In-between Hour (9781460323731)

by Claypole White, Barbara

  A sound came from her bedroom floor—a voice message alert on his phone. He snatched up his jeans and pulled his phone out of the back pocket. One voice mail.

  “Call the ward,” Galen said, and rattled off a number. “They’ll ask for the code word. Flower. Don’t tell Mom.”

  Another secret to keep from Hannah.

  Will sat on the edge of her unmade bed and stared at his iPhone, at the blank screen, at his reflection in the black mirror.

  If he didn’t go, if he bailed on a friend in need without even saying goodbye, what did that make him? He could still head back to New York—that part of his plan didn’t have to change—but he didn’t have to go today. He could sit with Galen, be there for him—since Hannah wasn’t going to fight for the right. If that were his son, he would be banging on the locked doors, demanding entry. Demanding Freddie not be alone....

  Will glanced up at the framed photos. Beautiful pictures without people. Studies in loneliness. He would go, but not as Hannah’s substitute, not as a parental figure. He would go as a friend.

  And tomorrow he would head back to New York where he was known yet unknown. Where those who crossed his life—the woman at Starbucks, the building doorman—smiled and asked how he was doing without caring that he answered by rote.

  Twelve years ago he’d gone to New York to lose himself in crowds, to find anonymity, not to expand his social network. And it had worked. Ask him to identify any of his neighbors in a lineup, and Will would flunk. These days, people knew the name, the face, the P.R. propaganda—everything but the darkness of his true story. In New York, he could be whomever the hell he wanted. And Hannah would never have to see him again.

  Will threw the phone onto the bed. On my way, dude.

  Thirty

  “Will Shepard here for Galen Jones,” Will shouted at the intercom. And tried not to imagine a phalanx of hidden cameras staring back. For reasons unknown, he also saw infrared lasers.

  “I know the code word.”

  Lame. He was trying to prove he was worthy of entry just because he could say flower, the word that acted like an unlimited calling card for the mental hospital. Galen once told him everything you said on a locked ward made you sound insane. Did that apply to visitors, too?

  The door buzzed open. Ten feet ahead of him—another set of doors.

  His chest tightened, and his right hand began to tremble like he had the DTs—delirium tremens aka withdrawal shakes. Research, novel eight. He would never survive confinement, never function as a shut-in. Every ounce of control you had was ripped away the moment someone put you in a room and turned the key in the lock. How could you breathe if you couldn’t see the sky? How could you breathe if you couldn’t feel sunlight on your skin? But this wasn’t about his psycho-baggage, about his crazy childhood, about his claustrophobia—Will rubbed his hands down his thighs to erase the evidence of sweat—this was about Galen.

  The second set of doors buzzed open and a young woman welcomed him. Pretty. Normal-looking. Will walked forward, and the tightness in his chest loosened.

  “I’m the ward clerk.” She offered a smile and a clipboard. “I need you to sign in, Mr. Shepard. And ask if you have any contraband items.”

  Contraband items? Did he look like a criminal? “Car key, wallet, iPhone.” He reached into his pockets and pulled out the offending items.

  Another smile.

  “And clothes from his mom.” He handed over the bag, then signed his name.

  Think of this as research, Will.

  “Galen’s in the day room,” she said. “I’ll take you to him.”

  “He’s not in a padded cell?”

  “This isn’t One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, you know. We encourage patients to get up, move about, engage with others.”

  The young woman turned and headed down the hallway. Will fell into line behind her, trying not to feel as if he were attempting to navigate a straight line on a listing boat. A door slammed, and he jumped.

  “I gather you’re representing the family?” she said.

  “Yeah.” No.

  “It’s good that he has someone—not just for now but for when he gets out. So many people have to go through this alone.”

  Way too much information. I’m here to say goodbye, not to be his recovery guide.

  They passed a group of people in a side room. All in street clothes, not a straitjacket in sight. Interesting.

  The day room—thirty-by-thirty?—was airy, quiet and comfortable-looking with a microwave and an ice machine. Outside, two guys in jeans were playing Ping-Pong on the porch. A stunning view of the town lay beyond the shatterproof glass.

  Galen was slumped on a modular sofa, asleep and wearing his purple hospital gown. Research, novel six, E.R. patients who are a danger to themselves or others—or in danger of wandering off, like Dad—get the purple gowns.

  Despite everything, Hannah had thought ahead, had known to send in clothes. Even in the worst trauma, she kept moving, kept thinking and acting as a parent. If he had anyone left to parent, Hannah would be Will’s role model. Except for the whole putting-work-first thing. He needed to remember that so he could stay angry. Anger would make it easier to leave.

  A nurse walked by. “Hi, just checking on Galen.” Another smile.

  Will wasn’t sure how to respond, so he jerked his chin in greeting.

  He grabbed a chair and tried to pull it across the floor, but it refused to move. Seriously? The furniture was bolted down? Easing himself onto the sofa, he sat next to Galen. Should he touch him, take his hand? Christ, he looked like a plague victim. So pale and his hair all matted. Maybe it was good that his mother couldn’t see him. A lifetime of conversations unlived with Freddie raced through his mind: the first shaving lesson, the first girl talk, the first conversation about college.

  “Galen?” Was this like a coma case, when you should talk to the patient, tell him about the minutiae of your stupid day? “Hey, dude. It’s Will. I got your message, decided to drop by.”

  Outside the Ping-Pong ball bounced—pop, pop, pop—then stopped.

  “I read some of your poems. Loved them. You’ve got to start writing again, when you...you know.”

  Another patient got up and shuffled out of the space; someone at the nurses’ station coughed. They were alone except for a family grouping near the far wall. The mother figure was in tears.

  “Your mom—” Will gulped back the image of Hannah sleeping, her hair fanning out on the pillow next to him. How would it feel to wake to that scene every morning? “I know she won’t come and visit until you ask for her, but she’s desperate to see you. You’re lucky, to have a mom like Hannah. She loves you more than anything.”

  Still nothing.

  “I, um, I have to say goodbye, Galen. I’m going back to the city. I walked out on everything up there. Got to get back. Taking Dad with me. But when you leave here, I hope you’ll come visit.” He meant it, too.

  He reached out to stroke Galen’s head, then snatched his hand back. Suppose Galen thought he was being patronizing, or worse, parental? And what of the emotional connection between caring for this young man and caring for his mother? Nothing happened in isolation. The butterfly effect of falling in love in your thirties. Making love with Hannah had been an oasis of peace in the middle of chaos, but his feelings for her were also an integral part of that chaos, woven through everything. He had fallen in love because of—not despite—the suicidal son and the senescent dad.

  “I don’t want to leave you. Or your mom.” And yet he was planning to do just that. “But I’m...I’m in bad shape right now. It’s not fair to anyone if I stay. There’s personal stuff no one knows about. Stuff I need to figure out, you know? And your mom—” Will sighed. “I think I’m in love with your mom. Does that freak you out? Or maybe you guessed. Maybe n
ot. I’m a pro at hiding my shit. And you, I never meant to let you in. But I did.”

  Will remembered the fear that had punched him when he’d lost sight of Galen on the rock, the fear that had stopped his breath the moment he’d catapulted through the bathroom door and seen blood. There was nothing tenuous about his feelings for this young man. “What you think matters. Don’t assume the worst of me, when you find out I’ve gone, buddy. Okay?”

  Galen licked his lips, then stretched his neck to force down a swallow. “Water?”

  “Sure.” Will sprang into action, pouring water from a plastic jug on the nearby table.

  “Here.” He slipped his arm under Galen, helping him forward. The pillow wedged behind Galen felt scratchy—polyester, not cotton.

  Galen swallowed slowly, and Will eased his head back down.

  “I didn’t plan to be here today.”

  “I know, dude. And I’m sorry, but can you blame me, not your mom? She just wanted to protect you. Keep you safe. That stuff she said last night, about being a parent—all true.”

  Galen said nothing.

  “You going to try and kill yourself again?” Might as well ask.

  “That’s the big question of the day,” Galen said. “They want to know, too—keep asking about my suicide ideation.”

  “And?”

  “Undecided.” Galen paused. “Your son’s young, right?”

  “Five.” Will stared up at the ceiling. Five for all eternity.

  “Be a while, then, before you have to...” Galen closed his eyes.

  “Deal with this kind of crap?”

  “Yeah.”

  Will fingered the Band-Aid covering the cut on his right palm, the mark of his first clumsy grab for the scalpel as he’d cleaned out the bath. Cold air rattled through the overhead vent and the world shrank to two guys sitting in a waiting room. Blood brothers who had visited hell and created a sacred bond of bare honesty. The only authentic relationship he had right now, and it was with a double suicide survivor.

  “I’m not a parent anymore. I haven’t been for four months and sixteen hours. My son is five, was five, will always be five. He’ll never see six.”

  Galen blinked slowly, clearly fighting the haze of meds. “He’s autistic?”

  “I wish.”

  “You mean—worse?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Like dead worse?”

  “Yeah.”

  He couldn’t say the words out loud. Hearing someone else speak them was surreal enough. In the past month, Ally and his publicist were the only people he’d interacted with who knew Freddie was dead, but it hadn’t been discussed. And in that month, he’d allowed himself to believe the fairy dust, to think, What if?

  “That’s why you understood how I felt.” Galen’s eyelids flickered. “But your dad, he doesn’t know.”

  “Knew but forgot, and I couldn’t find the strength to repeat the news. I’d like to pretend I did it for some altruistic reason, but I played along because it was easier. Do you know how hard it is to tell a grandparent that he’s outlived his grandson, to then watch as your six-foot-tall father falls to his knees and sobs, to watch as he’s restrained and sedated? Nobody would want to relive that.”

  “Pretending your son’s alive...that’s depraved, even by my standards.”

  Galen had a point. “I never expected my dad to get so caught up in the whole thing, and then it was too late to tell him the truth. But in some strange way, it’s been good. Given us both a reason to live.”

  “You’re not planning on disillusioning him, are you?”

  “Can’t.”

  “And I thought I was messed up....”

  “Guess we’re a club of two.” Will smiled. “The messed-up writer and the suicidal poet. You’ll keep my secret, right?”

  Galen nodded slowly, but it wasn’t enough. Will needed more of an endorsement, even if his confidant was sedated.

  “I’m living in this gray area where the rules of truth are irrelevant. Last night Dad thought the ambulances had come for my mom. She’s been dead for four years. A month from now he might not remember she ever existed. Why take the time he has left and force him to relive the bad stuff? With a handful of false memories, I can erase the horror. I can replace it with joy. I realize that makes me sound as if I have a God complex, but I’m just trying to get both of us through. You do understand, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you understand why I have to leave?”

  Galen nodded.

  “You need your parents, Galen, and they need you. They’re terrified. You’ve got to let them in. You’ve got to deal with this as a family.”

  “Mom promised I wouldn’t have to come back to a locked ward.”

  “And you promised you were in contact with your therapist. That makes you guys even.” Will paused. “Can I tell your mom she can visit tomorrow?”

  “I guess.”

  The Ping-Pong players came back inside and shuffled past.

  “How’re you feeling?”

  “Like my head’s stuffed with cotton balls. Like all I want to do is sleep. Like I was ready to die and failed. Again.”

  “Want me to leave?”

  “No. Stay.” Galen closed his eyes. “I’ve got to warn you, though, they check on me constantly. They’ll probably try and drag you in. They want me engaged. Keep talking about all these groups I have to go to. They keep you busy in here.” He gave an ugly laugh. “Will?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m sorry—about your son. I bet you were a good dad.”

  “I tried to be.”

  “I tried to be a good son. Didn’t work out too well for me, either.” Galen rolled his head toward the window. “You should tell Mom. About your son.”

  “She’s not talking to me right now.”

  “Give her a hug. She likes hugs.”

  Been there, done that, plus a whole lot more.

  “Tell me a story.” Galen’s voice had grown sluggish.

  Will held the words inside for a moment. Tell me a story, Daddy.

  “Fiction’s a dry well for me these days,” Will said. “But I’ll tell you a real story. About growing up poor. About growing up surrounded by whispers of identity. The Occaneechi tribe didn’t earn state recognition until 2002, but we all knew we had native ancestry. My dad told me when I was a little kid, just as my granddaddy told him. A family secret passed down through the generations. ‘Shhh, don’t tell anyone. You’re an Indian.’” Indan, if he were being honest. No i. Or Yesah, the people. But genealogy was for guys who cared. “My life started with a secret, and the secrets grew.

  “I was a half-caste kid who always felt like an outsider—part white trash, part Native American, smaller and smarter than I wanted to be. Only time I felt like me was when I was running wild on Occoneechee Mountain or losing myself in the world of make-believe, like my mom. There was a time when that horrified me, when I thought I was crazy, too. So much of this crap is genetic, you know? Dad and I covered up her madness, and the three of us lived in shadows, pretending. Making excuses. Living empty lives of denial. I’m a thirty-four-year-old guy who doesn’t know how to love. How’s that for a sick cycle of dysfunction?

  “At some point, I told myself I no longer cared about my mom, about her craziness. That was a lie, too. I left home, planned to never come back, but every day I circled her crap in my writing. I’ve spent the past ten years hanging out with fictional psychos.”

  “And now you’re hanging out in a locked psych ward.”

  “Yeah, how about that?”

  Galen slipped into sleep, and Will decided to stay. He would watch over Galen for the rest of the day and report to Hannah that her son was safe. This time tomorrow she would be sitting here and he would be
on his way back to his apartment in the sky. Not home, never home, because he didn’t have a home. But back to the world he’d constructed to keep him sane.

  Thirty-One

  While Will had been cocooned in the world of mental patients, clouds had rolled in, lowering the sky, threatening to obliterate dusk. Barely five o’clock, but already it felt like night. The distant whop-whop-whop of a helicopter drew closer. Rotating blades thumped and sliced through the air, creeping toward the dogwood parking deck. Medevac for an accident victim or transportation for a donor organ. Was the helicopter carrying death or a second chance at life? There was a time when the sound of every emergency vehicle triggered his imagination. Now it just opened the sinkhole of grief.

  The pain started in his chest and radiated up into his jaw, into his teeth, filling his mouth with a silent shriek. The helicopter whirred overhead, each whop rattling through his body and shaking his brain inside his skull. Will closed his eyes and covered his ears. How could he keep moving forward when the clock on his desk had stopped at 8:30 p.m. on July 1?

  He ate, he showered, he pretended to write, he pretended to sleep. The only thing that had brought meaning in the past four months was an interlude of sex that had, apparently, caused nothing but shame and regret. A terrible mistake.

  The drone of the helicopter faded, replaced by the hum of five-o’clock traffic. Husbands and wives returning home to their lives after a day of work. Home where they would reconnect with their kids, walk the dog, open the mail. Eat dinner with people they loved or pretended to love. Home—the place normal people retreated to at the end of a day.

  In his pocket, his phone rang. Someone found him, no matter where he hid. He was always connected to others through text messages, email, social media.... With a long, slow breath, he answered the call.

  “Mr. Shepard?” Female, voice unknown.