by Jerome Gold
When they had gone, Maggie came up to me. “What do I say? How do I write about this? I don’t want to lie, but what do I say?”
“Say exactly what you saw. Don’t lie. Say the truth. Whatever you say, you’ll have to live with it later.”
Julius nodded as though to affirm my words. As though we hadn’t been talking about him.
“Julius,” I said. “This is really serious.”
“I know,” he said.
“I have to call Jan. I’m going to call her from the office.”
He nodded again.
I went into Jan’s office and sat at her desk and picked up her phone and jabbed the numbers with my index finger. I hoped she wouldn’t answer. I hoped I could just leave her a message, but she picked up.
I said, “This is for your information. You don’t have to do anything. But I didn’t want Clara or somebody calling you and you not knowing what she was talking about. Julius beat up James.”
“Oh, Jesus.”
“I haven’t called the OD yet. I wanted to call you first.”
“Oh, Christ. What in the Lord’s name was in his mind?”
“Julius?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know if he knows. He seems to be in shock right now.”
“Did it just happen?”
“Yes.”
“Was it a fight?”
“No. Julius assaulted him. James just tried to cover his face and head.”
“Oh, God. Why? Well. Did you see it?”
“Yes. Both Maggie and I saw it. Other staff, from other cottages, probably saw something, but I don’t know what.”
“They were responding to the panic alarm?”
“Yes.”
“All right. You’d better call the OD if you haven’t already. Celia’s on tonight.”
“All right. I’ll call now.”
“Call me when everything’s settled down.”
“I will.”
I called the OD. She told me to keep Julius in the cottage until she called back; she was going to notify the police. Maggie took care of the cottage—put the Zone Four kids she had locked in the craft room in their rooms, gave head calls, gave out the evening meds—while I sat with Julius.
I told Julius what the OD had said. He nodded. I asked him if he had any idea why he had done it. He turned his head to one side, then the other.
After a while he said he had been afraid—I stared at him: he was more than a foot taller than that boy and outweighed him by a hundred and fifty pounds—not that James would beat him up, but that James would hit him and maybe cut his lip or break his glasses. Kids would know then that he’d been hurt and then his authority, and staff’s authority, would be destroyed.
I said I thought that he and James were locked into each other, each trying to dominate the other, or perhaps trying to avoid being dominated.
Julius thought about this. He said he believed I was right. “It was a battle for supremacy.”
It was an hour before Celia called. She told me to send Julius up to Administration; the police were there now. She asked what kind of shape the cottage was in.
The kids were in their rooms, I said. We hadn’t heard a peep from them. Maggie had finished giving meds. Everything was quiet.
Celia said she would send James back after Julius left the cottage. Maggie and I would have to write personal statements as well as incident reports. “Did both of you see it?”
“Yes.”
“All right. Try to get them done as soon as you can. Hopefully while the police are still here. Do you think the kids heard anything?”
“Yes. That’s why they’ve been so quiet.”
She was silent for a beat, then said, “All right. Get those statements done as soon as you can.”
I told Julius the OD and the police were waiting for him at Administration. He nodded. I said he didn’t have to talk to them, that he could ask to have a lawyer present.
“I’ll talk to them.”
At the door he told me to watch Frank’s interaction with James. “Frank is afraid of James.”
When I came back inside, Maggie pulled the phone away from her ear. “Security is ready to bring James back.”
“All right.”
The guy who had run over from Bull Cottage called. He asked again what had happened. I told him I didn’t have time to talk with him. A staff from Serpent called. He also wanted to know what had happened. Maggie told him we didn’t have time to go into it.
James returned. He said the nurse had given him some Ibuprofen for his headache. I hadn’t known he had a headache. I asked him how he was feeling and he said all right, but he wanted to go to sleep.
Caitlin was tapping on her door. I got her out of her room and took her into Jan’s office. Her nose was red, though she wasn’t crying now, and the skin around her eyes was red. She asked if Julius had threatened James. I was certain she knew what had happened, at least that Julius had hit James, but she did not want to say it. I told her I couldn’t say anything.
She said she heard me yelling “Julius! Let him go into his room! Julius! Let him go!” All I remembered now was yelling Julius’ name.
We sat silently until it was obvious that she didn’t know what else to say or had nothing more to say. I said I had some paperwork to do and asked her if she wanted to sit with me while I did it. “Would that be all right?” she asked. I said it would. That seemed to soothe her.
When I was done, I put her back in her room. Then I looked in on Sonia. She was sitting in the dark on the edge of her bed, looking back at me. I opened the door and she burst out crying.
“Come with me,” I said.
I took her into Jan’s office. I opened my arms and Sonia stepped into them. I said, “Go ahead, sweetheart,” and let her cry. After a while she thanked me and said she wanted to go back to her room.
I locked her in, then went out to the staff desk and sat down next to Maggie. She said she had checked on Michael; he was asleep.
“I faxed our statements to the OD,” I said.
She nodded.
It was strange. All the lights were on, in the living room, the dining room, the kitchen, both offices, yet there wasn’t a sound except for those Maggie and I made: a drawer opening, then closing; the wheels of a desk chair on tile; a ballpoint pen dropped. It was as though everyone but us had died or gone away.
“How are you?” I asked.
TWELVE
Though none of us but Jan had liked him, the first staff meeting without Julius felt as though there were a hole in its center. Nobody mentioned James except to say he hadn’t been hurt—that was Jan—and that his mother had retained an attorney to represent him in regard to Julius’ beating him up—that was me.
“Julius didn’t beat anybody up!” Jan said.
“Excuse me? I was there! Remember?”
“So was I,” Maggie said.
Everybody was looking at us: at Jan, at me, at Maggie.
Frank said, “Did somebody beat James up? Did somebody say somebody beat James up?”
“Where have you been, numbnuts? Isn’t he on your caseload?” Dick said.
“Yes, he’s on my caseload! What happened? Did somebody beat him up?” he asked me.
Time passed. Finally I said, “Yes.”
Dick said, “What the fuck do you put in your case notes? You spend your whole goddamn shift in the office—what the hell do you do in there, play with yourself?”
Layton started to say something, but Frank said, “He probably deserved it.”
“Nobody deserves it. At least no kid does,” Bernie said.
“You should try it and report back to the rest of us. Tell us what you think you learned from it,” I said.
Dick made a sound like a guffaw.
I didn’t understand why Julius had locked the room doors in the zone, pressed his body alarm, and only then hit James. I told Layton this. I also didn’t understand why I had taken Julius’ glasses when he h
anded them to me though I had refused them twice before; I didn’t mention this to Layton.
Layton said he understood. Julius locked the doors because he thought there were kids in those rooms and he didn’t want them to see anything. He didn’t know Maggie had put them in the craft room. And he pressed his body alarm because he wanted to make it look like James had struck him first, that he had simply fought back.
“That would mean that he expected me to lie for him,” I said.
Layton nodded his head with deliberation. He was looking at me.
“That’s not going to happen,” I said.
We were on the back porch. The kids were in school, Dick monitoring. Bernie was on the computer. There was no one to hear us. Layton asked me if I remembered Lani Hyatt. She had been a resident in Wolf and then she went to Andromeda. Of course I remembered her: her father had killed her brother for having slept with her, and when he got out of prison he killed her other brother for the same reason.
Well, when she was at Andromeda the first time, Boyd from Fox Cottage sometimes worked graveyard there to get some overtime. Layton knew this much without being told. But Lani told him that when Boyd was there he would find a reason to have her put in the quiet room. Then, after other staff had left, he would take her out into the office and screw her. There was also a guy who used to work Security—he was gone now—who screwed her. She consented to this with each of them because they presented her with her only opportunity for sex, and anyway, if she objected and they raped her, who would believe her? They would just say she was crazy.
“Why did she tell you this? What were you talking about when this came up?” I asked.
“She told me when she came back here. And then she asked me if I would like the same thing with her. She said she wouldn’t tell anybody. It would just be between us. I told her to put that out of her head. It wasn’t going to happen.”
“Did anybody find out about Boyd and this other guy?”
“Administration must have, because the kid from Security was fired. But Boyd was just told that he couldn’t work in Andromeda anymore. I knew that much myself. But nobody told me why until Lani did.”
“That’s it? A case could be made that these guys raped her.”
“Uh huh.”
“So you think Julius may just have his hand slapped and then he’ll come back to work?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Well, that was an inspiring story. It certainly raised my spirits.”
Caitlin’s second nightmare: She and Sonia are on a ferry. Someone runs a sword through the hull of the boat and it starts taking on water. The weight of the water turns the boat over and Caitlin can see into the water through the windows of the upper deck. The boat rights itself so that the passenger decks are above water again, but then it spins over again and keeps spinning, over and over, and she is in the water and then out of it, in and then out. The ferry is out of control. She woke feeling nauseated.
She went from describing the dream to describing what she felt during the murder. Anticipating it, she had a heaviness in her chest and her stomach was upset so that she wanted to be moving and active. After stabbing Jonas, she was worried that he might still be alive and that he would get a bat and come after them. She was pacing back and forth, oblivious to what the others were doing, Kelly and Sonia and her brother and sister who had been brought upstairs by their mother to help clean up.
She asked now if she could call her father. The anxiety she was feeling—she was sure he would not show up for their visit Saturday, though he had said he would. I let her call. She was right: he did not intend to come. She hung up on him. She said she was jealous of his other family.
“What about your first nightmare?” I asked.
“What about it?”
“What was it?”
“Didn’t I tell you?”
“No.”
“I thought I told you. I don’t remember it all now.”
“Tell me what you remember.”
“My sister was there. We were on a playground. I was pushing my sister on a swing and these men came up behind us. They had guns, like MAC-10s, and one of them had a knife and they were going to kill me.”
“How do you know? Did they say anything?”
“No. I just knew.”
“What happened then?”
“I don’t remember.”
I asked, “When did you have this dream? The first one.”
“I don’t know. A few weeks ago. Around the time Julius threatened James. The night after. Maybe the night after that.”
I thought of a question, then realized it was the wrong one. I asked instead, “Why are you telling me about your dreams now?”
“I thought you’d want to know about them.”
“I mean, why now? What made you want to tell me now?”
“I don’t know. Do you want me not to tell you about them?”
“No. I want you to tell me.”
She sipped her tea.
She asked, “You know when I first came here, when I didn’t want to talk to you?”
“Yes.”
“What did you think? Why did you think I didn’t want to talk to you?”
“I didn’t know. But I suspected it was because I’d told you I was going to make you dig inside yourself to find out why you did what you did. You said it was because I had the same name as your victim, but I didn’t believe it. None of us believed it. None of the staff.”
There was the tiniest smile on her lips; her face was suddenly soft.
“But that’s what it was. Your name. But I got past it. And look what happened. I got this relationship with you.” She opened her hands, seemingly asking a question. “I know you love me. And it makes me feel good, knowing you’re there for me.”
I felt my head nod. I felt apart from it.
It works like that sometimes. Something terrible happens, then something good comes from it. Julius beats up James, then Caitlin confronts herself, if only in her dreams. It must have been the noise, the yelling, and her knowing that something bad was happening that she couldn’t see. Of course, you don’t want to take this too far. There are plenty of bad things from which only more bad things result. And there is the matter of proportion, not to say subjective experience: how do you value what James suffered as compared to what Caitlin benefited?
Her attorney called. Her appeal would be heard on Monday by a panel of three judges. It was sixth of six cases on the docket. The attorney thought it would help if I was there. I wouldn’t be permitted to say anything, but she would introduce me as Caitlin’s case manager. It would be a help. I said I would be there.
She didn’t know why the appeal was going to be heard. The judge who presided over the decline hearing was permitted to use his discretion in allowing Caitlin to be tried as an adult. The attorney said again that she didn’t know why the appeal was going to be heard. But, she said, she did not intend to challenge the judge’s discretionary authority. Instead, she would argue on the basis of something Sonia’s attorney brought up at her decline hearing. Sonia’s attorney said a decline hearing should come under the same rules as a trial, that a preponderance of evidence should be shown to indicate that the accused did the crime, rather than a reasonable amount of evidence. Ultimately, it was a due process issue.
I got a new kid on my caseload: Peter Kasser. I asked him about his parents. He loved his mama, he said. Then he was silent. Then he started talking about his father. In a moment he began a kind of sing-song, stream-of-consciousness monologue that I thought at first was disassociation, but then, concentrating on the words rather than the rhythm, I understood it to be held together by strands of emotion linked to his father’s having done violence to him. Peter went on for twenty minutes and stopped only when I finally interrupted him. I stopped him because he had gone into a state of consciousness I had not seen before and I didn’t know if I would be able to pull him back. Stopping him was a test.
He looked at m
e as though he didn’t know where he was. He didn’t know he was going to do that, he said. It had never happened to him before. He didn’t like to talk about his father.
He was very tired and I asked him if he wanted to go back to his room. He said okay and I walked him to his room and locked him in. Through the window in his door, I watched him sit down on his bed and clasp his hands between his legs. He stared at the floor.
Peter said that from ages eight to twelve his father beat him daily. Verbal humiliation. Abasement. Peter was thirteen now.
I saw him punk a smaller kid during rec and I called him over. He had seen Jacob spit on the ground and it got him mad, he said. I told him that didn’t make sense and he said he didn’t like Jacob because Jacob sucked up to staff. He hated kids like that because they got more attention, leaving less for other kids. I was surprised that he was able to see that about himself—the reason he was angry—and surprised, too, that he was able to articulate it.
After her father told us not to allow Caitlin to call him at home, she called him on his cell phone at his job. Now his cell phone had been disconnected.
Caitlin asked me to be like a parent to her. She meant, she said, that she would like me to be stricter. But she didn’t want me to punish her if she didn’t do the assignments I gave her. But she did want me to give her assignments.
I told her I would assign her treatment work, but if she didn’t do it, I would punish her.
She asked what the punishment would be.
I said I didn’t know, but if she consistently did not do her assignments, I would not allow her to go out at night.
She looked at me.
I’m kidding, I said. That’s what I would do if you were my kid on the outs and you weren’t doing your homework. Here, if you don’t do the assignments I give you, I’ll take your level.
I do my homework.
I know you do. I’m just messin’ with you.
Don’t. I can’t tell when you’re joking. And don’t use the word “messin’.” That’s for us kids.