And now, on her birthday, Becca’s frustration reached its boiling point. She’d always wanted this job. She’d got her degree in sociology and done the additional work to pick up her QMRP certification: qualified mental retardation professional. She’d suffered under the delusion that the mentally handicapped were sweet and childlike. The people who worked with them would be the kind of people who rescued abandoned puppies and helped blind people cross the street. Smiling Down Syndrome kids and Special Olympics every day.
Truth was, the residents were not all sweet Down patients. They suffered a variety of organic brain issues, behaviors, and sexual urges that could not be satisfied. And the employees saw Riverwood as just another job. Some were great, others jerks. And some, like state and admin, were merely clueless.
Becca thought about bagging it. Get her masters, then teach at an alternative school or maybe even go for her Ph.D. and go into private practice. Either of those choices had to be less soul-devouring than Riverwood.
Alternatively, she could mail it in. The nurses did it; they just gave the residents whatever meds Dr. Pardo prescribed because it made their job easier. Saul Cage did it; he left early every Friday to ski or golf. He came to the floor so rarely that half the HTs didn’t recognize him if they ran into him in the parking lot.
“Or,” she said aloud. “I could keep licking Saul Cage’s balls.”
Becca had been staring at the screen for several minutes without typing a single character. She minimized the window, shut down her game of solitaire and rose to her feet. She grabbed her coat.
It was warmer outside than it had been; snow melted from the roof and trickled down the gutters. She walked around the building, watching for Dale or other escapees as she did. There was Roger, having a smoke beneath the porch light off the courtyard. He was a higher-functioning resident, but the guys that ran the group homes didn’t like him. Said he was antisocial and didn’t clean up after himself. Becca had never had a problem with him.
“You should put on a hat, Roger.”
He rubbed his bald head with one hand while holding the cigarette to his lips with the other. “Nah, not cold. Think spring’s on the way.” Other than the way he emphasized the last word of every sentence, Roger could have been any guy out for a smoke.
“I’m afraid we’ve got a lot of winter left. It’s just a February thaw. They say it’s going to turn cold again next week.”
“I hope it’s not too cold. They say it’s supposed to snow?”
“I don’t know, Roger, I didn’t hear. But you know, it doesn’t usually snow when it gets really cold.” Roger looked glum at the prospect of cold without snow. She added, “I’m sure it won’t last long. You know what they say, you don’t like the weather in Vermont, wait fifteen minutes.”
“Oh yeah. That’s what they say.”
She found it calming to talk to Roger about the weather. But she only had a few minutes to clear her head before she had to get back to work. “Well, I’ve got to get going. Make sure to shut that door when you go back inside.”
“Yeah, I know.”
Becca continued around the edge of the building. The rooms were mostly dark, although a few flickered with television lights. Another ten minutes and the grave staff would go around and give lights out to these night owls.
Even more of the snow had melted on the west wing and as she walked toward the doors by the employee parking lot her foot kicked at something. Becca bent, thinking it was trash, and came up with a hard piece of plastic. She held it under the globe light on the porch and wiped away mud and snow with her thumb.
It was Rosa Solorio’s name tag. It still hung to its clip, which had come unfastened. Becca looked over her shoulder with a frown. It was almost like Rosa had come out the door mid-shift, unclipped her name tag and then tossed it into the snow bank. She must have been pissed at something to leave like that.
Becca pocketed the name tag and was about to go inside when she hesitated, suddenly uncertain. She walked to the snow bank where she’d kicked up the name tag. The snow was mostly melted elsewhere in the courtyard, but nobody had walked directly under the eaves and here it was still several inches deep. She bent low.
Clearly, now, she could see an indentation in the snow. The imprint of a glove or hand, a leg, and a deeper part where a body had been. Rosa had fallen here in the snow; that’s how she’d lost her name tag. Stumbled, coming around the building, Becca supposed. But what was she doing under the eaves, where the snow was deepest?
What if the explanation were not so innocent? What if someone had knocked her down here?
Chapter Seven:
“Here, hold your eye open,” Dr. Pardo said to the man lying rigid in the bed in front of him. He pried open the man’s eyelids, then took a dropper and held it over the exposed eyeball.
“Not the left eye!” Faria cried from the other side of the prison wall. “Don’t let him do it!” Gone was the abbé’s analytical tone, replaced by panic.
It was the left eye that held Chad Lett’s hopes. The left eye that was his window to the world. Chad and Faria had tunneled quietly beneath the walls of the island fortress. It had taken months, years. But at last they had reached the edge of the prison. The Chateau d’If stood at their back, the open sea at their face. Chad could almost smell the sea salt, hear the cries of gulls that meant freedom.
What do you mean, escape? Chad had asked the abbé. Chad had lay in bed, having just held a conversation in Spanish with his invisible companion through the walls of their shared prison.
“Let’s escape from this hellhole. Just like in the book. We’ll make tools of broken plates and rat bones. We’ll dig, inch by inch toward the outer wall. And when we get there, we’ll swim for freedom.
An intriguing plan, Chad answered. If I really sat in the dungeon of a French castle. If there were really a treasure waiting on the outside to turn me into The Count of Monte Cristo. Instead of chained by my paralyzed body and imprisoned in the fortress of my own skull.
“Must you be so literal minded?”
Just tell me what you mean.
But Faria deserted him. For three days he did not come to the wall to speak. And after three days it came to Chad. His body was a prison. He would never regain control. But he didn’t need to. All he needed was a tiny hole in the outer wall. One small way to tell the world he was alive. And the world would come to him, find a way to communicate.
What did he know about paralysis victims? Be it stroke or spinal injury, they could make progress with intensive therapy. Chad’s own grandmother had been wheelchair bound after a stroke but had regained limited control of her limbs and much of her ability to speak.
Chad spent the next two weeks sending exploratory impulses to each toe, each finger, each muscle. Move, he urged them. Twitch. Flex.
Nothing. Not a single muscle responded to hours of pleading, threatening messages. And yet…and yet he had two candidates. The first was the index finger on his right hand. After hours of concentration, he could almost feel a twitch. Another full day of work and he had the sensation a second time.
The second was his left eye. It could see better than his right, almost like it focused itself from time to time. Even more promising, he’d felt something almost like a ripple in his lower eyelid. It started twitching involuntarily at one point on the following day and Chad wondered if this were its way of expressing fatigue.
The eye. He would go for the eye. An eye that could focus would be useful. And more than anywhere else, an aide or a nurse might look at his eye and see it blinking, not just randomly, but with a message. But only if he could control his eye. He had to teach it to respond to his brain.
Weeks went by, months, with no progress. It was like throwing his bulk against a giant boulder; the boulder never moved, but the effort of pushing left him exhausted. He slept fourteen, fifteen hours a day. When he was awake, he fought the boulder.
And then the boulder moved. The entire wall of his prison shifted. Faria sti
rred. “What was that?”
I moved the stone. He’d twitched a muscle in the lower eyelid of his left eye. Just once, and then the stone had settled into place.
“For God’s sake, don’t stop. Keep pushing.”
And he did. He pushed and pushed and pushed.
And one day he broke through.
He’d always been glad when Rosa was on shift. She spoke to the residents of Team Smile in Spanish as she worked. She massaged their feet and shifted them in their beds more often than the rules required. When Chad’s muscles spasmed, she would rub his legs or back.
And Rosa paid attention. She never pinched his skin in his wheelchair or, like that bastard who no longer worked here, set his feet to cook next to the radiator. And sometimes she looked him in the face and said, “I wonder how much of you is still down there. Does some part of you know where you are and what happened? Or is your brain really dead?”
I’m not dead! he cried. I’m alive!
She knew. She knew what had happened to him. She didn’t know that he still lived inside, but she knew. He heard her talk to Dr. Pardo, when the man came into Team Smile’s darkened room at night to press Rosa against the wall and tear down her pants. Pardo used her, hard, desperate, while Rosa seemed powerless to tell him no, even if she cursed herself and Dr. Pardo after he left.
“I can’t do this any longer,” she told Pardo one time as Chad heard her pulling her clothes in place. “It’s wrong.”
“It’s just sex, it doesn’t matter.”
“I’m not talking about that,” Rosa said. “This man, he deserves more. He deserves justice.”
“He’s dead. What does he care?”
“He’s not dead, and you’re not sure anyway or you wouldn’t switch to Spanish every time we talk about him.”
“That’s just superstition,” Dr. Pardo said. As if to prove his point, he switched to English. “Like crossing yourself when you go past the graveyard.”
“It doesn’t matter. I can’t do this anymore, I want to go home.”
“You can’t go home or you’ll never get an education.”
“That’s what you keep saying, but it’s been five years. Five years. And I’ve done nothing.”
Janitorial had passed in the hallway then and Pardo slipped away. A moment later and Rosa had been alone with Team Smile, crying softly to herself. Two days later, Chad made contact.
She’d been combing his hair after giving him a sponge bath and dressing him and he’d been twitching his eyelid, desperately, anxiously. They were just the slightest tremors and the effort had exhausted him to the point of stopping.
Rosa leaned over. “Let me get that gunk out of your eye, I…”
He stopped as soon as she started talking about his eye. A second. A twitch. Another second, two twitches. Another second, one twitch.
“Are you, can…” Her voice trailed off a second time. “No, it’s my imagination.”
Look at me, he begged. Don’t turn away.
“Are you alive?” she whispered. “Blink if you can understand me.”
Chad was almost to the point of collapse from the strain, but nothing could stop him now. He blinked. Rosa put her hand to her mouth and shrank back. “Dios mio.”
“She knows,” Faria said. “Rosa knows. We’ll be free.”
Two weeks later and Rosa was sneaking Chad out in the middle of the night. And then something terrible had happened to her. And now, Dr. Pardo stood over Chad with a dropper.
“Is that going to hurt?” asked a man standing over Pardo’s shoulder. The voice gave Chad chills. He knew that voice. But from where?
“No,” said Pardo. “Of course not. He won’t feel a thing.” Pardo squeezed the dropper. A drop formed on the end, bulged, and dangled.
No, Chad thought. No, don’t do it. Please, don’t. Please.
“Are you sure? I thought you said he was…”
“Very sure. The drops will be numbing, soothing.”
A single drop of liquid fell onto Chad’s exposed eyeball. It felt like a drop of boiling acid. His eye watered over and he screamed, or would have screamed, had he not lay there silently, motionless, taking whatever scalding poison had dropped into his eye.
“This should take care of things,” Pardo said. He looked at Chad as he said it and it was almost as though he were speaking to the crippled man instead of the other person in the room.
“So what is the plan?” the other man asked, letting out a breath.
“It will make his eye turn red and seep. Tomorrow I’ll come, take note of it. Next week, the same thing. It won’t be any surprise to anyone when he loses his left eye. There will be a paper trail, in fact.”
“Jesus, that’s got to suck.” The shudder was audible in his voice.
The pain faded slowly from Chad’s eye, but not his terror. They had discovered the hole he had dug to freedom and were now bricking it over. When they finished, he would remain in his dungeon forever and ever.
From the other side of his mind came the sound of Abbé Faria screaming and throwing himself again and again against the wall.
#
Wes found Becca Gull in her office, talking to a guy named Frank, who worked the graveyard janitorial. Frank had a piece of paper and was pointing out numbers and figures.
“So look,” Frank said. “The money will come in as little as two weeks if everyone follows the plan.”
Becca looked up in surprise as he entered. Surprise, and, Wes thought, relief. “Don’t tell me you’re quitting already.”
“Of course not.” Wes wondered if that’s why she looked happy to see him. “Is that what you want me to do?”
“You quit before state comes and I’ll kick your butt. Then why’d you come in so late? Did you pick up someone’s shift?”
“So you’ll do it?” Frank asked, looking back from Wes to the paper and then to Becca. “It’s just ten dollars and an envelope you have to mail. You add your name to the bottom of the list and just a couple of weeks later it will be your turn.”
Wes looked at the paper and now he understood. The relief on Becca’s face had been because she hoped the interruption would save her from Frank.
“What’s this?” he asked. “A pyramid scheme?”
“It’s not a pyramid scheme,” Frank said in an irritated tone. “It’s a multi-level wealth generator. You send ten dollars to join and when it’s your turn, you get somewhere between fifty and a hundred thousand dollars.”
“So a chain letter. A pyramid scheme.” Wes picked up the paper. It was a list with names and a silly note at the bottom about not breaking the chain and getting lots of money for doing nothing. “These things never work.”
“It’ll work if you follow it,” Frank said. “Just do the math.”
“Yeah, but where does the money come from? People higher up the chain. And the list expands exponentially. In about two months everyone in the world is on the list, supposedly, and who is going to pay them off? It’s mathematically impossible.”
Frank didn’t understand this line of argument, and they went a couple more rounds before the man said, “It’s people like you who ruin it for everyone else. If everyone just went along with it, everyone could get rich.”
Wes just blinked, not sure where to start on that one. Frank turned back to Becca. “Anyway, I’ll leave it here. It’s a great opportunity.” He scowled at Wes, then turned to leave.
“Well, you got rid of him,” Becca said. “Thanks for that, I guess. Pretty sure Frank will scratch you off his Super Bowl party list, though.”
“I don’t have much tolerance for stupid people.”
“Right, and that’s why you’re working here.”
“Totally different. These people have an organic deficiency. They didn’t choose…”
“Oh, god,” she said with an exaggerated roll of the eyes. “Because the normally stupid people—the ones you disdain with every sigh and sneering remark—they chose to be dumb, right? They purposefully set out to me
ss you up at the DMV or misread their seat assignment on the airplane. Right? Oh, and you worked so very hard to be smart, so that makes you morally superior to all those fools with IQs between 80 and 95.
“Let me tell you about Gil,” she said. “He was a resident here for a few weeks. Left just before you showed up. He’s the sort that comes through every so often, between group homes. Thing is, if you met him on the street, you wouldn’t think of him as retarded. Never mistake him for smart. God, no. Just another one of the marching morons. He’s borderline.”
“And?”
“But half the HTs didn’t get that he was retarded. You could hold a real conversation with him. Not about the looming insolvency of the Social Security system, but stick to the weather or the Red Sox and you’d be fine. And you know, most people can’t talk about that other stuff anyway. So they didn’t get it. You get half the HTs here—the lifers—and they probably have an IQ around 90, 95. Low end of average. Gil, he’s maybe 75, 80. Better genes, a few less beers downed by his mother when Gil was in utero and he’d have been working here, not living here. It’s a continuum, Wes. Just one step at a time and you’ll track from the slugs of the world to the Einsteins. Oh, and the influence you have on your own IQ is close to nil.” She nodded. “So next time you feel like being an asshole to the janitor, pause a beat, will you?”
Her words stung and his tone became defensive as he pointed to Frank’s chain letter. “You weren’t going to sign up for this thing, were you?”
“Of course not. I was going to be annoyingly non-committal and then blow it off.”
“Well, maybe I should have kept my mouth shut,” Wes said. “I’m sorry. I was just being blunt.”
“So was I. But with you, not Frank. Nothing is going to change Frank. You, on the other hand—I think you might be capable of self-reflection. Now what’s up?”
Wes had second thoughts. It was clear Becca thought he was a prick. But he didn’t know where else to turn. Not the Waterbury police, obviously, and not his mother. Dad wouldn’t stand up to Mom, no matter what. Aunt Charlotte, maybe? Uncle Bill? But really, Becca seemed like his best hope.
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