The Enchanted (11 page)

T
he warden comes two days later. I've been sitting with the blanket over my head. The trays have fallen willy-nilly on the floor, spilling untouched food.

“I heard what happened.” The warden stands outside my cell. “Striker's an asshole.”

They carried Striker off to the hole. It didn't have anything to do with me. The guards don't like shit. It has germs. When I first came here, one inmate shit-bombing another wasn't such a big deal, but now, with all the hepatitis and AIDS and staph infections, the guards get mad when someone shit-bombs another.

I keep my thin arms over my face under my blanket. I can feel the scabs starting to twitch where I tore out my hair. Now I know what it means when they say someone feels adrift, without moorings, when the most precious thing in life is gone.

The warden sighs. “People can be assholes sometimes.”

There is nothing left.

“I bought something for you,” the warden says.

The warden drops a small book with a white jacket through the slot. It is so new, I can smell the ink. The book falls as one stiff entity to the dirty stone floor. No pages flap, because the book has never been opened. The spine is unbroken.

I have never seen a brand-new book. I peer under the blanket through what remains of my raggedy hair.

The book has landed so the title is visible on the floor.
The White Dawn
it says.

I cannot help myself. I scramble off my bunk to rescue it. It cannot lie on the befouled floor. I grab it with long yellow nails. I hold it tight to my chest, feeling the stiff gloss of the cover under my fingertips. The smell of new paper and ink is like heaven.

My heart is beating, and now I know why they say beating like a drum. It is the drumming sound of blood running to all corners, flooding my body with the magic of the words inside. I scramble back on my cot and cover my head once again with the blanket, the book pressed against my thundering heart.

I want to tell the warden thank you, but of course I can't talk.

“H
ow are you, Mom?”

This is what the lady always says when she visits her mom, and every time she says the word, it breaks her heart into pieces that she has to pick up in her hands and shove back in her chest.

Her mom has dried crumbs on her lips and a vacant look in her eyes until she realizes it is her daughter. The lady takes her mom's hand. It is cold, and she rubs it. Her mother wakes up to the world and starts complaining. This is what the aides say about her mom, too. She is a Grade A complainer.

Today her mom wants to complain about another resident at her disability home. She believes that the resident stole the perfume the lady gave her for Christmas, even
though the aides have told her a million times that no one stole your perfume, you used it all up. But her mother is like that. She perseverates, is the medical term, which is fancy talk for saying getting stuck in a hell of an annoying way.

The lady listens to her mom talk and talk and talk and feels the old dull ache inside her. This is her mother—the one who gave birth to her, pushed her from her canal. Breast-fed her, she was told, until she was almost two. Loved her, in her own way. Fed her when reminded, cuddled her when she cried. Forgot her at the park. Never knew how to take her to a doctor. Misunderstood thermometer readings. Called the ambulance for colds but let broken bones go untreated. Couldn't set an alarm clock so her daughter never got to school on time. Never bought a toothbrush or read her a book or cooked a recipe. But would hug and kiss her and loved her beyond all measure. All the usual stuff of growing up with a mom with an IQ of 69, the lady thinks.

“Is everything okay, Mom?”

She has been her mom's caretaker since she was five. That was when she realized that her mom was one of them—a retard. The ones everyone made fun of. Even nice normal people on television make fun of retards. Short bus, 'tard, retard, she has heard them all.

She loved her mom anyhow. She wanted to protect her mom from the people who would make fun. So she learned how to cook and clean. She took care of her mother, and her mother's boyfriends took care of her: a circle of sickness and despair.

She was never one of them—never one of the normal people who teased and jeered and made fun of her mom in the store, following behind them and mocking her waddle-walk or the way she talked. She didn't want to be one of her mother's friends, either—the crazies and the slow learners and the strange men who you thought cared even as they shamed you. She could remember their names as easily as she recalled the names of the men she knew on the row. Danny, David, Alfonso. Robert and Joe.

Her mother seemed to wear an invisible beacon when the lady was a child. Even a trip on the bus could be a hazard—invariably, some creep would want to sit next to the retarded woman and her pretty daughter. How many times she had hopelessly tugged her mom's dirty sleeve only to be shushed—you be quiet!—her mom thinking the nice man wanted to talk to her, when it was really the tiny dark-haired girl sitting next to her whom he met with his gloaming eyes.

She realized early on that if she told anyone what her mother let happen to her, they would take her away from her mom. She was thirteen when she told a school counselor, because she was afraid of getting pregnant. It was a day that haunts her still for the scalding sense of having failed her mother. When the police arrived at the school nurse's office to interview her, she looked in their sober faces and realized she was never going home again. She was sent to a foster home for sexually abused girls. Her only consolation was she was able to find her mother again, years later, and get her in this nice disability home.

“You okay, Mom?”

This is her mom, this woman with thinning hair and a squat body. This is her mom, with breath like ripe apples and breasts that lie unhammocked on her chest. A woman who let men come and go through her door for years, to molest her baby. Not out of evil but for a reason that's harder to accept: She didn't know better.

“I brought something for you,” the lady gently says to her mom.

She pulls two Barbie dolls from her bag. Her mom always loved dolls. Her earliest memories as a toddler were playing Barbies with her mom. They would play for hours in the sun-splashed living room on the old ripped couch, under the shifting patterns of the torn tablecloth curtains. Finally, she would get hungry and go into their dank kitchen and climb on the counters to find something to eat.

Someone should have taken care of you, too, Mom.

She delights to see her mom's hazel eyes light up at the sight of the flaxen-haired plastic dolls. The two sit at the visiting room table and begin to play. An aide passes by, and a soft light comes into her eyes.

“Who are we today?” the lady asks her mother. She has an image of the priest sitting with them at the table. It is a surprising image but not a bad one. She thinks he would be kind.

“Princesses.” Her mother giggles.

“Yes. Princesses,” the lady says.

I
sit in my cell and remember the psychiatrist I saw back when I was a kid, when they sent me to the mental hospital. I was maybe twelve at the time; I'm not sure, exactly. Time had stopped passing. I was safe. No one tried to make me talk.

The psychiatrist was young. He had blue eyes that were sunburned around the corners, and his hair was sun-bleached. He looked like a surfer. On his desk was a dried Play-Doh sculpture decorated with finger-paints. I thought maybe someday I could put a sculpture on his desk. He would brag about me to his friends. He would say my name and smile.

He didn't ask me to talk. He smiled and passed me a piece of paper. I took the stub of pencil he offered. I applied the pencil to paper and pressed as if my dreams were leaking out.

“Show me,” he said.

I slowly drew a picture for him and silently handed it over.

He looked at the picture for a long time, and then he raised his eyes to me. The look he gave me was of infinite compassion. It was the first time anyone in my life had ever looked at me like that. Like he understood me.

“Where?” he asked.

I remember looking out his window to the freedom outside, out past the chain-link fence topped with barbed wire and the tiny plot of grass inside and the metal swing that no child ever rode.

I tapped my chest. It was inside me.

He nodded as if that made perfect sense.

He didn't ask the questions the others had asked, about why I didn't talk and what had happened to me and why I bit and growled and ran. He just sat back in his chair and looked at me for a long time.

I saw myself through his eyes. I saw a skinny boy with wild hands and wilder eyes.

“I wonder if we can help you,” he said.

I shook my head.

His eyes met mine for a long time. Then we both looked out the window to the freedom we both knew I should never have.

T
he lady visits with York once a week now. She tells herself she doesn't have time; she should be working nonstop on his case. But she promised to build him a castle, the safe place he needs to tell his secrets, just like all the other clients. He may even change his mind.

Today the sun is weak and honey-colored. York smiles at it with his funny-notched teeth. He doesn't care about what she has been doing on his case. He wants to talk about himself.

He speaks of the little things that are coming back to him. “It's funny how being close to death helps you remember,” he says. “There was this school bus would come pick up all the kids in Sawmill Falls to take them to the school in Squiggle Creek.” He tells how he would
wait for the bus outside the shack where he lived with his mom at the end of a dirt road. Sometimes the bus came, but most of the time it did not. He talks about a teacher who taught him how to count using dots. He talks about Auntie Beth and how she cooked a mean fried chicken on that old black stove back in the day. “Hell of a cook,” he says, and the lady wonders how much of this was imagination born of hunger.

He talks about his mother. “She was a good mom,” he says defensively.

The lady nods. “She loved you,” she says simply.

“Yeah. People don't get that.”

“Why not?”

“Because—you know.”

“Love isn't stopped by illness,” the lady says gently. “Not yours or hers.”

York gives her a startled glance and then nods. He is close now.

“She tried—she did,” the lady says, so softly. “She couldn't. But she loved you. And you loved her. No matter what you did later.”

His eyes are growing darker.

“The ones who came to visit—they didn't love your mom.”

Now she sees the rage. It is right there, behind the glittering eyes.

York begins speaking in a low voice. It is a voice that reminds her of birds that sing after dark.

“I got older, you know, puberty, and it was like electric
flashes went off in my head,” he says. “I had these—strange currents.”

“Yes.”

“It started when I was about twelve. I had been eating dirt—I was hungry, okay—and I thought maybe a strange walnut seed had planted itself inside me, you know, right inside me above my parts. I thought maybe the walnut had sprouted.”

She has to be so careful, each step. “What did the walnut seed become, York?”

He looks anguished. “A hard tree that wanted to push and push.”

She bows her head, listening. Storms blow through her. What is it in our world that breeds such howling despair?

“Lots of times I go to sleep and think tomorrow will be the day I wake up and feel sorry,” York remarks. “But when I wake up, I never feel sorry.”

She raises her damp eyes. “Could you?”

“How would it matter?”

She thinks how the attorneys who hire her don't understand. They don't understand that men like York were damaged long before they got here, damaged by what they did, then damaged by years spent living in the isolation of the dungeon. The attorneys think that getting them off death row will turn these damaged creatures into walking, talking real people with rounded edges—real people who can take a deep breath that doesn't hurt their soul.

Men like York are like the sightless fish that live in caves deep underground. Hauled above, they will perish.

“I understand why you want to die,” she tells York.

“Most people say that,” he says.

“I'm not talking about living on death row,” she says. “I meant I would want to die if I were you.”

He stares at her. There is heat in his hawk eyes. “Yeah? Why? Because of what I did?”

“Yes.”

The anger in his eyes passes and is replaced with sadness. “I don't like having to be nice, especially to a pretty lady like you, but I'm willing to do it this once. I'll ask you please.”

“Please what?”

“Walk on out of here and let me die.”

W
hen a man like York says he feels no remorse, I believe him. How can men like us really know what that word means? We hunt around inside ourselves like squirrels trying to find nuts, picking up each emotion and asking ourselves, “Is this remorse? Is this guilt?”

Men who have not been violated don't understand what it is like to have the edges of your body blurred—to feel that every inch of your skin is a place where fingers can press, that every hole and orifice is a place where others can put parts of their bodies. When your body stops being corporeal, your soul has no place to go, so it finds the next window to escape.

My soul left me when I was six. It flew away past a flapping curtain over a window. I ran after it, but it never came back. It left me alone on wet stinking mattresses. It left me alone in the choking dark. It took my tongue, my heart, and my mind.

When you don't have a soul, the ideas inside you become terrible things. They grow unchecked, like malignant monsters. You cry in the night because you know the ideas are wrong—you know because people have
told
you that—and yet none of it does any good. The ideas are free to grow. There is no soul inside you to stop them.