“Yeah,” Vickie said.
I placed it in Natalie’s mouth and she clamped down on it.
“Okay, Nurse. Are we ready?”
“Yes, Doctor,” I said.
Vickie turned the dial on the machine. “I’m now giving you one million volts.”
Natalie convulsed, her whole body trembling. She opened her eyes and rolled them back in her head. She screamed over the pen.
Vickie laughed. “That’s good, that’s good.” The wire under Natalie’s neck slipped out and Vickie tucked it back in. “Nurse, increase the voltage,” she said.
I reached over and turned the dial. “Okay, it’s all the way up,” I said.
Natalie shook violently.
“She’s repressing a memory,” Vickie said. “We need to go deep into her subconscious mind.”
Natalie screamed louder and the pen flew out. She was shaking with such force that I was worried she’d really hurt herself.
Poo Bear burst into tears and ran from the room.
Natalie stopped.
Vickie laughed.
Poo Bear disappeared down the hall, his cries of terror growing fainter as he ran deeper into the house.
“Woops,” Natalie said. She was sweating and red-faced.
“We better get him,” Vickie said.
They ran out of the room, chasing after Poo.
I glanced at the TV, a commercial for Herbal Essence. And then I ran after them.
Poo Bear was squatting beneath the grand piano in the living room. His eyes were squeezed closed. He was shitting.
I froze.
Vickie and Natalie sat on the sofa across from the piano. They sat side by side, hands in their laps, like they were watching him do scales.
“Oh,” I said. “Sorry.”
Poo Bear pinched a turd out on the bright blue wall-to-wall carpeting and Vickie and Natalie clapped.
“Way to go, Poo,” Vickie cheered.
Natalie giggled. She slapped her knees.
Poo Bear opened his eyes and looked at me. He grinned with his grape jelly mouth. “Poo can poo,” he said.
I looked at Vickie and Natalie. “Have you seen my mother?”
“She’s in the kitchen,” Natalie said. I started to leave, but she added warningly, “With my dad.”
“Well, I just have to ask her one thing, really quick.”
She watched as Poo brought his finger to his nose and sniffed.
I backed out of the room and walked down the hall. The old Victorian had many rooms and many hallways; two stairways and so many doors that it was easy to get lost. But the kitchen was easy—just straight back at the end of the house.
My mother was sitting at the kitchen table, which was piled high with dirty dishes caked with food. She was smoking a cigarette.
“Mom?”
She turned to me, opening her arms. “Augusten.”
I hugged her. I loved her smell, Chanel No. 5 and nicotine. “How much longer are we gonna stay? I wanna go home.”
She hugged me closer and stroked the back of my head with her hand.
I pulled away. “Are we gonna go soon?”
She picked her cigarette from the rim of a plate on the table and sucked the smoke into her lungs. When she spoke, her words came out smoking. “Dr. Finch is saving our lives, Augusten. It’s important that we be here now.”
In the distance, I heard Poo Bear laugh.
She took another drag from her cigarette, then plopped it into what was left of a glass of milk. “I know this is all new for you and it’s very confusing. But this is a safe place. This is where we need to be. Right here in the doctor’s own home, with his family.”
Her eyes looked different. Wider, somehow. Not her own. They scared me. So did the roaches scrambling across the table, over the dishes, up the arm of a spatula.
“Have you been playing with the doctor’s daughters? With Natalie and Vickie?”
“I guess.”
“And have you been having a good time?”
“No, I wanna leave.” The doctor’s house was not at all what I had expected. It was weird and awful and fascinating and confusing and I wanted to go home to the country and play with a tree.
A toilet flushed down the narrow hallway that led from the kitchen. There was a deep clearing of a throat, a rumble. Followed by the unlocking of a door.
“Augusten, Dr. Finch and I are talking now. You go back and play with the girls.”
My heart pounded. I was seized with panic. I desperately needed to check my hair in a mirror. “Please, can we go? I don’t want to be here anymore. It’s too weird here.”
I looked up and there he was. “Well, well, well,” he boomed, approaching me with his hand extended.
I grabbed it, wondering if he’d hidden something in it. A joy buzzer, maybe, or more balloons.
His eyes widened along with his smile. “What a firm handshake. That is an excellent handshake. A ten-plus on the Great Scale of Handshake Ratings.”
He was short, but seemed much larger. He occupied a lot of space in the room.
“How are you doing, young man?” He smacked me on the shoulder, like a father on TV; like Mike Brady or Ward Cleaver.
“Okay.” I could feel the bottoms of my feet sweat. I couldn’t tell him that his own freaky kids and his own filthy house were the source of my distress.
“Take a seat here,” he said, gesturing at a chair.
I moved the roasting pan to the table and sat. He took the chair between my mother and me. I looked back and forth between them and for awhile nobody said anything. My mother lit another cigarette and Dr. Finch scratched the back of his head.
“Your mother is in a state of crisis,” he said finally.
She blew a plume of smoke into the air. “That’s an understatement,” she said under her breath.
“Do you know what that means?” he asked me.
In the distance, somebody began to pound on the piano keys. “I don’t know,” I said.
“What that means is that your mother is in trouble with your father. Your father is very angry with your mother right now.” He elbowed a plate out of the way and placed his hands on the table, clasping his fingers. “Your father may want to hurt your mother.”
I swallowed. Hurt her?
“Your father is a very sick man, Augusten. And I believe he is homicidal. Do you know what homicidal means?”
I looked at my mother and she turned away. “It means he wants to kill her?”
“Yes. That’s what it means. Some people, when they get angry, become depressed. That’s what depression is, it’s anger turned inward. Other times, they project that anger outside of themselves. And that’s healthier for the person. But you have to be very careful dealing with somebody who is that angry.”
Freud pressed up against my leg, raising his tail. I leaned over and stroked his back. It was sticky. “Oh.”
“So your mother is not safe from your father right now. She needs to be protected. Do you understand?”
I was terrified but also excited. Dr. Finch left every single light in the house on, as opposed to my father who never let us turn any lights on, always saying something about the Middle East being the reason we had to live in the dark. “What do we do?”
“Well.” He leaned back in the chair, folding his arms behind his head. “I’m going to take your mother to a motel. And you’re going to stay here at my house.”
I’m what?
“There’s plenty of room here for you. You’ll be very safe.” He smiled warmly.
Again I looked at my mother, but she still wouldn’t look at me. She was focused on the table. I followed her line of vision and I think she was looking at this one spoon that had a reflection of the ceiling light in it. Almost like you could eat the light if you wanted to, like it was cereal. “I have to stay here?”
He rose from the table. “Deirdre, talk to your son. When you’re finished, I’ll be in the car.”
He patted me on the head firmly
, then turned and left.
My mother mashed her cigarette out in the plate. “There’s not much room on this table, is there?” she said.
“What’s going on? Why is my father trying to kill us?”
My mother sighed. As she exhaled she seemed to shrink into the chair. Even her perfume seemed to fade. She looked at her hands, turning them over in front of her face like they were misplaced artifacts she had pulled from the earth. Then she looked at me. She leaned forward and whispered,“Without Dr. Finch, your father will kill us. Dr. Finch is the only person in the world who can save us.”
I glanced at the window, half expecting to see my father clutching a meat cleaver and half expecting to see an elf wearing a stocking cap with a bell on the end waving at me. “Why?”
She turned away. “He has a lot of anger at his mother and he’s projecting it all onto me. Years and years of rage that he’s denied.”
My father had always seemed cold to me. He wasn’t affectionate or loving. He never played with me or touched me on the head like Dr. Finch. Which is maybe why I flinched so much when anybody touched me. But I didn’t realize he was a monster. But maybe that made sense. Maybe that explained why he was so cold.
Then my mother reached out and took my hand. She held it tightly. “God is working through Dr. Finch. The doctor is very spiritually evolved. I believe we’ll be safe with him, and only him.”
How long do I have to stay here? One night? Two? Where will I practice my Barry Manilow lip-syncing? “Can’t I come to the motel, too?” I loved motels, especially the little soap bars and the paper strip across the toilet bowl.
“No,” she said, quickly. “You stay here.”
“But why?”
“Because the doctor thinks that’s best.”
“But why?”
“Augusten, don’t argue with me now. You’ll stay here and be safe.”
I had the sensation of falling, even though I was sitting. I looked up at the clock on the wall, but it had no hands. Somebody had taken the clear plastic cover off the front and taken the hands away. Seeing this caused my eyes to itch, so I pulled at my eyelids.
“For how long? You have to tell me,” I pressed.
My mother stood, looping her bag over her shoulder. She clutched her cigarettes and lighter in the other hand. “Not long. Two days. Maybe a week.”
“A week?!” I said as loud as I could without screaming, even though I wanted to. “I can’t stay here in this house for a week.” I slammed my hand on the table and roaches scattered like a splash of water. “What about school?”
“You hardly go to school as it is,” she said flatly. “A week won’t make any difference.”
She was right about that. From kindergarten I’d been a very poor student, steering clear of the kids and clinging to the teachers, waiting to go home. The only friend I had was Ellen, who peed standing up like a boy, and I only liked her when it was the two of us alone. The rest of the kids hated me, calling me names like freak and faggot. So in truth, a week away from school wasn’t such a bad thing. Unless it meant staying here in this weird house. My heart started beating really fast as I tried to think of something to say to make my mother change her mind. But I felt too confused to think of anything.
She placed the back of her hand against my cheek. “I’ll visit you in your dreams. Did you know I can do that?”
“Do what?” I said, hating her.
“I can travel in my dreams. Once, I dreamt I went to Mexico. And when I woke up, there were pesos in my hand.”
Her eyes scared me. They looked radioactive.
I folded my arms across my chest and watched Freud jump onto the stove, stepping around the burners, settling in the center.
“We’ll be okay,” she said.
Then she was gone.
I stood alone in the kitchen, listening to the dim electric buzz of the clock as it secretly counted the seconds, the minutes, the hours. Briefly, I fantasized about slicing my mother’s fingers off with the electric knife that was hanging by its cord from the curtain rod.
THE CLEANING LADY
T
HE NEXT AFTERNOON I WAS SITTING IN THE TV ROOM when I heard a strange sound. At first I thought it was a wolf. The doctor’s wife, Agnes, had fallen asleep in the wing chair with her head rolled back and her glasses perched on top of her head, tangled in her violet perm. She was snoring. The television was blaring and rolling its screen like it was frustrated that nobody would watch it. And I was sitting on the sofa alone because Hope had gone into the kitchen. I was sitting there watching Agnes snore when all of a sudden I heard the sound coming from somewhere upstairs.
When I was ten, I had an after-school job helping two local dog trainers teach their black labs to retrieve. One of them also had a wolf hybrid. The whine I heard from upstairs sounded like that dog, only younger.
Did the Finches keep a wolf in the house?
It would make sense, I thought. They seemed to be sort of crazy. They were up at all hours of the night, they didn’t care if you used a coaster on the table under your glass. They didn’t even care if you used a glass.
The wolf moaned again, but this time it also called out a name. “Agnes.”
The sound was coming from the top of the stairs. But it was muffled, like it was behind a door.
“Agnes!” Now it sounded like an old lady. Frail, but insistent.
I was wondering if I should poke Agnes on the shoulder or maybe just slap the coffee table really hard to wake her up, but just then her eyes fluttered and she mumbled. Automatically she reached for her black vinyl purse, an air conditioner-sized accessory that was never more than a foot from her body.
“Agnes!” It was almost a howl. I could picture a ghoulish old lady, hands mangled by arthritis, crawling along the floor upstairs.
“Uh, oh. Okay, yes, okay, I’m coming,” Agnes muttered. Somehow she’d heard the old lady in her sleep and now she was standing up and heading for the stairs, as if programmed at birth to do so. “I’m on my way,” she called. Agnes looked weary and fatigued. Her body was like a bag of sand that she was forced to drag around.
“Where’d Agnes go?” Hope asked brightly when she walked back in the room. She was carrying a box of croutons and offered me one.
“Oh, no thanks.”
“You sure? They’re good when they get a little stale.” She shook the box.
“That’s okay, I’m not hungry.” The box looked old and worn, like it had been filled and refilled for many years.
She shrugged and sat on the sofa. “Okay.”
“Who is that lady?” I asked. “The one who was calling for Agnes?”
Hope smiled and then she chuckled, popping a crouton into her mouth. “Oh,” she said, rolling her eyes,“so you heard Joranne.”
“Who?”
“Joranne,” Hope said. “She’s one of Dad’s patients. She’s wonderful.”
I waited for more.
“Is that where Agnes went, upstairs?”
I nodded.
“Yeah, so okay. Joranne is really special. She’s one of Dad’s patients and she’s staying in the middle room upstairs.”
I would be living in the same house with a crazy woman? And then I realized I already was living in a house with a crazy woman—my mother.
“She’s a very sick lady,” Hope added, crunching a handful of croutons. Then,“Ouch,” and she spit one into her hand. She smiled up at me. “That one was a little too stale.” She brushed it onto the floor.
“What’s wrong with her?”
Hope sighed and set the box of croutons on the coffee table. “Joranne is a very brilliant lady. She’s incredibly wellread and very interesting. She loves Blake.”
“Who?”
“He was a painter,” Hope smiled at me. Her face said, Oh, I forgot you’re only twelve. You’re so mature for your age.
“Oh,” I said. I still didn’t get why she was here.
“She’s an obsessive compulsive neurotic,” Hope st
ated.
“A what?”
She turned sideways on the sofa to face me. “Obsessive compulsive neurotic. That’s the technical term for her condition.”
This sounded impossibly exotic and I immediately wished I was one too, whatever it was.
Hope then explained that this meant Joranne could not leave the room upstairs for any reason. In fact, she had not left the room once since she was brought to the house two years ago during a personal crisis in a nor’easter.
“She’s been here for two years?” All I could think was, wow.
“A little over, yeah.”
What kind of doctor lets a patient live in his house for two years? And did she really never come downstairs?
“She’s never been downstairs once. Agnes brings all her meals up to her. And everything has to be wrapped in aluminum foil. She’s afraid of dirt. So nobody can even step into her room. When Agnes brings her a food tray, she has to stand in the doorway. Nobody is ever allowed inside. Her room is really spotless by the way. Too bad the rest of the house doesn’t look like that,” Hope laughed.
If Joranne had never been downstairs, she’d never seen the overturned sofa in the living room, the dog shit under the grand piano or the moving blanket of roaches that covered all the dishes and pots and pans that were piled in the sink and on the kitchen table. She’d never seen the scrappy old burlap that hung from the walls instead of wallpaper. If Joranne had never come downstairs, she didn’t realize that the stairs themselves were tearing away from the wall and that every time somebody climbed them, they looked like they might come crashing down. I said to Hope,“If Joranne saw the downstairs, what would she do?”
Hope howled. “Oh, she’d absolutely die. It would just kill her. Can you imagine?”
I liked that I hadn’t offended Hope about the house. Somehow the fact that she knew it was kind of gross made it okay that she lived here.
Hope told me that Joranne only left her room to walk into the back bathroom and that nobody else in the house was allowed to use it.
“Really?” What an exclusive, mysterious disease. I wanted it.
Hope began to laugh. When I asked her what was so funny, she laughed harder. Her eyes filled with tears.