In the Company of Crazies (12 page)

“Oh,” I said. “Well, thank you. So what's your name?”

“My name is Ruth and my sister is Naomi,” she told me. “It's from a Bible story. Now do you think you can handle this?”

I nodded and Ruth took her sister's hand.

“Oh, by the way, I'm Mia,” I said before they turned and headed for the water table.

Ruth stopped and looked at me.

“We know that,” she said. “You live upstairs.”

* * *

Cecily had this freak thing wrong with her when she was a baby, not even a year old. One day she kept lifting up her left leg, like she didn't want to put weight on it or like it hurt. So my mom took her to the doctor, who didn't know what it was, so he sent us to another doctor and then another and another all the way up to an oncologist, which, I found out at six years old, is a cancer doctor.

If Cecily had been able to talk, it certainly would have helped. But while her twenty-plus-word vocabulary did (naturally) place her in a very high percentile for intelligence (actually measured), it didn't allow her to tell us what was wrong with her leg.

Nothing.

It turned out to be nothing. After a bunch of X-rays, bone scans and blood tests, they found that nothing was wrong with her leg. It must have been some tiny fracture that elevated some tiny blood protein. Whatever.

It was nothing.

She was fine. But for a while, for about a month or so, things were awful. Just the thought of what might have been, what could have been. It stayed with our family for a long time.

That's what my morning in the nursery school was. It was the might have been and the could have been. Not that any of these kids had cancer, but almost all of them had medical problems. They had brain defects and physical handicaps, learning disabilities and alcoholic mothers who drank themselves into oblivion all through their pregnancies.

That's what the twins had, fetal alcohol syndrome. Mary Belle told me.

* * *

“Do you ever worry that there are only so many words in the world?” Drew asked me. We were walking from the School House to the House for lunch. It was only a couple of days until Thanksgiving break, a couple of days and I would have been at Mountain Laurel for one month. I would get to go home this weekend.

It was so cold, my cheeks were pinched. My scalp was cold. Everyone else was way ahead. They were probably inside already. Warm. Warmer. I stayed back with Drew.

“What do ya mean?” I asked. I was trying to hurry, but Drew was slow.

“Well, just technically speaking, there are only a finite number of words in any language, right?” Drew asked me. “Yeah, I guess so.”

“So then one day,” Drew said, “everything that can ever be said will be said. And every book that could ever be written will be.”

“Hmmm.”

I suppose I wasn't really listening. I was too cold, and besides, half the things Drew (or anybody here) said were crazy. And sometimes with Drew, if you didn't agree with him, he took it the wrong way. Like you didn't like him, or like he had said something wrong, and he'd get upset. Or he'd just slip away and forget he had been talking to you at all. So sometimes it was better to just listen and pretend to agree.

“And it's the same with music, isn't it?” Drew talked as we walked.

“With music?”

“Yeah,” Drew went on. “If there are only a certain number of musical notes, then, someday, no matter how far in the future that is, someday, every possible combination of musical notes will have been put together. And there will be no new songs.”

“But there are so many combinations.” I wanted to reassure him.

“But there is no such thing as infinite,” Drew was saying. “There has to be a finish to everything. An end.”

I blew my warm breath into my hands. “Maybe, but it's more than your brain could ever even imagine. That will never happen in your lifetime.”

“Maybe not mine,” Drew said.

I wasn't sure if Drew was referring to his lifetime or his brain.

I was just about to ask him, but when we got up onto the porch we could hear John screaming. Yelling angrily, urgently. His voice was so strange, high-pitched and frightening. It hardly sounded like him at all. Drew and I looked at each other, both wondering, I suppose, what John would be capable of doing if he ever lost control.

We hurried into the mudroom. I took off my shoes without even thinking about it. I had started keeping an extra pair of socks in my coat pocket, and I slipped them on.

We could hear Karen's voice now. And Gretchen's. Gretchen was telling Carl to go and find Sam. A second later, Carl brushed by us. He didn't even grab his coat from the mudroom.

“John's gone crazy,” Carl said. He flew out the door.
Gone
crazy?

* * *

John had been caught cheating on his life.

* * *

Apparently. Karen had had her suspicions, turned over those folded-over pages marked PRIVATE in John's writing journal, and read them.

She discovered that John had been asking Maggie about her plans for the week's menu not just because he was weird (which he was) but because he had been writing his daily journal entries a week in advance. The only missing piece of information (in John's mind) that could have possibly altered the events of any given day would be what he would be eating for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Breakfast was a no-brainer since John never had anything but the oatmeal, which was always a Mountain Laurel option. Lunch and dinner, however, posed a serious problem. Cornering Maggie and getting the week's menu seemed to be the perfect solution. Once he had this information, John could pretty much construct his entire week and get all his homework done by Monday afternoon.

That's exactly what John had been doing. Rather successfully. But when Karen told him he couldn't do this anymore, he went, as Carl had aptly put it, crazy.

“You weren't supposed to look,” John was yelling. He was stamping his feet. His big feet.

“That's not the point, John,” Karen was saying.

We were all standing in the den. Everyone had heard the yelling and wandered in. It was almost as if the level of noise made the space smaller and John look bigger.

“What is the point, if that is not the point? That is the point,” John said. “When I turned down the page… You said that. You promised. You said that. That is the point.”

Gretchen held on to John's arm. I thought if he had wanted, he could have lifted his arm and taken Gretchen right along with it. He could have flung her right across the room. He was pulling away, but somehow she held on and stayed on the floor.

“John, you are right. That
is
what Karen said. And Karen was wrong for what she did. But that doesn't make what you did right. Does it?” Gretchen said.

“Why not?” John said. “I didn't do anything wrong.” He finally freed his arm and began pacing around the room. Everyone backed away and gave him space.

“John,” Gretchen said firmly. “Sit down. Right now. In this chair.” She pointed. She ordered.

John stopped pacing for a moment. He looked as if he was considering the chair, but then he started shouting again.

“It's not right. That's not what she said. That's not what she said. I didn't do anything wrong. She did.” John pointed to Karen.

Karen stepped forward a bit. “I'm sorry, John. You're right. I shouldn't have looked ahead. But I just want you to understand…”

“No,
you
need to understand!” John said. His anger had a target. It probably should have been Carl or Tommy or even Billy for all the teasing and torture, but at that moment it was Karen.

“Why is it wrong to be prepared? What is wrong with that!” John shouted.

“What the hell is he talking about?” Tommy whispered to no one in particular.

* * *

Trying to do exactly the same thing every day,
exactly the same way, was apparently John's one and only goal. Something about that concept terrified me.

Not just that someone would want to know what they were going to do every day, know exactly what to expect and be prepared for it. But the more disturbing aspect was that somehow putting it in writing, committing it to paper, writing it in a journal would make it happen. Would permanently seal your fate, so to speak. Make it unalterable. Make it real.

“John, if you sit down, I will talk to you about it,” Gretchen said. “I will listen.”

Maybe John would have sat down at that point. And it might have all been over. John lowered his arms and took a deep breath, but that was precisely when Carl returned, with Sam right behind him.

“See!” Carl shouted. “There he is.”

John felt the urgency and accusation leveled right at him. There was really nothing else for him to do but run.

* * *

Everyone had a direction to
search. Sam and Angel went in the truck out the back road. Half an hour had passed and John had not returned. Carl, Drew, and Mr. Simone looked in the School House building. There were rooms in there that no one used where John might be hiding. Billy and Maggie had the House and the dorms. Karen and Tommy took the nursery-school building, upstairs and down. Gretchen sat in her chair and waited for reports.

I had the barn.

“John?” I called out as I walked inside.

On the far end, the wall that faced the pond was so worn and old that rotten boards were half missing. You could see right outside. You could see the cliff that led down to the pond. In fact, it looked like the whole barn was teetering on the edge of a cliff. There wasn't anything particularly safe about this barn. I didn't think anyone trying to escape would come here. I turned to leave when I heard a thump.

“John?” I said again.

“What?” John answered. He was still mad.

“Everybody is looking for you,” I said. I couldn't see him, but it sounded like he was up in the loft.

“I know.”

“So come down,” I said. I stepped into the center of the barn and looked up. I still couldn't see him.

“No.”

For a moment I didn't know what to do. If I went to get help, John might run away again. Maybe farther. Maybe toward the pond or the pine forest. I knew there were hundreds of acres of land back there. John didn't seem like the type who would survive out in the woods for more than a minute or two.

Neither was I, for that matter.

If I called out for help, John might freak out again. And nobody would hear me from here anyway. If I stood long enough, I could probably signal to Mr. Simone when I saw him coming out. He'd have to walk by this way.

“Who's there?” John's voice came out of the corner shadow in the loft.

“Me.”

“Who's ‘me'?”

I looked out to the School House building, but I didn't see anyone around to help. There was just me. “Mia,” I answered.

“Mia?”

“Yeah.”

I could hear John starting to move. His weight made the barn creak loudly.

“Come down. Everybody is worried,” I tried again.

“No. Karen was wrong and I was right. She never said you couldn't write ahead in your journal. She never said you couldn't do that.”

That was true.

“You're right,” I said.

“She said she would never read something if you turned the page down. She lied,” John said. He really was angry. “If someone says something, they should mean it.”

“You're right,” I said. “That sucks.”

I could see his foot, his huge foot sticking out. He was edging toward the ladder like he had more to say and wanted me to listen.

“What's wrong with what I did?” John asked me. “What's wrong? I didn't hurt anybody.”

“No, of course not,” I said. “You know teachers. They just get like that.”

I thought I could just take his side, whatever he said. Then he'd trust me and come down. It was cold in the barn. I wanted to go already.

“Like what?” John said. “What do you mean? They get like
what?”

I realized I had said the wrong thing. I was making it worse.

“Well, I mean…” But I didn't know what I meant. I had to choose my words more carefully. I had to think about what I was saying.

“Karen was wrong and I was right,” John said. I heard him moving around up there. He wasn't exactly light-footed.

“Well, wait a minute, John. Think about it.”

“What?”

“Well, if you write everything down before it really happens, then you can't change anything,” I said. “You don't have any choices.”

“I don't want any choices. I know what I want to do. Every day. I just want people to let me alone so I can do it.”

I could hear tears behind his rough voice.

“I know. I know. I mean, so do I. Everybody does. Everybody wants to be left alone, but what if? What if there was something that you didn't know you wanted to do yet? What if there was something to do that might be really good? Good for you, something you'd really like but you wouldn't even try because it wasn't written in your journal?”