20. Blue
blue
Wolfe let me sleep in on most mornings, which I appreciated, waking up in that rumpled bed that still smelled like him, my head on pillows that still harbored his scent.
He would make tea in the cherry-red teapot and sit at the table all by himself, facing the back door, and look out on the land that he owed money to the bank for. Think his thoughts. Stay very still.
At all other times, he was motion and action, his hands creating something, his eyes tracking the horizon from time to time as though scanning for danger. It was just the way he was.
Getting up, making myself get up, I showered quickly, got dressed, and brushed my teeth.
All perfectly ordinary actions that settled me.
Told my body this was home. As I moved from the bathroom, Wolfe opened the back door; we watched the ribbon of gray steam wend its way outside.
A bit of a cold breeze swept into the kitchen.
“Might get a low-pressure system from the west today,” Wolfe said as he shut the door. “That means it might warm up a little.”
I sat down, nodding my thanks as he pushed a white china mug across the table. He’d gotten it ready for me. Timed it right. Added milk and sugar, just the way I liked it.
“Thank you,” I said.
“You okay?” he asked. He pointed between his own eyebrows. “You’ve got a furrow.”
I felt my forehead, touched the space between my eyebrows, and winced. “A headache, I think.”
Since my first few nights in the cabin, I’d not had a headache, just aches and bruises that had faded over time. My ankle was sturdy. So was my wrist. I was fine.
Except now, the room did an odd thing. It started changing shape, the living room wider than the kitchen, and the far wall to the front door wider than that.
I blinked hard, and that headache rushed in to land right in the middle of my head.
I gripped the table, nearly dropping my mug of hot tea, to steady myself.
Then the flood started. A rush of images that swamped my brain with the power of a firehose.
Not flickers. Nothing behind a fog. Memories.
Where I lived. Where I came from. The view from my bedroom at the back of the house my parents owned in Virginia, the grass lawn designed to host parties where people played bocce and croquet.
Shouts from down the long hall, my parents in my brother’s room. Laying blame. Flinging accusations. Cameron laughing at them. Telling them to go fuck themselves. That he was gay, and so who cared. They had. The family line must continue, or something like that.
The day Cameron died. I found him in his bedroom, where he’d taken pills meant to last him several months.
A sour gray foam had bubbled from his mouth and dried.
My parents were more worried about what the neighbors would think than how Cameron had felt when he’d taken those pills.
About the fact that Cameron didn’t cry out, though he knew he was dying.
I stood up, but I shouldn’t have. The room wobbled and my knees started to go sideways. Wolfe was there to catch me. To sit me back in the kitchen chair. He hunkered down at my side.
“Blue?” he asked, his hands on my thigh.
“My name is Crispin,” I said, the words high-pitched and hard. “I’m from Virginia. My brother died. He overdosed. I think he did it on purpose just to get away. We weren’t that close, but he was a good guy.”
“Are you remembering?” Wolfe asked softly. Looking up at me with wide, dark eyes. Not moving away. Not leaving. “What are you remembering?”
“Everything,” I said.
I remembered the Reserve, a bad boys’ reformatory, a place I later discovered was not more than fifty miles from my home.
Fifty miles. That’s all the distance my parents traveled to dump me off.
To put me in the hands of people—and surely my parents knew this—who thought cruelty was how you changed someone.
The Reserve was a camp for troubled boys that promised results, only nobody counted the cost. A place for kids with problems. Being gay. On Drugs. Violent. Or just troublesome at home.
The Reserve was made up of three or four buildings, on land that was two inches above swampland, on a field that mostly lay fallow, as far as I could tell during the time that I was there.
A twenty-acre wasteland tucked behind an industrial area, next to a pair of railroad tracks and a slow-moving creek.
I was sent there in June, the month after I turned seventeen. Two years ago. A lifetime ago. Still reeling from my brother Cameron’s death. Still staggering beneath the weight of the idea that I should have known. Should have stopped him.
My parents acknowledged that Cameron was dead, but insisted the line must continue. I must get engaged to be married because the family tree must grow.
I fought back, though I don’t know why. Why didn’t I just say yes and get on with it? The family fortune amounted to millions. It might have been worth it.
The Reserve was a place that quickly taught me to keep my mouth shut. To not argue. To not fight back when they shaved all the hair from my head, because of lice, they said.
The heat in summer was intense; the land the Reserve was located on was nearly a swamp, sloping down to a low, sluggish river, across from which were a twin set of railroad tracks. Trains ran nearly five times a day, two in one direction, headed north. Three headed south.
They fed us food that wasn’t fit for a prison. Generic oatmeal. Stale bread. Liquid eggs past their use-by date. Water that tasted like flint rock had been washed in it. Chicken patties and ketchup. Powdered milk that had barely been mixed and was definitely watered too far.
The showers were communal. The toilets were all in one room with no stalls and no seats. You learned to live with it.
They dressed us in dull-colored canvas pants, white t-shirts that scratched. Our shoes were like blocks on our feet. They were distinctive. If you ran off, which some boys tried, you would be spotted right away and brought back. And then punished.
They were inventive. Cellar was damp and cold.
They’d make you sit cross-legged on the cement and then they’d pour water over you, over and over.
There was a drain, so you didn’t sit in pools of water, but it was cold.
The smell coming out of the drain was murky.
What had I done to go to Cellar? That memory flitted away before I could grab it.
House was a little whitewashed cement hut off to one side.
They made you lie face down on a metal cot with wire springs and no mattress and hold on to the metal head frame.
Then they’d beat you with a belt they hung on a nail.
It was on the edge of the property, probably because the thicket beyond swallowed the screams.
I went there exactly once. For stealing another boy’s bread.
I was starving. So was he. His name was Mike.
I regretted it the second I’d done it, far sorrier than they wanted to make me with the beating.
He was gone soon after. Dead? Run off? I didn’t know.
I remember wanting to find him and say I was sorry.
Room was the memory that hit me hardest. It was at the top of the boys’ dormitory, the main building. There was no AC up there. Just a wooden floor, a window that was painted shut, and an ankle cuff attached to a chain pinned to the wall.
There was no lock on the door because if you were inside that room, you wore the ankle cuff and couldn’t leave, anyway. It was a hot box. They didn’t give you water. The temperature inside that room rose quickly by mid-morning, and it didn’t cool off much at night.
Ask me how I know. I think maybe I’d rebelled at one point, mid-July.
My parents had come for a visit, approved of my surroundings, and then left.
I threw folding chairs that were lined up in the gym for visiting day, a joke, since we’d been scrubbing and cleaning for days to make everything look good.
We even got real food at lunch that day: sheet pizza, brownies, slices of orange, but it wasn’t enough to make a difference.
Everyone I saw was skin and bones. The whole thing was a sham.
Those chairs made noise when they hit the wall, so there was no ignoring them. They dragged me up to Room. I sweated it out for twenty-four hours and, by the end of it, drenched from head to toe, my regrown hair in my eyes, I grunted that I was sorry and would never do it again.
The odd thing about Room was the lack of locks. I noticed this as they chained me to the wall. No locks. No need for them. If you got up to Room, you could let yourself in. If you weren’t chained to the wall, you could let yourself out.
The latch on the window, an old, thin iron tab painted over with layers of white paint, wouldn’t withstand a good kick. You could get out that way. They wouldn’t even look for you there because who would be stupid enough to hide in Room?
Me. I was that stupid. Or maybe, crazed with hunger, I was crazy like a fox. The idea came in September, long after parent’s day. Workers were again at the Reserve, mowing the lawn, whitewashing everything because journalists were coming to do an exposé and the stage must be properly set.
The workers were sloppy with the paint; the gym floor was only half polished in the open area where the shine would be visible. They also left things behind. Like a white bucket that had a box cutter in the bottom, buried in white paint.
I’d been told to rinse out the buckets and leave them by the trash bins.
I did this. I rinsed off the box cutter and hid it in the long grass at the edge of the property.
Another worker left his blue jeans, stiffened with paint, hung over the bollard near the old, disused phone box buried in the ground.
The blue jeans were faded. The bollard was rusted. They blended together. I grabbed the jeans during one forced march and hid them near the box cutter, still neatly nestled in the tall grass.