She takes in a deep breath. “I’m tired of working so hard to cover up my hookups. I lie to Seth. And Juliette. And everyone. I just have to deal with . . . I have to stop using guys to make me feel better. Or I won’t be able to move forward.”
“Just saying that makes you strong,” I tell her.
She eyes me sadly. “I don’t know about strong. I actually had a moment back there when I thought I deserved Ty’s abuse.”
I grab her hand.
“But I thought about”—she stares at our connecting fingers—“you.”
I give her a surprised look. “What about me?”
“I thought about your chaos theory.” Her gaze snags mine. “I realized that if I didn’t stop Ty and if I don’t stop doing everything that makes me feel so horrible, it will just keep happening.”
She puts her head back and closes her eyes. Strands of hair spread across her shoulders and the bare skin above her dress’s neckline. My breath catches looking at her.
But her beauty goes way beyond that. Despite all the reasons I shouldn’t be around her, I really dig her courage. How she can be gentle one minute and so fierce the next. And I respect the hope and drive she has to be more.
If we could both figure out how to get ourselves in a better place, I could love this girl. That’s for damn sure.
• • •
My plan was to bring Tessa somewhere interesting so she could shoot some photos and take her mind off what happened tonight. But I didn’t realize where my subconscious decided we were going until I pull into the familiar, creepy grounds and pass the “Clement Valley Center: Home for the Mentally Ill” sign.
“Jack.” She’s wary. “What are we doing here?”
I take a deep breath, slow the car, and park it in an unlit corner of a side lot. “Apparently, it’s my turn to be brave,” I say.
Although I’ve broken in here several times, I’ve only ever gone through the underground hallways or explored the grounds. I’ve never had the courage to go into one of the patient rooms. I’m too afraid. Watching Mom get crazier every day has done that to me. Those rooms are like museums for Mom’s illness. And warnings of what I might become. I know Dr. Surrey said I only have a 10 percent chance of being schizophrenic, but I never stop wondering if tomorrow, I’ll suddenly look up and the gas station clerk will have grown horns and fangs.
I help Tessa out of the car, grab my jean jacket lying in the backseat, and pull it around her bare shoulders, then lead her across the grass, past the front building—the only one lit up.
I head to the next building, with the windows cracked and broken. My palms coat with sweat, the fear rising as I guide Tessa to the latched metal door that’s slightly bowed. It’s always been bowed, but I made it worse the first time I busted in thinking I could use a crowbar. I’m a better intruder now. I pull out my screwdriver and credit card combo.
“Are we breaking in?” She’s panicked.
I turn to her. “There’s something I need to see, and I kind of want you with me when I see it.”
She looks at me, skeptical.
“I’ll keep you safe. I promise.”
She thinks for a moment, then nods.
I slide the card into the crack along the door frame, jimmy it until I can yank the entrance open. With my cell phone lighting the dark concrete stairwell, I lead her into the even-darker hallway. It smells like mildew. Wide steam pipes stream along the left wall next to smaller water pipes. I imagine they used to crackle and hiss as the heat and water flowed through them. Now they’re dormant, like all five buildings on the mental hospital’s campus but the first.
Tessa breathes lightly behind me as her heeled shoes click against the floor and we move past doors marked “Maintenance” then “Storage” to get to the end of the tunnel. A short stairwell leads to the door I’ve purposely avoided every time I’ve broken in. Last time I came, I actually stood in front of it for a good long time. Then turned around and left.
Now I start to fiddle with the lock, but my shaking hands fumble with my tiny screwdriver, and I almost drop the credit card. Finally, I pop the lock and push the creaky door open.
Overall, the room is pretty tame. It has a warehouse-tall ceiling and wall-length windows that are cracked and broken with rusted metal bars covering them. There’s no furniture besides a rolling metal cart piled with dirty rags, but some cleaning supplies, old cans of paint, and several torn boxes full of odds and ends have been thrown in corners.
But fear splits through me when I see chains hanging from bolts on the walls, their latches for wrists and ankles open. The room is thick with dust and the faint trace of urine. And I’m sure I hear the whispers and screams of the people who lived here. My heart squeezes to a pinching pain.
“Jack?” Tessa’s voice startles me, like I’d forgotten I’d brought her. She looks mortified. The way I imagine people would look at Mom if they knew how she really was. “Where are we?”
“This whole place and this room remind me of my mom.” My tongue trails against my lip ring.
Tessa puts her hand on my arm, but I barely feel it.
“She’s a paranoid schizophrenic,” I confess. “And she gets worse every day, Tessa. And I don’t know if I can hold it together much longer. I mean, she hit Emma. With her car. And then she drove the fuck away.” I shake my head. “Hearing you say it the night you found Emma’s hat made me so fucking furious. Because, seriously? Who does that? But she does that.”
Her expression turns sympathetic. “It must be hell for you to worry about her all the time.”
“Some days I just don’t know if I can do it anymore.” My chest feels so tight. I’m nauseous. And I just want to run out of here. But I also want this place to give me answers. Like why does craziness have to look and smell and act so damn horrible? And why can’t people be less afraid of it so maybe I wouldn’t have to worry so much about keeping it all a fucking secret? And why Mom?
“I also worry, Tessa,” I say, “that if Mom has this, what if I do, too. I mean, I think she had her first signs around my age. So what if, someday soon, I start losing my mind, and I don’t even realize it. I mean, maybe it will be like when you slowly freeze to death. How people say you feel hot, not cold. Maybe I won’t even be able to tell I’m crazy.”
She cocks her head and gives me a half smile. “Oh, I think you’re definitely crazy.” Her expression turns to serious. “But I don’t think you’re insane. You’re just a risk-taker.” She walks to a far wall. Her fingers run across a dangling chain, making it clang.
I cringe at the noise. Guards are always patrolling outside. They’ll come if they hear anything suspicious. But before I can tell her to keep quiet, she turns to face me, and I’m awed with how beautiful she looks. In her fancy red dress and her curled hair with the cracked windows and massive white-tiled walls behind her, she is striking. Like a guardian angel for the perverse.
“I can see why you would be worried,” she says. “I mean, people are worried every day about stuff that no one in their family ever even had. You know, like heart attacks or cancer or whatever.” She walks to me, her vanilla-berry smell pushing through the dust and urine. “But you have to watch your mom all the time. And based on this room, I’m sure it’s a pretty horrible thing to see.”
She taps my temple. Her touch is electric. “But what’s in here is amazing, Jack. You’re brilliant. Not crazy.”
“My mom is brilliant, too.”
“Maybe. But your mom’s illness has already been diagnosed.” Her finger trails from my temple down my jaw, giving me shivers. And I get the urge to slip my hands around her waist. So I push my feet into the concrete floor to keep myself steady. “You can’t live your life based on something you don’t even know will happen. Why peg yourself as nuts if you may never get there?”
My body is wide awake and vibrating with her so close, so I shove my
hands into my sports jacket pockets to keep them off her. My knuckles hit the camera I’d asked Juliette for, and I remember that Tessa is due for some creativity.
I hold up the camera and click a photo of her. It flashes.
“Not fair!” She hides her face with her hands. “I hate having my picture taken.”
I hold the camera out to her. “Then you take some.”
For a long moment, she eyes the camera like it’s too decadent to touch, deliciously good but she thinks she shouldn’t have it. Finally, she takes it, confidently.
She looks around, then raises the camera and snaps a photo. The flash floods the room with light. I get a spring of panic at the thought of the guards seeing the light. But there’s no way in hell I’m stopping her.
She glimpses a montage of paint cans, drips of color down the sides muted with dust. A photo snaps. She twirls. Spies an old teddy bear sticking out from one of the boxes. A photo snaps. She sees the chains trailing down the walls like tears, imprinting the photos onto her brain before she takes them, her mind juxtaposing objects, colors, textures. I could watch her do this forever and never get bored.
Tessa Leighton is perfectly fascinating when she’s fascinated.
Tessa
Somehow, within moments of Jack handing me the camera, I slipped into that creative zone I love. I have missed holding a camera, doing this. It’s only been a summer and into this fall, but it feels like it’s been a lifetime since I last took photographs. And this place, the stories it holds, is inspiring.
I see colors, patterns, shadows, light. I’m so busy seeing, capturing, that I miss the first sounds of a door opening down a hallway. It isn’t until keys jangle that I freeze, jerk toward Jack.
His eyes are huge. His panic also pulsing.
A guard is coming.
Jack gestures for me to run to the steam tunnel door. I rip off my heels to run faster. My bare feet smear the dusty floor.
The guard’s footsteps click down the hallway. Jack grabs my hand and pulls me into the darkness of the tunnel. The door squeaks loudly as he shuts it.
“Shit!” he mutters in the blackness.
I fumble for him, suddenly terrified of the dark, of losing him. The face of his phone splays light in front of us. His hand presses against the small of my back. His features are tense as he hurries us down the tunnel.
Voices rumble in the room we’ve just come from. I realize they’ll see our footprints on the floor, how they head to the tunnel door. They’ll find us.
“They’re coming, Jack.”
His hand pushes harder on my back. “Keep moving.”
My heart pounds faster than my feet. The concrete ground is freezing. The clatter of keys against the tunnel door rips a squeak of panic from me. But I see the stairwell to the door we broke in from. We’re almost there. We can run into the night and get away.
The voices of the guards are like distant thunder behind the door, until it swings open with a creak that echoes through the whole hallway. The voices bounce against the concrete walls.
But we’re so close to getting away. I swear we’re going to make it. Until the “Maintenance” door screeches open just as we pass it.
“Stop!” a guard shouts. His light flashes against Jack’s face. Jack fumbles for his keys as we run, and just before our exit, he shoves them into my hand.
“What are you doing?” I ask as we scramble up the stairs to the bent doorway. The closest guard is only a hundred feet away, his flashlight practically a spotlight on us.
All calm, Jack says, “Take my car. And go.”
I shake my head even as he’s pushing me through the exit. “They don’t want you. All they want is me. But I can talk my way out of this.” He sounds confident, but his jaw is worry-tight. “Trust me,” he pleads.
But in case he’s wrong and he can’t talk his way out of this at all, I can’t leave without letting him know how grateful I am. That he shared his fears with me. That he made me feel creative again.
I push my lips against his, and he startles.
Then he’s thrusting me out into the night. “Run!”
Jack
I’m relieved watching Tessa drive away—even as my hands are handcuffed by one guard, and I’m surrounded by two more. I struck a deal with Fogerty 2. And tonight, I broke that deal.
Fogerty 2’s going to have a field day when he sees me all bound and surrounded by security officers.
“What were you doing in here, kid?” one of the guards asks.
“Late-night stroll. Wait. Isn’t this the park?”
A second guard frisks me. The third draws his gun, though I know it isn’t loaded.
“Cops are on their way,” the first says.
When Fogerty 2 shows up, he looks me over, silently gloating, like he knew he would eventually bust me. Then he shoves me into the back of his vehicle. As he drives us back to the station, he says, “The guards said there was someone else with you.”
“Nope. They’re mistaken.” I stare out the barred window at the barely lit buildings. “Might have been a shadow. Or just a ghost of craziness past.”
Fogerty 2’s silent for a minute, dropping it like I knew he would. He’s already gotten what he came for. Then he says, “You know what this means.”
I take a deep breath. “I’ve broken our unofficial parole.”
“That’s right, Dalton. Ms. Barnes had her turn and couldn’t control you. So now you’re mine.”
From the rearview mirror, his dark gaze spears me, and for once, I doubt if I can talk my way out of this one.
Tessa
I pull Jack’s Dart into my driveway. All the way home, I imagined Jack being slammed against a wall. Handcuffed. Hauled to the police station. I hated abandoning him. It was stupid to go into that facility. But he wanted to. Needed to, I guess. To deal with everything that goes along with his mom and her mental illness.
My house is quiet. Only the living room is lit. My stepdad is passed out on the worn green sofa. He reeks of alcohol. The TV murmurs with a British sitcom on PBS.
A note from my mom sits on the counter.
Tessa, a fellow teacher is having a birthday. I’ll be out with my coworkers until late. I’m sure Seth fed you, but there’s casserole in the fridge for you and Willow.
I sigh. Fatigue grips me, all the night’s events catching up. I hate the thought of the name-calling and dirty looks I’ll have to face on Monday morning, and I can’t get the image of Jack in some jail cell out of my head.
But my stomach growls. I didn’t eat much at the restaurant before the dance. Simone and her friends were at a table close by, so I had no appetite. I reach into the fridge to get the food Mom made. It’s untouched. Willow hasn’t eaten yet even though it’s getting late.
I head down the hall. “Will, do you want any food?” I call outside her bedroom door. When I knock, she doesn’t answer. I open the door, but her room is dark and empty.
So is the bathroom we share. In thirty seconds, I’ve checked the rest of our tiny house. She’s nowhere.
I dial Willow’s number on my cell. It rings forever, until voice mail picks up. “Please leave a message for . . . Willow.”
“Willow, where are you?” I wince when I hear how controlling my tone is. “Listen, I don’t know if you cleared it with Mom that you’d be gone, but call me to let me know how long you’ll be . . . please.”
I hang up and listen to my stepdad start drunken-snoring in the next room. I’m sure he has no clue Willow’s even gone. She probably just took off without telling anyone.
I dial her again, prepare to leave a message about how her self-centered bitchiness isn’t fair to Mom or Dad. But Willow picks up.
“What, Tessa?” Behind Willow’s voice burst the riotous sounds of a party.
“Where are you?”
“Out with friends.
Hey, over here!” she shouts to someone. “I’ll take one!”
Something thuds.
“Here, beautiful,” a guy drawls.
“Thanks,” Willow says, kind of flirty.
“Willow!” I spit.
“Relax, Tessa.” Her casual tone is annoying. “No worries. I’m at Baker’s.” Simone’s after-homecoming party, I think.
“Does Mom know?”
“I told Dad I was spending the night here.”
“Dad?” I glance toward the living room “Was he sober when you asked him?”
“Not my problem.”
I let out a frustrated sigh. “How did you even get there?”
“Ty Blevens picked me up.”
A chill sweeps through me. I try to keep my voice even. “Will, just come home. What if Mom is worried you’re not here when she gets back?” I hope guilt can convince her.
She’s silent, like she’s thinking. “I might, but after I finish this drink . . . or the next one.” A smile enters her voice. I want to crawl through the phone and smack her.
“Willow, listen, you—”
“Whatever, Tessa.” She hangs up.
And I should leave her there, let her get in whatever trouble. But I picture Ty handing her drink after drink. Feel him pushing himself against me.
I throw Jack’s car keys on my counter, grab my own from my purse, and peel down our dirt road to get my sister.
Jack
My cell phone, sitting on Officer Weinhart’s desk, lets out the sound of a car horn honking, the signal I’m getting a message from Mom. I press my palms to the jail cell bench beneath me. I need to get back to Mom. She can’t be alone this long. If she’s texting, she’s not sleeping. And who knows what state of mind she’s in?
“Hey, Officer Weinhart?”
The broad-shouldered woman sits behind her desk reading the latest edition of the Pineville Post, ignoring me.
“Ma’am?”
Ripple Page 25
