Chapter 19 #2
Ninety days. I’d spent ninety days in a mental treatment facility.
My marriage had fallen apart. I had moved out, had been served divorce papers from Clay.
He had Lisette and had begun the motion for custody.
His reasoning was that I was mentally ill, and my hallucinations were scaring our five-year-old daughter.
I wasn’t able to care for her, the papers said. I was an unfit mother.
It’s just an assessment, I was told. Get an assessment, and then you can argue that you’re perfectly sane. Then you’ll get Lisette back.
So I’d gone. It was just an assessment. But the assessment took days, and then they injected me with something that relaxed me and made me feel drunk. It had loosened my inhibitions, and I’d started talking.
I’d ended up in the hospital for ninety days while they treated my dissociative episode, cause unknown.
When I got out, I had lost custody of my daughter.
We approached the doors. Bradley pushed them open. The nurse I’d seen wasn’t in the corridor ahead, but that didn’t mean anything. She could have turned a corner or gone through a door.
Think, Violet, think.
I wasn’t there anymore, back at that place. There was no assessment. I wasn’t about to lose Lisette, because I’d already lost her years ago. Lisette wasn’t mine anymore.
Who was that nurse, and what was she doing here?
Were there others?
Bradley steered me, just like the orderly had steered the man in the wheelchair. He put his hands on my shoulder blades and steadily urged me forward. He made no comment that I seemed suddenly unable to function.
Another orderly passed us in the hall. Then a woman in a skirt and blouse. Then a young man, tall and thin, his hair messy as if he’d just gotten out of bed, wearing pajamas.
I was cold, so cold.
“Bradley,” I whispered, “what do you see? Who do you see?”
“Keep walking,” he said.
“That boy,” I insisted. “Do you see him?” There was something familiar about the teenager in pajamas.
“Sure,” Bradley said.
“You don’t.”
“Violet. Keep walking.”
He studied a sign on the wall, then steered me right, down a different corridor. This one was quiet, dim. There were no people. He stopped me in front of a door. He knocked on it politely.
“Come in,” came a woman’s voice from inside.
Bradley looked at me. His expression gave nothing away. Then he said, “I don’t know what the hell’s going on right now. But get your shit together, Esmie, so we can get out of here.”
I grasped the words like a drowning woman grabs a life jacket. “Go screw yourself,” I said back, my voice shaky.
“I do that every day,” Bradley said matter-of-factly. “In the shower most mornings. It helps to clear the pipes because divorce is shitty. Now let’s go talk to this lady.”
I wiped clammy sweat from my forehead and nodded. “Fine, you pig.”
He opened the door, and we walked through.
Joan Sleeter, at least, was real. She was about sixty, with a short perm as hard as a helmet and an ill-fitting sweater on. She didn’t bother with introductions or greetings before she started in.
“Gus Pine found my daughter at the bus station and returned her home when she tried to run away in ’81,” she said, her voice the hard kind that hinted at how much she dealt with in her job every day.
“That’s the only reason I took his call and agreed to this.
But I don’t like it. I don’t run the records department, and I don’t know what’s going on. ”
Both of them looked at me. I was supposed to speak, to say something. To make this happen. I had come all this way. Instead, I froze.
There was a soft shuffle in the corner behind my right shoulder, a flicker of movement. I saw blue-striped cotton from the corner of my eye. Pajamas. The boy from the hallway was standing right there, and as I listened, he shuffled forward, closer to me.
I stared forward, refusing to look at him. Go away, I thought as sweat broke out on the back of my neck and my stomach turned. You aren’t really there. Go away.
“Well?” Joan Sleeter asked.
The boy came closer, so close I could feel a chill on my upper arm and in my ear when he leaned to whisper into it. “Sister sent me,” he said.
Darkness clouded the edges of my vision. I was going to pass out again. I dug my nails into my palms to fend it off.
From somewhere far away, Bradley slung an arm around my shoulders, tugging me into his side. He smelled strongly of Speed Stick deodorant. “Joan,” he said, “my girlfriend here, Violet, just needs a quick favor.”
The darkness receded, though the boy didn’t move. Bradley’s touch made the urge to pass out fade, though I was still rigid and sweaty, my voice gone.
Joan said something, but I didn’t hear it because the boy was whispering again.
“She thinks you’re crazy,” he said. It was a normal voice, a teenage boy’s voice, except for the fact that no one else could hear it and it was as cold as ice slicing into my ear. I stayed rigid under Bradley’s arm.
“Her little brother died young,” Bradley was saying. “A long time ago. Maybe you heard. It was tragic. Violet would like any record she can find of her brother. You know, as a memento. To help her move on.”
He was good. It was a good story, told smoothly. The thought was far away as the boy kept talking, his voice burrowing into my brain.
“She thinks you belong here,” the boy said. “Because you do, don’t you? You should be locked up because you see things. You can’t take care of yourself. Maybe she’ll give you an assessment. Just an assessment, right? Just an assessment.”
I flinched, hard, and Bradley noticed. He and Joan were still talking. He tugged me closer, and his hand went to my temple, pushing me down so my head was on his shoulder. “It’s okay, honey,” he said, as if he was comforting me. “Don’t be upset.”
“I suppose I could make a call,” Joan said.
“Could you?” Bradley asked.
“Get out of here,” the boy hissed in my ear. “Go home. Before they assess you. Before they find out how crazy you are.”
My stomach turned. I gave a low moan.
“There, there, honey,” Bradley said.
“Take a seat in the hall,” Joan said. “I’ll call the girl in Records. Just one phone call. That’s all you get.”
“Sure, sure,” Bradley said, and as he turned me, I flinched again. But the boy was gone, his whispers silenced.
There was a bench in the hall, Joan’s makeshift waiting room. It was deserted. We sat down.
My knees were shaking, and so were my hands. I leaned forward, my elbows on my thighs. Bradley was silent.
“A teenage kid in pajamas,” I said after a moment, my voice quiet in the empty hall.
“About seventeen or eighteen. A boy. Dark blue pajamas with white stripes. He’s tall, stringy.
Five-eight, five-nine, maybe even taller.
Dark blond hair, curly, worn short at the sides and longer on top.
Brown eyes. He’s been dead awhile. Why does he look familiar? ”
Next to me, Bradley went unnaturally still. I stared at the floor.
“You saw him?” he asked, and I heard fear in his voice, a low hum under the words.
“He was talking to me.” I kept my gaze down, rubbed my palms together. “He was standing right there in the office, telling me to leave. But it wasn’t really…him, in a way. I’m starting to understand that now.”
“Then who was it?” Bradley asked.
“There was a ghost in my bedroom when I was growing up.” I rubbed my palms harder, squeezing them, squeezing back the fear.
“A…hostile one. Angry. Evil, maybe. I don’t know how to describe it.
She hated me. When I left that house, when I left Fell, I left her behind.
But she’s still here. She’s sending messages through the others, I think. ”
I sounded absolutely objectively crazy. I sounded like one of those people who hallucinates, hears voices. One of those people who wander the streets, shouting. That guy who said a dog made him kill all those people. Someone like that.
Someone who had no business raising her daughter.
Someone who should be locked up. Again.
Bradley was frozen still, and he wasn’t touching me anymore. He’d get up and walk away, leave me here. I wasn’t going to blame him. If I were him, it was what I would do.
After a long silence, Bradley said, “You saw Martin Peabody. We went to high school with him.”
I wiped my clammy forehead, racking my memory for the name. It was faintly familiar, but there was no face attached to it. “He was our classmate?”
“Tallest kid in school,” Bradley said. “He was six feet by senior year, skinny as a rail. Blond, curly hair. No one else looked like that. Quiet kid, no friends, didn’t talk much. That has to be him.”
My stomach roiled, sour liquid boiling over itself, and I wiped my forehead again. “What happened to him?”
“He ate his father’s shotgun three weeks after graduation,” Bradley said. “No one knows why. He didn’t leave a note.”
I made a choked sound. I’d been gone by then. I’d left Fell before graduating—on top of my other failures, I was a high school dropout. When Martin Peabody killed himself, I was in Long Island, waiting tables and probably trying coke for the first time. I hadn’t remembered Martin at all.
Fell was a cursed town, but it had its everyday tragedies, too. The kind that had nothing to do with the supernatural. The kind that weren’t mysteries, unless you counted the mystery of what had been happening inside quiet, friendless Martin Peabody’s head that day.
You could leave Fell and get away from the ghosts, if you really wanted. But anywhere you went, you’d still find the usual kinds of sadness, like the kids who wanted off the ride and eventually decided today was the day.
As always, I thought of Lisette. I wanted to touch her, feel her hair. She hated when I touched her anymore.
“Here’s the thing, though,” Bradley said. Some of the fear had left his voice, though not all of it. “Martin didn’t die in the hospital. He died in his bedroom. So why is he here?”
“They aren’t tied to their place of death,” I explained.
“I’ve seen people where they died. I’ve also seen them in their homes when they didn’t die at home.
I’ve seen them in other places. I’ve seen them in different stages of life, sometimes young, sometimes old.
They’ve never spoken to me until now. The one in my bedroom…
I don’t think she died there. She died somewhere else. I don’t know how I know. I just do.”
“Are they in graveyards?” Bradley sounded curious now.
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Probably. I don’t hang out in graveyards.” I twisted to look at him. He was sprawled against the wall, his knees carelessly wide. “Why are you still sitting here, helping me? Can’t you tell I’m crazy?”
He blinked once. “I have so many questions, though. Can you talk to them? Can you ask Martin stuff if he comes back? There’s stuff I want to know.”
“It doesn’t work like that,” I said, though I didn’t really know anymore, did I? What was happening was nothing like it had been in the past. I had thought I had it bad when I saw the occasional dead person, silent and polite. Now I was wistful about how easy those days had been.
“Ask him what it’s like to be dead,” Bradley said. “Ask him if there’s God. Ask if Jesus is real. Does he have the beard and the long hair, like the pictures they show in Bible school? What’s he like?”
I glared at him. “I’m going to the ladies’ room.” I stood up.
“They’re good questions,” he argued.
“I’m too tired for religion or philosophy right now, Bradley. And I have to pee.”
“Fine,” he said, defeated. He pointed back down the hall. “I saw a sign that way.”
I turned and started walking. I caught sight of the restroom sign and aimed for it.
There was no one else in this hallway, but at the end of the corridor, people walked by, going about their business.
Nurses. Orderlies. Two doctors, walking and chatting.
The nurses wore scrubs, not decades-old uniforms. I had been reduced to checking every person I saw, verifying if they were alive.
As I put my hand on the ladies’ room door, a woman paused at the end of the hall and watched me.
She was young, pretty, slender. Unlike with Martin Peabody, I recognized her almost immediately, even though I had never met her.
I had seen her picture in the newspaper I’d read in the diner, right before I met Gus Pine.
I stood for a moment, looking at her. I could have sworn she saw me, too—truly saw me. I felt no harm coming from her, only sadness. I paused there, taking her sadness in.
I had no idea if I could talk to her, or if I could, what I would say.
Maybe that I was sorry. Maybe that I didn’t have answers for her.
Maybe that her murder would be solved someday, by someone.
But I couldn’t promise that, could I? And until that happened—if it happened—the unfairness of life meant that she would have to wait for justice.
I pushed open the door and walked through it before Cathy Caldwell could follow me.