Janet mistook Corry’s confusion as fear. “Oh, don’t you worry about Mr. Nilsson,” she said. “He’s real nice. Aren’t you, Mr. Nilsson?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. But he wasn’t smiling. He was staring hard at Corry.
Something very weird had just happened. In the Secret Future, Mr. Nilsson sat quietly during the introductions. He didn’t pipe up halfway through. And when he did pipe up halfway through, in the present, it made the Secret Future split in half and disappear for a second, just like it did when Corry altered it. Except this time, he wasn’t the one who did the altering.
But what was really, really weird was that it looked as if Corry wasn’t the only one who noticed this happened.
“It’s a pleasure indeed to meet you, young Master Bain,” Mr. Nilsson said, his voice just a hair above a whisper. “I imagine we have much in common.”
Chapter Thirteen
“I win again, Mr. Pierce,” Corry said with a hint of triumph as he laid down his last three cards.
Mr. Pierce leaned over the table, reviewed the cards, and concluded that yes, he had been defeated. “So you do,” he said cheerily. He took out the pad of paper on which were written the scores of every game of rummy the two of them had ever played and began tallying up the totals.
Osgood Pierce was probably Corry’s best friend, despite their forty-plus year difference in age and the fact that one of them was a little nuts. Mr. Pierce was slightly overweight, very pale, and had perpetual bags under his eyes. It also looked as if he were always in shadows, even when the light was directly overhead. Still he was, according to Violet, a very handsome man. Not that Corry had any opinion on this whatsoever.
Corry couldn’t explain why it was they hit it off so well, but in the part of his brain where thoughts more mature than he was resided, there was the notion that perhaps their daily personal needs fit well together. Corry needed an easily manageable father figure, and Osgood Pierce had a pathological need to lose at everything.
To that end, rummy was the absolute perfect game. Corry was familiar with a fair number of card games, thanks mainly to the men in the Mildly Crazy ward, all of whom had a personal favorite. But unlike poker or straight gin, in rummy, one player’s discard could be used by another player. For a boy with his own Secret Future, there was almost no way he could lose.
“It’s your deal,” Mr. Pierce said, putting down the pencil. As Corry swept up the cards and attempted to shuffle—he still hadn’t quite gotten the hang of it—Mr. Pierce asked, “So how was school this year?”
“Okay, I guess.”
“It’s over with now?”
“Yep. Summer vacation starts today.”
The problem with shuffling was the cards and his hands were not the right size for each other. Whenever he attempted to curl them upward, they just sort of exploded into the air. So he did a cheating sort of shuffle, where he pushed the two halves together five or six times.
“And you’re spending your first day of freedom here,” Mr. Pierce said matter-of-factly.
“ ‘E’s a nutter,” said Mr. Finn from halfway across the room. Timothy Finn said he was 100% Boston Irish, but for some reason he always spoke with the same funny English accent Dick Van Dyke used in Mary Poppins. Corry didn’t think that was the only reason he was in McClaren, but he hadn’t seen evidence of any other specific pathology, so he couldn’t be completely positive.
Pathology was a word Corry learned very early. It came into play whenever he wondered how or why the people around him had gotten locked away from the outside world. Usually, if he wanted to know, he could just ask because most of them weren’t shy about it.
“He’s not a nutter, Tim,” Mr. Pierce said. “Are you, Corry?”
“Don’t think so,” Corry said. He started dealing the cards.
“No, you’re not nuts. Just a little shy, am I right?”
“I guess.”
On the couch a few feet from Corry’s chair, Mr. Parseghian was starting to tick, more or less literally. Every day, from ten minutes before the hour to five minutes past the hour, Ari Parseghian stared intently at the clock on the wall above the television and announced the ticks of the second hand for everyone else in the room. He used to do this through the whole hour, every hour, so the fifteen minutes of audible ticking was pretty major progress. Still, it could get annoying. Especially when he announced the hour with a shout, like the town crier in that comic strip in the paper, The Wizard of Id.
“Besides,” Mr. Pierce continued as he picked up his cards, “who wouldn’t want to spend the afternoon with a group of gentlemen such as ourselves?”
“I don’t know. I can’t stand myself,” said Mr. Conway from the couch. He was sitting next to Mr. Parseghian and doing an excellent job of ignoring the ticking while loosely following the talk show on the television.
“Yes, Reginald, but self-loathing is why you’re here, isn’t it?” asked Mr. Pierce.
“Speak for yourself. I’m just here for the medication.”
Corry smiled. Mr. Conway’s pathology was that he liked to hurt himself. Corry found out when he’d asked Janet one afternoon how come Mr. Conway always had a bandage or a bruise. Corry had thought someone else there was hurting him, and this had him understandably worried.
Mr. Pierce started the round, throwing down a seven Corry didn’t need. Corry drew from the deck, stared at a ten he also didn’t need, and held it over the discard pile for a second. In the Secret Future, he saw Mr. Pierce also passing on the ten, so he put it down.
There was a while there, back at the end of last summer, when Mr. Pierce, probably without even realizing it, started to take long pauses between his decisions. Anything longer than five or six seconds was too long for Corry to catch a glimpse of it, so suddenly Mr. Pierce was winning regularly. But then Corry started slowing down, too. He found if he held his discard out for long enough it would make his opponent anxious, and when he was anxious, he acted quickly, and Corry got back the advantage.
If he thought there was anybody he could safely share that information with he would, because he was awfully proud of himself for having figured it out.
“How about girls?” Mr. Pierce asked.
“Girls?”
“Yes, Corry. Creatures much like you, only with curvier bodies and bumps in interesting places. You are familiar with the term?”
“Sure I am,” Corry said, his face suddenly warm. “What about them?”
“Have you met any?”
“Sure.”
Mr. Pierce stared at him over the cards. “I mean socially, young man.”
“Oh,” was all Corry could muster.
“Boy’s just twelve, Osgood,” said Mr. Conway. “Give him a little time to get his feet under him.”
Mr. Pierce gave him a conspiratorial smile. “Don’t worry. We’ll have you prepared for them by August.”
This did not make Corry all that comfortable. “I don’t think I need any help,” he said. “I don’t even like girls all that much.”
“Nonsense,” Mr. Pierce said.
“Fancy you, of all people, givin’ the lad advice,” Mr. Finn chimed in from over his magazine.
“I’ll hear none of that, Irish!” Mr. Pierce said in a voice a tad too loud.
Given how well Corry and Mr. Pierce got along, it was sort of interesting that he was one of the only guys he’d met there who didn’t ever explain why he was there. Corry knew already—Violet had told him a long time ago when it was clear the two were friendly with one another—but he kept this knowledge to himself out of respect. And since it was kind of embarrassing, Corry understood why Mr. Pierce didn’t want him knowing.
From what Violet said, Mr. Pierce had something called a nerve breakdown. Corry didn’t know exactly what that meant, but he figured it had something to do with going crazy over stuff that makes you nervous. Mr. Pierce had been a pretty important guy when it happened, important enough to have to wear a suit all the time. Up until his nerve breakdo
wn. That made him—through a mechanism Corry couldn’t hope to ever understand—take the suit off, along with all of his other clothes, right there in the office. Violet didn’t get too specific with what happened after that, but Corry had a decent imagination and figured running around naked in an office with secretaries and stuff probably led to a few . . . awkward moments. Maybe even some of what Violet called Bad Touching. She used to warn him about Bad Touching as far back as when they were in the commune in Maine. He didn’t understand it at all then and was only starting to now. Anyway, he got why Mr. Pierce didn’t want to talk about it.
Corry refocused on the card game, which he was actually in the middle of losing on account of all the distractions. But Mr. Pierce wasn’t done asking questions. Maybe this was a new strategy of his.
“You know what impresses young women, Corry?” he asked, then answered. “Confidence.”
“Okay.”
“I mean it.”
“Okay.”
Mr. Pierce sighed. “Nurse Mills,” he said, referring to Janet, who was listening to the entire exchange and trying hard to pretend she wasn’t. “Am I not right?”
“You’re half right, Osgood, but the boy doesn’t wanna talk about it. Look at him; he’s as red as an apple.”
Corry hated it when this happened. Every now and then adults spoke to one another as if he couldn’t understand what they were saying. This year his science teacher took them on a field trip to a tide pool—which smelled—and explained how starfish ate while holding one in his hand. Times like these, Corry felt like the starfish.
Fortunately, a reprieve came in the form of Mr. Parseghian, who loudly announced that it was four o’clock. Everybody in the room jumped, even though he did this every day. Well, everyone except for Corry and Mr. Nilsson.
Harvey Nilsson was sitting in the same chair he’d been in on the day the two of them were introduced. Corry actually couldn’t remember a time when he wasn’t sitting there. Sometimes, it looked like he was asleep, but that seemed unlikely given the noise that typically filled the room in the afternoons.
On this occasion, as the other occupants busied themselves by saying various bad words—which adults always tended to do when they were startled—Mr. Nilsson looked over at Corry. Their eyes met, and the old man winked.
“You don’t startle easily, do you Corry?” he said.
“No—” He began to respond, before catching himself. Because something wasn’t at all right. Mr. Nilsson had said that, but he also hadn’t.
“Yes,” Mr. Pierce said, putting down a set of sevens. “I’ve got you this time.” He thought Corry was speaking in reference to the last hand of cards, which Mr. Pierce was winning. Mr. Pierce didn’t hear Mr. Nilsson, because Mr. Nilsson didn’t actually speak.
“I know you can hear me,” Mr. Nilsson added. Somehow, he was speaking in the Secret Future and only in the Secret Future, because when the moment came for him to actually say those words so that everyone could hear them, he only uttered a mild grunt.
“How are you doing that?” Corry said.
“What do you mean?” Mr. Pierce asked. “I’m just winning. Is it really all that unusual for me to actually beat you?”
“N-no.”
“You’re kind to play with Osgood,” Mr. Nilsson said/didn’t say, “Even his family won’t visit him. He’s lonely.”
Corry shut up and fixed Mr. Nilsson with a sideways glance. Mr. Pierce was busy offering more advice on how to romance twelve-year-old girls, but Corry was no longer paying much attention to the present. He was trying to figure out how the hell Mr. Nilsson was doing that.
“That’s why he doesn’t mind losing.” Harvey Nilsson’s mouth—his future mouth—was definitely moving. “He doesn’t even care that you’re cheating.”
“I’m—” Corry began to say, but of course his voice was stuck in the present. Had Mr. Nilsson been speaking for everyone’s benefit, Corry’s assertion that he was not cheating would have preceded the accusation by a good five seconds.
“Son, are you all right?” Mr. Pierce asked. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
Corry was trembling. Mr. Nilsson’s bizarre trick had screwed up his hold on the now, which was always tenuous under the best of circumstances.
“I . . . don’t feel so good,” Corry said. In speaking, he tried to use his own words as a lighthouse to find his way back to the correct moment in time. Mr. Pierce put his hand on Corry’s arm.
“You look queasy. Something you ate?”
Corry shut his eyes and focused on the tick-ticks from Mr. Parseghian, which were all jumbled together. He slowed his breathing and listened until the five or six ticks came at appropriate intervals again. He opened his eyes.
Mr. Pierce was still looking at him, very concerned. Out of the corner of Corry’s eye he could see Janet standing to one side, looking ready to catch him if he fell out of his chair, which he was apparently about to do.
“Yeah,” he said finally. “Prob’bly something I ate.”
“If he ate lunch here, I’m not surprised,” Mr. Conway offered, laughing. Corry smiled weakly.
“I’m fine,” Corry insisted, extricating his arm from Mr. Pierce’s tight grip. “Just felt a little oogey for a second.” He was consciously trying not to look in Mr. Nilsson’s direction.
“Are you sure?” Mr. Pierce asked.
“Yeah. I’m okay.”
“Well, then,” he said, looking over at Janet, who still appeared concerned. “You won’t mind if I do this.” He put down three cards and threw the fourth onto the discard pile. “I win.”
Corry looked at his own hand and realized he could have won about three cards ago. “I need to go to the bathroom,” he said, getting to his feet.
“You gonna be sick?” Janet asked.
“No, really. I’m okay.”
“I should call your mother,” Janet was about to say.
“Don’t bother Violet,” Corry said. Janet looked taken aback because Corry had neglected to wait for her to actually speak before responding. Mr. Nilsson’s trick still had him all screwed up.
“All right,” Janet said.
The bathroom was off the hallway just outside the door to the common room. Corry made it almost all the way there.
“We need to talk,” Mr. Nilsson said, again in the Secret Future. Corry froze in the doorway, held onto the jamb, and tried to keep his head in the present even if his ears weren’t. He was still holding onto five cards, he realized distantly. Mr. Pierce wouldn’t be able to finish the scoring without those cards. “Meet me here after five. We’ll be alone then.”
Corry reached out and put the cards on the edge of the little table near the door, next to Janet’s magazine. “Okay,” he said. Then he left the room.
Chapter Fourteen
Things worked a little differently for Corry in the summertime. In the fall and the spring, when he was in school, he was required by the Laws of Violet to attend the McClaren afterschool homework program—as she jokingly called it—Monday through Thursday. But when school was out, barring any summer classes, which he thankfully had not earned as his grades weren’t terrible enough to warrant them, he was free to come and go as he pleased. His school had a summer day camp that he attended sparingly, signing on for field trips to cool places but not lingering when they were just hanging around the school and doing crafts and whatnot because that was almost exactly like being in classes, only with fewer tests. Some days he just stayed at home, read comic books, and watched television. Very occasionally he went to the park and threw a ball around with one or two of the few kids he was friendly with, but that was a rare enough event to almost not warrant mentioning. Mostly, he did whatever struck him as interesting when he got up that morning.
On the days when he decided to stop in at McClaren, despite having a means to get back home again in the form of his bike, he typically waited until Violet got off work and then rode home with her. He expected in another couple of years they would reach
an impasse where she would either have to purchase a larger car or he would have to deal with a bike that was much too small for him, as the one he currently used only just barely fit into the trunk of the Dart and also only barely fit him. Then again, in a couple of years, maybe he wouldn’t be interested in visiting the hospital at all. A lot could happen in that time.
The schedule of the Mildly Crazy patients at McClaren impacted his schedule as well. For instance, Corry generally preferred not to arrive there until just after lunch because most of his friends there were occupied in the morning with various Sessions. Corry didn’t know for sure what a Session was, but he had some indirect evidence to suggest it had something to do with making them better. There was just as much evidence that the opposite was true, as it did not seem to Corry that anybody there was getting any better—except for maybe Mr. Parseghian and his obsessive ticking—but it was a decent theory anyway.
The order of events was the patients would eat their lunches—under supervision, to make sure everybody was eating and also not harming themselves—and then get their meds. Roughly half an hour after that they were ready to see guests like Corry or whoever else might be there that day, as this was when visiting hours were scheduled. Family visits took place in a section of the hospital Corry had never seen.
Corry thought the part when everybody took drugs was sort of interesting, if only because of what it told him about Violet. It occurred to him fairly recently—in a burst of insight that comes to children when they examine their parents as people instead of just as parents—that she seemed to go out of her way to find places where everybody else was taking drugs. According to Violet, she had stopped using drugs recreationally back when Corry was five, but she obviously still liked being around people who were taking them.
At around four thirty, the social-recreational part of their day was concluded, and the patients were asked politely to return to their rooms if they were not already in them. Corry wasn’t positive what followed from that point but he believed there was another round of meds involved, along with dinner and evening Sessions. Violet’s shift ended at five thirty, which made perfect sense in that a shift change was best done when all the patients were in their rooms rather than wandering the floors. But it was inconvenient for Corry, who was basically left with an hour to kill and nobody to kill it with. He usually spent that time in the front lobby because he wasn’t supposed to be in the common room alone, and Janet left along with the patients when four thirty rolled around.
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