“You better hurry,” Loochie said.
Pepper crouched on the desk, holding the receiver to one ear. He cupped his free ear with his other hand to drown out the banging at the door.
A dial tone.
Ringing.
A woman’s voice answered.
“Hello?” the woman said.
“Do you have a sister named Xiu?”
This time, Pepper pronounced her name perfectly.
A long pause, then, “Yes.”
“Would you like to save her?” he asked.
Xiu’s sister, Yun, cried on the phone. At first, it sounded like she was sneezing. Pepper didn’t interrupt right way, even though he was in a hurry. She asked him to explain so he did—quickly—and Yun was relieved. At first she’d assumed Pepper had kidnapped her sister. (It happens.) Pepper told her about the judge in Florida, Sue’s stay in immigration jail and the denial of her medication, her escape, her recapture in New York, her stay at New Hyde Hospital, and then being pulled out of Northwest yesterday. Every few seconds, Yun muttered to herself quietly, using her little sister’s pet name, saying, “My girl, oh, my poor A-Xiu.” When Pepper had told Yun everything, she said she must hurry and she hung up immediately. Didn’t even say good-bye. Pepper understood.
He set the receiver back down in its cradle.
Sure, one could wonder if Yun would be able to find help for her sister in time. First step would be to find a lawyer. A lawyer in California? (Where Yun lived.) One in Florida? (Where Sue had been sentenced.) Or one in New York? (Where she had most recently been held.)
And this would have to be a lawyer who was willing to work for nothing because Yun was a cashier at an Albertsons supermarket in Oakland.
Then that lawyer would have to contact the courts in time.
File the proper paperwork to delay the extradition.
Head down to Florida and petition the court for Xiu’s release. (Or would it be handled in a New York court?)
The lawyer might propose that Xiu be released into Yun’s custody so the two could return to Oakland. But what if they had to appear before the same petty dictator who’d sentenced Xiu to deportation? How likely was it that such an unreasonable prick would be reasonable now? (Although bullies like that usually act a whole lot nicer when the bullied person has retained counsel. Probably just a coincidence.) But even with a (free) lawyer, that judge would still have to turn over his original order. Or another judge would have to contest the Florida ruling.
There were so many steps to Xiu’s rescue. Even with Pepper’s phone call, there were a dozen more chances for it to fail.
But if two mental patients at New Hyde Hospital could commandeer a doctor’s office and dial out while police tried battering down the door and if they actually reached the right person using a phone number that a third mental patient pulled out of his ass (or from the vast Internet computer cloud with his brain), if all those steps worked out, well, shit, maybe the others would, too. It could happen. They’d just have to practice patience now. Take the long view. Success is airmail, not email.
Loochie looked back at Pepper when he hung up. Though her body rattled as she held the door, her face burned with pyrotechnic brightness.
Pepper looked as luminous as Loochie just then. Maybe it was the sunlight streaming through the office windows, but for a moment, the man’s aura glowed a triumphal red.
Pepper hung up the phone and told Loochie she could let them in. She kept her shoulder to the door for a minute more. She hadn’t barred the way just for Pepper’s sake.
Loochie didn’t know the Chinese Lady, so it wasn’t for her, either. She’d be the last to admit it, but this whole time she’d been picturing her mother and brother on the other side of that door. Loochie held it closed for that last minute.
Then she stepped back and pulled the chair away.
Loochie felt disappointed when the door opened and the cop and Dr. Anand didn’t fall into the room. She’d been hoping they’d spill across the floor, a little slapstick for the midday show. Instead, the door banged open and the two men stood there, huffing and glaring. Behind them stood two more officers in plain clothes, concerned but confused.
Funniest part? The pair in the second row were two of the three officers who’d brought Pepper to New Hyde. Huey and Louie. Pepper felt a shock because he hadn’t really expected them to come back for him. Yet here they were. Was it finally time for him to go before a judge? Receive his sentence? Huey and Pepper locked eyes and Pepper waited for some reaction.
Zero recognition.
Louie looked at Pepper and his demeanor was the same. Blank. Nothing.
“Where’s Dewey?” Pepper asked. He didn’t mean to say it, the words just came out. Of course, he regretted it—it was like he was trying to remind them who he was.
The question sounded completely random, nutty, so they ignored Pepper. (Dewey was actually back in the parking lot, waiting in the Dodge Charger. He’d refused to come inside the building, no matter what.)
“We done here?” Huey asked the cop in the uniform. It clearly galled the detective to have to ask the patrolman anything.
“Sorry,” said the pudgy one. He barked the same question to Dr. Anand. “We done?”
Dr. Anand stormed inside. He found Pepper sitting again, but remained suspicious. He checked his desk, every drawer. He checked the file cabinets in the corner. What had they been doing in here? What had been taken? What had been defiled? To Pepper’s great satisfaction Dr. Anand never even peeked at the telephone.
Dr. Anand surveyed his desk a second time. He noticed Pepper’s big boot print on the papers. But what did that prove? That Pepper had been stomping on his desktop? In a way, this actually calmed the doctor. They’d just been acting out, venting. A pair of monkeys who’d gotten loose. And, in a way, it had been the doctor’s fault. Samuel Anand chastised himself. He never should’ve left them alone. He’d spoken much too freely, feeling frazzled and forgetting himself, and that had led him to be lax. He must always be wary. He looked at Pepper, and then at Loochie, who had taken her seat again, too. The four cops crowded the doorway.
“You did something,” Dr. Anand said to them.
Loochie said, “We washed the floors for you, Dr. Sam.”
And do you know the four cops actually peeked at the tiles? All four. (Oh, if only Loochie had seen them do it. She would’ve grinned for a week.)
Huey nudged the patrolman.
“We got this other thing here,” the doughy cop said. Then jerked his head down the hallway. Meaning the reason they’d been called in. Because Dorry’s neck had snapped. Over in the smokers’ court. Where the old woman’s blood soaked the concrete.
Dr. Anand gave Loochie and Pepper the once-over. “You can go back to your rooms,” he said. “We’ll decide what to do with you later.”
“After the cops are gone,” Loochie said quietly.
“Yes,” Dr. Anand said. “Once we have you to ourselves again.”
Pepper and Loochie looked at the pudgy cop.
“You heard that?” Pepper asked. “He’s threatening us.”
The cop rubbed his shirtsleeve across his sweaty forehead and said, “Probably.” Then he and the other officers left the room.
Dr. Anand stooped forward, resting his knuckles on the desk. “Was it worth it?” he asked. “Are you going to keep causing me trouble?”
Pepper felt himself flush with honesty. He couldn’t lie.
And, “Yes,” he said, “yes. I will. Yes.”
35
AFTER PEPPER AND Loochie left Dr. Anand’s office, the doctor made a phone call to a member of New Hyde Hospital’s board of directors. He’d been dreading this moment since he got the call about Dorry. He stood while he talked. He wondered if they would finally fire him. He didn’t think he’d mind.
Pepper and Loochie entered the hall and walked toward the nurses’ station. As they entered the oval room, they saw patients scuttling all over. The unit was abuzz.
&
nbsp; The sounds of running showers could be heard from Northwest 2 and 3. The rumbling of dresser drawers in people’s rooms sounded like bowling balls rolling down multiple lanes. Then the drawers slammed shut and it sounded as if every patient had just hit a strike.
Loochie and Pepper reached the nurses’ station. Miss Chris sat in front of the computer; only a very short stack of paper files on the desk. Miss Chris wore a pair of glasses down near the tip of her nose, and she tilted her head backward to see through them. Pepper and Loochie leaned against the high counter of the station.
“What’s going on?” Pepper asked.
“Is someone else dead?” Loochie asked.
Miss Chris sucked her teeth to dismiss Loochie’s question. She looked up at them, over the top of her glasses. “You’re leaving,” she said.
Pepper gestured to him and Loochie. “The two of us?”
The nurse frowned. “All of you.”
“Leaving where?” Loochie asked.
“We’re taking you out. So the police can work without any nonsense.”
Loochie and Pepper recoiled at the suggestion. It was the sound of that sentence: You’re leaving. It’s what Pepper and Loochie wanted, of course, but they both realized they were a little scared by the idea. They’d been to the courtyard but now they were being promised the mountaintop. Outside. Pepper had only been here for three months, Loochie for ten, but already both had kind of forgotten what outside really meant. Right now it sounded like sudden peace at the end of a long and delirious war. The thing everyone had been hoping for even as they stopped believing the day would ever come.
Loochie’s mouth went dry. “Where are we going?”
Pepper leaned almost over the nurses’ station counter, as if pulled by some magnetic force. His lips parted with muted surprise.
Miss Chris took some pleasure in keeping the answer to herself. “You’ll see,” she said. “Soon, soon.”
So many of the patients were showering that there wasn’t even any hot water by the time Loochie and Pepper reached their rooms. That didn’t stop either of them. It didn’t matter how frigid the water temperature, the thrill of stepping outside had started a fire inside. Curiosity fed the furnace. They each had a core temperature of 180 just then. If those showers were cold, they barely noticed.
Those patients who hadn’t worn their outside clothes in years, yes years, pulled them on no matter how tight or semi-tattered or out of style. Women and men brushed or combed or picked their hair. Pepper even tried to get the crinkles out of his shirt by rubbing it back and forth against the edge of his door, working the wood like he held a saw.
He must’ve really been putting some energy into smoothing his shirt. The door vibrated, causing some of the ceiling tiles to bump and shake. The tile with the stain, which had never been changed, even sprinkled a handful of flakes to the floor. The sight of the ceiling cracking caused such a visceral panic in Pepper that he dropped his shirt and jumped into the hallway shirtless and shaking. He stood there watching the ceiling, expecting a monster to come crashing down.
Pepper was shaken out of his trance when Mr. Mack stuck his head out of his room, saw Pepper, and shouted, “Nobody wants to see your pasty chest!”
Pepper ignored the insult (after all, Sue had liked it) and walked back into the room, to the ceiling tile. There were dozens of tiny cracks running from the stain, in the middle now. Pepper doubted this part of the ceiling was strong enough to hold much of anything anymore. A weak spot. Still Pepper found himself crouching slightly as he put on his shirt and left the room.
Scotch Tape stood at the secure door and tried to temper the patients’ enthusiasm. “Relax, everybody,” he told them more than once as they lined up in front of him. “It’s just, like, six blocks.” As if they would be disappointed. But he couldn’t understand. Scotch Tape walked eight blocks at the end of each shift and waited for the Q46. That bus took him to the Q30 and then he transferred one more time for the Q9. All this so he could get to Jamaica, Queens, where he then got on the J train and traveled home to Brooklyn. A ninety-minute commute. Sometimes longer with transit-system delays. He’d been working at New Hyde for three years. Making that commute five, and sometimes six, days a week. So this little trip of six blocks … to him, meant hardly anything.
The patients gathered at the door and Scotch Tape waited. He kept peeking out the plastic windowpane as if he were expecting company to appear on the other side, an armed escort maybe. That’s how some of the patients read his gesture, but of course some of them were clinically paranoid. Really Scotch Tape kept looking out the front door as an excuse to avoid the patients’ gazes, their conversations. The ones who got there first looked to him like dogs do to their masters. Let us out! Open up! He was already exhausted by their undisguised need. But finally they had all arrived. “Ready?” he asked.
“We’ve been ready!” Doris Roberts shouted playfully. She had even done her hair after borrowing Sandra Day O’Connor’s brush.
The other patients stared at the door. Let us out. Open up! Pepper and Loochie were the last patients on line. Loochie had decided against wearing the towel wrapped around her noggin. Instead she’d returned to the blue knit cap. She’d removed the strings that once held the pom-poms. Nurse Washburn and a second nurse were behind them. The patients stood in pairs, like schoolchildren.
Scotch Tape unlocked the secure door. That click barely audible over the twelve patients’ heartbeats. He held the door open.
“Come on now,” he said to Mr. Mack and Frank Waverly, the first two in line. Their old sport coats were so crisp they looked steamed. (An easy trick if you run a hot shower and hang the coat inside the bathroom.)
“Don’t rush me,” Mr. Mack told him.
Scotch Tape nodded and waited, exasperated and respectful. Mr. Mack reached up and tried to close the buttons of his coat before moving. But his fingers were trembling so fast they damn near blurred. He had trouble getting the first button through its hole so Frank Waverly tried to help by reaching for Mr. Mack’s coat. But the littler man slapped Frank Waverly’s help away. Leaving Mr. Mack to wrestle with the fabric a little more. Frank Waverly got bored and walked out of the unit without him. The rest filed around him, too.
Mr. Mack was the last patient to go. His sport coat still unbuttoned.
The group passed through the secure ward door and into the hallway. The fluorescent lights above them cast the same old sickly yellow glow, but the lavender walls were a welcome change.
They walked through the empty lobby with its cheap chairs and sofas. These didn’t look any better just because they were on this side.
But then the group reached the double doors that led to the parking lot. Scotch Tape opened one door and the sunlight came in. Somehow this sunlight seemed different from the stuff that reached the smokers’ court. There, the light looked like melted margarine. But out here? You know.
Like butter.
Twelve patients stepped outside and proceeded to act the fool. They squinted up at the sun and covered their eyes with their hands. They sniffed the air theatrically. Some hummed. One yipped at such a high pitch it sounded like a birdcall. They wiped their hands over their faces as if they’d just lifted their heads out of a pool. It was the middle of April, and a wonderfully pleasant day. A strong wind played among the trees and some folks shut their eyes, just listening to the quivering leaves.
Shhhhhhh
Shhhhhhh
Shhhhhhh
“That’s nice,” Loochie said.
Pepper gazed at her and wondered if he looked as happy as she did. He hoped so.
Loochie opened one eye. “I thought someone was watching me.”
“You’re just being paranoid,” Pepper said.
She shut her eye, breathed deep once more. “That’s what the doctors tell me.”
“They have pills for that,” Pepper said.
Loochie laughed with him. The other patients seemed to be having their own reveries. Even Mr. Mack was f
eeling better out here. With his eyes shut, he found the top button of his sport coat. With steady hands he slipped it through the corresponding hole in one try.
“Everybody ready to walk?” Nurse Washburn asked.
Scotch Tape raised one hand at the front of the group. “Let’s go.”
They took the six blocks slowly. Some of them, like Pepper and Loochie, could probably have done with a faster pace but others, like Mr. Mack and Frank Waverly, the Haint, and Sandra Day O’Connor, had more gingerly strides. This wasn’t just the fault of old age or medication. The sidewalks around here were also a mess. On every block, there were a few trees whose roots had finally cracked through the concrete surface, causing the sidewalk panels to buckle and occasionally shatter. Neighborhood joggers didn’t bother running on those sidewalks because it was double hell on the knees. Joggers, bike riders, even folks out walking their dogs tended to move in the street. The only people limber enough to risk the sidewalks were neighborhood children, who found all the dips and rises kind of fun. The staff wouldn’t let the patients walk in the road, even though everyone could tell it was the commonsense choice. What if one of them got smashed by a passing van? All three staff members would lose their jobs for that one. Not to mention the tragedy of someone getting smashed by a van. (But really, the fear of losing a decent-paying job in 2011 could not be overstated.) So if the older patients, or the dazed patients, or the morbidly obese patients took their time to move six blocks, well, no one felt too angry with them.
People from the neighborhood watched the group go by. An old woman dragging her garbage bin out from the side of her house or a middle-aged couple returning home from the grocery store. They didn’t throw eggs or stones. No pitchforks and torches.
Mostly, the neighbors just watched them, as you would any time a parade made its way down your street. The neighbors watched intently but refused to admit it. They did this strange move where they ducked their heads as the patients passed, looking at the sidewalk or their front lawns or their garbage bins, always toward the ground. But anyone could clearly see the eyes shifting up to gawk.
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