The Turning (18 page)

I grabbed for something, anything. I felt one of Linda’s husband’s golf clubs sticking out of the ground. I yanked it free and raised it above my head.

“Get the hell out,” I told Norris.

Norris disappeared. But he was a ghost. He could do that. He appeared again, on the other side of the kids. Linda and the children stood between me and Norris.

“Get out of the way,” I told them. I let Norris see that I had the golf club and that I meant to use it. It crossed my mind that he wouldn’t care. He was dead already. Then I let the thought go. There was nothing else I could do.

I advanced toward Norris. He watched me approach and started to laugh.

“You think this is funny?” I said.

Then everything got very warm.

The sun blinked out. The world went dark.

TUESDAY, AUGUST 12

DEAR DAD,

The rule was I had to wait two weeks before I could write you. Maybe it’s just to see if the crazies here (like me!!) know what day it is, so we can tell when two weeks have passed. Which would mean we’re sane enough to start reestablishing contact with the outside world.

I wish I could have written to you before. There’s been so much I’ve wanted to say. But maybe it’s good for me to have had this time to sort out what happened to me on the island.

Dad, it was really strange to wake up in my bed in my room on the island and see you leaning over me, frowning and worried, saying, “Jack, Jack, please wake up.”

“I’m awake,” I said. “My head hurts. What happened? What are you doing here, Dad?”

You said, “It’s not clear, Jack. We’re still trying to figure it out. It seems you had some kind of episode. Jim Crackstone sent a doctor out on the ferry with me. According to the doctor, you had a little … break with reality. And we need to figure out what caused it. If it’s something physical or mental or—”

I touched the sore spot on the back of my head. It’s a shock to discover a painful Ping-Pong ball bulging straight out of your skull.

“What’s this?” I asked. “This bump back here?”

Linda and the kids said that I was yelling and threatening them with a golf club. Linda knew she had to defend the children. She yanked another club out of the ground and hit me from behind, not hard enough to seriously injure me but hard enough to knock me out cold.

I said, “I wasn’t threatening the kids. I was defending them from Norris.”

You asked me who Norris was, and I told you he was a guy who used to work on the island. You asked me if he’d come back to the island recently, or since I got there, or what.

“Dad,” I said. “Don’t you get it? The guy is dead. It was his ghost.”

“That’s our problem right there,” you said.

You know the next part, Dad. Jim Crackstone’s doctor came in to talk to me, and he asked if I wanted something to make me feel better. I knew it was a bad idea. I knew it meant they were going to drug me. They’d probably take me off the island and lock me up somewhere. But you know what? By then I would have gone for anything that anyone promised would make me feel better.

I dimly remember the ferry ride. You stayed with me for the whole trip. You kept saying I’d be fine. I remember checking into this hospital or treatment center or whatever this is. I remember someone in a white coat saying that I’d had a serious infection and also that I hadn’t slept for a long time. Which was strange. Because I was pretty sure I had slept. I remember sleeping on the island with the sounds of the waves in my ears and waking up to the cries of the seagulls. But already I was figuring out that I was probably the last person who knew what had really happened—to me!

A few days after I got here, I started seeing Dr. Lee, who’s quiet and nice and mostly listens and lets me talk, though every so often he stops me and asks me to think about something. So far he’s asked me to think about Mom dying and whether that had any effect on what happened to me, all these years later, on the island. My seeing ghosts and so forth.

I told him that was an interesting question, because my girlfriend—my ex-girlfriend—once asked me the same thing. I’d blown up at her, but now that I was starting to feel better, I was beginning to see how that might be one theory about what happened. A few days later Dr. Lee stopped me when I was talking about my first days on the island and asked me to consider the fact that some people, especially people my age, don’t do all that well with isolation and being away from home. He let me talk for another few days, and I got on the subject of Sophie, and he asked me to consider whether my breakup with Sophie might have led to some of the problems I began to have with reality.

I thought about all the things he suggested, and they all sounded reasonable to me. Very perceptive. I guess they’re going to keep me here for a while. They’re trying this new medication on me, and everyone seems optimistic about how well it’s working.

If things go well I might get out of here in time to go back to school in the fall. I guess it will be a little weird, seeing Sophie in the halls and in my classes. But Dr. Lee has it all worked out that everyone at home will be told I had to leave Crackstone’s Landing because I had a serious infection. And that part is true. I know I wrote Sophie a lot of letters about the bizarre events I imagined. But she’ll understand when she finds out that I was hallucinating from fever.

She’ll probably be relieved. In fact I think I’ll write her and bring her up to date on my condition and apologize for everything I put her through. After all, it was her father who was nice enough to get me that job in the first place.

Also I’m glad that you got a chance to meet Linda, even if it did take me going crazy to make it happen. I always knew you two would like each other. And I was happy to hear that you’re going back to the island to see her. Maybe you two will fall in love, like I hoped. And it will all be worth it, everything that happened to me and every awful thing I went through, if it means that you and Linda could possibly get together. Not that I’m getting ahead of myself or putting any pressure on you two. But wouldn’t it be funny if someday people ask you two how you met, and you say, Well, actually, we met after Linda hit my son over the head with a golf club?

I’ll write you again as soon as I get a chance. Which means as soon as they let me.

Love,

Jack

AUGUST 13

DEAR SOPHIE,

As I guess you’ve heard, they’ve put me in this … place. Jim Crackstone is paying for it, and I think he and my dad worked out some deal where he’ll pay me for all the time I spent on the island, plus compensation for getting sick. So I will have enough money for college, or maybe for a few months of college, if we’re being realistic, which everyone here is always saying to do. Be realistic. Speaking of which, did you hear that my dad and Linda have sort of been seeing each other? Which is great. Maybe someday someone will think I faked this whole thing to bring my dad and Linda together.

But you’ll know that I didn’t. If they get together, it will probably mean that Jim Crackstone will have to hire someone beside Linda to take care of the kids. Or maybe my dad will move out there with them. I hope that doesn’t happen. I can’t imagine going back there, and I know my dad would never do something like that to me. Jim can find someone else. And Miles and Flora will forget Linda, like they forgot Lucy and Norris, like they’ll forget me—the scary guy who tried to attack them with a golf club.

You probably know better than I do what our friends at home are saying. Supposedly, I had some infection. Which is true. But you’re the only person who knows about all the other stuff.

Unless you already told Josh.

As you can see, I crossed that out. I promised Dr. Lee—my doctor here—that I would stop giving you a hard time about Josh. He says there’s no evidence that you were ever cheating on me and that my thinking you did was just another sign of the hard time I was having. It was just one more thing I imagined. So I’m sorry, Sophie. I guess I put you through a lot. And you were really patient with me, trying your best to help until I couldn’t be helped anymore. By you.

The doctors here are helping a lot. One theory about why I had problems was that I had too much free time and I wasn’t ready to structure whole days for myself. So they’ve certainly taken care of that. An hour of breakfast and room cleanup, two hours of group therapy, two hours of lunch and rest, an hour of individual therapy, two hours of occupational therapy—which means covering appointment books with glitter as a present for someone we love. Do you want one? I can’t exactly see giving a glitter-covered calendar to Dad, no matter how much he might appreciate the gesture.

My fellow inmates—oops, guests!—are exactly what you’d imagine if you’d seen even one film or read one book about places like this. The eating-disorder girl, the guy with the bandaged wrists, the tattooed girl who keeps freaking out and screaming because she’s only allowed two cigarettes a day. I wish I could say this place is unique. But it’s not. It’s like someone called the casting director and said, Hey listen, send me a dozen crazies between the ages of fifteen and twenty.

But like I told you, it’s helping. I understand all the reasons for what happened this summer. I also understand you were only trying to help me when you told me your theories about where my problems might be coming from. I’m sorry I was so mean.

I’ve come to realize that I just imagined all that stuff about the ghosts. And I guess I must have been really nervous from the beginning. Otherwise I wouldn’t have had that fantasy about the seagull telling me not to go to the island. And the people I saw on the boat were definitely not Lucy and Norris, who are definitely dead.

But you know what, Sophie? One thing still confuses me.

For the first week here, they made us wear these dorky pajamas, I guess so we’d really feel like inmates or patients. I mean, guests. Then they let us put on our real clothes, after they’d searched them for pills or razor blades or whatever they imagine we might try to smuggle in. They gave me back my old jeans and T-shirt, and it felt good to look like myself again. Not that they let us have mirrors here. But I could tell I looked like me.

That first day I was at breakfast, and the tattooed girl was screaming about not being allowed to smoke. It put the rest of us on edge. I wasn’t really aware of it, but I must have had my fists jammed deep in my pockets.

When I took my hands out again and opened them up, there it was.

Lucy’s holy medal.

I wasn’t imagining it, Sophie. I have the medal here now, with its silver frame and the image of the saint. I’m looking at it as I write. The saint of hopeless cases. And I’m praying to it. Please let me see Lucy just one more time. This time I’d tell her everything I wanted to say and didn’t. But what would I say? Maybe it doesn’t matter, because the saint doesn’t seem to be answering my prayers.

So tell me this, Sophie. Because you always were so smart. Smarter than I ever was. Smarter than I ever will be. Tell me: If I imagined everything, the seagull and the ghosts and the morbid playing cards, if it was all just a fantasy, then where did I get this medal? And why is there still that red spot on it—that drop of Lucy’s dying blood?

When I get out of here, I’ll show it to you. And you can let me know what you think.

So okay, between now and then, enjoy the last weeks of summer. Thanks for being there for me when I needed you. Thanks for reading my letters.

See you soon, I hope. If you want to see me. And I hope you do.

Meanwhile,

XOXO

Your friend,

Jack

LISA YUSKAVAGE

FRANCINE PROSE
is the critically acclaimed author of nineteen novels, including the National Book Award Finalist
BLUE ANGEL
and
MY NEW AMERICAN LIFE
. She has written three other novels for young adults:
AFTER
, winner of the California Young Reader Medal, an IRA/CBC Young Adults’ Choice, and a New York Public Library Book for the Teen Age;
BULLYVILLE
, a
PW
Best Book and Book Sense Children’s Pick; and her most recent,
TOUCH
. She is also the author of two picture books,
LEOPOLD, THE LIAR OF LEIPZIG
and
RHINO, RHINO, SWEET POTATO
. The recipient of numerous grants and honors, including a Guggenheim and a Fulbright, Francine Prose was Director’s Fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She lives in New York City.