by Stephen King
(It occurred to him that he ought to call and check on his mother, but then he thought, forget it. She was a big girl.)
The current situation stank of female conspiracy: seduction and entrapment. That the loony in Unit 10 had somehow known the warden would be calling him in pretty much sealed the deal. He wouldn’t say they were all in it together, no, he wouldn’t go that far (it would be crazy), but he wouldn’t say they weren’t, either.
He sat on the edge of the warden’s desk and accidentally jarred a small leather bag off the edge, onto the floor.
Don bent to pick the bag up. It looked like what you might use to put your toothbrush in if you were traveling, but it was nice leather. He unzipped it. Inside the bag was a bottle of dark red nail polish (like that was going to distract anyone from noticing that Coates was a hideous witch), a pair of tweezers, a pair of nail clippers, a small comb, a few unopened tabs of Prilosec, and . . . a prescription pill bottle.
Don read the label: Janice Coates, Xanax, 10 mg.
2
“Jeanette! You believe this?”
It was Angel Fitzroy, and the question made Jeanette clench up inside. Was what true? That Peters had taken her into the corner by the Coke machine and made her beat him off? Her headache wasn’t just a headache anymore; it was a series of explosions, bang-bang-bang.
But no, that wasn’t what Angel was talking about. Couldn’t be. Ree would never tell anyone, Jeanette tried to comfort herself, her thoughts like shouts inside her skull, yet barely discernible over the detonations set off by her migraine. Then she guessed—hoped—what Angel was talking about.
“You mean—the sleep thing?”
Angel stood in the doorframe of the cell. Jeanette was on her bunk. Ree was off somewhere. The floor of the wing was open in the late afternoon, everyone on Good Report free to roam.
“Yeah, course that’s what I mean.” Angel slid smoothly into the cell, pulled up the single chair. “You can’t sleep. None of us can. Won’t be too much of a problem for me, because I don’t sleep much, anyway. Never did, not even as a kid. Sleepin’s like bein dead.”
The news of Aurora had struck Jeanette as preposterous. Women cocooned in their sleep? Had the migraine ruined her mind somehow? She wanted to take a shower, but she didn’t want to talk to a guard. They wouldn’t let her, anyway. A prison had rules. The guards—oh excuse me, the officers—were the rules incarnate. You had to do what they said or bingo, Bad Report.
“My head really hurts, Angel. I have a migraine. I can’t handle the crazy.”
Angel inhaled, deeply and loudly, through her long, bony nose. “Listen, sis—”
“I’m not your sister, Angel.” Jeanette was in too much pain to worry about how Angel would take a rebuke.
But Angel just rolled right along. “This thing’s crazy but it’s real. I just seen Nell and Celia. What’s left of em, anyway. They went to sleep and now they wrapped up like fuckin Christmas presents. Someone said McDavid’s got it, too. Gone baby gone. I watched it grow on Nell and Celia. The stuff. It crawls right up. Covers up their faces. It’s like a fuckin science experiment.”
Crawls right up. Covers up their faces.
So it was true. You could tell by the way Angel said it. Well, why not. It didn’t matter to Jeanette. There was nothing she could do about it, or anything else. She closed her eyes, but a hand fell on her shoulder and Angel began to shake her.
“What?”
“You goin to sleep?”
“Not while you’re asking me questions and shaking me like I was popcorn. Quit it.”
The hand lifted away. “Don’t go to sleep. I need your help.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re all right. You ain’t like most of the rest of em. You got a head on your shoulders. You’re as cool as a fool in a swimmin pool. Aren’t you even gonna let me tell you?”
“I don’t care.”
Although Angel didn’t respond immediately, Jeanette felt her looming over the side of the bed.
“That your boy?”
Jeanette opened her eyes. Angel was peering at the photograph of Bobby fixed on the painted square on the wall beside her bunk. In the photo Bobby was drinking from a straw out of a paper cup and wearing a cap with Mickey ears. His expression was adorably suspicious, like he thought maybe somebody was going to try to snatch his drink and his hat and make a break for it. It was from when he was little, four or five.
“Yeah,” said Jeanette.
“Cool hat. Always wanted one a them. Jealous of the kids that had em. Photo looks pretty old. How old’s he now?”
“Twelve.”
It must have been about a year before the bottom completely fell out, when she and Damian took Bobby to Disney World. The boy in the photograph didn’t know that his father was going to punch his mother one time too many and that his mother was going to bury a clutchhead screwdriver in his father’s thigh and that his aunt was going to become his guardian while his mother did her time for second-degree murder. The boy in the photograph just knew that his Pepsi tasted great and his Mickey hat was cool.
“What’s his name?”
While she thought of her son, the explosions in Jeanette’s head receded. “Bobby.”
“Nice name. You like that? Bein a mom?” The question slipped out without Angel knowing she meant to ask it. A mom. Being a mom. The idea made her heart stutter. She didn’t let it show, though. Angel had her secrets, and she kept them close.
“Never been much good at it,” said Jeanette and forced herself to sit up. “But I love my son. So what is it, Angel? What do you need me to do?”
3
Later, Clint would reflect that he should have known Peters was up to something.
The officer was too placid at first, the smile on his face entirely inappropriate to the charges being leveled. Clint was angry, though, angry as he hadn’t been since he was Jared’s age, and he didn’t see what he should have seen. It was as if there was a rope in his head, binding shut a box containing a lot of bad stuff from his childhood. His wife’s lie had been the first cut in the fiber, Aurora had been the second, the interview with Evie had been the third, and what had happened to Jeanette had snapped it. He found himself considering the damage he could inflict on Peters with various objects. He could shatter his nose with the phone on the desk, he could cave in the abusing fuck’s cheek with the warden’s Correctional Official of the Year plaque. Clint had worked hard to exorcise that kind of violent thinking, had largely gone into psychiatric medicine in the first place in reaction to it.
What had Shannon said that time? “Clint, sweetie, if you keep fighting, someday you’re going to win too good.” She’d meant that he’d kill someone, and maybe she had been right. It wasn’t much later that the court granted him his independence and Clint didn’t have to fight any more. After that, his senior year, he had consciously funneled his rage into running track. That had been Shannon’s idea, too, and a damn good one. “You want to exercise,” she had said, “you should run. There’s less bleeding.” He’d run from that old life, run like the Gingerbread Man, run all the way to medical school, to marriage, to fatherhood.
Most of the system kids didn’t make it; foster care was a true case of odds-against. Many of them had ended up in jailhouses like Dooling Correctional or Lion Head Prison up the road, which, according to the engineers, was in danger of sliding down the hill. Indeed, there were plenty of system girls in Dooling, and they lived at the mercy of Don Peters. Clint had been lucky. He had beaten the odds. Shan had helped him. He hadn’t thought of her in a long while. But this day was like a broken water main, there was stuff coming up, a flood in the streets. It seemed that days of disaster were also days of remembering.
4
Clinton Richard Norcross had entered the foster system for good in 1974, when he was six, but the records he’d seen later said he’d been in and out even before that. A typical story: teenage parents, drugs, poverty, criminal records, probably mental health iss
ues. The nameless social worker that interviewed Clint’s mother had recorded, “She is worried about passing her sad feelings along to her son.”
He had no memories of his father, and the only scrap he retained of his mother was of a long-faced girl grabbing his hands, swallowing them up in hers, shaking them up and down, pleading to him to stop chewing his nails. Lila had asked him once if he was interested in attempting to make contact with either of them, if they were alive. Clint was not. Lila said she understood, but, really, she had no idea, and he liked it that way. He didn’t want her to. The man she married, the cool and able Dr. Clinton Norcross, had, quite consciously, put that abandoned life behind him.
Except you couldn’t put anything behind you. Nothing was lost until death or Alzheimer’s took it all. He knew that. He saw it confirmed in every session he held with every prisoner; you wore your history like a necklace, a smelly one made of garlic. Whether you tucked it under your collar or let it dangle loose, nothing was lost. You fought the fight over and over, and you never won the milkshake.
He had passed through a half-dozen homes during his youth and adolescence, none of them like a home if that meant a place where you felt safe. Perhaps it was no wonder that he had ended up working in a penitentiary. The feelings in prison were the feelings of his youth and young adulthood: a sense of being always on the verge of suffocation. He wanted to help people who felt that way, because he knew how bad it was, how it struck at the center of your humanity. That was the core of Clint’s decision to leave his private practice before it had really started.
There were good foster homes out there, more than ever in this day and age, but Clint had never landed in any. The best he could say was that a few had been clean, run by foster parents who were efficient and unobtrusive, doing only what was required to collect their fee from the state. They were forgettable. But forgettable was great. You’d take forgettable.
The worst were the worst in particular ways; the places where there wasn’t enough to eat, the places where the rooms were cramped and dirty and cold in the winter, where the parents had non-paying jobs for you, the places where they hurt you. Girls in the system got hurt the most; of course they did.
Some of his foster siblings, Clint couldn’t find their faces now, but a few remained clear. There was Jason, for instance, who killed himself at thirteen by drinking a bottle of off-brand drain cleaner. Clint could summon up Live Jason, and he could summon up Dead Jason lying in his coffin. That was when Clint had lived with Dermot and Lucille Burtell, who boarded their fosters not in their pretty Cape Cod house, but in a long shed-like structure out back with bare, splintery plywood floors and no insulation. The Burtells held what they called “Friday Night Fights,” with their half-dozen wards as the pugilists, and a chocolate milkshake from McDonald’s for the prize. Clint and Jason had been matched up once, fighting for the amusement of the Burtells and their friends. The arena was a little patch of broken-up concrete patio and the spectators gathered around the edge to watch and lay bets. Jason had been a longshot, scared and slow, and Clint had wanted that milkshake. In the open casket Jason had a nickel-sized bruise under his eye that Clint had given him a few evenings earlier.
The next Friday, after Jason drank Gunk-O and retired from boxing forever, Clint won the milkshake again and then, without thinking about any possible consequences (at least not that he could remember), he threw it in Dermot Burtell’s face. That had resulted in a tremendous beating for Clint, and it hadn’t brought Jason back, but it had gotten him out of that house.
At the next place, or maybe the one after that, was where he’d shared a dismal basement room with good old Marcus. Clint remembered his foster brother Marcus’s wonderful cartoons. Marcus drew people so that they were eighty percent nose, pretty much just noses with wee legs and wee arms, The Nose-It-Alls was what he called his strip; he was really good, and dedicated, too. Then one day after school, without any explanation, Marcus told Clint he’d thrown all his notebooks away somewhere, and he was lighting out. Clint could picture the cartoons, but not Marcus.
Shannon, though, Shannon he could see; she was too beautiful to fade.
“Hey. I’m Shannon. Don’t you want to know me?” She introduced herself that way without glancing over at Clint, who was walking past on his way to the park. Sunbathing across the hood of a Buick that was parked at the curb outside the group home in Wheeling, blue tank top and black jeans, and smiling right up into the sun. “You’re Clint, aren’t you?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Uh-huh. Well, isn’t it nice to meet us?” she replied, and Clint, despite everything, had laughed, really laughed for the first time in who knew how long.
The group home in Wheeling where he met her was the last stop on his grand tour of the state foster system. For most, it was basically a connecting point to places like Dooling Correctional and Weston State. Weston, a monumental Gothic asylum, closed in 1994. Now, in 2017, it was open for ghost tours. Was that where his father ended up? Clint wondered. His mother? Or Richie, who got his nose and three fingers broken by some prep school boys at a mall because he said they shouldn’t make fun of his purple jacket that had come from a donation box? Or Marcus? He knew they couldn’t all be dead or in prison, and yet it didn’t seem like any of them could still be breathing and free. Did they all float around the dark halls of Weston after hours? Did they ever talk about Clint? Were they glad for him—or did he shame them by still living?
5
The Wheeling home was preferable to many of the stops that had preceded it. The sneering administrator, thumbs popping the pockets of his gray polyester vest, admonished each new arrival, “Enjoy your last year on the state’s tit, younker!” But he, the sneering administrator, didn’t want any trouble. So long as you managed not to get arrested, he let you sign in and out all day long. You could fight, fuck, or shoot up. Just keep it out of the house, younker.
He and Shan were both seventeen then. She had taken notice of Clint’s reading habit, how he slipped off to a park down the street and sat on a bench to catch up on his homework, despite the cold late fall weather. Shannon had also seen the bloody scrapes on his hands from the trouble he found—and sometimes searched for—between the home and school. They got to be friends. She gave him advice. Most of it was good.
“You’ve almost made it out, you know,” she said. “Just need to keep from killing anyone a little while longer,” she said. “Let your brain make you rich,” she said. Shan spoke as if the world didn’t matter too much to her, and somehow that made Clint want to make it matter—to her, to himself.
He went out for track and stopped fighting. That was the short version. The long one was Shannon, Shannon in the sun, Shannon prodding him to run faster, to apply for scholarships, to stick to his books and stay off the sidewalks. Shannon at night, jimmying the lock on the door of the boys’ floor with a celluloid-backed playing card (the queen of spades), and slipping into Clint’s room.
“Hey now,” she said at the sight of him in his team uniform, tank top and high shorts. “If I ruled the world, all the boys would have to wear shorts like that.”
Shannon had been gorgeous and she’d been clever and she had her own boatload of problems and Clint thought maybe she’d saved his life.
He went to college. She advised him to go, and when he hesitated (talking about the army), she demanded. She said, “Don’t be no fool, get your ass to school.”
He did and they fell out of touch, phone calls too expensive and letters too time-consuming. It was eight or nine years between when he left for college before they reconnected that New Year’s in DC. 2001? 2002? He’d been in town to attend a seminar at Georgetown and stayed on for a night because of car trouble. Lila had told him he was allowed to go out and get drunk, but he was forbidden to kiss any desperate women. He could kiss a desperate man if he absolutely had to, but no more than one.
The bar where he’d run into Shan was boiling with college kids. She was waitressing. “Hey, p
al,” she said to Clint, stepping up beside at him the bar, bumping him with her hip. “I used to know a guy in the joint who looked just like you.”
They had embraced for a long time, swaying back and forth in each other’s arms.
She looked tired, but she seemed all right. They managed to get a minute alone in a corner underneath a flashing Molson sign. “Where y’all?” she had asked.
“Out in the sticks: Tri-Counties. Place called Dooling. A day’s drive from here. It’s a beauty spot.”
He had shown her a photo of four-month-old Jared.
“Oh, look at him. Now wasn’t it all worth it, Clint? I need to get me one of those.”
Dew shone on Shannon’s eyelashes. People were screaming all around them. It was almost a new year. “Hey,” he’d said to her. “Hey, it’s all right.”
She had looked up at him and the years had narrowed and it was like they were kids again. “Is it?” Shannon asked. “Is it all right, Clint?”
6
Over the warden’s shoulder, on the other side of the glass, late afternoon shadows were staining the garden, where there were rows of lettuce and peas climbing trellises built of scrap wood. Coates cupped her hands around her coffee cup as she spoke.
The coffee cup! Clint could upend it on Don Peters’s crotch and then smash it against his ear!
There was a time, before he knew Shannon Parks, when he would have done so. He reminded himself that he was a father and a husband, a doctor, a man with too much gray in his hair to fall into the trap of violence. Sometime soon he was going to clock out and go home to his wife, his son, and a nice view out the glass doors to a pool in the backyard. Fighting for milkshakes had been in another life. Still, he wondered what that coffee cup was made of, if it was that heavy ceramic that sometimes didn’t even crack when you dropped it on hard tile.
