Above

by Leah Bobet

  I shift my feet. I try to slide my wrapped-up hands in my pockets, but the bandage catches and I take them out again. “Doctor Marybeth,” I ask, thick and feeling worse for the asking, for the knowing, for everything. “Did you get the other file?”

  She pauses. Her mouth crimps. “Bring me my bag.”

  When I asked for the file, Doctor Marybeth put me questions, like she was the Teller and I had the Tale. She asked me the day and time of Ariel’s finding, the color of the clothes and shoes she wore. She bade me draw the letters and pictures on the bracelet I cut dirty from her wrist and explained them to me: numbers, family name. Initial. “I’ll see,” she said, tucking the paper deep away, “what I can do.”

  Doctor Marybeth is as good as her word. She peels open a side pocket on her bag with careful fingers. Pulls out, brighter and less creased, another copied-out file. “Let’s take this outside,” she says, a glance over the shoulder, and opens the back door for me.

  We pace out onto the lawn and sit down, cross-legged. She reaches over. Puts it into my hands.

  “You found where she was,” I say, simple, ’cause putting all I feel into something complicated would tangle it up, draw the knot, and choke me blue and hushed before morning. The file is stiff and tidy. It doesn’t feel half as wicked as the wicked I know’s inside.

  “I did,” she says grave. “Queen Street Mental Health.” A pause. “The inpatient facility.”

  I can’t hear for the dead quiet in me. Plastic bracelets and Whitecoat words. Isolation bunks. Needles.

  I knew it all along, and I didn’t want to know it.

  “That’s like Lakeshore, isn’t it,” I say, voice shadowed from that choke-thing in my throat.

  Doctor Marybeth opens her mouth, then closes it, and I can see the spark of her looking to argue that they don’t do things like that no more. “That’s like Lakeshore,” she says finally, and shuts her mouth tight.

  To hell with the Tales people should tell for themselves. I open the file.

  “Tell me what this word means?” I say after a moment. She looks to where my finger’s pointing and tells me. She tells me that and the next and all of them and holds my hand, tight between both of hers like I’m her little kid. And maybe I am, since she brought me out from my mama’s dark into lighter dark with her own two hands years past and long ago.

  She holds it while I read Ariel’s file, and she don’t let go.

  There’s a name for what she is. It’s nothing to do with bee’s-wing, and it’s only part to do with the hurt other people laid down on her in the Tale I built in my head where it could all be fixed with loving. It’s many-lettered like all Whitecoat words. And from Doctor Marybeth’s face, the care she takes to talk gentle and hold my hand loose so I can draw it away, I can tell she thinks it’s so.

  “It’s not true,” I say, faintly, like someone who’s been long Sick themself. “It’s just that people hurt her.”

  “I think people hurt her,” Doctor Marybeth says, careful and soft, her eyes nothing but a slow concern. Doctor-face. Doctor-voice. “But I don’t think it’s just that.”

  The file says hearing things. It says seeing things. It says raging, and fear, and not knowing all the time what’s true.

  “What do they do?” I say when I’ve finished the part called diagnosis, past the weight in my throat, the knot drawn thinner that makes it hard to talk.

  “Therapy,” she says. “Medicine to keep them from hurting themselves. Special houses, sometimes, with people who know how to talk the right way.” A stop, a stutter even someone not trained as Teller would hear. “Sometimes electroconvulsive therapy.”

  “What’s that mean?” I ask, head coming up.

  “Electricity,” she says, smaller. “Shocks.”

  “Like Jack,” I whisper. “Like Jack taking your hand all the time.”

  Her face closes in for a minute. I wonder how many times she’s taken hold of Jack’s hand.

  “Nobody should do that to my Ariel,” I whisper. “I’d kill them.” Forgetting for just a second, and then the flush comes slow up my cheeks.

  Doctor Marybeth doesn’t say no you wouldn’t or don’t be silly or think I’m fooling ’round. She looks at me very slow and grave and says: “That wouldn’t help you nor your little girl.”

  “She’s just as old as me,” I say faint, defensive; so used to defending.

  “Older,” Doctor Marybeth says. “But some people stay young longer,” and I got nothing to say to that.

  I read on. I read treatment, and I wish to everything I hadn’t.

  “Why do people do this?” I ask her at the end, when I have to put it away so my tears don’t spot the page.

  “They just wanted to help her be normal,” she says, simple, and cups her hands together, holding on to her own private impossibilities.

  I cry it out. Doctor Marybeth lets me, is so gentle and tiptoe and kind that the red hatred comes up and I have to sit still, breathe slow once I can breathe without hitching, to let it down to where I feel nothing at all. The tree-shadows move across the yard. A black squirrel follows one, tail twitching and rustling like it’s worse than Sick. I tighten my hands up and try not to think.

  “What’re you gonna do?” Doctor Marybeth asks eventually.

  Burn that file, I think, but no. Burning won’t stop the Sick that lives in my Ariel’s heart. “I don’t know,” I say, knowing I’m nothing but an echo, a shadow of the boy who begged to buy Ariel a peach. “Talk to her.” If she lets me. “Help her. Try to make her Safe.”

  It comes out like the rattle of empty cans.

  “Matthew,” Doctor Marybeth says, clear and distinct, and I turn to look at her already before she takes my face in her hands. “Promise me something.”

  “What?” I whisper, surprised at her touch. It doesn’t chill like shadows but feels warm and regular as always, warm like someone vital, living.

  “Before you decide a thing more with your Ariel, you talk to me. And if she can’t find her way in Safe, let me take her somewhere she can get well.” She lifts her hands off my face and raises one before I can say a word. Her eyes are deadly grave. “Not Whitecoats. Not Lakeshore. Well.”

  She don’t wait for my reply.

  She knows I won’t refuse her.

  Jack comes outside in the evening light, when it’s dark enough that he’ll go outside even with his bound-up hands. The lights are burning in the neighbors’ houses, but inward; the dun light of bedroom lamps or the bright one of dinnertimes, the flicker of the television that Doctor Marybeth barely ever turns on.

  I’ve been sitting most of the evening with the file in my lap.

  I look up at him quiet, my own bandaged hands tied loose enough that they’re starting to itch. He stops halfway through Doctor Marybeth’s yard, his foot just shy of her thick-stemmed garden, and stands in the shadow of a tree, in the darkest dark he has.

  “What went on with you and the girl?” he asks, hands in gloves tucked in pockets.

  I stick my hands in my own pockets and look at the grass that pricks between my bare toes. At the smudge of spilled-out blood on the knee of my jeans. Jack’s known me since I was four and shy and Mamaless. He’ll find me out if I go lying.

  “She wasn’t where I left her,” I start, breathing the grass and trees and hot thick evening to brace me ’gainst my own Tale. “She went away before I came back, and I had to hold fire to another one’s face so he’d tell me where she’d gone.”

  “That won’t make trouble,” he says, flat. Threatening it into being. This better not make trouble.

  “It won’t.” And I’m pretty sure that of all things, from the silence Darren kept even when I shook and scared him behind the sealed bathroom door, that won’t.

  Jack is watching me under his thick old prickle-brows. He nods once: Go on. Tell on.

  “She went back to the one who hurt her. The one who — who broke her,” I stutter, and my hands curl into hurting fists all of their own design. It pulls the ski
n where they’re wounded, and they sweat under the bandages. It’s not hot enough, eveningtime, for them to sweat so. I still want to hit him.

  I want worse to hit myself.

  “And?” he says. A hand on the back. My own tricks used against me.

  “And I hit him and I kicked him ’til he half died,” I blurt out, and my shoulders hunch down like tunnel-walk, though there aren’t no tunnels for hours. “I thought he died,” I correct. “There were police. We didn’t stay.”

  “You’re not all the way sorry, are you?” he says.

  Jack has known me since I was four years old.

  I shake my head, tiny slow.

  Jack’s breath goes out with a huff that shakes me through. But there’s no Killer! come out on the tail of it. There’s no red in his eyes when I dare to look up.

  He doesn’t send me away.

  What he says is: “That’s grave, Teller,” low as low, not changing one whit except to shift his weight left foot to right. “Grave indeed.”

  I don’t speak up to agree.

  “And that’s why she won’t come out,” he says, push push push.

  I hate him for a second, right red and complete. Yes, I want to say. Yes, that’s why she hates me so hard. Because I took away her bad lover. And she’d never say different. She’d not raise her voice to give answer. I’m the one who bears the Tales, and the Tales I tell are true.

  She’d just run. She’d grow wings and fly away from my lying, and it’d be no more than I deserved for finding ways to leave bruises without touching skin to skin.

  So: “There’s more,” I whisper. “I got mad at her after.”

  Jack’s eyebrow goes up.

  “I shouted,” and my voice has gone small. It’s gone soft from the ache to not be saying this, for no one to hear the words I make it say. “I shouted right in her face, and I scared her. I grabbed her,” I say, down to a mutter. “It bruised.”

  “And she turned,” Jack finishes for me, because he’s got some mercy in him after all. “And marked up your hands.”

  “I didn’t want her to run no more,” I whisper, and there’s not red but tears in my eyes, not mad but hurting. “I try to be good with her, talk soft and make Safe, and I told her all the stories so she’d know we wouldn’t hurt her. But she just keeps running, and I know I’m not good with this but I just wanted her to stop —”

  Jack is good and kind. Jack looks away while I do my crying, and he doesn’t say nothing about it from the time my voice goes down and my shoulders start to quiver to when I get my breath back under rein again, swallow up the little gulps.

  “I just wanted her to stop running,” I finish, like there was never a break in the Tale. “I gotta find the right words.”

  “No, Teller,” Jack says, and it’s heavy, heavy like he’s walked a long road today and has walking yet to go. “There’s never been a thing wrong with how you do your talking.”

  Four or five days ago I would have dragged out the thread of how he’s spoken rough about my Ariel. I would have stomped and fought and told him she was Sick and that kind of talking wasn’t right. But the words of Whitecoat files are swimming in my eyes, and I don’t know what way’s home no more. “It’s not enough,” I say, strained and too-old. “It’s never gonna be enough to make it good.”

  “No,” Jack says, not gentle, but gentle as he ever speaks to anything.

  “Doctor Marybeth told you, didn’t she?” I ask, finally seeing what’s behind that stony sad-faced look. I raise the file, shake it. “She told you ’bout this.”

  “She did,” Jack says, even.

  I’m bright-red furious for one long second.

  “She’s Sick,” I say, when I can get back my voice. “She needs us. Me. That’s what Safe was made for.”

  “Teller,” Jack says, and he never raises his voice, not once. “You’re making yourself reasons.”

  A light goes off in the house ’cross from us. A dinner-light — people long risen from the table and the dishes cleared, a family made of Mama and Papa and little kids putting themselves to bed for dreams that don’t taunt you past morning. New shadows fall across us, a stripe of light put down to bed as well. I wonder if those shadows touch Doctor Marybeth, tied as she is to the shadows that come of touching too deep the world below the tunnels, the old sewers and the new.

  “I’ll stay with her Above,” I say. “I’ll get thicker shirts and pluck the scales more. She’ll pull them for me. I’ll stay and make it good.”

  It’s just foolishness to go ’round wanting not to have a Curse, my pa’s voice whispers inside, in the dark.

  From that stripe of darkness Jack looks at me measured, measuring, long. “Above’s not a place for you, boy,” he says in that soft slow way.

  “It’s not so bad,” I say. Taste Ariel’s lips on the words, salt like tears: It wasn’t that bad.

  Jack looks at me, long and cool, and the longer he looks the less I feel like he’ll ruffle my hair or point me the way that needs going. I open my mouth and there’s nothing but silence in it, a silence that grows as if from seed to reach out over the whole of Doctor Marybeth’s lawn and hush up the eveningtime birds.

  And then Doctor Marybeth’s at the door, head poked outside into the shadow-driven night.

  “Come in,” she says, and opens the door wider. “Violet just woke up.”

  It’s Whisper and me who throw on our shoes and go, go, go for the hospital.

  Whisper and me and not Jack or Doctor Marybeth. Jack would spark the bus that takes you there into dying, and Doctor Marybeth needs to stay home in case Ariel comes down — and to pretend like she doesn’t know us besides. And there’s no keeping Whisper away after hearing those words. Ghostless or not, small and old and soft or not, nobody’s even fool enough to suggest it. But they both draw the line at Whisper going into Whitecoat places alone.

  So it’s a quick wash for me, a change into the jeans and shirt that were bought new only a few days past with Atticus’s careful-hoard emergency money. Doctor Marybeth lends me a cap, shows me how to pull it down low to hide my face from cameras and policemen and Whitecoats. It keeps half the world out of my view. Mack would hate it.

  “You know where the hospital is?” I ask ten minutes later when I get downstairs to Whisper waiting, tidied and still edgy-frantic, a sharp I recognize: someone you love dearest in danger.

  “I know,” she says, and takes off down the street, between the streetlamps, to the bus.

  I’m an old hand at bus riding now. I’m the best Passer of bus riding in all of wide Above. I get my paper transfer and get up to the seats halfway through. Whisper sits down next to me. Her hands are twitching, and they aren’t folded in her lap to keep me looking away.

  I don’t know what I’m expecting for hospital. Something like Lakeshore, all old brick and ratted grass and wooden beams gone dry and hard. But the hospital Whisper leads me to is nothing like that at all. It rises up bright-lit and yellow from a lawn with a circle drive cut through it, and the lawn is a short sharp green as even as a barred window. The white vans that Doctor Marybeth called are parked all through that drive with their lights at rest, the men who work them standing outside and crackling with a watchfulness that makes me know it’s a prison.

  I stop there. I tell my feet to move and they won’t do any more moving.

  Hospital. Oh my oh my god.

  “C’mon, Teller,” Whisper says, hissing quiet from the corner of her mouth.

  Your papa’s feet were broken nearly four times, I tell myself, and if he could endure that, you can go in there. It still takes all my doing to follow her inside.

  The hospital is made for getting lost. It curves and twists and dead-ends into walls or doors with Staff Only written on them. Whisper walks it eyes half-closed. Angry smells fill up my nose, making the end tingle; I’m scared to sneeze for the thought of Whitecoats descending and declaring me Sick, police seeing my face and locking me up in chains. Either one feeling down to the bitten-off scales
on my back.

  Whisper’s drawn up with hurry, marching down another hall with the same walls, same doors, same tile-colored trail as the ones we’ve passed. “How do we know where we’re going?” I ask quiet as I can.

  She nods ahead at something I can’t see. “Hospitals are full of ghosts,” is all she says, dry and urgent. “And keep your hands in your pockets.”

  I look down. The bandages flutter like a signal light. I stuff them in my pockets.

  I trail Whisper past a green-rimmed desk, hurrying to keep but one step behind. There are four Whitecoats behind it, hidden among racks and racks of files that block off exit from the back way. The files draw my eyes; I can’t even count how many people locked away they mean, how many admission forms. They’re orange and blue and green and stacked like fresh brands as far up as there is to go, and there’s no Doctor Marybeth here to let them all out.

  “Hey,” someone says, and my hands are ’round my matches before I can tell myself down! Whisper stops sharp and turns back ’round, looking up with big innocent eyes at the Whitecoat behind the desk.

  Anyone watching well can see the hint of red fire beneath that look.

  “We’re visiting,” Whisper says, smooth as you please, never a flicker that lets you know she doesn’t live and breathe Above. She cocks her head; listening. “Room four-thirty-eight,” she adds.

  “You family?” asks the Whitecoat. A girl Whitecoat, hard-faced and crag-nosed and with a look in her eye that says she’s fixing to turn us out the door.

  “I’m her nephew,” I say, thinking on the move. Nephew’s good cover Above. They don’t expect you to look nothing like each other, and it’s still close enough that you can laugh, weep, hold each other’s hands.

  She frowns. “There’s only one woman in four-thirty-eight, and she’s a Jane Doe.”

  My hands freeze in my pockets ’til I remember the man at the shelter, the sad look in his eye. “We’re not sure,” I mutter, knees tensed to run. “We — she went missing. We came to find out,” I say, and hope.