Hush (6 page)

intimate.
"Helen, I don't have a lot of experience with these things, of course, but I do

think that when they happen we have to listen to our heart and do what it tells

us to do."
She nodded as if she'd just heard the wisdom of the ages. "I think you're so

right. That's what I love about you, Jack, you're so...mature."
"Maybe we ought to go to lunch and talk about it some more."
"Maybe we should." She smiled as she replied, and Jack knew they wouldn't be

breaking bread anytime soon.
8
A chubby eleven-year-old boy burst through the front door of the Bentman

Children's Center and tossed his balogna sandwich into the air. Slices of pink

meat and white bread fell as he scrambled down the steps. No more than a second

later Celia dodged the debris and called out to him.
"Harold, time-out. Harold, time-out this instant!"
She nimbly took the stairs three at a time and was just about to nab him when

Dr. Tony Weston walked around the corner of the building and neatly lifted the

boy up off the ground.
Harold Matley's legs pumped spastically in the air, as if his body were still

trying to catch up with his mind, but when Tony put him back down the boy

crumpled to the ground and his tears began to flow.
Celia kneeled beside him, placed her arm around his shoulders, and wiped away

his tears. Tony watched from his considerable height.
"Harold," she said softly, "what's bothering you today?"
He shook his head, as if he didn't want to talk. But Celia had a pretty good

idea why the boy had fled the Center.
"Are you seeing those things again?"
Now he buried his face in his hands and moved his head up and down.
"Do you think you're ready to draw them for me?" She stroked his dark curly

hair. "I'll bet Dr. Weston lets you skip group if you'll draw for me."
She glanced up at Tony and saw his pained expression. But the director quickly

relented.
"Yes, I suppose I could do that."
Harold nodded into his hands one more time, and Celia whispered to him,
"You're a brave boy. You really are."
*
Children's art covered all the walls of Celia's office, a dizzying array of

pencil and crayon drawings, along with finger paintings and watercolors. It was

an even larger collection than the one she'd hung in her studio, but a more

important distinction lay in the presentation: in her office every picture had

black electrician's tape over the young artist's name, which was the anonymity

she granted each of her clients.
At her desk she studied a painting of a tree by a ten-year-old girl as Harold

worked with his colored pencils. When he looked up his eyes were still moist,

and his voice still trembled.
"I'm done."
He held out his drawing at arm's length, as if he found it distasteful and

wanted to get rid of it as soon as possible.
She walked over to the worktable and took it from him. What she saw was

alarming, but hardly surprising. He had written the word "Mad," and drawn the

letters a and d inside the jagged yellow lines of the M, which also contained

two burning red eyes. Red beetles swarmed over the letters.
Celia felt deeply for Harold. It was unusual for a child his age to be diagnosed

with schizophrenia, even more so for an eleven-year-old to suffer

hallucinations. They appeared without warning, as they had this morning, and the

very fact that he knew they weren't real made the monsters he saw on the walls

and ceilings and in the air that much more painful to him: If the giant red

beetles aren't real, and I know they aren't real, then why do I see them, and

why do they scare me so?
Celia had formulated his confusion and fear into simple language, but

schizophrenia didn't yield to words the way less serious mental disorders often

did. She could not discuss, cure, and ease the pain. No one could. Harold had

been dragged across a genetic land mine, and bits of his brain chemistry had

been scattered forever. He would never heal or be whole. He would know a

lifetime of deeply disturbed days.
She had tried to understand the grimly disruptive world in which he lived, and

had studied the disease extensively; but the more she read about it the more she

realized how little was actually known about schizophrenia. A few weeks ago she

ran across an article in a book review that said all the major symptoms of the

disease seemed to be matched by countersymptoms, what the author had chillingly

described as an "antiworld where everything appears in reverse." An antiworld.

The word haunted Celia, for it captured the quiet eeriness of everyday life.
It gave her a cold feeling to contemplate this antiworld, not unlike the

discomfort she'd known when she tried to imagine Harold's fears. Shortly after

he was referred to the Center last year, she learned that she would have to

define the extent of her empathy clearly.
On his second day he experienced some of his worst hallucinations, and she'd

seen just how quickly terror could grip the boy. He shook terribly as he tried

to fight off the unseen demons; and at times he squeezed his eyes shut,

wrinkling his entire face in a frantic effort to block out the sights that

scared him so. His fear had been so great— and Celia's sense of it had become so

real— that she'd felt his pain sharply.
When his eyes had suddenly opened and he'd pointed wildly and screamed, "See,

they're coming, they're coming to get me, they're coming to get me," she had not

been able to look for fear that she, too, might see what could not be seen.

Instead, she had kept her eyes on Harold and pleaded with him to listen to her

even as he pleaded with the monster to leave him alone.
"Go away!" he'd screamed over and over. "Go away," he finally begged; but they

hadn't gone away, and another half hour of panic passed before they vanished.

Celia had held him and quietly— so quietly he hadn't noticed— cried for him as

well as for herself. She had felt his terror to her very core, and it had scared

her as nothing had for many years, for Celia had suffered similar pain all of

her life, those silent threats to sanity that insinuated themselves into her

psyche and crawled like dark insects along the back corridors of her mind. She

had always feared that the full force of this nightmare would unveil itself at a

vulnerable moment, and that when it did she would blank out, not to nothingness

but to horror, to the crushing meltdown of consciousness. She feared this still.
*
She sat on a child-sized chair next to Harold and placed his picture on the

table before them.
"You really worked hard on that. Can you tell me about your drawing?"
The boy forced himself to glance down, then pointed to the beetles. "It's like

them. I see them on the walls and, and"— he began to cry again—"sometimes in the

air, like they're flying and they're coming to get me and I can't get away."
Celia saw the fright in Harold's eyes, in the way his fingers had frozen to the

edge of the table. Then she looked at his picture and saw it there too, in those

three simple letters—Mad— that spelled out his complex fate.
"Harold, why don't you draw a picture and lock up those scary beetles?"
He nodded, but he didn't pick up any of the colored pencils.
"Do you think you could do that?"
"I could, but ..."
"But what?" she prodded.
"But," and now he spoke so softly she could barely hear him, "I think they'll

escape."
9
Davy sat in the back row and stared at the teacher. He didn't like her one bit.

Every day this week she'd asked him questions and made nasty faces when he

wouldn't answer them. She had done it on Monday, Tuesday, yesterday, and she did

it again today. And then the kids laughed at him, every time. She'd be sorry.

He'd make her so sorry she'd never forget. Never. Same for the kid next to him.

He'd poked Davy with a pencil three times so far today. One more time and he was

going to get it. Davy knew just what he'd do to him, and when he did it he'd

never let go. Never.
He hated this new school. He wanted to go back to his old school, the one his

real daddy had taken him to. That was last year, a long time ago. Then his real

daddy died and went to heaven and his mom met Chet and they moved to that

trailer. And then she went away and they moved here. To Oregon. He hated Oregon.

He hated that trailer even more. Every time he went inside he could see the dark

cracks in the floor. Stains, that's what they were, dark stains that wouldn't

wash away. He knew 'cause Chet made him clean them with Comet. "Keep scrubbing,"

he'd say, "it's your mom's mess, clean it up." My mom's mess? But why? He

couldn't remember, but he knew he hated those stains more than anything in the

whole world.
Davy had scrubbed them till his hands got sore and red, but he couldn't scrub

them away no matter how hard he tried. They were buried in the cracks. He

couldn't forget them neither. He'd think about them in the middle of the day

when he was thinking about nothing. They'd just be there all of a sudden and

he'd see them like he did when he scrubbed them, and he'd get this awful feeling

in his stomach that wouldn't go away nohow, not even when he rubbed his belly or

sat on the toilet and tried real hard to go.
Dark stains inside him, under his skin, like the stains on the floor.
The kid got that pencil out again, looking at it like he wasn't thinking about

anything at all, then looking at Davy, smiling, but not at him, at the other

kids watching.
They giggled, and the teacher turned around fast. She was angry, but not at

them. No, she liked them. On Davy's first day she had told him, "I've got a good

class, and I want it to stay that way."
She had let the other kids go to lunch, and then made him stand there while she

talked some more. "We do not have any problems this year, so learn to

cooperate."
She smiled at him but Davy could tell that being nice was hard work for her, and

she'd said that last word real slow—co-op-er-ate— like he was stupid and she had

to sound it out for him. "Do you know what that means?"
Davy stared at the floor and felt his stomach growling. He was plenty hungry and

all he wanted to do was eat.
"It means you try, Davy. Your stepfather says you used to talk, so we know you

can do it. Even if you don't know the answer, you try just the same."
Now she had another question. He could tell by the way she looked at him. He

didn't like her eyes. They were as small and dull as dirty old dimes.
"Do you think"— her voice reached an uncomfortably high note and cracked—"do you

think that you could spell the world 'man'?"
Davy glanced at the kid with the pencil. He was giving the teacher all of his

attention, just the way she liked.
"I'm waiting, Davy."
As soon as she turned to pick up a piece of chalk, the kid whispered,
"Betcha if I stab you hard, you'll say something."
His lips hardly moved but Davy heard him and got ready. The kid wasn't going to

get away with it again. Davy scowled at him as the teacher wheeled around.
"Davy, please do not pester your neighbors. If you're not going to answer my

questions, at least behave properly."
She shuffled the chalk from hand to hand. "I'm going to give you another chance.

It's the last time this week that I'm going to do this. If you don't cooperate

I'm afraid I'll have to speak to your stepfather. Do you hear me?"
The teacher nodded, not like she was happy, though, more like she was letting

off steam, the way the lid on an old kettle bobs up and down when the water

starts to boil.
"Okay, how do you spell 'girl'?"
She turned back to the board, holding up the chalk as if she really expected him

to answer.
"Davy, I'm waiting."
She had to say it like that, like she was no more patient than a hungry cat.
This time the kid with the pencil caught him on a soft spot right below a rib.

Davy moved quickly. He grabbed the boy's arm and bit his hand so hard the kid

lunged out of his seat and screamed. Davy heard the teacher yelling too, and

rushing toward him, but didn't care. He had what he wanted, the kid crying and

yanking and getting nowhere.
Davy saw her bony hands flashing by his face, and felt her fingers digging into

his jaw, like a vet pilling a pup. When he couldn't stand it anymore he opened

his mouth, and the kid's arm snapped back like a spooked snake. Then he grabbed

the teacher's wrist and bit her arm just as hard as he could.
Red spray shot up like mist from an orange peel, and then it was gone, as if

he'd blinked it away. The moment hung too, a speck in time before she slammed

the side of his head. His ear rang, his face burned, and his teeth ached from

the force of her blow, like they'd tear right out of his gums if she did it

again. And she did, over and over, but the harder she hit him the more he knew

that he was hurting her more than she was hurting him.
10
Celia leaned back in the chaise longue and took in the pine smells that drifted

up from the mill. Each time one of the big saws ripped into a log it released

more of that sweet odor, and even a slight breeze could stir the scent all the

way up to the ridge.
Gray haze rose from the giant drying shed where the freshly planed lumber lay in

tall blond stacks, and farther west the last of the sun tinted the sky pink and

purple; but it was her sense of smell, not sight, that filled Celia with

pleasure this evening.
The Border collie she'd been feeding since Monday disturbed her idyll with its

high-pitched bark. Must be Jack with the drinks. She heard him close the door as