Pharmakon (33 page)

The cover page bore the title of Casper’s opus:
P
HARMAKON
,
a Greek word that can be used to mean both the cure and the poison.

I slept late the morning after my swimming lesson. When I finally woke up and looked out my bedroom window, the policeman with the shotgun had vanished from our backyard. Rubbing the seeds of sleep from the corners of my eyes, I took in all that was familiar, unchanged, my small bedroom, my little world— the night-light that looked like a pink elephant, the watercolor of the ugly duckling, the teddy bear missing a glass eye, and thought for a yawning moment that yesterday was just a bad dream.

Then I saw the shorts and the T-shirt I had been wearing when Casper taught me how to swim. My mother, distracted with worry, had left them draped wet over the footboard of my bed. They were still damp and smelled of pond water and the promise of mildew. They had already left a ghostly white stain on the varnished wood of the footboard. With time and polish it faded, but the mark Casper left on me was indelible.

When I got downstairs, my mother was scrambling eggs. My sisters were setting the breakfast table. Willy was talking to a policeman I hadn’t seen before who was sitting on the back steps. I thought the fact that he wasn’t holding a shotgun in his lap meant that things had gotten less scary. Strange but true, learning to swim had made an optimist out of me.

My parents had showered and changed clothes, but they had not gone to bed. My father was on the phone to Neutch, the police sergeant from Hamden, who had driven up to Townsend at my father’s request. Neutch was a lieutenant now. The opening pages of Casper’s prologue, stolen by the wind when he leapt from the library window, had just been found. Neutch didn’t have them in front of him; he promised to send them on and paraphrased. “He made up all this B.S. about stuff you do to patients, and then he ends, if you’ll pardon my French, by writing ‘fuck him’ about fifty times.”

“I see,” was what my father said to Neutch. But he didn’t. What was frighteningly unclear was why Casper had not begun his revenge with me. My father and mother both knew Casper had reason, opportunity, and motive. They had traded insights and accusations all night, trying to make sense of it. Sometime between 3:00 and 4:00
A.M.
my father put forth the theory that Casper had intended to drown me but had changed his mind, returned me unharmed, to send a message: “You are my prisoner now. I can hurt you any time I want to.”

In my father’s mind, there was no question. As the night’s second pot of coffee boiled over, he announced, “Casper’s demonstrating his power over me, prolonging his euphoric delusions of omnipotence that we are at his mercy, that we are . . .”

My mother interrupted him. “We
are
at his mercy.”

“Nora, they’ll catch him.”

“What happens the next time he escapes? He’ll never forgive you.”

“Goddamnit, I’ve done nothing that needs forgiving.” He knew that wasn’t true. And having to face that fact across the kitchen table made him at that moment hate her. “I tried to help him.”

“I believe that.”

“But you blame me.”

“It’s my fault, too. If I had let him kill himself that day at Sleeping Giant, Jack wouldn’t be dead. And we wouldn’t be . . . what we have become.” She did not want to put that into words.

What was resolved between them in whispers as the sun rose over Greenwood was not shared with any of us. Likewise, my parents did not discuss the details of Casper’s escape from Townsend and subsequent arrival at my lemonade stand. That was so mysterious, it bordered on the impossible.

The cab driver who’d picked Casper up at the front gate at nine said they made two stops. The first was at the Townsend Theological Seminary Library. Casper was inside for about ten minutes. After that they went directly to the Townsend train station. Casper had paid with a crisp twenty-dollar bill; a New York–bound train had arrived approximately five minutes later. Logic would indicate that Casper had boarded. But the conductors could not remember taking a ticket from anyone matching Casper’s photograph. And, more important, if he had traveled to New Jersey by train, he wouldn’t have arrived until 4:20 in the afternoon; Casper had appeared in front of my lemonade stand just after noon.

Though no black Cadillac or any other dark-colored sedan had been reported stolen in the Townsend area, even if he had hot-wired a car whose owner might not have reported it missing for what was now over forty-eight hours, if Casper had driven south, at the very earliest he would have arrived three hours after he had. The only explanation was that he flew. Prop plane, helicopter, broom . . . New Jersey and Connecticut police were at that moment checking local airports and charter services.

A mental patient who could walk out the front gate of a hospital for the criminally insane, hail a cab, stop at a library, hop a plane, and acquire a late-model Cadillac was not omnipotent, but he was a force to be reckoned with and frightened by.

All of which in hindsight makes my parents’ behavior that morning doubly strange. When I came back from swimming the night before, my father’s phone calls to the men who were trying to help him were spiked with threats and obscenities. He told my mother to shut up and promised a state policeman, “If you don’t find this creep, I will make it my life’s work fucking your life up.” I had never heard him say the F word before. And even though he used his soft, warm, patient voice on me, I felt burned by the rage that boiled beneath his self-control. Overnight, something had changed. And that morning he was full of “thank-yous” and “I appreciate it” and small talk about Lieutenant Neutch’s wife and children.

Most surprising of all, when we sat down to breakfast, my father took my mother’s hand and announced, “I am not going to let a man I tried to help deny my life. We are not going to let him defeat us.”

“What if they don’t catch him? He’ll wait a year or two years and come back and . . .” Lucy blubbered what Willy and Fiona were thinking.

“Even if they catch him, he’s smart, he went to Yale, he can escape again, you’re not God.” Fiona gave my father a look that told him she was talking about Joel as well as Casper.

“I’m not God, but by God I’m not powerless. Casper Gedsic is going to be dealt with. I’m not promising, I’m telling you.” The others didn’t believe him, but I did. I was the only one at the table who wasn’t scared of Casper. It was my father who frightened me now. He made me think of a movie Willy had taken me to called
The Vikings.
My father wasn’t wearing a helmet or carrying a battle-ax, but he was making a blood oath.

He wasn’t finished surprising us. “We are not only going to continue with our lives, we are going to make the most of them. Your mother and I are going to Philadelphia to attend a psychological conference where I’m scheduled to read a paper.”

“You’re going to leave us here alone?” Willy spit egg out of his mouth in my father’s direction.

My mother took over. “Of course not. You children are going to stay with Lazlo for a few days in New York.”

“What if he follows us to New York?”

“He won’t, Lucy.”

“But what if he does?”

“Slavo will shoot him.” Lazlo stood in the kitchen door. “Which will cost extra, but my pleasure.” Slavo was one of two Yugoslavian licensed bodyguards Lazlo had hired.

Six foot six and three hundred pounds of muscled fat, Slavo hunkered behind Lazlo, casting a shadow across the breakfast table. When he bent down to shake my father’s hand, I saw a revolver in a shoulder holster. Later, I’d notice he had another pistol, so small it didn’t look real, strapped to his ankle.

Willy must have seen the guns, because he stopped being scared and started to complain. “What are we going to do in New York?” Willy didn’t like Lazlo, mostly because I did.

“You’ll see the sights, go to museums.” My mother pushed Willy’s hair out of his eyes.

“I hate museums.”

“Do you like television?” Slavo lit Lazlo’s cigarette. “I have three sets. One color.”

Willy was happy. Fiona was thrilled. Lazlo lived in Greenwich Village. Joel the wrestler and she had been planning on sneaking in to see the Kingston Trio at the Bitter End. Lucy cheered up when she looked out the window and saw the other bodyguard leaning up against the side of the limousine Lazlo had rented for our rescue. He looked like Bill Holden in the movie
Picnic,
only with better cheekbones. Lucy, at fifteen still a sucker for fairy tales, had fantasized what it would be like to ride away from Greenwood in a limousine.

Suddenly, suitcases were being pulled out from under beds. We were packing clothes and toiletries and changes of underwear as if we were going on a holiday, not running away from the shadow in the pricker bushes.

All of Greenwood knew about Casper now. The police had circulated a photograph of him sent by teletype, told our neighbors to be on the lookout, cautioned them to remember to lock their doors and bolt their windows. When I had first disappeared from my lemonade stand the day before, the Lutzes and the Murphys and the Goodmans had organized search parties and yelled themselves hoarse calling my name into the evening. But when I showed up unharmed and they found out what my father’s ex-patient had done to Dr. Winton back in Hamden, their goodwill evaporated into outrage.

How dare my father not tell them, warn them he had a homicidal maniac on his trail? How dare he bring a killer to Harrison Street? And most galling and inexcusable of all, how could my parents send us off to New York in a limousine and take off to Philadelphia so my father could play the big shot at a medical convention, leaving them to face our nightmare?

Now that they knew why we were so weird, they thought even less of us. What if Casper came back and, finding us not at home, kidnapped one of their children for a swimming lesson? Put a bullet hole in their necks? Gave them a beating with a field hockey stick that left them wearing diapers in a wheelchair?

They stood on the porches and peered over their hedges as we carried our bags to Lazlo’s rented limousine. Their eyes narrowed at our gall, their jaws set with contempt. Children darted into the road, eager to try out the backseat of the limousine and ask me questions about my maniac. But before they got to our side of the street, their parents called them back and ordered them inside, like what we had was catchable.

What did they expect my father to do? Would they have respected him more if he took his revolver out of the bedside table and patrolled the yard, waiting for Casper to return? I didn’t want my father to hurt Casper, but at the same time, I did not want Dad to run away. It was okay for me to do that to keep from drowning, but not my father. He didn’t sound like a coward over breakfast, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were doing something that wasn’t right.

My father was oblivious to the neighbors’ disdain. My mother lined us up and they kissed and hugged us, one by one, and put us in the limousine. The policeman said, “Don’t worry, everything’ll be back to normal in a couple days.” I didn’t believe him.

As we drove away, I looked back for one last wave. My parents had already turned their backs on us.

I had been to New York before, the Museum of Natural History, the Bronx Zoo, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Grand Central Station. It was a place where it wasn’t safe to go to the men’s room without my father, a place where my mother embarrassed me by insisting on holding my hand and constantly warning us, “Don’t wander off or you’ll get lost.” In short, it was the last place in the world you’d go to be safe.