Straightjacket

by Meredith Towbin

  “I said, shut the hell up!” Caleb screamed, lunging toward him. He stopped an inch away, his nose almost touching his father’s. His hands were trembling, and he used every last bit of self-restraint to prevent himself from wrapping them around his father’s neck and squeezing until the man collapsed onto the marble floor. “You don’t talk to her like that. I’m walking out that door, and you’re never gonna see me again.”

  “I see. My money is what you want.”

  Caleb’s eyes narrowed with disgust, and he headed toward the door. He pulled it open and again its immense weight moaned against the pressure.

  “Go to hell.” He walked briskly down the front steps, one hand grasping Anna’s while the other swooped up the suitcases that they had left outside. They turned to the left, following the curve of the driveway. Anna kept up, although she had to walk faster than him. Neither of them said a word.

  The driveway dead-ended into an enormous garage. Caleb stopped in front of a keypad next to one of six large doors, punched in a code, and the third door down the row lifted upward, its panels disappearing into the ceiling inside one by one. He led Anna inside before the door had finished creaking completely up. The five cars lined up in a row were the same as they had been—the Bentley, Audi, Mercedes, Porsche, and Ferrari—each in their designated spots, gleaming with a fresh coat of wax. The only one missing was the Jaguar, which Caleb assumed his stepmother had taken out on her daily shopping spree.

  He popped open the trunk of his car, a silver Audi R8, and wiggled one suitcase inside. The others he wedged into the shelf behind the front seats. With a single violent thrust of his arm, the driver’s side door swung open. Anna didn’t slide inside like he expected. Instead, she was leaning against the front bumper, breathing hard and slow.

  “Anna, I’m so sorry, I didn’t even stop to see—”

  “I’m fine, I’m fine.” As she headed toward the passenger side, Caleb raced around to meet her.

  “Please just tell me you’re okay,” he pleaded as he helped her settle into her seat.

  “Yeah, I’m fine; let’s just go.” Without a word, he slammed her door shut and ran around to the driver’s side. Not caring for a second that he no longer had a driver’s license, he slid the key into the ignition. The car roared to life. Contained within the walls of the garage, the sound of the engine revving was monstrous. He adjusted the stick shift and peeled out of the garage. The car hugged the curve around the fountain and raced down the long driveway. The rearview mirror offered him one last look at the house, which was shrinking by the second.

  “Do you want to stop at your house to get some more of your stuff?”

  Anna turned to him. Her face was stricken with fear.

  “No, I’m not going back there,” she said, shaking her head quickly back and forth.

  “Are you sure? You’re going to need—”

  “No, I can’t go back to that house.”

  He laid his hand over hers. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. We’ll just get going then.” His hand couldn’t help itself and reached up to stroke her hair.

  “Thank you.”

  “You don’t need to thank me, you know. This is your life, too. You make your own choices. I’m not going to tell you what to do.”

  They were both silent for a few minutes and the only sound was the engine shifting gears every now and then.

  Finally, she answered. “You don’t know how you’ve saved me. Just thinking about being released from the hospital, going back to that house, living with them, living that life again, I can’t even tell you…”

  “I’d do anything for you. You’re so…incredible. I can’t believe he spoke to you like that.” His voice soured. “I’m so sorry. I won’t let anyone speak to you like that ever again.” His hands gripped the steering wheel tighter, twisting the black leather as if it were guilty.

  “It doesn’t matter. I don’t care about what he says to me. I really don’t care about anyone anymore except for you. Just forget about it.”

  They drove on in silence. Caleb turned onto the main road, and they made their way through the city. As they sat at a red light, two guys in the car next to theirs pointed at them. One of them howled. Anna instinctively tensed up, no doubt waiting for something outrageous to happen.

  “Nice ride,” the howler yelled out the window.

  Anna’s body relaxed. When the light turned green, the tires screeched as they jolted forward, leaving the two guys far behind them.

  “This is a pretty awesome car,” she said.

  “I got it for my birthday. I kinda like it.”

  They continued on, and merged onto the highway. Caleb shifted into the highest gear and was able to keep his hand on Anna’s.

  “So I wanted to ask,” she said, wringing her hands nervously. “What was that about a deal you made with your dad?”

  Caleb shifted uncomfortably.

  “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to,” she added quickly.

  “No, it’s fine. I was going to tell you later. I’ve always had a trust fund, and I was supposed to get control of it when I turned eighteen. But then…he took it away.” He cleared his throat, embarrassed. “My father told me the only way I could get it is if I checked myself into a psychiatric hospital. So that’s what I did.”

  “Oh.”

  “I called the lawyer before I went into the bank to make a withdrawal, and that was that. Now I own this car and have enough money to take care of us for a very long time.” This time Anna didn’t answer at all. Her eyes were glued to the road in front of them. “Don’t worry,” he said, resting his hand on her leg. “We’re home free.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  They’d been driving for two hours. Anna was just finishing the second half of a turkey sandwich. It was nothing fancy, just turkey and a little mustard Caleb had smeared on one of the slices of wheat bread, but she thought it was the best turkey sandwich she’d ever eaten. Of course it wouldn’t have tasted quite so good if she were eating it at one of the tables up in the ward, with an attendant standing nearby counting down the seconds until dinner was over. She let the last bite linger in her mouth.

  The cornfields stretched endlessly to the right and left, the long line of the highway extending far in front of them until it disappeared into a tiny dot on the horizon. The sky was big and infinite too, and the sun was starting to set. To the left it glowed orange and red. Her eyes followed the arc of the sky all the way to the right, where the colors had blended and shifted into dark blue and finally purple. Even the clouds shone with color.

  Her focus shifted to Caleb. She had for the most part suppressed all her questions, all the things that didn’t make sense, during the drive. Always thinking. That was her problem. She wanted more than anything to get outside of herself and ignore the way her brain analyzed and picked apart everything constantly, detail by excruciating detail.

  Fortunately there were plenty of distractions, like Caleb’s perfect profile, which was framed by the cornfields and glowing orange sky behind him. He looked like something out of a movie. She couldn’t believe this was real. He, looking like he did, treating her this way, taking her away from all the things she could no longer accept as acceptable, zooming through the cornfields in a sports car that belonged in the pages of a magazine.

  Another distraction came from reading the words on every billboard that rolled past them. Duke’s Cattle Farm, its sign in the shape of a cow, was just ahead at exit 32. Some cows rested apathetically underneath the sign, their tails flicking behind them at some flies and their mouths grinding grass. There was an all-day breakfast place at exit 33. The sign showed a stack of perfectly round pancakes, a half-melted pat of butter placed exactly in the middle, with syrup dripping down the edges, that made her want to stop at exit 33 even though she wasn’t hungry anymore. She read every word of every billboard, even the name of the billboard company at the bottom.

  But something was off about the n
ext set of billboards. They were really close to the highway, unlike all the others, which stood a few hundred feet back. The words were smaller, there were many more of them, and they took up the entire surface of the sign. She squinted and tried to make out the first one: If you were to die today, where would you be?

  Thinking about this was exactly what she didn’t need right now. They drew closer to the next billboard, thirty feet ahead of them, and this one was easy to read. The letters were large and red: Hell is real.

  Instantly a wave of sickness burst in her stomach and spread upward into her lungs and chest. Caleb turned toward her, but she ignored him. The doubts she had buried over the last few hours exploded out of their hiding places. And then the image of her parents flashed in front of her, and her palms moistened with cold sweat.

  The third billboard in the series hovered largely in front of them, this one listing the Ten Commandments. She skimmed them quickly, resting on Honor thy father and thy mother. Her training from the hospital kicked in—a deep breath in, a hold, then a breath blown out slowly and quietly. There were just endless cornfields and infinite sky all around them—nothing to focus on besides the panic. The fields weren’t beautiful anymore, only lonely and stark. Her heart was racing, the dizziness set in, and the thought that she was having a panic attack kept looping through her mind. Everything—her doubts about Caleb’s sanity, the fact that she was defying her parents, the fear of what was ahead—flooded her mind. She couldn’t stop any of it from attacking her.

  “Anna, what’s wrong?” Caleb said, his hand darting up to her shoulder.

  She was too focused on not losing her mind to be embarrassed that he had noticed.

  Breath in, hold, breath out slowly. Even though she felt like her body wasn’t a part of her anymore, like she was floating, the touch of his hand anchored her. Her heartbeat slowed. Then the shaking set in. The car swerved, and within seconds they were stopped on the side of the road.

  “Are you okay? What’s wrong?”

  The warm relief spread through her whole body, and she could have cried, she was so happy that not only was it over, but it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Was it the medication? Or Caleb? It didn’t matter. It was over.

  “It’s okay,” she said. The shame was setting in now that the immediate threat had passed.

  “How can you say you’re fine? You’re shaking, you’re pale, your hands are all sweaty. Are you sick? Should I take you to a doctor?”

  “Caleb, it’s okay. Really, I’m fine. Sometimes I—I have…” She was going to tell him, but she hesitated. He’d be the first to know about the attacks besides Dr. Blackwell.

  “Tell me.” He laced their fingers together.

  “I have…panic attacks. I just had one.” He said nothing, all the while rubbing the back of her hand with his thumb. Eventually he reached over and held her, pressing her cheek against his chest. The warmth of his T-shirt felt good. They sat there for a while in silence.

  “Are you okay now?”

  “Yeah. I’m okay.”

  “Did something…trigger it?”

  This was the moment. She could keep trying to push everything down, for the next few hours, the next few months, maybe even the next few years, or let it all come gushing out. Her faith in him was still there, her trust in what they could be for each other, but it would all be a lie if she carried on the way she had been. A deep breath in.

  “This is all…it’s just too much. You swore you were an angel. And then, it’s your house, your father, your car. I don’t get it. How can all that stuff be here? How can you tell me you’re an angel and have all of that, a whole past?” She was crying desperately. There was pain in his face. She hated herself for having caused it.

  “I should have told you. It’s my fault. I should have realized it would make no sense to you.”

  “So make sense of it—for me,” she said, terrified of what she didn’t know yet but soon would.

  “All of it is part of my past. It was my life before…before I was an angel.”

  “What?” She was still crying, still scared of what was coming.

  “I wasn’t always an angel. I had a life, with my parents, in that house. And then it ended and I went to heaven.”

  “What? So—so you died?”

  “Like I said, I went to heaven.” She ignored the fact that he hadn’t answered her question. Instead, the part of Caleb’s conversation with his father that had been nagging at her the most grabbed hold of her and wouldn’t let go until she spoke it.

  “When your dad said—when he said he’d found you…”

  “To him, I disappeared. I guess it must have been for a few months. And then when Samuel told me I had to come down, I did, and that’s when my father thinks he found me. He told me a cop saw me in a stupor, sitting on a sidewalk downtown. A few hours later, I was in the psych ward.” Her mind tried to arrange the tangled mess into some kind of order that would make sense. “But that’s the way it was supposed to happen. That’s why I came back. It was for you.”

  “I don’t know what to say.” She couldn’t trust herself right now, not when she was so confused.

  “You don’t have to say anything.” He cupped her cheek in the palm of his hand. “You just need to believe in me. You need to believe in us. If you don’t, I can leave you alone, if that’s what you want. I’d do anything for you, even if it killed me. I don’t want you to have any doubts. The important thing is that you know how special—how important—you are.”

  Dazed, she kept trying to come up with any way she could to take what he had said and arrange it so that it was tidy and logical.

  “Anna.” No answer. “Anna,” he said again, louder. His hand guided her cheek up until she was looking straight at him. “I love you. That’s all you need to know about me. I love you.”

  Those three words seeped into every part of her. As she let them settle in and take root, all of her doubts dislodged themselves, making room for this. In a few moments, none of them remained. Finally she could see clearly—his answers made no difference. He might be an angel. He might not. But in the end it didn’t matter.

  * * *

  They drove on through the dark for another four hours, the music from Caleb’s iPod playing in the background. Sometimes they spoke to each other and sometimes they said nothing for long periods of time. There was no polite need to fill the silences with meaningless chatter. The pauses were as comfortable as the talking. Anna’s eyes swept the dark blanket of sky, looking for bright points of starlight that were poking their way through.

  “We’re almost there,” Caleb said. He turned off the highway, and they drove through a tiny town, its streets lined with a small grocery store, a gas station, a pharmacy, and some shops. The plate glass windows revealed dark interiors, and there wasn’t a soul walking around.

  The car turned down a narrow dirt road that cut through the woods. It was almost black outside. The moonlight couldn’t penetrate the blanket of treetops around them. The car moved through the path slowly, but even so it was bumpy. Anna put her free hand on her arm in the sling, but it wasn’t enough to stop her broken collarbone from aching with every sudden jerk.

  After a few miles, the headlights shone onto what looked like a house, and the car stopped.

  “Stay right here,” Caleb said. “I’m going to go turn on some lights.” He popped the door open and headed toward the house, but she lost sight of him as the darkness swallowed him up just a few feet away.

  Suddenly the entire outside of the house was illuminated. Anna stopped breathing. It was spectacular. Before her stood a real log cabin, and it was the most beautiful house she’d ever seen. The deep brown logs extended horizontally in parallel lines until they met and crisscrossed with those around the side of the house. Two enormous stone chimneys cut through the house, dividing it into thirds. A huge wooden deck wrapped around one side, disappearing into the darkness. Windows with white grilles crisscrossing their frames lined the front, but th
e blinds were drawn so she couldn’t see inside. The house was just the right size, nothing like the enormous white palace she’d seen earlier in the day.

  The car door squeaking open startled her. Caleb’s outstretched hand waited for her. “Are you ready to see your new home?” She put her hand in his and when he pulled her up and out of the car, she fell into his chest and wrapped her arm around his back.

  “This is so beautiful,” she whispered.

  “You haven’t even seen the inside yet. Or the outside, really, when it’s light out, I mean.” He pulled her toward the house. They walked up three wooden steps and onto the deck. She placed her hand on the railing, letting it lead her around the perimeter. The wood was uneven and bumpy yet smooth, as if it were made of one tall, thin tree trunk that had been pulled out of the ground, sanded down, and flipped onto its side. An owl hooted from one of the enormous pine trees that towered over the roof. Pausing at a clearing in the trees, she squinted out into the dark emptiness.

  “That’s a lake.” He came up behind her and looped his arms around her stomach. She tried to make it out but could only hear the sound of water splashing in the distance. “You’ll see it tomorrow. Let’s go in.” He swung her around and scooped her up in his arms. She laughed and let him carry her to the front door, which he kicked open. He stepped into the house, put her down, and flipped on the light.

  An enormous fireplace took up an entire wall in the living room, its smooth, oval stones extending from floor to ceiling. They ranged in color from light taupe to charcoal with gray cement wedged smoothly in between the spaces. A stone mantel cut the fireplace in half and displayed candlesticks and wooden bowls with intricate designs.

  Caleb plopped down on the couch nearby. Its wooden frame looked like tree trunks had been nailed together; flowered cushions balanced themselves on top. A cloud of dust burst upward into the air. The particles chose their separate ways and floated off into various parts of the room. He laid his arm along the back of the couch and motioned for Anna to sit next to him. She bounded over and nestled herself tightly into the spot where his arm met his body, resting her head against his chest.