Her expression went blank and she shrugged, looking down at her notes.
“I won’t fuss if it helps you to have a sense of humor about all this,” she said, almost breezily. “We’re going to have to get to know each other, and I prefer my patients cheerful, if at all possible. Cooperative, at the very least.”
“Aye, aye,” he said with a salute. Usually he was dealing with buttoned-up counselors glaring at him behind spectacles, but maybe he could have a bit of fun with this one. She was closer to his age, surprisingly young for a nurse. If he played his cards right, she might be his friend, and a friend might be able to help him place a phone call to his mother. “And how do you run the Good Ship Loony Bin. Is it a tight ship or a loose one?”
It never hurt to use a little flirtation when making friends, even if that approach had fallen flat with the dusty old psychologists he was normally assigned.
“I know this must be difficult for you, seeing as how you . . .” Nurse Ash scrutinized her notes, which included the paperwork from Butch. Her sentence trailed off, and he could just about pinpoint the instant she located the exact reasons for his being there. After his name (Carrick Andrew Desmond, although nobody but his grandmother and Butch when he was angry called him Carrick), his age, his weight, and his date of birth, there would have been whatever euphemism Butch had picked for his problem this time.
The last two times, he’d also cited “violent outbursts” on these applications. But that was just the one time, and really, Butch deserved the fork that got flung at his head for the things he was calling Ricky.
“Seeing as how I got caught in bed with the neighbor boy. Or I should say, young man. I’m not that much of a pervert.”
“You’re not a pervert at all, Mr. Desmond,” Nurse Ash said flatly. Huh. That was new. “I don’t like words like that. They don’t do anything but shame. Treatment is not about shame.”
Maybe she really was different. He doubted it, but anything was possible.
“You shock me, Nurse Ash. But in the very best of ways.”
She smiled then and it almost made her pretty. “Please let me know if you have any trouble settling in. Accommodating to life here can be”—the nurse bit down on her lip, hesitating—“perplexing.”
“Oh, trust me, nothing I can’t handle. I was born to jailers.” Possibly an overstatement.
As she moved to go, she frowned, shaking her head. “I’m afraid life must have been very unfair for you so far.” But that was an understatement.
“I’m afraid it’s very unfair for everyone.”
“I’ll check in with you again shortly,” she said, trotting to the door. She seemed to turn away from him quickly, perhaps to hide the blush creeping down her neck.
He was feeling even better, downright smug, when a familiar girl’s scream cut through the silence. The door shut hard and locked with a click, and Ricky’s smile vanished. That wasn’t just the scream of someone gripped by madness. It was a shriek of pain.
Breakfast occurred at seven. Lunch at noon. Predictable. Regimented. When Ricky asked the sharp-faced nurse escorting him to lunch what he could expect to eat, she shook her head and said with a humorless chuckle, “Soup and bread, Mr. Desmond, soup and bread. You’ll learn.”
She wasn’t as nice or as quick to blush as Nurse Ash.
Breakfast had been soft porridge and eggs (not quite scrambled, and not quite real, he suspected, but powdered). Nothing one could possibly choke on. He guessed that was the reason behind the soup and bread, too.
He ate his lunch in observant silence, his eyes scanning the “cafeteria,” which seemed to be a large, multipurpose room with a gated corridor to the kitchens and an arched doorway to the main hospital hall that also could be shut up and locked if necessary. White. Everything was white and blisteringly clean. It was clean enough to eat off the floors in here, but luckily they hadn’t made him do that.
Rain drummed against the walls; he could hear it distantly, a reminder that life continued on while his stalled inside Brookline.
The soup draining off his spoon was the color of diluted blood. At one point it had probably resembled a hardy vegetable soup, but it had been watered down and reconstituted to a tepid, tomato-flavored water with the occasional chunk of celery. Setting down his spoon, Ricky watched a few other patients file into the room. They were brought in shifts; his table was already full, and now the bench directly behind him was filling up.
It was like high school, only these weren’t cliques choosing their own little spheres. They weren’t even talking. The other patients were eating so quickly they might have been having their last meal, and Ricky hurried to finish his soup, figuring they knew something he didn’t. Nurses stood at opposite ends of the long, white tables wearing identical expressions as their eyes roamed the room.
At the table in front of him, an elderly woman sat elbow to elbow with a short-haired girl who looked like she wanted to glance over her shoulder, maybe to catch his eye. But each time she started to turn, she glanced first at the nurses and thought better of it.
Ricky scraped the last of the soup out of the bowl and crammed half of the stale roll in his mouth. The nurses began walking down the bench behind them, tapping each patient on the shoulder, their signal to leave. A big, broad-shouldered hulk down the bench from Ricky hesitated, taking an extra second to eat some soup.
“Dennis.”
She clapped, once, and Ricky watched wide-eyed as the giant man scrambled up off the bench, hanging his head as if he were a kid caught with his hand in a candy jar. Whatever the nurses did here to keep their patients in line, it was clearly working.
When the rain stopped they were marched outside for “work hour.”
Ricky stood in the grass and stared up at the dull sky, letting records play in his head. Otis, Stevie, Smokey . . . All the records he could only play when he was home alone. His parents hated his taste in music, especially Butch.
Ricky wrinkled his nose as Nurse Ash appeared in the yard, carrying a basket filled with gardening gloves. Yeah, this felt about right. Chore duty usually landed heaviest on his shoulders when Butch came home early from work and caught him playing Smokey Robinson’s latest on full blast. On Butch’s hi-fi, no less.
I won’t have any of that goddamn noise in my house, a man wants peace and quiet when he gets home.
Oh, Butch, I really don’t think my mother would appreciate that kind of language in this house—
Outside, Carrick. Now!
Nurse Ash didn’t scream at him as she handed him a pair of gloves. She was still as neat and tidy as the other nurses, but now Ricky noticed her hair looked wilder under her hat, not clipped or curled or rolled into a perfect bun.
“What am I supposed to do with these?” he asked wryly.
“Put them on your hands, I imagine,” Nurse Ash responded, equally dry.
He smirked. “I figured out that much, but . . .” He nodded to the other patients, who had grabbed pairs of gloves and immediately peeled off to predetermined locations to begin work.
“Every day after lunch we have supervised gardening. We can’t let you have anything too sharp, obviously, but Warden Crawford thinks this kind of exercise is good for you. Why don’t you join Kay? She’s going to deadhead the azaleas.”
“Groovy,” he muttered. Before Nurse Ash could move down to the next patient, he said, “Look, do you think . . . Is there a way you could maybe put in a good word for me with that warden guy? I really need to talk to my mother. If I could just make a phone call, it would mean the world to me.”
Instead of rejecting his request outright, she calmly handed a pair of gloves to the patient after him.
Right when he’d resigned himself to being ignored, she asked, “Is something the matter?”
Ricky’s guffaw was so loud it startled everyone in the yard. All eyes were on him as he cleared his throat and lowered his head, trying to shake off their attention. “I don’t belong here,” he said, softer. “Look at me.
Can’t you tell? I’m not . . . one of these people. A crazy.”
She sighed. “Order, routine, discipline, and—yes, occasionally—correct medication. That’s what we do here. That’s what keeps our patients healthy. That’s what keeps them from harming themselves.” She paused and then said significantly, “Or others.”
Right. So maybe that incident was what had really landed him in Brookline. Maybe this had nothing—or little—to do with him and Martin.
“It was one time,” he whispered.
“Your stepfather had a fractured wrist,” she pointed out. “Try to get along here, Ricky. It’s for your own good. Order, discipline—”
“Yeah, I got it.”
Ricky yanked on the gloves and turned slightly, facing the driveway beyond the wrought-iron fence. A row of bushes, azaleas apparently, grew along the fence, outlining the borders of his prison in green and pink. A serious-looking and seriously strong male orderly guarded the gate itself while the girl Nurse Ash had pointed out knelt next to one of the azalea bushes. The morning mist that should have dissipated by now hung like a wreath of smoke around the fence, a ghost spread across the entire yard.
He made his way toward the girl but kept his eyes on the gate. Ricky briefly considered rushing the guard, but between the sedative, the eggs, and the watery tomato soup, he didn’t exactly have much energy for tackling.
“You can stop looking at the road,” the girl said when he reached her. He hadn’t noticed her watching him. Her eyes were still on the azaleas. “Nobody’s coming for us.”
“Not yet, anyway.” The yard sloped down toward her and the bushes. As he knelt beside her, recognition dawned—she was the girl who had tried to scope him out during lunch. She was black and her hair was cut short, unevenly, but even the bald patches couldn’t take away the fact that she was a looker. Tall, slender, managing to look poised even in the baggy, sack-like shirt and trousers they’d given her to wear.
He rested his knees in the mud and started picking at the flowers, even though there weren’t any that were obviously dead. “What happened to your hair?”
“They make me cut it short, so I tear it out sometimes instead.” She said it softly, sadly. Her voice was gentle and low, as if someone were sleeping nearby. Ricky had met a few New Yorkers at Victorwood and Hillcrest, and he could hear a similar influence in her accent, though he couldn’t be sure. “Order and discipline aren’t really my style. Never seen you here before.”
“I’m new,” Ricky replied. He stopped his picking, turning fully toward her. “My name’s Rick, or Ricky. Carrick, actually, but only when I’m in trouble.”
That made her smile. “Kay. I guess we both like to keep it short and sweet.”
“And you’re here for what? Tearing your hair out?”
“No, that’s just my one little rebellion. I try not to draw too much attention to myself,” she said, pausing and wiping the back of her hand across her forehead. When she rested back on her thighs Ricky could tell she was even taller than him, by a few inches. “You might’ve noticed, but anybody gets caught talking too much or out of turn and they’re disciplined. Still, we find our ways.” She pointed to his right, where Nurse Ash was supervising an old patient who didn’t seem to be working so much as admiring the tulip beds. He had grave scarring along one half of his neck. It was well healed but still gnarled and pink. “That’s Sloane. He’s convinced he can fly. Tried jumping off a few roofs until his kids got tired of scraping him off the pavement. Far as I can tell he’s been in here for forever. And that’s Angela,” Kay said, indicating a middle-aged woman tending to daffodils at the top of the hill. She didn’t look insane to Ricky, just bored. “Took her husband apart and tried to serve him to his stepmama.”
Ricky gave Angela another look, wide-eyed this time. “Really?”
Kay nodded. “He was beating her up for years. Cops wouldn’t do anything to help because he was one of them. Makes you sick to think about.”
“God, that’s awful. Shouldn’t she be in prison?”
“Maybe a judge went easy on her. I don’t know her whole life story,” Kay explained nonchalantly.
“That still leaves you . . .”
“And you,” Kay replied.
“Uh-huh, but I asked first,” Ricky said, enjoying this little game.
“I didn’t have to give you all that information. It’s hard to get answers around here, you know. Hard to even talk without getting in trouble. Took me a month just to get a word out of Angela during work hour.”
Then he was lucky she was talking to him at all, and in an almost friendly way. Looking away, he shrugged and said, “That’s fair. I like other boys. Well, I like girls, too. I don’t really have a preference, and that’s the problem, I guess.”
“According to your parents,” Kay said in her soft voice.
“According to pretty much everyone.” He studied her for a moment before saying slowly, “But not you.”
“No. Not me.” She clenched her jaw, and together they watched Nurse Ash finally tug Sloane off the gate and urge him back up the shallow hill toward Brookline’s entrance. He still couldn’t make out her exact accent. It sounded like she had polished the rough edges off whatever it was. “Is that it? You do something else?”
“Not really,” Ricky lied. She didn’t need to know about the one bad time he’d lost his temper. About his stepfather’s fractured wrist.
“They tried to put my auntie in some hospital in California for that. I almost ended up there, too. Thank God we moved back to New York before they could get that idea in their heads. Some terrible things went on in that place. They wouldn’t even tell me all of it, said it was too much for a child’s mind. Shame they didn’t think putting me in here would be too much. I guess no horror stories get told about this place.”
Ricky shivered. The previous “resorts” his parents had tried were horrible in their own way. Even so, he had occasionally enjoyed tricking the staff there and finding ways to get around. It was like a game. He still thought Brookline could be a game, too, once he got the hang of it.
“So you’re like me?” he asked, trying not to think too hard about how long he might be at the hospital. He didn’t think he could stand being here for a month.
Kay laughed at that, glancing at him sideways. “I’m not sure I would put it like that.”
“So what then? Do you want me to guess?”
“I wouldn’t make you do that.” Kay chewed her lip. It was rough and worn, as if she resorted to chewing it quite a lot. “And I should take pity on you, seeing as how you’ve been talking to me like I’m a lady.”
Ricky blinked. “Because . . . you are one.”
She chuckled, rolling her eyes. “You really think so?”
“Is this some kind of trick question?” he asked, his face suddenly warm. “I mean, you are,” Ricky insisted.
“I wasn’t always that way.”
That was something to think over, but not now. He didn’t like to be on the back foot in a conversation, didn’t like feeling foolish. He took what he hoped passed for a casual glance at her. “Well, you’ve looked like a girl as long as I’ve known you.” That got a short laugh. “You sort of have that Diana Ross look going on, it’s nice.”
“Diana Ross . . . ,” Kay whispered it, staring past Ricky, her eyes becoming slightly unfocused. “That would be nice, wouldn’t it? Only she wasn’t born Daniel Ross, was she?”
“Miss Ross and I aren’t exactly on a first-name basis,” Ricky said lightly.
“Kay is short for Keith.”
Kay waited, watching, smiling wider the longer the silence went on, like she was used to this. After a moment Ricky nodded. He just nodded. What else was there to do? He understood and it seemed like she had more to say.
“My parents are both beanpoles, and my pops couldn’t grow a beard if his life depended on it, all that’s lucky for me.” She laughed, wistfully, shaking her head. “My brother found out I was hopping a train to Baltimore. Rat
ted me out. I heard about a doctor there that helps out girls like me. Guess that was for nothing now.”
“That’s why they keep cutting your hair here?” he asked.
Kay nodded, smoothing her long fingers over her patchy hair. “Before they put me in here it was so nice and long. Wish you could have seen it.”
“What’s in Baltimore?”
“An open mind or two,” she murmured. “I was afraid, you know, and I didn’t really want to leave home, but what else can you do? You have to grow up, I guess, or try to.”
“I’m not sure I could’ve gotten as far as the train station,” Ricky said honestly. “That takes a lot of guts.”
“I didn’t get on it,” she said a little shyly. “Who knows if I would’ve made it all the way.”
“Hey, you two, work hour is over.”
Nurse Ash hurried up to them, her white skirt and jacket streaked with mud from helping Sloane. The yard had emptied except for the three of them and an older man with spectacles and a long white coat who stood watching from the doors. Ricky hadn’t noticed him before, but now he could feel the weight of the older man’s eyes on him and it left him unsettled. Was he in trouble? Kay said they weren’t supposed to talk so much. Maybe this was what she meant.
“It’s rude to interrupt,” he said half-jokingly, cocking his head to the side.
“That’s cute, Mr. Desmond, but it’s time to go inside.”
Kay started back up the hill obediently. “Just do what they say, Ricky. Take it from me—it’s much easier that way.”
“Who is he?”
Kay looked up from her pad of paper. With a soft blue crayon she had doodled a sailboat nestled into a cloud. Her gaze strayed from the paper just for a second. “Warden Crawford.”
“He’s got a staring problem,” Ricky said, watching the man at the door. It was the same person he’d seen watching them two days earlier during their supervised gardening. Just like then, the man watched Ricky steadily, conferring in whispers with Nurse Ash. She shrank in his presence, hunched, her eyes darting away from him constantly.