The Forgetting Place (24 page)

M
ovement: the brief sense of weightlessness as my body was lifted into the air for a fraction of a second before coming down again with a thud.

“
Hey, watch the bumps,
” a voice spoke up beside me.

“Sorry.” A more muted response.

I swayed to my left, felt the cold touch of metal against my forearm, but when I tried to lift that hand to my face, I couldn't. Something was holding me down at the wrist, a thick band of rubber maybe two inches in width. There was something similar attached to my legs at the ankles. Only my right arm, with its thickly wrapped splint, was free to move.

I kept my eyes shut, feigning unconsciousness. My body was resting on a thin, narrow mattress, short spans of railing on either side. To my right, just beyond the rail, there was a flat pane of plastic that I could slide back and forth a few centimeters with my fingers. Working my way to its edge, I found that I could reach past it into a compartment of some sort. Inside were individually wrapped sections of tubing.

An ambulance,
I thought.
I'm in an ambulance
.

There was no reassurance in this. We drove onward—no
sirens to call attention to ourselves, no hospital waiting for us at the end of
this
line.

“She's starting to stir,” the man sitting beside me called up to the driver.

“So give her more of the juice. I don't want her waking up back there.”

“Right,” the man snarled in agreement, his voice rough and callous in the small compartment we shared.

No,
I thought.
I don't want to be
—

The sting of a needle as it buried itself in my upper arm.

I tried to fight it, wanting to know where they were taking me. I didn't want to wake up lying on a dirt floor and chained to a concrete wall—no way of knowing where I was or how many halls and doorways stood between me and the light of day.

But I could feel myself rolling away now, the jostle of the road beneath our tires becoming a distant thing. There was a moment or two—before I slid down the steep and muddy slope into unconsciousness—when it seemed as if I were high above the ambulance looking down on its rooftop. The road stretched out long and straight below me, and I could see all the places I had been along the way—the Eastern Shore wetlands where Haden had died, the Bay Bridge looming high over the Chesapeake, the river and the dog, the hospital Emergency Department . . . and near the edge of the horizon: the foreboding grounds of Menaker itself. I could see its scattered buildings, the sporadic oaks that stood like sentries in the grass, the watchman's booth near the front gate, a few patients moving along the concrete sidewalks. But it was the wrought-iron fence that my eyes kept returning to. The ten-foot speared pickets curving inward at the top.

I turned and looked in the opposite direction, trying to make
out where the ambulance was heading. But the path ahead was a mirror image of what lay behind us, and with it came a sense of disorientation, a carnival ride that spins and spins and will never stop.
Everything we've done, we will do again,
I thought, but the sun had fallen from the sky and darkness was almost upon us. I could feel myself slipping now, the world becoming dim and full of shadows.

D
ark. Headstone quiet. Before I even opened my eyes, I could tell that I was alone.

The floor was soft and a little spongy against my face. I sat up, tried to look around. There wasn't much to see, only a small rectangle of light at face level along one wall—enough for me to note that the rest of the room was empty. Feeling along the walls, I found they were covered in the same material as the floor.
Soundproofing
. Whatever happened in here would never leave the confines of this cell. They could rape or torture me—or simply leave me in here and never come back—and no one would ever know. No one would hear the screaming, the eventual tapering into silence.

I went to the small Plexiglas window, looked out at the narrow hallway beyond. There was someone—another prisoner perhaps—shuffling away from me toward the far end of the hall. I couldn't make out his features, only his hunched form and the way his clothing—as lackluster and hopeless as the human frame inside—hung from the sharp angles of his body. With a closed hand I banged on the window, the sound filling the room with its hollow, desperate reverberations. If he'd heard me, he made
no indication, only turned the corner at the end of the hall and disappeared without looking back.

I stopped banging.

It was quiet again. Just the sound of my own breathing. I tried to slow my respirations, tried to focus and remain calm.

So there are others,
I thought,
others like me who are being kept here against their will
. The man I'd seen must be one of them. He'd looked beaten—not physically necessarily, but certainly in spirit. He had more freedom than I did at the moment, but he'd moved without any sense of purpose, the boundaries of his world expanded just enough to reveal how isolated he truly was. I wondered how long he'd been here, and whether I would eventually take his place—someone new awakening here and looking out of this very room at me.

I ran my hands along the wall in front of me, my fingers coming to a crease in the lining, following it to the floor, then back up and over the portal, the crease running parallel to the ceiling for about three feet until it once again ran straight down to the floor.
A door,
I thought.
This is a door. The window is only part of it.
But there was no doorknob, no latch or other mechanism. I pushed on it, then wedged my fingers in the crease and tried pulling it toward me, but there was no give. If this was indeed a door, then the only way to open it was from outside the room.

Running my fingers carefully along the padding, inching my way around the cell, I checked for other points of access. There was nothing other than what I'd already found. I was trapped in here—no way out except by the will of others. Panic started to close in, its jagged fingers digging into my flesh.

You're okay,
I told myself, pacing back and forth across the room.
They've put you in here for safekeeping, but they haven't hurt you
.

Yet,
another part of my mind answered back.
They haven't hurt you yet. Oh, but they will, Lise. They'll hurt you plenty. You can be sure of that.

I thought of the shallow grave awaiting me, could almost taste the grit of dirt between my teeth.

“Got to get out of here, got to get out of here,” I whispered, but there was no way out, nothing to do but wait.

You will die here,
the voice spoke up inside my head.

“
Shut up, shut up!
” I looked down at my naked feet, tried to think. “I haven't done anything,” I reasoned. “I don't know who they are—don't have enough information that could hurt them.”

They don't know that, Lise. That's why they brought you here. To be certain.

“I'll just tell them,” I whispered. “I'll just have to make them believe me.”

Silence.

“I could do that,” I said. “There's no need for them to—”

That isn't the way this works
,
and you know it.

I stopped pacing. The voice was right. That isn't the way this works. They will torture me until I have reached a point where lying is no longer possible. I will tell them everything—
anything
to make the pain stop—and only then will they listen to what I have to say.
Even then
they will not stop. Not until they are absolutely certain. And once they are certain, they will have no more use for me. I will have become . . . dispensable.
That is how things play out from here
—and for once the voice inside my head was in complete agreement.

“Okay then,” I said, and continued my pacing, unable to remain still. I concentrated on my breathing: head low, eyes cast downward—
like the man in the hall,
I thought. I was almost to
the door before I looked up and noticed the face staring in at me.

For a few seconds, I could've sworn it was Uncle Jim, that he'd been out there waiting all this time because . . . well, because we had some unfinished business between us. Despite his illness, in the end he had shown me what needed to be done—had provided an example for me to follow. And yet here I was, still hiding from it. But Uncle Jim, he was here to help, to take me by the hand and make me face this thing—this unfinished business—once and for all.

I ran the last few paces to the door, put my face to the window so he could see me in the darkness and know that I was ready. The face pulled back, a bit startled, and I could see that it was not Uncle Jim after all, but rather the face of the man I had seen in the hallway earlier.

“
Open the door,
” I begged. “
Please, let me out of here.
”

I doubted he could hear me through the soundproof walls, and yet he seemed to understand what I was asking—reached out for the handle.

Yes,
I thought.
Yes, that's it. Just turn the knob a little
.

Then he stopped. Over his shoulder I could see that someone had appeared at the far end of the hall. I couldn't hear what the other man said, but the stooped figure gave me one last glance through the window before turning and walking away.

There. You see that, Lise?

Uncle Jim again, whispering in my ear, his voice low but clear in the still of the room.

At the window. You see him looking in on us just then?

“I saw it,” I answered, my voice too loud, too harsh in my own ears—something I barely recognized.

But we'll be ready, won't we? We know what to do.

I swallowed, felt it go
click
in my throat.

“Yeah,” I said, not wanting to be part of whatever plan he'd come up with. But still, things had been set in motion.

Good then. We'll wait. We'll wait for the right time. You and I . . . I thought we could do this together.

T
HE SOUND OF
the screen door slapping shut. My eyes open in the darkness.

A bedroom. I can hear the rain outside, the steady drum of drops pelting the rooftop. There is no time to listen. I pull back the covers and ease my feet to the cold floor. A pair of shorts is slung over the back of the chair at my desk. I slip them on over gooseflesh skin before going to the window and peering out. The rain is coming down so hard that I can't make out the front yard or the street beyond, but I have a sense that something is not right out there, that something is about to happen and I'm already too late to stop it.

I slip into the hallway, stepping over the spots where the floorboards are prone to squeak the loudest. I know this house. The door to my brother's bedroom is closed, same as my parents' door. The one to the guest bedroom, though, is open. Uncle Jim's room. And I know before looking in that the room will be empty.

I do not know what to do next. There is an urge to cross the hall, to bang on my parents' door until one of them—my father, no doubt—swings the door wide.
What in the hell's the problem?
he will want to know.
And what will I tell him?
That Uncle Jim's missing—only half the truth—or that Uncle Jim has gone in search of our neighbors' five-year-old boy at two in the morning.
He told you this?
my father will ask, and whether I answer yes or no, it will be far from the whole truth of it—that he'd been
telling me in his own way that he was going to do this and I'd done nothing to stop it.

Dad will kill him, or come close enough,
I think. He resents Uncle Jim's intrusion on our family. But that's not why he will kill him. My father will kill him because there is something about Uncle Jim that scares him. Maybe it's the mental illness—the wild, unpredictable nature of it. It reminds him, maybe, of my mother's own struggle with depression. Maybe he hates him because Uncle Jim requires patience and compassion, and my father has very little of either. Or maybe he just hates him because he's different: strange and weak, defective in a way that makes him an easy target.

I decide to remain quiet, turn from their bedroom door, and continue down the hall and into the kitchen. We keep a flashlight in the upper drawer here, and I pause long enough to take it with me. There is something wrong with the contents of the drawer, I notice, but I don't focus on that now. Because again I am filled with the certainty that there is no time to waste, that I might be too late already.

The flashlight is dim and weak when I test it, the way all flashlights are when you need them the most. If we have any extra batteries, I don't know where they are, and now is not the time to go looking. At the front door, I can see that the heavier one—the door with the deadbolt—is standing wide open, leaving only the mesh of the screen door to hold back the chill of the night. It is the end of summer, but the September rain has brought with it the taste of an early fall, and I wish for more than a T-shirt and shorts as I step outside. The concrete, wet with precipitation, presses against the bare soles of my feet, and I look down, surprised, realizing that I haven't bothered to put on my sneakers.

No matter,
I tell myself.
Get moving.

I am down the steps and across the street at a half run, feeling the rough texture of the asphalt beneath my feet but not slowing until I've reached the McBees' driveway. The house in front of me is dark and silent, the shrubs like hunkered animals watching me from the shadows. The front door is closed, the small porch vacant and undisturbed. I have the feeling that the house does not want me here. It raises itself up a bit, protective of the family within.

The side yard looks up at a window to Ronald's bedroom. I move around to that side of the house because it is where I think Uncle Jim would go—to the window with a partial view of our front yard, to the one he pointed out to me as we sat beneath the oak a week and a half ago in the gathering dusk.

There,
he'd said to me, two fingers raised in this direction, the cigarette nestled between them.
You see it now? . . . You see him looking out at us?

I hadn't argued with him, hadn't tried to talk sense into him, hadn't gone to my parents to warn them that Uncle Jim was getting sicker. Instead, I'd sat with my back against the tree and done nothing.

He'll come for you first, I think,
he'd told me,
or maybe your brother. Because he's smaller and won't fight as much.
The cigarette had burned down to almost nothing in his hand, a forgotten thing.
You think your parents will protect you? You think they'll put a stop to it?

I stand in the grass looking up at the window, my right hand shielding my eyes against the rain. The window is high enough that I can't look directly through it and into the bedroom. If I jumped, I could maybe touch the bottom portion of the glass
with my fingers, but that is all. I won't be able to open it. But Uncle Jim is much taller than me. If the window is unlocked,
he
could've gotten it open.

Where is he now
? I wonder.
If he went through the window, wouldn't he have come out the same way? Would he have taken the time to close it behind him?

I walk around toward the rear of the house. There is a back door, of course, but the chances of the McBees not locking it at night are slim.
So . . . maybe he gave up
.
Maybe the house did its job protecting them after all. Except
. . .

Except where is he now? And would he have left all this up to chance, hoping for an unlocked door or window? No,
I think,
he is smarter than that
. He came here tonight
knowing
he would be able to get inside. Because . . . because . . .

The answer strikes me just as I near the rear corner of the house.
Uncle Jim has a key.
He has a key because my family and the McBees are neighbors, and neighbors exchange such things so that there will be someone to water the plants and take care of the animals while they're away. That's what was missing from the kitchen drawer when I'd fetched the flashlight. If I'd taken the time to notice, I might have—

And there it is as I round the corner: the back door standing open.

He's inside. He's in Ronald's room right now.

I run through the doorway and into the house. I've been inside before and know that Ronald's room is halfway down the hall on the left. My naked feet thud softly on the carpet, but it doesn't matter if I wake the whole house. All I care about is getting there in time. In my mind, I can see Uncle Jim standing beside the bed, the pillow held firmly in his hands and
pressing downward on the boy's face, the child's small hands beating uselessly at the thick forearms above him, my uncle's head turning to look at me.
Lise,
he will say,
I did it. I took care of that thing we were talking about
.

“
Noooo!
” I scream, trying to stop him as I burst into the bedroom through the open doorway. I am so convinced that he will be there that at first I
do
see him staring back at me from the darkness—his eyes wide, the sides of his mouth pulled back nearly to his ears, the face nothing more than a grinning skull. But then there is the sound of footsteps within the house, another door being flung open, the hallway light flashing on behind me.