In the Company of Crazies (9 page)

“Smoke coming out of our mouths?” Tommy said. “Yes, Tommy. That is correct,” Gretchen said.

I shook my head.
She won't even need slivers of wood, I
thought.

It was quiet and then Carl said suddenly, “It's the cold.”

“Excuse me?”

“It's cold out. Everybody has smoke coming out of their mouths.” And with that, Carl just darted right out of the living room and we all heard the front door bang shut. Karen put down her book. Carl must have run around the side of the house. He popped up by the living-room window. He rapped on the glass and then started puffing. And pointing. And puffing and pointing. Tommy finally caught on.

“It's the cold,” Tommy said suddenly. “See the smoke?” He looked at Mr. Simone for a response and then everyone turned to Gretchen. Carl came running back inside; another rush of cold followed him.

“So you are telling me that you were not smoking,” Gretchen continued, seemingly unimpressed.

Both of the boys nodded.

“That it was the natural moisture in your warm breath forming condensation in the cold air, which Mr. Simone mistakenly confused as smoking?” Gretchen said. The boys nodded happily.

Mr. Simone stepped forward as if he had something to say about that, but Gretchen raised her hand like a traffic cop.

Tommy and Carl looked at each other and then smiled. “Yup,” they both said.

The fireplace crackled. Gretchen leaned forward in her chair, which was really so much bigger than she was. She lowered her voice.

“Do you think it is really very important to me that you were smoking a cigarette?” she asked. “Do you think you are the first or will be the last teenage boys to think smoking a cigarette is a cool thing to do?”

Tommy and Carl looked confused about how exactly to answer that. In normal circumstances it would be advisable not to answer, but this was Gretchen, and not answering was not an option.

“No,” Tommy started slowly.

“Uh, no,” Carl agreed.

Gretchen leaned back again. She pulled her sweater around her. She closed her eyes a moment, but everyone knew she wasn't done. When she opened them again, she began. “But to throw a lit cigarette into a ravine of dry leaves. Next to a barn.” She took a breath. She shook her head as if she was thinking of the possibilities. “Next to my barn.”

Carl and Tommy both dropped their eyes. They knew they were finished.

“My husband built that barn,” Gretchen went on. “Many years ago.”

I had never heard Gretchen or anyone speak about a husband. I hadn't seen anyone who might be a husband. The only men at Mountain Laurel were Sam and Mr. Simone. It was hard to imagine Gretchen as someone who had ever been young, let alone married and in love. Harder to imagine someone in love with
her.
But I guess she was, and I guess whoever had built this whole place and even planted those pine trees up on the hill had done it with love. Gretchen and her husband had probably dreamed of watching the saplings grow into a forest. Maybe they dreamed of growing old together and sitting in this living room, just the two of them, with the fire keeping them warm.

I looked around the room. But it sure didn't turn out that way, did it?

“Never,” Gretchen said suddenly. “Never again will you be so thoughtless and selfish as to jeopardize this land or this house or anything or anyone here. If you want to smoke, smoke. I can't stop you, either of you. Nobody can stop you if you want to continue such a dirty, foolish habit. It will be your choice. But not here. Not in my house.”

Gretchen stood up. She looked tired. As soon as she left the room, Carl and Tommy took off. Mr. Simone let out a deep breath. He nodded to Karen, who simply nodded back, and then he left as well.

* * *

“Did Gretchen's husband
die?”

Karen and I were peeling carrots. Gretchen said everyone at Mountain Laurel was expected to contribute by way of regular chores and duties, but I had a feeling she had just made that up on the spot. Gretchen was real good at coming up with longtime rules and procedures whenever anyone looked like they were wandering, even for a second.

I suppose I had been wandering. The next thing I knew I was peeling carrots with Karen. Maggie had left a list of predinner preparations.

“Yes,” Karen answered. “Just a couple of years ago. They were married forty-nine years and were still in love. It was very sad.”

It was hard for me to feel anything right then. I couldn't get the image of a bossy, cranky old woman out of my mind. Maybe his death had changed her. Maybe she had once been more
lovable.

“He was the complete opposite of Gretchen,” Karen went on. “He was silly and easygoing. He was always making jokes that made Gretchen laugh when she didn't want to.”

Guess not.

“I cared for him very deeply. After I got divorced, Gretchen and Peter became family to me. They offered me a job and a place to live. I've been teaching here ever since.

“When was that?” I asked.

Karen stopped what she was doing to answer me. She put down her knife. So I stopped to listen.

“Seventeen years ago,” Karen said after a while, as if she had just calculated the years and suddenly felt the passing of every one of them. “It's been seventeen years.”

I wondered if she was happy or miserable. Why hadn't she married again? Did she have any children? I had this funny sense that Karen hadn't planned on staying here this long, that maybe it was like waking up from a dream only to find you're still dreaming.

Mountain Laurel.

Sometimes I try to imagine where I will be in seventeen years, or twenty years, or five years, or shit, next year.

And I wonder. It scares me. I just wonder.

* * *

After she died, I still had to pass Debbie Sanders's house every day coming home from school. I had to imagine her family inside. And I'd imagine her room, even though I had never been in it. I imagined it empty but everything left just the way it was. Maybe her clothes still lying on the floor and her notebooks open on her desk.

I don't know why. I really didn't know anything about her. I knew she had an older brother and a sister in college; that's all. I'm sure they never imagined anything like this. Or even if they imagined it, they never thought it could really happen. I didn't think I had any right to be sad or to cry when I saw her house and thought about her family inside.

But that didn't stop some other kids.

There were kids in school who thought nothing of writing something at the top of their test when they hadn't studied, like “Need a re-test. Too upset…” And then in little letters underneath “…about Debbie Sanders.”

Or when they didn't have their report done or their project completed.

“Can't concentrate since the funeral.”

Girls hung out, putting on makeup in the bathrooms, and when they were late for class they'd say, “We just started talking…about Debbie.”

Sometimes, they'd cry.

I knew for a fact that those two girls in the bathroom wouldn't have been able to pick Debbie's picture out of the yearbook.

I had talked to Debbie before. She rode my bus. We were both on the volleyball team.

And still I hadn't cried at all.

* * *

Billy wasn't so bad once you got to know him a little. Once you got past the fact that he wore some article of army clothing every day, whether it was army fatigue pants or a camouflage jacket or a camouflage T-shirt. Once you stopped noticing how he bit his nails and when his nails were too short he started in on the skin of his palms until they were red and scabby.

Once you got to know him and got past all that, you liked him anyway.

He was really just a big crybaby.

Tuesday morning, my second week at Mountain Laurel, Billy burned himself on his electric blanket. Sam had to drive him to the local hospital. Any break in the routine at Mountain Laurel was a good reason to hang around and talk. Even the teachers thought so. We had hot chocolate and worked in our journals all morning.

When Billy returned he was a hero, with an ugly burn on his forearm to prove it.

“Where did you get an electric blanket, anyway?” Tommy asked him.

“None of your business,” Billy answered. He had his sleeve pushed up to the top of his white chubby arm. His burn was uncovered, but it had a layer of something gooey over it. It was red and blistery and just gross enough for everyone to be interested in it.

“How did it happen?” Drew wanted to know.

“I don't know,” Billy told us. “I didn't even wake up, I guess.”

We were in the living room. Maggie was in the kitchen, getting lunch ready. Gretchen was on the phone with someone at Billy's house. She was in her office with the door shut. You could hear her voice, but you couldn't make out what she was saying. Billy could have called home himself, but he seemed to prefer showing us his wound.

“What a jerk you are then,” Carl said. “How could you not wake up when your arm was on fire?”

“It wasn't on fire,” Billy said. For this much attention, he didn't even mind being called a jerk. “The guy at the hospital said I must have been leaning on the thermostat thingy. It's a second-degree burn.”

“Does it hurt?” I asked Billy. It looked like it hurt. “Ye-ah. It hurts like hell,” Billy said proudly.

The only person who wasn't interested in Billy's disgusting burn was John. John seemed to have something else on his mind entirely. He kept walking into the kitchen and talking to Maggie and then coming back out, sitting down at the table and writing in his journal.

“I'm probably going to have a scar,” Billy told everyone. He was starting to lose his audience. I decided to get up and see if I could help Maggie with anything.

“If it starts to puss up,” Billy was saying, “I have this yellow, sticky medicine to put on it.”

Until only Drew was still listening.

“What are we having for dinner Thursday?” John was standing in the kitchen talking to Maggie when I walked in. “Pot roast and green beans,” she told him. “Oh, hello there, Mia.”

John looked at me and then hurried away. He was guilty of something. I could recognize it.

Mountain Laurel.

Sam had dinner with us tonight and he talked about this doctor, Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, who he said was really into death and dying, which sounds morbid but the way he talked about it, it wasn't. She was trying to help people deal with stuff. Anyway, Dr. Ross said everyone went through these five stages whether they were dying or knew someone who was.

Sam said Dr. Ross had the stages all mapped out and named. She said they were denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. So I starting thinking about that.

Denial.

Anger.

Bargaining.

Depression.

Acceptance.

And it's funny. That's just what happened to me. When I got caught shoplifting.

Exactly.

* * *

The first thing I thought of when the woman in Kohl's grabbed my arm was:
This can't be happening. This woman must think I'm someone else. Her daughter maybe.
Or she thought
I
worked here and she was looking for the aisle where they sell throw rugs and bathroom scales.

“You need to come to the back of the store with me,” she said. “So we can talk in private.” She had let go of my arm, and I was able to calm down enough to see who she was.

She looked just like any woman who would be shopping that day.

Why was this woman grabbing my arm?

She didn't have on a red apron with the name of the store printed across the front, like the other people who worked there. She had her coat on. She was even carrying a shopping bag from one of the other stores in the mall. And her pocketbook. If this woman worked here, she wouldn't be carrying a pocketbook. She looked like a mom. I remembered her now; I had noticed she was looking through the bin of little-boy socks like she wanted to buy them.

No, she couldn't be a security woman and I couldn't have just been caught shoplifting.

This was my first thought—
No
way.

Then I realized she must be undercover, looking like a regular shopper on purpose. Trying to blend in. That wasn't fair. It was a setup. A trick.

For a second that thought made me mad enough to say, “I didn't do anything.”

“Maybe you didn't,” the woman said. “But we need to go in the back and work it out. You haven't left the store yet. You can just come with me and no one will notice. We can talk there.”

I turned around. There was a mom and her teenage daughter a couple of racks away, definitely looking my way. And there was a boy walking by with his head turned toward me.

“What if I just put it back?” I said. I suddenly felt my heart, which had been beating so hard since I first put the gloves and belt into my bag. Now there was no stopping the pain of my heart working overtime. I couldn't think straight. My fear was taking my breath away and I couldn't breathe at all. I had to do something. I could fix this if I tried, couldn't I?