“Wrong. Number two: dragonfish.”
“Animal,” Joey guessed. “Are they all animals?”
“Ding, ding, ding! Correct!” Robert laughed and shook his head. “This one, he’s gnarly lookin’. Number three: blue fang skeleton tarantula.”
“Dumbass, you gave it away. Animal, obviously.”
“Oh yeah.” Robert crumpled up the paper. “And ‘bald parrot’ would be a very lame band.”
“Are you gonna bring ’em in or what, man?”
“Yeah, I’ll do it. When am I gonna see some money?”
“All in due time.” Joey took a swig of milk. His mouth was rimmed with white, like a clown who’d been interrupted in the makeup chair.
“You’re disgusting.”
“Thank you.” Joey grinned.
“I mean it about the money. I’m going to have to go mob on you soon.”
Joey snickered. “‘Go mob’ on me?”
“Like, break your fingers.” Robert wished he could sound more menacing, but even his threats sounded like jokes. “Joey Kovach sleeps with the fishes.”
“Dude, I am not going to rip you off, all right?” Joey spread his hands. “Quit acting like it.”
“All right,” Robert said.
Joey was his only friend. If he couldn’t trust Joey, who could he trust?
* * *
The first Adderall had fizzed in her blood, firecrackered in her brain.
Deb had been a daydreamer when she younger, her grades always solidly mediocre. In elementary school, the fantasies revolved around wearing brand-new white breeches and shining black riding boots and jumping her own Thoroughbred, which would be chocolate brown and named Abracadabra. By high school, diversions took the form of boys. Later, one boy, who’d knocked her up and kept her from going to even community college. But she’d grown out of her inattentiveness. Or so she thought.
Now she was just exhausted.
When she’d signed up for Real Estate Fundamentals in July, Deb had been picturing her face on ads at the bus station, in the Tide. Smiling, bathed in soft light, confident. A local celebrity, really, like Laura Roth. Trust Deb MacPherson, the posters would advise, to find your dream home.
The dispatch center was a windowless cave. When she stepped out for her smoke breaks, she squinted like she was coming out of hibernation. She talked to dozens of people a day, sometimes while they were experiencing the worst moments of their lives, and she never saw a single one of their faces. If she were a Realtor, she’d have a reason to dress up. She’d shake people’s hands. They’d know her name.
And the money, even if she just sold a house or two a month, would give her a cushion. She could save to enroll Robert in something, somewhere, once he graduated. She didn’t delude herself that he was still college-bound, not with the grades he’d been getting, but she would be able to pay for vocational training. Her son was certainly smart enough to be an electrician, an EMT, a graphic designer.
And maybe, eventually, she could buy her own horse.
The class met at Robert’s high school. Something about being in that school’s stuffy, boxy rooms melted her focus. A pre-class Diet Coke failed to perk her up. When she’d seen those posters with Laura Roth’s carefully straightened hair, her snappy red suit, she’d had no idea that the course itself would be so boring.
During her third class, somewhere between joint tenancy and community tenancy, her chin crashed into her chest as she nodded off.
The state of Washington required ninety classroom hours to obtain a real estate license. She hadn’t made it through two and a half.
She slipped from the classroom as quietly as possible and walked down the dim, empty hallway, hoping that a little movement would rouse her. She snuck out for a quick cigarette, but back in the classroom, she still felt one step behind, struggling to finish taking notes while her classmates were already opening their textbooks. She didn’t hear what page she was supposed to turn to, and by the time she found it, everyone was closing their books again.
On her way out of the class, she passed Barry Lancaster’s office. His name on that closed door, right over its frosted glass pane, was what reminded her of the Adderall. She could practically hear his voice again, reassuring her over the phone that Adderall was a safe drug, one that could help her son reach his potential, smooth out his discipline problems, pave a path for his future.
She’d filled one bottle for Robert as soon as Dr. Rishni had prescribed it, on their way home from the appointment, in fact. And then Robert hadn’t finished it, and somewhere along the way she’d misplaced it. Wasn’t in the medicine cabinet. Wasn’t on the kitchen counter. Had she mislaid it cleaning, somehow? She’d dumped Robert’s book bag and rifled through his things, making sure he hadn’t gotten any dumb ideas about selling the stuff. Deb had driven herself crazy looking for the missing bottle, but it had never turned up. So she’d told herself she’d made up her mind that Robert wasn’t going to keep taking the pills anyway, so what did it matter if they’d accidentally gotten tossed in the garbage? Then about a month later, Deb had gotten another call from Lancaster, asking her how she thought the meds were working, expressing concern about Robert’s still-dismal grades. And so she’d called Rishni’s office and gotten the prescription refilled. So committed had she been to straightening her son out once and for all that she’d asked Ready Drug to fill it automatically, and so a month later another bottle had been ready for her, surprising her when she’d only run in for lipstick and cigarettes. Despite the fact that she’d once again changed her mind and decided that rather than medication, what her son truly needed was a solid kick in the ass, she’d paid for the pills and stuffed them in her nightstand next to the other bottle Robert had never finished.
Two hours before class the next week, she swallowed one with a swig of soda in the dispatch center parking lot on her break.
After the initial jitters, the drug careened through her like a roller coaster, and she found even real estate taxes incredibly interesting. Her notes were a masterpiece of acronyms and highlighting, her capital letters marching across page after page. She did the week’s homework as soon as she got back to the trailer, and had it completed in less than an hour.
The next day she felt a little foggy. A headache pulsed behind her eyes. But if one pill had made her this productive, this sharp, why not two next time? She popped them before her next class and waited for the rush to fade like an outgoing tide.
But the motivation and focus never returned. Her hands shook. Her feet tapped a nervous rhythm on the classroom floor. Her thoughts galloped, and though she fiddled with her pencil like a twirler leading a parade, she didn’t take a single note. Two pills was clearly one too many, the fine line between medicated and high as a jet plane breached.
This must be what my son feels like all the time, she realized.
After class she didn’t sleep. Instead, she cleaned the trailer. She dusted and then scooped out the corners of the windowsills with a Q-tip. She scrubbed the toilet, shook out the rugs. She organized her socks by color.
Or so she thought. The next morning she’d find she was so distracted she’d thrown clean clothes into the hamper with dirty ones, completely misplaced her own hairbrush, and left every kitchen appliance unplugged.
But now, armed with a bottle of Windex, she sprayed and wiped, sprayed and wiped, sprayed and wiped each window until it seemed she’d polished the glass into night-black oblivion. Like she could climb through the empty window frame and fly out of the trailer.
Instead, she studied her own reflection, imposed over the dark spruces at the edge of the yard, and remembered the night, over ten years ago, that Robert Senior had tried to disappear.
After he’d hit and killed a man, Robert’s father had ended up back at their trailer, this time tottering up the front steps and knocking on the door. Deb had answered and, moved by the thick tears of a man she had once thought she’d marry, had allowed Rob to wait crouching on the porch while she pac
ked him a bag: a granola bar, an apple, a bath towel, a can of Diet Coke, and five cigarettes rationed from her own pack. She’d pressed the cigarettes into his hot, slick palm and bundled the rest into a trash bag, knotting it closed. He’d asked for money; she’d refused, and then shut the door. She’d watched out the window as he stumbled across the yard, rounding the trailer’s back corner, where he’d pass right under his sleeping son’s bedroom window before bounding into the forest. She’d turned away before she had to watch him disappear.
At the time, she’d thought she was helping her son’s father. She kept silent during the manhunt, when Sheriff O’Shay came to the trailer and asked if she knew where Rob might run to. But now she wondered if Rob would have been better off if she’d turned him in. She could have stalled him, said she was going to get some money, while she quietly called in the tip. Even later, she could have pointed the posse searching for him in the right direction.
Rob might have gotten a lighter sentence if he hadn’t made Sheriff O’Shay look like such a fool. If the search for him hadn’t dragged on for days, while the Tide slammed the Sheriff’s Department and island residents railed against their incompetence. If Rob hadn’t given the sheriff a black eye when they finally dragged him out of the woods, if Deb had made the call before Rob could even part those pine branches, he might not have gotten the maximum sentence for his crime: eighteen years. The difference was what kept Rob Kelley behind bars today.
Branches pogoed. Her heart hopped like a startled rabbit. She half expected Rob to step out of the woods with a caveman beard and the towel she’d given him knotted to a stick, roaring about how he’d survived by trapping critters and munching on crickets.
Finally, he’d have a true story to tell.
An animal, a blur of fur with twin flashlight eyes, darted across the yard and under her neighbor’s porch.
She wiped away Rob’s memory like just another smudge, and shut all of the trailer’s blinds.
She was cleaning her own room, peering under the bed, when she spotted an amber cylinder lying on its side. She stretched and grasped until she could grab it. That original bottle of pills, the one that had seemed to walk away. It’d been here all along. She hid it in her nightstand drawer with the others.
She’d been right not to keep Robert on this medication, and she was going to stop taking it herself. She’d keep the bottles around, just in case, until she had finished her ninety hours of classwork. Then she’d flush every last little blue tab down the toilet.
Interview with Barry Lancaster, Yannatok High School guidance office, October 4, 2010
From Flight Risk: The Robert Jackson Kelley Story
“He wasn’t a bad kid. Not mouthy, not disrespectful. Would wave to me when we passed in the hall. He was one of those kids you wanted to help out, but there was just no follow-through at home. And everyone knew his father was in jail, but the mother never took him to any kind of counseling to process it. How does a kid deal with that? I think he was just in denial, avoiding the whole thing. Stuffing down all that emotion. Kids like that explode eventually. Should I have called Children and Youth, gotten a social worker involved? I didn’t think so. There wasn’t abuse. Truancy was never an issue. It was like he couldn’t wait to get to school, actually, so he could run around with Joey Kovach. Like he was lonely, really. I was hoping I could just help him get through without too much damage, run out the clock, basically, and get a diploma. After that, well, everybody’s got to grow up and take responsibility sometime, right?”
NOVEMBER 2009
The barking started in sixth period. Robert was doodling through algebra; he’d failed it last year and was only doing slightly better this year. He needed the math credit to graduate, so he made an attempt at the homework during homeroom most days, scribbling equations through the pledge and morning announcements. Mrs. Main looked at him pointedly when she caught him drawing, but the scribbling busied his hands enough that he could listen to some of what she said.
The barking grew louder, punctuated by heavy footsteps. Robert’s hand shot up. “Can I go to the bathroom?”
“Not now,” Mrs. Main replied without looking away from the board. “You can see here that the variable—”
“Mrs. Main, I really gotta go,” Robert interrupted.
“You cannot go while the dogs are out there,” Mrs. Main snapped. “Am I making myself clear?”
Robert slumped in his seat. The dogs passed the slim, rectangular classroom window a few minutes later. German shepherds with alert ears and dark eyes, exclamation-point tails, hungrily sniffing the lockers.
His stomach dropped. Drug dogs. What else could they have been? If Mrs. Main would let him go to the bathroom, he could warn Joey.
They called Robert to the office just before study hall. Vice Principal Diederman escorted Robert there.
“What’s up?” Robert asked. He ran his palms down the rows of lockers. He usually enjoyed the clanging, but all he could think was how he should have ignored Mrs. Main. He should have bounced out of the room and through the school’s double doors and kept going until he hit the beach, the woods, the highway to Seattle.
“Don’t touch those lockers,” Diederman said. “You good friends with Joey Kovach?”
“Yeah.” He kept his hands in his pockets for the rest of the walk.
How dumb was Joey to keep the pills in his locker for days on end? Still, Robert felt sorry for his friend. If the school made him do community service, he’d probably have to pick soggy, stinking trash off the beach.
Diederman led him right into Principal Simena’s office. Simena was flanked by two cops, both at least a foot taller than she was. A walkie-talkie crackled. Joey slumped in front of Simena’s desk. He sniffled and didn’t look at Robert. Was he seriously crying?
“Yo, Joey.” Robert tried to get his attention. “You need a Kleenex, bro? It won’t be that bad. A few weekends and you’ll be done.”
“Take a seat, son.” The first cop nodded at the empty chair next to Joey. Robert recognized Holt immediately. His hair had grown in, but Robert was sure it was him. “Holt!”
The man didn’t smile. “Sheriff Holt. ‘Sir’ will do fine.”
“Sheriff Holt, sir. Listen, I was wondering—”
Robert wanted to ask about the bear, if it had finally been lured out and set free in the mountains.
Simena interrupted him as she rifled through a file. “Robert, does your mother have alternate contact information? Another phone number? You don’t have an emergency contact.”
Robert slouched into the chair. Joey still wasn’t looking at him. He gnawed on an already raw fingernail. “She’s at work.”
“We’ll try her again,” Holt said.
“I’m going to call down Barry Lancaster,” Simena mused.
Holt showed Robert a baggie with three amber bottles inside. “Do these belong to you, son?”
“My name’s on them,” Robert sighed. And my mom filled them.
Holt squinted at the label’s print. He looked at Robert. “So you’re Robert Jackson Kelley?”
Robert sat up. Holt did remember him. “That’s me.”
Holt studied him. “Do you live in a trailer out on Cove Lane? Near the woods?”
“Yeah,” Robert answered. “Listen, I think there are still bears out there. You guys should get some more traps and—”
Principal Simena interrupted. “Should Robert answer questions without an attorney present?”
“I’m simply ascertaining the boy’s residency, ma’am,” Holt said. He cleared his throat. “Do you know how these pills ended up in Mr. Kovach’s locker?”
No. He must have stolen them. A lie that would have been difficult to disprove. But then Joey took a tattered tissue from his pocket and blew his nose. Simena reached across her desk to hand him another, and Joey swiped at his red-rimmed eyes.
Robert’s heart leaped like it would take off. I will not be a snitch. “I gave them to Mr. Kovach. Sir.”
“And why did you do that?”
Robert paused. “Mr. Kovach told me he would sell them and I could have some of the money.”
Joey kicked Simena’s desk. Robert jumped at the hollow thud. Simena stood and leaned over her desk. “Do that again and we’ll add destruction of property to this report! Do you understand me?”
Joey nodded miserably. Robert quickly added, “But I’m pretty sure Joey here is a terrible salesman. Because I haven’t gotten paid, and I don’t think Joey’s sold any.”
“I appreciate your honesty, son,” Sheriff Holt replied. Robert felt strangely proud. He’d probably saved Joey from getting in a lot more trouble. How can you be a dealer if you haven’t sold anything?
Joey’s mom came right away. Her curses and crying penetrated the office door. She yanked Joey up by his collar and dragged him out to her car. Robert didn’t get to talk to his friend before he left.
Robert was stranded in the office for a slow hour before they relocated him to the ISS room. He studied the graffiti-covered desk. His fingers itched to add his own contribution to the initials and doodles. He drummed instead, palms slapping the faux wood. He wondered how long he’d be suspended. Joey would surely get a stiffer punishment than he would; even though Robert had done everything he could to help his friend out, they’d found the pills in Joey’s locker.
Three thirty came and went without Deb answering her phone.
The longer Robert waited, the more anger roiled his stomach. He smacked the desk until his palms stung. Deb, too busy to talk to the sheriff, but with plenty of time for a pharmacy run.
Eventually, Holt drove to the dispatch center to deliver the news while Robert waited. Deb would be sitting with her headset on, or sneaking a smoke break, when Holt told her what had gone down. Would she stomp out her cigarette, spitting curses? Throw her Diet Coke against the wall?
Maybe Holt would ask her why they had all those prescription bottles in the house in the first place. Just who had filled them all and then left them lying around, nobody paying enough attention to miss them?
Flight Risk Page 6
