13 1/2 (6 page)

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Authors: Nevada Barr

BOOK: 13 1/2
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Dylan knew what she meant. An insane asylum. He’d never been to one, only seen them in the movies and on television. The thought of being locked up with crazy people jarred him out of his indifference.
“I want to stay here,” he said. She blinked at him from behind her glasses and he remembered that what he wanted didn’t matter any more. “I’m a danger to others,” he quoted the judge. “You have to keep me in jail.”
“Unfortunately, you’re going to get your wish,” the psychiatrist said. “There doesn’t seem to be a place for you in the system, so you will stay where you are for the time being. I’m also afraid we can’t let you have the sick bay for much longer. There are a hundred and seventy-three boys here at the moment and we have just these two beds that can be secured. You’ll be moved to the psychiatric ward, then if all goes well, to Ward C with the other boys.”
“You’re afraid I’ll chop them up into little pieces and flush them down the toilet,” Dylan interrupted.
“Not that,” she said quickly, but she was lying. That’s exactly what she thought. That’s what everybody thought. “Most of the boys here are here . . . for different reasons and we want to be able to take better care of you.”
“What kind of care of me?” he asked.
Dr. Olson sighed. She was tired, maybe tired of monstrous boys or maybe just because she worked other places besides Drummond. “We have discussed your case a lot,” she said.
“The ‘Royal We’?” Dylan asked because his mother used to joke, saying, “The Royal We,” and, though he’d never really understood what she meant, she’d always said it in a way that he knew it was supposed to be funny. In his new voice it didn’t sound funny at all.
“Sort of,” she said. “The care I’m talking about isn’t care for your body but for your mind. I have read your case, and I believe you really can’t remember what happened, just that it did happen.” She quit talking then and stared at him with that hungry-dog look like she was expecting him to throw her a bone. Dylan had no bones.
“Stop me if I’m chasing down the wrong rat hole,” she said and smiled again.
Dylan liked her for talking to him like he was a human being. “No, that’s my rat hole,” he said seriously. “I know it happened. Mack the Giant showed me.”
Dr. Olson’s face settled into an older mask; what he said made her think he should be put in the insane asylum, and he couldn’t find the words to tell her he wasn’t seeing things. Mack the Giant was a giant cop named Mack.
She took off her glasses and waved them back and forth the way his dad used to when he came in from the cold and his lenses steamed over. “Mack the Giant showed you,” she said carefully.
A flash memory of blood on the carpet, staining the walls, of Rich’s ashen face hit Dylan so hard he doubled over and clutched his middle as if he’d been struck by a baseball bat.
The hit passed. He straightened up.
“Are you alright? Do you want a glass of water?”
“I’m alright,” he said and suppressed the urge to laugh like he had at “fine.” He was a monster, but he wasn’t a
crazy
monster. She had to see that.
“What I think—and Dr. Kowalski, the other psychiatrist, agrees—is that you will not be able to begin healing until you can access those memories. That night, bad as it was, needs to be dealt with if you’re ever to be a whole boy again.”
A whole boy. Maybe a real boy like Pinocchio wanted to be. All he had to do was remember. That had been what the lawyers, the policemen, and the judge had wanted. They’d hammered at him to remember and gotten mad and mean when he didn’t.
Wouldn’t, they said. He wouldn’t remember.
If they made him remember, then he would go insane; he would be a crazy monster, a crazy-ass, bug-shit Butcher Boy. If he was crazy maybe he’d grab any old axe he found and start hacking people’s legs off. When he was sent to jail he’d thought the questioning would be over. He would have prayed for it to be over but that would have been blasphemous.
He started to cry.
“That’s a beginning,” Dr. Olson said kindly.
The beginning of what terrified him.
6
Richard turned fourteen in a private room at the Mayo Clinic. Nothing but the best for Richard Raines. Minnesota could not do enough for her injured children, her orphans, or her celebrities, and Richard was all three. Flowers and balloons from total strangers filled the room, their colors painfully bright in the diamond-hard winter sunlight. Out his second floor window was ice-blue sky, the bare branches of trees spider-webbing against it like cracks in the universe.
In the tradition of gout-ridden kings, Richard reigned propped up on three pillows, his leg swathed in bandages and immobilized. It had hurt like a son of a bitch at first but the drugs took care of that.
Took care of everything.
The thought drifted through a warm morphine haze.
Kids at Rochester middle school thought they were big deals with a joint or two pinched from their big brothers and here he was mainlining morphine.
Rock star. Dylan would think it was cool.
A whisper of sound pulled his mind from the morphine summer. The skirt of a highly starched pink-and-white dress poked through the partly opened door like a tongue through lips. Richard leaned his head back and closed his eyes.
From beneath his lashes he watched as a doe-eyed face followed the skirt into his room. This candy striper was new, a girl not much older than he, and so pretty if they’d met in the school lunchroom she probably wouldn’t have given him the time of day. Letting herself in silently so as not to disturb the king, she fussed with the covers tented over his wound.
Slowly, he let his eyes drift open. “Could you get me a drink of water?” he whispered.
She refilled his water carafe then poured a glass and held the straw to his lips. The scent she wore was sophisticated. The side of her hand brushed softly against his cheek as she dabbed a drop prettily off his chin, leaning closer than she had to.
“Will you lose your leg?” she asked timidly.
“Maybe.” There was a dimming behind her eyes, a darker shadow pooling in the brown irises.
She was shallower than he’d thought. A one-legged boy couldn’t ski, skateboard, or whatever she thought was cool.
“Naw,” he amended truthfully. “I won’t lose it. Might have a limp is all; the doc says I lost a chunk of thigh muscle the size of a softball.” The doctor had actually said tennis ball but tennis sounded wimpy.
Her child-woman face softened in pity. It was an act. Since he could remember he had been watching people. His mom thought he was psychic but ESP wasn’t necessary to read the minds of ninety-nine percent of people or predict what they were going to do or say. They broadcast their thoughts for anybody paying attention to read.
“Does it hurt?” she asked.
“Bad, real bad,” Richard said and grimaced as he remembered how cutting the pain had been in the beginning.
At the moment he felt terrific. Really terrific.
Acutely aware of how much he liked the sweet-dream sleepiness of the morphine dripping into his arm he promised himself he’d start telling the nurses and doctors that the pain was better. When he got out of the Mayo life was going to be hard enough without an addiction.
“Would you like me to rub it for you?” Candy smiled coyly.
The smile had probably been practiced, but Richard wasn’t sure. It might have been self-conscious rather than fake. It didn’t matter either way. Stupidity turned him off. Rub it? His leg was nearly sliced in half.
“That’s awful nice of you but I need to get some rest.” He closed his eyes and felt her pat his feet through the thin hospital coverlet before she tiptoed from the room, closing the door with exaggerated care.
As soon as he heard the latch click he opened his eyes again. His room looked like a florist shop: flowers, cards, stuffed bears, balloons. The outpouring of Minnesotans’ inherent kindness had manifested in cash as well as gifts. One of the doctors told him more than two hundred thousand dollars had been sent to the hospital for Richard Raines. The doctor imparted this important fact offhandedly, as if Richard was a child who wouldn’t know what to do with more than movie money.
Even if he could get the money, there was no way they were going to let a freshman in high school live on his own, even though he had a home. The Raines house had belonged to his grandparents; it should be paid for by now, or close to it. It wouldn’t matter; until he was eighteen he’d have to have a guardian. Social workers were having hushed conversations about where to put him, as if he were a towel they could fold and stick on this or that shelf. Their whispers were about as subtle as theatrical asides meant to be heard in the last row.
No one bothered to include him in these sotto voce chats.
An orphanage had been mentioned, but foster care was in the lead so far. People could dress foster care up any way they wanted but they did it for the money: more kids more money. And kids got shifted around. On the radio he’d heard this whole thing about foster kids being given suitcases as presents because at the drop of a hat they were forced to play musical houses.
Vondra’s parents, the Werners, were a possibility. Vondra would try to help, but Mr. Werner didn’t like him. Not that he said anything; Richard had read it behind the man’s eyes. That he’d been with his daughter in the middle of the night when her parents were out didn’t make it any better.
There was a nurse in the ER he remembered. He remembered everything about that night with surreal vividness. Weeks later it still seemed more immediate than the time he inhabited from moment to moment. He’d liked her. She was smart and quiet and gentle with him. Her name was Lackey, Sara-with-no-
h
Lackey. Nurse Lackey was in her forties and didn’t take care of herself: she was underweight, her hair was a mess, and her nails had been bitten down to pseudopods.
Depressed, he guessed.
The next time a nurse came into his room, a hefty woman with an honest face and strong hands, he said, “There was a nurse who was extra nice to me that . . . that night. A Miss Sara something. I’d sure like to thank her.”
Hefty beamed approval at him as she deftly set about changing the dressing on his thigh.
“Oh, yes, that’s a sad story, that one,” she said.
When the nurse finished her bandaging and her story, Richard asked if she thought Sara would come see him sometime. “I liked her voice.” Saying it he remembered how good it had felt to hear that warmth, how good it had felt to be the center of her attention when the world was screwed up.
7
For nearly three weeks not much happened except that Dylan was moved from the infirmary into the psych ward. It wasn’t like he’d imagined, with people thinking they were Napoleon and sneaking around at night smothering each other, but it was pretty bad. There were three other kids. One was always screaming because he saw spiders. After half a day of it Dylan was looking around for the spiders himself. A couple times he thought he felt them on him but he didn’t let that show. He didn’t want to be stuck in the psych ward forever.
Not that he deserved anything better; he wasn’t stupid enough to pray for it or pretend he had a right to get out. Still he didn’t want to spend his life with loonies. Another kid was a great big retard, big as a man. There was nothing else wrong with him that Dylan could see. He was stupid but he was nice enough as long as you didn’t try to touch his things. The third boy just sat and plucked at his eyebrows and eyelashes, or where they’d used to be; he was bald-eyed as a bunny and blinked rapidly. At first Dylan thought he was staring at him, but Carl didn’t stare at anybody; he just stared.
Dylan did his share of staring too. Out the windows mostly. Psych was on the third floor on the backside of the building. Outside nothing but snow-covered fields stretched all the way to the snow-white sky. Dylan put himself in the snow and numbed out as much as he could.
After a while, Dr. Olson decided he could go to classes with the sane kids and eat with them in the dining hall. Given that he shouldn’t feel happy or good anymore he felt guilty for being glad to be out of the nut ward. There wasn’t enough snow in Minnesota to numb him clear past boredom. It was so bad he was actually excited about going to the school they had for the inmates. He still spent nights with the crazies and had to shower and use the bathroom there.
Being crazy—Dylan supposed he was and it wouldn’t have mattered if he was as sane as apple pie, crazy was like cooties, highly contagious, and he was living at cootie central—got him picked on by the sane boys. They didn’t beat the crap out of him—not like he’d wanted Rich to that time—but they were always poking and pinching and shoving, making him drop his tray in the dining hall, pushing him so he fell down.
It was still better than doing nothing with the loonies. Being left alone with only his brain to play with was too weird. He’d think about the other kids and what they’d done and he’d think about himself and what he’d done, and then he’d think that they were humans and he wasn’t, that he was this other thing, this monster thing, and if he kept on like that he knew he’d be screaming about invisible spiders before long.

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