Outview (12 page)

“Who invited him?” Dustin asked, pointing
to Kyle. “How’d he get in here?”

“Fair question.”

“Look at me. Just look at what the meds
have done. If not for Rose, I wouldn’t even be able to have this conversation.
Can you see me sweating? Do you know how hard this is for me? I’ll be in bed
for a week after this visit.”

“I’m sorry, but if you still hear the
voices and see past lives--”

“It’s less and less, the meds really fog it
all out. I guess that’s what they’re supposed to do. But there are other things
that I’ve been working to develop during my brief mornings of fragile clarity.”

“Like?”

“That’s gotta be a topic for another time.
Our seven minutes remaining isn’t near enough to even begin.” He gave me a long
pleading look. “Nate, you have to get me out of here. It’s a slow death, I
swear.”

“I know.”

“No, Nate,” his voice hushed but firm. “You
do
not
know.” He leaned close to me, still talking in a loud whisper.
“These pills make me seem all calm for Mom so she thinks I’m getting better,
but the only thing wrong with me is
these pills
. She just won’t believe
the chemicals are destroying me from the inside. Destroying me.” The last words
came out as a desperate hiss.

“We did a bunch of research online, and now
that you’re eighteen, they have to review your case within nine months. If they
think you’re ready to re-enter society, then Mom can’t stop them. I’m sure
they’ll let you out then.”

“In nine months it won’t be worth bothering
with me anymore. I’ll be a puddle of a man. Nothing but mush, Nate.” His hand
reached gently to the back of my neck and slowly pulled me to him until our
foreheads were touching. His eyes did more talking than his mouth. “Find a way,
Nate. Please find a way to save me.”

“I will Dustin, I will,” I whispered. He
squeezed the back of my neck and nodded slightly. His lips trembled and eyes
filled. He nodded again. We sat there a minute until the orderly came to take
him away. Just before the door closed behind him, he looked back and nodded
again.

“Are you okay?” Kyle asked, as we were
walking back to the car.

“How could I be? I might have been the one
in there. Do you realize how close I came? They’re killing my brother, maybe
not like my dad, but don’t kid yourself, they
are
killing him, too.
They’re just doing it in some slow and terrible way.” I had to kneel on the
ground. Linh saw from the car and ran to us.

“What happened?” she asked.

“We have to get him right now,” I said.

“Nate, we can’t,” Kyle said.

“What happened?” Linh repeated.

“There’s nothing wrong with him. My brother
has spent two years being tortured for no reason.”

“He hasn’t been tortured,” Kyle said.

“What do you call it? Two years of
chemicals and confinement. You heard him; he’d rather be in prison. They’ve
kept him from his mind. They’ve methodically been stealing his sanity. You know
all these pharmaceuticals have brutal side effects. Who knows what the meds are
doing to him physically. It
is
torture.”

“Okay, I’m not going to win that argument.
I have no interest in defending what they’re doing here. I sure wouldn’t want
it done to me or anyone. But we can’t just go and grab him,” Kyle said
impatiently.

“Let’s figure it out and make a plan.”

“Let’s talk to Rose.”

“Who?” Linh asked.

“My Aunt Rose has been helping Dustin deal
with his psychic gifts without my mother knowing. Dustin said that she and my
dad and my grandmother were all psychic, and Rose knew Dustin and I would be,
too.”

“And she told his mother,” Kyle added.

“Your mom knew?” Linh asked.

“Well, knowing and believing are two
different things. My mom must be afraid of all this for some reason.”

“Do you blame her?

“Yes, I think I do,” I said.

“Nate, let’s get out of here. We can’t save
him today. Let’s go find Rose,” Kyle said, putting his arm around me, urging me
to the car.

“All right, but either way, I’m going to
get him out. Not in weeks or months but in days.”

“Here, I wrote this for you,” Linh said
handing me a sheet of paper.

brother to brother

sun to sun

side by side

forever young

I look into your eyes

I see a thousand worlds

of which I am familiar

we share that secret

that violence

and unlike the weather

we are consistent

with what we have chosen

brother, dearest friend

enemy, confident

can you know

this love that forever binds

as blood connects

embroiders the earth we walk on

together this march

this passive remembrance

of shoelaces learned

music played, cigarettes burned

we are the image I hold --

a longing to know

why this separation

this other-worldly beckoning

an outcast to our souls

Brother, hear my cry

I am here, in front and beside

like Tolstoy, or Gandalf

like a tree,

or a dog

21

Aunt Rose looked at the three of us a
moment before screaming, “My God, Nate, that’s
you
, isn’t it, honey?”

“Hi Aunt Rose, it’s been a long time.”

“It’s been ages! Oh, aren’t you handsome
like your father. What are you doing here? What am I talking about? What are you
doing out there? Get in here.” She pulled me in the door. “And who are your
friends?”

“These are my best friends, Kyle and Linh.”

“Come in, come in all of you.” Inside the
foyer, she led us through open double doors to a room with a carved round
wooden table and matching cushioned chairs. I was pretty sure Rose was about
five or six years younger than my dad, which would make her around forty-one.

“I’m so flustered to see you, Nate. I just
got back from the beauty parlor.” Her hair was reddish brown, which probably wasn’t
her real color because I recalled seeing several other shades over the years.

“It’s very pretty.” Linh smiled.

“Oh, you think so, Kitten?” Rose beamed,
playing with her long wispy strands.

“Is that a crystal ball?” Linh asked.

“Sure is,” Rose said, pointing us to the
sofa under the window. The coffee table was fashioned from thick planks of
redwood and pine and contained several dazzling rocks. I recognized a rather
large amethyst cone. She’d given me a smaller version on my tenth birthday,
knowing that I loved rocks. There were also geodes and crystals in yellow,
clear, pink, and green. “Nate, it’s been four damn years since your mother
excommunicated me from my own family. I’m tickled the universe finally brought
you back to my door, but I hope everything’s okay.”

“We just came from seeing Dustin. He
suggested we pay you a visit.”

“Is Dusty okay?” she asked, sitting behind
the crystal ball dressed in flowing layers of multicolored scarves similar to
the ones that adorned the room around her table. From our angle, it was
difficult to see where she ended and the room began, which is probably the
effect she wanted.

“As well as he can be in that place.”

“I know it’s awful. I can’t stand to see
him there. I’m a little surprised because I didn’t think you’d visited him
before.”

“I’ve been seeing past lives and hearing
voices.”

“Of course you have, honey,” she said,
looking at Kyle and Linh. “Does your mother know?”

“Does she know what? That I went to see
Dustin? That I’m here now with my black sheep, forbidden aunt or that I’m some
sort of psychic freak?”

“Oh, Nate honey, you’re not a freak. It
only feels that way because most folks don’t remember how to be open to the
universe.”

“My mom doesn’t know anything.”

“Don’t be so sure. Your mother is smarter
than you think. That’s how she got my brother. He always went for the smartest
girl. Your mother is pretty, but Montgomery didn’t care a thing about that. All
he wanted was brains.”

“If she’s so smart, why did she lock her
firstborn in an asylum?”

“She’s scared, Nate, like a lot of folks,
just plain terrified. Your mother always has been.”

“What’s she afraid of?”

“Oh God, I don’t know. What
isn’t
she afraid of? She’s scared of anything that might disrupt her white-bread view
of the world. She doesn’t want to know what’s on the other side of the veil
because she just barely manages to keep things straight on this side.”

“That’s no reason to doubt your own son.”

“Fear’s a powerful thing; it can be
blinding. Dusty didn’t help his cause with all the drugs, which sort of ruined
his credibility with her. I’ll bet she’s mighty worried about you, though.
Dusty was always tough, anyone could see that, even when he was little. But you
were the sensitive one, always lost in your thoughts and worrying over folks.”

“Do you know who murdered my dad?”

“Goodness, you get right to it, don’t you?
Did I mention you were always forthright as well?”

“I don’t know how to be polite about
someone killing my dad. I want some real information.”

“I know you do. I miss him so much, but I
don’t know who did it or exactly why. If I did, I don’t know what I’d be
capable of, but let me tell you that I do know for a fact he was murdered.”

“How do you know that?”

“He told me.”

“Who?”

“Your daddy.”

“My dad told you he’d been murdered?”

“He came to me just hours after he died,
long before your mother even called to tell me. He was right there,” she said,
pointing to the doorway. We all looked, I almost expected to see him standing
there. “He was out of breath like he’d been running and just as solid looking
as you or me. But I cried, ‘no, no, Montgomery, no,’ because I knew right away
he’d crossed over. You may not know this but your dad and me were close. We
talked three or four times a week our whole adult lives. It was the gift that
bound us. But we’ll talk about that later. He looked at me and said, ‘It’s not
what they say. Don’t believe I died.’ For a minute I thought he was trying to
tell me that his soul was still there, you know, that none of us really die. But
he knew that I knew, and his face was so distressed. ‘Murder again,’ he said. I
got real calm because I knew it was taking so much energy for him to appear to
me like that, and I needed to understand everything he was trying to get
across. I asked who and why, but he just shook his head, and then I realized he
was gone. I hadn’t even seen him go.”

“How do you know you didn’t imagine it?’

“Please, Nate, this is what I do, this is
who I am.” She waived an arm around at the candles, crystals, colored scarves,
and trinkets hanging about. “Do
you
think I imagined it?”

“What’d my mother say when you told her?”

“She didn’t get the full version, just that
I’d received a message from the other side telling me Montgomery was murdered,
that the autopsy was faked or missing something. And, well, she always thought
I was nutty and she was still in shock, so it didn’t go over too well.”

“You told her that Dustin and I have
psychic abilities?”

“Yep. I guess I might as well have told her
that you two were alien witches and her husband had been killed by the Lord of
Darkness trying to save Princess Leia.”

Linh giggled.

“So, you’ve been visiting Dustin ever since
he got to Mountain View?”

“No, I didn’t even find out he was there
for four or five months. I kept hearing these voices that said, ‘help Dusty,
help Dusty,’ over and over again. Then I found him, and I’ve been trying to
help him as best I could, between the drugs they have him on and the
restrictions of where he is.”

“How’d you find him?”

“There are ways. I found him on the astral.
My mother had this gift too, but my father forbade her to talk to us about it
or use it. She still did, of course, just kept it to herself. About the time
your dad and I started coming into it she died. You never did know your
grandmother, Nate, but you would have liked her, and she would have loved you
to pieces. She had a way, I’ll tell you. Anyhow, she was able to help us enough
to keep us from getting locked up or killing ourselves, which is what happens
to so many who find the power.”