A Good and Happy Child (13 page)

My mother gripped my shoulders. Even my scholarly mother was not immune to the acute embarrassment I was causing her.

“George, sit down!” she hissed.

“He crawled under the car and sawed away the brake line!” I cried again, and this time, I raised my right hand into the air, in front of my own eyes, and looked at it. There was a smear of black grease across my palm. I gave one more gulp of desperate, keening laughter, then collapsed into the chair under the pressure of my mother’s full force. Abby escaped to fetch ice water.

The murmuring began instantly. My words and the car crash outside did not quite fit together yet—but some people already matched my words to the event and sensed something very wrong. Abby returned with the water. I drank it in gulps, and it did calm me down. I was lucid enough to remember pretty clearly some man in the gear of a Roman general come into the room and announce, distressed: a g o o d a n d h a p p y c h i l d

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“Tom Harris crashed into another car at the intersection. They’re sending the ambulance.”

My mother let out a whimper. I remember most clearly of all Abby Gold saying to my mother and me, in a voice full of friendship but also of warning:

“I think you better go.”

n o t e b o o k 8

The Quiet Room

Ahandful of facts are for sure. We sat in the car, and my mother yelled at me,
What did you do? What did you do?
I did not answer. I was swimming on the verge of consciousness. We screeched out of the darkened clearing Freddie had commandeered as a parking lot—the other vehicles left behind us were chrome ghosts glinting here and there under the moon. At the bottom of the drive, pink lights glowed—flares set by a policeman in a broad hat, who waved traffic around the accident—along with red ones, rotating on the roof of an ambulance. Then we were gone. The rest is a nasty memory, pictures jammed together like frames of film soldered into a continuous, confusing whir. First my mother drove us home, and I lolled on the living room sofa, where I heard my mother speaking urgently on the phone, stamping and gesturing, then slamming it down. I faded out, then she was rousing me to get in the car again. We passed the sign indicating a right turn for the A. P. Hill Hospital. My mother spoke to the attendant, a hick lady with curly hair, a potbelly, and white sneakers. Mom came and sat down next to me. Why are we here? I asked her.
Someone’s got to take a look at you.
A doctor? I said. I feel fine.
You drank wine tonight,
Mom said.
I’m going
to kill Freddie.
Dad chose that wine, I said, and she did not reply.
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We saw Abby Gold and Clarissa. Why were they here? They huddled together by the mouth of the corridor leading to the treatment rooms and the ER. My mother gathered herself, traversed the waiting room and whispered in conference with them. She returned wearing a sad, lopsided smile.

“They don’t know how he is yet,” she said. It dawned on me she was referring to Tom Harris. “Mm.”

Another figure crossed the room, coming for me. The social worker was forty, thin, in a hospital smock over blue jeans.

“Are you George?” she drawled, then gave a smile-at-the-child smile. “Why don’t you come with me, now?” I followed her to a consulting room, sat on the examining table as she started asking questions, making notes with a ballpoint pen. Each question seldom seemed connected to the last.

“Have you been drinking alcohol tonight?”

Hermitage 1971, the year I was born, my father picked out the bottle, my father was dead.

“Is this your first time drinking?”

I had a sip of beer once (very proud—Miller High Life in a can, watching
In Her Majesty’s Secret Service
on television one Friday night with Dad while Mom was away).

“Do you ever smoke cigarettes or any other substance? Sniff glue?

Inhale paint fumes?”

No.

Then they got harder.

“Do you know why you’re here?”

No. (Rather indignant: Why
was
I there?)

“A friend of your family’s was in a car accident tonight. Do you know how he got hurt?”

No.

“Did you have something to do with him getting hurt?”

I don’t know.

“Do you have a reason to want to hurt him?”

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No—I don’t know—maybe.

“Why is that?”

I don’t
like
Tom Harris. (Petulant, childish.)

“Why is that?”

He killed my father.

“He killed your father, and that’s why you want to hurt him?”

I don’t know.

“Did you want to hurt him tonight? Maybe scare him a little?”

No. Well . . .

She waited, ballpoint poised.

My father told me to.

“Before he died?”

No.

A slight pause of comprehension before the ballpoint touched the page.

“Your father told you to hurt him,” she said. “Your father who’s dead.”

I remember going to sleep on the examining table, rousing a few times. I woke . . . my mother huddled in the doorway, speaking with the social worker, who then came at me with a glass of ferociously cold water and a pill that she forced down my throat. I woke: I was at home, in my bedroom, my mother packing my underwear (white briefs, Fruit of the Loom) into a bag. I woke: a floodlit truck stop on the highway. When I woke up at last, a real waking up, it was dark, the middle of the night, and I had a headache and a desperate need to pee. I was in strange pajamas, in a bed with a chrome rail. I found my way to a little bathroom, my feet padding on cold, hard-tile floors. I peed, went back to bed, carrying with me from the disinfectantscrubbed bathroom an unmistakable smell: hospital. I was in the Psychiatric Unit of the University of Virginia Medical Hospital. I had made it to Charlottesville after all. a g o o d a n d h a p p y c h i l d

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r r r

The windows had blinds with one of those chain pulls; I tugged them aside with a swish. I was on a high floor overlooking the hospital’s utility outbuilding; beyond were more hospital rooms and some trees, gray and huddled together like naked prisoners. I sat on the heater (the boxy kind, set in the window). I touched the frost forming on the window with my fingers.

I sat there a long while.

They came slowly at first, like the first drops of rain when you’re taking a stroll which you ignore, but which increase, suddenly, rapidly, even violently, until before you know it your shirt is soaked, your vision is blurred, and you a find a rainstorm thrashing you: the little details from the last week, two weeks, two months, which crept, then crowded and pushed into my memory. From my tantrum with Tom Harris in the kitchen, to the freakish, horrible phrases of the night before—
He
did it by cutting the brake line
—all the nightmare clues came back to me. I dabbed a spot on the glass with my fingers, recalling facts suddenly available to me after a night of sleep uninterrupted by night noises or voices or visions.

I sat there so absorbed I scarcely noticed my bottom burning on the heating unit. And when I finally pulled away, I saw what I’d created: the window was a mosaic of smudges. I must have been at it for close to an hour, intent, placing a smudge for every day I’d “missed.” I finally took in my surroundings. The green institutional paint. The heavy wire mesh over the windows (to keep people from breaking them? jumping out?). And a roommate.

He had swaddled himself in sheets, so that only his face protruded. The opened blinds allowed the sunrise to cast its dull blanched light onto his features. He was a black boy, younger than I, with an innocent face and rounded forehead, and pink fingertips poking daintily over the top of the sheets, which he held in a sleepy grip. But his face had been
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scarred. More than scarred—slashed. A long, pink wound disfigured him from the corner of his left eye, across his mouth, to the right side of his chin. It was ugly and quite fresh, a few weeks old. I later found out his sister had cut him in a rage; yet it was he, who, in the ensuing weeks, had tried to kill himself—out of shame about his scar, anger at his sister, who knows—and had been hospitalized, medicated, observed, and, occasionally, restrained. His name, I learned later, was Joe. Joe had awakened, and was staring at me.

“Hi,” I said hoarsely.

“Go away,” he said.

After another hour alone with my thoughts—which came slowly, but with plodding clarity, like the words of a determined dumb kid who wants to make certain he gets it right—the nurse came, told me “the doctor” was waiting for me, and I went to see a psychiatrist named, with a comical aptness, Dr. Gilloon.

Tall, lean, with thick salt-and-pepper hair, he wore glasses, as well as a (then-unusual) set of adult braces. These gave his speech an unintentionally slack, couldn’t-care-less quality. This was unfortunate, since, while clearly a bright man, Dr. Gilloon nonetheless strained to show any ordinary social warmth. He compensated for this by furrowing his brow often, no doubt wishing to convey sympathy and concern. But of course he only made you think you were crazy. He first asked me if I knew where I was. I pointed out there was a black stencil reading “University of Virginia Medical Hospital” on his smock. He asked me if I knew my name, the current president, the day of the week. I did.

“George, I’m going to name three objects, and I’d like you to repeat after me: pencil, radio, butterfly.”

“Pencil,” I said. Words came with difficulty. “Radio, butterfly.”

“Very good. Do you think you can remember those for me?”

“Okay.”

“Okay. So, how are you feeling today, George?”

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“I’m sort of melancholy.”

“Melancholy,” he repeated with a touch of incredulity. I guess he didn’t hear that one too often on the children’s ward. “Why melancholy?”

“Well . . .” My brain felt like it had been scrubbed with Ajax: clean, but chemical; stripped. No answer came.

“Do you know why you’re here?”

“Because of the party?”

Dr. Gilloon pursed his lips. “Why don’t you tell me what happened?”

“Car accident,” I said, with effort.

“Do you remember that?”

“I heard it.”

“What about before the accident? Remember anything?”

“Not specifically.”

“Did you have something to do with it?”

“Not sure.”

Dr. Gilloon furrowed his brow.

“Tell me about the man who was in the accident . . . Tom Harris.”

He consulted my chart.

“He’s a friend of my parents . . . my mom’s friend.”

“Do you like him?”

“He’s spooky.”

“Spooky?”

“He thinks things he doesn’t say.”

“What kind of things?”

I shrugged. “He stares at me.”

“Last night,” said Dr. Gilloon, consulting my chart again, “you mentioned to the ER nurse that your deceased father told you things about Tom Harris. Does your father talk to you?”

“No.”

“Then what did you mean . . .”

“Only once.”

“How did he talk to you?”

“What do you mean?”

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“I mean, did he show up and speak to you; did you just hear his voice . . .?”

“I was kind of asleep.”

“Could you explain that a little more?”

“My dad,” I said finally, “was sitting in a room . . .”

Dr. Gilloon waited for a moment, but there was nothing more forthcoming.

“George, do you sometimes hear or see things that nobody else can?”

The hands of the wall clock buzzed. The desk beside us had lozenges and prescription pads and gauze, just like a regular consulting room.

“George?”

“I guess so.”

“Can you tell me about these times?”

“They’re like dreams.”

“Do these ‘dreams’ tell you to do things?”

“Not explicitly.”

He furrowed his brow at my use of the word
explicitly.
“Can you elaborate?”

“He doesn’t tell me. It’s more like . . . information.”

“Is this person, this ‘he’ you’re referring to, your father?”

I shook my head.

“Is this the ‘friend’ you told your therapist about?”

“He told you?”

“He did, yes. He wanted me to be able to discuss it with you. Is that okay?”

I shrugged. It was hard to care. My mind was numb—emotions felt like paralyzed limbs I was dragging behind me.

“So this friend gives you information? How?”

“When I see him.”

“In these dreams,” he prompted. I nodded. “George, can other people see your friend?”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

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“Do you see your friend right now?”

“No.”

“When was the last time you saw him?”

“It isn’t so much I see him, as I feel him.”

“What do you mean by ‘feel’ him?”

“Even when he isn’t saying anything, or doing anything, I can feel him. He’s like . . . a cloud.”

“A cloud hanging over you.”

“Yeah.”

“So he is more of a feeling than a person.”

I shrugged again.

“What about now? Do you feel him now?”

I thought a minute. “No,” I said.

“Does that make you happy or sad not to feel your friend?”

“Happy,” I said—to my own surprise.

“Why does it make you happy not to have your friend around?”

the doctor asked.

“I think he lied to me,” I said, and I realized it was true. I recalled Tom Harris’s anger from the party:
You’re messing with things you can’t
handle.
“About people.”

“What’s an example of a lie he told you?”

“He told me that Tom Harris tried to get rid of my father.”

“And you think that’s not true.”

Somebody knows, somebody wanted it.
The notion had once seemed so obvious. It took great effort to overturn it. It was like rolling over a stone. I must have drifted a long time. I found Dr. Gilloon staring at me.