Project Pallid (24 page)

“I
can’t see! You’ve got to lift it higher!” Catee lay at the tip of the driveway,
and she attempted to peer under the garage door that I tried my hardest to
hoist. “I can’t see anything!” she announced to me and to any attentive
neighbors who might’ve been watching or listening-in.

“I
can’t get it any higher!” I grunted, pressed against it, and strained to push
my legs up and into locked position. “Can you see anything yet??” I stammered
and shook under the weight of the door.

“I
see it …” she started. “Tables … Beakers … Tubes … Spotlights …” The things she
listed provided few answers and sparked only greater confusion and curiosity.
It was all scientific, jumbo-jargon, and no individual element of it meant
anything. Together though, it revealed everything. It showed
us that her
dad
had
brought his work home with him. That he
hadn’t
let go of
whatever he’d been working on at the hospital. And that
whatever
it was,
it was something he wasn’t supported in doing. He was up to something. There
was no question about it.

“Catee!”
I yelled, as the door won-out and crashed to the ground. “We
have
to say
something!”

“Like
what? To who?” She jumped back and barely got her feet out of the door’s
bone-crunching trajectory.

“I
don’t know. Madison General? That pharmaceuticals place he used to work at? We
have to say something to someone!”

With
conflicted emotion, she agreed. And minutes later, she concluded her phone call
to Madison General. One where she described the things we’d seen, and she
intimately detailed the paperwork we’d read, months before.

And
when she hung up, struck by the gravity of her conversation, I finally
understood the significance of what she’d done. She’d just ratted out her own
dad. And right or wrong, I’d played a very active role in her familial
betrayal.

“So
what’d they say?” I asked, almost too enthusiastically. “What now?”

“Nothing.
There’s nothing left now,” she replied. “They told me they’d take my call into
advisement, and that was it. They didn’t even let me speak to anyone
else—just the girl who answered the phone—some receptionist. I
don’t know, I feel like she shut me down just as soon as she figured out how
old I was and
who
I was connected to. She barely listened to anything I
said after that.”

“So,
what do we do now?” I pressed closer to her. “Where do we go from here?”

“Based
on that? What can we do? That woman barely heard me at all. She didn’t give a
rat’s ass, Damian, and I know for fact, she’s not running to anybody to give
them the tiny bits of whatever she remembers from anything I just said. It’s
not happening. Whatever’s going on out there,” she pointed to the kitchen, through
the foyer, and into the garage, “it won’t have anything to do with them. I can
promise you that. They’re obviously done with him.”

The
air of indecision hung densely around us and neither of us said anything to
break its silence. We gave no references to past events, and consequently, we
provided no proactive solutions for those left to come.

“I
say we write a letter and pretend we’re from CrossPoint Pharmaceuticals. Let’s
act like we know what he’s up to and try to get some reaction out of him. You know,
see what he does.” I finally blurted.

“You
mean,
forge
something?”

“Yeah,
you know, make it all formal and stuff. Have it delivered … slide it under the
front door … something like that … for when he gets home sometime. Then we’ll
see what he does. We might not be able to get into the garage, but maybe we can
smoke the monster out.”

Catee
surprisingly agreed with almost no hesitation, and we made quick use of the
limited time we had left to scan the letter heading from one of the boxes he’d
left unlocked, outside his office. From there, it became our template for a
letter:

CrossPoint Pharmaceuticals

51 Research Avenue

Washington, DC 09825

Dear Mr. David Laverdier:

It has come to our recent attention that
certain items became unaccounted for with your departure from CrossPoint
Pharmaceuticals. While we wish you the best in your endeavors, we do wish for
and insist on the return of items previously designated as property of
CrossPoint Pharmaceuticals. Your failure to do so will leave us no alternative but
to take action against you to reclaim those properties that are rightfully our
own.

We appreciate your anticipated
cooperation in this matter, and we look forward to mutually agreeable
conclusions to this otherwise, congenial relationship.

Cordially,

CrossPoint Pharmaceuticals

“It’s
perfect!” Catee exclaimed. “Not too much! Not too little! We haven’t said
anything—”

“But
we’ve said enough!” I jumped.

“Exactly!
If we get any reaction out of him, it’ll be because of this,” she guaranteed.

But,
as much as I wanted to believe our shared conviction, I was beginning to have
my doubts. I’d been so vehement from the start that her dad was up to foul
play, that I’d barely taken time to consider the possibility of his innocence.
That maybe I’d leapt to my own conclusions because of his surly ways, and that
maybe, at the core of it all, he wasn’t the bad guy I’d made him out to be from
the start.

But
then reality hit, and I remembered his office. I remembered the garage. And I
remembered the sickening feeling I got whenever he was around. It wasn’t
natural, and like my mom always said, you’ve got to go with your gut. From the
start, mine had screamed that Catee’s dad was nothing but bad news.

And
as we sat down to Good and Bad dinner that night, Catee and I choked on the
excitement of what would happen when her dad found the letter we’d planned to
deliver under their door the next day. What would he do with the operations
he’d set underway in the garage? Anything? Nothing? We were acting on suspicion
alone.

Still,
it was that intuition that steered us to seek answers, long before anyone else
understood the severe irreversibility of the isolated events that erupted
across Madison, only two months later. And it was that intuition that gave
us—or me—the advantage I need to survive its devastation and to see
that he pays the ultimate price for the harm that he’s done.

April
23
^rd:

Turns
out, our letter was entirely ineffective, and it only prompted intrigue from
Catee’s dad, who asked us if we’d manufactured and left it under the door for
him. In hindsight, I think the formality of the letter itself was negated by
our informal method of delivery. Had we considered or even understood
registered mail, we could’ve gone that route, but even then, given our limited
mobility, it would’ve only been postmarked from Madison, and it would’ve been
even more incriminating than it already was. Naturally, we denied any knowledge
of it, and we played entirely ignorant to its contents. Catee even managed to
choke out a few tears and asked him if they were safe anymore. She said he was
scaring her.

The
letter did nothing to circumvent his workings in his garage laboratory. In
fact, it actually exacerbated his work, and it caused him to spend as much time
blockaded inside it as he’d spent at the hospital before. It went on like that
for almost a month—until the news broke about their neighbor, Mrs.
Arnold, losing her mind at the bank. And only then did he reemerge to
reintroduce himself to us as a new person: a more cheerful person: a gloriously
vindicated person.

And
when the news reported her death, four days after her hospitalization, he was
out in the garage, whistling cheerfully and packing boxes.

And
as reports of the officer who mauled his family were leaked that same
afternoon, Mr. Laverdier was finally taping up the boxes that he’d left long
unattended, outside his office.

“Be
back soon, kids!” he shouted into the house as he moved to load the last of
things into the trunk of his Mercedes.

And
minutes later, he pulled away without another word, leaving us to stand and
stare at the empty driveway from inside the foyer—the garage door swung
open beside us.

We
looked to each other, then to the door, and fought to be first through it, to
finally see its hidden guts.

But
it was empty.

The
myriad of folding tables were still there. The light fixtures swayed there,
too. But everything Catee had seen before—the beakers, the test tubes,
the liquids—they were all gone. Had we been seeing it for the first time,
the garage would’ve seemed perfectly ordinary and unassuming. But seeing it
before, and seeing it then, we knew that it’d harbored something far more
sinister than its remaining paint cans and spare tires suggested.

It
was the birthplace of The Whitening.

April
26
^th:

Catee’s
dad purchased their place in Damariscotta two weeks after his dinner with my
parents and two-months before he fled from Madison with the innards of his
garage. It wasn’t a place where he and Catee spent any time together, but it
was one he claimed to be fixing-up for. And because of that, when he wasn’t in
the garage, he was away from home, more and more—allegedly doing repairs,
painting, or other restorative things of that nature.

Even
though their place in Madison had a “FOR SALE” sign staked street-side in front
of it, Mr. Laverdier repeatedly assured Catee that if it sold, and that no
matter what, they wouldn’t be moving before summer, so she didn’t need to worry
about being pulled from Madison High. He even stopped mentioning her
“slipping-up” as a contingency of that contract. He only said it’d take time to
get their new home “ready”.

Catee
had been there a few times before, and she reported that it seemed perfectly
fine: smaller, but in even better shape than their place in Madison. Her dad’s
claims made little sense until his intentions became clearer, and he stopped
inviting my mom to his copycat, family dinners, and he starting inviting her
out of town, to his place in Damariscotta, instead: in the process, they left
Catee and me alone in Madison until Mom picked me up around eight, nine,
sometimes even ten o’clock at night.

“Mom
… ”

“Yes,
Damian?”

“Are
you and Dad okay?” It was one of the latest night’s she’d picked me up: 10:46,
and on a Tuesday night, when she pulled into the Laverdiers’ driveway. With school
in the morning, I wouldn’t be to bed for at least another hour.

My
question made her laugh before she answered. “Well, of course we’re okay,
Damian. That’s a silly question.”

“No,
Mom, it’s not.” I’d noticed the changes in my parents over the weeks until
then—since she’d started spending more and more time out at Mr.
Laverdier’s second home. How could things possibly be the same when she’d
changed everything about herself in such short time? Everything about herself
that my dad had fallen in love, married, and raised a family with? How could
things possibly be
okay
with my dad when the routines he’d come to
expect were suddenly pulled from under his feet? How was my dad supposed to
feel when my mom, the closest person in his life, totally disappeared and left
him to microwave dinners and television reruns, all alone? How could she
possibly sit there and pretend everything was okay? I just wanted to reach over
and slap her across the face. Hard. So it stung. So maybe she’d return to some
semblance of normality and be the mother she’d always been, instead of the
pod-person I saw her becoming.

“Damian,”
she started, “your father and I have talked about this in great depth, and
we’ve come to certain conclusions that you wouldn’t understand and that I don’t
feel we need to explain to you. What I
will
say to you is this: There’s
nothing going on between Mr. Laverdier and me. Nothing that’s going to change
anything between me and your father. I promise you that.” The air hung heavy as
she selectively chose her next words. “But Pastor Dave and I have certain
things we agree upon. And because of that … that … that higher understanding …
he and I have become better friends, Damian. That’s it. Friends. It’s nothing
you or your father needs to be concerned about.”

“Pastor
Dave!” I shouted.

“Pastor
Dave!!!!??”

My
volume swerved her into the oncoming lane.

“Damian!
Damian!! Do you hear yourself??!! You could’ve gotten us killed! What are you
doing screaming at me like some maniac??? Have you lost your mind?!” Boy was
that question the pot calling the kettle black.

“Well,
I’d rather be dead than call Catee’s dad, Pastor Dave!!!!!” I screamed again,
and at the top of my lungs. “What sort of Pastor is he, anyway?! He’s a
SCIENTIST, Mom! A SCIENTIST!!! That’s it! He’s got no connection to God. None
at all! He only thinks he’s some fucking god!!” I couldn’t help but spew
profanity at the title she’d afforded him.