Ultraviolet

by R. J. Anderson

  A good place, Rachael had said. You’ll like it there.

  Beyond the sign, a cluster of institutional buildings sidled into view. At first they looked separate, a peak-roofed longhouse surrounded by cabins; but as we drove closer I saw that they were all connected, like a hydra in the process of budding. In front of the hospital the trees surrendered to grass and asphalt; behind it, the forest shrank away from a courtyard enclosed in chain-link fence. As we drove by I glimpsed a girl pacing around the yard, all bony limbs and hair like a splatter of ink, talking and gesturing wildly with her cigarette.

  There was no one with her.

  A shudder rippled through me. I slid away from the window, flinching as my handcuffs clinked and gold starbursts filled my vision. This was all wrong. I didn’t belong here. Even after what Rachael had told me—that the scratches and bites on my arms had been self-inflicted, and that I’d been brought to St. Luke’s screaming and struggling all the way— part of me still refused to believe that I could be anything like that girl.

  With an effort I unclenched my fists and willed myself to breathe. Calm, Alison. Whatever happens, you have to stay calm.

  The van slowed to a stop, and the door rumbled open. Humid, pine-flavored air washed over me, to the tune of droning cicadas and the staccato call of a chickadee. I stepped out into the grip of my police escort, who marched me across the asphalt to a door at the side of the main building. It growled open at our approach and closed behind us with a steely click.

  As Constable Deckard took out his key and fumbled with my handcuffs I stood meekly, shivering in the air-conditioned chill. At first glance the room looked like a dentist’s office, with plaque-colored walls and wintergreen furniture. But the sofa bled stuffing from a gash in its side, while the chairs and table looked like they’d been flung across the room at least once before anyone thought to bolt them to the floor. The wall beside the nurses’ station had a hole in it the shape of a size-twelve running shoe. I hoped I wasn’t about to meet that shoe’s owner.

  My handcuffs snapped open. The officer hooked them back onto his belt, then led me over to the admissions desk and introduced me to the two nurses on duty. They sized me up as though I were a time bomb, held a murmured conference, and finally told the two of us to sit down.

  “It’s going to be a while,” said my police escort. “So make yourself comfortable.”

  How I was supposed to do that with him sitting next to me, I couldn’t imagine. According to Rachael, police helped transfer psych patients between hospitals all the time; it was a community service, she said, to make sure the ambulances stayed available for people who really needed them. But something in Deckard’s manner, the watchful glances he kept giving me out of the corner of his eye, made me feel nervous and even a little guilty. As though I really had done something wrong, and he knew it.

  But how could that be? I might have had a mental breakdown two weeks ago, but that wasn’t a crime. And even if I had broken the law in some way . . . it couldn’t be too serious, could it? I struggled to piece together the scraps of my memories, but they kept fluttering away from me.

  “Want me to turn on the TV?” asked the officer, gesturing at the set bolted high in the corner.

  I didn’t watch much television; I found its fake, flat colors too irritating. But it would give the constable something to watch besides me, so I nodded. He flicked it on, and I listened halfheartedly to some American talk show until the clock’s hands inched to noon and it was time for the local news.

  I wasn’t paying much attention by then. In fact, I was almost asleep. But a few minutes into the broadcast, I woke abruptly at the taste of a familiar name.

  “. . . Tori Beaugrand, who disappeared on the afternoon of June seventh . . .”

  My blood ran hot, then icy, and my stomach clenched like a fist. Somewhere in the back of my mind a trapped memory fluttered, trying to get out.

  “. . . Ron and Gisele Beaugrand, parents of the missing teen, are offering a reward to anyone who comes forward with information leading to Tori’s whereabouts. Meanwhile, police continue their investigation into the sixteen-year-old’s disappearance, but so far no trace of her has been found . . .”

  “Alison.”

  I blinked. Constable Deckard tapped my left arm, and slowly I turned it over to find four fresh, weeping scratches on the underside.

  “Why’d you do that?” he asked.

  “I—I don’t know.” The scrapes were throbbing now, painting orange stripes across my inner vision. I closed my right hand around them, trying to press away the pain.

  “Did you know that girl? Tori Beaugrand?”

  Again that rustle of memory, like a pile of dead leaves shifting in the breeze. But whatever was underneath stayed buried. “I went to school with her,” I said. “I didn’t know she was missing.”

  His brows went up. “You don’t remember hearing about her disappearance before?”

  I shook my head.

  “When was the last time you saw her?”

  His voice had sharpened, taken on a new urgency. Like he thought I might actually know how, or why, she’d disappeared. But why would I? Tori and I didn’t hang around together. We barely even talked. “I’m . . . not really sure,” I said. “In the cafeteria, I think? At school?”

  “When?”

  “At the end of lunch period,” I said. “On Monday.”

  Monday, June seventh. The day she’d disappeared. The same day I’d gone into hospital. But that was just coincidence . . . wasn’t it?

  “And what was she doing, when you saw her? Was she talking to anyone? Did she look frightened? Angry?”

  I closed my eyes, straining at the memory. She’d stepped in front of me as I was heading out the cafeteria door, demanding to know. . . something. But after that it was all a blank.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “My memory’s not very good right now.”

  Deckard gave me a hard, searching look. But something in my face must have convinced him, because all he said was, “All right. But there’s something I want you to do. The minute you remember anything that might help us find Ms. Beaugrand— any detail, no matter how small—you tell your psychiatrist, and have him call me. We’ll all sit down in a nice comfortable place, and talk about it. All right?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “I can’t emphasize strongly enough how important this is, Alison. Because if Tori’s been abducted, if she’s been hurt, and it turns out that you knew something that could have helped us find her but didn’t say anything about it . . . that would be a very serious thing.”

  My stomach twisted. Abducted? Hurt? I’d never been close to Tori, but I’d never wanted anything like that to happen to her, either.

  “Do you understand me?” pressed Constable Deckard.

  A thunderstorm was building between my temples, zigzags blurring the edges of my vision. In an hour or two, I was going to have a killer migraine.

  “All right,” I said faintly.

  . . .

  “Alison Jeffries?”

  By the time the nurse called me, the scintillating patterns behind my eyes had brightened from mango to tangerine, and my head felt as though it had been clamped in a vise. Gingerly I got up and walked over to the admissions desk.

  “Okay, Alison, I’ve got some questions to ask you. . . .”

  Over the next few minutes, they took my name, my history, and everything I owned—except, unfortunately, my headache. I was strip-searched with clinical thoroughness, and my clothing and shoes were locked away. Then they made me shower and change into the shapeless pajamas they’d given me.

  Feeling like a damp scarecrow, I shuffled out of the bathroom to be met by the taller of the two nurses, who took my photograph and clamped an armband around my wrist before escorting me to an examination room. There a doctor with a drooping mustache looked me over from crown to soles and several humiliating places in between. He quizzed me about my medical history and looked grave when I told him I had a
headache. He gave me two pills and a seat in a darkened corner, and I was still sitting there when the door opened and another white-coat came in. I looked up, into the muddy hazel eyes of the nicest man I would ever learn to hate.

  “Hello, Alison,” he said. “I’m Dr. Minta.”

  It turned out that this little, balding, square-spectacled man was the psychiatrist assigned to my case. And from the proud way he escorted me through the admissions wing and into the main building, chattering about programs and facilities all the while, you’d think he’d designed and built the whole place just for my benefit.

  Unfortunately, I was in too much pain to appreciate it. The pills had muted my headache enough to keep me from fainting or throwing up, but I still felt as though someone had shoved a raw carrot into my eye socket. I wanted to beg Dr. Minta to stop talking and let me lie down, but I was afraid of showing that much weakness. I wanted him to see me as healthy, normal, the kind of person who didn’t belong in a place like this.

  Everything inside the hospital was painted in tentative colors: eggshell, fog, rosewater. The hallways echoed silence, like the corridors of a high school during class. Nurses strode purposefully here and there, carrying files or clipboards; aides pushed trolleys, and a security guard followed us with his eyes. But I didn’t see any patients. Maybe they were all in therapy or something.

  “Let’s sit down in my office,” said Dr. Minta, ushering me through a door. The room beyond was as blandly soothing as the rest of Pine Hills, with dark leather furniture and walls the color of milky coffee. I lowered myself onto the sofa, bracing myself for the interrogation.

  “So, Alison. You’re sixteen, isn’t that right?”

  I nodded.

  “Just finishing up eleventh grade at Champlain Secondary?”

  Another nod.

  “You live with both parents? . . . And one younger brother? . . . How were you doing in school? Any difficulties there?”

  I’d been afraid he was going to push me to talk about my feelings, but these questions I could answer easily. Yes. Yes. Fine. Not really.

  “Okay, Alison, let’s do a little memory test. I’m going to read out a series of numbers, and you recite them back to me.”

  I disliked numbers, and they didn’t think much of me either. But even if they didn’t always want to multiply or divide for me, I had no trouble remembering how they looked in a sequence. I rattled back the answers without hesitation until we got to the second test, where he asked me to count backward from ninety eight by sevens. At that point, the numbers flat-out rebelled, and after a few painful attempts at mental subtraction, I had to ask for a pencil and paper. To my relief, Dr. Minta said that wouldn’t be necessary. He made a few notes on his clipboard and laid it down again.

  “So tell me. What do you think is your main problem?”

  I blinked at him. Was this some kind of joke?

  “All right,” said Dr. Minta, “let me put this another way. When was the last time you felt like your usual self?”

  I was about to say I don’t remember, but then all at once I did. I’d been sitting in after-school detention, twisting a pen between my fingers, waiting for Mr. Cartmel to finish marking history quizzes and tell me I could go. And all the while this high-pitched, maddening noise had been shrilling inside my head—because she was there, right beside me.

  Tori.

  My buried memories stirred again, pushing their way toward the surface. So close now. . . if I could just forget the throbbing in my head and the ache in my chest, if I could only concentrate—

  “You seem distracted, Alison. Can you hear anyone talking to you right now? Any voices other than mine?”

  The frustration of being interrupted, just when I was almost there, nearly snapped my composure. I wanted to tell him to shut up and leave me alone for a minute, didn’t he realize how important this was? But I bit back the words. I needed this man to believe that I was in control of myself.

  “No,” I said. “I was just trying to think. Sorry, what was the question?”

  . . .

  Dr. Minta kept talking to me for what must have been thirty minutes, asking me everything from my favorite part of the day to the name of our current prime minister. I did my best to stay focused, but the whole time, my stomach kept heaving and the orange pulse in my head got brighter and brighter. By the time we were finished, I’d broken out in a sweat.

  “Alison, you look pale. Are you feeling ill?”

  I couldn’t hold out any longer. I closed my burning eyes and nodded.

  “Well, then, let’s call it a day. You still need to meet with your rights adviser, but we can arrange that for tomorrow.” He picked up the phone on his desk. “Marilyn, could you send someone to my office? Alison needs to go to her room.”

  As we walked to the door, he said, “I think we’re off to a good start. Tomorrow we’ll talk some more about how you’re feeling and what we can do to make you more comfortable. In the meantime we’re going to give you a room in our Red Maple ward, which is the most secure and private, but if you appear to be doing well, we can move you into Yellow Poplar and you can join some of our group activities.”

  He made it sound like I was checking into a resort, not a psychiatric hospital. I had a vision of myself lounging by the pool in a bathrobe, sipping a fruity beverage while a nurse painted my toenails, and a little, hysterical giggle forced its way past my lips. Then I caught Dr. Minta’s eye, and all at once it wasn’t funny anymore. I toed the carpet and avoided his gaze until the aide arrived.

  She was tall and athletic-looking, with dark hair sleeked back into a no-nonsense ponytail. Her name tag said Jennifer, which was a frilly sort of name; it didn’t suit her. She led me past a conference room and a couple more offices, then down a short hallway to a set of putty-colored doors. She swiped her keycard, and the lock opened with a thunk that weighed on my chest like a cinder block. I had to take three deep breaths before I felt light enough to move again.

  Beyond lay a rose-tinted hallway lined with doors on both sides, most of them open. The walls were covered with scratches and greasy handprints, and the air smelled stale. Somewhere at the end of the corridor a hoarse alto voice was spitting out profanities. Another voice said firmly, “Micheline, we don’t use that kind of language here.”

  The answering snarl crescendoed to a screech, and I stopped dead. I did not want to see whatever was going on down there. I did not want to meet Micheline, whoever she was.

  “Here you go,” said Jennifer, opening a door. “Dinner’s at five o’clock, but you can stay in your room until then if you want. Or you could watch TV in the lobby and meet some of the other patients—”

  “No,” I said quickly. “I’ll just lie down. Thanks.”

  . . .

  My new room was almost as plain as the one I’d woken up in at St. Luke’s, with concrete walls and scuffed linoleum tile. The bed was narrow, the built-in desk dismally small, and in the bathroom I could sit on the toilet and touch the shower, the sink, and the sliding door at the same time. But at least the room had a window, even if it was made of scratched Plexiglas. And though I could still hear Micheline ranting in the distance, I was finally, mercifully, alone.

  I crawled onto the mattress, pulling the blanket over my head. If I could just shut the world out, pretend that I was anywhere but here, maybe the pain in my head would go away. . . .

  “Alison, you have to get up. The police are here.”

  My mother spoke in a whisper, but the taste of her fear was overpowering. Even through my cocoon of blankets I could feel her words searing my tongue, blazing behind my eyes, scalding my skin.

  “Please, Alison. You can’t keep hiding like this. You’re sick, you’re hurt, you need help—”

  “Is there a problem, ma’am?”

  There was a stranger in my room, beside my bed. The stench of his nearness was overpowering, like a slab of rancid meat, and I pressed my face into the mattress as another wave of nausea washed over me.
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br />   “She won’t get up, officer. I’ve tried to talk to her, but I—I don’t think she understands what I’m saying.”

  He made a skeptical noise, and a scribble of brown wrote itself behind my eyes. From the back of the room came the shrill warble of a younger man: “Ma’am, do you have any reason to suspect your daughter may be under the influence of alcohol or drugs?”

  “Oh, no. Alison’s not like that. She’s never—”

  “Is there any chance she could be concealing a weapon? Was she armed when she came in?”

  “I didn’t see anything in her hands. Only . . .” Her voice faltered.

  “ Yes?”

  “There was some . . . blood.”

  A ponderous pause. Then the officer said briskly: “All right, Alison, I’m going to pull back these covers so we can look at you. On the count of three. One. Two.”

  I clung desperately to the quilt, but the policeman was stronger. He ripped it out of my hands and tossed it aside. Hectic, relentless, the colors of my bedroom pounded at me, battering me with bruising force. I turned my face to the pillow and moaned.

  “There’s something on her fingers.” His blunt voice sharpened. He seized my hand—

  My arms flew up, knocking him back with the strength of raw panic. Blindly I grabbed the lamp off the night table, and flung it as hard as I could. Glass shattered in a cascade of electric-blue triangles, and then someone wrenched me off the bed and shoved me down on the floor—

  I flung back the covers, gasping. My heart was beating so loud I could see it, lime-green blotches pulsing too bright, too fast. Fighting the officers had been bad, but it wasn’t the worst thing I’d done that day. Something had happened before that, something enormous, something terrible—

  A wild swing. A sickening impact. Blood on my knuckles, hot and slick—

  Tori stumbling back, hands clapped to her face—

  A noise so loud, I thought my eardrums were exploding—

  Her back arched in agony, mouth opening wide as she screamed—

  The trickle of memories became a stream, a gush, a torrent. I gripped my head between my hands and rocked back and forth, inarticulate with horror. I hadn’t meant to do it. I hadn’t even known I could. But I’d been so angry, and before I could stop myself . . .