After that we decided it was bedtime. I went into the children’s room, and Lee followed me. “Don’t you want to sleep in the four-poster?” I asked.
“Too much trouble replacing all those pillows just so,” he said as he pulled back the rainbow comforter and settled himself in.
I laid a finger on the switch on the lava lamp. “Okay?” He glanced at the curtained windows before nodding, and I switched it on. An eerie blue glow filled the room, and once the lamp got warmed up the rising blobs cast odd upward-moving shadows on the wall. I got under the covers in the bed by the door. The sheets were stiff and smelled of plastic. Of course they’d never been washed.
“Lee?”
“Yeah?”
“Did you ever have a girlfriend?”
“I did, once.”
My heart began to thud in my chest, and I was afraid he could hear it. “What was her name?”
“Rachel.”
“That’s a pretty name.”
“Yeah.” He paused. “Sometimes you remind me of her.”
I propped myself on an elbow so I could see his face. “Really?”
He glanced at me. “Yeah. She liked to read a lot. Jane Austen, stuff like that.”
“What…,” I began, and almost lost my nerve. “What happened?”
“It’s a long story.”
I tried to smile. “We’ve got all night, right?”
“All right.” He paused, arranging the memories in the right order. “There was one night—I brought Rachel over to the house because Kayla wanted to meet her, and I thought maybe they could talk about the things you girls talk about, because I could tell Kayla really needed somebody to confide in—my mom could hardly be bothered keeping food in the fridge, let alone telling her anything—and we were having a nice time, just the three of us, drinking root beer and laughing at dumb jokes, before he showed up.” Lee’s hand hardened to a fist atop the rainbow duvet. “Another one of my mom’s boyfriends. They were all the same, you know? I’d come home after school and find him slobbing out on the couch, two dozen empty beer cans on the side table and another one open in his fat, hairy fist, the TV tuned to a NASCAR race and the volume up so high it’s a wonder the neighbors never filed a noise complaint. He’d tell me to get him another beer out of the fridge, I’d tell him I wasn’t the maid, he’d start calling me names that fit himself a whole lot better, saying it was high time my mom turned me out, and I’d say, ‘Nah, it’s high time we turned you out.’” He sighed. “My mother always paid for the beer.
“By this time he’d be up off the couch and in my face, and I could smell every disgusting thing he’d done in the last week. Whizzing in alleys, puking in trashcans. He’d follow me around the room, shouting abuse, and meanwhile I was locking the door and pulling the blinds.” He chuckled coldly. “No idea what was coming to him. They were always so drunk, they never had any idea.”
“Anyway, the difference this time was that Kayla and Rachel were there. I made them both go into Kayla’s room and lock the door, and I … and … Rachel didn’t listen to me. She saw.” I heard him swallow. “And that’s the reason I had to leave.”
“What happened?” I sat up in the bed and folded my legs beneath me. “I mean … what did she do?”
He stared at the ceiling as he went on. “She didn’t scream—not at first. She just stared at me with her mouth wide open for the longest time. I wanted to wash up before I went near her—to comfort her, you know—but I was afraid she’d run before I could get to the bathroom, so I just stayed put and tried to talk to her. I told her I’d never hurt her, that I would only hurt someone who hurt other people and that I couldn’t help it, but she just stood there in the doorway like a statue.” He took a deep breath, and I realized he was crying, or near enough to it. I sat on the floor between the beds and patted his hand.
“Then I heard Kayla open her bedroom door, call my name, and ask if it was okay to come out, and that broke Rachel out of her trance. She ran out of the house, and I couldn’t run after her or she’d think I was coming after her, you know? So I cleaned up and waited a few more minutes—it felt like forever—and then I told Kayla I was going out. She kept asking me what had happened, and had Rachel and I had a fight, but I wouldn’t tell her.” He took hold of my hand, squeezed it, and released, and after that I didn’t know where to put my hands.
“I drove over to Rachel’s house and her father came to the door. He’d never liked me and I could see it in his face—smug, you know? Like he’d been right about me all along. He locked the screen door so I couldn’t come in and he just stood there with his big beefy arms folded across his chest like a bouncer, telling me she’d come home and thrown up and that she was raving about somebody getting eaten. I could see it never occurred to her parents that she meant it literally, they just thought I’d gotten her drunk and tried to … to…” He sighed and pressed his fingers against his eyes. “Anyway, I told him I hadn’t laid a finger on her, that I’d never hurt her, but of course he didn’t believe me. I could hear her screaming and crying upstairs, and her mother trying to calm her down.” He let his fingers fall from his eyes again. “I loved her more than anybody, but I couldn’t put her at ease and make it right. Her dad slammed the door in my face, but before he did…” Lee affected a deep, intimidating tone: “You will stay far away from my daughter, do you understand?” He paused. “If it hadn’t been for Kayla, I would have killed myself.”
Until you hear a story like that, you think heartbreak is just a figure of speech. I wanted to comfort him—not just pat his hand and tell him how sorry I was, but actually make things better. If I had to be a monster, why couldn’t I have some sort of magical power that might fix this for him? “What happened after that?” I asked. “Did you go to school the next day?”
“How could I go back after that? Things get out. People talk. Everybody knew I’d done something terrible, something unforgivable. They didn’t know what I’d done, but it was enough.”
“What about Rachel?”
He shook his head. “I haven’t seen her in two years. Not since that night.”
“She didn’t ever want to see you again?”
“She couldn’t see me even if she wanted to. I ruined her life, Maren. She had to go to the hospital. They took her out of school. There’s no way to reach her. I can’t talk to her, I can’t explain. She’s stuck in that place with a bunch of crazy people, drawing with crayons and eating mashed potatoes with a spoon, and no one will ever believe her.”
She’s stuck in that place with a bunch of crazy people. People like my father.
Lee began to cry, and this time he didn’t try to hide it. I sat on the bed beside him, and he sat up and clutched my shoulder and rested his forehead in the hollow of my neck. “All this time, and I’ve never told anybody about any of this.” His voice was eerily calm. I felt his words hum through me. “How could I tell Kayla? She’s the only person in the world who still thinks I’m good.”
“I think you’re good.”
Lee tried to laugh. “I guess you don’t know me well enough.”
“One of us has to be the good one,” I replied. “And it definitely isn’t me.”
“I never should’ve brought her home. Why didn’t I just take them both out for ice cream or something?” He pulled back from me. His eyes were bloodshot. “Aren’t you glad you asked?”
“That’s the other reason you keep going back, isn’t it? Hoping to see her.”
He lay down again and closed his eyes, and I went back to my own bed. The moment was over. “I just sit in the parking lot looking up at the building, wondering which room is hers. Tried to get in a few times, but her parents told them about me. They have a list of people they’ll let in to see her, and if you’re not on it then you can’t get in. I don’t think there’s any way I can make things right, but if I could just explain things to her, maybe it would help.”
“Do you … do you still love her?”
“Yeah,” he said slow
ly. “Yeah, of course I do. It’s not … the same, if that makes sense. I know it’s over between us, and I know she deserves better—she always deserved better.”
I never thought I’d be jealous of a girl in a mental hospital. And yet … if I could have switched places with her, I would have. It would have solved our problems—hers and mine. My father and I could have adjoining rooms, play checkers and go for walks up and down the lawn in our white pajamas. We could still listen to Revolver together.
Lee opened his eyes. “Are you nervous?” At first I didn’t understand.
My father, of course. Frank. “Wouldn’t you be?”
“If I were you? Yeah.”
In a little while he fell asleep, his face still streaked with tears. I lay on my side, watching the blue blobs take form and bubble upward.
* * *
The next morning, Lee was frosty. When I woke up he was parting the curtains to let in the pale dawn light. “Who knows how early they come in to show the place?” he said. “And we still have to clean up in the kitchen.” I wondered if the real estate agent would notice the missing can of cookie dough. Not that it mattered.
There was a coffeemaker in the kitchen, so we had proper brewed coffee. Only a canister of powdered creamer, though, and no conversation. Every time I came near him—to grab a mug, or borrow the spoon he’d used to stir in the creamer—he moved away from me like it would be a disaster if we brushed hands or elbows.
I didn’t say anything at first. I wanted to see if he’d talk to me on his own. Finally I asked, “Why are you being weird? Is it because you wish you hadn’t told me about Rachel?”
He sighed as he rinsed out his coffee mug, shook off the drips, and put it back in the cabinet. “Well, when you put it like that…”
“It’s not my fault.”
“I didn’t say it was.”
“I was just asking about your life. That’s what friends do.”
He didn’t answer. We let ourselves out the way we’d come in, went back to the truck, and pulled out of the unfinished development. It was only another five or so miles to Bridewell, and then what?
Still that stony silence from the driver’s seat. I ran through all the possibilities in my head—all that I could say and every possible way he could reply. I knew that if I asked him, Do you want to leave me in Tarbridge and drive back to Virginia and never see me again? and he said yes, I wouldn’t be able to pretend anymore that I only cared for him as a passing acquaintance. I would cry, and he would know.
So I had to pretend like it was my idea. “I guess this is it,” I said as we took the turnoff for Bridewell.
“What do you mean?”
“You’re going to leave me here and go back to Virginia.”
“What?” He turned in his seat and stared at me. “What are you going to do? Check yourself in?”
The asylum loomed at the lip of a hill, three redbrick stories of barred windows. We pulled up to a guard shack where the parking lot met a tall wrought-iron fence. The man in the booth wore a navy blue uniform with a patch marked BRIDEWELL SECURITY across his bicep. “Visitor?”
Lee nodded.
“All right. We’ll just take down your plate number, and you can head on in.”
The parking lot was pretty much empty, but Lee pulled into a spot as far from the main entrance as possible. “Answer me, Maren. What are you going to do?”
“Does it matter?”
Lee gave an exasperated sigh and hopped down from the cab.
“I don’t know why you’re acting like you care all of a sudden,” I said as he rounded the truck and opened the passenger’s-side door. “You were the one who said you didn’t make friends.”
“I’m not going to leave you here without you having a sensible plan.”
“I’ll go back to Sully’s.”
“I said sensible, Maren. The man’s a creep, and you know it.”
“Did he stab you in your sleep? Did he poison your stew?”
“Stop it,” he said. “Stop being such an idiot.”
“I’m going to see my father now, and anything that happens after that is none of your business.”
He actually seemed hurt. “Do you really mean that?”
Of course I couldn’t look at him as I replied. “Yes,” I said. “I really mean that.”
“What if you change your mind?”
“I won’t.”
“You will. I know you will. But I can’t hang around waiting for you, Maren.”
I slung my rucksack over my shoulder and slammed the passenger door. “Then don’t.”
9
The woman at the front desk raised her stenciled eyebrows when I told her I wanted to see Frank Yearly. “Wait a moment while I find Dr. Worth.” On the opposite wall there was a larger-than-life portrait of a white-haired man in a tweed jacket. The plate at the bottom of the heavy gold frame read:
GEORGE BRIDEWELL, MD
“Whatever he may diagnose or prescribe,
the physician’s finest instrument is compassion.”
“Dr. Worth will see you in her office,” the receptionist said. “Right this way.”
I followed her through a door beside the desk and down a long gray corridor. She opened a door and waved me in, but the office was empty. “Just wait here a moment,” she said again, and disappeared.
There was a frog-shaped glass paperweight on the desk not securing any papers, and the bookshelves along the back wall were lined with medical textbooks. The office was very tidy apart from an enormous water stain on the ceiling. It was several shades of brown, as if someone on the second floor had spilled many cups of tea. The windows looked over the parking lot, and my heart swelled when I saw the black truck in the distance.
The doctor came in. She had short red hair and thick wire-rimmed eyeglasses, and she seemed to be a little older than Mama. “Good morning,” she said crisply as she seated herself at the desk. “I am Dr. Worth, the director here at Bridewell. I’m told you wish to visit Francis Yearly?”
I nodded. “If you need proof that I’m his daughter, I have my birth certificate right here.” I slid the folded blue paper across the desk, but she didn’t look at it, just opened the manila folder she’d carried into the room.
“I’m afraid Mr. Yearly is very sick,” she began as she looked over the document inside. “My concern is that a visitor after all these years might prove too upsetting for him, and for you.”
“You mean he’s never had a visitor?”
She gave the chart another perfunctory glance. “That’s correct.”
“Was no one allowed in, or … did no one ever come?”
The doctor assembled her features into a mask of professional sympathy.
“I never knew where he was,” I said. “If I’d known, I’d have come much sooner.”
“Please don’t feel any regret on that account. Truth be told, I could not in good conscience have allowed a minor in to visit a patient in his condition.” She closed the folder and opened my birth certificate. “You’re only sixteen. Where is your mother? Does she know you’re here?”
With my eyes I traced the squiggly outline of the ceiling stain, a big brown blotch becoming the map of a lost continent. “She couldn’t come, but she … she knows I’m here.”
“I really shouldn’t let you in to see him without your mother present.”
I leaned forward and clasped the edge of Dr. Worth’s desk. I was literally holding on. “I know my father isn’t well, doctor. I just need him to know I’m finally here.”
“Do you live with your mother?”
“Not anymore, no.”
“Where are you living, then?”
I swallowed. “With a friend?”
Dr. Worth eyed me above her reading glasses. “I see.”
“Will you let me see my father?”
She sighed. “It’s unlikely he’ll understand who you are. I know you’re anxious to see him, but no one is ever truly prepared for that.”
; “Yes,” I said. “I understand.”
Dr. Worth leaned forward and pressed the intercom button on her phone. “Denise, could you page Travis to my office, please?”
While we were waiting I glanced out the window. The truck was gone. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. I will never see him again.
A minute later the door opened and a man in gray hospital scrubs came in. He was tall, a bit overweight, and in need of a haircut. There was something very gentle and teddy-bearish about him, and even in that first second I knew he would be kind to me.
“Travis, is Mr. Yearly awake?”
The orderly smiled and greeted me before answering, “Yes, Doctor.”
“And how is he today?”
“Fairly good to good. Alert. He ate most of his breakfast.”
The doctor nodded and turned back to me. “I will let you in to see your father for ten minutes. For your safety, Travis will remain with you for the duration of the visit.”
For my safety?
* * *
Maybe you think you know what an insane asylum is like on the inside, but you’re probably wrong. There are no raving madmen reaching between the bars to grasp at you, no frantic struggles dissolving into tears and sedation and straitjackets—none that I saw, at least. The radio was tuned to a classical station in the common room, where people of all ages played checkers or solitaire, wrote letters, or painted in watercolors. Some wore pajamas and some were fully dressed. No one was talking to themselves or to each other.
A pale-haired girl in a shapeless gray sweater sat in a chair by a window overlooking the woods behind the hospital, her hands curled in her lap like an old woman’s. There was an eager, almost hungry expression on her face, as if she were only biding her time until the fairies came in the night to rescue her. I thought of Rachel.
Some of the older patients were in wheelchairs. If they looked up as we passed I expected to see some spark of curiosity, but a glance satisfied them that I wasn’t bringing them food or medication and so, for their purposes, I didn’t exist.
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