The One That Got Away

by Joe Clifford

  She snatched her hoodie and bomber off the bed. Not like she had anywhere else she needed to be.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The changes to her hometown were subtle and profound, major and no big deal. Unless you’d grown up here, come and gone, been someone else before, you wouldn’t notice an improvement. Redone Shop Rites, a Walmart, new strip mall, double-decker fast food restaurants. Fancy ones that combined all the cheap eats into one convenient pit stop, a Taco Bell and a KFC, a Pizza Hut. In a town like Reine, these alterations mimicked progress, and were a distraction from limited job opportunities and stagnant pay rates. A Krispy Kreme goes up around here, and the line extends up the block to be first in line. Alex recognized the push toward gentrification: bike lanes added, better bus routes, duplexes all painted that same shade of green. But Reine was still a poor man’s town, the same one she’d escaped. They could erect all the skyscrapers on the horizon they wanted, even change the name; Reine would always be Reine.

  Sugar maples and red oaks shed their skin, burnt orange and deep, dark maroon falling from crooked bones. They hit the interstate. Dented metal guardrails and rocky barriers zipped past. Staring out the window, Alex couldn’t believe she still let herself get swept up in the romance of it all. There are no star-crossed lovers, no casualties of circumstance. This wasn’t the movies. They were just two people in a moving car; and she hated herself for ever wishing they could be something more.

  The currency of sympathy in the face of tragedy is a strange thing. There were a million girls like Alex when she was growing up. Lousy mother, absent father, no money, no one cares. Alex’s day-to-day existence went by unnoticed. No one saw a damn thing. Not the teachers in school. Not the priests at church. Not the pillars of the community, the same respected ones who would later cheer her resurrection as proof that miracles happen. Growing up, Alex didn’t enjoy many happy days. Few friends, she led a solitary life. When she grew into her looks, the boys came around, but not the kind of boys you wanted coming around, not the boys who stayed. There were plenty willing to use you for a night. They’d say what they had to, be as sweet as they needed to be until they got what they wanted, then they’d throw you away like yesterday’s trash. No one saw the real her. No one really tried. Until Riley, and that only happened because of Parsons.

  As bad as those three days and nights locked in the basement were, as frightened as she was, Alex could list fifty memories that had hurt as bad, had inflicted as much damage. But no one cared about those. They weren’t as sensational. No one notices a life lost in the cracks. People can see physical injury. Busted arms and black eyes are tangible, quantitative. Emotional wounds are abstract, subjective. Broken bones heal. The other kind of pain lasts a lifetime. Her tenth birthday, having to drag Denise out of the Tic-Tac Club because there was nothing in the fridge but a wilted head of lettuce, some mustard, and plastic beer rings. The week she spent alone when she was thirteen, after Denise and some guy (Ron?) headed to Atlantic City for the weekend, leaving twenty bucks for food, money she spent on pizza and soda the first night, surviving on rice and Ramen for the next six, wondering if her mother was coming home, and not knowing if she was better off one way or the other. Parsons? Parsons was a bruise among scars.

  She’d been scared when she woke up on that cold concrete. She could taste the chemicals burning her throat. She was hungry and alone, and she knew horrid things awaited her. But Parsons never came for her, never touched her. Of course she had no way of knowing he’d already been picked up, having traded her whereabouts for leniency. In the end, time had undermined the fear she felt. With so much trauma packed into such a short span, it made the denial easier. After a while, she’d checked out, gone somewhere else, somewhere far away. There’s only so much torment the mind can withstand. Maybe that was where she’d honed the ability to separate space and time. Alex could divorce herself from the situation, pretend it was just another episode of Law and Order: SVU.

  And, when it was over, there had been an unexpected benefit, a perk. To the town of Reine, Alex Salerno became a celebrity. Her life changed when she rose from that bunker. Alex Salerno suddenly mattered. To the town, its people, an entire region. She personified hope.

  Until Kira Shanks.

  If Alex had been hope, Kira Shanks came to represent something else. The mystery surrounding her disappearance, the horror that had latched onto Alex by proxy. After Kira Shanks, when people saw Alex, they saw a dead girl walking. Triumphant tales rewritten, no one emerged victorious; there could be no happy endings. There were only the ghost stories told by parents to frighten children about boogeymen who waited in the dark to snatch unwitting prey from the safety of their beds. So behave, eat your vegetables, listen to Mom and Dad, go to sleep on time, or what happened to those girls will happen to you, too.

  Riley said something that snapped her out of her head. As was often the case, Alex had lost a huge chunk of time, unaware of how long they’d been driving. Could’ve been ten minutes. Could’ve been two hours.

  They now sat parked in front of a large, brick building. Towering, institutional, white. A hospital.

  “What are we doing here?”

  “You’re so interested in Benny Brudzienski,” Riley said, pointing up at the high windows. “Thought you’d like to say hi.”

  Outside the car, she patted down her bomber for cigarettes, scanning the grounds. No tall fences. No razor wire. Not even an overweight, middle-aged security guard holding a peashooter. Just doors people could walk out of any damn time they pleased.

  “This is where they keep a man guilty of murder?” Alex cupped her hands and struck a match. “Must be nice.”

  While Alex scrambled between bartending jobs in the city, fighting off drunken come-ons, cobbling together a livable wage by walking dogs, selling pills, any other part-time gig she could land to make rent on an undersized, overpriced room in someone else’s house, a monster like Benny Brudzienski got to spend his days in a furnished pad, courtesy of the state. Three squares a day, a warm bed, free housekeeping, probably cable TV, too.

  “Put that out,” Riley said, pointing at the sign that forbade smoking within twenty feet of the hospital entrance.

  Alex took a last, long drag and flicked the butt into the lot, even though there was an ashcan by the automatic doors.

  Riley handled sign-in, exchanging IDs for visitors’ badges. Alex meandered around the lobby, which wasn’t much different than any other waiting room. Like they were visiting Grandma at the Sunnyside Retirement Home. Old People magazines and National Geographics with original addresses torn off the front spread across bleached-wood tables in between cushy chairs and fake ficus trees. Department store artwork hung on walls, askew. Maybe she should feel lucky. At least the man who kidnapped her had been put in a regular prison where inmates meted out their own brand of justice. Alex heard Kira’s parents left Reine after the tragedy. It couldn’t have been easy knowing the man responsible for their daughter’s death had copped to an insanity plea, enjoying all the spoils of hospitalization over incarceration.

  Riley called Alex’s name—she’d drifted to the other side of the room, debating whether to re-center a photograph of a sunflower. He was directing her to the elevator, doing the hand-winding thing again, which made her want to beat her fists against the wall.

  He stood at attention, holding the doors open. Stepping inside, Alex could feel his anger directed at her. What had she done? She had been the one wronged, not him. He’d abandoned her, not the other way around. Now he was more concerned with Benny Brudzienski catching a bad break?

  They waited to be buzzed in at the set of locked taupe-colored doors. All the walls were painted similar unthreatening hues. Light pinks. Soft tans. Rounded corners instead of sharp edges. Nothing too jarring to incite the lunatics.

  “You’re taking me to see a bunch of psycho killers? Sure know how to treat a girl.”

  “This isn’t a date.” Riley punched the buzzer and pulle
d the door.

  Another checkpoint waited for them. An orderly in white sat secured behind a cage. He sifted through a large ring attached to his belt and unlocked the gate. There was a loud metallic clang as the heavy steel door caught rollers, cranked open and disengaged. Even the Royal Motel had key cards. The jangling metal harkened back to the days of shock therapy and lobotomies, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, an ice pick jammed between the eyes to quell hysteria.

  On their way in, a nurse was walking out. Her night shift over, she handed off a chart to a young, black man.

  In the large, communal area, sedated patients slumped over tables bolted to the floor. Some fumbled with their hands, rolling one over the other in a never-ending game of baker’s man. Others pulled at tufts of hair like they were plucking lint from the carpet, fleas from a dog, monkeys delousing. You could smell the crazy soon as you stepped on the ward.

  “Is everyone like this?”

  “It’s a psychiatric hospital.” Riley pointed across the room, where a large, bald man slouched in a chair propped by the window. A long scar rivered the back of his skull, punctuated by a sizeable divot in the center. He watched big black birds perched on power lines. As Alex drew nearer, she saw he wasn’t watching birds. Head lolled to the side, he stared beyond them, over the pasture, into the distance, at nothing.

  Alex turned back to Riley. “That’s him?”

  “Say hi to Benny Brudzienski.”

  She took a tentative step closer, like you might a wounded wild animal, unsure whether stillness was a ruse, a ploy before the beast pounced. But Benny Brudzienski wasn’t going anywhere. He looked different than the man she recalled shuffling around town. Older, of course, but moreover his body was losing its containment, years of inactivity collapsing form into a gelatinous blob. Alex waved a hand in front of his face. No response, not even a blink. His face remained a blank slate, eyes glassy, lifeless. The light was on but nobody was home.

  Sticking her hands in back pockets, Alex turned to Riley. “They have him pumped full of meds. I knew a girl like that down in the city. Schizo. Overdosed on Thorazine. She looked like this.”

  “They found him like that,” Riley said. “After that mob came after him with pitchforks.”

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “Catatonic.”

  “From the beating?”

  “Possibly. Even the doctors aren’t sure. They say sometimes a person can experience something so disturbing, it pulls them under, into an abyss, where they are lost in the fog forever.”

  “Disturbing? Like maybe witnessing rape and murder, firsthand?”

  “Maybe,” Riley said, not baited by the sarcasm.

  “Or maybe he’s a big, fat faker?” Alex peered over her shoulder to see if her jab registered but Benny Brudzienski did not stir.

  “Benny’s mental state was already compromised.”

  “Compromised?”

  “Stunted, slowed. Mentally deficient. Whatever you’d like to call it. He wasn’t playing with a full deck. Had a fifty-six IQ. Doesn’t matter how you classify the condition. The attack didn’t do him any favors. He hasn’t said a word since whoever it was took a run at him.”

  “Didn’t they find Kira Shanks’ blood all over his clothes?”

  “They found her blood, yes.”

  “And his?”

  “Yes. They found his blood, too.”

  There was no point in Riley denying what Alex read in the papers; it was public record. But she knew Riley wasn’t giving her anything else.

  “So, what?” Alex said. “He was all messed up in the head before Kira Shanks goes missing, now he can’t talk? Great. They wheel him up to the window, let him look at the pretty scenery. That it? Gets to sit in this place instead of a prison? Access to free food, water, shelter. Doesn’t seem like such a bad deal, if you ask me.”

  “No one asked your opinion.”

  “Why did you bring me here?”

  “You come back to town, out of the blue, start harassing the Brudzienskis—”

  “I was not harassing anyone—”

  “Asking questions about Kira Shanks, Benny. Me.”

  “Maybe I missed my hometown?”

  “After not responding to my phone calls or emails?”

  “Is that what’s bothering you? Feeling jilted? What happened to the loyal, doting husband?”

  “I wrote you as a friend. I care about you.”

  “Sure you do.”

  “Whatever you’ve got going on in there.” Riley gestured at her body, head to toe and then back again, like the entire vessel were infected. “It is going to kill you. Feeling like everyone abandoned you.”

  “Not everyone, Sean.”

  “I wasn’t the one who left.”

  Alex stepped to him. He didn’t back down. Strange, to have this moment play out here, in the state looney bin, in front of a fat psycho killer melting in his chair, but she didn’t care; she’d waited too long.

  She stared into his eyes. “Tell me it didn’t mean anything.”

  “It didn’t mean anything.”

  For the first time, there was a crack in the hard veneer, and she felt him soften, his resistance begin to melt. She wanted him to kiss her. Alex moved closer. “Your wife feel the same way?”

  “I confessed everything to Meg a long time ago. And she’s forgiven me.”

  She reached for him. He caught her hands.

  “I’m not seventeen anymore.”

  Riley let go, backing away, watching her like she were unpredictable, untrustworthy, adversarial. Unbelievable. Her. Inside this killing field.

  “Come on,” he said, “I’ll take you back to your hotel.”

  “I’m not going anywhere with you.”

  “Do you know where we are? How far we drove while you daydreamed?”

  “I don’t care.”

  “You can’t stay here. This isn’t a place you visit. Understand? You’re only here because you’re with me, and now I’m leaving. Let’s go.”

  Alex jammed her hands in her bomber jacket.

  “Real mature, Alex.”

  She jutted her chin forward, flashing a phony grin.

  “You still can’t stay here.”

  “Fine. I’ll walk.”

  When Alex passed Benny Brudzienski, she leaned down low, so close to his ear she could smell the sick on him. “You might have everyone else fooled,” she whispered, “but I know what you are. And you’re going to burn in a hell.”

  Riley reached over to hurry her along.

  “Don’t fucking touch me!”

  The orderly twitched at his desk. Riley showed his hands.

  Alex smoothed her bomber, regained her cool, then patted Benny Brudzienski on his meaty shoulder. “Enjoy the view, sicko.”

  That’s when she made her mistake.

  She looked into his eyes.

  BENNY BRUDZIENSKI

  I will always remember her this way. Beneath the big oak trees. She looks down on me and smiles. No one ever smiles at me. Not like that, not anymore. When I was little they used to. But then I turned into the thing I am now, a thing that people pity or fear. She is new in town and does not know better. I have never seen anything so beautiful in my life. I want to protect her, wrap her up in a box, keep her safe forever.

  I am not stupid. Dad thinks I am stupid. My brothers, Dan and Wren. Teachers, classmates, cops, the bakery shop owner, Mr. Miano. They do not use that word. Not around me, at least. They say I am slow, challenged. They say I am special. But they think I am stupid. I can see it in their pitiful expressions when I slog past, in the way they pat my head and say, “Good boy, Benny.” Like I am a big, dumb dog. But when I close my eyes I dream too. I cannot write the things I feel or say the words I think. Ideas come out as grumbles, grunts, groans. The harder I try, the more frustrated I get. I do not try to speak much anymore. My dreams stay trapped deep down inside me. But I feel.

 
And I watch. I listen. No one notices me so I am invisible. I can be everywhere, at all times. I can see and hear everything.

  Her name is Kira. She moved here with her family from Buffalo. She is my brother Dan’s age, in his grade. I hear my brother talking about her to his friends every night on the telephone, and I can hear the excitement in his voice when he mentions her name. He says he is in love. I have never heard my brother talk about other girls like this. He talks about girls all the time because he plays football and is very popular. Wren is a couple years older and plays football too. But for the college team. Both my brothers are many years younger than me, each with strong shoulders and chins like our father, arms roped with muscle and sturdy hands. They are the sons Dad and Mom wanted. I think Dad and Mom were scared to have another child after the way I came out, which is why they waited so long to try again. I do not blame them for the way they look at me. I once heard Dad tell some men that they left me in the oven too long. He meant the place they keep babies at the hospital, the incubator. Said the heat got turned to high. The other men laughed but I do not think he was trying to be funny. He looked sad when he said it. There is something broken inside me. I am different. But I have good in me, too. For instance, I am strong. Really strong. Before Dad gave up on me being a regular boy, he used to call Mom out to watch me lift firewood in the yard. This was when I was very young, before my brothers were born.

  Dad would say, “Mom, watch Ben! Watch how much he can lift!” Then he would turn to me, say, “Go ahead, son. Show your mother how much firewood you can lift.”

  I would bend down and scoop up seven, eight hunks of wood, logs thick as tree trunks, and Dad would say, “Hold on,” as he piled on four, five, six more. My legs did not buckle under the weight. Mom would stand on the porch and clap. My hands would get bloody and raw from the snow and cold, but I would cart the whole haul, heave it on the pile by the woodshed, and go back for more. I did not care about the pain. I would have done it all day to see them proud of me. I liked being good at something. Dad used to say I could crush the life out of a cow if I wanted to. I do not know if that is true. I never tried. I never wanted to.