The Inverted Forest

by John Dalton

  “What?” she demanded to know.

  “A pervert,” he said. “A pedophile.”

  With this they crossed over into some starker and more darkly cunning realm of their argument. She made herself perfectly clear: the choice of whether or not to honor Christopher wasn’t Dr. Lammers’s. It was hers. And she’d decided to go ahead with the memorial. She’d spend whatever money she thought necessary.

  Dr. Lammers assured her she’d do no such thing. If she went ahead with the memorial, she’d be doing it with her own money. She’d also be doing it as a single woman, rather than as his wife.

  Neither of them had ever before made such an open reference to divorce. But it was fine with Marcy. She said she’d pay for and organize Christopher’s memorial as a divorced woman. She already had a lawyer in mind. In fact she’d done some preparation work with this lawyer. She knew some things for certain: she’d get the house they were standing in. At the very least Dr. Lammers would have to sell off one of his laser vision eye care clinics. As she made these pronouncements, she was gathering up her purse and coat in order, she told Dr. Lammers, to go out and pay a visit to her lawyer. Her limbs were shaking, her balance skewed. She could hardly navigate the maze of her own living room. Entirely stupid that she should crawl behind the wheel of an automobile and attempt to drive. She did though. It was a starkly gray Sunday afternoon in March. Of course she knew of no lawyer with whom she might consult. Instead she drove to the empty back parking lot of a Walgreens drugstore. For what must have been several hours she raged and wailed and became undone.

  From the second-floor window she could see the last pair of holiday party guests descending the front steps and strolling arm in arm along the walkway to their car. A very nice couple, by the look of them, the young man stately and attractive, his wife in a lovely maroon coat, her brown hair uncovered and swaying prettily with each step she took. Her name was Abigail, if Marcy remembered correctly. Her husband, a sales rep for a laser eye technology company, was named Jason or Joshua. Earlier in the evening they’d stood by the fire in the great room and talked with Marcy, briefly, about the new soccer and softball complex set to open in their township at the start of summer.

  Now, at the end of the driveway, they were easing open the doors of their sedan. It wasn’t hard for Marcy to imagine how the remainder of the couple’s night would unfold. They’d drive home and collapse onto their couch. Maybe they’d fix a drink and watch TV awhile. Or make love.

  Or fall into an argument. Because that, too, was a feature of being married. At almost any time, or under the umbrella of any mood, a disruption could present itself. There were many kinds: an annoyance, a disappointment mild or severe, an icy, unspoken bitterness. It could go on for days. Or it could explode into a sudden raging misery in which everything in the marriage was turned inside out and made to look shabby and sick and intolerable. No matter how long you’d been married there was never a stage at which you moved beyond these pitfalls.

  Thank heavens she and Dr. Lammers had had the good sense to sit down and negotiate those things that could not be tolerated in their marriage. For Marcy it wasn’t bearable that her friend Christopher should be labeled with certain cruel names. He was to be spoken of with respect or not at all.

  For Dr. Lammers’s sake she’d agreed to keep her moonyness to herself. In a minute or two, when he climbed the stairs to the bedroom and found her at the bathroom sink or, more to his liking, beneath the covers of their bed, he hoped to be greeted by a face purged of sorrow and longing.

  The other term of their negotiation was a bit harder to bear. No memorial for Christopher Waterhouse. Though what she chose to commemorate in her heart of hearts was her business, wasn’t it?

  Chapter Fourteen

  For their strenuous efforts with the state hospital campers, each member of the Kindermann Forest counseling staff was paid, after taxes, two hundred and forty-seven dollars and twenty-three cents. The paychecks were handwritten and signed by Schuller Kindermann, though he did not distribute the checks. That duty fell to Head Cook Maureen Boyd, and the formalities of her assignment—standing at the mess hall serving counter, calling out the names, dispersing the checks—appeared to terrify her. Several times her voice went wheezy or silent. Her hand shook. As soon as the last check was doled out, she took a deep, bolstering breath and made her announcement.

  It was true, she said. The remaining camp sessions had all been canceled. The children would not be coming. Their parents had been called and told to keep their sons and daughters at home. Or find another camp. Because the summer at Kindermann Forest was over. Finished. Everyone was dismissed—the kitchen and maintenance staff, the counselors, the wrangler and lifeguard. Dismissed. Officially so. This was their notification—right here, right now. She said she could not, in her wildest dreams, have guessed the summer would end this way.

  The news settled over them in crushing increments. Eventually they understood. There was nothing else to do but gather their belongings from the sleeping cabins and arrange rides home. Their careers as summer camp counselors had lasted twelve days.

  What a humbling experience it was to return home, to go back to being moody lodgers in their parents’ houses. The first thing they did upon arriving was telephone the boyfriends and girlfriends they’d abandoned two weeks earlier. Hey there. Listen, it’s me. I’m back. All right now . . . hold on just a minute. Don’t be that way. Humiliating. They walked in the pressing summer heat to the drive-thru restaurants and day-care centers and begged to have their dull summer jobs back.

  They’d been gone twelve days. It felt like an embarrassing, even laughably brief, stretch of time. Now they were back stocking groceries and mowing lawns and counting down the days of their summer break. Six weeks. Four weeks. Then—thank God—two weeks. In late August they were relieved to pack up their things and move back to college.

  Or rent an apartment. Or join the U.S. Navy. Or get married. That was how the summer ended for Kathleen Bram and Michael Lauderback: a late September wedding at the First Baptist chapel in Kathleen’s hometown of Swansea, Illinois. On the face of it, all their choices seemed unwise. They were both twenty years old. Neither had a college degree. Except for their twelve days at Kindermann Forest, they’d never lived away from home. At the time of the wedding Kathleen was three months pregnant. (Why shouldn’t she be? They’d had eight consecutive nights of fumbling and revelatory sex on the floor of the Kindermann Forest arts and crafts pavilion.) And yet, despite these obstacles, they survived the difficult first few years of their marriage. Later, in their mid-twenties, they both began careers—occupational therapy for Kathleen, real estate for Michael—that sustained them very nicely. Theirs was an unlikely success: three more children over the next decade, a boisterous and secure family life, and a married partnership that was steady and unpretentious and deeply companionable. The new friends they made in the neighborhood and at church were a little puzzled—and envious. But you couldn’t very well ask to know the secret of Kathleen and Michael’s marriage. Happy couples were never able to explain their good fortune from the inside out.

  Instead their friends asked how Kathleen and Michael had met.

  “At summer camp,” Kathleen said. “We were camp counselors.”

  “Really?” their friends exclaimed. A summer camp. It set their minds racing. They could picture it all so clearly: the quaint, tree-shaded sleeping cabins, the rowdy and adoring children, the sudden camaraderie between male and female counselors—the possibilities this entailed for tenderness, for love.

  “How wonderful,” their friends said. “A summer camp. What a wonderful place to meet and fall in love.”

  It was wonderful. For Kathleen and Michael it was. Their memories of Kindermann Forest always carried a special vibrancy. Call it an atmosphere. Call it an aura of goodwill. They could recall this goodwill arising from nearly everyone at camp—from the counselors and lifeguards, from the nurse, from the kitchen and maintenance staff. Even from t
he state hospital campers. That’s right. This same goodwill was alive in the campers, too. Kathleen and Michael had talked about it over the years. At Kindermann Forest they’d been twenty years old and in love for the first and only time. They’d been lit from within. It might sound improbable, but the state hospital campers were aware of what was happening between Kathleen and Michael. The campers wanted, in their own way, to honor and be near it. They liked to stand close to Kathleen and Michael’s unfolding tenderness and wag their heads in approval.

  Too bad this aura of goodwill didn’t extend to everyone at Kindermann Forest. It was fair to say that many of the counselors were beyond its reach. None of the Lonesome Three felt honored during their time at Kindermann Forest. They weren’t entirely surprised when the camp season came to an early end. (To the Lonesome Three it seemed that every night at Kindermann Forest there was something reckless and carnal happening inside the perimeter of the woods. No real surprise that the summer should end in a homicide.) They packed up their things and shared a ride to St. Louis. There they nodded farewell and went back to their respective hometowns. In the fall they returned to college. They were dutiful—if less than popular—students, and after graduation they found entry-level business jobs and became dutiful—if less than popular—employees. They weren’t the type to keep in touch with one another or any of the other Kindermann Forest counselors. At various times in their lives all of the Lonesome Three had short-lived and tepid romantic associations. One of them was married for less than a year. Otherwise the basic ingredients of their lives were very similar: an unremarkable job, a single-bedroom apartment, a pet that was often fickle in its affections. Were the Lonesome Three unhappy? They wouldn’t have said so. Or at least they wouldn’t have claimed to be terribly unhappy. Mostly they felt resentment at never having been welcomed into the fold of office co-workers or college roommates—or, for that matter, fellow camp counselors. The fault for this, they knew, was probably their own. It wasn’t simply a matter of being unattractive; every day they encountered less than attractive people who had wide circles of friends, who had devoted lovers or grateful wives and husbands. No, the problem was a part of who they were. They seemed always to give off a faint but steady signal that kept other people at a distance. There was something within them—a strange disability that had them lurching on the inside—that couldn’t easily be named or diagnosed. It couldn’t be remedied, either. They were lonesome all their lives.

  Kindermann Forest Counselor Wayne Kesterson went to jail for possessing five and a half ounces of homegrown marijuana. This wasn’t an unforeseen event—all summer he’d carried inside him a worming sense of dread—but the terms of his incarceration were swift and startling. The judge decided that Wayne would serve his allotted forty days over the course of sixteen weekends. Weekends? At the sentencing Wayne tried to wrap his mind around this possibility: Monday through Friday he’d be a free-strolling member of society? Weekends he’d be a shuffling prisoner?

  He wasn’t far off the mark. Each Friday at 6:00 P.M. he checked into the St. Louis County Jail, donned an orange jumpsuit, and was placed, along with thirty other drug and alcohol offenders, in an enormous holding cell. Each man found a small portion of the concrete floor to call his own. They ate boloney and cheese sandwiches from paper trays and slept on foldout cots. There was moodiness and bad hygiene, but little outright violence. The minutes of each hour trickled by. Monday at 6:00 A.M. they were set free. It was then, stumbling out into the shrill morning light of the new workweek, that they realized how unfair their punishment was. There was no way to recapture what they’d missed out on over the weekend: the keg parties and dope smoking and courting of drunken women. No good at all to try to reenact these things on a Monday morning. There was no time for it anyway. They had to hurry home, shower, and race off to work.

  For Wayne this meant rushing to St. Matthew’s Catholic Hospital for the start of his 7:30 A.M. shift. His department was housekeeping, his assignment was wielding the large and powerful Tour Master 5200 electric floor polisher. He had plenty of time while buffing the long hospital corridors to reflect on the jail conversations he’d had over the weekend. The boasting. The bullshit. He could review it all in his mind and scoff. Nearly every man in the holding cell had elaborate plans to start a business, to enroll in college, to run for public office. At least Wayne wasn’t trying to make himself look better in the eyes of other weekend prisoners. He was a floor polisher, for Christ’s sake. He wasn’t going to get an advanced degree or rise to the station of hospital director. It was achievement enough to hold down a steady job for a while.

  Or, as it turned out, more than a while. A few years. It wasn’t so bad, really. A floor polisher’s salary was nearly twice that of a burger flipper or grocery store cashier. The benefits were good. In five years he’d saved enough for a down payment on a mobile home. He rented a grassy little lot in a trailer park. At work there was always a flood of young nurses strolling across his floors. He knew most of them by name. Over the years he dated more than a few of these nurses. Several became steady girlfriends. And even after the relationships ran their course he was on friendly enough terms with these nurses to go out for a drink or sell them a little pot now and then. It was only mildly surprising to realize he’d worked at St. Matthew’s for a decade. By then he had a strong hunch he wasn’t going to be a husband or father. That was probably for the best. He didn’t have any strong inclinations to be someone’s spouse or someone’s daddy. He liked to come home and smoke and see what was on TV. Every once in a while he’d do something stupid: get a DWI and, rather than hire a lawyer, give up his driver’s license. Stupid maybe. And a little embarrassing. What else could he do but learn to live with it? He was thirty-three years old, then thirty-five, then thirty-seven. He was the only long-term employee of St. Matthew’s who came to work each morning on the public bus. But once he arrived people seemed glad to see him. Morning, Wayne, they liked to say. He was a fixture at St. Matthew’s. So what if his life’s work was floor polishing? He wasn’t going to walk around feeling ashamed for doing a competent job. And the work itself wasn’t so bad. He could grip the weighty handlebars of the Tour Master 5200 and slip away comfortably inside himself. An hour later he’d surface to find the long hospital corridor behind him gleaming in the light.

  One afternoon in the chilly late winter of 2011, Wayne, on the bus ride home from work, lifted his gaze from a scavenged newspaper and studied one of his fellow passengers—an old man—sitting across the aisle. It was an odd sensation. Just to sit and look at this old man made Wayne fretful—a sharp, insinuating fretfulness. When he got home, he’d have to smoke and drink a stiff Coke and bourbon.

  And then it dawned on him: the old man across the bus aisle was Mr. Stottlemeir. Terrence J. Stottlemeir. Years ago—could it be fifteen years?—at a summer camp called Kindermann Forest, Wayne had cared for Mr. Stottlemeir. He’d been Mr. Stottlemeir’s counselor, though this was a misleading term because, really, the duties he’d performed for Mr. Stottlemeir—the showering and dressing and cleaning up after a bowel movement—had been the duties of a nurse’s aide. For two mostly awful weeks Wayne had suffered in these duties: he’d been screamed at and ridiculed, slapped and cursed.

  But this couldn’t be the same Mr. Stottlemeir. That Mr. Stottlemeir had, in the summer of 1996, been old and impossibly cranky. By now he’d be more than ancient. He’d be dead. Also the Terrence J. Stottlemeir whom Wayne had cared for had been completely out of his mind. He’d had an unnerving habit of ratcheting his head back and forth and opening his crooked mouth. He’d raved. He’d slapped and clawed. Just to feed Mr. Stottlemeir his meals each day they’d had to dress him in a heavily buttoned garment that resembled a straitjacket. The old man sitting now across the bus aisle from Wayne looked to be in full command of his arms and of the taut bearing of his neck and shoulders. He raised two fingers. With a delicate, pinching grip, he adjusted the bridge of his glasses. He was maybe seventy years of age, perh
aps seventy-five. Now and then a potent thought seemed to break the surface of his calm expression, and he furrowed his brow and scribbled a few letters or marks onto a writing tablet balanced on one knee. Then he lifted his pale face to the window and looked out again, thoughtfully, at the passing city blocks.

  A short while later the bus stopped along Olive Road, at the Friendly Village Retirement Home, and the old man rose from his bus seat and along with a half dozen other elderly passengers filed to the front of the bus. Down the steps they went, donning mittens and scarves and treading carefully across the frozen pavement to the gated entranceway of the Friendly Village.

  It was, for Wayne, an unsettling encounter, deeply so. For several days he couldn’t think of anything else. It couldn’t possibly have been Mr. Stottlemeir. And yet there was a quality to the old man’s face, a refinement, a princeliness, that couldn’t belong to anyone else. It was god damn unnerving. And the usual remedies—the smoking and watching of his favorite TV shows—did little to settle Wayne down. In the middle of the night it dawned on him: Mr. Stottlemeir hadn’t been elderly in 1996. He’d been late middle-aged—fifty-five or sixty years old.

  At work Wayne talked about the encounter to anyone who’d listen: his fellow floor polishers, the kitchen staff. He talked about the man who might have been Mr. Stottlemeir to the nurses of St. Matthew’s. This turned out to be a wise tactic. Nurses knew things. They knew other nurses. For example, the nurses at St. Matthew’s knew several nurses at the Friendly Village Retirement Home. The St. Matthew’s nurses, stirred by Wayne’s distress, called the Friendly Village Retirement Home and made an inquiry.

  The old man on the bus was Terrence J. Stottlemeir. He was seventy-two years old. He’d been a long-term resident of the state hospital in Farmington. Six years ago an eager doctor at the state hospital had tried a series of new prescription medications on Mr. Stottlemeir. The first two medicines did nothing. The third one changed everything. In a matter of days Mr. Stottlemeir went from cursing and flailing his arms to padding along the state hospital corridors and studying, patiently, the framed prints of horse pastures and forest cottages. At the nurses’ station he made a polite request for butterscotch pudding. More impressive, he could use the toilet on his own. He could feed himself. The things he said were mostly lucid and reasonable. It was clear to his attendants that Mr. Stottlemeir no longer required the services of a locked-down institution. Still though, he had to suffer confinement in the state hospital for two more years, until a diligent caseworker was able to secure for Mr. Stottlemeir a change of status: from ward of the state to Medicaid patient. He ended up at the Friendly Village Retirement Home, a stroke of real luck, since the home was new and staffed with well-paid and conscientious nurses. The food at the Friendly Village was said to be varied and delicious. He took advantage of the home’s flower arranging and Jazzercise classes. On Fridays he went by bus with a group of other Friendly Village residents to the botanical garden to make pencil sketches of the acclaimed orchid collection.