Stealing Snow (2 page)

I shook my head, a lie my body told automatically. They encouraged talking about the subconscious at Whittaker. But I didn’t like to. I was determined to keep my dreams mine and no one else’s. Even though they were often twisty and dark, they were the only place I got to be close to Bale. I had slipped and told Vern once. A fact she would not let me forget.

Last night’s dream had been Bale-free. And a little stranger than usual. The tree was in it again, huge and looming, taking up the whole sky. Then there was that
thing
… The memory of it flooded in, distracting me, pulling me back into the cold, dark water. Patiently, Vern waited for me to sit up, pulled out a fresh pair of Whittaker gray sweats for me to wear, and sighed a heavy, breezy exhale that denoted her disappointment.

I slipped out of my paper-thin cotton pajamas in front of her and caught a glimpse of my reflection in the plastic mirror on the door of my closet. Since the kiss, I was still searching for whatever it was about me that had spooked Bale.

My face looked the same to me. Brown eyes. Pale skin because of the lack of sun. The trail of white scars tracked down one side of my body, most densely on my left arm. Despite multiple surgeries, my arm and torso would forever bear the weblike tattoo of the day that had brought me here.

The white streaks that wove through my ash-blond hair had grown only more pronounced this year. Vern blamed it on the new drug cocktail, but I didn’t see any other patients going gray, and plenty of us in Ward D were taking the same prescription.

“Maybe we should put some new art up. You’re really getting good,” said Vern.

I shrugged, but I felt a surge of pride well up underneath the gesture. I had begun drawing as therapy. But I kept doing it for me.

Sometimes I drew the other patients. A lot of my drawings were of Bale. There were dozens of them, in fact. I drew the inmates as they were and as they wanted to be. Wing thought that she was an angel or something, so I gave her wings. Chord believed in time travel, so I’d draw him anywhere or anytime he wanted to be. He once told Bale that he “blinked” from place to place. That was what he called it: blinking. He could come and go from the signing of the Declaration of Independence in a single blink. Time was infinite and different for him. I envied him that. I would give anything to blink back in time to before the kiss with Bale.

Sometimes I sketched Whittaker. The asylum had a lot of rooms. But there was a dividing line between what the parents saw and what the patients saw. My room was pretty spare: white sheets and walls, a white cabinet, a full-length plastic mirror on my closet door, plus a small white desk. The only decorations at all were the drawings hung everywhere with duct tape. I had Vern to thank for that. The rest of Whittaker looked like an English manor —with high ceilings, fancy furniture, and wrought-iron sconces along the walls. The irony was Whittaker wasn’t that old. It was built sometime last century. And rural New York was a far cry from England.

Sometimes I sketched my dreams, which ranged from stark, blinding-white landscapes to creepy execution scenes that I
couldn’t really explain. The worst was the one with me standing on a mountaintop, and below me there were bodies, blue as ice and covered in a blanket of snow. I was smiling in it, like I had a secret.

Or there was the one with the armored executioner who was wielding an ax, about to swing it into something—or
someone
—off the page. I was proud of how I captured the blowback of blood on his armor.

Dr. Harris thought drawing was a good way to channel my anger and imagination by putting pen to paper and seeing the “ridiculous” things in my head. By getting them out of my mind, he thought it would help draw a dividing line between what was real and what was just a fantasy.

It worked for a while, but ultimately Dr. Harris wanted the drawing to be a gateway to my talking about my feelings. That rarely happened—or at least not in the way that he liked.

“Almost time for visiting hours,” Vern pressed. She had turned to her cart and was grabbing the familiar tiny white paper cup that contained today’s pill.

“What’ll it be today, Vern. Sleepy or Dopey?”

I had affectionately named my myriad pills after some of the seven dwarfs. Each one corresponded to the effect it had on my mood. Sleepy made me sleepy; Grumpy, etc. One by one, they all came to represent—even Sneezy.

Today there was a green pill in the little cup.

“Happy.” I grimaced. That one didn’t really work anymore.

“You are chatty today,” Vern half questioned, cocking her head.

I pulled the nondescript hospital uniform shirt over my head, and I pulled on the pants. Vern handed me the paper cup and waited for me to gulp down the pill, which was so big that it scraped down the back of my throat even with a sip of water. Vern took back the cup and waited for me to open my mouth to check that I had actually swallowed the pill.

In that half-a-heartbeat pause, a second of resentment flooded in. It was that moment in our everyday routine that kept us from being friends—that, more than the lock on the door or the syringe in Vern’s pocket. It was her job to check, not to trust. And it reminded me every day that even though she was the only person who really talked to me, she was paid to be here.

At Vern’s skyscraper-ish side, I walked down the hall of Ward D, peeking inside the small, square double-paned windows to the other rooms along the way that made up the most secure wing of Whittaker. Through the one to my left I could see Wing perched on the edge of her chair, ready to take flight. She couldn’t really hurt herself from that high up, but her White Coat, Sarah, a birdlike woman with surprising strength, was attempting to coax her down from the chair anyway. Wing didn’t look it, but she was probably the patient the White Coats were most afraid of. One open door, one loose restraint, and Wing would find the highest surface she could and throw herself off it. Wing thought she could fly.

I walked away the second she “took off.” There was literally nothing sadder than seeing Wing’s face when she landed and realized that her flight was over.

In the next room, Pi was scratching things in his notebook.
He thought he was writing an equation that would save the world, or break it. According to Vern, who liked to fill me in on the other patients, he was done with his alien abduction phase and he had moved on to some new kind of government-conspiracy-cloning thing that involved code breaking.

Magpie’s room was empty. But I knew that underneath her mattress there were dozens of tiny things that she’d stolen from all over Whittaker. Magpie was our resident thief and my sometimes nemesis. I had been so distracted with Bale over the years, I hadn’t noticed that for the better part of our lives she had a head start on hating me. But I was playing catch-up now. It was something to fill the time, at least.

Then there was Chord, who was just sitting, staring out the window. Statue still, blinking. Finally, I hesitated by the last cell, Bale’s. Bale was staring with intent at the wall. By the white-knuckled grip he had on the arms of his chair, I knew he was thinking about fire again. He was probably trying to set fire to the drywall with his mind right now.

Bale came to Whittaker like we all did: against his will. But he also came without a name. He was only six, like me. I had spent a whole year at Whittaker without him. An angry year. A sad year. A lonely year that I would never get back. And then there was Bale.

They said he had been left alone, starving and scrounging for food in an old house. His parents had left him there—parents he said he didn’t remember. He was emaciated and dirty when he arrived—and not just from the soot from the flames. They said that he had stood and watched his house burn down after setting
it on fire. He didn’t try to run away. He just wanted, maybe needed, to watch it burn down to ashes. He claimed that he didn’t remember anything about his parents even though he was old enough to remember. Dr. Harris said he was choosing subconsciously or unconsciously to forget. And he didn’t know how to read or write, which some of the Whittaker kids made fun of. Just because we all lived in glass houses of insanity didn’t mean that we could not be cruel.

That first day he walked through the Whittaker gates, I thought Bale had been sprung directly from my imagination, his red hair spiked up on his head like a little skeleton devil. He looked like he’d literally walked out of the fire instead of just setting one. One of the other kids ran and hid, but I walked right up to him and touched his face to make sure he was real. I can’t say that I loved him at first sight, but I’ve been walking toward Bale from the second I met him.

Bale was a complete mystery to all of us. He didn’t even know his own story. I had had so much therapy with art and dolls and stories already that I confused it for play.

“Why don’t we make your story up?” I had suggested.

“Why would I want to do that?” he’d asked.

“For fun,” I had countered with six-year-old logic. “I do it all the time about other people.”

I pulled out my sketch pad and began to write:
Once upon a time…

Bale looked at me like I was crazy, but he didn’t retreat. I looked at his profile and drew a quick sketch of him.

“That’s me,” he’d said, pointing at his own chest. How he
found himself in my collection of rudimentary lines made me want to draw him out, make him tell his story even more.

“Now you tell me who you are,” I’d urged, doing my best Dr. Harris impression. “Once upon time, there was a boy named …,” I singsonged, and waited.

“Bale,” he had replied quickly. “Once upon a time, there was a boy named Bale who lived in a house made of wood. The monster made him cry like no mother or father should. Then his family went away. But made Bale stay. And Bale burned it all down one day.”

To this day, I don’t know if I remember it right or made it up, but the name Bale stuck and so did his story.

We had different monsters. Mine was my icy anger. Who wouldn’t be angry after being locked up all their lives? Bale’s was his love of fire. If fire didn’t exist, I thought Bale would have been a normal boy. But a world without fire didn’t exist any more than a world without air. Would Bale love me, understand me, if fire didn’t consume him like it did?

I knew Bale loved me from the first time he saw me have an episode. He was no stranger to anger. And when I was feeling it, the sensation was so strong, it took over my whole body, making me hot and cold all at once. I was never sure if it was better to hold it in or let it out. Fighting against it felt like holding my breath. There was no way the anger wasn’t coming out eventually, and my head always hurt from the pressure. Most people usually ran in the other direction when I exploded. But not Bale. He stood right next to me. He didn’t touch me. He just stood patiently until I was done. When I stopped seeing red, and the
intense, all-consuming wave of anger subsided, and everything in the room finally quieted down, he held my hand. That was when I fell in love with him, too.

I wanted my hand in his from that day to forever. Even if he did break it in two places eventually. Because no one really understood what it was like to live with this kind of rage and pain, like fire and ice, inside you. No one but us. And no matter what ward we were in, we always found our way to each other. Again and again. He made this place a home. Without him, Whittaker was the same thing for me as I’d always thought it was for everyone else: a prison.

I stood in the hallway of Ward D, staring intently at the back of Bale’s head, willing him, begging him, to turn around. To look at me now.

He didn’t.

Vern gently cupped my arm to get me to keep moving.

“Please … just a few more seconds,” I pleaded.

She shook her head. “Child, if we could actually cure things by staring long enough, Whittaker wouldn’t need to exist.”

Begrudgingly, I continued down the hall toward the visitors’ lounge.

“You know you’re going to have to forgive your mother eventually,” Vern said.

I shrugged. Mom had said she loved me. And despite all my problems and her committing me to an insane asylum my whole
life, I believed she did, in her way. But after Bale broke my wrist, Dr. Harris had recommended that he and I be separated, and Mom had agreed. She took away the one thing that made Whittaker more than just survivable. He was my only friend. I could not forgive that. I hadn’t even tried to.