by Nic Joseph
I stared at Sam, and I thought about what Kira had said—even if we didn’t know for sure what had happened when he was ten, he didn’t deserve what had happened to him afterward.
I reached over and grabbed the tissue box, holding it in front of him.
It was probably the closest I’d ever get to a peace offering.
Chapter Thirty-Four
The Sam Farr Story
By: K. L. Jones
FINAL DRAFT—Not to be shared without express permission of author, K. L. Jones
Sam raced out of the living room, the puppets grasped in his hands, and he was glad nobody followed him.
“Let him go,” he heard his father say to his mother as she stood up and tried to follow him. “He’s going to need some time.”
He’d broken his first puppet.
Sam had been as careful as anyone could be, and he’d broken one of them. He’d been worried about bringing them out around a group of people, and yet he was the one who’d broken it.
Sam ran up the stairs and sat down on the bench in the Scrolls’ hallway. It was a long wooden bench with no back, anchored on each side by two small end tables. He leaned forward and looked at the place where his puppet had snapped.
Sure, it could be fixed. A little glue would do it.
But he would always know. Every time he picked up the puppet, he would think about how it was broken, damaged.
Sam sat perfectly still on the bench, the puppets in his hands. Five minutes passed, then ten. They were going to come looking for him soon, and they’d think he was a baby if they saw he was still crying. But he couldn’t get himself to move.
He’d started rocking slowly back and forth when he heard the noise.
It was a loud thump, not too loud to make him think anything was wrong, but loud enough to make him curious.
He grasped both puppets tightly in his hands as he stood up. The noise had come from down the hall—from Kate and Alex Scroll’s bedroom. Sam walked slowly down the hallway toward their closed door.
“Lucas?” he said.
He was still upset with Lucas for what he’d said to his friends earlier, but he wasn’t going to worry about it anymore. Lucas was just like the other boys. Maybe he hid it a little when his parents were around. But he wasn’t a friend, that was for sure.
Sam walked toward the Scrolls’ bedroom and put his ear to the door.
“Lucas?” he said. “Are you okay?”
There was still silence, and he put his hand on the knob, wondering if he should go in. He would never go in the adults’ room without their permission, but he had heard a noise, and Lucas wasn’t saying anything.
What if he’d fallen?
The truth was, Sam really did want to see the inside of the Scrolls’ bedroom. Even his broken puppet hadn’t erased his curiosity about their home. He guessed it was just as pretty and nicely decorated as the rest of their house.
He pushed the door open gently and stepped inside. He took a deep breath, marveling at the large bedroom and the ornate decorations that filled it. The bed was covered with a shiny tan-and-gold bedspread. It was also covered with a million pillows, and Sam wondered how they slept with all of them.
Did they throw them on the floor every night? Sleep with them in the bed? Place them one by one on the chaise on the side of the bed? It seemed like a lot of work, but it sure was pretty.
“Lucas?” he called out again, stepping fully inside the room. Sam turned another corner and walked into the small dressing area. The door to the bathroom was partially open, and he hesitated before going closer. If it wasn’t intrusive enough for him to have come inside in the first place, he surely shouldn’t go into the bathroom.
If only Lucas would answer him back. And tell him what that noise had been.
Sam moved closer to the door and listened carefully.
“Lucas, are you in there?” He touched the handle and tried to peer inside.
“Lucas, what are you doing?”
He pushed the door open and went inside, and the sight in front of him almost bowled him over.
There in the tub…
The bright, colorful shirt.
Lucas Scroll…
Sam stumbled back and fell onto the floor, his eyes never leaving Lucas’s body in the tub. He couldn’t move; instead, he just sat there completely motionless for a few seconds, struggling to get a full breath. He sprang up and ran to the tub. Reaching in, he grabbed Lucas’s body, the water pouring in waves over the side and covering his own clothes. He turned Lucas over and saw the boy’s face, bloated and pale, and he knew right then.
He was dead.
Letting him go, Sam tried to breathe through his mouth, but he felt like he was going to have an asthma attack. He turned and raced out of the bathroom, back into the Scrolls’ bedroom, before running out into the hallway and toward the stairs.
As he did, he could hear laughter coming from downstairs, voices ringing through the house, and he ran toward them, wanting his mother, needing her. He raced down the stairs, holding the banister tightly.
As he turned the corner into the living room, everyone in the room looked up.
“What’s wrong?” his mother said immediately, standing up, and all of the adults looked at him with expressions of confusion and concern.
“Lucas,” he managed to choke out, feeling as if the world were coming down on him, suffocating him. The adults began to move, everyone except Kate Scroll, who stared at him in shock, and then, the wineglass in her hand dropped to the carpet.
“What’s going on?” someone else said, and then they were pushing past him, running upstairs, and someone was bending down in front of his face, but he couldn’t really see who it was.
Sam followed them back upstairs, unable to say anything else, because they would see soon enough.
In a matter of seconds, they would know.
As he reached the top of the stairs, he heard the first screams, loud peals, and he didn’t know who they were coming from. And then Kate Scroll turned the corner into her bedroom, and Sam stood shaking out in the hallway, his mother still crouched in front of him.
He ran into her arms and hugged her tightly, and she hugged him back, asking a million questions, but none of them really mattered. Sam continued to hold her, wishing it would all go away. He needed to get away. He turned and walked into Lucas’s room where he’d left his things.
As he did, he heard a noise in the hallway, and then Kate Scroll was there, crying and screaming and demanding that Sam tell her what had happened.
“What happened to my baby?” she screamed. And then someone was holding her back, and Sam wished he could be anywhere else in the world besides standing there in front of Kate Scroll, who was so mad, mad at everyone, but mad at him the most.
He turned away from her while she was still screaming and grabbed his silver briefcase off the floor. Walking over to Lucas’s bed, he began to put his puppets away, neatly, one by one, wrapping them carefully before placing them gently into the briefcase.
“What is he doing?” Kate screamed out, but Sam ignored her. There were too many people in the room now. Everyone thought he had something else to say, something to tell them about what had happened to Lucas, but he didn’t.
He just needed to go.
It was too much.
The broken puppet.
Lucas and his tie-dye T-shirt.
The water—so much water.
Sam didn’t know what he should be doing, but he knew he needed to finish putting his things away so his family could leave. He took a deep breath and tried to block out the rest of the room as he lifted another puppet and wound the protective wrapping around it—
Chapter Thirty-Five
Tuesday, 11:00 p.m.
I walked slowly down the hospital stairs, replaying my conversation with
Sam.
I couldn’t just go home—there had to be something else I could do. An idea started to form, and before I could stop myself, I got in my car and began to head toward Orland Park.
Twenty minutes later, I pulled up in front of Christine’s office and turned off the engine. The streets were as quiet as the night before, and I thought about how naive I’d been, thinking I could walk inside Christine’s clinic and steal my father’s files. The lights were off in the front of the building, and I walked through the alley toward the back door, much more confident than I’d been the last time. I looked over my shoulder, but there didn’t seem to be any mysterious figures lurking about in the shadows.
I walked up to the back door and banged on it loudly with my fist.
Nothing happened for a few seconds, and I banged again. Finally, I heard rustling on the other side of the door, and then a click before it creaked open. Christine stood there with a frown on her face. “What are you doing here?” she asked, scanning the alley behind me. “What do you want?”
“I need to talk to you.”
Her expression changed, and she seemed to consider it for a moment before stepping back and letting me inside. She shut the door behind me, securing the large dead bolts.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, looking around. It was a different space than the one I’d left last night; there were only a few lights on, and there was no one else in sight.
“Cleaning up some old files. I had Giselle and Eric take the night off,” she said.
She stared at me with an expression that could only be described as defeated. The woman I’d met in her office at Cove Sparry Hospital had disappeared. That woman had been in control, even smug. Tonight, Christine seemed like a shell of herself, staring at me with exhausted, glassy eyes. “Talk to me about what?” she asked.
“Do you know who John Rose is?”
Her eyes clouded over, and she didn’t really need to answer me. “Um, I’ve heard of him, yes,” she said, looking even more uncomfortable than she had before.
“So you know what the potential effects of these procedures are? You know what happened to John Rose and why several organizations outlawed D. B.’s program?”
“Well, those ‘effects,’ as you call them, are nowhere near proven,” she said. “You can’t trust every critic who has something scathing to say, Francis.” She spread both hands in front of her. “Look, I know where you’re going with this. Everything we do in life carries risks. Absolutely everything. You know that, right? We looked into it. What they didn’t want to report was that John Rose had a lot of problems of his own, problems that had nothing to do with false memories.”
She looked away from me, and her face reflected anger. It occurred to me that she’d probably had arguments like this many times in her career.
“Is that why you came here? To tell me how unethical all this is?”
“No, I came here because I realized that, even though my father was willing to try out these theories on people he didn’t know, and of course, Sam Farr—he was scared of it. Did you know that?”
“What?” she asked. “That’s not true. He always spoke about how harmless the process is.”
“If it’s so harmless, why was Alex so adamant that no one in his family should be even remotely exposed to it?”
“That’s not true,” she said again. “He said many times that he would trust the life of his own family with it.”
“Well, he lied,” I said. “Who best to have memories about what happened that night? If not the Farrs, then myself or my mother. But my father was completely against that. It wasn’t just a coincidence that he never actually tried it on us. He was scared of the potential effects.”
“I would never endorse a therapy I thought was harmful.”
“Maybe you wouldn’t. But my father did.”
Christine seemed at a loss for words, and she wrung her hands together. “So that’s why you’re here, to tell me what a horrible person your father is?”
“No,” I said. “I’m here because I need to know what you think. Given what I just told you about my father. Do you have any of the same concerns?”
“I told you, no,” she said. “I wouldn’t be doing this research if I did. Now why do you keep asking me that?”
“Because I want you to try it on me.”
“What?” she asked. “No, I won’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“Because,” she sputtered, “D. B.’s therapies aren’t something you just toss around and try whenever you feel like it. It’s a science, and that takes—”
“It’s our only option,” I said. “I was there that night. I need to know if there’s anything left, anything at all that can help us. Isn’t it worth it to find Alex?”
She hesitated, and I stepped forward.
“To find Matthew?”
She didn’t say anything for a few moments, and then she looked away from me, focusing on a spot just past my head. But I could tell from her expression that I’d gotten to her.
“Yes,” she said, drawing her eyes back to me. “I’ll help you.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
“Follow me.”
She led me down to the room I’d been in the day before with her turtleneck-wearing bodyguard.
“You can have a seat there,” she said, pointing to the chair. I leaned forward and checked for the water bottle I’d stashed beneath it, but it was gone.
“I don’t need to get undressed?” I asked, sitting down.
“Why would you need to do that?” she asked. “This is psychotherapy, not a prostate exam.”
“But last time—”
“I told you, I saw you on the cameras the minute you walked in. We needed to make sure you didn’t have any weapons,” she said.
“Oh.”
I was silent as she opened the cabinet above the sink and began looking for something.
“So what really happened to John Rose?”
Christine paused and turned back to me. She cleared her throat. “There were accusations that when John underwent D. B.’s therapy…that he came away with a few false memories.”
“Such as?”
“That his mother beat him. Every day, for years.”
“Hell,” I breathed. “And then he jumped off a bridge.”
She squared her shoulders. “It was a terrible event, but it didn’t reflect on our industry the way his family tried to say it did.”
“So what do you think? Were the memories John Rose had true?”
She raised both hands and shrugged slightly. “I don’t know, Francis. How could I know? What I do know is that even if they weren’t true, the therapy wasn’t responsible for his tragic death. Right? All it does is provides information.”
“But that’s what his family said?”
“Yes,” Christine said. She turned to face me. “We should probably get started.”
My heart was pounding as she walked toward me with the small white cup and another water bottle.
“You have to take these.” She held the cup in front of me, and I could tell she still wasn’t quite convinced this was the right thing to do. “For real, this time.”
“What are they for?” I asked. “Scarface wouldn’t tell me.”
She ignored me. “They are a part of the induction process,” she said. “Just a mild sedative to help you relax as we begin the procedure.”
I juggled the pills in my hand before tossing them back, following them with a swig of water.
The pills had been down for less than a minute, but the room began to sway, and her face began to get grainy.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said. I knew then that my performance the first time around had been abysmal. I was having a hard time keeping focused. Christine had probably been lau
ghing her head off the previous day at my pathetic attempt to appear as though the pills were taking effect.
“Okay,” she said. “I’m going to need you to sit back and relax, and listen to the sound of my voice. Can you do that, Francis?”
“Yes,” I said, and my voice sounded foreign.
“Good,” she said. “Now take a look at the painting on the wall. Do you see it?”
I turned my head slowly and focused on where she pointed. I hadn’t noticed the painting in all the time we’d been in the room, but now, I couldn’t stop staring at it. It was a splash of colors, loosely forming the shape of what looked like a feather. The vivid teal, warm-brown, and bright-yellow brushstrokes danced across my vision, and I slipped further and further into slumber.
“Good,” she said. “Now I want you to close your eyes, and I want you to stay with me. You’re going to feel tired, but do not give in. That’s the only thing I need you to do for me. Do not fall asleep. Can you do that for me?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, Francis, keep your eyes closed and think back to the night of the dinner party. You know the night I’m talking about? It was a long time ago.”
Of course I knew. It was why we were here. Right?
“Francis?”
“Yes.”
“I asked you to tell me what you see. Can you do that for me?”
“I don’t see anything,” I said, my mind foggy, the painting still dancing in front of me even though my eyes were closed.
“That’s okay,” she said. “You’ll see it soon.”
I gripped the armrest and closed my eyes, fighting the urge to drift off fully.