by Lisa Preston
Nobody meant for a cloud to hang over Caroline and Malcolm’s wedding, but there it was.
Forgiving Greer and his parents, enjoying the present company that evening, Maddie mused on couples, matches and mismatches, and the foundations in children that couples create.
Her mother said that her first marriage had seemed so perfect, so real. She’d had Maddie, then somehow, the relationship between her and Maddie’s father fell irretrievably apart. When he disappeared with Maddie, Caroline spent most of her adult life searching for them, still married to the absconder. And then recovering, only in recent years finding the life of salad days she’d missed.
So her first marriage reigned as the world’s worst. Maddie compared it to the world’s best divorce, Bella and Ardy’s. They raised five wildly disparate children as a functioning team, two cooperating households, two adults who held feelings for each other but could not keep living together in their twenties and thirties.
Bella had introduced Maddie and Caroline to many friends. Some of those women were divorced, too, each with a protracted tale of tries and failures. Her mom mentioned subordinates at the bank who were the opposites of commitment, one a mistress and the other married thirty-plus years. She said her boss had been left by his wife. The woman had run off. There were whispers in town, suspicions of the worst kind.
“Cut the cake,” someone shouted, rousing Maddie from her ruminations.
Malcolm, her new stepfather, rose, regal and proud in his tuxedo. The cake Emma crafted, her gift to the couple, was exquisite. Pearly frosting and a cascade of butter-colored roses iced a chocolate so dark it was nearly black. The contrast, revealed as Caroline and Malcolm brought the knife down together, brought a gasp from onlookers. Maddie winked at Emma, who blushed furiously.
Do it, she had urged her mom a year earlier when Malcolm proposed. Do it.
Now the words came back and Caroline flushed with excitement.
We’re doing it, Mom.
The whispered gift of a coming grandchild and the associated present of letting her mom cry it out to the cheering crowd was all she’d hoped it would be. The shouts and hurrahs were immediate. The joy grew as guests asked Doug and Maddie about their child-to-be. They roared and joked about raising Dodie, the next generation.
“Dodie,” Caroline whispered, wiping away a tear.
Maddie nodded, then talked with shame about everything that could go wrong in raising the child, and she knew her mom saw her fear.
“Oh, sweetheart.”
“Look. Look at Greer over there.” Maddie nodded her head toward the wall. Caroline turned. The boy sat with a plateful of uneaten cake, tears in his eyes, while Doug talked about his coming son or daughter, and Frankie’s band played a rumbling loop.
They watched Greer wipe his face and fade away in the crowd. When the throngs parted and Maddie still couldn’t spot him, she moved to a quiet corner and studied the packed room.
A voice behind her whispered, “Will you do something for me?”
She turned in a flood of relief. “I’d do anything for you, Greer.”
But he pleaded for the one thing she wouldn’t do, something she knew was wrong.
“Don’t tell anyone what we talked about at the cabin today, okay?”
“Greer …” Unease bathed Maddie, knowing she would not honor such an agreement, even if the little kid had to wrest a false promise just for her to calm him down. She would never keep anything from her husband.
“Just don’t tell, Maddie.”
“Okay, I won’t tell.”
CHAPTER 18
No matter how many grim-lipped smiles Ardy Donner gave his wife as they packed a little duffel bag of clothing for their son’s stay at the Southbank Psychiatric Hospital, Bella kept quiet, wide-eyed at the prospect. She reminded him of their troubled little son with the sick smile, the silence.
The Cheshire kid, someone called their Greer.
“I didn’t expect you to say yes so quickly, so easily,” she whispered at last, “to this whole psychiatric hospital idea. Maybe I didn’t think I’d commit. Maybe if I don’t know myself that well, I can’t know someone else.”
In the past miserable months as they fumbled and struggled, trying to learn about their young son and themselves, his wife now shocked him with the suggestion that they didn’t know all about each other.
When Bella was pregnant with the last kiddo, his yes to her marriage proposal let the family come fully together again. He’d given mostly yesses since then. Yesses worked great. Ardy rubbed his neck and looked at his wife. When he’d lost the fight to keep Greer out of their bed, he’d known. Wishing the little guy would get through this rough spot hadn’t gotten them anywhere. The kid spent so much time at night staring into the darkness, brittle even when he lay still as a book between his parents. Waking up in a wet bed was something that had not happened since he lived in his cabin, before he and Bella divorced, back when Emma was still a baby. Now the almost daily wet sheets made Ardy clamp his lips together and agree to almost anything in search of answers.
The deal they’d worked out, promising Greer they’d check it all out, had come due. After Bella’s one-on-one parent session, which she said gave her no insight at all on her son, they’d managed to get home for the tail end of Caroline and Malcolm’s wedding reception. Now it was Greer’s turn and they were going to tour more of the facility, hear about how visitation would work.
And they were going to leave their son behind.
He stirred in the driver’s seat. Bella sat in the backseat on the drive east to the city, holding their weeping son. Ardy eyed them in the rearview mirror. On the ferry, they didn’t bother to go up top, just sat in the car as the boat churned them across Puget Sound to downtown Seattle. They were the first car in the center lane, beaten by rain coming in the open-ended vessel. Ardy felt sunk beneath his old Ford’s rain-mottled glass. Ben had recently joshed him, told him the car was called a white-trash-mobile.
Ardy had always provided for his family. Are you ashamed of me, son?
Ben straightened up in an instant. No, Dad. It’s just an old car. Relax, I’m teasing.
Facing high-rises and instant traffic, panhandlers, shouts from ferrymen, and honks behind him, it was too long until he turned on the ignition and the windshield wipers, to bull through the traffic.
They’d tried to hide the duffel bag that morning, but Greer knew what was in the back of the old station wagon. It was the bag the boy had used last fall to tote his soccer cleats and team uniform and extra warm clothes for after the games. Things were good last fall; they were great.
At Southbank, the three of them held hands, taking up the width of the hallway that began at a receptionist’s desk. Two-toned green walls and heavy doors screamed institution. Ardy could hear every smack of distant shoes on the stinking-clean plasticky floor. His boots, Bella’s flats, and Greer’s sneakers didn’t make much noise on linoleum.
“Ah, the Donner family?” the front desk receptionist said with a smile. “One of the doctors is on his way.”
Ardy clutched Greer’s duffel to his chest with his free hand when a woman arrived and gushed about seeing the dormitory or taking Greer to talk for a little while, just to get to know him.
Bella hugged Greer, kissed the back of his neck, and rubbed her hands across his shoulders. “This is a place to rest. You’ve told me you’re so tired. This could be a really good, healthy rest for you, honey.”
Greer shook his head. “No.”
She hugged him again when he pleaded with her not to leave him in the hospital, not ever. A hug wasn’t enough. She wouldn’t promise not to dump him there. The boy looked from one parent to the other, his face white, lower lip trembling. “What if … what if someone thought that I, like, well that I …”
Bella reassured him with smooches and murmurs. “Nobody is going to think anything bad about you for being here. Nobody but us even knows.”
Greer shook his head. “What if something happ
ened to everybody while I’m here? I wouldn’t have a family at all. I wouldn’t have anybody. I’d be all alone.”
“You’re not alone, buddy.” Ardy’s voice was hoarse.
Then the woman led his kid into a private room for his very first hospital session. Ardy slumped onto a padded bench that turned out to be bolted to the floor.
“Mr. Donner?”
Ardy didn’t look up to the voice, a man’s. He tried to respond, really he did, but as his lips moved in silent speech, they gave way to quivering, then his chin followed, wrinkling and puckering. He cried without shame at the wrongness of his little boy’s anguish. Bella slipped her hand into his, and he leaned against her as he wept.
The scars from past sorrows had worn on their souls for decades. They had grown apart and then together, through no small amount of trying. Now all their trying in the world was losing a child. They’d lost their first child together, now they were losing their last one. Greer, their precious Greer, the wonder boy, everybody’s buddy. Ardy’s reconciliation with Bella had been marked by Greer’s conception. The G baby. He remembered the afternoon that he’d guessed she was pregnant, and she told him that boy or girl, this one would be called Greer. And there would be no more.
Another person came by, an older woman with short gray hair, and asked Bella to come join Greer. Ardy sat alone on the bench, the duffel across his knees, and listened to a man ask him again to come into a room to talk. He wiped his face and looked up.
The man had a white lab coat over his shirt, tie, and slacks. He peered over his clipboard, over his glasses. “Uh, Mr. Donner, you’re a … logger? And hay man?”
Ardy’s stomach lurched at the fake-sounding interest, the genuine unfamiliarity this doctor showed with harvest occupations. His jaw set. “What else you got in those papers? Anything useful?”
“Why don’t you come into a room with me?”
“I’ll wait for my wife.”
“There might be things you and I should talk about privately.”
“There aren’t.”
It was a half hour until Bella came out and reported her negatives, how she’d jostled Greer on the counselor’s sofa, how the boy sat in silence. How the woman then asked Bella to step out so she could again try privately with Greer. Ardy took Bella’s hand and followed the doctor into an office with impressive certificates on the wall behind the desk.
“Mr. Donner, in Dr. MacLean’s notes there is a comment about your son having a gun.”
Ardy nodded. “One of my pistols was in his bedroom. That was a couple of months ago.”
The doctor regarded him with raised eyebrows. Ardy looked down, remembering how he’d passed it off a little casually to himself, and to Bella when he told her after.
The doctor gave Bella a stiff glance. “Did you know about this?”
Her bare, belated nod left the man’s jaw tighter still. He turned back to Ardy. “And now what do you think about him having a pistol?”
Ardy jerked his sagging head up to look at the man across the desk. “I’m afraid he might have been thinking about turning it on himself. I had no idea that was in his mind. He could have shot himself then.”
“It’s beyond me why a child would have access to a gun in any case,” the doctor said.
Ardy came clean with a voice like gravel sliding in an avalanche. “It was in my jacket. He took my jacket to his bedroom.” He explained how the house was now gun-free and so was his mother’s. He’d taken his father’s guns to Doug’s cabin too, so that there was no chance Greer could get a gun when he was with his grandma. Ben and Ryan said they didn’t have weapons. Clara and Emma did, but Greer didn’t go to their homes, all the way over here in Seattle.
How else could he save Greer from himself? Didn’t he take care of his family best by loving them?
“Why did you have a gun in your jacket in the first place?” The psychiatrist looked flabbergasted.
“Well.” Ardy thought back, then snapped his fingers. “We were all looking for Greer. He’d come off a horse and we were out looking for him.”
“So you carried a gun?”
“Sure.”
“Was it loaded?”
That baffled Ardy. “There’s no such thing as an unloaded gun.”
The doctor’s brow wrinkled at this response.
“Look, what’s the deal with my boy?” Ardy leaned forward and demanded answers. “What is going on in his mind? Is he crazy? He never seemed crazy to me.”
Bella shook with silent crying, one hand over her eyes, her mouth a grimace.
The doctor leaned forward. “Let’s drill down on your kid having a loaded gun.”
Ardy shook his head. “Look, you’re obviously one of those people that is not okay with guns, and we’re okay with that. But we’re okay with guns.”
“Your despondent eight-year-old son had a gun.”
“I didn’t know he was desp—sad.”
“You knew he had a loaded gun.”
“I knew it was in my coat. I put my coat on him. He was cold. Been out in the woods for hours. Sweating, crossed the river. It was night. He was cold. Look, I’d probably let my kid throw knives or juggle while riding a dirt bike. They don’t do that kind of thing too often.”
The doctor sat, waiting. Bella looked away.
Ardy went on. “Of course I gave him my coat when he asked. Checked on him later that night. Went into his room after I got up to pee in the night. He was asleep. My gun was loose on his bed. I took it and tucked him in. I remember I laid my coat across him, because he’d asked for it earlier. Normal stuff.”
“It’s normal for him to have a gun in his bed?”
“No, that had never happened before—”
“That you know of?”
Ardy nodded. Bella winced.
The doctor tapped his notes. “Greer has an extreme fixation on the concept of mortality. It is especially unusual given that we can find no known loss he’s experienced, with the exception of your father, which was three years ago. His fixation is part of what prompts the PTSD diagnosis. We’re talking about an extreme stress. And people have a genetic tendency for stress adaptation.”
“Genetic tendency,” Ardy mumbled.
The man nodded. “That and other factors affect how well someone handles stress. Event severity and proximity, though yet to be determined in this case, are generally the most significant factors. The subject’s maturity level is another factor. In the case of affected children, the parental reaction, along with the family setting, and the child’s general stress level is central. For example, if the father—”
“This father adapts to stress just fine and would like to hear how you’d help his boy.”
The man spread his hands. “I can tell you that your son’s case is urgent. Dr. MacLean was absolutely correct.”
“What about school?”
“We have state-certified teachers here, on par with the school you sent him to yesterday.”
“Actually, he didn’t go yesterday,” Ardy explained. “His brother took him fishing instead.”
“You allowed him to skip school? Didn’t Dr. MacLean talk to you about the importance of maintaining a schedule?”
Ardy nodded. “Sure.”
“There’s a reason your son is a straight F student, sleeping in school, fixated on scenes of death, and experiencing bizarre thoughts about being able to see the future. He’s terrified. We have to move now. We have to intervene. Please understand, an atypical expression of suicidal ideation does not mean it is not real and—”
“He doesn’t want to kill himself. He told MacLean he wants to die. I asked him about that. Greer told me he just doesn’t want anyone else to die before him. He’s young and there’s stuff he doesn’t understand.” Ardy was ready to boil. “Tell me how things got to this point. Can you do that?”
“Various factors are at play. In a case of acute trauma, for instance, the degree of post-event sleep disturbance can play a tremendous role in the depth of
symptoms manifesting.” The man talked about the ramifications of an adverse childhood experience, hyperarousal, and conduct disorders.
“You lost me at trauma,” Ardy said, cutting both hands through the air to shut the man up. “Look, this boy is loved. We kiss and hold that lad like there’s no tomorrow. Always have. I adore his mother, have since high school. You doctors talked about substance abuse. Please. Maybe he’s seen the youngest of my adult sons three beers deep. Which means that Frankie jokes around more than when he’s sober, and that’s all it means. That’s it. You guys talk about physical abuse. I have never even thought about hitting any of my kids in anger. Or my wife. That is just not me. And she is not some crazy closet child-smacker. She’s just not. Not my wife.”
“Mr. Donner—”
“You guys talk about sexual abuse. Even MacLean said that Greer is black and white that he’s never been touched that way. Never.”
“It’s going to take time to uncover the nature of your son’s disturbance. We need to talk to him in a safe environment—here—about anything traumatic. And we have a full medical team here. When organic causes are ruled out …”
“Organic causes? You mean he’s poisoned?” Ardy asked.
Bella shook her head. “Greer used to be so strong, so happy and independent.”
Ardy nodded. Trying to pin the first nibble of a moment when they noticed he was less than himself didn’t seem to be the doctors’ goal. Instead, the man said, “Let’s take that tour.”
Ardy’s body jerked him to his feet and out of the room. Another man in another white coat walked up and was introduced, but the new name fell out of Ardy’s head as though he never heard it.
“Ah,” said the second doctor, looking at the first while shaking Ardy’s hand, “this is regarding your PTSD child.”
Ardy looked hard at this doctor and jerked a thumb toward the first. “And how would you fix his PTSD child?”