The two women with the toy do not look up or stop playing when we come in, and the metallic kissing continues, regular as a clock’s tick-tock. They both have their legs propped up on the coffee table, and I finally notice the circle of red plastic around each of their ankles with a blinking red light and a little electronic chip at the buckle. I have seen similar bands before in the suburbs of Louisville where Laura and I live—on the necks of dogs. Invisible Fence, the pet product is called.
“What the hell is this place?” I ask.
“A way station,” says Spencer.
“On the way to where?”
“Ah,” he says. “That all depends. The people here can’t live at home, but their families or doctors don’t want them institutionalized. It’s a sort of collaborative venture. The Chapins—the owners—provide clean beds, plumbing, grounds, an alarm system, and meals. They schedule the psychiatric visits. They pay the nurses and the guards.”
“Guards?”
“They only come if anyone tries to leave against the doctors’ orders.”
“So this is a prison.”
“No, not really. It’s voluntary, the way most private psychiatric wards are run. The patients are here because they feel safe here. And the visitation rights are unlimited.”
“So Theresa volunteered to be here.”
“I volunteered her,” Spencer says. “But she agreed.”
“Goddammit,” I say softly, wanting to kick the couch and break the ball toy. “Why didn’t you just tell me?” I can’t get used to the way he’s talking about her—as if she’s real.
Spencer ignores my question. “Follow me. She’s up there.” He starts up the stairs, which are carpeted in thick white pile.
“Hold on,” I say, grasping his arm. He turns around. “Spencer, I have to see her on my own.”
“No,” he says, after a brief pause.
“What do you mean, no?”
“Mattie, think. This is a fragile soul, do you understand? She always has been. She has moments where she’s better, now, almost there with you sometimes. But not that many. And no one’s sure what draws her out. I don’t want you to drive her away.”
Furious, I shove him into the wall. “I’m sorry,” I say, “but that is just about e-fucking-nough.”
“Keep your voice down,” Spencer hisses, but even whispering, his own voice is rising. “There are sick people here, remember?”
Suddenly, everything I’ve felt this whole weekend, the terror and guilt and longing and loneliness, has erupted in my throat like tinder after a lightning strike, and the only way to breathe is to shout. “You still have no idea how important this is to me. I need to know if she can see me, Spencer. If seeing me means anything at all. The only way I’ll ever know that is if I go up alone. Who the fuck do you think you are anyway?”
“I’m her Caretaker. The person who stayed,” Spencer says, his voice breaking, and he’s not yelling anymore, and there are tears in his eyes. He doesn’t lift his hand to his face or push me away. He just stands there, crying.
“Well, I’m the one who came back,” I say, and the burning in my throat subsides, leaving my tongue scorched and my mouth full of smoke. “And we both love her.”
Spencer waves a hand between us. “Maybe. But I’m the one who’s been acting on her behalf—Barbara and me—for a long, long time.”
“Barbara? Barbara Fox? Spencer, God—“
“I told you the truth about her. She was gone. She came back. She shouldn’t have, for her own sake, but she did. She comes here almost every day, even more than I do. Mattie, you can’t just go up there. Please trust me on this.” He sinks to a sitting position on the steps and bangs his fists on his legs. “She’s...if she saw you...if you just walked in...anything could happen.”
“Spencer,” I say, and I touch him on the shoulder, very gently. “I’m glad you found her. I’m relieved that you and Barbara are here with her. But she’s not yours. Has it occurred to you ... I mean, isn’t it possible that seeing me might help her, not hurt her?”
Spencer’s expression is flat, cryptic. He says nothing.
“Look,” I continue. “Clearly, none of this has been resolved for any of us. But having you stand guard over her like some kind of pit bull isn’t going to settle anything.”
Finally, Spencer looks up. I still can’t read his expression, but his eyes and cheeks are wet. “You could be right, Mattie. You could be the Devil, or you could be right. I don’t pretend to know. I didn’t then, and I don’t now.”
“Then let me go up there. I swear I’ll call you if she needs you.”
“Just...just be careful, Mattie. Please. Be careful.” Head down, he slides closer to the wall and lets me pass. “Third door on the left.”
My footsteps make no sound in the deep carpet. Three steps. Five. The wooden banister feels cool under my hand. If there is a tunnel and white light when I die, my movement through it will be no more surreal than this ascent.
At the top of the staircase, another hallway curves toward the front of the house, with five tall white doors on each side. Behind one, I can hear a television playing quietly, a rerun of Welcome Back, Kotter. Other sounds float my way, all of them muffled. Down the hall, someone is playing Ella Fitzgerald. I don’t recognize the song. The door to the room with the television on is partially open, and I can’t resist a glimpse inside. The woman sitting on the railed hospital bed is in her sixties, her hair like the flying white mane of a horse. She looks up, smiles, and returns to watching television.
Three steps from Theresa’s door, the seventeen-year spell that has propelled me toward this moment expires. My legs roll to a gentle stop, and all I can do is listen. The door to the room across from Theresa’s is closed, but that’s where Ella’s voice is coming from, scatting, humming softly. From Theresa’s room, there is no sound at all.
Theresa’s room.
Under my feet, I can feel the floor swell, as though a wave is passing beneath it. I am lifted off the ground and falling forward through no will of my own. I have rowed myself all the way back within shouting distance of this shore, and now the world is flinging me against it.
The door is most of the way closed, and I knock on it lightly. A few seconds later, I knock again. Finally, gently, I push it open.
At first, all I can do is gape. I’ve seen this room before, or almost this room, or not really this room—not that bed, not this light, not the white carpeting—but the bookcases are the same. The same mismatched freestanding set has been arranged in the same order along one wall and around the one window and continuing on the other side of it. The same red writing desk sits low between them, with its red plastic chair tucked underneath. Inside the cases, the exact same books sit in their places, the long leather set of World Classics and the jumble of paperbacks in no obvious order except it’s the one I remember. I could practically recite the titles, though I only saw them once. Seeing them here, with the pattern so systematically replicated, makes the volumes seem as incomprehensible and ancient as Stonehenge. In between the cases, the same scatter of photographs flashes the same faces: Theresa’s mother on her sled; Theresa’s father holding a very small Theresa’s hand at the library. There are no pictures of Theresa looking older than she was when I knew her. Except for the hospital bed, the place is a dollhouse, a perfect reproduction.
But the doll that inhabits it is too big for the room. Theresa is leaning by the window with a book in her hands and her back to me. Her hair is longer, dirty blond, lying dead on her shoulders like kelp.
I want to whisper her name, sing her a song we knew, do something gentle to reintroduce myself into her life. Instead, I cry out. The sound splits the air, bites into the wall over her head like the blade of an ax. When she glances back at me, her face is a porcelain model of the one I remember, the brown eyes less symmetrical, the nose too flat. But the bow mouth is dead on.
“It’ll be all right,” she says, and returns her gaze to the window.
T
he voice is not the voice I remember, and yet it’s so clearly her. That one sentence, almost devoid of inflection, has brought back every Mind War and classroom from first through sixth grades, and my whole Michigan childhood hisses around me like a cloud of wasps I have kicked from their nest in the grass.
“Theresa, it’s Mattie,” I say.
She swings around, and I am stunned to find her brown eyes full of tears. “I love that smell,” she says. “Don’t you? Ty Cobb. Wild Bill Donovan. Hooks Wiltse.”
I don’t smell anything and I don’t care, because I’m already reaching out to touch her, hold her, I’m not sure which, when she says, “It’ll be all right” again and stops me.
“Hey,” I say, searching for the magic words that will release a little of the tension. When hey doesn’t work, I try, “Theresa, please talk to me.”
“Donie Bush,” she says. “Wahoo Sam.”
Her hair only looks that way, I realize, because it’s wet. She has just had a shower or a bath. I stand still, let the waves my presence has created roll through the room, slap against the walls, and roll back over us as the hush reasserts itself. Theresa’s mouth stops moving, the list of whatever it was dying on her lips. I hope it worked, I am thinking. I hope it kept her here with me. Then I do touch her, lightly, on the arm. Tears overrun her lashes and spill down her skin, and I see myself floating in her eyes, among the dead parents and lost years and ghost people. We stand together and rock in that room above the wintry world as though we’re trapped together in a hot-air balloon that has just slipped its guide ropes.
“Hello there,” says Theresa, and nods. “I’ll be right behind you.”
“It’s Mattie,” I say again, stupidly, while Theresa watches the doorway behind me. Does she know I’m here? Am I hurting her? Despite all the years I have spent imagining variations of this moment, I find now that I don’t know what to do. So I drop to one knee before her. In another universe, in a sweeter life, I might be proposing marriage. Spencer would perform the ceremony. Instead, I unzip my backpack and take out Theresa’s notebook.
She recognizes it, I’m all but certain, because, as still as she has become, she gets positively cadaverous when I put it in her hands. Her eyes lock, and she seems to stop breathing. When she starts again, the breaths come even and shallow. I stand up, close to her, and watch her peel back the torn blue cover.
“Nnnnh.” She’s nearly humming. “It’ll be all right.”
Sliding down onto her bed, she begins to flip pages with her hand, not quite looking at them. I’m watching the top of her head, thinking about the mud running down her legs on the day we became the lake.
“I’m so sorry,” I whisper, and let my own tears come. “Theresa. I am so sorry. For everything.”
For a while, she does nothing but turn the pages of the notebook, tipping her head to one side, the other side. She is mumbling words, maybe reading aloud, but I can’t make out what she’s saying. Abruptly, she stands up, too close to me. I feel her hair against my cheek, her hand, and then she kisses me.
For a few blissful seconds, I don’t feel the strangeness. Her lips are touching mine without pressing, and I can taste her breath, toothpaste and apples. Through our slightly open mouths, I can feel our lives touch like the tips of our tongues, though our tongues never meet. The familiar ache in my body sharpens just under my lungs. Theresa is leaning into me the way a little kid might press her face against a car window to taste the condensation. I don’t pull away until she starts screaming.
By then, she has one arm around my neck and she won’t let go. Her teeth tap against mine, her whole body tenses, and she screams again, right into my mouth. I jerk backward, almost pulling her over with me, but she lets go and opens that mouth again—the black hole at the center of my world—and, to my astonishment, holds there.
“Theresa, no,” I say, and she sways, mouth gaping. “Please,” I say. “I’ll leave. Or I’ll stay. I’ll sing to you. Just tell me what you need. What do you need, Theresa? What do you want? What can I do?”
“I can’t,” Theresa says, very quietly, and despite the fact that I see her mouth drop open again and I know what she’s about to do, a horrible, tingly elation trills through me. I am all but certain, for that one moment, that she knows it’s me. Then she’s screaming again, and there are people pouring into the room.
I watch the notebook slip from Theresa’s bed and flop face down on the floor as someone shoves me aside, grabs hold of her, and eases her back to the bed, but the screaming doesn’t stop. The person holding Theresa down is enormous and wears a white doctor’s coat. A second person shoves past me and stands over the bed, wearing jeans and a sweater. Curly hair. I never see his face. The third person into the room is Spencer, and he engulfs me from behind.
“You asshole,” Spencer is snarling.
The man in the doctor’s coat glances up sharply. “Mr. Franklin, get out. Take your friend with you and get out of here.” He pins Theresa back against the bedsheets and holds her there. Spencer is grappling with me, grunting, saying nothing now, but I’m still watching Theresa, who has already gone quiet. Her arms went slack the moment everyone appeared at the door. If anything, she looks more peaceful now than when I entered the room. If the doctor let her, I half believe she would wave to me.
“It’ll be all right,” I say to her, almost smiling, as Spencer shoves me into the hall and stands in Theresa’s doorway, panting.
I can no longer see the doctor, but I hear him say “Mr. Franklin” again. “Please. It’s okay, now. Let’s give her some quiet, huh?”
“Sorry,” Spencer murmurs—to the doctor, Theresa, I can’t tell.
“The notebook,” I say suddenly.
“What?”
“Her notebook. On the floor in there. I brought the notebook back. It might not be a good idea to leave it with her.”
Spencer steps back into Theresa’s room, reemerges with the blue binder in his hands, staring at it.
“Jesus dog,” he whispers.
“You know what that is?”
“The cop with the licorice showed it to me,” Spencer says. His hands are shaking. “It scared the living shit out of me.”
“That’s why I thought we shouldn’t leave it.”
“Why’d you even bring it? What’s wrong with you?”
From inside the room, the doctor snaps, “Mr. Franklin,” and both of us edge toward the staircase, and I have one completely inappropriate feeling, a flash of goofy memory, Ms. Eyre whirling on Spencer and me from the blackboard and screaming at us for talking.
“Why did you bring this, Mattie?”
I have no answer, now that I think about it. What good could it possibly do her? For me, it has been a relic, a puzzle box, a treasure map. X marks the dead spot.
“It’s just something I’ve held onto,” I say, and stash it away in my backpack.
From Theresa’s room, cool and steady, Theresa’s voice comes floating. “One. Two. Six. Twenty-four. One hundred twenty. Seven hundred twenty.”
Spencer stares at me. I stare back. For one, brief, impossible moment, it feels as if both of us are about to smile. But neither of us does.
“This was a horrible mistake,” Spencer says. “Obviously. Maybe even you know that now.” He starts past me down the white-carpeted stairs. I have no answer, nowhere else to go. I follow him into the sitting room, which is empty now. “Let’s finish this outside,” he says. “Goddammit. I should have never let you up there.” He retreats toward the front hall, and we both retrieve our boots and coats and step through the door onto the deck facing the snow-laden lawn.
“Spencer,” I say, “do they even know what’s wrong with her?”
When he speaks again, he sounds as if he is reciting from a manual. “A patient with Depersonalization Disorder feels like an automaton. She may spend a disproportionate amount of time ruminating obsessively. The real world seems unreal, and time becomes blurred and confused. Frequently, such disorders have an undetected o
nset in childhood, which can make it tough to trace their evolution.”
I stare at him, but he won’t look at me. “We detected it,” I say. “In a way.”
“Yeah. Maybe. But this doctor also thinks she may be suffering from brutal and persistent Dissociative Amnesia. Which means pretty much what it says, except that it can lead to aggressive impulses.”
This time, the premonition hits me like an ache in the joints, I can’t get my knees straight or my wrists to bend, and I want to cry out. “Spencer,” I say eventually, “please just tell me the rest. Right now.”
Spencer stares out at the snow. Then he sighs. “Analissa Pettibone lived with her mother Mariannah at 119½ Decatur Street. I met her for the first time on the day I took her to the clinic over on Grand. November twelfth, 1990. She was ninety-eight days old.”
Wind chases snow ghosts across the surface of the drifts, and the trees nod slightly like old people watching children race through a park. Upstairs, Theresa Daughrety may well be back at her window, watching over us, a Chagall ghost in a perpetual blue never-never.
“Shepherd Griffith-Rice had just anointed me a Caretaker.”
“Which is a step below Shepherd?”
“Not below. There just aren’t many Shepherds. Aren’t many who are willing. It takes up your whole life. One of the clinics downtown gave free checkups when a child turned one hundred days old, including immunizations. Several of our more disadvantaged members used this particular clinic, but I’d never been there. On November twelfth, I picked up Analissa and Mariannah at their triplex downtown and drove them over. There was snow on all the buildings and ice in the streets, but the day was midsummer bright. Mariannah seemed upset, so I kept trying to calm her down. But no matter what I said, she just held her baby against her chest and nodded at me. She would’ve nodded if I’d said I was driving into the river to see a friend. It seems Analissa had been sick, and Mariannah hadn’t told anyone, and she was afraid. Big girl, Mariannah, kind of pretty but real big. Analissa looked like a wrapped-up strawberry in her hands. One of them smelled like alcohol—the rubbing kind, not the drinking kind.
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