“I even worked at Northrock one summer. That was tough work, shoveling gravel all day, but it was damn good money for a kid just out of high school. I worked with your Uncle Davis. That kid worked his ass off, shoveling gravel just like the rest of us. I was sorry to hear that he’d died.”
Wes interrupted a second time. “I don’t see what—”
Stiles leaned forward and his face hardened. “Frankly, Mr. Pilson, I think you’re full of shit. You’re looking for attention. You jumped on a couple of accidents your brother suffered—yeah, I’ve seen the reports and I talked to your mother and to several people at Riverwood—and when nothing came of that, you’re trying to get me worked up about an illegal alien who you don’t know, who undoubtedly is cleaning hotel rooms in Boston or has simply gone back home to Mexico or wherever. And when I didn’t pay enough attention you made up this story that someone attacked you.”
Wes had nothing to say, just the sputter of protest that he knew would not change anything.
Stiles said, “If you were anyone else, you’d be looking at charges for filing a false report. But because you come from a good family—”
“Since I come from a good family, can’t you give me the benefit of the doubt?”
“I already am. I’m going to assume that you really were concerned about your brother. And I’m going to assume that you really did worry about this woman who worked at Riverwood. And I’m going to forget the story about the attacker with the taser, who nobody else saw and who you cannot describe, because I’m going to assume that you got excited and thought I wouldn’t get involved unless you embellished your story.”
“I don’t believe this.”
Lieutenant Stiles rose to his feet. “My advice? Quit this dead-end job at Riverwood and go back to school. Now, I’ve got traffic court tomorrow, so if you’ll excuse me, I’m kind of busy.”
Wes stood to go. He felt exceptionally bitter. “I’ll call Rosa’s landlords and tell them to go ahead and clean the place. They’ll be happy to know the police don’t give a shit about immigrant girls. It’ll make their job a lot easier.”
“Don’t mess with me Pilson.” Stiles’s voice had grown dangerous. “Don’t even.”
Wes left the police station thoroughly disgusted. He wondered if he should go to the state police, but since Riverwood was in the village, they would undoubtedly just refer the matter back to Lieutenant Stiles.
But he sure as hell wasn’t going to leave it alone. He wanted to talk to Becca. Would she still be at work at this hour? She said she’d been pulling a lot of overtime. He could swing by Riverwood on his way home and see.
#
Doctor Pardo peered into Chad Lett’s eye with a small flashlight. The retarded man lay in bed, restraints in place to keep him from thrashing against the bars in the middle of the night. Pardo turned the light on, then off again. He put the flashlight into the left pocket of his lab coat.
He took out a small vial from the right pocket, then turned to the man standing over his shoulder, away from the bed. “A few drops of this should clear up the condition.”
What condition? Chad Lett asked. He felt the words travel to his tongue, his lips, his vocal cords. But of course no sound came out. No movement, not even a twitch, stirred the muscles and the words died in his mouth, unspoken.
He felt everything, heard everything. When his muscles seized, shards of pain stabbed through his limbs. When a fly landed on his face, he couldn’t twitch a muscle to chase it away. When his arm or leg got stuck in an awkward position he had to sit with the discomfort until someone moved him. He could taste the pureed shit they shoved into his mouth until his reflex swallowed it. He could even see, if something walked in front of his vision. But he could not move, could not interact with his environment. They had warehoused him in this room and here he would spend the rest of his life. People came, went, some kind and gentle, others unfeeling or callous.
Years had passed. He guessed five, maybe six of paralysis. He didn’t know for sure, because the early months remained a blur. Chad had awakened from a coma like a diver swimming up from the depths, his oxygen low, the sun a dim memory far above. The smell of Windex, bleach, the smell of hair and shampoo as a woman, perhaps a nurse, bent over him. Then came sounds: a beeping heart monitor, the whir of a linoleum scrubber, a television droning from the next room.
Doctors came, others who must have been family or friends. He heard them talking about him. Brain damaged. A vegetable. One step from brain dead. No point, then. They’d removed the breathing tube and to everyone’s surprise, his body had taken over breathing. There was discussion; should they stop feeding him and let him die?
“And there will be no chance that he’ll ever recover?” someone had asked.
“No chance whatsoever.” A doctor.
It was this moment that he regained full consciousness. The slumber, the drugged feeling from which he’d been clawing for weeks, fell away and he was fully awake for the first time. No, he cried. No, I’m alive. I’m in here. I’m alive!
“You’re dead,” came a cold voice from elsewhere in his mind. It sounded like it came from the other side of the wall—slightly muffled—as if from a fellow prisoner in some dark dungeon.
No, I’m not.
“But you are. You’re a man being buried alive. Your family is standing over your grave, mourning your death while they shovel dirt on your coffin. They can’t hear you screaming inside. Does it matter if you’ve died now or if you slowly suffocate later?”
Chad had no idea how long he’d been unconscious in the hospital and the next several weeks were a daze. Much of the time he lay unconscious or asleep as his body and drugs fought to keep him alive. Later, they transferred him to Riverwood, to live among the vegetables.
He wanted to die. He tried to die. He was incapable of committing an act of violence against his person, but he slipped into a depression as deep as the coma from which he’d emerged. He concentrated for hours on his heart, commanding it to stop beating.
I am already dead. Let me go!
And he learned that one cannot simply will oneself to die.
His companion brought him out of the depression. “Wake up,” said the voice from the other side of the wall. “Live.”
I am alive. I cannot die.
“I don’t mean ‘fail to die.’ I mean, live!”
Who are you? Chad asked.
“I am your fellow prisoner. I’m the one locked away in your mind. The fellow prisoner of the Château d’If.”
Faria. Like in the Count of Monte Cristo. Edmond Dantes, thrust into the bowels of the prison, dead to his fiancée, to his family. His fellow prisoner, the poor, doomed priest, Abbé Faria, unjustly imprisoned, had been Dantes’ teacher and confidant.
“You may call me Faria if you wish, Monsieur Lett. I like the name.”
Chad was not insane—he had merely traveled to the edge of sanity—and he knew that Faria was not real, but a manifestation of his subconscious. His mind groped for some way to communicate with the outside world; barring that, it would hold dialogue with itself.
Life at Riverwood was monotony itself. Every morning they would take Chad from his bed, change his diaper, dress him. A pureed breakfast would be followed by some mind-numbing show like Price is Right.
Chad passed between boredom, depression, and anger, often suffering all three emotions in the same day. One day the HT for Team Challenge put the TV on the Discovery Channel while he and Rosa helped the short kitchen staff clean up after breakfast. They’d left Chad turned at an angle, but he could hear.
It was a show about spine and brain injuries. Specifically, locked in syndrome. It featured a man who had suffered an injury to his upper spine, rendering him almost completely paralyzed, but for the ability to blink his eyes. He’d suffered mutely for several months before someone recognized that he was still alive inside his broken body. He had worked out a means of communicating with his wife and his children.
Oh my god, Chad
thought. That’s me.
Except for the part about controlling the eyes, of course. Chad couldn’t do as much as twitch a single muscle. Oh, and the fact that the man’s family gave a damn, while Chad had no one.
Every bit of his attention focused on the show. For several minutes the entire world disappeared as Chad learned what he had become. The show talked about future treatments for the spinal injuries, beginning with stem cell research. But the two HTs returned at that moment and one of them hunted down the remote and pointed it at the television.
No, Chad begged. Don’t. Please.
The channel changed. “Come on down!” the man on the television cried. “You’re the next contestant on the Price is Right.”
“My favorite show,” Faria said dryly. “So much better than that boring brain stuff. Chad Lett, come on down. You’re the next contestant on the Price is Right.”
Goddamn it.
Chad spent the next half hour in a silent rage. He mentally broke everything and everyone at Riverside. He tore the building to the ground, then stacked the corpses of its workers and residents in the ruins and burned them. When that was done, he moved his destruction to the town, then to the state, until eventually all of New England was a sulfurous, radioactive slag heap where nothing would grow for ten thousand years.
When his tantrum spent itself, Faria asked, “Are you quite done yet? Good. Sometimes I think you’d rather feel sorry for yourself than do anything.”
What the fuck can I do?
“Remember what your father told you.”
Chad’s father was a workaholic. Lying in bed, ravaged by cancer at the age of eighty-nine, he’d been placing phone calls to his business associates from his hospital bed. The last thing he’d said to Chad: “Did you get that contract you bid on?”
“Keep busy,” his father had told him again and again. “I don’t care if you have to dig a hole. It doesn’t matter. And if you still need to keep busy, fill the hole in again.”
I remember, he told Faria.
“Then get to work.”
Chad’s body was a useless husk that brought nothing but pain. But his brain worked. He exercised his memory. He repeated overheard conversations until he could remember a dozen sentences word for word. He worked on his math, doing multiplication tables and calculating the area of rooms at Riverwood.
But his salvation came from Spanish.
He’d spent significant time around Spanish speakers, had taken the subject in high school and again in college, but had been an indifferent language student. He remembered how to introduce himself and the words for fruits and colors, but laziness and the passage of years had calcified him into a monolingual. Even when he’d traveled abroad, he hadn’t bothered with the language. Hearing Rosa and Yamila speak and for a time Team Challenge’s HT, a man named Joaquín, made him regret that he’d let the opportunity pass him by.
And then one of the graveyard HTs came with his Spanish CDs. He was a college student who only lasted a few months, but he was struggling with his Spanish class and every time things were slow, he would come in and put one of his CDs into Aaron’s CD player. He’d sit next to Chad’s bed late at night and listen to his lessons.
It was a simple program, meant to play in the car or in the background while one did something else. The program would say something in English, wait a moment while the listener tried to recall the phrase in Spanish, then repeat the phrase in Spanish.
“When does the next bus leave for Seville?”
“Cuándo sale el próximo autobus para Sevilla?”
“I would like to change two hundred dollars for Mexican pesos.”
“Quisiera cambiar doscientos dólares por pesos Mexicanos.”
The college student simply could not get the Spanish. His accent was terrible. He could listen to a lesson twenty times and not be able to respond before the Spanish cut in. Chad could tell that he was trying to translate word for word rather than learning the language on a deep level.
But Chad, frozen in bed, unable to even mouth the words, learned. He paid ferocious attention to the lessons and all day, while waiting for his unknowing teacher to return, he would repeat phrases in his head and form new ones. He worked out grammar rules and tried to match them with the dusty memories of his own schooling.
All too soon, the college student quit, first the lessons, then the job entirely. But by now, Chad had started down the path. He listened to Rosa speak with Yamila and Joaquin. They spoke so quickly that at first he couldn’t tell where one word began and the other ended. Between the noise he occasionally picked out individual words: “quiero, tú, comida,” and these words eventually grew more complex and more numerous. Soon, Chad learned new words from context and he added these to his interior conversations.
Chad dreamed in Spanish. He imagined himself emerging from his stupor one day to stun Rosa with his perfect Spanish. He and Faria held long, admittedly limited conversations in Spanish, the abbé’s knowledge of the language growing side by side with his own.
One day, he and Faria chatted in Spanish for some two hours about a variety of subjects. They were not capable of discussing international politics or the diet of the scarlet macaw, but neither did they run out of words as they might have several months earlier.
“Not bad,” Faria said when they finally switched to English. “Not bad at all. I’d have taught you myself, but alas, you and I share knowledge and information. Unlike the Abbé Faria of literary fame, I can only teach you that which you already know.”
If only there were French speakers around here, or German, we could start on something new.
“It’s been, what? At least eighteen months in this place.” Faria asked. “Maybe longer. A long time to spend in prison, but men have spent decades in the Chateau d’If.”
Don’t remind me.
“You’d better pick something more ambitious than Spanish if you want to avoid insanity.”
What are you talking about? Chad asked.
“Do I have to spell everything out for you, my friend?”
Just humor me. I want to hear you say it.
“I’m talking, my dear Dantes,” said Faria from the other side of the wall, “about tunneling through these walls. I’m talking about escape.”
Chapter Six:
Today was Becca Gull’s birthday and she was pulling a double shift. Thirty years old. Big milestone, wasn’t it? Half a dozen calls had vibrated through on her cell phone. Her brother, no doubt, and her parents calling to wish her a happy birthday. Probably her boyfriend, Andrew, and maybe a couple of friends from Portsmouth, where she’d gone to high school. She let them go to mail and didn’t call in to get the messages.
Becca sat at her computer long after Saul Cage went home for the evening. These records were a mess; she had class logs to organize, incident reports to file, and patient records to input. Three residents had left for group homes in the last month, and two more had come back, revolving door style. There was another who’d transferred from a place in Bennington and she didn’t even have a file for him yet. Too much time spent subbing for missing staff. She’d filled one spot with the quixotic Wes Pilson (let’s see how long that lasts, she thought), but the candidates for the other HT were crap. Of course they would be, at ten bucks an hour. Who wanted to wipe asses at six in the morning for ten bucks an hour?
This damn inspection. She’d been just holding it together until that lovely bit of news. Saul had come down from his office while she and Carolina were tag-teaming Team Challenge and Team Smile. He’d seemed annoyed to step onto the floor, and more annoyed when Becca kept interrupting him to chase after Dale, on his normal flight pattern.
Saul frowned. “Can’t you keep him—here, let me show you how it’s done.”
She stepped back. “Please, do.”
“Now, Dale. I want you to sit here. Yes, sit, Dale.” He put his hands on Dale’s shoulders and pressed until the man flopped onto the couch. Saul turned to Becca. “Now I’m going to keep
my hands here for a moment, then let go. When he stands up, I’ll do it again and firmly repeat that he must sit down. This is especially important. Every time you sit him down, use his name.”
Dale had an IQ of eleven. He didn’t know his name from his nut sack. Becca figured it would take Saul about two seconds to figure this out. But as Saul kept struggling to get Dale to sit, repeating his command again and again, she realized that perhaps she’d overestimated Saul’s own IQ. He kept at it, pleading with Dale to obey. And each time, Becca knocked five points off Saul’s IQ. He was at group home range before he turned to Becca in exasperation.
“What’s wrong? Why isn’t Dale listening?”
“He’s not the best listener in the facility.” And if you ever set foot on the floor you’d know that already.
Dale had one goal, to get from wherever he was to wherever he was not. He could figure out a push handle on a door; anything more complicated and he’d stand in front of the door and scream. Fortunately for Dale, ninety percent of the doors in Riverwood were push doors. The state wanted residents to be able to escape in the event of a fire. Riverwood had never suffered a fire, but the police and neighbors regularly brought back Dale when they found him wandering down the middle of the street.
Dale had come to Riverwood after a long and glorious career breaking the certification of lesser facilities around New England. Even if you were lucky enough to have understanding inspectors, the one-on-one attention Dale commanded meant your other residents could run amok.
Carolina returned from the bathroom, and Saul took the opportunity to abandon the floor. Becca followed. And it was in Saul’s office that she heard the bad news; state was coming back next week. Are we ready?
It was the perfect moment to quit. God, it would have been great watching Saul sub for her, subbing for an HT. Put him on Team Challenge. “Dale? Dale, why aren’t you listening?” Instead, she listened, nodded, and then outlined her plan for getting through the inspection short-staffed.
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