The door was open behind Ricky, but he could feel the solid bulk of the orderly as he moved to stand in the way, to watch. Ricky was trapped.
“What . . . What are you doing to her?” he asked. His sense of self-preservation rose swiftly, and he began to tremble. How was this the first alternative to kind and gentle? Everything the warden had said about his limitations was so unfair. Patty was the vulnerable one here. Ricky couldn’t help picturing himself on that same gurney, strapped down. Patients had died in this hospital. He knew that. He had seen the patient cards for himself.
“This procedure was invented in Portugal, but refined here. It was once a much messier business, drilling actual holes into the skull and such,” the warden explained nonchalantly. His voice was utterly dispassionate as he waited for the anesthesia to take effect, and he picked up a long, slender object that looked like an enormous nail.
The light caught its silver finish, a bead of white sliding down it like a tear.
“Walter Freeman perfected the procedure, honed it.” The warden admired the nail implement for a moment and then drew closer to Patty, waiting until Nurse Ash took a deep breath and positioned the woman’s face, tilting it up slightly. Ricky could see directly into her nose.
“Now there was a brilliant man, but never satisfied,” the warden rambled. Ricky couldn’t believe what he was seeing, or that Nurse Ash could so calmly assist. Who was the monster now, he thought viciously, his fingers curling into fists. This was the secret, he thought, this dark, horrible basement and the things that went on in it.
Deceased, deceased, deceased . . .
“Never satisfied,” the warden reiterated. “Rather like me!” He vented a dry laugh. “It’s much simpler now. Much more humane. The transorbital lobotomy was a revolution. Some call it out-of-date, barbaric—myself included, I think there are better ways now—but it is still considered a last resort when medicine fails someone like Patty.”
Ricky bolted forward. He had to stop this. Patty had been his distraction, hadn’t she? And part of him wondered if she had done it intentionally to mess with the warden’s big night. He respected that. He admired it. He didn’t want to fail her. The orderly caught his shoulders from behind, wrestling him back.
“It will be over quickly,” the warden assured him. He raised the spike without warning and Ricky flinched, closing his eyes tightly. The sounds were just as bad. He heard a sharp intake of breath, then a tap and an unmistakable crunch. There was a pause and then the same sound again. It chilled him through to the core and he shivered, his head suddenly pounding. A scream rose out from the hallway behind them, from the other cells. It sounded like rage. Like sympathy. It started with a little girl’s scream, muffled by a heavy door. Other voices joined in, rising in the same horrible chorus he’d heard in his vision.
He wished he could clamp his hands over his ears but the orderly held him fast.
The minutes crawled by. He didn’t dare open his eyes.
If only he could shut out the screaming, the wailing . . .
“There now. That wasn’t so bad, was it? She’ll be right as rain once the anesthesia wears off. I think we can expect better behavior in her future.”
She had hardly behaved poorly before, Ricky thought. She might not even have been ill at all. Patty just liked to sing, and she had a beautiful voice. He would sing, too, if he had a voice like hers. He remembered how on weekends sometimes Martin would play the guitar for him in the park, and he would start to sing along, acting totally serious. He was awful, couldn’t carry a tune even if he knew all the words, and they would dissolve into laughter over it every time. He wanted to hide inside that memory, fold it around himself like a warm blanket, but he could feel the palpable chill of the cell breaking through. When Ricky opened his eyes, the warden was beaming proudly from over his patient, oblivious to the muffled screams filling the basement.
Nurse Ash caught his eye, and he knew the depths of her regret. She looked as trapped, as remorseful, as he felt standing there, Patty limp and sleeping on the gurney before them.
“I don’t understand,” Ricky said, staring. He no longer struggled against the orderly holding him up, but sagged. If they were going to try to strap him down to that goddamn gurney, he would use every ounce of energy he had to fight back.
“Yes, you do,” the warden told him gently. He set down the spike on the tray and moved to the end of the table, putting a hand on Patty’s ankle. “Patty was an instigator—a threat to the health of our other patients. We don’t tolerate that here.”
We punish it. Ricky finished the implied threat for him. He glanced at Nurse Ash again, who looked away, her face pale. The orderly let go of him. This was not his fate. It was not his fate because Nurse Ash had kept quiet. He didn’t feel grateful, exactly, but he was relieved. Why couldn’t she have intervened on behalf of Patty?
“Nurse Ash, stay with the patient, please. Update me when she comes to.”
“Yes, sir,” she said in a tiny voice.
Ricky fought a wave of repulsion-fueled nausea. Not for the warden—whom he was now sure he disliked—but for the nurse. This was her job, he reminded himself. And she protected you.
The warden waltzed right by Ricky, humming cheerfully to himself. The lobotomy, it seemed, had put him in a good mood. Ricky knew he was expected to follow, and when he didn’t move quickly enough the orderly urged him along, then shut the door to the cell with a thud.
They were leaving behind the basement, and Ricky wouldn’t complain about that, but it unsettled him the way they left it to the still-echoing noise of the screaming and wailing. It didn’t appear that the warden even noticed. Maybe he didn’t care.
The worst-case patients were down here, Ricky thought, but Patty hadn’t been so bad. Did that mean the others were just as mistreated?
He was lost in thought as they climbed the stairs back to the first level, the chill of the basement winding up behind them, trying to escape. His posture didn’t relax until they actually stepped into the sunlight streaming through to the lobby.
He said, “What I still don’t understand is, why did you show me that?”
“This is the reality of my line of work,” the warden explained. His good mood had vanished and now he sounded exhausted. “That procedure can be deadly. I am constantly called upon to make these judgments, to decide whether it is worth the risk to help a patient and address their abnormalities.”
“She wasn’t abnormal,” Ricky shot back immediately. “She was just eccentric! You didn’t need to do that and you certainly didn’t need to show me! What if I tell my mom about all of this when she visits?”
IF she visits.
“I showed you because I believe in you, Mr. Desmond, and I think you have the potential to become an extraordinary young man. But I need you to understand that this is still a mental care facility. The people around you are not here on sabbatical, they are here to get better, in hopes of returning to their families, if they are fortunate. You are correct, Patty was an eccentric. Ill, too. The two are not mutually exclusive. So it is with you, only the difference is that you have the potential to be something more. Returning to your family isn’t all you have to hope for.” He tilted his head to the side, regarding Ricky behind his odd little spectacles. Why did he sound so sad? “Here.”
Instead of directing Ricky back to his cell, he guided him and the orderly to a room on the first floor—one Ricky hadn’t visited before. The warden opened the door to reveal an orderly who was mopping the floor, whistling, though there was nothing joyful about it. Ricky stared inside, his stomach twisting into a painful wreath of knots. His muscles tightened, bracing against invisible surges of agony.
He recognized the machine, its clamps and restraints. He recognized the frame that would hold a body upright. He recognized the white, pull-down screen for the slide show. The room reeked of piss, and worse, of fear.
No matter what he told himself, he couldn’t make his body move. He was frozen, transpor
ted to Hillcrest, to the nasty little room at the end of the second floor’s west wing. To the restraints. To the pain.
The warden’s minty breath made his knotted guts turn, and he gasped against the urge to vomit. He’d already felt ill, but now he was sure he was going to throw up.
“This is not the room for a special program patient, for someone with potential,” the warden whispered gently, soothingly, as if any kind words at all could steal away the paralyzing fear of that moment. It wasn’t memory but trauma, and Ricky wanted to leap at the orderly and choke the life out of him for whistling that jaunty tune while he cleaned up the evidence of unadulterated torture. “You don’t need to be in here, Ricky. You never need to be in a place like this again, and you don’t need to end up like Patty. Do you understand?”
Ricky still couldn’t speak. Or move. His veins felt like cold, stinging threads, lit up with the memory of being gagged and shocked.
The warden’s voice was no longer kind. “Do we understand each other?”
“Yes,” he heard himself say. It was the only thing to say. He didn’t want to end up like Patty. He could still hear the crunch as the spike went in. “Yes.”
The door closed and he sobbed, and shrank. He wondered if people would ever stop making him feel so small.
The orderly marched him back toward his room. He wasn’t imagining it—this first-floor hallway really did seem dimmer. He glanced up as they walked, noticing that one of the bulbs in the overhead lamp had gone out and nobody had bothered to change it. The cracks in the facade were mounting.
They passed the lobby and Ricky pulled himself out of his fear and confusion to pay attention, listening to the raised voices as a familiar man shouted down at a nurse behind the metal grated door.
It was the warden’s brother, the man from the other day with the same pale skin and sharp cheekbones, the same dark hair. Ricky saw now that this man’s clothes were shabby. He vaguely remembered something about a mother’s estate that needed to be settled, and he wondered if the warden had come by his own money honestly or if this was part of the reason for their fighting.
“What do you mean he won’t see me? I’m his brother, for God’s sake. I had an appointment! You tell him I’m not leaving. I’ll wait all day and all night if I have to!”
Then Ricky lost sight of the argument as they rounded the corner and left the lobby behind. The multipurpose room was shut up, and no voices came from inside. It truly was a lockdown, Ricky realized. The warden was punishing everyone after the gala disaster.
The orderly unlocked his door impatiently and nudged him inside just as thoughtlessly. He shut the door without another word. At least Nurse Ash would remind him how long until lunch or dinner, or tell him to try to get some rest. He wondered if this orderly even knew his name.
He felt like he had returned to death row, and now he had to await whatever fate the warden had in mind. He shut his eyes tight and tried to collect himself, but it wasn’t helping.
Then he opened his eyes and gasped. He wasn’t in his small white cell, but home. His home in Boston. The tiled floor was gone, replaced with a stretch of overlong summer grass. His heartbeat fluttered. This wasn’t possible, but it was there, and he was walking up the front drive of their prim, white Colonial. Nothing looked quite like it should, though. The flower boxes, normally filled with the bouncing heads of cheerful red blossoms, hung crooked underneath the windows. Red petals wept from the plants, their bare heads drooping and dry. The front door was slightly ajar, the opening strains of his mother’s favorite television show drifting out onto the lawn. Static muddled the music, breaking up the rhythm and lyrics into a random collection of notes and words.
Still, he ached to go inside. This was home, whether he got along with the family inside or not, and even if he hated his mother sometimes there was love there, wasn’t there? What if he had just talked to her that day when Butch came home swinging? What if she had actually listened?
The door opened to greet him, slowly and just enough to allow him through. Something was burning in the kitchen, filling the air with a greasy, smoky tang. His mother’s laughter burst out from the living room to the right, and Ricky followed the sound. She was hoovering the carpets, but the vacuum wasn’t on and she twirled the cord like a lasso.
“Mom?” he asked, standing in the doorway.
Her favorite show was on, but the television flickered so badly it was impossible to know what they were saying.
“Oh, Ricky, honey, you’re back. I’m so glad you’re back. Just in time for dinner, too! What a nice surprise.” She sighed, swaying back and forth to the skipping television track.
Her head was canted back as she pretended to vacuum, her skin paler than usual, eyes fixed open and staring, a wide grin on her face. That smiling mouth didn’t seem to move as the words came out of her.
“Are you all right, Mom?”
“Perfectly fine, honey,” she said, and again her mouth remained frozen. “Why don’t you go upstairs and get your father? I’m sure he’ll want to eat soon.”
His father. Ricky darted for the stairs. She never called Butch, his stepdad, “his father.” He was always Butch. That meant his real father was upstairs. He had come back finally, the thing Ricky had always wanted but never dared to admit because it was just too cliché—it was exactly what those creeps at Victorwood wanted. The only time he’d ever said as much out loud, it had reduced his mother to furious tears. His father had left, she reminded him, he had left them alone, too selfish to stay and try to make it work.
But now his father was back. He would put the house to rights. He would plant new flowers in the flower boxes and shake his mother out of her weird daze. The floor upstairs seemed to swim as Ricky stepped onto it, the hall tilting as if part of a fun house maze. Ricky steadied himself with a hand on the wall, stumbling down the hallway, bare feet squishing into soaked carpeting. Thick, red ooze bubbled up between his toes, staining his skin.
The radio was on in the bathroom, the only room with a light glowing beneath the door. Ricky found his way there, fighting the nauseating back and forth of the hall as it tried to throw him off balance. His feet were wet and cold, his head stuffed with cotton, too disoriented to make out the song on the radio.
The bathroom door was freezing to the touch, but he knocked. He knocked again. The song on the radio was clear now—one of his favorites. “Tears of a Clown.”
“Dad?”
But don’t let my glad expression
Ricky knocked harder, trying to overcome the music.
Give you the wrong impression
No matter how hard he hit the door it didn’t make a sound. Ricky pounded and pounded, shouting, screaming so hard his throat began to sting. His father was in there. Why couldn’t he hear him? Didn’t he want to see Ricky again?
Panic set in and the music cut out abruptly.
“What’s a matter, son? What’s with all the knockin’?”
Ricky turned, and there was Butch down the hall, his usual huge, bulky self, but something was wrong with him, too. He was turned away from Ricky but bent back toward him, neck and head twisted at an impossible angle, so that even with his back to Ricky his face was visible. Pale. Sickly. He had the same fixed, wide smile as his mother.
“Why all the racket?” He was moving toward Ricky now, fast, taking exaggerated steps on tiptoe, unnaturally fast and scuttling, like a daddy longlegs. “Why all the knocking?”
Ricky backed up against the door, huddling. Oh God, there was no getting away, no doors to open, no rooms to hide in. He couldn’t look away from that horrible grin, the one that didn’t move, the one that got closer and closer until Butch was right on him.
“Don’t you know he’s dead? Don’t you know he’s dead, DEAD, DEAD? DECEASED.”
Ricky hit the floor with a grunt. Reality slammed into him just as hard—it was another vision. A dream. His chest ached and he had bruised his chin. He rolled onto his back, pressing his fingertips to his breas
tbone and gulping down breaths until the last of the dream evaporated. The cold floor was the only thing that felt real. Solid. Even his body, shaking and weak, couldn’t be trusted.
Why did the visions he had here feel so real, and when, he was desperate to know, would they stop?
“I’m getting out of here. I have to. Nothing here is right, nothing is . . . And Patty.”
Ricky punctuated the statement with a grunt, tearing a clump of weeds out of the flower bed. The lockdown was over. They had been given supervised gardening, which now felt like a gift. He and Kay weeded side by side, and a few yards away other patients did their best to prune or plant. Even on this warm day the sky was hazy, and the same, the odd fog lingered at the fringes of the yard. It made him think of a wizard’s spell cast on the place to keep anyone from getting in or getting out.
“Work time is probably our best shot—times like this.” He was rambling, but it helped to fill the silence. “Maybe we can get someone else to help us, you know? Cause a distraction. We could make a break over the fence, and then stay off the road. It won’t be easy but we have to try. I won’t let us end up like Patty.”
Angela, who was usually glued to Patty’s side, worked on her own. Patty was just a few yards away, obediently tending to the plants. She was quiet now, no more bursting into song.
Wiping at her forehead, Kay sat back on her heels. A little smudge of mud stayed on her skin, mingling with sweat. “You know that’s not possible. You saw what they did to her. Do you really want to try and cause a fuss after that? They would just catch us and then what?”
“I know, Kay, I know, but that’s all the more reason why we have to go,” he said. Ricky dumped a handful of dandelions into a plastic bucket, shooing away a fly from his arm in irritation. “Since I’m no longer worried about sounding crazy, I’ll tell you that I had a vision last night about my family. My house was falling apart and my mom and stepfather looked like monsters. They had these awful smiles.” He twitched just thinking about it. “I think it was a sign.”