The Enchanted (5 page)

Y
ork is furious that the lady has seen his aunt.

He glares at her from the wooden bars of the Dugdemona cage, his eyes like obsidian. His hands grip the bars. She can see the tensed anger in his body, the barely contained rage that lives inside so many of her clients. She is suddenly glad for the chains, glad for the cage, glad for the keepers at the door.

“You didn't have my permission to talk to her,” York hisses.

Usually, she cultivates these death row clients for months. She builds a castle for them in the Dugdemona cage where they reign as kings. They feel safe in that castle, so they can tell her their terrible, shameful secrets. From her own history, she knows how strong that castle has to be, how deep its moat of protection has to be to let a grown child tell the world buried secrets. At each and every step, she asks their permission. “Is it okay if I talk to your mom?” or “Do you mind if I visit your aunt?” She knows condemned men feel powerless. In the secret castle they build together in the Dugdemona cage, she gives them power.

But York is already scheduled for execution. She
doesn't have time to bring him along. Besides, he told her he wants to die. So she ignored this critical permission-gathering step. She realizes now that was a tactical mistake. She tells herself she needs his cooperation to do her job, if nothing else.

“I'm sorry I went behind your back,” she says.

“What did my aunt say?” His voice is naked.

“She said she still loves you, despite what you did.”

His hands drop from the cage bars. The dark eyes soften. “Auntie Beth.”

“She told me about the rabbit.”

He just looks at her. Now he is on firmer ground. Killing things is his specialty.

“Who was Troy?” she asks.

The hawk eyes get bewildered, and he pushes off the bars, and with a flash, she sees it, buried deep in his soul.

A familiar, small, sad bell of recognition rings inside her. It is only here, with men in the Dugdemona cage, that she gets to hear the bittersweet sound of that bell, ringing from her past into the present. She knows now what she needs to do.

T
he next visit with Auntie Beth comes on a Saturday.

The lady likes to travel on Saturdays. The roads are mostly clear, and the world feels like a weekend. Probably because it is, she teases herself.

The drive is even better than before. She thinks she could drink the blue-forested beauty forever, and when
she gets to the chain of lakes, she holds her breath. She stops at the same lookout to see the glittering, gorgeous waters, the tall trees around her. She hears the small sounds of a forest alive: birds, the rush of wind in the tall branches, the sound of water chapping at the shore.

Now she understands what people mean when they say they fell in love with a place. She isn't sure it is love, but it is peace. She breathes deep and lets the blue air cleanse her soul. She stops at a little bakery along the way, then a decent grocery store.

Auntie Beth is overjoyed to see her. She sees the lady has brought another bag of groceries—
You shouldn't have!
—and a small brown paper bag dotted with grease stains and emitting the most heavenly aroma of fresh donuts.

Auntie Beth ducks her head as she eats the donuts, wiping the crumbs from her mouth. The two talk about a lot of things. They talk about baking; the old woman used to make all her own bread. They talk about kids. Beth says she never had any of her own. She was a spinster. “Maybe my sister turned me off of all that,” she says. They talk about shame and life and the deep orange color of a good farm egg.

The lady tells Auntie Beth a little about herself. It is odd how comfortable she is, telling these people—the families of her clients—details about her life that she would never tell her colleagues. But she knows Aunt Beth will understand. And she knows that with the channel opened between them, Aunt Beth will share.

When Auntie Beth is ready, they talk about York's mother.

“Shirley was the sweetest little sister,” Auntie Beth says. “I was older, you know, but not by much. Those were the days! The log trucks burned up the roads back then, and one tree could fill a truck. Nowadays you got all the spotted owls and the tree huggers. I grant you, they were right, because there ain't no woods left around here anymore. Just scrub and poison oak like you see now. But back then, the town was full.”

She ruminates for a while, looking at the distant clouds from her porch. “It was the horse kick. They didn't know what to do back then. No extra rays or nothing. Just put some dressing on it. Like the vee-dees she got later. The town doctor didn't do nothing for that,” Auntie Beth spits with some venom. “By the time she had my nephew, every man in the town had her. Things happened I won't name. It was like the whole town, all the menfolk, went crazy on that girl. And the women just watched and smirked and let it happen. Even my own family.”

The lady watches as a tear floats down Auntie Beth's wrinkled face. “You know why?” the old lady asks.

The lady shakes her head.

“She was beautiful, that's why. I got a picture.”

Auntie Beth lumbers to her swollen boat feet and makes her painful way into the main room, where she opens a rickety wooden drawer and takes out an ancient photograph. She offers the photo as if it is worth more than a bar of gold.

The lady accepts it with the same reverence. It is a black-and-white photograph of a beautiful young woman with pale skin, wide eyes, and silky dark brown hair. There is something disconcerting about the blankness in her eyes. It is strange and yet an invitation. Take me, her eyes say. I am as blank and deep as the emerald lakes outside your door.

Sitting on the woman's lap is a little boy. It is York, the lady realizes, looking too young and innocent to ever be a killer. The only known photograph of him as a child has been hiding here in his aunt's shack for twenty years. Before, he was a demon without a past. Now he was once a child.

The lady can see now what Beth meant—how York was as sweet as sugar before he hardened. He had a hopeful, tremulous smile. Perhaps the photographer was promising candy when they were done.

“Just a baby back then,” Auntie Beth says, and reaches for the photograph. “Funny teeth.”

The lady broaches the subject carefully. “Maybe sometime, if you are okay with it, I can borrow that and make a copy.”

“Why, sure, I trust you,” Auntie Beth says, and goes to get a used envelope to tuck the precious photograph inside. “Anyone who knows her donuts gets my love.” And they both laugh.

S
he leaves Auntie Beth's home early enough to get back in the town of Sawmill Falls before the dinner hour. She
feels a little sick from all the donuts and the coffee Auntie Beth made, which was thin but bitter enough to cut rope. Only after she drank it did the old woman tell her, with some mischief in her eyes, that she reused the coffee grinds for weeks to save money. “I steeps them in hot water,” she said.

The town of Sawmill Falls is dusty and dead. There is the solitary store, which she already knows has one mysterious aisle devoted to boxes of dream mix coated with dust, years past any expiration date—if such stuff expires. She wanders a bit with the roar of the creek in the background. There is only one street, so there is not far to wander.

After the economy collapsed following the mill closure, the townspeople apparently tried to find other ways to make money. The two-block main street has boarded-up signs for the Bead Store Emporium and Nature's Gifts. She has come to recognize bead stores as indicators of economic doom. She peeks in the soaped window and sees empty shelves and the velvet antlers of a cheap necklace tree on the floor.

Farther down the street, she finds a single small brick building with boarded windows. A creaking sign outside has a board swinging. It advertises that the building was once the town law firm, post office, and doctor's office.

It
was
a bigger town then. The lady imagines how the loggers would come in from the hills after working for weeks in the company longhouses in the woods, to spree on liquor, and the country folk coming in from afar looking
for their mail, shy and uncertain in the big town. She could imagine the moms lining up at the post office to mail their holiday letters and the children hopping foot to foot, excited to see if the eagerly awaited Sears catalog had arrived, to be thumbed for months before Christmas. She could picture the young couples coming to town with their new babies, taking them to the doctor to be weighed and measured and inoculated.

And she could envision Shirley, traipsing the dusty street in a dirty dress, as fond as a flower, her vacant eyes turned happily to any face. The lady could imagine how the town women hated her. They saw her as different, thinking she chose to be the way she was. They didn't see the damage behind the beautiful face.

The lady realizes she has stopped. She doesn't know why she has stopped and turned around. She is staring at the creaking sign over the closed brick building. It takes her a time, listening to the raging creek off the main road. Sounds come from a distance to her in times like this, when life rages in a vacuum backward.

The dust smell climbs in her nose, and the episode passes without her falling to her knees in a full-fledged déjà vu attack, which is always embarrassing.

It is the sign. For the town doctor: Dr. Hammond.

It is the thought that has been coalescing in the back of her mind for days. York's mother was the town slut, she thinks, the brain-damaged girl who spread her knees for a nickel.

All those men and only one son?

T
he lady is close to the city when she realizes that hours have passed, and she didn't even see the highways. Night fell long ago. She was in a reverie.

She was remembering sitting under the bushes in her backyard as a child. It was her secret place. The bushes were large, overgrown laurel hedges, and inside she had made a sort of cave. She took things into the cave sometimes—a piece of soft cloth to touch, a dirty plastic toy teakettle to pretend. Mostly, she just took herself.

What did she think about during those endless hours in the laurel hedge? As a child, she made an imaginary world so real that she could feel and taste it today. Sometimes she would imagine that she and her mom lived on a magical island where the trees dripped fruit. Other times they traveled all over the world, just the two of them, like the best of buddies. In all the stories, her mom was whole and she was safe. When she left the laurel hedge, she would bend the thick green leaves back, to hide where she had been. And when she came back the next day, crawling with a sandwich she had made of stale bread with the mold cut off and hardened peanut butter from the jar, the magic world would be waiting for her.

She wonders if York had a magic world, too. A magic world away from the pain and terror of his life. She wonders if he had a safe place he could take himself, a place to shelter the tender nugget of life within, or if he was naked and open all the way, to whatever walked through his mother's door.

W
hen I read a book now, I hold it under the light above my cot. The bulb is dim in its wire cage. But if I sit just right, I can catch a segment of gray light without the wire cage marks. My eyes are getting old. I have to squeeze them sometimes to see the words.

Long ago, in the library, I sat on the table under a cloud. The little dust motes would fly in the window and hang above me like a halo or God in the sunlight.

For a long time I thought maybe those little sparks were creatures. They could be creatures almost too tiny to see, just a little taste on the tip of your tongue. Maybe God sent them, like fire creatures, like the sparks before the beginning of life, or maybe the dust that rises from your hair after you're dead. I would stop reading and crane my neck back to watch them swarm above me. The other inmates would jab each other and point, but I didn't care.

Later I read that there
are
things inside us too tiny to see. Not even a microscope can capture them. This got me thinking—if there are things inside us too tiny to see, might there be things outside us too big to believe?

I
was nine when I went into the hospital. The police showed up at the run-down hotel where my mom and I were staying. They took one step inside and saw. I remember one officer covering my naked body with his blue rain jacket before he took me to his car.

They took me to a foster home, but I kept running away—running to find my mom. Finally, the foster parents gave up. No one wanted a boy who didn't talk, a boy who sat in the corner and growled, a boy caught trying to cut open his own belly with a razor.

STATE HOSPITAL FOR THE INSANE
said the script above the front door. Back then they had a children's ward. The children's ward was a tall concrete building painted a dismal pink, with rust stains running from the bars like long red tears. In the middle of the night, we would pull our mattresses out into the hallway so the lights from the windows at either end of the hall would illuminate what the guards otherwise would not see.

It was there they said I had selective mutism and a bunch of other words like
antisocial
and
conduct
and
disorder
. I didn't agree with those words and I still don't. People try to make names for things they don't understand. They want to contain people in jars like dead babies.

I was in that place for almost ten years. I got used to it—used to the sound of soda cans clunking down the machine in the staff room late at night when the custodians came, used to the constant light in the white rooms, used to the restraints and the smell of piss when you couldn't hold it anymore, used to the lost months of Haldol and strange dreams of Thorazine, used to the terror of night, used to the parade of therapists and counselors and doctors who came through with rancid breath that smelled of coffee and anxiety, and sweaty fingers grasping my file, promising they would stay
when always they would leave, until they merged into one long watery face.