Plea of Insanity (29 page)

61

The genetic link can’t be ignored. With each family member afflicted with the disease, the risk factor for fellow family members does go up.

She heard Dr Barakat’s words play over and over and over again in her head, with the same inflection and reflective pause as when he had said them in his office last week. She saw herself in that room, admiring his faux-painting and rich leather chairs, never once thinking he was talking about her.

And the risk is cumulative. So if Mom, Sis and Grandma have schizophrenia, Junior is at least twenty-six times more likely to develop the disease than, say, you or me.

Than, say, you or me.

We’re different, was what he meant.
We
don’t have mental illnesses like the defendants do.
We
wouldn’t get that dirty disease.

And in the courtroom just two days ago, casually discussing the cause-and-effect relationship of schizophrenia with the experts, she’d been right there on center stage, with all eyes on her, asking the dramatic, breathless questions and secretly relieved to be part of the club. The Majority Club. A part of the Than, Say, You Or Me crowd. At that moment she was an intellectual, able to discuss and examine the clinical causes and frightening symptoms from an objective perspective in a courtroom full of other intellectual professionals. Now that was all gone. She was a percentage now – a statistic waiting to be realized. And just the word alone suddenly sounded repulsive and dirty and terrifying. Schizophrenia.
Schizo.

She wiped the tears with the back of her hand, but it was useless. It was like an unending stream that she had not been able to shut off for two days. Maybe something was broken, she thought. Maybe the crying would never end.

Rain poured off her windshield in heavy sheets, whipped around by the gusty wind. Even with headlights, it was impossible to see more than a few feet in front of the car, and traffic on 95 had slowed to a stop-and-go crawl. She probably should’ve called the airport before she’d left her apartment to see if her flight had been delayed or cancelled, but she hadn’t. After finding a seat on the last JetBlue flight of the day, she’d quickly thrown some clothes into a duffel bag and hurried to drop Moose at the kennel before they closed. She had to keep packing, moving, going, hurrying – or else risk stopping to think. And right now, she knew that was just too dangerous. Because she didn’t really know what she was going to do when she got off that plane in New York. And with too much thinking, she might not go. There were still stacks and stacks of memories inside her head that she couldn’t bring herself to drag out and examine just yet. The ones that she knew now might never have even existed the way she once thought they did.

It was like the shock of suddenly finding out Santa wasn’t real, without ever having once questioned his existence. One small fact had changed everything. It had even changed history. Only it wasn’t just Santa she’d found out didn’t exist today. Or the Easter Bunny. It was her whole life. She turned the music up on the radio, hoping someone could sing loud enough or strong enough to stop the thoughts that kept running through her head while she waited for the traffic to inch forward in the driving rain. She wondered if the voices did come for her, would she know they weren’t real? Would she know the difference between a DJ on the radio and a phantom?

She felt so alone. So incredibly alone with shameful secrets no one could ever know. No one wanted to be friends with the girl whose parents were murdered. The girl whose brother was a murderer. Old friends had stopped calling right after the funerals. Even Carly. New friends wanted no part of someone who was so different. So she’d made sure she wasn’t. She buried her past in secrets and lies that she kept from everyone. Friends, boyfriends, teachers, professors, bosses.
Her parents had died in a terrible car crash. She was raised by her aunt and uncle. She was an only child
. She’d told the same lie for so long that, on occasion, even she’d thought it sounded right. For just a little while, sometimes even she’d forget what it felt like to be so damn different.

Andrew’s sweet, young face flashed before her, with his milky skin and dark curly hair. The deep dimples when he smiled. Bobby Brady, her mom thought he looked like. He had never looked evil to her, even that night when he pulled away in the police car, covered in the blood of their parents. A boy of barely eighteen. That’s all he’d been. A boy. Ten years younger than she was now. She’d abandoned him all this time, while he sat alone, going through a cold, indifferent justice system that she knew he didn’t understand and that didn’t understand him.

She chewed her thumbnail till it started to bleed, staring straight into the blurred red brake lights of the Mazda in front of her. Now there was one more horrible secret to bury from friends and co-workers and boyfriends. She blinked back tears again. Only this one she might not be able to keep all to herself.

‘Schizo,’ she said aloud in the empty car. Then she opened her window and spit the dirty, scary word out into the rain.

62

‘Whoa, little lady. I know you don’t want to be in here now,’ said the deep voice of a blue coat whose whole large body blocked the front foyer. His broad arms grabbed her and held her tight.

She screamed something, anything. And she punched out at him, hoping to distract him with a claw to the face. Make him flinch so she could run past. It was her house, damn it!

Maybe they were still alive.

It was no use. Her small body was no match against Burly Man. ‘I have to go in,’ she pleaded. ‘Please! Please! You don’t understand! I have to go in!’

‘No, you don’t, honey. No, you don’t,’ he said in a voice that was too calm. Too soothing. As if to say, ‘There is no emergency anymore, there’s no need to be rushing.’

‘They’re my parents! I have to see them!’

‘No, honey. You don’t want to see them this way. Trust me. Where’s Potter?’ Burly yelled to one of the blue coats in the living room behind him. ‘Have him get a psych out here, will you? Get me one of those EMTs!’

‘That’s my mother! My mother!’ she screamed. ‘Momma! Oh God, Momma!’

Through Burly Man’s legs, she could see the puddle of bright red blood that stained the cream living-room rug behind him. It looked like it ran up the walls. Sticking out from behind the couch her eyes caught on the bright yellow rosebuds and pink ribbon that trimmed the sleeve of her mother’s new nightgown. The one Julia had given her for her birthday last week. Long, slender fingers still held a bloody phone in their frozen grasp, the nails painted a dainty, soft pink. Her legs began to shake uncontrollably.

Potter ran in the front door. ‘Julie, you need to come with me.’

‘No! I want to see them! I have to see them!’

‘Julie, it’s very bad,’ said Potter.

She turned and screamed the words at him. ‘My name is Julia, you asshole! J-u-l-i-a. And that’s my parents in there! That’s my mom! I want to see them! You can’t not let me see them!’ She began to cry again and she felt her body weaken with exhaustion against Burly Man. There was little fight left. The blue coats and cheap suits in the living room had all stopped what they were doing to watch.

‘Get me Disick,’ Potter said into his handheld, running a palm through his sweaty hair. The detective was more than a few pounds overweight and that last run across the lawn had left him red-faced and wheezy. ‘Have him meet us down at the precinct in thirty.’

Julia had seen enough movies. She knew from Detective Potter’s tone just who Disick was and she slumped down, defeated, on the floor. It must be a dream. This must all be a dream. Life can’t change this fast.

‘Take her outside,’ said Burly Man to Potter. ‘Let them finish up in here.’

‘We need to find your family, Julia,’ said Potter softly, stooping down to her eye level. ‘Do you have any other family, honey?’

Any other family. Hers was all gone now. She stared blankly at the pinprick-sized spot of grease on the detective’s tie.

He reached over and gently lifted her up by the arm. ‘Come on, Julia. Let’s go. There’ll be someone down at the station you can talk to while we try to find your relatives. I have a couple of questions …’

Potter’s voice finally tapered off. She could tell from his moving mouth that he was still speaking, saying something, but she couldn’t hear him. She couldn’t hear anything anymore. Sound had suddenly been sucked up into a vacuum, replaced by an intense, deafening pressure inside her head and she thought she might pass out. She watched as the different characters slowly came back to life all around her, busying themselves once again in her living room and moving across her lawn and her driveway. Burly nodded grimly at her before turning his attention back to the officer behind him, giving him directions with animated hands.

And just like that, the world went on.

She let Potter lead her back through the small foyer with the fake brick linoleum that her mother had always wanted to replace, and out the front door into the cold night air. Yellow crime-scene tape held back the growing crowd of pajama-clad neighbors. When she reached the cement walkway that led down to the sidewalk she stopped, turning to look back for one long last second at the house she’d lived in for thirteen years. She knew she would never see it again. Every room, including hers, was ablaze with lights, crawling with silhouetted strangers. Through the living-room window, she could see the technicians and photographers and detectives do their handiwork right alongside the Christmas tree that she and her mother had decorated just last week.

Oddly enough, no one had thought to unplug it.

63

On a Saturday morning, the taxi ride from the hotel at LaGuardia Airport to Ward’s Island only took about twenty minutes. It was strange. Here it was, she’d grown up in New York, volunteered during summers in college at both the Queens and Bronx Zoos, spent countless weekends down at the Seaport or in Greenwich Village clubs, gone to dozens of concerts in Washington Square and Central Park. She was probably one of the only New Yorkers who’d actually visited the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building, and she’d memorized the NYC subway system like a treasure map. But until three days ago, she’d never even heard of Ward’s Island. How ironic that for years and years, she was just a short taxi ride away from her brother.

After the tollbooth at the Triboro, the cab turned off, following insignificant green and white signs for Randall’s Island and Ward’s Island – the same ones she’d always somehow managed to overlook. The road twisted around what was, by New York City standards, a veritable forest of tall oaks, sycamores and maples, as it wound down a hill and under the bridge itself. Even though it was winter and the trees were barren, the million-dollar-plus view was breathtaking. The skyline of Manhattan loomed less than a mile to the west, over the dark waters of the East River. But there were no homes here to appreciate it. No office buildings or restaurants or gas stations or, even among all this glorious outdoors, parks to play in. This piece of prime real estate was eerily undeveloped, overgrown and devoid of life.

The taxi pulled up to the gate of an old stone guardhouse. Another insignificant green and white metal highway sign next to the door read
Manhattan Psychiatric Center.

Julia lowered her window. ‘Kirby?’

‘Name and picture ID,’ said the guard, holding a pen and clipboard in front of him.

‘Valenciano,’ she said, holding out her State Attorney’s badge, hoping it might work the same powerful magic in New York as it did in Miami. She was too tired to answer questions.

It did. The guard nodded and pointed, dropping the clipboard to his side. The fact that she’d come by taxi instead of in a marked police unit didn’t seem to bother him at all. ‘Take this straight ahead. Kirby’s on the left after the turn.’

‘What’s the number on that?’

He looked at her blankly. ‘It’s the building with two forty-foot razor-wire fences around it, lady. Trust me, you ain’t gonna miss it.’

She nodded and sat back in her seat as the taxi pulled away from the gatehouse. From research conducted on the Internet she already knew that Manhattan Psychiatric was made up of three buildings: Meyer, Dunlop and Kirby. All three had been constructed sometime in the fifties to house the city’s overwhelming number of mentally ill residents – 28, 000 at one point in time. But in the sixties – after the first generation of antipsychotics were discovered and institutionalization fell out of public favor – the number of committed residents fell from the tens of thousands to only a few hundred. Dunlop and Kirby closed their doors shortly thereafter, sometime in the seventies, leaving Meyer as the sprawling center’s only facility to offer both in-patient and out-patient psych services. Eventually Dunlop housed administrative offices, but the Kirby building remained shuttered and abandoned until 1985 when it reopened as a maximum-security forensic psychiatric hospital – a present-day criminal insane asylum. Julia watched out the dirty window, already caked with winter, as the taxi made its way through the hills and past the first two buildings, presumably Meyer and Dunlop. Though it was near freezing out, a few green scrubs and white uniforms were seated outside at bolted-down metal picnic tables, sipping coffee or smoking cigarettes or simply staring off into the trees. Given what they had to do for a living and where they had to do it, it was easy to see why someone would take their break as far away from their day as possible, no matter what the weather.

The guard was right. As the taxi rounded the final turn, it was impossible to miss the double chain-link fence that wrapped around the perimeter of the twelve-story building. Thick rolls of steely barbed wire topped both fences. She paid the driver and watched him turn around and take off back through the parking lot. She fought back the sudden urge to run after him, scream for him to stop, pull out another twenty and demand he take her back to the airport. Back to Miami. Back to where everything was a mess, but at least it was safe and it was familiar.

But her feet didn’t move. And she said nothing as the cab disappeared from sight behind the trees. She lit a cigarette with cold, shaking fingers, watching as the cab’s trail of white exhaust fumes floated off into the sky and disappeared. She knew she couldn’t just go back. Nothing in her past was real anymore. Nothing was truly safe or secure or even familiar – not even the happiest of memories. It was as if she were standing on a precipice, with one foot dangling over in mid-air. One more step in the wrong direction and she would surely free-fall out of control. But what was the right direction anymore? Inside the building behind her was not just the past she never knew she had, but the future she might not want to ever meet. Backwards or forwards, the ground was unsettled, no matter where she stepped.

She finally turned away from the road to face the dirty gray institution that loomed behind her. The black steel-mesh windows stared back at her like cold, vacant eyes; the rolls of prickly barbed wire formed a twisted smile of razor-sharp teeth. She wondered how many faces might be watching her at that moment from behind those windows and through the checkered steel of the fence. Watching her hesitate. Watching her deliberate. The faces of murderers and rapists. The faces of the criminally insane. Were any of them Andrew? Would he know her if he saw her? Had he been waiting all these years for her to come? Every Saturday and Sunday and holiday for the past fourteen years?

She sucked in the final puff of her cigarette and made her decision. She stepped forward off the ledge and into the darkness of an unknown future, not sure if anything would hold her up when she did. And as she made her way along the concrete walkway, past the razor wire and the abandoned picnic tables, through the double security doors and metal detectors, one last question burned in the back of her brain.

Did he still wait?