Ricky had been at his lunch table before, but they rarely ended up on the same work hours. Today Dennis did his shift covered in bruises, his head purple and blue, a few dents and gashes running deep along his heavyset brow.
“Slip in the shower today, Dennis?” Ricky asked, tying another napkin off. “They actually hosed me down with warm water this morning. Lucky, right? I feel downright peppy.”
Dennis ignored him, working twice as fast.
“Who throws a gala at an asylum anyway?” It was a question to no one, but with five days until the warden’s illustrious gala, Ricky couldn’t help wondering once again why this couldn’t be a job for a professional staff. Angela, Sloane, Tanner, and a few other patients worked down the table from them. Ricky had begun to recognize more of his fellow inmates. Sloane was easy enough to remember, from his wild, puffy white hair to the angry scar on his neck (Ricky was pretty sure he didn’t want to know how the old man had gotten it). Sloane seemed to recognize and remember him, too, and he went out of his way to keep his distance, flinching if the two of them were ever forced to enter a room together or sit at the same table. There was John-John, a boy about his age who suffered from short-term memory loss. He was here because his parents thought it was all a ruse, that he was making it up to get out of school. From what Ricky could tell, John-John had a genius’s understanding of math and science, so if he was cutting class it wasn’t impacting his learning much.
And there was Patty, a soft-spoken middle-aged woman whose cell was on Ricky’s floor, and who had a tendency to speak in verse or burst into song. It was actually kind of pleasant. Sometimes it was obvious from the timing that she did it just to rankle the staff. Ricky always liked when he could hear her singing through the walls. Some nights he got entire renditions of musicals. Last night had been Oklahoma! It didn’t help him sleep, but it did chase away some of the darker thoughts that had begun to creep in around the edges when he was alone.
He knotted and tied another napkin, sloppily, and tossed it onto the pile.
Six nurses milled near the door, pointing at different tables in the cafeteria and then to open spaces, perhaps discussing how best to arrange the room to satisfy the warden’s exacting demands. Ricky was just about to daydream ways to instigate a jailbreak when Kay slipped in the doors, skirting along the wall behind the nurses before walking with purpose across the room to Ricky’s table. Without missing a beat she fell in next to him, watching the way Dennis twisted and folded the napkins before doing one of her own.
“I didn’t think we were on the same work slot today,” Ricky said softly. He didn’t really mind if Dennis heard, since the hulk of a man didn’t seem prone to chattering, let alone ratting on them.
“We’re not,” she said. “I shouldn’t be in here but I had to show you something.”
“You’re breaking the rules?” Ricky asked, impressed. “For me? You shouldn’t have.”
“This might change your mind.” Her hands moved lightning fast, dropping the napkin she had just tied off and grabbing something that was hidden under her uniform top, tucked into her waistband. She slipped it into Ricky’s hand and then glanced behind him. “It might be nothing. I don’t know. But what you said about seeing that ghost in the closet—”
“I said I didn’t know what I saw,” Ricky mumbled.
“Would you just look at it?” She grabbed another unfolded napkin, copying Dennis’s movements. Down the table from them, Patty began to sing one of her songs, but the nurses were too engrossed in debate to notice.
“Most of this is rubbed off,” Ricky said, examining the small patient card she had found. The notes were in a long, looping hand, almost indecipherable. At the top he recognized half of a physician’s name and then in the patient slot what looked like either Diamond, Dandelion, or Desmond.
Whoever it was, he had been sequestered for a violent episode, injuring one of the attending orderlies. He was apparently “extremely resistant to Tues. experiment therapy.”
“Desmond is a common enough name,” he pointed out. “If that’s what it says.”
But his hand shook a little as he read over the card. Kay didn’t know the full truth about what he had done to his stepfather, but seeing his last name coupled with a penchant for violent outbursts concerned him. Frightened him.
“I know you don’t care for your stepfather much,” Kay said softly. “Whatever happened to your real daddy?”
“He ran off,” Ricky said. It was the only story his mother ever told about him. “He was no good for us. I was a handful even as a kid, and I guess it was just too much, so he left.”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“I know what you’re thinking.”
“I’m just thinking that I’m sorry,” she insisted.
“He ran off.” He ran off. He left us. Left us with Butch. That was the truth.
Ricky clamped down on the note card harder, feeling the ugly darkness that preceded one of his incidents flaring up. No, it wasn’t Kay’s fault. She was just trying to help. Still, he wanted to lash out at something. He felt too full up, overcharged, and all the fear and uncertainty needed to go somewhere. But there was nothing to hit so he shoved the card into his waistband.
“Do you mind if I keep this?” he asked.
“It’s already been down your pants, so yeah, it’s all yours.”
The need to smash something went out of him and he laughed, glancing up at her. She was smiling back, tentatively. She had broken the rules for him, and he knew how much that meant for her. “Thanks. I know you’re just trying to help.”
“Desmond is a common name,” she said back.
“Really common,” Ricky agreed. He already felt better.
Dennis jerked his head up, a napkin gripped in both hands. “Still,” the man said, drawing out the word so slowly it sounded like he had fallen asleep mid-syllable. “So still. Like a statue, that one. Stiff. Posed. Beautiful.”
“What did you say?” Ricky shared a glance with Kay. Despite her longer stay, she seemed just as shocked as he was. “What are you talking about, Dennis?”
“Nothing. The last time I saw him. Nothing.” Dennis smiled then, far away, and tied off another napkin.
The screams that woke him the next morning were not in his imagination. They jerked him awake in his bed, distant, yes, but real. He knew they were real because he knew who they belonged to.
Kay.
Ricky hurled himself out of bed, pacing, rumpled and exhausted. What were they doing to her? Was the shock treatment for her “problem” worse than what they’d tried on him at Hillcrest? That had been bad enough. It was humiliating. It was torture. He didn’t know how anyone could do those things and call themselves a doctor. Doctors helped. Doctors cared. Just like their word “treatment,” the term here was phony.
God, he felt like hell. Probably looked like it, too. He hadn’t seen himself in more than ten days. At school he had never lacked for dates or attention. Just like Burt Ward, his mother used to coo, before she knew about his condition. She would ruffle his hair and then fix it back down. Handsome just like Burt Ward, my little boy wonder! My very own boy wonder!
It always sounded so stupid to him. There was only a vague resemblance, and anyway those suits they wore on Batman were ridiculous. I’d put one on now and run laps in the cafeteria in front of the whole school if it got me out of this place.
There were no mirrors around for patients to access, probably because it was assumed they’d break them for the shards. He got it now, the desperation, the need just to get out. The other patients seemed so calm. Acclimated. He couldn’t imagine that would ever be him. He wouldn’t let it be.
No matter what, it was time to come up with a better plan than sucking up to Nurse Ash or the warden and hoping for a phone call. It was clear now that a phone call was never coming. He hadn’t seen much of the warden or the nurse in the past couple days anyway. So much for her trying to help.
Kay was the bigger concern
now. He needed to see her. Needed to help her. He would need an ally if he was going to keep his head about him.
Nurse Ash came for him after all, but not until lunch. Another nurse had appeared to take him to breakfast, but Kay wasn’t there, and the nameless nurse stayed to watch him while he ate. Ricky was ready and at the door when Nurse Ash arrived; he had heard her heels clicking in the hallway, recognizing her comparatively relaxed gait.
“Eager today, are we?” she joked, all benign smiles when she unlocked the door to find him standing there at attention.
“Eager? Are you kidding?” he snorted. “After what you said the last time I saw you, I think you owe me some answers. You ran off without really saying anything. It looked like you were going to be sick. He’s a monster, remember? A butcher? What did you mean by all that? What did he do to that girl who was in the basement?”
Nurse Ash pulled back her head, lifting a single brow. “Rick . . . I have no idea what you’re going on about. I’m only here to take you to lunch, then on to gardening, and then you will work in your journal for an hour.”
“But you . . . No! You saved me from the basement! You told me not to trust the warden, you said . . . You made me promise not to go anywhere with him.”
She frowned at him, consulting her chart. “Don’t be foolish, Mr. Desmond. The warden is my superior. I would never say those things, and I would appreciate it if you kept me out of your wild delusions.”
Ricky still hadn’t adjusted to the feeling of confinement. Even now, as worried as he was about Kay, and as curious as he was to know about that Desmond patient card, he fantasized about breaking into a run, crashing through the orderly and the gate that separated him from the driveway and sprinting until he was out of sight.
Kay hadn’t been at lunch, and now she wasn’t outside for gardening. Looking around, Ricky didn’t see a single sign that any of his fellow patients noticed or cared about this, and that was a sad thought. Kay had noticed so much about all of them.
A chill passed through him as he turned to go in at the end of the hour, like a stiff wind that became an arrow gesturing toward freedom.
“Run,” a soft voice said from behind him. It was unmistakably outside his head. He twisted to follow the sound, feeling another crackle of cold against his skin.
“Ricky, come on, it’s time to go inside,” Nurse Ash called.
“But I heard—”
“Is it going to be that kind of day?” she asked.
Ricky heard the impatience in her voice and tried to ignore the uncomfortable drifts of cold air sliding over his skin. Subtly, he pinched his own pinkie and felt for himself how chilled his flesh had become. And here it was June.
They were only a few steps from the multipurpose room when he heard the voice again. This time closer. This time right in his ear. “Run,” it said again, then, “hide.”
He didn’t expect Kay to be writing, but there she was, already sitting alone at a table in the far corner, looking so miserable that the nurses didn’t even make her move to join the others. Ricky couldn’t believe Kay was sitting upright at all. After only fifteen minutes or so of shock therapy at Hillcrest, Ricky had felt dizzy and confused, his memory taking an entire day to recover.
Nurse Ash lingered after handing him a few crayons and a pad of paper, following him to Kay’s table and hovering over them. His skin was still cold, and his hand shook as he lowered his crayon to the page.
“You two just work quietly now,” Nurse Ash said, directing this more to Ricky. “The warden is hoping to use his fund-raising gala to introduce the most improved patients to some of his donors. Wouldn’t it be nice if that included you two? You might even get some of the cake at the end of the night.”
“Thrilling,” Ricky muttered.
“Cut the sarcasm, please,” she said with a sigh.
“The warden enjoyed my observations. You should, too.”
“I’m not the warden,” she replied. He looked up at her at that. It was the only hint from her that she remembered their odd conversation. Was that a slip? A hint? “Focus on your journal, Ricky.”
He waited until she was gone to say another word.
Tired. Kay looked so, so tired. Her head drooped on her neck, her eyes were bloodshot, her hands trembled on the table. It seemed like further torture to make her sit there. They should have let her rest and recover properly.
Maybe she now had memory loss. Maybe she was confused. Ricky waited, but his thoughts were a jumble. His knee bounced under the table as he touched crayon to paper and left it there, trying to think of what to say. He didn’t know if he should tell Kay about the voice he’d just heard. It would only make him sound like he was going off the deep end, and worse, it might make her hard day harder.
“You know,” she said, doodling a spiral on her paper, “my daddy isn’t a bad man. I know he isn’t. Sometimes a person gets fixated on something and it’s the only thing they care about. For me? I just wanted to make him happy. Not a bad thought, right? Just make him happy, any way I could, and for a while it worked.”
Kay’s voice was stronger than Ricky had expected. It gave him hope, that she was still her old self, at least from what he could tell.
“But my pops had a different thought in his head. He thought he should do whatever made God happy, and what makes God happy isn’t what makes me happy. That’s really it. Sometimes to make a person happy you’ll do anything, even if it hurts like crazy on the inside.”
True or not, Ricky shook his head. He peered around at the others. Sloane was there, but he didn’t seem interested in his journal. He stared at Ricky, glaring. Angela and Patty worked diligently, or appeared to. Nurse Ash stood still and silent near the door with her superior, Nurse Kramer, which was fine by Ricky. Anything was better than having the warden staring at him.
“He should’ve wanted to make you happy,” Ricky said softly. “You should have been the thing he cared about most. You and your happiness.”
Kay shrugged. “Have you been through it before?”
Ricky knew plenty about what she was going through. Or at least he assumed as much. He doubted there was much variation in the treatment.
He nodded.
“At Hillcrest. That place was a breeze for the most part, but they got frustrated with me toward the end. They show you pictures and give you the shocks if the wrong things get you excited,” Ricky said, stumbling a little. It was impossible to phrase without sounding disgusting, but maybe that was the point. “You see a handsome guy and your little soldier goes up? Boom. Shocked. Right where it counts.”
That made Kay crack a wry smile. She really was pretty, maybe even prettier than Diana Ross if she could look that angelic with her hair all matted and mangled. “Yup.”
“Sometimes I couldn’t get my body to cooperate even when I wasn’t into their slide show. The things that happen below my belt are not a perfect science,” he added, hoping to make her smile again. She did, and even giggled a little.
They were quiet for a while after that, and Ricky jotted down what he could remember of his conversation with Nurse Ash. The one they’d had before she lost her memory or whatever the hell had happened to her. The warden has a way with people. He wanted to know what that meant. Maybe he could brainwash her or something. It seemed far-fetched, but he didn’t like believing that she was trying to trick or goad him.
The warden is a butcher. The warden is a monster. There, Nurse Ash, I wrote it down so I can’t forget it. Happy now?
Kay glanced at him now and again as he wrote, but he didn’t mind it. When he was finished, he waited until Nurse Ash took her eyes off him to tear out the page and stuff it in his waistband like he’d done with the patient card. Would they start searching him more thoroughly now? Or did the warden still want to give him special “privileges”?
Shuddering, he scribbled something much more mundane to leave there in the notepad.
“You all right?” Kay asked, her crayon poised in midair.
“Sure,” Ricky said. “Actually, no. We’re in an asylum, so obviously it’s kind of relative, but I’m pretty sure I’m worse than when I got here.”
She nodded, slowly, lowering her head closer to the table. It couldn’t have been more obvious to the casual onlooker that she was about to whisper something secret.
“Is it the dreams?” she asked, wetting her lips, adding just as softly, “the nightmares?”
“Every night I’m wandering through Brookline. There’s this sound like a drum or a heartbeat or something, and I have to follow it, just like the first time when I thought it was really happening. Now I wonder if maybe it was. It feels like it was. I can’t really tell the difference.”
“And you go to the basement,” she added, her dark eyes getting bigger and bigger.
“Where there’s a little girl . . .”
“In the last cell on the right.” Kay sat back hard in her chair, reaching as if to chew the end of her crayon, then remembered what it was and chewed her knuckle instead. “That’s one big coincidence.”
“I know,” Ricky said. Good, Nurse Ash wasn’t watching them. Nurse Kramer had distracted her, showing her something on a clipboard. Perfect. “There’s more, Kay. A lot more.”
“I’m not sure I want to know,” she said, wiggling a little in her chair and leaning in. “But from the look on your face I can tell you need to get it off your chest.”
“I didn’t get a chance to tell you yesterday, but the warden finally pulled me aside. He gave me this big talk about geniuses and how it’s sad that they die. I know, don’t look at me like that, it didn’t make much sense when he said it either. Thing is, it felt like he was singling me out for something. Something strange. He said he doesn’t want to change me. You know, doesn’t make me want to stop liking other guys. What the hell do you think that even means?”
“That doesn’t sound right. He wants to change me. In fact, he just tried his very best to make it happen. How is that fair?” Her eyes flared with rage, but she glanced away before Ricky could feel it directed at him. Hell, maybe she should hate him. Maybe the fact that he was a “nice” white boy from a nice white family was all it took to earn the warden’s favor, but he highly doubted it. John-John seemed to be miserable in his treatment, too.