“It’s like the Scouring of the Shire,” Kay said offhandedly.
“The who-what of where?”
Ricky had no idea what transgression could possibly merit someone rolling their eyes as hard as Kay did right now.
“Oh, come on, don’t you read? Tolkien? Lord of the Rings?”
He blushed, staring at the weeds in his fist. “Does Tiger Beat count?”
“No, it most certainly does not.” But she lightened up, leaning into his shoulder and nudging him. “Anyway, it’s from a book. These little hobbit people go on a long journey away from home. At one point, the main guy has a vision of his hometown burning down, and when they get back at the end, they find everything really has gone to hell in a handbasket. I’m simplifying, but it’s an allegory anyway.”
“A what?”
At least she didn’t roll her eyes this time. “The point is you can’t ever go home, not really. There was still danger at home for the hobbits, and there’s still danger at home for you. Even if you get over that fence, when your parents find out they’ll just send you back, yeah?”
“Yeah,” he admitted. He slumped down, sighing. “That’s probably right. I don’t think I’ll ever be cured enough for Butch. Or for my mom, honestly.”
“Well then. We need a better plan,” Kay told him quietly. “And when we get out of here, we don’t go home. We go anywhere else.”
The thought of being out on his own was a scary one, but she had a point. And he would be eighteen next year. He’d never had the best grades, and he already hadn’t been sure whether he’d go to college. He kind of liked the idea of going to New York, seeing the West Village his friends at Victorwood had told him about. “Do you think we could really make it on our own?”
“I don’t know, but we could try.”
Ricky nodded. It sounded wise. Grown-up. “God, my dad was in that dream, too. I stopped dreaming about him years ago when I realized he wasn’t really coming back.”
“Why’d he run out in the first place?” Kay asked. She wasn’t doing much work, pulling out healthy flowers when Nurse Ash had her back turned and fashioning them into a flower chain. “Do you think he’d be nice to us if we managed to find him?”
Ordinarily a question like that would make Ricky’s temper explode, but for some reason he didn’t mind when Kay asked. Probably because he knew she didn’t want to tease him about it. The kids back home were a different story. His mother must have done something wrong to make his dad run off, or so the common story went. That was just how it was. No self-respecting man up and left his family, so his dad was a bad person or his mother was a hussy.
Ricky thought of the strange photo he had found in the file room, the one with a man that looked weirdly like Ricky. That plus the patient card Kay had found . . . It was almost easier to think of his dad going off the deep end and winding up at a sanitarium. That would mean he’d had no choice, that something was actually wrong with him, other than him being a selfish jerk.
Ricky yanked out another bundle of weeds. “My mom never settled on a good story. One day he’d always been a do-nothing bum, the next time I asked she’d say he was a dreamer who just never wanted to settle down. Butch says it’s because he’d get drunk and slap her around, which was why she hated talking about it. But I don’t remember ever seeing him drunk. Hell, he might take us in, but I just don’t know him.”
“Where would you start looking if you could?” she asked.
“California, probably. That’s where he grew up.”
“Tell you what, we get out of here together and I’ll come with you,” she said, laughing softly. “Know why?”
“Why?”
“Because it’s as far away from here as you can get without being in China. And it’s nowhere near my daddy.” She finished the flower chain and plopped it on Ricky’s head. “I’m sorry you had to go down into the basement. I can’t even imagine what it was like seeing her get—seeing her like that.”
“Thanks,” he muttered. The flower chain tickled the tops of his ears but he let it stay. Nobody had ever made him a crown before. “I’m surprised he didn’t just come out and say: behave or you’re next.”
“But you’re teacher’s pet, right?” Kay teased. There was an edge to her voice, and Ricky picked up on it immediately.
“I shouldn’t have said anything about that. I am not his pet.”
“Right. Maybe that Phase Two thing was just a misunderstanding. You might have heard them wrong.”
“It doesn’t matter what I am, I’m getting out of here.”
“What’s your next plan? Now that the gala failed.”
“I don’t know yet,” Ricky said. “I know it sounds twisted, but maybe this thing with the warden could be a good thing for us. I could get more freedom, maybe. Tell him it helps me calm my impulses to walk outside at night.”
It sounded just as stupid and thin as their last plan, but just saying he would do something made him feel better. Staying in Brookline with no direction, no plan, would be worse.
“Sure,” Kay said, and she sounded as beaten down as he felt. “Just don’t fly out of here without me, okay, Superman?”
“I wouldn’t.”
Kay made a soft grunt of agreement and began to pick more perfectly healthy flowers. For a moment they were quiet, and there was just the sound of the errant bird chirping above them in the trees or Sloane muttering to himself. Then he heard her inhale deeply. “The problem is, my daddy would pay anything to see me normal again. I’ll never let them win, so he’ll just keep paying and paying, and I’ll never get out.”
“Would he really do that?”
“Oh, most definitely. That’s what happens when you get a little bit of money. You think you can throw cash at anything and it’ll be fixed.” Kay finished her second flower chain and crowned herself, watching Ricky while he weeded. That didn’t sound too far off from the warden’s friends, Ricky mused.
“How’d he make all that money? My mom inherited hers.”
“Music. Morris Waterston and the Getup Seven, getting famouser by the day, and in no need of a problem child.” She sighed and pulled on her work gloves, halfheartedly raking her fingers through the dirt.
“The Morris Waterston?” Ricky didn’t know whether to tell her that he had all three of their records at home. It had never occurred to him that one of his favorite bands might be led by a person willing to lock away their kid.
“Mmhm. He got thrown in jail once for a bar fight, but he cleaned up since then. I’m not the kind of clean he wants to be. I thought one day he’d let me in the band. Trumpet. But can’t have a lady trumpet player in that kind of group, and definitely not a lady trumpet player like me.” She picked up a handful of dirt and searched through it, pulling out a worm and flinging it over Ricky’s head toward old man Sloane. “Joke’s on him, next time I see him I’m shoving my trumpet so far up his—”
“Waterston! Back to work!” Nurse Kramer had spotted them from the opposite direction, marching up to them with her cheeks red and puffy. The heat, apparently, did not agree with her lily-white complexion. “And you—” She pointed at Ricky and then leaned over, tearing the crown off his head and throwing it into the mud. “Get up. Warden Crawford wants to see you.”
Journal of Ricky Desmond—Late June
I keep dreaming of my father. He comes to me every night, looking like the guy from the picture I found because I can barely remember what he looked like when he left. Sometimes he leads me out of my room, out into the lobby, and right out into the sunshine. Other times he leads me into the black, empty shadow of the basement. Maybe he really is as bad as Butch says and maybe I’m just like him. Maybe that’s why I’m here, because we’re both bad and bad people are supposed to disappear.
Sometimes I wonder if he was born like me, too. I wonder if he liked men and women or maybe just men and Mom found out. She wouldn’t be able to take that. She always needs all the attention on her. All the love for her.
; Not enough love for me, though. No love for me. It’s not fair. It’s not fair that she can just lock me away in here and there’s nothing I can do about it. Whoever said a mother is always right? If I can be sick and broken, then she can be, too.
Kay is right—my dad could be out there somewhere. Then we could disappear together.
Be strong. Ricky put on a placid smile for the warden, watching with dread as he collected a few instruments into a case in his office. Had he somehow heard what he and Kay were talking about outside?
“You wanted to see me?” Ricky prompted, his skin prickly with anxiety.
“Yes. Now that the hospital is back to business as usual, it’s time we began this collaboration of ours in earnest,” the warden said. He was serious today. Stern. Tucking the case under his arm, he bustled around his desk and went to the door, pausing only to brush a flower petal out of Ricky’s hair. “Hard at work in the garden, I see.”
“It was just a bit of fun,” he defended lamely.
“Palling around with Keith again?”
Kay, he corrected silently, trying to keep a lid on his rising temper. “Like I said, just a little fun. Hard to keep morale up around here, you know? After Patty . . . Well, I mean we can all tell there’s something different about her. She doesn’t sing anymore.”
“Hm,” the warden replied, as if that were completely boring and irrelevant. Right. The warden had made it clear he felt justified in sticking an ice pick in Patty’s eye and scrambling her brain. Why would the feelings of his patients on the subject matter? “You won’t need Keith’s friendship much longer. Or Patty’s. This project will demand total focus from you and from me. We’re developing your potential, testing the bounds of the human spirit and mind. It’s exciting, Ricky, but very taxing. Now, we should get going to your new accommodations.”
“New what?” he blurted. A shadow fell across him from behind and he turned to see one of the male orderlies behind him. “W-Wait, where am I going?”
“Why, upstairs, Mr. Desmond,” the warden said cheerfully, popping a mint into his mouth. “I told you, we’re beginning in earnest. It’s become clear to me that I was wrong about your fraternization with fellow patients. It isn’t helping you to gain the appropriate perspective. Patty demonstrated that quite clearly to me—I was wrong to make you spend so much time with the others.”
His tone darkened and Ricky heard the implied threat—agree to the warden’s terms, or be strapped to the contraption across the hall and suffer aversion therapy for the rest of his stay. Or worse, the spike.
Ricky didn’t respond, which was apparently as good as an answer in the affirmative. The orderly, he knew, was there in case he tried to change his mind.
“Nurse Ash has cleaned out your room and prepared your new place.”
“Can’t I say good-bye?” Ricky asked, feeling the orderly’s hand close around his upper biceps. He was being manhandled out of the office. This didn’t feel like favoritism, he thought, his pulse racing, it felt like exile. “Can I just talk to Kay before you move me?”
“Of course not, Mr. Desmond. Didn’t you hear a word I just said?” The warden clucked his tongue, sweeping by with his head thrown back, a smile on his lips. “Trust me, soon Keith will be the furthest thing from your mind.”
Room 3808 was warmer but still spartan, furnished almost identically to his last cell except for a few more amenities. The windows were still barred, but the bed had a thicker mattress and a pillow bigger than a marshmallow. The blinds were open, the sunshine in the room almost blinding, reflecting painfully off every white surface.
Ricky shielded his eyes and then dropped his hand, noticing an odd window cut into the wall on the right side of the room, near the door. It was about a foot and a half wide and about that tall, with a white wooden frame outlining it and a single pull-down slat lowered past the bottom edge. The handle there made it look as if it could be drawn upward into the ceiling, giving one a view into . . . something.
“This will be your new room for the time being, Mr. Desmond,” the warden explained, entering behind him. “Nurse Ash cleaned the place up admirably. Excellent.”
His pulse hadn’t slowed since they left the first floor and now it tripped over itself in a renewed panic. If Nurse Ash had cleaned out his old room, then she must have found the journal entries he’d been tearing out and keeping. The patient card for the mysterious Desmond before him. Idiot. He hated that she was the bearer of all his secrets. She might not have ratted him out on the night of the gala, but she was still the warden’s puppet at the end of the day.
“Now then, I think it’s time for your first exercise,” the warden said, striding to the bed and taking a seat. He rested one ankle on the opposite knee and opened his doctor’s case. It clicked open and Crawford reached inside, pulling out a bright red stone on a silver chain that snaked and snaked out of the case, rustling softly as it came free.
The orderly who’d accompanied them moved inside, bringing a chair. He set the chair down and waited, passive, silent. He reminded Ricky of Lurch from the Addams family. Ricky took a seat without prompting.
“What is that?” He couldn’t take his eyes off the red stone in the warden’s palm. It seemed to flicker with its own internal light, spidery veins of deeper red shooting out from its irregularly shaped core.
“Just one of my many methods,” the warden said calmly. He cleared his throat and shifted to sit on the very edge of the bed. Then he lifted the chain, letting the stone swing at the end, a glistening heart of a pendulum. “I want you to follow the stone with your eyes, Ricky. Deep breaths. Relax. Yes, that’s good. Is the chair comfortable?”
It was hard enough to look away from the stone when it was stationary, but now his gaze followed its trajectory automatically.
“Yes, it’s comfortable,” he said absently. The chair wasn’t really even there for him. He couldn’t feel it. He could feel his pulse regulating, feel with almost disturbing clarity the thumping of his heart and the warmth—the speed—of his blood flowing through his body.
He wasn’t getting sleepy like those goofy hypnotists in television shows always said, but he couldn’t help but focus on the stone. Back and forth. His breath began to go in and out to the pace of the swinging. The warden’s face disappeared behind the pendulum. It was the stone and the voice, the deep, warm voice that kept him anchored and alert.
“Continue to watch. Continue to follow. Mesmerizing, isn’t it? Almost . . . comforting. That’s good. I knew you would take to it. Now, Ricky, I want you to listen to my voice and concentrate as hard as you can. My voice will keep you safe. My voice will help you.”
Yes. That sounded right. Back and forth. A calm, loose sensation settled over him. It reminded him of skipping school and nipping into a stolen bottle of brandy with Martin on the pier. Butch would throw a fit when he found out the bottle was missing from his liquor cabinet, but in that moment, on the pier, with the gulls crying in the distance and the waves lapping near their feet, Ricky had felt utterly at peace.
“When Nurse Ash comes in later you will take the medicine she brings you,” the warden told him gently. That sounded like good advice, too. He was in a hospital. When you were in hospital you took your medicine. A dose. The first dose. “You will swallow it. Taking the medicine will keep you safe. You’re safe here, Ricky. This is where you belong. You don’t want to leave, do you? Why would you ever want to leave us when you’re perfectly safe.”
Dreamless sleep. Beautiful, peaceful, restful sleep . . . It was such a relief to sleep soundly, but it didn’t last long. He came awake and out of his blissful stupor in a panic, feeling a strong grip around his wrists. Cuffs? When had he been cuffed? His head was so foggy. He couldn’t remember anything before coming to his new room. They had moved him to room 3808, and then the warden had taken out a red stone on a chain and after that it was like someone had reached into his brain with an eraser and wiped half the board clean.
“Sh-hh!” It was a woman’s
voice. The room was dark but if Ricky squinted he could just make out Nurse Ash kneeling next to his cot.
“What are you doing? Why are you . . . Why are you putting me in cuffs!?”
It was too much. He had come out of darkest sleep to this shock, and his heart began to ache. Flailing, he tried to knock her away from the bed but Nurse Ash held on tight, shushing him again.
“Hush. I’m taking the cuffs off, Rick. I’m letting you go.”
“Oh . . . Damn it. Why can’t I think? And why did they tie me up?”
“I told you,” she whispered, shaking her head. A few halfhearted moonbeams broke through the blinds, striping the floor. He saw there was a tray of food on his bedside table, but he was hardly hungry. “You can’t trust the warden. You can’t trust me either.”
“That’s very obvious now! I think I figured that out when I watched the two of you shove a needle in Patty’s face.”
She pulled the keys away and Ricky was free. The cuffs fell to the floor with a soft jangling, and he tried to sit up, rubbing at his chaffed wrists.
“He made me help with that for a reason,” she said softly, standing. “That’s what he does. He doesn’t want you to believe me or trust me. He doesn’t want you to think I’m . . . good, and he wants to keep us complicit in his deeds. Keep us afraid of being seen. I don’t care if you believe him or me. It really doesn’t matter. All that matters is that you trust yourself.”
“Said the crazy person to the crazy person.”
“I’m not crazy and neither are you,” she insisted. A blue, knit shawl had been draped over her shoulders, and without her paper cap she looked much more human. Normal. “I wish I could tell you everything . . .” She closed her eyes tightly and whimpered, a sheen of sweat glossing over her face. “Whenever I try it’s like there’s a hand just hovering there, waiting to slap me.”