call me Lorne, Zachary.”
“I know… Lorne…” Even having known him for so many years, Zachary was still uncomfortable calling his old foster father by his first name.
Mr. Peterson pulled the visitor’s chair closer to Zachary’s bed and sat down. He looked Zachary over. “So… how are you, Zachary?”
“I’m fine. Doctors said I probably won’t have any permanent damage. Just… one of those things.” He shrugged. “You didn’t need to come… I’ll be out in a few days…”
In fact, the doctor had said that physically, he was well enough to go home any time.
“I just wanted to make sure… I got the feeling when we talked on the phone that things weren’t going well.”
Zachary let his breath out slowly, staring off into the distance. He knew he didn’t have to put on a front for Mr. Peterson. He had seen Zachary through dark times before. “No,” Zachary admitted. “This whole thing is getting me down… I thought… when people saw what was going on, there would be an uproar… they’d insist on shutting Summit down. But even after seeing it… they still don’t care.”
“That must be discouraging. If they were forced to close or change, you could at least feel like it had been worth the pain.”
“Don’t people care about anything? It’s okay if people are being tortured, as long as it’s not them? Guys like Dr. Abato say it’s okay, autistic people don’t feel pain the same way as we do. Like they’re a different species. It’s not right to treat anyone like that.” Zachary’s voice cracked.
“No.” Mr. Peterson shook his head. “When I saw that video… I couldn’t even watch it all, Zachary. I had to turn it off. That woman nearly killed you. I can’t imagine allowing someone like that around children and other vu
lnerable people.”
“But they said she’s just one bad person. It doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t make the institution bad.”
“There’s some truth to that. One bad person doesn’t make the institution bad. But the fact that they didn’t supervise her closely enough to see what was happening under their own noses… the fact that they put a weapon in her hand and pointed it at a vulnerable population… that they routinely edited videos of therapy sessions… and that their supervision was so lax that residents could be trafficked right under their noses…”
“Then why doesn’t anyone care about that?”
“People don’t want to have to get out of their comfort zones. To have to make changes. They’ll watch the video and be all shocked about it… but that’s as far as it goes. Then it’s on to watching cats and cucumbers.”
Zachary rubbed the space between his eyebrows. He was exhausted. Which made no sense at all, because he was spending most of the day sleeping. After weeks and months of insomnia, he suddenly couldn’t stay awake. Though he knew it wasn’t just sleepiness.
“What have they got you on?” Mr. Peterson asked, as if reading his mind. “An SSRI? Mood stabilizer?”
“SSRI… but then they gotta take me off of stimulants, so they’re experimenting with other combos… waiting to see if they will work…”
“And it may take a few weeks before they know.”
“Yeah.”
Mr. Peterson was quiet for a few minutes.
“I was wondering something,” he said finally.
“Yeah? What?”
“I was wondering about the girl you told us about when you came to visit.”
“Annie?” Zachary had meant to pretend not to know what Mr. Peterson was talking about. But her name just popped out of his mouth before he could stop it.
“Annie. That was it. The little girl that died, right?”
“Uh… something like that. Or maybe it was Amy.” His cheek muscle ticked, giving away the lie. Mr. Peterson was not fooled.
“Annie,” he repeated. “Did you ever talk to anyone about her?”
“What do you mean? I talked to you.”
“I mean did you ever talk it over with a therapist? The police? Or maybe get in touch with her family?”
“No. I talked to the therapist at Bonnie Brown… but I didn’t tell them anything. Just… pretended I didn’t know anything… that… it didn’t matter.”
“If this business at Summit was bothering you… bringing up memories of what happened to Annie, then maybe you should do something about that.”
Zachary gave a short laugh and shook his head. “It’s too late. It was almost thirty years ago.”
“If it’s still affecting you, maybe you need to talk to someone about it.”
“No,” Zachary said flatly. “There isn’t anything to say. I didn’t know her. She was just the girl who died in the cell next to me.”
“It still upset you. Why don’t you talk to her parents? Tell them what happened that night?”
“I don’t remember what happened.”
“Your body does. It’s bothering you. It might have been thirty years ago, but your body still cares that you haven’t dealt with it. And her parents, they won’t have forgotten her. It would mean something to them to hear that someone still remembers her and cares what happened that night.”
“I don’t know how to reach them. I don’t even know… where they live. Their names. They probably moved away.”
“Maybe you could hire a private investigator to find out,” Mr. Peterson said wryly.
Zachary rolled his eyes and shook his head. “They won’t want to hear from me,” he insisted.
But a couple of weeks later, Zachary and Mr. Peterson pulled up in front of the Sellers’ house. A dark brick bungalow with neat gardens in the front filled with various kinds of greenery, but no splash of color from spring flowers.
“Is this the right thing?” Zachary asked Mr. Peterson. Not for the first time. “I mean… they put their daughter to rest years ago. Here I am, stirring up memories for no reason. What good is it going to do for them to hear this?”
Mr. Peterson considered the question seriously, even though he’d already answered it, in one form or another, half a dozen times. “If it was my child… I’d want to know. Even if it was years later.”
Annie’s father answered the door. He had been a tall man. He was still taller than Zachary in spite of how stooped he had become. Zachary was glad he had asked Mr. Peterson to go with him. Lorne seemed to know what to do; he connected with someone in his own generation. Introductions were made, and Mr. Sellers invited them in. They went to the living room, where they met Mrs. Sellers, a tiny woman, and the introductions were repeated. They all sat down. Zachary stared into a hexagonal china cabinet with some Royal Dutton collector’s pieces in it as if that were what he had come for.
“Zachary.” Mr. Peterson gave him a nudge.
Zachary looked at Mr. and Mrs. Sellers, a knot in his stomach. He shouldn’t have bothered them. He should have just left them in peace. They’d dealt with their daughter’s death decades before.
“You said… this was something about our daughter, Annie,” Mrs. Sellers said. “I really don’t understand… what this is all about. How you even know about her.”
Zachary looked down at his hands, unable to keep his gaze on her face. On her sad eyes.
“I was at Bonnie Brown years ago. When she… was there.”
“You couldn’t have been more than a boy,” Mr. Sellers said. “You couldn’t have worked there when Annie was there.”
“No. I didn’t. I lived there. A resident. Like your daughter.”
“Oh.” They both considered that.
Mrs. Sellers inched forward in her chair. “Did you know Annie, then? Were you friends?”
“No… I knew who she was. Heard about her. But she was normally in a different unit than I was.”
“Ah.” She nodded.
Zachary found it impossible to continue. The silence grew. He couldn’t even look at Mr. Peterson, afraid of being pushed into the conversation before he was ready.
“I have pictures of Annie,” Mrs. Sellers offered. “Would you like to see them?”
“Yes. Sure.”
She got up and retrieved a photo album. It wasn’t thick. It started with Annie as a baby, looking like a perfectly normal baby, happy and healthy. Gummy smiles in faded Polaroids. Pictures with her family. But as she got older, her different-ness became more obvious. The distant gaze. Fingers screening her eyes. Limbs skinny and awkward, mottled with bruises and bite marks. Fewer pictures with her family. An occasional candid shot of her playing alone, isolated.
In the last pictures, she looked just how Zachary remembered. The thin, dark-haired girl who didn’t want anyone to touch her. It unlocked a flood of memories. He had been suppressing the images for years, trying not to remember, but they were still there, as clear and crisp as if it had been just the day before.
“What happened?” Mrs. Sellers asked, her voice shaky. “Were you there?”
Zachary nodded. There was a lump in his throat and his eyes stung. He relived the outrage he had felt then, combined with the terror that if he didn’t stay out of it, he would be next.
“I was in the detention unit,” he said. Maybe they already guessed that part. “I kept screwing up. Getting in trouble. When they brought her in, she was screaming, kicking, having a… a tantrum, they called it. A meltdown. I don’t know what triggered it.”
“She did that,” Mr. Sellers said. “That’s why she was there. We couldn’t handle her anymore.”
“She managed to bite one of the guards.” Zachary was amazed that the names still came to him easily, so many years later. “Berens. It was really bad. Bleeding. So after they got her into her cell, the one next to mine, they called the police. Had her charged with assault.”
Mr. Peterson looked surprised at this, but her parents didn’t.
“Wh
y would they do that?” Mr. Peterson asked. “If they knew she had autism… she couldn’t help it, could she?”
“They did that. Schools do it now. Call the police on little kids. Kids with disabilities. Like their behavior is criminal.”
Mr. and Mrs. Sellers nodded. They must have been acutely aware of it whenever such a story hit the news.
“So the police came,” Zachary glanced up at them and then stared back down at his hands. “She was still… mid-meltdown. If they’d just left her alone, she would have calmed down… wouldn’t she?”
“Eventually,” Mr. Sellers agreed.
“They didn’t tell the cops she was autistic, just that she was violent and had assaulted Berens. He showed them the injury. Still bleeding. So when they took her out of her cell…” Zachary swallowed. He tried to just go on. It would get harder before it got easier. “They were hitting her. Punching her with their fists and yelling at her to stop fighting.” A glance at their faces showed Mr. and Mrs. Sellers intent, living the story, and Mr. Peterson listening in shocked horror. “They got her down on the ground. Prone. One of them kneeling on her while they handcuffed her hands behind her back.”
Zachary put his hands over his face, needing to escape from their gazes. The details of the memories didn’t dim. His shoulders shook as he tried to keep his body under control.
“She stopped breathing. The cop, he got off of her and they turned her over. She started… started breathing again. She was mostly conscious and was breathing when they took her away.”
Zachary rubbed his aching eyes. He opened them and looked down at her picture again. If he could just finish, maybe he would stop being haunted by what had happened.
“They never told us that,” Mr. Sellers said.
Zachary nodded. Of course they hadn’t told her parents. They hadn’t even filed an incident report. He took a few deep breaths, again trying to calm himself. “Other cops brought her back a couple hours later, gave the staff hell for not telling anyone she was autistic. The guards put her back in her cell…”
Mrs. Sellers was crying softly. Mr. Sellers put his arm around her. “Did they hit her again?”
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