Psychopath (11 page)

Billy Bishop could worship his physique and hair, and the little gold ring through his nose, and the blue-green letters and the skull and cross bones tattooed across his back.  He could gloat over being a good fighter, a great football player, and a magnet for pretty girls.  But his vanity was just a defense against what he felt inside — ugly, rotten to the core, worthy of every beating he had ever taken and would ever take.  Like nearly every abused child, deep in his soul he had given the benefit of the doubt to his abuser, to the man with the strap.

But Billy didn’t end up on the pavement.  As the two minutes of silence came to a close, he leapt in another direction.  He turned to Clevenger. "We don’t need to get this drug test," he said.

"We’re getting it," Clevenger said.

"I can tell you what it’s gonna show."

Clevenger glanced at Billy and saw he was serious.  He swerved into the parking lot of a Dunkin’ Donuts and threw the truck into park.  "Okay. What will it show?"

"Marijuana," Billy said, resisting the impulse to smile.  "I smoked a couple joints I couldn’t sell at school."

Clevenger’s heart fell.  For a few seconds he felt utterly powerless, foolish to be trying to father a boy when he hadn’t been fathered himself.  Who was he trying to save anyhow?  Billy?  Himself?  Why not just admit the two of them were hopeless together, the blind leading the blind?  "How much have you been..."

"That’s not all it would show," Billy said.

Clevenger let out his breath, wondering what else was coming.

"Marijuana..." Billy went on, watching the way the word seemed to injure Clevenger all over again.  "And cocaine... and steroids."

Clevenger could tell from Billy’s tone that he had intended to hurt him, that he was trying to engage him in the only way he knew how — negatively, through confrontation.  And that reminded him that rescuing Billy had never looked like anything but a marathon.  The opposition of the Department of Social Services to his adopting Billy had at least helped him see that much.  More than half the kids adopted at Billy’s age, with histories like his, ended up homeless, jailed, or dead before the age of twenty.  Winning the fight for his soul meant holding his hand while slowly, painstakingly uprooting his demons.  It meant fighting for years, losing plenty of battles.  "So what do you figure we should do?" he asked.

Billy shrugged, still watching Clevenger’s face intently.

"You figure that’s my job," Clevenger said, mostly to himself.

Billy turned and stared through the windshield.

Clevenger did the same.  "There is the standard response, ’You’re grounded,’" he said.  "Which won’t work here, if you ask me.  I think you’d be pretty content up in the loft for a month with your weights and your stereo, sneaking in girls."  He paused.  "There’s another one that goes something like, ’You’re out of the house, on your own, unless you get yourself into a thirty-day program.’  And there’s some merit to that kind of thinking.  The ’tough love’ thing can work.  But it’s risky with someone like you.  You’re so unhappy with yourself you might feel at home on the streets.  You may figure that’s all you deserve.  And I don’t want that for you.  Truth is, I couldn’t stomach it."  He glanced at Billy to see whether he would respond to that olive branch.  He didn’t.  "Other parents just call the cops," he went on.  "Let the DA get a conviction against their kid for possession and hope a judge will make Narcotics Anonymous and drug-testing part of a deal for probation."  He shrugged.  "That isn’t always a terrible idea.  Having a jail sentence hanging over your head can make it tougher to enjoy getting high."

"Or more exciting," Billy said, still staring straight ahead.

Clevenger turned to Billy, saw the smug look on his face.  And right about then it would have felt really good to grab him by the neck and drive his head into the windshield, to smash the smirk off his face, to teach him that as tough as he thought he was, there were people a hell of a lot tougher than him.  Maybe that’s the lesson Billy needed to learn, the one no one had been able to teach him in the school yard at Auden Prep.

But as Clevenger felt the rage gather inside him, felt his heart begin to race, his jaw clench, he realized a beating was exactly what Billy was angling for.  He was unconsciously trying to resurrect the relationship he had had with his father, casting Clevenger in the role of his abuser this time.  Clevenger shook his head, thinking how hard the past died.  He was just one mistake away — a slap, a punch — from becoming his own father, completing the pathologic journey from victim to victimizer.  Seductive stuff, this repetition compulsion.  The only way out was to speak the dynamic, instead of acting upon it.  "Of course," he said, "there are parents who just lose it, knock the living crap out of their kids."

Billy looked at him.  "I don’t give a shit.  Go ahead, if you want."

"It’s what
you
want."

Billy rolled his eyes.

"I used to be in the same rut you’re in," Clevenger said.

"What rut is that?" Billy asked.

Clevenger looked out through the windshield again.  "Trying to show how strong I was by surviving one beating after another.  First from my father.  Then, when he wasn’t around anymore, I filled in for him pretty well.  Nearly killed myself with cocaine and booze."

"You?" Billy said.  "Cocaine?"

Clevenger squinted into the night.  "It dulled the pain.  That’s the obvious part.  But it did something else.  It kept the dream of my father alive for me.  The dream that I had a father who cared about me."

"I don’t get it," Billy said.

"As long as I was abusing myself," Clevenger said, looking at him, "as long I didn’t deserve any better, I could believe he loved me.  Me, the fuck-up.  Me, the addict.  The liar.  So what if the old man was a fall-down drunk?  So what if he grabbed a belt when he was pissed at me?  It wasn’t like I didn’t deserve it.  All I had to do was look in the mirror to see that I did."

Billy was listening more intently.

"There’s a lot of grief headed your way when you realize you’re a worthwhile person, Billy," Clevenger went on.  "I mean,
really
worthwhile — because of your heart, not your hair or your face or your body.  Because then you start to feel how much it hurt to have that belief beaten out of you, how much you suffered before you finally let go of it.  You start to add up how much it cost to have a father who
didn’t
love you.  And then you start to bleed for real."

"Or bleed out," Billy said.

That comment took Clevenger by surprise.

"Everybody’s always saying how you should face up to stuff," Billy said.  "Like that’s gonna make you happy.  But who’s to say it won’t make things worse, even make you lose it?"

Clevenger nodded.  Billy was right.  If you let down your defenses and confronted your demons, there was always the chance they would win.  "I won’t lie to you," he said.  "That happens to some people.  Sometimes the pain is too much to bear.  But it doesn’t happen nearly as often to people who team up — like you and I could.  If you were willing to tell me when you feel like using drugs, instead of using them, if you and I could talk the most when you’re low instead of high, we’d end up beating this thing."

"You’re not my shrink, though," Billy said.

Clevenger wondered for a moment whether Billy was finally asking to see a therapist, something he had been hounding him to do.  But then he realized Billy was asking for something more.  "No," he said, "I’m not your therapist.  I’m trying to be a father to you."  He watched as Billy swallowed hard — which either meant he’d been moved by what Clevenger had said or that he was acting that way.  "So tell me where to take you, champ.  Your decision.  I can drop you at the mall, take you back to the loft, or over to Strasnick’s lab.  Whatever you pick, I’m still with you one hundred and ten percent."

"Why would we need the lab?" Billy asked. "I already told you what the tox screen is gonna show."

"It’s too early for me to take your word on that.  There are plenty of other drugs you could be using.  Without the lab, I still have to worry whether I know what we’re up against.  And I’d rather not."

Billy looked out the passenger window.  He thought how he really owed Clevenger a lot.  He thought how what Clevenger had said made sense — the parts of it he could understand, anyhow.  But mostly he thought how he’d already spilled his guts about everything he was taking, except for Ecstasy now and then.  And he hadn’t used that for about a week.  So it definitely wouldn’t show up on a tox screen.  And he’d already told Casey he couldn’t get to the mall until later that night.  So, long and short of it, he really had nothing to lose by giving up a little blood and urine.  He turned to Clevenger.  "Let’s go to the lab," he said.

s e v e n

Early morning, February 23, 2003

Canaan, Vermont

It was nearly 1:00
A.M.
, but Jonah had no desire for sleep.  He lay in bed, in jeans and nothing else, spread-eagled on the mattress, smiling up at the ceiling.  The perfectly sculpted muscles of his chest, shoulders, arms, and legs rippled with excitement.  The apartment was still foreign to him, still freeing to him.  The anonymity of the place — its vacant walls, new white sheets and towels, freshly cleaned beige wall-to-wall carpeting, plastic plates and utensils, vinyl couch and wood veneer dining room table — made him feel reborn.  No one in the apartment building knew him.  No one along the three-mile road to the hospital knew him.  During the weeks since arriving in Canaan he had installed no phone, connected no cable, ordered no newspaper.  He either grabbed food at the hospital cafeteria, or wolfed takeout from the Chin Chin Chinese restaurant two blocks from his apartment or the Canaan House of Pizza just around the corner.

Michelle Jenkins had asked him out twice more, but he had politely turned her down each time.  He didn’t need a woman.  His caseload had grown to eight patients who transfused him not only with their pain, but with that of their troubled fathers and mothers and siblings who came for family meetings on the locked unit.  Eight life stories quickly became sixteen, then thirty-two, then sixty-four.  Each workday was a nonstop orgy of suffering.

It satisfied Jonah.

He laced his fingers behind his head, closed his eyes, and thought of six-year-old Naomi McMorris, raped at age three.  She had sat silently in his office the first thirty minutes they had spent together, her ankles crossed, her little girl legs swinging back and forth, too frightened to look at him for more than a few seconds.  She was beautiful, though skinny, with straight blonde hair and green-blue, soulful eyes that were far more knowing than they ought to have been at her age, eyes that hinted at how much she had seen, too early, of human cruelty.  Her mother’s rapist boyfriend had come and gone, but he had left adult and foreign knowledge inside her.  That was the reason Naomi cut herself habitually, clawing her wrists open when she couldn’t get her hands on a knife or fork or broken pencil, staring at the blood as it oozed.  Because a six-year-old could not find words to express the terror it had to be to feel herself penetrated — her
self
penetrated — the unspeakable pain, the desperation.  Cutting herself open could tell the story without words — the breach in her body’s integrity, the warm, red fluid dripping to the carpet.  Time and time again she would step out of her room on the locked unit or stand up in the cafeteria and hold out her bleeding wrists for everyone to see, her eyes wide, triumph on her face, as if to say, "Let there be no secret now.  I have been torn apart."

Before retiring from Canaan Memorial, Dr. Wyatt had written orders in Naomi’s chart designed to keep her safe.  He wrote to file down her nails every other day, to restrict her access to sharp objects, and to check on her safety every five minutes.  These were sensible measures to keep her from cutting herself.  So, too, were the 75 milligrams of Zoloft she was to take each morning to elevate her mood, the 2.5 milligrams of Zyprexa she was to take each afternoon to calm her agitation, and the 25 milligrams of Trazodone she was to take each night to ward off nightmares.

The trouble was that Naomi’s bleeding was mostly internal.  Preventing her from cutting her skin would never stop the shards of her shattered childhood from quietly shredding her psyche.

Jonah knew that he would never gain access to a girl like Naomi in the usual way.  She was not about to open herself up to him simply because he was called ‘doctor’ or promised to do her no harm.  He needed to be a victim, like her.  He needed to tap her instinct to comfort and protect another person, an instinct that often survived trauma, even grew stronger because of it.

"I don’t like it here," Jonah had told her after sitting in silence with her for that first thirty minutes.

Naomi still hadn’t spoken, but she had glanced at him for the first time.

"I hate it here," he said.

Another glance from her.  A shrug.  Then, looking at her feet swinging:  "How come?"

How come?
  Two words, seven letters, but an opening no less miraculous than the Red Sea parting for the Jews en route to the Promised Land.  A six-year-old soul, still new to this terrible world, was inviting
him
inside her.  Him, dirtied by over four decades on the planet.  Him, whose own sins were beyond words.  Him, unto her.  Unto God.  "Promise not to tell anyone?" he asked her.

She nodded.

"Swear?"

"I swear," Naomi said.

"They’re mean to me," Jonah said.

Her legs stopped swinging.  "Who?"

"The other doctors."

She looked at him, kept looking at him.  "Like how?  What do they do to you?"

"Call me all sorts of names.  Tease me."

"Why?"

"I guess because they don’t like me."

"They don’t like you?" she asked.

"They don’t want me here.  They don’t want me to be their friend."

"Why not?"

He shrugged.  A six-year-old would not be able to fathom why other six-year-olds had it in for him.  And for the moment Jonah was six, making a six-year-old friend.  He wanted to forge the kind of fierce allegiance children of that age can. 
Us
against
them
.  Us against the rest of the world.  "This is all a secret," he said.  "Just between you and me.  I wasn’t supposed to tell you."