His Hands were Quiet

by P. D. Workman

  Zachary saw red, and then black, and then he was awake, on the couch, staring at the TV screen like it was the enemy.

  Zachary swore and tried to catch his breath and relax. He closed his eyes, still on the edge of sleep. If he didn’t wake himself up any further, he’d be able to find sleep again. Maybe more restful this time.

  He flowed into another dream. Innocuous. Relaxed. Not in a facility this time. He was in a department store. Bored. Walking with a woman who had to be a foster mother. There had been too many to remember so many years later. Her name was something musical. Lyra? Viola?

  “Quit dawdling,” she told him, looking back over her shoulder.

  Lyra. Definitely. Zachary sped up a little, not really making much of an effort. When she stopped looking at him, he dawdled again, looking around at the merchandise.

  They stopped in the boyswear department. Zachary started looking through t-shirts with licensed cartoon characters on them. He never got to buy new clothes. It was always hand-me-downs from other foster children, or uniforms, or something from the thrift store that looked like it had been left on the side of the road.

  “Oh, cool,” he paused at a Spider-Man shirt. “Can I have one of these?”

  “No,” Lyra said flatly. Non-musical. No inflection.

  Zachary looked at her, trying to discern what her objection was. Price? Something the school wouldn’t allow? There were no swear words, no blood and gore. He let go of the shoulder of the Spider-Man shirt.

  “What can I have?”

  “I’ll decide what you can have.”

  He waited for further direction. But she didn’t offer any enlightenment. She went to a wall of drab, dressy shirts. Zachary wandered through the racks, looking at other clothes. Daydreaming and imagining what he would buy if he could have anything he wanted.

  “Zachary!” Her voice had a snap in it. “Get over here.”

  Zachary located Lyra and moved back through the racks to where she stood.

  “You are not to wander off. You’re supposed to be right here at my side. Understood?”

  “I was just looking over there—”

  “Is that right by my side?”

  “No.”

  “Then that’s not where I said you need to be, is it?”

  “No,” Zachary muttered, low, angry.

  “What?”

  He raised his voice, eliminating all traces of emotion. “No, ma’am.”

  “I need you to stay right here by me.”

  He grunted and stayed put. She grabbed him by the shoulder and turned him around to hold a shirt up to his shoulders in the back. When she draped it over her arm, he turned back around.

  “Could I have a blue one?”

  “No.”

  He looked at the wall of shirts, and looked sideways at her. “Can I have another color?”

  “No.” She nodded to the olive drab shirt she had draped over her arm. “This is fine.”

  “Won’t I need more than one?”

  “I’ll get another one if that fits you. After you try it on.”

  “In another color?”

  “No.”

  Zachary ground his teeth. “Why not? Is there a school uniform?”

  “No. This is what you’re getting, and I don’t want to hear anything else about it.”

  He’d never been able to choose his own clothes before, so Zachary wasn’t sure why it should bother him so much that he didn’t get to choose the color he liked. But he was there, standing in the department store, able to express his opinion. And there was more than one color. They were all the same price. It wasn’t a uniform. So why couldn’t he choose a different color?

  “Are we getting pants?”

  She looked at him. “Yes, we’re getting pants too.”

  “Which ones can I look at?”

  “You can stand here with me. I’ll pick out what we are buying.”

  “Can’t I look?”

  She didn’t answer, which Zachary supposed was as good as a ‘no.’ He bit the cuticle of his thumb. It hurt, but it distracted and calmed him. He didn’t care about clothes. Why worry about it? He should be happy that he was getting new clothes. He didn’t know when the last time was that he’d had new clothes. Maybe when he was a baby. Or maybe even then his family had been too poor to buy new and had picked up what they could find at the thrift stores. It would be a new experience to put clothes on his body that had never been on anyone else’s.

  “Stop fidgeting.”

  Zachary dropped his thumb from his mouth and tried to stand still. Lyra held a pair of black pants up to his hips, frowning.

  “You’re so thin,” she complained. “And I suppose you’ll hit a growth spurt as soon as I buy you anything.”

  And, of course, he had. They changed around his meds, she was a good cook, and in a couple of months he’d put on twenty pounds and shot up three inches. Then it was back to thrift-store clothes and hand-me-downs, with his barely-worn new clothes being stored away in closets and boxes for the next skinny boy who happened to need them.

  Zachary rolled over. The light from the TV was bothering him, but he was too tired to get up and turn it off. If he did that, he would wake himself up and he wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep again.

  The low murmur covered up the noises of the building and made him feel like he wasn’t alone.

  So he pulled his blanket up over his face to block out the light from the TV screen, and closed his eyes, seeking sleep again.

  He should have known that trying to go back to sleep a third time would undo everything. He wanted to go to a more peaceful place. Like when he had gone from the dream about Roddy Rodriguez at Bonnie Brown to the dream about shopping with Lyra. But instead of finding a happier memory, he found himself in the detention cell at Bonnie Brown, his face pressed to the window, watching Annie die while he screamed and banged impotently on the door.

  Zachary waited until mid-afternoon to call Kenzie. She sounded happy to hear from him and ready to take a break from her work.

  “Zachary! I’ve been wondering how your case is going. Did you get in at Summit? Or are they blocking you?”

  “I went there yesterday. Spent a few hours there, touring the facility, seeing what it is they do. Saw Quentin’s room where it happened.”

  “Well, what did you think? What did they seem like?”

  “It’s a lot to go over,” Zachary said slowly. “Do you want to get together for supper again? I don’t want to take you away from your work for too long.”

  She made a little groan that communicated she would like to get out of there sooner. But Zachary knew she was diligent about her hours and wasn’t going to sneak off just because there was something more interesting to do.

  “Yeah, let’s do that,” she agreed. “Where do you want to go? We haven’t done the buffet for a while.”

  “Sure, that’s good for me. Just give me a call when you’re off, and we’ll head over.”

  That way, whether she left early or had to work late, they wouldn’t be waiting on each other. Kenzie agreed and, after muttering a bit more about her work, told him goodbye and got back to it. Zachary hung up the phone and sat there looking at it for a few minutes, wishing she would call him back and say that she was just going to take off, and she would make up her hours later. Or maybe someone else would call him, just to chat and cheer him up. But there weren’t a lot of people who would call him just to chew the fat. New clients, current clients asking for progress updates, insurance agents, but not friends.

  He sighed and got back to work, signing on to his new laptop and waiting while it connected with the cloud, where all of his documents were now stored so they couldn’t be destroyed in a house fire. Or an office fire. Or a hard drive breakdown. He’d learned the hard way and he wasn’t leaving his data at risk again.

  The time passed slowly, but eventually Kenzie called to say she was done and on her way to the restaurant. Zachary packed his laptop and notebook into a slim portfolio a
nd headed out to meet her. He thought briefly about Bowman’s comment that Kenzie would be interested in a relationship if Zachary would work on it. But he wasn’t sure what the next step would look like.

  So the meal followed their established pattern. A bit of small talk about the weather and how things were going at the coroner’s office, a few jokes about the stiffs she worked with. Dishing up their meals from the buffet and sitting down to discuss the nitty-gritties of Zachary’s case. Kenzie was ready the minute she sat down and stabbed a baby corn-cob with her fork.

  “You look about bursting to tell me all about it,” she said, “so go for it. What did you find out?”

  Zachary tried to keep his narrative chronological, to explain what he had seen, in the order he had seen it, but he was easily distracted and quickly segued completely to the therapy session with Ray-Ray. Kenzie listened carefully, nodding in understanding.

  “That all sounds about right,” she said. “I mean, it all goes back to Pavlov, doesn’t it? Conditioning them to give a certain response to a certain stimulus? Getting more complex, of course, but when you break it all down, that’s what they’re doing.”

  Zachary nodded. He rubbed the bridge of his nose, up to his forehead. Trying to smooth out the frown lines he could feel there. He ate a few bites of the random foods piled on his plate, trying to come up with a response.

  “I just… I guess I’m having problems with treating people like animals,” he said. “Like you say about Pavlov… training them like dogs. Like they aren’t thinking, feeling human beings.”

  “It may not look like they care, Zachary, but I’m sure they do. All of the therapists that I’ve ever dealt with have had loads of empathy for their patients. But you can’t necessarily let that dictate how you deal with them. Right?”

  “If you had seen… it felt abusive. Not giving him any breaks, shouting and making loud noises and threatening him when he made a mistake. Grabbing him and forcing him to do what she wanted him to…”

  “If she had been doing something wrong, the doctor wouldn’t have let it go on. He would have interrupted the session to make sure that Raymond was safe and pulled the therapist out or corrected her in how she was administering the treatment. But he didn’t, right?”

  “No. He sat there watching… said that Raymond was okay… kept bragging about their program, how many people wanted to get into it. From all over the country… I can’t imagine how parents would actually want their kids to go through that, if they knew what was going on.”

  “I’m sure they do know,” Kenzie said. She speared a length of asparagus and cut it neatly into several pieces. “They would have gone through an orientation. Watched videos. Gone through training of their own. Because the kids that go home are going to need consistency when they’re not at Summit. They need to be getting the same responses no matter which environment they are in.”

  Zachary thought about Ray-Ray’s face crumpling when he was corrected after giving the wrong response. The idea of Ray-Ray’s mother treating him the same way as Sophie had, taking away the things he loved, yelling at him, forcing his hands and his body to obey, made Zachary’s stomach tighten. He took a deep breath and let it back out again. He wasn’t investigating Summit’s therapy methods. Not unless those methods had led to Quentin’s death. He was there to determine if the police were right and Quentin had committed suicide. He wasn’t there to stop them from making Ray-Ray cry.

  “They physically restrain him,” Zachary said, jumping right back into it. “What if that was what happened to Quentin? What if someone put him in a choke hold because he wouldn’t do what they wanted him to, and accidentally killed him?”

  “It’s a big jump from restraining a five-year-old’s hands to choking out a fourteen-year-old. You didn’t see them physically harm the little boy, did you? They didn’t do anything to hurt him?”

  “No… they were rough, though. A lot rougher than I think you need to be with a child who is so small and defenseless.”

  Kenzie gave him a warm smile. Zachary wasn’t the stereotypical hard-boiled detective of pulp fiction. He wasn’t the rough-and-tough, beat-the-hell-out-of-suspects type that got all of the pretty girls on TV and in paperback novels. But Kenzie seemed to like that about him. She didn’t act like she was disappointed that he had a soft heart instead of a hard fist. That he didn’t carry a gun. That most of his work was tedious computer research rather than sweating suspects. That all seemed to be okay with her, and even won him a soft smile and hand-holding when he got all sentimental about someone.

  “Sometimes therapy can be uncomfortable,” she said. “You’ve had physiotherapy, right?”

  Zachary nodded. Most recently, he’d had physio to get him back on his feet after the accident, to retrain him to walk after the spinal cord injury that had left him temporarily paralyzed. And long before that… he could remember the therapy he’d had when he was ten, after the fire. He was glad that she’d referred to physical therapy rather than to the years of visiting all manner of counselors, psychologists, and psychiatrists. He could look more dispassionately at physio and talk about it. “Yeah. A few times,” he agreed.

  “Did it hurt?”

  Zachary raised his brows, surprised by the question. “Well… yeah, it did.” If she thought that physiotherapy was all roses, she should think again.

  “In fact, it can be pretty brutal, can’t it?” she prodded.

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve had friends who have done physio. Friends who have done boot camp and said that physio is worse.”

  Zachary nodded.

  “But that’s not abuse, is it?” Kenzie went on. “Even though they push you really hard, and it hurts, even makes you cry, that’s not abuse.”

  Zachary could see where this was going, so he didn’t answer immediately. Kenzie had a sip of her drink, and looked at him, eyebrows raised.

  “It can be abusive,” Zachary stonewalled.

  She cocked her head, considering. “I suppose so. They could take it too far. Reinjure you. Push you to do something painful just because they wanted to see you sweat. But that’s not the norm. I think usually they’re pretty good at knowing where to stop. Exactly how far they can push each patient.”

  “Yes. Usually.”

  “Well, that’s my point. That just because it’s painful, that doesn’t mean it’s abuse. It’s like… debriding a burn. In order for the burn to heal properly, you need to scrape all of the dead skin away. They say it’s very painful. But it has to be done.”

  Zachary caught his breath and held it. All of a sudden, he was ten years old and back in the hospital. After the fire that had burned his house down and ruined his family forever. It was more than just remembering what it had been like, he could feel the burns all over again. Most of the burns had been on his arms and legs, and inside his throat from breathing in the superheated air. He’d been lucky not to have more of his body burned. At the hospital, they had put him on heavy painkillers, but even with opiates in his IV drip, debriding the wounds had been excruciating. It had taken several nurses to complete the process, some of them holding him down while the others took turns scraping the wounds clean. Zachary screamed, cried, and threw up, but they still had to do it.

  “Zachary.”

  Kenzie was far away from him. He could hear her, but he wasn’t in the present anymore. He was far in the past, trying to fight off the nurses who tortured him. Lashing out like an animal, screaming with pain.

  “Zachary.” Her fingers moved from his hand to his wrist, gently resting over his pulse. “Come back to me, Zachary. You’re okay.”

  There was another murmured voice, but Zachary couldn’t make it out. He was barely holding on to Kenzie’s voice; he couldn’t see or hear anyone else.

  “No. We’re fine. Just give us some space.” She touched Zachary’s shoulder. His cheek. “I’m sorry, Zach. Are you okay? Come on. Just talk to me. Tell me about it.”

  Her hand went back to his wrist again, first t
aking his pulse and then stroking the white scars across it.

  “Have a drink. A nice cold drink.” She guided his hand to his glass, and Zachary automatically closed his fingers around it. Brought it up to his mouth. Took a few sips of the ice-cold soft drink. The restaurant started to resolve around him.

  He wasn’t in hospital. He wasn’t having his burns treated anymore.

  That had been years before. Decades.

  “Better?”

  He could see Kenzie, her dark curls and bright-red lipstick. He could see the fine lines around her eyes as she studied him, worried. Zachary took another sip of the cold, sweet drink. He held it in his mouth while the bubbles fizzed on his tongue, then swallowed it down.

  His throat was fine. Not sore. Not burned.

  “Sorry,” he croaked out.

  She wrapped her fingers around his and gave them a little squeeze. “Tell me about it. What happened?”

  She knew so much of his sordid past. The really bad stuff. Yet he was still embarrassed to show this weakness in front of her. To have to explain it.

  It could have been worse. She’d seen him collapse in a panic attack before. Helpless as a baby lying in a heap on the frozen sidewalk. And she still chose to go to dinner with him. Having a flashback wasn’t as bad as that. And he didn’t have to tell her the whole thing. She already knew most of the story.

  How he had been the one to light the fire. How he had ended up destroying everything.

  “A flashback,” he said softly, breathing out and in and out again. It seemed like it had been a long time since he had breathed last.

  Years.

  Decades.

  “Yeah, I thought so.” She rubbed his shoulder soothingly. “What about?”

  “The fire… but afterward. The… debriding.”

  “Oh!” Her mouth was small, her eyes wide. She swore. “Oh, I didn’t think. I didn’t know… I didn’t realize you were burned that badly. You never said…”