Tumbledown (13 page)

Mr. James Candler was nowhere in sight. Mick had been taught to relax himself whenever he believed he might have made a mistake. He dropped his hands from the steering wheel and took twelve deep breaths. Step two required him to consider possibilities.

Was he supposed to have gone to the Center to meet Mr. James Candler after all?

No, he recalled his mother saying
Donut Hole
and that it was near Alonso’s.

Was there another place near Alonso’s?

There wasn’t. He had not made a mistake. He had simply beaten Mr. James Candler to the building—despite driving very slowly. Perhaps that meant his counselor had to come all the way from his house. He lived somewhere in the county. Mick supposed he should feel guilty about making him drive all that way. He took twelve more deep breaths and the anxiety receded.

Faith Hao,
that was sort of funny.

A car pulled in behind him, an old green Toyota. The woman who got out was short with a solid build. She carried a slip of paper. He climbed from the Firebird to meet her. Ms. Patricia Barnstone paused on the sidewalk to study him. “How are you this evening, Mr. Coury?”

“I was at a party.”

“I didn’t expect you to be driving. That’s quite a car, a beauty. It all cherried out?” She bent down to stare through the passenger window. “I dated a NASCAR driver way back when I first moved to Onyx Springs. He was always talking about
making the cut,
and what a tense life it was if you didn’t have the big backing. You follow racing at all?”

Mick shook his head. “I got a ticket, though, when I was seventeen, for going forty miles over the speed limit. It was in the Lagunas, the freeway through the mountains, and it was a plane that caught me.” His girlfriend had been with him, her bare feet in his lap. They had been in high school together in Yuma, Arizona. He remembered the details perfectly, but he could not remember the experience of doing it. “I had to go to safe driving school.”

“You were quite the hell-raiser.”

He and his girlfriend had committed intercourse that day, after the ticket, on the way back through the mountains. They stopped in a tiny town with an even tinier mountain lake. They ate at a park on a picnic table, and then they lay together on the table, one beside the other. She said, “If we’re going to do it, I want to take off my dress.”

“I have a note for you,” Ms. Patricia Barnstone said and handed him a sealed envelope. The note within it was handwritten.

The
doofus
made Mick smile, followed by a surge of anger that he had left Karly for nothing but this flimsy wing of paper. The anger quickly dissipated. He was not an angry person. He turned to Ms. Patricia Barnstone. She was dressed in drab pants and a man’s shirt. He felt the odd sensation that there ought to be a picnic table, pine trees. His girlfriend’s name was Peggy Stein. Her family had moved to Yuma from Miami, and when she was naked in the dark, lying on the table, a gold Star of David had dangled from a tiny chain around her neck and glimmered in the moonlight. That was a few weeks before it happened, before his illness skewed the world, before his family left Yuma and moved to the other side of the Lagunas for his rehabilitation.
You’re like a Gatling gun,
Peggy Stein said to him, meaning the sex. They were in the same American history class, and he knew what a Gatling gun was.

“What party were you at?” Ms. Patricia Barnstone asked.

“A friend from the workshop. We were going to watch a movie.”

“I won’t keep you then. I was watching a movie myself.”

“I remember driving this car fast,” Mick told her. Peggy Stein seemed to be there too, watching him, smiling slightly—something he could tell about her even though he couldn’t see her. “But I don’t remember being the person who drove this car fast.”

“Like what? Watching a video of yourself?”

He shook his head. “It’s like being the person in the video instead of yourself.”

“You feel flat? Limited?”

“Maybe,” he said, but he couldn’t make her understand him. “I know I’m the same person, but I’ve lost . . . something.”

“Lots of people feel they’re not the person they used to be. Count me in the club. It’s a crap feeling.”

“I feel I’ve lost . . . I’ve lost my
atmosphere,
” he said, nodding, happy to name it, despite the meds, despite having to leave the party. He remembered that night in the mountains with Peggy Stein, and the moment was lingering, staying here with him, letting him think like the boy he’d been when he was with her. Here was the proof, the best proof yet, that he was improving. Yuma wasn’t so far away. He had lived on one side of the mountains, and now he lived on the other. It should be easy to go back.

Ms. Patricia Barnstone patted his shoulder. “I’m watching
Key Largo
at my place. If you’d rather come over there, you’re welcome to. I can start it fresh from the get-go. Bogie, Bacall, a hurricane. Hard to beat.”

The invitation so surprised him that Peggy Stein, her moonlit body, and the golden star slipped away. “Thank you,” he said, “but my friends are waiting.”

“No sweat.” She slapped his shoulder this time. “You ought to do exactly what you want to do.”

On the way back to Alonso’s, Mick realized that Ms. Patricia Barnstone must have written the note. Mr. James Candler would be at home out in the county. He had dictated the message. He tried to imagine what Mr. James Candler would be doing at his home. Reading, maybe. A book with hard covers, thick and important. When he went to work the next day, people would say,
Have you read that important book that everyone is talking about?
And Mr. James Candler would nod solemnly.
I finished it last night. I didn’t go talk to one of my clients to finish it.
What might the book be about? It was an election year, but Mick couldn’t quite imagine Mr. James Candler reading a thick book about politics. The book was definitely thick. It might be about the important issues in every person’s life. How to do the right thing, for example. How to be good to the people who love you. How to love people yourself. How to take care of others. How to make decisions that are smart and that do not hurt people. Really, Mick thought, he ought to get this book himself.

Rhine’s moped was in the space where Mick had parked earlier. He pulled in across the street. At the top of the exterior stairs, he stared through the window. They were watching
Wayne’s World.
Alonso, Rhine, and Karly sat on the carpet, Alonso with his hand down his pants, Rhine in his gaudy suit, one hand tugging covertly at a stray thread from Karly’s cut offs, and Karly, lovely Karly, sitting with her legs crossed and feet tucked beneath her legs.
Indian style,
it was called, to sit that way. Was it a racist way of sitting? Could there be mean-spirited postures? He would defend her right to sit that way, he thought, and was almost immediately aware that he had gone off on a tangent. People can sit any way they want. She shifted, her knees rising, her thin arms wrapping round her legs, one wrist held in the other hand.

Oh, he loved her, all right.

He slipped in quietly and took his place on the floor.
Grace Hao,
he thought,
Blanche Hao, Felicity Hao.
When the time came, he sang the two-word theme song with the others. No one asked where he had been or what he’d been doing. By the time the movie was over, they had forgotten he was ever gone.

Maura played her boom box at top volume until the attendant tapped on her door. She put on an oblivious smile, as sweet as she could make it, and opened the door.

“It’s after ten,” the attendant said. He was her father’s age, the same guy who had played Sinatra over and over to sing it with his daughter. He spoke kindly and without condescension, and she felt bad about fooling him.

She punched the stop button on the boom box. She was in a flannel gown she never wore, and the smile got away from her—a phony, patronizing grin, but
fuck it.
“I’m so sorry.” So saccharine it embarrassed her. “I was just turning in, anyway.”

The guard wished her good night, raising his fingers to an imaginary cap. As soon as the door shut, she whipped off the gown and slid a chair to the door, fully dressed. She pressed an ear to the louvered vent. She could not hear his feet on the linoleum, but she would hear the door to the stairs swing open and clink shut. Making him knock was the only way to know for sure that he was on her floor.

The metallic clank of the door set her into motion again. She had to be fast. She shut off the light and eased her door open. Over the latch, she applied a domino held in place by duct tape. It had taken experimentation to find the right size block, sanding the domino with a fingernail file. The piece permitted the door to close without locking. Bedroom doors on this floor automatically locked at night. For safety reasons, clients—
inmates
—could leave their rooms, but they could not reenter without the assistance of an attendant. This wasn’t true in all of the dorms and not even all the floors of Danker Dormitory, only the at-risk floors.

She padded down the hall to the stairs and pressed her ear against the door. When she heard another door close, she knew he was out of the stairwell. She let herself in. There was a monitor on the ground level, sitting at a desk by the entrance, but she went down to the basement, which held offices and storage rooms. No one was there this time of night. A dusty desk was centered beneath a casement window, right where she had shoved it. In less than a minute, she was walking across the grounds.

She didn’t have directions to Alonso’s place, but it was near the workshop. The party would be winding down by the time she got there, but the only thing that interested her was getting Mick to give her a ride home. She had studied the route the van took to the Center. She wasn’t stupid.
Too smart for your own good,
her mother liked to say. A lot of the clients at the Center were plenty smart, and just as many were dumb as cheese. Alonso was dumb, but she didn’t mind him. She liked to brush her ass against him so he’d hightail it to the john to jerk off. She didn’t have that kind of power in the real world. She wasn’t a girl men looked at with sugary eyes or that predatory stare that seemed to come as naturally to boys as menstruation to girls. Maura was ordinary, and her personal plan for mental health required her to be honest about it.
Accept your mind, accept your body.
She was smart and looked as ordinary and dismissible as a tree stump.

She reached the edge of the Center’s grounds and hopped the low brick wall. This wasn’t a prison or a real asylum, just a private retreat for fucked-up-in-the-head people with money, like herself, or people who had turned over their lives to save their kid, like Mick’s family, or people who needed someplace to store the family problem. She crossed the highway, which was obviously the old route through town, full of gas stations and rundown motels. She didn’t want to walk beside the road. It was not a walking sort of street, and someone from the Center might spot her. She headed to the backside of the buildings, a gravel alley, and picked up the pace. It was a long walk, but Mick would have his car. All she wanted was to ride in that hideous contraption and talk to him. She was wearing a loose-fitting T-shirt and short skirt. She never could have worn the skirt at any other stage in her life. She had nice legs now. Her body wasn’t extraordinary, but she had to use what she had. Bodies mattered. The crochet-brained therapist she had seen back home tried to tell her it was what was on the inside that mattered. “You mean my liver?” Maura had asked. “My gastrointestinal tract?” The bitch was wearing a Danskin and there was an exercise step beside her desk.

Barnstone just said, “Some of that weight ought to go. You’ll be happier.”

She smelled garbage. It was hard to see where to put her feet. Mick’s car was a grisly, macho, gear head car. Not that it mattered. He was no longer the person who’d buy such a car. He was sweet and beautiful, blond in a California way. Maura was from Minnesota and knew something about blonds. He wasn’t a Nordic blond, his hair and skin had more color, and he carried his shoulders with a western attitude. If he could get past this mental whatnot, he could have the world. Maura would not then be a candidate for girlfriend. If you can have the world, no fucking way you choose Maura Wood. She wanted him to be well, and she needed him to be ill.

His attachment to Karly Hopper was both baffling and obvious. Karly was none too bright, though she was more dingbat than flat-out stupid. Here was the honest part—Karly Hopper was incredibly good looking. Every day Maura wound up acknowledging this. Good looks were an advantage that no amount of cleverness could overcome. You’re born, and you’ve either got it or you haven’t. Karly had it. She was dumb and fucked up in some meaningful way to be going to the Center, but what did it matter? All the boys threw themselves at her. Maura had to admit that if she were a boy, she’d do the same.
Fucking honesty.
She was better looking than Maura’s sisters, better looking than her brother, her mother, that girl at the high school who supposedly fucked the vice principal. Karly was a beauty. There. Said and done. Enough already.

Some of the motels—or whatever they were—had back fences. Most were dark. One had dogs in a wire enclosure, big black dogs with enormous heads. They barked and trailed her to the end of their lot. Their black bodies had dollops of brown, like rust spots. After a quarter mile or so, she turned where the van always turned, a road that angled through a residential neighborhood. No one was walking on this street either, but there was less traffic and she didn’t feel conspicuous. She had never been trouble to her parents until she was fifteen—a straight-A student, reasonably honest, a favorite of her teachers. One day in a second hand clothing store with friends, she decided she wanted a flowery psychedelic miniskirt from the seventies, and she didn’t want to pay for it because she knew she’d never wear it—she just wanted it. She took it into the changing booth and stuffed it down her pants. That was the beginning, that stupid skirt she never wore because it made her thighs look like beer kegs. Later that week she ripped off cigarettes and became a smoker. She stole beer from the fridge and tried to drink it. She ditched her old friends and dressed like the lowlifes who convened in the park. She liked that word
lowlifes
and used it often.
How’s my favorite lowlifes?
They got her high and she stole an entire canister of Slim Jims from a convenience store. She let the air out of the tire of a parked police car. She climbed a fence, shed most of her clothes, and jumped from the high dive into the community pool at three in the morning. She learned how to give hand-jobs and took up with Skinner. Her junior year, she called a history teacher a
cunt-eating cunt
and got suspended.