Victim Rights

by Norah McClintock

  Jesus. What had she done? And why? Was it because of him? He should have been nicer to her when he’d seen her in that coffee shop. He shouldn’t have asked her those questions the way he did.

  Or maybe it was because of Parker.

  Either way, he started toward her.

  One of the nurses came toward him.

  “You can’t come in here,” she said, her voice brusque, nononsense. Beth turned toward the door, saw Dooley, and said something to her mother that he couldn’t hear.

  Beth’s mother stood up. For a moment, Dooley was hopeful. Her mother had been nicer to him than normal when he’d gone to the apartment. Maybe she would intercede on his behalf now.

  But no.

  She flew at him, scowling, her hands thrust out to push him away. She yelled at the nurse, “Get him out of here. I don’t want him near my daughter. Do you understand? I don’t want him near her.” What was going on? She’d been nice to him the last time he’d seen her. Well, maybe nice was overstating it. But she’d been civil.

  Dooley stared at Beth’s black lips and white face. She was crying. To his left, he saw the second nurse pick up a telephone handset and speak into it. Her eyes never left Dooley. The first nurse outflanked him and joined forces with Beth’s mother to block his way.

  “You can’t come in here,” she said again.

  Beth’s head was in her hands. Her shoulders were shaking. She was sobbing. How could he not go to her? He tried to push past the two women, but Beth’s mother grabbed his arm. She was a small woman, short and slight. Her head barely reached Dooley’s shoulder. But, boy, it turned out that she was strong. She dragged on him like an anchor. The nurse stayed in front of him, moving backwards with his progress and warning him that if he didn’t leave, security would put him out. Then Dooley saw relief in her eyes. Two burly security guards appeared, the younger of them looking pumped and ready for action.

  “I don’t want him here,” Beth’s mother said. “I don’t want him near my daughter.”

  Dooley looked at Beth over the top of her mother’s head. She was hunched over. Her hands covered her face.

  “Come on, pal,” the older of the security guards said, firm but reasonable. He reminded Dooley of his uncle. “If we have to, we’ll call the police.”

  He couldn’t win. No matter what he did, it always came to threats of trouble. Of cops. That was the last thing he needed. He relented and let the security guards steer him out of the room and down the hall to the Emergency entrance, passing Warren on the way. They walked him through the door and stood there, arms crossed over their chests, making sure he left hospital property. Dooley stood out on the sidewalk. He didn’t care that the two security guards were watching him. He waited until he saw Warren come through the doors, then he turned and walked down to the stop sign on the corner, out of sight of the Emergency entrance.

  Warren joined him a few moments later.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “Her mom wouldn’t let me talk to her.” In fact, she had acted like the whole thing was Dooley’s fault. Did that mean it was? Did that mean that Dooley was the reason Beth had done it—Dooley, not Parker? Jesus, as if that even mattered after what she’d done.

  “Is she okay?”

  Her lips were black. Her tongue was black. Not positive signs.

  “Do you clean the rooms, Warren, or just the halls?”

  “I clean everything—rooms, halls, shit, piss, vomit.”

  “What about the room she’s in now?”

  “I run a mop through there every hour and empty all the trash cans.”

  “If you find out anything, call me, okay?”

  “No problem.”

  “Any time, Warren. I mean it.”

  Dooley had seen lips like Beth’s before. Tyler Brock’s lips had been black. His tongue, too, and his gums, all that black making his teeth look whiter than they really were.

  Dooley was surprised that they’d let him visit Tyler. They even arranged for someone to run him over to the hospital. True, part of that person’s job was to stick close to Dooley to make sure he didn’t use the opportunity to slip away. He found out later that no one else had even asked how Tyler was, forget about asking if they could see him. He doubted that he would have asked, either, except for the timing. It had been maybe an hour after Dooley had made his position clear that he’d seen Ralston downstairs, harassing Tyler about laundry detail.

  “I did it just the way you told me,” Tyler was saying. “Folded everything, too, just like you said.”

  “Show me,” Ralston had said. He’d unlocked the door to the basement and held it to let Tyler go first. Dooley had heard the door click shut behind them. He wasn’t positive, but he bet it was locked.

  Tyler wouldn’t look at Dooley when Dooley was shown into the ward’s dayroom. There were other people in the room. A few had visitors, but most were sitting alone in chairs, staring blankly out at the world, like they couldn’t believe they were still in it. The youth worker who had accompanied Dooley took a seat by the door, out of the way, and picked up an ancient copy of Time magazine. Dooley slipped into a chair opposite Tyler.

  “Hey,” he said, forcing a cheeriness into his voice that he didn’t feel and that he believed Tyler didn’t want to hear. “You okay?” Stupid question. Tyler had been Form One’d—they could hold him up to seventy-two hours for a psych assessment. The floor he was on was locked, so he couldn’t leave. If he was stupid enough to try anyway, they could forcibly restrain him.

  Tyler stared down at the floor. There was a black streak on the front of his hospital smock.

  “They made me drink charcoal,” he said in a whispery voice. Dooley wasn’t sure that he had heard right.

  “What?”

  “It tasted like shit. They made me drink two bottles.”

  “Of charcoal?” Dooley was trying to picture it. He found out later that it was powdered charcoal suspended in some kind of liquid.

  “Next time,” Tyler said, “I’m gonna do it differently. Maybe I’ll jump. Or maybe a knife.”

  Next time?

  “Jeez, Tyler—” But Dooley didn’t know what to say after that. “Did you tell them what happened?”

  “I told them I broke into the infirmary.”

  Actually, he’d walked into the infirmary, complaining of a sore throat. Dooley knew because Devon Deacon had told him. Devon was in the infirmary at least once a week. He had stomach problems and kept getting sent for ulcer tests. Once in, Tyler had somehow managed to swipe a bottle of aspirin. Whoever had been on duty would be in shit for that because what if it hadn’t been aspirin? What if it had been something that could be used to get a high on? What then?

  Tyler had swallowed the whole bottle all at once, with a glassful of water. Dooley had seen him do it. Or, rather, Dooley had seen him swallow something, one handful after another, and then lie down on his bed in the room across the hall from Dooley’s. Dooley had seen it but had put it out of his mind—what did he care what Tyler did? He hadn’t given Tyler another thought until he had to go to the can. He passed by Tyler’s room. The kid was sprawled on his bed, his eyes closed. He hadn’t moved when Dooley passed by a few minutes later on his way back to his room. So what? Which, of course, is when he spotted the empty aspirin bottle on the floor. Dooley stood there for a moment before going into the room and pressing two fingers to the side of Tyler’s neck. He was still breathing. Dooley hesitated. The thought in his mind: it was none of his business. But a whole bottle of aspirin? Dooley wasn’t positive how much was needed to kill a person, but he’d heard of people getting themselves into serious trouble with aspirin. He found out later that as few as (or as many as—it all depended on your point of view) twenty tablets was serious enough to cause seizures, comas, and, yup, the one Tyler had been going for, death. He looked for and found a counselor playing two-on-two ping-pong in the rec room and told him what he’d seen. The counselor dropped his paddle and hurried out of the room. The paramedics s
howed up five minutes later to take Tyler to the hospital. Two days later, Dooley was in the psych ward dayroom, pulling a chair up so he could sit opposite Tyler.

  “I mean,” he said, “did you tell them what happened before you ... did what you did?”

  Tyler refused to look at him.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Right. Okay. He was probably embarrassed. Who wouldn’t be?

  “If you want, I could say something,” Dooley said, even though he didn’t want to. Thing number one: What if no one believed him? Thing number two: Why did he even have to? Why didn’t Tyler just stand up to the guy? That’s what Dooley had done, and if he could do it, so could Tyler. He looked at Tyler’s pale face and enormous eyes, black and glazed like a doll’s, all big-eyed innocence, until you studied them and realized there was nothing behind them. You’d never guess that he’d been locked up for violent assault. What Dooley had heard: Tyler had grabbed a kitchen knife and stabbed his foster mother with it. A guy who could do that should be able to tell another guy to fuck off, shouldn’t he? “You want me to talk to my uncle?” Dooley said. He barely knew his uncle then—Gary McCormack was just some hard-nosed ex-cop who had showed up one day and was on Dooley’s case, once a week when he visited, to shape up, for Christ’s sake, think about his future and what he was going to do when they released him into the community, where did he see himself living, what did he see himself doing? Always pushing Dooley for answers when, mostly, Dooley was thinking that the very first thing he wanted to do was celebrate—by which, of course, he meant get high. Still, his uncle used to be a cop, which meant he would probably know how to handle Tyler’s situation.

  Tyler shook his head. “I’m okay.”

  What did that mean? Dooley had seen him go into the basement with Ralston. He knew, because he knew Ralston, what that was all about.

  “You should say something to someone.”

  Tyler stared at him. He didn’t say a word. Dooley didn’t get it. Maybe Tyler was afraid to go up against Ralston on his own. That was understandable. But to turn down help when it was offered? If you did that, you had no one to blame but yourself.

  Dooley reached into his pocket, pulled out the couple of candy bars he had picked up in the gift shop, and set them on the table in front of Tyler. Tyler didn’t so much as glance at them. Dooley asked him how long he would be in the hospital. Tyler didn’t answer. Dooley said if they kept him any longer than seventy-two hours, he would see what he could do about visiting him again. Tyler was silent. When Dooley stood up to leave, Tyler didn’t seem to notice.

  Two days later, Tyler came back from the hospital. He had to report to the infirmary every morning for some pills. Dooley wasn’t clear what they were for. Tyler hardly ever spoke. Ralston stopped by his room regularly and stood in the doorway, talking softly to him. Dooley never heard Tyler answer.

  Dooley climbed his uncle’s porch steps and sank down onto one of the Muskoka chairs his uncle had out there. He still couldn’t believe it: Beth was in the hospital, and it looked like she had done more or less what Tyler had done. He thought back over everything he knew about her. She was bright and driven to succeed. She took school seriously. She’d been traumatized as a kid—her father had been murdered and she’d been right there. The wounds had been deep. She hadn’t been able to shake the memories. But when her brother had died, she’d shown herself to be a tiger. She’d pushed hard to get to the bottom of what had happened to him. Nothing had stood in her way. So, suicide? It didn’t make sense. Beth was a fighter, not a quitter. Suicide was the ultimate surrender. No, it didn’t add up. What had led her down that path?

  The front door opened, startling him. It wasn’t his uncle. It was Jeannie. As usual, she was well put together, hair neatly styled, just enough makeup to look fresh and elegant, never too much that she seemed desperate to recapture her youth. She was wearing black slacks, a form-fitting blouse, and black loafers. She looked terrific for a woman her age.

  “Oh,” she said, surprised to see him sitting there. “I thought I heard someone come up the steps. I thought it was Gary. He went out to run some errands.” She looked him over. “Is everything okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  Maybe it was the fact that she didn’t take his response at face value but stood in the door, looking at him. Maybe it was the concern in her eyes. Or maybe it was that she was a woman, an okay one at that, and he trusted her.

  “You remember Beth?” he said.

  Jeannie’s smile was swift and soft.

  “Of course.”

  “She’s in the hospital.”

  “Oh?” Jeanie let the screen door shut behind her. She perched on the edge of the Muskoka chair beside his as if to reassure him that she wouldn’t stay if he didn’t want her to. “Is she okay?”

  Dooley struggled with how to answer the question. He had no idea what, if anything, Beth would want him to say. He was hoping she hadn’t done it because Parker had dumped her like Annicka said. But would it make things any better if she had done it because of Dooley instead, because of the way he had reacted, what he had said?

  Jeannie placed a hand over his and let it lie there for a moment.

  “I won’t pry, Dooley. That’s not my style. But if you want to talk, I’ll be inside. And Gary should be back soon.” She got up and moved toward the door.

  “She tried to kill herself,” Dooley said.

  Jeannie turned and stood motionless.

  “But she’s okay?”

  “I don’t know. I guess so. I saw her, but I didn’t get a chance to talk to her. They wouldn’t let me. They called security.”

  Jeannie sat down again and squeezed his arm.

  “I don’t know why she did it,” Dooley said. He glanced into Jeannie’s quick, compassionate eyes. She was a good person. She’d taken his side before. So why was he lying to her now? “She went away for a week. To work on a community project. Her school is very big on community projects. Stuff like building houses for underprivileged families.”

  “Probably to teach them how over-privileged they are,” Jeannie said quietly. Yeah, Jeannie was a good person. She always got it.

  “There was this guy on the trip with her,” Dooley continued. And before he knew it, he was spilling out the whole story—not the part about going to the tennis club or to Parker’s party, but the rest of it, about Nevin and Parker and what the girls at Beth’s school had said, about what Beth had said. About what he had said to Beth.

  “I should have told her straightaway that I believed her,” he said. But the thought was still there, burning in his brain like an ember: what if she’d swallowed all those pills because of Parker, because he’d fucked her and then dumped her? What if she’d heard about the trash Parker was talking about her? What if what she’d done had nothing to do with Dooley at all? He didn’t tell Jeannie that part, either.

  “But she’s going to be okay?” Jeannie said when he had finished.

  “I sure hope so,” Dooley said. Tyler hadn’t been okay. They’d kept him under lock and key for a while. They’d put him on medication. They’d made him see a shrink regularly. But, in the end, Tyler had gone ahead and finished the job, differently, just like he’d said he would, not with pills but with a twisted-up bed sheet and a plastic milk crate pilfered from the kitchen.

  “I don’t know Beth as well as you do, but what I’ve seen, I like,” Jeannie said. “Maybe she’s not perfect. Who is? But she seems to have a good heart.”

  Jeannie was right about that, Dooley thought. Look at the effort she’d put into her brother. Or how she’d listened to the worst about Dooley and had still stayed with him because, she said, she believed she saw what other people didn’t, maybe she saw the other side of him. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe, after all this time of looking at him the way no one else did, she’d come to a decision. She’d kept quiet about who was going on the trip with her and, once she was gone, she’d made a play for someone different, someone more
like what she was used to, someone with promise.

  Maybe.

  “Her mother won’t let me near her. She’s the one who got them to call security on me and throw me out of the hospital.”

  “I remember her mother,” Jeannie said. The two women had met under less than optimal circumstances. “If I were you, I’d talk to her, Dooley. I wouldn’t give up.” She squeezed his arm again and then got up and went inside.

  Dooley’s uncle came into Dooley’s room later that night, after Jeannie had gone home.

  “Jeannie told me about Beth,” he said. He didn’t ask why Dooley hadn’t told him himself, but Dooley could see the question in his eyes. “You want me to talk to her mother, see if she’ll cut you some slack?”

  “No, it’s okay,” Dooley said. “I’ll do it myself. It’s probably better that way.”

  “You sure? Because I don’t mind.”

  “I’m sure. But thanks.”

  His uncle nodded and closed the door quietly behind him.

  SIX

  “A couple of years ago, it was guns,” Dooley’s uncle said from behind the newspaper the next morning. “Kids were running around shooting each other and the papers were all over it, calling it the summer of the gun. Remember?” Dooley didn’t, and, in any case, his uncle didn’t stop to wait for an answer. “Now it’s knives,” his uncle said.

  Dooley poured himself a bowl of cereal and a cup of coffee.

  “Every Tom, Dick, and Harry has a knife, and they all seem to be using them to carve each other up. Kids especially.”

  Dooley glanced at the page his uncle was reading. “Teen stabbed to death in front of local mall.” There was a picture of the kid, but that wasn’t what caught Dooley’s attention.

  “Can I see that?” he said.

  “When I’m finished. And since when did you start reading the paper at breakfast?”

  “Whatever,” Dooley muttered. He added milk to his bowl and sat down to eat.

  His uncle moved through the pages slowly, as if he were committing each one to memory. Dooley drank a cup of coffee while he waited. Finally his uncle put the paper down. Dooley grabbed it. He read the news brief next to the picture of the fatally stabbed teen: Body found in ravine. The story was exactly one paragraph long. It said an off-duty cop had found a body while he was out jogging on Sunday morning. It referred to the deceased as a white male whose name the police had not yet released, “pending further investigation.”