Raveled (14 page)

The woman
glanced at the book and read the title aloud. “Edgar Allan Poe.
The Raven and Other Stories
.” Her eyes, upon returning to mine, held doubt mingled with concern. “Aren’t reunions usually lighthearted occasions?”

“I suppose,” I said, “if you’re willing to settle for that.”
A glance at her badge confirmed my suspicions about her role here: Dr. Liza Graft, Staff Psychiatrist.

“Hm
,” she said. “Interesting. Which story had you two planned to recite?”

Why not give her something to chew on in her next session with Jasper?
“The Telltale Heart, of course.” I winked at Ray. “After all, he got that regrettable piece of advice from his mother, and we all have our crosses to bear.”

“What do you
—”

“Look at the time,”
I said, letting energy burst forth like I was the busiest person in any room I entered. “Must dash. Ray, thanks for your help. Let Jasper know I got it. I’ll see myself out.”

I took off down the hall and watched the elevator doors close
me in, leaving Ray and Dr. Graft in the wake of my lies. As I stared absently at the elevator buttons, the word
Infirmary
jumped out at me. Second floor. Before allowing my internal good girl to pipe up in protest, I pushed it.

The
ding came almost immediately and the elevator doors slid open to reveal a cloying watercolor of oversized butterflies in a meadow. If you weren’t sick when you got here, you would be after you toured the artwork. According to the chipped sign at eye level, the administrative offices were to my right, the infirmary to my left. I turned left.

What was the worst that could happen? A janitor
would tell me to get lost? A nurse would reprimand me for not having a hall pass? Probably, but neither of those things happened as I passed a tired janitor and an overwrought nurse on my way to the double doors. A metal plate screwed into the wall required an entry code to access the actual infirmary, but a stout doctor with adult acne and huge feet exited, leaving the doors with their arms wide open to greet me. How could I not take it as an invitation?

A thrill shot through me as I
crossed into the forbidden zone. Not that it was my first time slinking through doorways. I’d gone home with a few bar patrons over the years whose questionable housekeeping habits and subpar bedroom performances had found me sneaking out in the middle of the night, cursing their unoiled door hinges.

The nurses’ station stood emp
ty. I waited at it for a moment and my plan fell all to pieces. I grasped blindly at the desk as a current of queasiness ripped through me like chilled water through a dehydrated runner. Memories came rushing back and the ecstasy of the hunt for Jasper lost any element of enchantment.

I had forgotten and
sure as hell didn’t want to remember now, but the incessant beeping of monitors and the smell of the infirmary’s forced sterility brought it back full force. The whiteness of the floors. The barely perceptible tap of soft-soled shoes. The institutional coldness. The walls closed in around me. I looked longingly at the water cooler a few feet away but knew that if I stepped towards it, I’d faint. It felt like someone had shoved a hot poker in my ear and was swirling it with abandon around my brain.
Come on, Allison, get it together.
But I couldn’t. Old words and sensations throbbed in my head like a warped record. “He’s gone. Took his own life, apparently.” Phrases whizzed at me from over a decade ago. A shrill nurse mumbling to a doctor in the background. “Can’t say I blame him.” My mother squeezing my hand so hard that the bones crunched together, trying to give me strength while keeping herself from cascading toward the floor. The doctor repeating to no one who could hear, “I’m sorry. He’s gone. We tried but it was no use.” My mother talking over the doctor as she clung to a reality that no longer existed. “No! No! This can’t be!”

Two cold ha
nds suddenly clutched me around the waist and brought me back to the present. A bony arm wrapped itself around my back to brace my drooping body. “Ma’am! Ma’am, are you all right?” A hesitation and an impatient sigh. “Judy, is this woman a patient?”

I didn’t hear Judy respond. Maybe she’d
shaken her head or shrugged her shoulders.

“I’m sorry,” I
whispered as I stood up. I swallowed hard and stared at the woman to my left with concentrated focus to keep the dizziness at bay. “Very sorry. I’m diabetic and I forgot to bring a snack with me. Orange juice?”

Another nurse appeared with orange juice and, looking bored, handed it to my
rescuer who pressed it to my pale lips. “There you go,” she said. “You’ll feel better in a second.”

Yes, because orange juice always ma
kes you feel better about your dad’s death. “Thanks,” I said. “Much better.” And I was. The moment had passed and I resented my weakness.

“Are you a patient?” she asked, although I felt sure that the mysterious Judy had already answered that in the negative.

“No, I needed to deliver something to Jasper Shifflett. Dr. Liza Graft said it would be okay.” Heck, I’d gone to all the trouble of reading her name tag. Might as well use it.

The nurse looked confused
so I clarified. “Jasper Shifflett. Checked in today for food poisoning. I need to give him this book.” I gestured absently to the Poe still clutched in my hand.

Again, the flustered expression. “I’m sorry,
Ma’am. I don’t think he’ll be able to read it, but maybe you could read it aloud to him. They say they respond to familiar voices sometimes.”

“What do you mean?”

“Mr. Shifflett is in a coma.”

Coma? For food poisoning
? Forget the clam sauce. Something in the water ain’t right.

Chapter
19

Allison… present

I remembered the day the verdict came in. The lawyer called early on a Saturday morning to tell my mother that after two days of deliberation, the jury had reached a verdict. I heard her throw up in the bathroom, the running water unable to hide the sound. Kevin planned to escort her to the courtroom. She emerged from her room twenty minutes later wearing a black dress, as if she were already a widow. I begged to go, even threw a tantrum complete with thrashing arms and legs until Kevin took me aside in his room.

“Look,” he said, “Dad wouldn’t want you there. He wouldn’t want you to see him like this.”

“It’s the last time I might see him, Kevin.”

“That’s not true, Allison. Even if he’s found guilty, we can visit him all the time.”

“It’s the last time I might see him as an innocent man,” I said. “That first moment, when they walk him out in the handcuffs and stuff, even though it won’t look like it, he’ll still be innocent. We learned it in Civics class.”

Tears formed in Kevin’s eyes. He tried to sniff them back without success.
I needed to find anything else to look at: the weightless spider in the corner, the lint on Kevin’s brown-checkered bedspread, the third-grade tornado painting he’d tacked to his wall—anything so I wouldn’t see him cry. It was a version of my brother I didn’t want lodged in my memory. But some occurrences are so poignant and sharp that their sounds alone brand the entire episode onto the tangles of a brain. I wrapped my hands around my head to keep the hot iron from penetrating my skull. It didn’t work.

“Look,” he said,
his voice thick, “Mom’s not going to be able to handle it if he’s found guilty. I’m gonna need to be tending to her. Last thing I need is you fainting or crying.”

“But I’ll help
,” I said. Even then, I knew I would rise like a beacon of strength above this whole sordid situation, or at least stand firm beside it. I’d never let it inside me, never provide it such an easy vantage point for destruction.

“
I know you would, Allison. But Mom doesn’t want you to see Dad like this. Can’t you understand?” He spoke unabashedly through his blubbering. “She’s been trying this whole time to keep things normal for us. Makin’ dinner every night. Helpin’ with paperwork at the garage. Askin’ you about school each day. The last thing she wants is for you to have a memory of your father being dragged off to jail.”

“I’m not a little kid anymore, Kevin.”
I handed him a box of tissues, still avoiding eye contact. Through the window, I watched a butterfly land on the outer sill, tilting awkwardly as a small breeze caught its wing and forced the translucent blue extension into a drop of sticky sap. The poor thing got stuck and I realized anew how fragile life was.

“You don’t act young
,” Kevin said, “and you don’t think young, but you’re still a kid. With a kid’s brain. Things like this, they leave a powerful scar that you don’t realize ‘til later.”

“I’m already scarred, Kevin.
Do you have any idea what it’s like at school? I had to transfer out of my biology class ‘cuz it was mostly Bobby’s friends. My teachers won’t call on me, let alone look at me, and I’ve been sittin’ alone at lunch. People throw things at me.”

“What? Why
didn’t you say something?”

“I’m not stupid. I’m not gonna sit there at dinner and tell Mom things that’ll make it even worse for her. Don’t worry
, I can handle it. I’m only telling you so you’ll know I can hold it together in court today.”

He sighed.
“Let them at least think they’re protecting you.” He reached out and turned my head towards his face, grinning a bit. It made the moisture in his eyes glisten. “You’re stronger than me, Alley Cat. I know that. You know that. But I’m asking you for Mom and Dad’s sake. Please.”

I pushed my face into
his pillow and screamed at him to go. He rubbed my back before quietly exiting the room and closing the door as if I were a napping baby. A few minutes later, I heard them pull out of the driveway. The shower in my mother’s bathroom dripped but I was glad for the noise. It gave me something to count, to fill my mind so I didn’t have to think about my father looking out at the world through rusting, vertical slats for the rest of his life. When I reached 982, I got out of bed and felt a roaring surge of energy. It was probably nerves, but I needed to burn it off or die. I returned to my own room where my clothes from the day before lay scattered on the floor. I threw them on, ignoring the mustard stain on the back of my shirt.

I found my
red bike against the side of the house and hopped on after wiping the dew from the seat. Defiantly, I rode straight into town to show all the naysayers that I didn’t care what they thought. Besides, I might hear the verdict sooner if I was in town. The trip went fast, my mind racing far ahead of my half-deflated tires. But when I got to the heart of Lavitte, there were no people milling about. None at all. No one to appreciate my defiance. The town stood as empty as a coffin before a duel, so strange for a Saturday. The front window of Westerling General Store displayed a hand-written sign that read
Opening late today
. Libby’s Salon, usually abuzz with ladies getting their cut-and-blow-dries for a night on the town, was so dark I could see my body and bike reflected in the glass. Was it a holiday I’d forgotten about?

I rode through an alley and into the parking lot behind the grocery store. Plenty of cars there, but no
customers loading purchases into their trunks. Maybe it was a holy day and everybody was sweating it out in the old church. I cruised around the lot, weaving in and out of cars, hoping to dent all the ones that belonged to people who thought my father was guilty. That would have been about any car in the lot.

Tiring of
that, I steered out to the store fronts again and rode over the sidewalks faster than I ever had before. They were usually packed on weekend mornings with shoppers or churchgoers, but not today. I caught air on a huge bump caused by the roots of a near-dead crape myrtle and landed with a thud that jarred my spine and made my teeth crash down on each other. Then I turned the corner to the courthouse and saw it. The crowd.

It
seemed alive, behaving as one massive organism. A snake. That’s what it was. An angry, ravenous snake. The people undulated as if connected, moving like the segments of the hungry serpent, each part vying for the best seat in the house. Every person seemed to be shouting or throwing their arms in the air. Most wore their funeral best and dozens held clunky video cameras. The noise reminded me of the time my parents took me to the circus. Standing in line to get our tickets with my small hand entrenched in my mother’s grip, the din of the crowd had been deafening. From behind a frayed, black tent, an elephant had trumpeted, trying desperately to drown out the clamor of the masses. He’d known he didn’t belong there, his mournful cry long and wretched for the dire circumstances in which he found himself. The sound had stayed with me all these years as one of the saddest I’d ever heard, and this crowd recalled the feeling. For all their racket, I imagined that not one of them had anything as important or woeful to say as that elephant.

T
here was only one person whose words mattered today and he was tucked safely inside the old building. The judge. A fat, fried, old man who’d come to speak to my fifth grade class years ago. The rocking chair had creaked in pain when he’d squeezed into it. His face had reminded me of a pig who’d been force-fed so he’d be plump and juicy for slaughter. His veiny nose was wider than it was long and looked like a snout, lost in his blubber. And now, that pig got to oink out the fate of my father.

I turned my bike around, not wanting to see my
black-clad mother and swollen-eyed brother fighting their way through the crowd. Would people jeer? Would they throw eggs? I hoped my family had already made it inside, unstained and stalwart. But even ensconced behind the thick walls of the historic building, they’d no doubt hear the angry shrillness of the sadistic onlookers. Could my father hear it, too? I was about to turn the corner and leave when a man’s voice blared through a bullhorn. “Attention! May I have your attention please?”

Despite
all the ambient noise, the emotional crack in the man’s voice echoed its way to my ears. I rotated myself slowly back around to see the two-story courthouse doors partially open, barely enough room left by the throng to allow breathing room for the man. I rode in closer and braced my feet on the sidewalk.

The man looked familiar. I
’d seen him at Artie’s Autos a couple times when Mom and I stopped in. He drove an antique, blue Ford Mustang if I recalled correctly. Always smiled and waved at us. That’s why I remembered him—I had teased Mom that he had a crush on her.

The man
repeated his call for attention, then lowered the bullhorn, along with his head, while the crowd steadied itself, coiled and ready. A motionless snake was a dangerous snake, I wanted to tell him. Never shock or surprise it.

When the
din settled to a low murmur, he raised the bullhorn again. “There will be no reading of the verdict today.”

The snake hissed and rattled
: “What?” “Why not?” “What’s going on?” All the
w
words blended together into a whirring swoosh that grew louder and more threatening with each passing second. The snake slithered forward, crushing in towards the man with the friendly face. At least two piercing screams formed a harmony with the whirring and I pictured women tripping on their high heels and falling to the ground as the crowd trampled over them.

The man, sensing
an impending riot, lifted the bullhorn quickly, in a defensive manner this time, as it offered the only buffer between him and the crowd. “There’s been an accident.”

The snake hissed more loudly
: “Accident?” “What kind of accident?” The sibilant syllables sliced into my brain, filleting it into pieces that might never come together again. “What’s this you say about an accident?”

I watched it all. Heard it all. Felt nothing
and everything. I already knew. The change affected my heart first. Like cement shooting straight into my veins. Then to my head—my skull and face. Finally, it found the site in the body where personality hides. Where whatever makes a person cry at sad movies and coo over newborns resided. Stoicism, some might call it. Coldness, others. Strange. Distant. Insensitive. Adjectives they could and would use. I’d always thought of it as a Teflon coating. And I cherished it.

My mother took me to visit my dad in the hospital the
next day, when he officially died. The unofficial day, in my book, was the morning they found Bobby Kettrick’s stiffening body. The beeps from the cold, white machines, in combination with the chattering walkie-talkies of the guards outside my dad’s intensive care room, reverberated through my brain like the scream of a thousand mourning elephants. I sent the cacophony boomeranging back out into the world, my mind rejecting the intrusion. Let them deal with it. I held it together far better than Kevin as I uttered good-byes to my father, silently forgiving him for his distance and lack of effort. It felt so odd to touch his hand while speaking to him. The length of the kitchen table had exceeded his reach, after all.

My mother sent me to live with my aunt the day after the sparsely attended funeral. Most therapists would have called it a mistake, denying me the chance to grieve properly before being ripped out of the only world I’d
ever known.
Removing me from my support network. Disallowing closure
. They could label it whatever they wanted. My mother did the best she could. There was no precedent for how a mother should react when her husband hangs himself in his cell ten minutes before his verdict is read. Apparently, a sheet shredded and tied by skillful hands into a noose around one’s neck caused brain anoxia, and a brain without oxygen wasn’t much of a brain at all. It didn’t even know how to keep a body alive.

Rumor was,
the verdict was
Guilty
.