“I don’t mean for good,” I said. “Just for a day or two. After everything that’s happened . . . I think it would help to get away.”
“Ah, yes.” He relaxed. “Well, I have to say that I’m impressed by how well you’ve responded to this difficult situation. I’m not sure I can convince your mother to allow you to come home for the weekend, but I think I can arrange for you to join one of our group outings into town, if all else fails.”
A group outing would mean maybe four hours away from the hospital, all of it supervised. It probably wouldn’t be enough—but I’d take what I could get. “Thank you,” I said, and rose to leave.
“Alison—just one more question, if you don’t mind.”
“Yes?” I said.
“You mentioned earlier that you’d fought with Tori just before she disappeared. What else do you remember?”
I should have known this was coming. Keeping my back to him I said carefully, “What I remember . . . doesn’t make any sense. One minute she was there, and the next she was gone.”
“Do you think it’s possible,” said Dr. Minta, “that you might have killed her, by accident perhaps, and blocked the memory out?”
You’re not insane, whispered Faraday’s voice in my mind. You’re not a murderer.
Even now, part of me believed him. But I’d believed I’d written that poem about the martyred leaves, too.
“It’s possible,” I said. “And if the police find some clear evidence that points to my guilt, then I’ll have to accept that. But I never meant to kill Tori. And right now, I don’t know how I could have.”
My psychiatrist toyed with his pen, his expression distant. Then he said, “Thank you, Alison. You may go.”
. . .
I was halfway through lunch when Micheline dropped her tray onto the table beside me, dragged out a chair, and threw herself into it. She tossed the black flag of hair out of her eyes and said in her throaty crow’s voice, “Hey, stupid.”
I watched her sidelong, not sure what to expect. Her knuckles were swathed in gauze, but apart from that she seemed more comfortable and even happy than I’d ever seen her.
“Tell you something,” she said as she stabbed a forkful of fries. “First time I saw you, I thought you were a narc. That whole I’m-so-quiet-and-well-behaved thing, you know? Like you weren’t even trying to fake being schizo, just hanging out in Red Ward so you could spy on us.”
“But you don’t think that anymore?” I asked.
“Nah. You’re as screwed up as the rest of us. Just better at faking sane.”
Not long ago, I would have been horrified by those words. I’d grown up believing that mental illness was one of the worst things that could ever happen to anyone, and when I’d first met Micheline in Red Ward, she’d seemed as sinister and unknowable as one of Sanjay’s aliens. But now that I’d actually talked to her—or at least listened a little—I’d realized she wasn’t so different from me after all. Just another confused, hurting teenage girl, trying to make sense of the world as best she could.
“Gee, thanks,” I said.
She snorted. “Watch your smart mouth, princess. You start getting full of yourself again, I’ll beat the crap out of you.” But there was no malice in her tone, and she finished the sentence with a flash of her uneven teeth.
Tentatively, I smiled back.
. . .
“Alison?” Jennifer stuck her head out the door into the courtyard, where I was sitting with Micheline as she finished her afternoon cigarette. “Dr. Minta wants to see you.”
I got up quickly and came inside. As I walked into the office my psychiatrist rose to greet me, looking pleased with himself. “I have good news,” he said. “I’ve just had a call from your mother.”
“You mean . . . she called you?” I was startled. “What about?”
“It appears she’s had something of a change of heart,” he said. “She asked me if there’d be any chance of bringing you home for the weekend. So I’ve made arrangements for her to pick you up later this afternoon.”
Home? Tonight? Even my wildest hopes hadn’t gone this far. I fumbled for a chair and sat down, no longer sure that my legs would hold me.
“However,” said Dr. Minta, holding up a cautioning hand, “this privilege comes with a few conditions. You’ll need to stay on your medication schedule, and I’ve advised your mother that you should remain in the house and keep visitors to a minimum, to avoid any undue shock or stress. And we’ll expect you back here Sunday evening. All right?”
It was more than all right—it was incredible. “Yes,” I said weakly. “Yes, that’s fine.”
Dr. Minta’s round face softened. “I’m glad you decided to confide in me, Alison. This is a big step forward, and I know you won’t regret it. If this weekend goes well, and your mother seems happy with the result . . . well, we can talk about that on Monday. But let’s just say I’d consider it a very good sign.” He shook my hand. “Good luck.”
. . .
“You can’t go,” said Sanjay fretfully, trailing after me as I carried my suitcase out of the residential wing. “It’s not safe. They’ll take you away and put their mark on you, and then you won’t be Alison anymore.”
Ever since Kirk had been disciplined—all privileges revoked, and an aide assigned to follow him wherever he went—Sanjay had been wandering around like an abandoned puppy. But now he’d latched onto me, not even Micheline’s warning glare could discourage him. “He’s going to find you,” he insisted. “He knows where you live.”
“Get lost, spaceman,” Micheline told him. Then she turned to me and said, “You gonna be okay?”
“I think so.” But my voice wavered as I said it, because I’d just realized that Sanjay was right: Faraday did know where I lived. He’d seen it in my records—the ones I’d given him permission to look over, back when I still believed he was a real neuropsychologist.
Micheline’s eyes narrowed. “Yeah, well, you better not do anything stupid. You know what I mean.”
I did, but I wasn’t sure that was a promise I could make. “I’ll be careful,” I said.
Sanjay fumbled in the pocket of his slacks. “You need this,” he said, thrusting a scrap of paper at me. “It has the words that will stop them.”
I unfolded the note and looked at it. It read:
KLAATU BARADA NIKTO
A pang went through me—not pity this time, but sympathy. I remembered the poem I thought I’d written, and how hard it had been to accept that I hadn’t. And what a scary thing it was to face the possibility that what I perceived as reality might not be real at all. I folded up the page carefully and tucked it into my jeans.
“Thank you, Sanjay,” I said.
. . .
I thought my mother might be annoyed when I emerged from the hospital lugging my keyboard as well as my suitcase, but I couldn’t bear to leave it behind. There were just too many emotions inside me needing to be turned into music, especially now.
Fortunately, she didn’t object. She even came around to open the back door of the SUV and help me slide it in. And when I started to get in after it, she put a hand on my arm and said, “Why don’t you sit up front?”
She wanted me beside her? That didn’t seem like my mother at all. Feeling like I’d just had a glimpse into some alternate universe, I climbed up into the passenger seat and buckled myself in.
All my life I’d lived in the Sudbury Basin, one of the largest meteorite craters in the world; and most of that time I’d wished I’d been born somewhere else. But after being locked up in Pine Hills for nearly two months, those rugged hillsides, scattered lakes, and stands of twisted pine seemed almost unbearably beautiful to me. As we emerged from the forest and turned onto the highway, I found myself pressing my hands and face to the window, reaching out with all my senses to hear that landscape, taste its contours, smell its hues.
“Alison?” My mother’s voice was tentative, the merest brush of lavender across my mind. She drew a ragge
d breath, hands clenching around the wheel. “I . . . I need to apologize. To you.”
“Mom. . .”
“Please. Let me finish.” She shot a nervous glance into the mirror at the 18-wheeler rumbling up behind us and accelerated a little. “For a long time now, I’ve been afraid that . . . I mean, I’ve been concerned about you. About your mind. Because of that, I haven’t always been there for you when you needed me, and . . . I realize now that I was wrong.”
Who was this alien inside my mother’s skin? I’d never heard her apologize like this in my life. She’d obviously prepared her speech in advance, but her red-rimmed eyes showed that the emotion behind it was real.
“You see,” she went on tremulously, “when I was young—”
“Mom, the road!”
She gasped and swung the car back over the yellow line, then pulled off onto the shoulder. The truck roared past, rattling us in its wake.
“I’m sorry,” she said to me. “Are you all right?”
I uncurled my fingers from the armrests and forced myself to breathe. “I—yes. I’m fine. Go on.”
My mother folded her hands along the top of the steering wheel, her dark eyes haunted. “My mother, your grandmère . . . she was not right in her mind. And once your grandpère died, and it was only the two of us . . . I did everything I could to keep her happy, but it was never enough. Whenever I came home from school, or from being out with my friends, she accused me of all kinds of things, terrible things. The angels had spoken to her, she said, and told her my sins . . . and now I had to be punished, to save my soul. So she would beat me with her hands, or with my father’s belt, or with the handle of her broom, until I cried and promised to repent.”
I sat motionless, stunned by her words. I’d known my grandmother had been strict and even harsh at times, but this was worse than I’d ever imagined.
My mother cleared her throat and went on, “And even when she wasn’t hearing voices, she seemed to live in a different world. She talked of shapes and colors in the air that I could never see. She said she could smell food burning, even when there was nothing in the oven or on the stove. She commanded me not to say certain words to her, because they had a bad taste . . . she especially hated the sound of English, so I was never allowed to speak it in her presence.
“To me it seemed that all these things were part of her madness, and that if she would only listen to the doctor and take the pills he gave her, the voices and the visions, the bad smells and tastes, would all go away. But she refused to get help, and she became worse and worse, until—”
She broke off with a sob, and covered her face with her hands. For a long, dreadful moment she wept with the messy abandon of a child, while I scrambled for tissues in the glove compartment and thrust them at her, not knowing what else to do. But at last she drew a shuddering breath, wiped her eyes, and sat up again.
“She spent two years in the hospital,” she went on, her voice so soft that I could barely taste it. “Then the cancer took her, and she passed away. But the doctor told me that her illness—schizophrenia—runs in families, and that if I ever had children, they might have it too. . . .”
I stared out at the darkening sky, feeling cold all over. No wonder all the doctors who treated me had been sure I was mentally ill. Not just because of my violent reaction to Tori’s death or the bizarre-sounding things I’d babbled as the police were taking me away, but because they’d talked to my mother and found out her family history. And with such an obvious explanation for my behavior in front of them, why should they even consider anything else?
“Do you understand now?” she pleaded. “Why I was so afraid? Why I did . . . the things I did?”
I understood, all right. For all that I’d prided myself on being nothing like my mother, I’d followed the same pattern of fear and denial and avoidance as she had. “Yeah,” I said.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “I know I’ve hurt you . . . disappointed you . . . in so many ways. I don’t expect you to forgive me, but . . . I want you to know that I love you, Alison. And that if I could turn back time, and change everything that’s happened between us . . . I would.”
I snatched up a tissue and crumpled it against my mouth, breathing hard. Then I dropped my head against my mother’s shoulder, and she put her arms around me and held me tight.
We stayed like that for a long time.
FOURTEEN (IS SEDUCTIVE)
“There’s one thing I don’t understand,” I said to my mother, when we were back on the highway again. The sun was low in the sky now, melting toward the horizon like a scoop of orange sherbet, and I flipped the shade down to protect my eyes. “What made you realize you were wrong about me? I mean, I’ve done some pretty crazy-seeming things, and Dr. Minta still thinks . . .”
She glanced at me, surprised. “You mean he didn’t tell you?”
“Who didn’t tell me what?”
“Dr. Faraday. When he called yesterday, I assumed he’d talked it over with you first. He was the one who told us about your . . . what’s it called again?”
“Synesthesia?”
“Yes. He told us that you were tremendously sensitive, even for a . . . for someone with your condition. He explained why you’d been so upset when you came home that day after school, and—and afterward, and why you reacted so violently to the fire alarm. He seemed to have an answer for everything, and it was such a relief . . . I was sorry to see him go.”
“See him? You mean—he came to the house?”
She nodded distractedly, her eyes fixed on the road. “Last night. He spent more than an hour sitting in our living room, talking with us. It was such a relief to meet someone who knew so much about what had happened, and thought so highly of you. It’s too bad he’s going back to South Africa.”
My breath caught in my throat. “He is? Did he say when?”
“A few days, I think. I suppose that now he’s done with his study, he’s anxious to get back home.”
I clenched the damp tissue in my hand. If she was right, then I had even less time to carry out my plan than I’d thought.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m looking forward to getting home, too.”
. . .
“Ali!”
Chris exploded out the door of the basement and hurled himself at me so enthusiastically he nearly knocked me over. Mom made an incoherent noise of protest, but I only laughed and hugged my little brother back. “Hey there, Puck.”
He dug his elbow into my ribs. I stepped on his toe. Proper sibling relations reestablished, we broke off and he flopped onto the couch. “So how’s the loony bin?”
“Chris!” exclaimed my mother.
“Honestly? It sucks,” I said. “And the food’s no good either. You’d better not have been messing up my room while I was gone.”
He just grinned.
The stairs creaked, shooting gray arrows across my vision, as my father stepped into view. He greeted me with a hesitant smile, but didn’t move until I took his bony hands in both of mine, and stretched up on tiptoe to kiss his cheek.
“It’s okay, Dad,” I whispered. “Everything’s going to be okay.”
And for the moment, I almost believed it.
. . .
“I told Mel you were coming home this weekend,” said Chris, reaching across the table to spear another slice of roast beef. “She said you should call her.”
Considering that she hadn’t come to see me in over six weeks, I was surprised she had the nerve. “Has she been asking about me a lot?” I asked.
“Right after you left she did, yeah. Not so much lately. Hey, does anybody want more potatoes?”
“Go wild,” I said, handing him the bowl.
“If you’d like to ask Melissa to come over,” said my mother, “I don’t think Dr. Minta would mind.”
I nudged a carrot around with my fork. “Okay. Maybe I’ll call later.”
But it wasn’t Mel I was planning to call.
Dessert was chocolate sil
k pie, my favorite, but I was too full of roast beef and nervous anticipation to enjoy it. And when the dishes were cleared away, we stayed around the table only a few minutes before the usual gravitational forces pulled my family apart—my father to his study, my mother to the kitchen, and my brother to play street hockey with his friends outside. It was hard not to feel a little wistful about that, but it would have been awkward if they’d all hung around trying to make conversation for my sake. Besides, I’d have plenty of time to spend with them tomorrow.
It felt unreal to be back in this house, after I’d dreamed of coming home so long. As I climbed the stairs to my bedroom, part of me was convinced that any second now I’d wake up and find myself back at Pine Hills, a victim of some drug-induced delusion. But I opened the door and there it was, just as I remembered it—the desk beneath the window, the bookshelf crammed with paperbacks and sheet music, the single bed neatly covered with the same quilt I’d been hiding under when the police came in.
I sat down on the bed and opened the drawer of my night table. My neglected cell phone gazed up at me blank-faced, so I plugged it in and lay back to wait. Soothed by walls the smoky purple of evening, I felt the restless energy that had been driving me all day begin at last to subside. Within minutes I was asleep.
. . .
If it hadn’t been for my phone beeping to tell me it was charged, I might have slept all night. But that shocking pink ribbon unfurling across my dreams was enough to jolt me awake, and I scrambled upright to find the room dark and my clock reading 11: 21 P.M.
There was no calm left in me now. I paced from the bed to the closet and back again, chewing fretfully at my pinky nail. What if it was already too late to call? What if I got no answer—or worse, some tapioca-bland voice telling me the number was out of service?