A Good and Happy Child (28 page)

“Is Clarissa in trouble?”

“I don’t know,” Mom said. Her voice hardened. “I hope so.” She took me by the shoulders. “George, is there anything else?”

“Like what?”

“Has there been anything else like this? Anything you’ve seen?

Anything they’ve told you?”

I froze. If one discussion about dad’s visions provoked this uproar, what would happen if I revealed I’d taken part in an exorcism?

“You know why I’m asking, don’t you, George?”

I shook my head.

“Sweetie, this kind of talk . . . about devils and demons and visions . . . this is the kind of thing that gets people
put away.
If we mention any of this to the psychiatrists, it could ruin all your hard work. All those days taking stupid pills for nothing.” I blushed, guilty that I’d been sticking them to the wall under my bed. “We’ve got everything we need for tomorrow. Perfect attendance at school, perfect reports. Richard called me this morning and told me the tests were good. Don’t let them take you, George. You’re too good for that. You’re too good for that.” She clenched me to her. I felt her warm breath on my neck.

“Please promise me,” she whispered in a hoarse voice. I opened my mouth to speak, but no words came.

“Let’s go,” she said, suddenly pulling away.

Clarissa had entered the lobby and had drawn up short in the mouth of the corridor, carrying her briefcase. My mother pulled me
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through the glass doors. Outside the air was inky blue and freezing. Snowflakes were beginning to fall—the tiny hard kind that make
pit-
pit
noises when they land. Clarissa emerged from the doors of the clinic behind us.

“Joan!” she called.

“Mom, she’s calling you.”

“Joan, wait!”

“I hear her,” Mom said.

“
Joan,
” Clarissa called again.

“George, get in the car.”

I took my seat on the passenger side and glued my eyes to the rearview mirror. As our headlights swept the trees and driveways and the increasingly thick curtain of snow, Clarissa remained a small, forlorn figure under the lights of the clinic vestibule. When we turned the first corner, she disappeared.

r r r

My mother kept patting my leg, referring to my
perfect performance,
my grades, the reports from my teachers; kept repeating,
I knew you could
do it,
until finally I asked her nervously to please watch the road. In the summertime, the highway over the mountains to Charlottesville afforded splendid views of the lush green valley and the purplish mountains beyond. That morning, a dense fog had settled over the landscape of snow-encumbered firs, and the highway climbed steadily with nothing but white mist on either side and red taillights ahead. At last my mother, sobered by the dangerous driving, dropped the overexcited patter and focused on our journey to our checkup with Dr. Gilloon. At its peak, the road cut through gulleys of limestone that had been blasted out of the mountainside, leaving long scars. I watched the silent stone walls as we passed. Snow clung to their crags like moss. When we arrived, however, Mom seemed sprightlier than ever.
What a drive! I need a beer!
She babbled with nervous excitement about a g o o d a n d h a p p y c h i l d

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taking the afternoon to sightsee, to visit Monticello. Earlier she had drilled me, repeating how I was not to mention Tom Harris or Clarissa or Freddie. I was especially not to mention
that book.
Richard would fudge the fact that I was retaking the T.A.T. Today, everyone agreed, would be the last time in my life I heard the words
residential treatment
facility.
If Mom and Richard thought the visit would go smoothly, who was I to disagree?

We sat in the long, white waiting room. A palsied youth repeatedly bellowed a phrase: “
Ta’ it off!
” (take it off) as he tried to yank a snow boot from his foot. “That’s enough,” his mother snapped. An octogenarian man, waxy and spotted, sat in a wheelchair while his middle-aged daughter stroked his hand in silence. My mother was called first. After a time, the nurse in blue scrubs returned. “George,” she said. I passed my mother, who stood at a nurses’ station filling out forms. I sat on the examining table. Dr. Gilloon—lean, dark, and browfurrowed as ever—whipped my chart from the door and scanned it, then peered at me, scrunching his nose to keep his glasses on.

“George Davies. Taking your medication?” he asked brusquely. He face and voice conveyed no recognition. He had rubber bands on his braces. “How are you feeling?”

A battery of questions followed. Seeing anything? Voices? Thinking constantly about anything, anybody? Scribbles on the chart. Did the nurse take blood pressure, weight? No? She can do that afterward. Running behind today. Lots of patients. Therapy helping? Did I like my therapist? No scribbles on that one. Just a nod. “Good, good.”

Mumbles about my tests. Check, check, with the pencil. “Okay,” he said finally. “Let’s get your mom back.”

My mother returned. We watched the back of Dr. Gilloon’s salt-andpepper head while he hovered in the hallway, momentarily engaged in a whispered conference with a resident—a mole-covered twentysomething fellow with large, perplexed eyes. At last the doctor extracted himself from this conference, and in a single motion, shut the door, and flung himself into his chair.

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“Davies, Davies,” he said, again fixing on the chart. “He’s responding to the Thorazine,” pronounced Dr. Gilloon. “Tough doing homework with the medication?” he asked me, a little loudly.

“No, I like homework now,” I said.

He shook his head. “Haven’t heard that one before. No problems in school?”

“He’s fine. The teachers said so in his reports,” broke in my mother impatiently. “I gave all those to the administrator. He’s been getting As. Perfect attendance.”

“Tests from therapist . . . all okay,” nodded the doctor. Finally he pulled his nose out of the chart and spoke to us. “Well. That’s the good news.”

“Does that mean there’s bad news?”

“Well, yes,” said the doctor, double-checking my chart for confirmation. “There’s still no spot for him at Forest Glen. I have to apologize,” he said. “Usually they give us an indication of when a bed’s coming available. Makes it easier for everyone to plan. But,” he shrugged, “they have a new director. He’s probably bringing old patients with him and giving them priority. That’s how these things work sometimes, unfortunately . . .”

“Doctor,” my mother interrupted. “You said the tests were good.”

“That’s right.” He nodded. “This is the kind of follow-up we hope for. Means we have the right dosage, and reasonably attentive parents,”

he added, with a clinical callousness.

My mother ignored this. “So why do we care about . . .
Forest
Glen?
” She made it sound like a cheesy air freshener.

“I’m sorry?”

“I can just take George home,” she stated.

“Sure. Of course,” said the doctor, standing up. “Like I said, I apologize. You shouldn’t have much longer to wait.”

“But,” said my mother, struggling to clarify, “he doesn’t have to go.”

Dr. Gilloon’s mouth hung open for a moment and his adult braces stretched their rubber bands. He and my mother faced off now, finally a g o o d a n d h a p p y c h i l d

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understanding that after speaking at cross-purposes, they were each confronting an opponent.

“You must have misunderstood,” said Dr. Gilloon, in surprise.

“George has improved—but due to sedation. He still has to be treated.”

“He’s practically a star pupil,” fumed my mother. “What do the C students get, electroshock?”

“Mrs. Davies,” began Dr. Gilloon, controlling a rising impatience.

“George’s behavior is what we’re monitoring—not his skill at long division. He’s impulsive and unpredictable. If we don’t treat him, there’s no telling what could happen.”

“So why put us through this?” cried my mother, standing now, agitated and pale. “Why drag us back here just to rub our noses in it?”

Her voice cracked with emotion.

Dr. Gilloon’s brow furrowed, for once without seeming calculated to make himself seem nicer, or someone else crazier.

“It’s Forest Glen or an involuntary solution. I told you that on your last visit.” He lowered his voice. “I didn’t want to mention this last time, because I didn’t foresee how far you would take this. But . . .” He removed his glasses. His eyes peered out at her, green, close-set, and watery; tired eyes; all-nighter eyes. “Do you know what that means for a kid his age? We’re talking about juvenile detention. Is that your real preference, for a kid like George? A juvie home?”

My mother recoiled. “He hasn’t broken the law.”

“The people in the car accident he caused would beg to differ.”

“No one’s pressed charges.”

“
Mrs. Davies,
” he said, exasperated. “You’re missing the point.”

“
You’re
missing the point,” said my mother, her voice dry, tense.

“I’m not going to let him go.”

The argument dragged on. Nurses interrupted, poking their heads in to call him away, but Dr. Gilloon dismissed them curtly, seemingly determined to make my mother understand. He stood, he sat; he cited standards, procedure, medicine, and finally ethics. My mother grew angry. Their voices rose. At last the door opened. It was the young
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resident with the perplexed eyes, who jerked his thumb over his shoulder.
Time to go.
Dr. Gilloon’s shoulders slumped as he took a step toward the door.

“I’ll call Richard Manning,” he said. “Maybe he can explain this better than I am right now.”

“Oh, I understand perfectly,” said my mother. “You’re supposed to be helping us, but you’re telling us we have no options.”

He turned back to stare at her.

“
Doctor,
” insisted the resident.

Dr. Gilloon left, shaking his head.

In a few moments my mother and I found ourselves on the cement-and-brick plaza outside the hospital, free of that strange environment which combined airless sterility with the entropy of scuttling caregivers and complaining patients. The cold breeze bit our faces, our fingers. Snow flurries were falling again. A dozen paces from the entrance my mother stopped, as if one last line of argument had struck her, and she was contemplating charging back inside. Her coat hung on her arm. She had forgotten to put hers on. I had never taken mine off. Hospital workers passed us by. Snowflakes melted on my face and glasses. I waited for my mother.

“Still want to visit Monticello?” I asked weakly. She did not reply. N o t e b o o k 1 5

Racket Ghost

My eyes opened, but I lay rigid. I wondered whether I was being summoned out of sleep by my Friend rapping on the window with a terrible force. No: too far away. It came, a regular, rough banging, from somewhere inside the house. Maybe some pipes had frozen and backed up. I rose from bed and tiptoed to the doorway. The noise was a scraping sound. It was followed by some form of contact—the banging noise I had heard. The combination made a kind of
swish-boom.
Regular, or semiregular.
Swish-boom. Swish . . . boom.
Swishboom.
I stood and peered into the obscurity, toward the bathroom. My mother’s light flipped on. “George?” came her voice. She appeared in her own doorway, bleary and without glasses, wrapping a robe around her. “George? What are you doing up? Is that you making noise?”

“No, Mom,” I said.

She stood in confusion for a moment.

“It’s coming from down there,” I said. I took a step toward the bathroom. The noise grew louder. I reached the doorway and extended my arm into the darkened room and switched on the light. I saw it first; Mom was still putting on her glasses. The shower door—a glass one in an aluminum frame, the one through which I had
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first beheld the face of my Friend—was sliding back and forth on its track.
Swish,
it slid;
boom,
it struck the side of its frame. The hundredwatt bulbs in the overhead light burned brightly over this scene. The cheery shade of lime green on the walls smiled down upon it. The dimpled glass of the shower door shimmered in the bulb light as it slid back and forth.
Swish boom. Swishboomswishboom.

My mother and I simply stared. Then she moved toward me and swept me up in her bathrobe.

“Get in here,” she said, and hustled me into her bedroom. She had the sour smell of sleep on her. As she pulled me in, I realized all my limbs were shaking. She slammed the door and locked it.

“Call Tom Harris,” I told her. “Call Tom Harris.”

She picked up the phone. Her hands were trembling. She dialed once but screwed up.

“Hurry!” I told her.

“You’re not helping,” she snapped.

She dialed again.

“Hi, it’s me. I need you to come over here. Yes, now. It’s an emergency. No, right away. Kurt, I can’t explain now.” She shot a look at me. “No, it’s not George,” she said more softly. “Come as soon as you can.”

In the movies the noise would have stopped after the phone call was made, and the boyfriend would come over and say,
Now now, little lady,
what’s all this?
thinking we were crazy. But the sound went on and on. The shower door kept sliding and slamming, sliding and slamming. It was a fifteen-minute drive from Kurt’s place to our house. We waited in the bedroom listening to the noise, Mom in her big blue chair, me on the bed. With the light from the bedside reading lamp, I noticed the framed prints on Mom’s wall: a series of seashells, and one of a Vitruvian façade. Some stockings were laid over the arm of her wicker rocking chair. In here the sound was muffled and persistent like a prisoner digging his way out of the next cell with a pick. We both sat, ashen. But eventually we made conversation. Our words were clipped; the sentences seemed to die in the charged atmosphere. a g o o d a n d h a p p y c h i l d