Best Boy (16 page)

“Thank you.”

TWENTY-FOUR

I
'M VERY DISAPPOINTED IN YOU,”
M
R
. R
AWSON
said, making his jaw long to show his feelings. “And I mean deeply, deeply, personally disappointed.” We were sitting in his office and had been for a few minutes. He was wearing the blue box of his suit again. He was wearing a tie. His face had unhappy feelings on it. The phone rang and he picked it up and handed it to me.

“If you ran me over and then shot me,” my brother said into my ear in a low voice, “I don't think I could have felt worse than you made me feel these last twenty-four hours.”

I'd walked away. I'd been brought back by Trooper Cullen who was a nice person and allowed me to eat my hamburger in his car. Somehow during this time I'd also become “selfish, thoughtless and indifferent to other people's feelings,” which was another thing my brother said.

A little bit later I was standing on the lawn in front of my
cottage with Raykene. Her hands were lying very gently on my shoulders and she was shaking her head slowly back and forth.

“I may know why you did it,” she said. “But what I need to know, honey, what I really, really need to know is why didn't you talk with me first?”

I shrugged my shoulders while staring at the ground.

“What happened to being the sharer-in-chief who told me everything? What happened to our quiet time and no secrets between us?”

“I don't know,” I said softly while continuing to look at the ground.

I heard her give a long sigh. “Unfortunately,” she said, “there's something else, and it's not good.”

A silence began going on and in the silence I looked up finally and saw she was making a sad face. “I just got the news ten minutes ago. The news is very sad. Greta Deane died,” she said. Water filled her eyes and began spilling down her cheeks.

“Greta Deane?” I said.

“Called back, that poor innocent soul. ‘The righteous perish,' as the Good Book says, though that doesn't make it any easier. I just hope she's found peace.” She blew her nose.

“I'm sorry,” I said.

The tears made her eyes very bright.

“You know, Todd, I was only four when my mother passed. That one memory I have of her face smiling at me? I just keep it inside me, bright like a candle. When you love someone, it's always too soon, but Greta Deane was only twenty-eight years old.”

“Ohhhh,” I said.

She looked at me while I looked away.

“It just breaks the heart,” she said.

I didn't say anything.

“But the living gotta keep doing what they been doing, and that's why you need to know another thing.”

“Yes?”

“Mike Hinton is gone for good.”

I felt something turn in my stomach behind my belt buckle.

“Mike Hinton?” I said.

“As gone as a cracked egg. He's never coming back. I just got that news as well. You know, we tried to make you two happy together, but after you left we all had a rethink about things and realized maybe we'd gotten it wrong from the start. I'm not supposed to tell you any of this, sugar, but these are special times, and you know what?”

“What?”

“That man was never on my playlist.”

“Mike Hinton”—I repeated his name to be sure—“is not coming back here, ever?”

“That's right. I just got word from Administration. And I'll tell you something else. Mr. Rawson checked out his résumé yesterday, and those medals he supposedly got in Iraq? Couldn't find 'em anywhere. You believe the nerve on that man?”

“Goodie!” I shouted suddenly. At that moment it didn't matter that I'd slept in fields and walked in stores that made me feel I couldn't breathe. It didn't matter that the not-taking Risperdal had caused me to vomit and shake or that I'd ridden in a truck with Mike the Apron and wanted to hit him in the head with a hammer. Suddenly I was grabbing my hands and sticking them between my knees and then rocking forward and back happily as hard as I could.

Raykene raised a hand to her face. She wiped her eyes while she tried to hide her smile. She said, “I know, right? But no perseveratin', you.”

Then she put her hand on my shoulder where I was still rocking and said, “Seriously, Todd, steady down, now. This is no time for rejoicing and you got a lot of ground to make up besides. First thing to know is if you ever gonna bust out or do something like it in the future, you'll be at the Dewitt Center before sundown that same day. You want that?”

The Dewitt Center was for “troublesome” villagers. It was a big enclosed building where everyone sat mainly in their small rooms with very few activities and no lawns except a concrete border that went around the building where the residents were walked by staff. They never went to the movies. They never went to the mall. They almost never left campus.

“No,” I said, “I don't.”

“Of course not. So from here on in, you gotta be extra-careful because people will be watching. Run your mouth but not your legs, all right?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.” She blew her nose again with a tissue and said, “I'm-a swing by later today and check in on you. Meantime you got your appointment with Sherrod Twist in five minutes to, uh, discuss about what happened. Move on that because you don't wanna be late, right?”

“Right,” I said.

Raykene stood looking up into the sky for a moment. “What a world,” she said softly. “What a world this is we live in.”

I watched her walk away and then I slowly turned in the direction of Sherrod Twist's office. Everyone dislikes Sherrod Twist and I do too. She's the psychiatrist who prescribes your meds. Also she's the person you see when you've done something so bad that Annie Applin can't fix it. I began walking across campus to her office but I wasn't thinking about Sherrod
Twist as I went. I wasn't thinking about Martine who I'd forgotten while I was on the road and then started thinking about lots as soon as I returned. I was thinking about Mike the Apron not ever being there again. I was thinking that it was supposed to make me feel good and it did but that the warm burst of the good feeling was already going away. The voice in my head was taking it away. The voice was telling me that he was still nearby. It was telling me he could still drive his truck into Payton late one night through the open gates and no one would stop him. It was telling me he could come into my unlocked cottage and lean close to my face, drawing his lips back over his rusty yellow teeth and hissing like the nightmare people in my head.

It had been ten days since I'd taken Risperdal and suddenly I wanted it again. I wanted the roof it made. I wanted it to muffle the voice in my brain. When I took Risperdal I could hear that voice but like it was coming through a wall. The walking in fields and stores and the policeman talking and the man in the gas station looking and the everything else that had happened in the last day and a half made me fight to stay calm as I crossed the lawn. I did this by remembering to breathe. Soon I was entering the front door of the building and climbing the stairs.

As I walked into her office Sherrod Twist looked up at me from her desk and smiled with the narrow sides of her face. She's a tall low-voiced woman who's always able to see what you're thinking and I got ready to hear her say, “You stopped taking Risperdal and look what happened.”

But instead she said, “Todd, sit down.”

“Thank you,” I said.

She said nothing. She just looked at me.

Then she looked at me some more.

“Well,” she said quietly.

I didn't say anything.

“Quite the little adventure,” she said.

“Yes.”

“A selfish adventure, don't you think?”

“I don't know.”

I was looking up at a far corner of the wall. The lines that made up that corner went on to infinity, shooting out past the stars and planets. I heard her click a pen and take out a piece of paper.

“Well how would
you
describe putting the entire Day Program in jeopardy because you felt like taking a walk? Let's talk about your motives, Todd.”

“What?”

“Why'd you do it?”

“I wanted to go home.”

“So I gather. What were you planning to do there?”

“I wanted to see my home and my parents.”

“You wanted to ‘see' your parents? See them how?” She looked at me and frowned. “They died several years ago, as I don't need to tell you, Todd.”

I shrugged my shoulders, raising my glance over her frowning face and again looking at the far corner of the wall. Corners were comforting, like bathrooms.

“I don't know.”

“I advise you to try to enter as fully as possible into the spirit of this conversation.”

“Okay.”

“Let's be honest with each other. Obviously your relationship with Mike Hinton was putting you under a lot of strain. We understand that now. We know this was a less-than-optimal situation. In weighing how to respond to what you've done we'll
certainly be factoring that in. Institutions can self-correct just like people, you know. I want you to understand that. Todd?”

“Yes.”

She leaned back in the chair and she watched me with her little green eyes.

“For how long exactly were you planning your . . . excursion?”

“I'm not sure.”

“Are you really not sure?”

I looked over her head.

“Yes.”

“I ask because in staff reports your roommate Tommy Doon says something about you having maps and plans and so forth a few weeks ago. So I can assume, Todd, you've been thinking of it at least that long?”

“Uh-huh.”

“The answer, then, is ‘a good long while.'”

“Maybe.”

“I'm not sure I see the maybe here, Todd. I'm not sure I see the maybe anywhere in this room.”

There was another silence. I kept feeling like I wasn't saying the right thing but I didn't know what the right thing was. For help I looked at the part of my hand that had the big red welt on it from biting. I could feel the hand telling me it should come into my mouth.

“You have been an outstanding member of this community for a very long time,” I heard her say. “There's a reason you're known around here as a ‘village elder.' You've been an exemplary resident here and in certain ways even a role model. This is why what you did is all the more disappointing.”

“Yes,” I said. I was waiting to hear what the threat would be. There was always a threat with Sherrod Twist. It always arrived
at the end of other things. She was sitting up in her chair and clearing her throat when I saw Martine out the window and suddenly there was an orange mist in my head and I couldn't hear what Sherrod Twist was saying any longer because all of me had just jumped through my eyes out the window. Martine was walking behind a building and laughing with a higher-functioning Developmental named Randy Atkins. I knew Randy. He used to tease me about holding my mouth open. He wore nice clothes that his parents sent him. He spoke a lot and took pictures with a camera and showed them in the Main Hall on campus. The window I was looking through seemed to move backwards and away from me until the light of it was coming towards me down a long corridor. When I heard my name called I turned away from the window but the corridor stayed in front of my eyes. At the end of the corridor I could see Sherrod Twist's mouth opening and shutting slowly.

“We're going to need to do some evaluations and possibly revisit your meds,” she was saying. “Also, there'll be a General Meeting the day after tomorrow to talk about Greta Deane where I'll expect to see you.”

A General Meeting was held every year or two when something very serious like a death happened. Everybody went, including even cleaning staff.

“Okay,” I said slowly.

“Todd, are you all right?”

“Um, can I go to the bathroom?”

All I wanted was the clear, clean ideas of the sink, the toilet, the white tiles, the pink ball that dispensed the soap. I could feel my heart beating hard. Sherrod Twist was frowning.

“You know where it is,” she said.

TWENTY-FIVE

A
FTER LOOKING AROUND CAMPUS FOR HER,
I
SAW
her later that day. She was bent over slightly and her mouth was open. Her hair looked chopped again. I was walking towards her on the lawn and I thought she didn't see me, but as I got closer Martine suddenly looked up and made a quick movement of her head in the direction of a space between two buildings. I followed her there and when we were out of sight she straightened up and shut her mouth while the eye that had been drooping suddenly opened wide.

“You!” she said and smiled.

“Hi, Martine.”

“You're famous!” she said.

“I walked along a road for two days and then the police brought me back.”

“Everybody's talking about you and the dead girl and that man you introduced me to who they threw out of here and I mean
everybody
.”

“Greta Deane and Mike Hinton.”

“I was dead once too.”

“Do you like Randy Atkins?”

“It was boring being dead. My heart stopped. Then it started again. Once I walked away from a facility too. It was called Naismith. They came and got me and shaved my head and put me in a locked ward. Randy Atkins is funny.”

“No one likes Randy Atkins.”

“Afterwards I thought I was going to get the juice.” She made a face of open mouth and wide-open eyes. “You know: buzz buzz!”

“Not even staff likes him,” I said.

The eye squinted at me. “Why'd you run away?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “I wanted to go home.”

“Are you taking the pills?”

“No.”

“Me neither but no one knows. So in public I'm all”—she slumped and her mouth hung open and even her eyelid slid partly down over her eye—“like I'm still on meds. But when I'm alone, I'm all”—she stood up straight and shut her mouth and she flashed the bright eye at me and said, “normal, see?”