“Oh stop it, Arnie.” Dale asked Oscar, “What do you need, Doctor Loste?”
“I bet he wants drugs from the evidence room,” commented Arnie.
“Seriously. Shut the fuck up,” Dale told his brother. “What can I do to help you out, Doctor Loste?”
“If there was a crime and the police and courts were involved, there’d be a file right?”
“Of course,” said Dale. “Most of what I do anymore is dealing with paperwork.”
“If I were to give you a name and an address, would you be able to look into an incident that happened a while back?”
“If it happened in this county,” Dale said, “then, sure.”
“What the hell is this about, Doc?” Asked Arnie. “You have me real interested now.”
“I need to look into an incident that happened with my patient, Beth Bardo. I need to know what happened to her birth parents.”
Dale considered Oscar’s request by quietly studying the therapist’s face. The favor and the sobering tone with which Oscar asked were both concerning. He finally nodded, saying, “Of course I’ll help you.”
“Of course we’ll help you,” added Arnie.
...
The three of them agreed to meet in a diner the following afternoon. Dale and Arnie were waiting in a booth in the back when Oscar arrived. They were both keeping their heads down. When he slid into the booth, the two brothers looked like they had just witnessed an execution.
“Dark shit,” said Arnie as soon as Oscar made eye contact. “Real dark shit you got us looking into.”
“Me into,” corrected Dale. “Oscar asked me to look into this,” he continued, pulling out an envelope.
“Well, excuse me for providing assistance,” said Arnie, leaning away from the booth and conversation. “I’ll let you two luminaries discuss it. You don’t need me.”
“Oscar,” said Dale, “this shit you had me looking up kept me staring at ceiling all last night. It’s weird, man.”
“Did you find out anything about Beth’s original family?”
“Damn sure, did,” Dale said. “Only what I found out doesn’t make any sense. You said that Beth’s birth parents were these abusive monsters.” He slid some paperwork out of the envelope. “It looked that way at first but it’s strange. I don’t know what to say about it.”
“All I’ve seen is what’s in Beth’s file,” said Oscar, “and what the Bardos told me.”
Dale stared at the file, shaking his head and wrinkling up his face with apparent dissatisfaction. “If that’s true,” he went on, “then my instincts about people are...off.” He flipped through the stack of paperwork until he found the section he wanted. “Until the night Beth was taken away from them, Beth’s father had never been arrested, charged or even questioned over any crime. Neither he nor Beth’s birth mother ever displayed any documented psychiatric illnesses. They both worked at a glass plant on the northeastern end of town. The dad was an engineer and the mom worked as a secretary. The plant closed down five years ago. You know I called around until I found one of the birth father’s old coworkers. Talked to him for a while. Asked him if he ever sensed anything creepy. He told me he knew both of Beth’s birth parents and that they were kind people.”
“That doesn’t prove shit,” argued Arnie. “People at Dad’s job thought he was great too.”
“I asked him,” said Dale, “if he thought the parents were capable of doing the worst to their daughter.”
“What’d he say?” Asked Oscar.
“He told me something seemed rotten about that. I quote.”
“I know that Beth’s mother is dead,” Oscar said, “but I don’t know about her father.”
“He’s dead too,” Dale told him.
“What happened?”
“Both parents killed on the same day in separate prisons, a hundred miles apart,” said Dale. “Two days after going in. Both of them. Both of their murders resulted in no arrests and no suspects. The case against them was weird too. The file referenced recorded testimony of several druggie sleazebags who claimed the parents rented Beth out to take drugs and take pictures. It also referenced two recorded confessions. The weird part is that I can’t find any of it. I hit a brick wall. Either something was missing or the computer file was corrupted. Missing evidence and fucked up reports aren’t unheard of, but all that missing, that’s strange.”
“It’s a hell of a lot more than strange,” Arnie interjected. “In fact, that is some fucked up shit.”
“So, what evidence is there left in existence?” Asked Oscar.
Dale started to page through the stack of paperwork. “That’s the thing,” he said. “All I could find were the arrest report and their death certificates.”
“I don’t understand any of this,” said Oscar. “Is this how the criminal justice system normally functions?”
Dale stared at the ink of the arrest report and shook his head. “Not in my experience,” he said. “In fact, it makes no fucking sense to me. I would expect to see a long list of complaints about them. There should be a file from the family court. There isn’t shit.”
“Is it really possible all these files were just lost?”
“It would have to be just that,” Dale said, looking like he had just identified a body at the morgue. “Otherwise that would mean...”
Arnie lit a cigarette, saying, “It would mean the police just showed up out of the blue and took that little girl away from her parents. It would mean those parents didn’t do shit.” He blew out a ring of smoke. “It would also make it seem like...”
His brother finished his sentence, saying, “Something is rotten in the city of Philadelphia.”
...
Chapter 13
Scars
Even gorgonorphan didn’t bring an easy sleep that night.
The long roster of patients the next day didn’t help with his tired condition. It seemed as though they were all conspiring to make his day more difficult with their demands. He watched the hours drain away until it was time to meet with the Bardos. When he showed up to the mansion that evening, there was an armada of Bentleys and Rolls Royces out front. They all seemed to be leaving.
“Business meeting or family reunion?” Oscar asked Lorne Bardo when he met him at the door.
“Business, of course,” Lorne answered. “We just finished an investor meeting.” He scanned Oscar’s face and noticed either the fatigue or the influence of the cough syrup in his glassy eyes. “My goodness,” he started to ask, “I think whatever flu you’ve been fighting is storming the beaches.”
“I’m just tired,” said Oscar, closing the matter. “How has Beth been this week?”
“Much, much better,” said Lorne. “I think you’re helping so much, Oscar.” He stopped in the spacious hallway in front of a family oil painting and went on. “To tell you the truth, I think just the knowledge that it’s just the past haunting her is making Beth feel better. Perhaps we’ve identified the problem and we’re on the road to recovery.”
“It would be nice if it was that simple.”
“Still,” said Lorne, who looked very grateful at that moment, “you’ve done wonders, Oscar. I know you’re reluctant to give her a clean bill of health just yet, but my wife and I finally see some light at the end of the tunnel. I do notice though,” he said as his face took on a concerned expression, “that although you’re helping Beth, it seems as though continually bringing up what she did to her mother is counterproductive. It seems all it does is upset Beth.”
“So you would like to forget the fact that your daughter stabbed her adopted mother? You want me to forget that it seemed to have happened for no reason. Well I can’t forget it. Children are brought up all over the world under all kinds of conditions, some near royal, others deplorable. Across this entire world, with all the insanity and abuse going around, you’d have a hard time finding ten kids who attack their parents. You see plenty of it the other way around. Except for the rarest circumstances,
kids never attack their parents. It goes against a child’s instinct for survival.”
“Those monstrous drug addicts,” Lorne told Oscar, “Beth’s birth parents left a psychological scar on our little girl that caused her to lash out in a confused or fugue state.”
“Perhaps.”
“The human mind is fascinating,” Lorne added, “to think that trauma leaves such an imprint on the psyche.”
He walked Oscar to Beth’s room, where the little girl was waiting for their appointment. Standing up and turning her attention away from her crayon drawing, she seemed happy to see him.
“What’re you drawing, Beth?” He asked when he saw the strange colors and shapes in the drawing. Something about her sketch felt familiar to him. It was as though he had seen the same strange shapes but couldn’t remember. Beth had drawn what looked like a little girl with purple crayon pigtails in the eye of some kind of dark spiral or whirlpool.
“It’s me,” she said like a proud artist. Then Beth pointed to another figure in the drawing, a gangly-limbed, one-eyed creature. “It’s Mister Smiler,” she said. In the sketch, he was being ripped away from the little girl.
“What’s happening to Mister Smiler here?”
“They make him go,” she said. “So he can’t protect me. When they get together, they’re stronger than he is.”
“I don’t understand, Beth. Can you tell me who you mean by they?”
Her haunted eyes flashed fear. Then there was only confusion in her face. Oscar could tell that she was trying to understand and verbalize what was happening to her. However the task seemed beyond a child’s mind.
“It’s OK, Beth,” he told her. “Let’s talk about something else.”
“Mister Smiler says you don’t trust my mommy and daddy.”
With surprise evident in his face, he corrected her, saying, “That’s not true at all, Beth. I have no reason not to trust your adopted parents.”
Her eyes darted to her upper right as her invisible friend made an address of some kind. She suddenly looked even more confused. She told the empty space in the room, “I don’t want to,” she argued. “He doesn’t like it when you say stuff like that.” After a few moments of nodding like she understood, she told Mister Smiler, “Oh fine.”
“It’s OK, Beth. Tell me what he’s saying.”
“He says you’re up to two bottles of cough syrup per day. Pretty soon, he says, you’ll be able to see him and talk to him yourself.”
“That would be nice,” Oscar said with a forced smile. “There are a couple of things I’d like to say to Mister Smiler when I meet him.”
“Shhh. He’s telling me something important,” Beth interrupted. “He says that I need to tell you to pay attention.”
“I’m all ears.”
“He says you’re getting closer and you need to be careful.”
“I take it he’s not going to be any more specific.”
“He says that he can’t do everything.”
“Beth, what the hell is that supposed to mean?” Oscar asked. Shortly after asking, he realized that his tone was definitely not appropriate for a six year old.
Beth just shrugged her shoulders and whispered, “I don’t know.”
Everything from her hushed tone of voice to the completely guileless look on her face told Oscar that she didn’t understand what was happening any better than he did. He told her, “I’m sorry, Beth. I shouldn’t have spoken to you that way. I was just frustrated with Mister Smiler.”
She seemed relieved that Oscar wasn’t mad at her. Her mouth wrinkled into something close to a smile. “He says to tell you that you’re a good man and you take care of people.”
...
Chapter 14
What did you say to Stanley?
Arnie and Dale McSorley showed up to their therapy appointment in the midst of a heated argument. The moment they walked in, Arnie was already yelling, “If you think I’m gonna put flowers on that fucking bastard’s grave, you’ve got another thing coming! He’s just lucky all I did was drop a fucking turd on it! I thought about digging him up so I could shit in his face.”
“Looks like the communication channels are open,” Oscar joked before realizing that both men were almost too heated to notice their therapist.
“That man was your father,” Dale told his brother.
“So. Fuck him,” Arnie answered, sounding suddenly plain. “Get it through your head, brother, I don’t give a shit who my father was. I am my own man and he didn’t have shit to do with it. I raised myself and you despite that fucking asshole.”
“You didn’t raise me, you asshole!”
“OK. Who did then? Are you honestly going to say that sperm donor taught you how to be the man you are today? Can you honestly tell me that either of us are anything like him?”
Defeat in the argument was apparent in Dale’s expression. “Fuck I guess not,” he said.
Oscar could finally get a word in. When he asked the brothers what had happened, they both were hesitant to discuss the situation.
Dale finally spoke up, saying, “He got arrested for taking a shit on our father’s grave.” He added, “It was really fun to explain to the other officers. Looks great for a new sergeant.”
Arnie sat down quietly and crossed his arms over his chest. He didn’t look at his brother or Oscar. His expression was blank and his eyes distant.
“Arnie,” Oscar started to ask, “tell me what happened tonight.”
“Today is my mom’s birthday,” Arnie said. “I went over to the cemetery to put flowers on her grave the way I always do. I was kneeling down when I looked over and saw my father’s grave next to it. I felt like the asshole was gloating. So I took a shit on him. I don’t see what the big deal is.”
“The cemetery,” his brother argued, “takes it seriously when people vandalize the grounds.”
“I didn’t vandalize anything,” Arnie said. “I just added some free fertilizer. If you ask me, they should be thanking me.”
“It’s interesting to me,” Oscar said, “that you hold your father in such contempt while your mother is put on a pedestal.”
“So what’s interesting about it?” Asked Arnie, looking at Oscar as though he should be careful about his next statement.
“I’ve heard you and Dale talk for weeks about beatings and terrible humiliations at the hands of your father. I assume at least some of this is taking place in the house. Where is your mom when this is happening?”
“Be careful, Doc,” said Arnie. “My mom couldn’t do anything to stop it. If she could, I’m telling you she would have.”
“The first time you came in to see me,” said Oscar, “your brother, Dale, told me a horrible story about your father humiliating you in front of that girl you liked.”
“So what of it,” said Arnie as his the deep caverns around his eyes took over his face.
“I didn’t take it further at the time,” said Oscar, sounding careful with his words. “But what struck me was the worst punishment of a whole childhood full of them took place over an Elvis dinner plate you broke. That was your mother’s plate, right?”
“She loved that hideous thing,” said Dale. Then something lit up in his brain, a memory hidden plainly in sight. “Dad did hate it,” he said. “I remember him commenting on how ugly it was. I heard him say it more than once.”
“So what does that mean?” Asked Arnie, looking like a man ready to leap into a fight.
“With all these beatings and humiliations,” Oscar said, leaning in toward Arnie, “was your mom chained up in the basement?”
“Doc, I don’t…” Arnie said with his hands starting to shake. “Why are you doing this?” The trembling spread from his hands to his shoulders. Then eventually his feet were tapping on the floor. “Why would you just let me have…?”
“Let you have what,” Oscar asked, “a lie?”
“Doctor Loste is right,” said Dale. His eyes were watering but his face beamed pure relief. “We were
all alone. You did take care of me. You did raise me.”
It was too much for Arnie. He leaned over, staring at the floor, tugging on his mop of hair with his fingers. “Doc,” he whispered, “what is the purpose of this?”
“I think knowing and confronting the truth is important for everyone,” Oscar said. “The truth isn’t always what we want it to be but it’s better than lies. The lies are what really make us suffer. Going on believing a lie is giving up on life.”
“Doc, I know that you don’t believe this fucking garbage,” Arnie told him. “You say I shouldn’t give up on life, but what the hell have you done? No wife. No kids. Do you even have any fucking friends?” He stood up with a big blue vein pulsing in his forehead. “I bet you don’t!” He yelled. “I bet you don’t care about having friends anymore. If I’m any judge of character, you gave up on that idea a long time ago. Now you’re nothing but a god damned drug addict. I don’t care if you deny it. You can’t fool me, Doc. You’re just like me. There’s nothing for you here and you know it. You just want everyone else to be as alone as you are.”
Arnie stormed out of the room, with Dale behind him.
...
A few minutes after the McSorleys left, Oscar sprawled himself out on the therapy room couch and took out one of his bottles of cough syrup. He put his head back and let the bitter, blue goo pour down his throat. The liquid seemed to have a mind of its own, coating his mouth and moving down his throat like a swarm of determined insects.
After a few minutes of comforting emptiness, he pulled himself to his feet and drove home. When he got to the parking garage roof, he took out the same bottle and finished it off.
He still had one more bottle in the glove compartment and when he reached for it, he noticed someone watching him from the wall of the garage.
The Owlman pointed his gloved finger at him. For a moment, he thought he might be seeing things. He rubbed his eyes and the Owlman was still there with a bright red tie tossing in the wind. The figure’s black opal eyes caught the moonlight in a way that made them seem to glow.
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