by Oliver, Tess
He surveyed the yard and headed straight for me. “Shit.”
Lawson turned his squarish shaped head back to make sure no one was around. Then he returned his beady eyes to me. He motioned toward the cigarette. “Jameson, you know there’s no smoking allowed at this facility.”
“So I’ve heard.” I stuck the cigarette in between my lips and sucked hard. Long fingers of white smoke reached out and circled his wide face.
He fanned it away with his hand. His mouth pulled tight with rage. “Look, what you saw in there—”
“It’s not going to happen again.”
His mouth dropped open, and now, he looked even dumber. “What?”
“It’s over. You’re not going to touch her again.” I took another hit.
He pushed his thin lips up into an ugly grin. “Technically, she was touching me. And it was fucking nice.” The asshole knew he was stabbing me with each word, but I kept my cool. He wasn’t worth getting my ass arrested.
I tossed down the cigarette and smashed it with my shoe against the black rubber mat. “You like your job, Lawson?”
He lifted his finger to my face, but my expression made him lower his hand. “Look, you coke snorting little rich boy, don’t be threatening me. You walked into the controlled substance closet. Don’t know how you got in, but that alone can get you kicked out of here.”
“So?” I said. “I’ll just be going back to my coke snorting, rich boy life. You’ll be out of a fucking job. Here’s the deal, Lawson. We both keep our mouths shut. You keep your fucking paws off of Sugar, and if you yank that dick of yours out in front of her again, I will twist it into a fucking pretzel. Oh, and I like Camels best.”
Dumbness turned to confusion. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“I like Camels. Two packs a week should do and then you can keep your job.” I brushed past him, wanting badly to clash shoulders with him but deciding against it.
I could still see the dumbstruck goober’s reflection in the front window of the building as I walked inside.
Chapter 3
Sugar stacked the watermelon rinds in a curved tower on her plate. She had skipped the sandwiches and filled her plate with the fruit.
“Guess you really were looking forward to watermelon,” I said.
Her lips were watermelon red, and, no doubt, watermelon sweet too. “A good piece of watermelon is like a thousand dollar bottle of wine. Rich and fruity and delicious. Not that I’ve ever tasted a thousand dollar bottle of wine, but that’s how my uncle, the one with the California winery, describes it.”
I avoided the topic of my conversation with Lawson while she gnawed away like the cutest little rabbit on her fruit. Mandy, one of the patients, or residents as doctors and nurses like to call us as if we were all part of a big, fun neighborhood, had been sitting nearby. She was someone who was always completely preoccupied with herself. She’d been in a few movies, ones I’d seen but I couldn’t remember her in any of them. Apparently, she didn’t make a big impression on screen. Off screen, she was pretty and confident and thought highly of herself because she’d been in movies. Here, at Green Willow, she faded into the pale green walls, a nobody, like the rest of us. Only Sugar didn’t fade. And it seemed Mandy had developed a healthy dose of disdain for her because of it. After picking at her sandwich for a few more minutes, Mandy got up and left.
Aside from two nurses taking a lunch break on the opposite side of the room, the dining area was empty. I looked over at Sugar. She licked the tip of one finger, which stopped me cold for a second. This was a purposeful tease. Once I recovered, I figured it was time to confess. “Lawson and I had a little talk. He’s bringing me cigarettes, free of charge. So, you can keep your hands and whatever else to yourself.”
Sugar slumped back against the chair and stared at me for a long moment. “I already told you, Mr. Center of the Universe, I was getting a joint for Peggy. So, fuck off and don’t tell me what to do.”
Now it was my turn to stare hard at her. She didn’t flinch. I wanted to respond, but the truth was, she was right. I had no say in anything she did. My tongue was already twisting up, and I knew that if I opened my mouth to speak, the words would get stuck. I stayed silent.
The cold glare Sugar had produced especially for me, softened as she looked over my shoulder. She smiled, but it wasn’t for me.
“Hey, Jules, you didn’t eat lunch,” she said cheerily as if we hadn’t just been sitting in a block of ice.
Julian headed straight toward our table. Like a horse with blinders on, he rarely noticed anything that was happening beyond his line of vision. His blue eyes, blond hair, boy next door features and sinewy build made him seem like the kind of guy girls would go nuts for, but his complexion was bleached white from lack of sunlight and he wasn’t exactly the type who could charm a girl out of her panties, or anything else for that matter.
He had his favorite blue cap pulled down low on his head, the one that had been autographed by some famous mountain climber, a French sounding name I could never remember. He had a lot of caps, kind of an obsession of his along with the mountain climbing thing. But this cap was the one he always wore. Besides Dr. Kirkendall, Sugar and I were two of the only people he talked to. He looked amped up about something. It was weird, Julian always looked like he was ready to jump out of his skin, and at the same time, you got the feeling that the guy had a complete cerebral understanding of the universe.
He ignored Sugar’s comment about lunch. Besides blinders, sometimes the guy had in imaginary earplugs too, like he could just drop himself into a Helen Keller world and turn off all his senses and be completely alone with his big brain, his massive fucking brain.
He leaned over the table. Rock climbing chalk was smeared on his forearm. “I want to show you two something. Come by my place if you’re finished.” My place, the guy always referred to his room as ‘my place’ like it was his home or something, which I guess it sort of was. He told me once that he’d always had much greater respect for his grandfather, old man Fitzpatrick, his paternal grandfather, than for his own dad. Maybe being here kept Julian closer to the man he loved and further from the man he wasn’t so crazy about.
Sugar stood up. “Wait, I’ll walk back with you, Jules.” She showed him her plate of watermelon rinds. “You missed out.” But Julian had something on his mind, so food didn’t matter. As they walked out, Sugar dropped her arm around his shoulder. Julian stiffened at first. If it had been anyone else, anyone but Sugar, he would have pushed the arm away. Physical contact wasn’t something Julian was into, or maybe I was wrong and maybe secretly the guy craved it. Maybe he secretly enjoyed it. It was Sugar, after all, and a guy would have to be fucking nuts not to crave her touch. Maybe, just maybe, beneath the strange, uneasy exterior, Julian wasn’t all that nuts.
I tossed the last half of my sandwich and headed down the hallway to Julian’s place. Three fast knocks and two slow ones. That was the knocking pattern Julian had devised for Sugar and me. That way, he knew it was us. I could hear Sugar’s voice through the door as she came to open it.
Her blue eyes smiled. She was through being pissed. “Tommy, nice of you to drop by.” It was like that with Sugar and me. One minute, anger would put a wall up between us, and the next minute, everything was chill. And in between our mutual mood swings, I never stopped thinking about her.
Being the grandson of the man the building was named after had its perks. While the rest of us had plain, peach colored walls adorned with pleasant paintings of the ocean and flowery meadows, Julian’s walls were dotted with fake rocks. An entire rock climbing wall had been constructed from one side to the next. On the wall over his bed, he had pinned up his collection of hats, every color in the rainbow and then some.
Since the ceilings were only nine feet high, Julian did most of his climbing across instead of up. He’
d calculated that the distance from the starting point rock to the final rock on the adjacent wall was sixteen feet of mountain. Hanging on the wall at the end of the rocks was a whiteboard where Julian kept track of the distance he climbed. His goal was the highest point in the United States, Mount McKinley, at just over twenty thousand feet. Today’s total had been scribbled hastily in blue marker— eight thousand, thirty-five feet, and he’d calculated that to miles, which was one of those long decimal numbers.
Julian stared wide eyed at me. “Did anyone follow you?”
I glanced back at the closed door and held down a smile. “Uh, don’t think so, Jules. Just me.” Julian’s paranoia was not new to me, but sometimes, it was hard not to find it humorous. Sugar caught the sarcasm in my tone and scolded me with a silent scowl. Julian hadn’t caught it. He was leaning over his computer clicking away fiendishly like some mad doctor working hard to bring his creature to life. The guy swung easily from manic to depressed, but he swore they couldn’t pin the bipolar label on him because he had too many other symptoms that just didn’t fit the mold. One thing was for sure, they gave the guy a lot of prescribed drugs to tame whatever demons were bothering him. Sometimes, if I ran into him in the morning, he seemed as heavily drugged as a horse getting readied for castration, like my grandfather’s stallion. My mom and I had driven to his ranch, and as we pulled up to the barn, Grandpa’s gray stallion, Rebel, was stretched out on the dirt with its legs splayed apart like a rubber horse and there was blood everywhere. ‘I-i-is the horse dead’, I’d asked my mom. The scene had me upset enough to stutter out the question. Mom shook her head and considered her words carefully. ‘No, Thomas, they’re just castrating him to make him nicer.’ I hadn’t understood the word castrating at first, but later, that night my grandfather laid it out in simpler terms. ‘Tommy, cutting off a horse’s balls takes the dragon out of him. Now ole Rebel will be just like a puppy dog when you go out to visit him in the pasture’. I nearly puked, thinking about how much it must have hurt Rebel, and I couldn’t figure out why anyone would rather have a puppy than a dragon.
“All right, this is it.” Julian raised his finger over the keyboard as if he was the president about to press the button in the nuclear football. His finger went down. Sugar and I braced ourselves as if the roof might lift off. There was a sucking sound and then quiet, pure quiet.
Sugar lifted a brow at me. I shrugged.
“Jules, what happened?” she asked.
Julian peered up at us from the blue shade of his hat. “Did you hear that?”
“Yeah,” I said. “It was sort of an anti-sound, like a whole bunch of refrigerators going off at once.”
“Right.” Julian lifted a long finger into the air. “Listen.”
I tried hard to listen, to hear something, and all the while wondering if he was losing it.
Sugar heard it first. She walked to the door and pressed her ear against it. “Lots of frenzied conversation and hurried footsteps.” She looked over at Julian. “It’s the staff. They sound sort of panicked.”
Julian nodded. “Yes, I would imagine they are. I just rendered the entire security system, gates and all, completely useless.” The voices grew louder. “No reason to cause full chaos.” He tapped his keyboard, and the buzz that had fallen silent, started up again. Voices and activity in the hallway slowly returned to normal.
“Dude.” I held out my fist for Julian. Fist bumping was one of the human contact gestures I’d taught him, but he wasn’t always in the mood to return it. Apparently, this occasion called for it. He lifted his fist and awkwardly tapped mine. “You said you were working on something big. You weren’t kidding.” The doctors and nurses liked to pretend and give the illusion that we weren’t locked in this place, but the circus of activity Julian’s little push of the atomic button had caused negated all their silly attempts. The truth was, some of us, like Sugar and me, were here because a judge had told us to sober up or do time. Julian was one of those few residents who’d walked himself through the doors voluntarily.
Julian shut his laptop. “Thought I could do it.” And that was all he needed. He had no use for this major accomplishment, but he’d proved to himself he could do it and that was that.
Chapter 4
“Tommy, the group meeting room is the other direction.” The hallway light glinted off the row of tiny gold hoops that lined Dr. Kirkendall’s ear. That ear always caught my attention. She was a neatly put together, all-business type of woman, mid thirties, nice little bod and always dressed in a crisp suit. She was like one of those girls in high school, who was the president of every club. Not the snowboarding and cheer club, but the brainy clubs like debate and chess. That one daring ear with all the tiny hoops looked as if she’d taken it off another person and stuck it on her own head. I liked that ear. The rest of the woman, I wasn’t too crazy about. Mostly because she wanted to get into my head . . . badly. And I didn’t want her in there.
“Yeah, thanks for the directions, Doc, but I’ve got to go to the can first.”
“But you are coming to group, right?”
“Uh, yeah, guess it depends on how things go in there. A lot of different ways a whiz can go, you know?”
She sighed. The tiny hoops twinkled and relaxed with her exasperated release of breath. It was obvious a lecture was coming next. “Look, Tommy, if we don’t— if you don’t make any progress, which means coming to group and coming to your one-on-one sessions, then I can’t, in good conscience, sign you out of here.”
“Not asking you to do anything against your good conscience. I just don’t think those groups do anything for me. Don’t really want to hang out and shoot the breeze with any one of those people.”
“Sugar will be there. She doesn’t always participate, but she shows up.”
“Good for her.” I said it with confidence as if my obsession with Sugar wasn’t out there in the open for everyone to see and know about.
“Maybe you don’t want out of this place,” Kirkendall suggested lamely.
“Yep, that’s it. Congratulations. After all the digging, you finally got into my brain. I just love being here in this Lysol scented, watery green, boring as fuck hell hole. You got me.”
I had to hand it to her. Even when I was acting like a rude sonavabitch, she kept her cool. The only glimmer of her being pissed off was that those gold hoops would ripple along her earlobe for a second as she discretely tightened her jaw.
“I’ll save you a seat,” she said. “Don’t be late.”
“Right, wouldn’t want to miss one riveting minute.” I turned to walk away and took a bad step.
“Tommy, is your leg bothering you?”
“Nope, it’s fine.” My leg had been the first clue that I had an addictive personality. I’d broken my femur at the age of sixteen when I crashed my dirt bike into a very non-forgiving hill. The pain pills had been the only thing to get me through the day. And I’d had a helluva time giving them up, even going so far as to pretend I was still in massive pain when I wasn’t. Not that a compound fracture of the femur didn’t hurt like hell. It was like holding your leg under a jackhammer. The pain was almost as bad as having to sit through one of Kirkendall’s group sessions.
Dr. Kirkendall was passing out little notepads and pencils as I stepped into the room. Everyone looked up. Sugar flashed me a smile that was one of those secret, only for me, smiles. I lived for those damn smiles. She knew how much I hated these sessions. Her hair was down, and one stray strand was curled up around her chin, pointing her lips out to me. As if they needed pointing out.
I made a beeline for the pink box of donuts sitting on a table. A chocolate donut could help alleviate some of the misery of a group session. Donut in hand, I plunked down on the empty chair, two seats away from Sugar and directly across from Doctor Kirkendall. Mandy, the self-proclaimed starlet, and Harold, the crossword whiz, w
ere on each side of her. Sitting next to Mandy was Pete, a forty something business man who was recovering from a nervous breakdown, among other things. Jayleen, a thirty plus, nail biter who was heiress to a hamburger chain fortune was in the chair between Sugar and me. Peggy, the woman who Sugar had gotten the weed for, had her sweater wrapped around her as if the room was cold. She kept mostly to herself, I’d noticed. She had awesome copper colored hair and a permanent frown, a permanent look of sadness that made it hard to judge her age. Julian never came to group sessions. While the rest of us had one-on-one sessions twice a week, Julian attended them every day. Apparently, he was just a little too screwed up to attend group.
I slumped back and stretched my long legs out in front of me before taking a large bite of my donut. My unexpected arrival seemed to have stirred up a bit of tension. Everyone was watching me as I chewed and swallowed the bite of donut. Dr. Kirkendall held up a notepad. I shook my head. Couldn’t imagine what type of notes or reflections I’d be scribbling down in the middle of this silly group.
Kirkendall dropped the notepad in her lap on top of her pink clipboard. Someone, maybe even the doctor herself, had taken time, time that was lost forever, to paint yellow daisies on the clipboard. It was where she kept ‘little notes, interesting anecdotes’ she’d once told me when I’d asked her what she had under the big silver clip.
She flashed a satisfied grin at the group. “Nice turnout today, everyone. I hope you are all ready to share some things, reflections, concerns, ideas. Remember, this is a time for you to get things off your chest without being judged.” For some reason she felt the need to throw an admonishing glance my way, thus judging me before I’d even opened my mouth.