“Mom, I brought company with me,” he tells her with a smile, looking back over his shoulder at me. “Ravenna, this is my mother, Beatrice Michaels.”
My feet inch across the carpet as my eyes take in the frail, sickly woman staring at me. Her dressing gown looks two sizes too big for her small body, but I can still see the bones of her shoulders sticking up through the material. Her face is sunken in and pale, and the turban-style wrap on her head doesn’t fully hide the fact that she doesn’t have any hair.
Nolan watches me as I look at her, his quiet voice filling the room. “She has cancer and it’s progressed pretty rapidly in the last few years. But she’s a fighter, and she’s going to get better real soon.”
“Don’t talk about me like I’m not here, son,” Beatrice mumbles, her body wracked with a coughing fit.
Nolan reaches between her blanket-covered leg and the arm of the chair, pulling out a handkerchief and handing it to her. Beatrice quickly grabs it, holding the white cloth against her mouth as she coughs. When she lowers her hand from her mouth, I notice the handkerchief is dotted in bright red blood.
“So you came back,” Beatrice says as she looks me up and down while I stand like a statue in the middle of the living room. “I always knew you’d come back and finish what you started.”
Nolan stands up next to her chair and looks between us. “Mom, what are you talking about? Ravenna has never been here before.”
Beatrice shakes her head slowly back and forth, her eyes never leaving mine. “I warned them, but they didn’t listen. Now they’re surrounded by death.”
Nolan puts his hand on her frail shoulder, rubbing it gently. “Why don’t you take a nap? When you wake up, it will be time for your medicine again.”
He leans down and places a kiss on the papery skin of her cheek, walking back to me. Grabbing my hand, he laces his fingers through mine, gently tugging me toward the door. I let him hold my hand and lead me away, only because I don’t like the way his mother is staring at me. My skin crawls with each word she speaks, and I just want to get as far away from her as possible.
“The dead speak, and you should always listen,” Beatrice shouts in between coughs as Nolan opens the front door. “I see the letter T. Do you remember? Do you know? T means death, death means T. Remember T. REMEMBER! My husband pulled that little body from the water. He was a hero and he paid with his life for going against evil’s wishes.”
Nolan quickly pulls me the rest of the way out the door, closing it gently behind us. I feel sweat trickling down my back and a sharp pain shoots through my head, stabbing behind my eyes and making me squeeze them tightly closed. I let Nolan blindly lead me down the stairs and back into the woods, moving us quickly through the path until we come out on the other side on the prison grounds. He pauses in the middle of the yard, and I finally open my eyes as the headache subsides. He faces me, and I stare up at him silently while he rubs his hands up and down my arms soothingly.
“I’m sorry about that. The medication she’s on sometimes makes her say some pretty strange things,” he explains. “Before my father died, she used to work at the prison doing palm readings for some of the tour groups. She’s always had kind of a sixth sense about things and your father thought it would be something fun to add to the tours. Mostly, it’s a lot of just reading people and their reactions, telling them things you know will get a rise out of them. It’s not like she actually speaks to the dead or anything.”
Nolan laughs uncomfortably, but I look away from him and stare at the prison off in the distance, thinking about the words she spoke to me. He continues talking to fill the awkward silence.
“I heard shouts and screaming coming from the woods that night. I had woken to give my mother her medicine,” he explains, his hands still moving softly up and down my arms while he speaks. “I ran into the woods and found you lying there on the ground, bleeding from the head. I scooped you up and took you back to the prison. Your father told me to put you on the floor and leave immediately. When I tried to argue with him about calling the police or getting you to a hospital, he threatened my job. He told me if I said one word about anything, he’d fire me and kick my mother and I out of the house.”
Swinging my gaze away from the prison, I look up at him, seeing the truth written all over his face: the truth, the guilt, the pain, and the remorse.
“Your father only gave me this job because he felt bad that my father had a heart attack here on the prison grounds while he was working. If I lose this job, I’ll have no way to pay for my mother’s medication, and we’ll have nowhere to live. I couldn’t risk that, Ravenna, I just couldn’t. My mother is all I have left,” he finishes, a slight quiver of emotion filling his voice.
“It’s fine, Nolan, I get it,” I tell him, resolving him of some of his guilt. Even if I don’t understand the kind of love and affection he has toward his mother, I’m not so cold and dead inside that I can’t see he had no other choice. If my father found out he shared this with me, he’d toss them both out onto the street without giving it a second thought. He doesn’t care who he hurts, as long as his secrets are safe.
T means death, death means T. Remember T. REMEMBER!
“It’s not fine, Ravenna. I should have told you. If I thought that information would help you figure things out, I would have, I promise. You already know your father has problems, and he’s keeping things from you. Telling you he threatened my job and my family’s home wouldn’t have done anything but make your father follow through with his threat and I just couldn’t chance it,” Nolan finishes.
“So your father worked here before you did?” I ask, changing the subject before I start to enjoy having his hands on me.
His hands drop from my arms as I move away, but I give him a smile so he doesn’t think I’m mad at what he told me.
“Yes, he got the job when I was a couple years old,” Nolan confirms, walking with me back to the prison.
T means death, death means T. Remember T. REMEMBER!
“Your mom said something about pulling a little body out of the water. Do you think she meant the accident in the lake when I was little? Was your dad the one who rescued me?”
Nolan shrugs. “It could be true, but I have no idea. Sometimes the things she says make sense, and other times she’s extremely confused, mixing up things that happened in her life with things she read in the newspaper or heard on the news. I never heard either one of them talk about you falling in the lake when you were little and my father pulling you out, so it could just have been her mind playing tricks on her.”
T means death, death means T. Remember T. REMEMBER!
I don’t remember meeting Nolan’s father when I was little, but that doesn’t mean anything since I don’t remember much of my childhood.
With another promise to Nolan that I’m not angry that he kept this secret from me, I leave him to go back home to tend to his mother while I head upstairs to figure out a way to force my father out of his office.
“My name is Ravenna Duskin. I’m eighteen years old, I live in a prison, and I have no idea why the letter T fills me with dread.”
Chapter 16
“T means death, death means T,” I say to myself softly, writing the words on the back of an old grocery list my mother left pinned to the front of the fridge.
Underlining what I just wrote, I set the pencil down on the kitchen table and lean back in my chair to stare at the words. I have no idea why I’m trying to figure out if the ramblings of a sick, dying woman mean something, but I’m out of options right now. I can’t get the image of her eyes out of my head. They weren’t in a daze or clouded over like someone on the verge of death, pumped full of so much medication that they weren’t aware of anything. Beatrice’s eyes were bright and clear, and they never strayed from my face. I don’t care if Nolan thinks her palm reading was just an exaggeration of a sixth sense she has or that she sometimes confuses things she’s seen or heard with real life. The words she spoke made the hair o
n my arms stand up and made me want to run from the room so she’d stop talking. As much as I hated it, I couldn’t ignore it. If I hadn’t trusted my instincts recently, I’d still assume my mind was playing tricks on me and I couldn’t swim. If I’d ignored my gut feelings, I’d still be dressing the way my parents demanded and braiding my hair every morning. I never would have found that suitcase full of clothes I knew were mine, and I never would have remembered being in that spare bedroom before.
Nolan’s mother might have given me another piece of the puzzle, no matter how weird and confusing it was. Her words didn’t evoke any memories, but they still left me feeling uneasy and—I hate to say it—afraid. Fear is for the weak, and I will never be weak again.
“T means death, death means T,” I say out loud again, hoping it will trigger something. Obviously the letter T stands for something. Picking up the pencil again, I start writing names I know that begin with T.
Tanner Duskin, my father
Trudy, now my ex-best friend
There’s only one more person I know whose name begins with the letter T and my hand starts to shake when I merely think his name. I hear a loud snap and realize I just broke the pencil in half from squeezing it so hard. Closing my eyes and taking a few deep breaths, I drop the eraser end of the pencil and use the small broken tip to write the last name.
Dr. Raymond Thomas…
I put an ellipsis after his name because I have no idea who he is to me. I only know that his name fills me with dread, makes my skin crawl, and fills me with the urge to scream at the top of my lungs until my throat is raw.
I’ve avoided thinking about him since the night my mother shot herself. When I asked her about him, she said something about how he only did what they asked him to do. I’m assuming she meant her and my father, but who knows? She might not have even been talking about the doctor. For all I know, she hadn’t even heard me say his name and was rambling about something else.
I can’t avoid it any longer. I have to think about him, even if my mind is screaming at me to run away because it will do nothing but hurt me. There has to be a reason why just the mention of his name by Dr. Beall caused me to black out on the stairs. There has to be a plausible explanation for why the few times his name has quickly flown through my mind by accident since then, I feel like someone is physically causing me pain, and I have to stop, remember to breathe, and calm down.
When I heard his name, it was almost as if he became one with my most painful memories and the scariest dreams I’ve had since this all began. Even if I know it’s something I have to remember to put all of this missing information in my mind together once and for all, it’s still something I’ve been refusing to do since that night.
Those memories make me feel so much more than the comfort of hate and anger. They make me want to do more than just fantasize about harming people. It’s one thing to think about these things and realize there might be something just a little bit strange about myself. It’s a whole other nightmare to feel so overwhelmed by those feelings—by the mere thought of one man—that I know without a shadow of a doubt that I could end someone’s life and not feel bad about it at all.
I’m not a killer. I don’t know much, but at least I know that.
Right when I come to terms with it, forcing myself to think about that man just to see if I can remember something about the person who elicits so much pain inside me, I hear the door to my father’s office fly open, slamming against the opposite wall.
Pushing the chair away from the table, I get up and hurriedly go to the kitchen doorway to see my father head toward the stairs.
“We’re out of whiskey. I can’t believe Claudia hasn’t bought more. I’ll have to speak to her about it,” my father mumbles as he stomps down the stairs, the keys to his car jangling in his hand.
I was fully prepared to bang on his door later to demand he come out and talk to me. I figured I had nothing to lose by telling him I’ve started remembering things, just to see what he would say, even though I’m pretty positive he would just continue lying. He seems to be an expert at that. I want him to know that I’m aware that he lied to both Dr. Beall and me when he said he didn’t know how I got back to the prison after getting hurt that night. I want to be looking him in the eye when he realizes that I know all about the threats he made to Nolan, and I want to see his reaction when I mention the name of Dr. Thomas.
Hearing him speak to himself about my mother like she’s still alive immediately kills that plan. I should probably stop him from driving anywhere in his condition, but at this point I don’t really care if he crashes his car and hurts himself, or even if he gets himself killed. He’s avoided me for days, the first time he even looked at me being the night my mother killed herself, and he shouted accusations and blame at me. He quickly laid waste to the silly notions I had when I first woke up after the accident, that he was a good father and truly loved me. I shouldn’t have ignored my instincts that day in the cell block, when it felt foreign to hug him, as if I’d never done it before. I shouldn’t have brushed aside the gut feelings I had that he was lying to me from day one. Maybe if I had listened to what my head was telling me sooner, I’d have remembered everything by now.
Even though one of my plans has to be put on hold for now, I quickly realize another door just opened for me. Literally. My father’s office door is wide open and when I hear the faint rumble of his car starting outside, followed by the peeling of tires on the driveway, I race across the living room.
The room reeks of stale liquor, sweat, and vomit, and nothing like the pipe smoke and peppermint that usually surrounds him. I pull the neck of my shirt up over my nose, masking some of the smell before I get sick, as I move farther into the room.
I immediately spot the back of a framed photo on the corner of his desk, grabbing it and turning it around to inspect it. Contrary to what my mother said, the photo doesn’t tell me any secrets. It doesn’t even conjure up any memories as I stare at it. Even though it was taken on the main stairway leading up to this area, it seems to have been taken by a professional photographer, since the name of the studio is embossed on the picture in the bottom right-hand corner. There’s nothing special about the photo; it’s a typical family photo with my father sitting on one step and my mother on the one right below him, her body turned to the side with her knees demurely pressed together. I would guess I’m around five or so, and I’m seated right next to my mother with one elbow casually resting on her legs and the other in my lap, and she has her arm around my back, part of her hand that holds onto my hip visible.
The only thing that is strange and a little telling is that my father seems to be separated from us. He doesn’t have his hand on her shoulder, he’s not reaching down to lovingly touch me in any way, and he’s the only one not smiling, his frown lines deep and prominent. Even though both of our smiles—my mother’s and mine—seem a tad forced, at least we don’t look ticked off at the world. He stares into the camera as if at any moment he’s going to jump up and start yelling at everyone. Looking closer at the space between my mother and me, I can see he has his hands clenched into fists, one on each knee.
Shaking my head, I wonder why they even went through with this photo. My father doesn’t seem like the type of person who can be coerced into anything, but it’s kind of obvious he was pushed into taking this picture when he clearly wasn’t having a good day.
I’m not sure if this is what my mother meant when she said the photo would tell me the truth. I already figured out my father isn’t very good at disguising his anger, even in a family photograph. I’m guessing I’m around five in the photo and that was the year the whole lake incident happened. Maybe that’s what my mother was talking about and the cause for the mad look on my father’s face. Maybe this was taken around that same time or even the same day.
I quickly dismiss that notion, though, placing the photo back where it was. The accident when I was five is the one thing they didn’t keep from me and pretty mu
ch the only thing they were quick to talk about when I asked. It’s not a secret or a truth that I needed to figure out.
Moving around behind my father’s desk, I wonder if her mention of the photo was just a confusing way to point me in the right direction. I sit down in my father’s chair and begin pulling open drawers. For the next few minutes, I flip through every piece of paper in each drawer, finding nothing but financial paperwork about the prison, old blueprints, and other miscellaneous items that are useless to me. In frustration, I slam the last drawer closed so forcefully that it shakes the desk, knocking our family photo off the corner of the desk and onto the floor.
Getting up from the chair, I walk to the front of the desk to pick up the photo, thankful that my father has a small area rug under his desk that prevented the glass in the frame from shattering. That would’ve made it a little harder to cover my tracks so he wouldn’t know I was in here. Considering his drunken behavior, I doubt he’d even notice, but I’m not taking any chances. The less he knows about how suspicious I am of him, the better.
Lifting the frame from the rug, the cardboard backing falls off, and with it, a small slip of folded paper. Setting the frame to the side, I pick up the paper, unfolding it to find a three-digit code written in the bottom left-hand corner. Looking around the room again, I ponder what the code is for and why my father would have it hidden in such a strange place. Rising to my feet with the paper in my hand, I stand in the middle of the office, my eyes panning the room. I glance at the bookshelf on one wall, filled with encyclopedias, literary classics, and a few random objects like a coffee cup holding paperclips, a flashlight, and one empty bottle of whiskey that somehow didn’t make it outside with the rest he finished. Slowly, I turn in a circle, looking at all the old photographs in large ornate frames that hang on the walls. They are all black and white, and each one is of the prison at various times through the years. A few were taken on the outside and the rest were taken inside when the prison was still functioning, showing inmates eating in the mess hall, working out in the fields, or lined up waiting for the showers.