The Stormchasers: A Novel (31 page)

But she stands watching the sheriff and her brother move down to the sunporch, where he’ll be escorted out through the back and spirited off across the back lawns so nobody will see, although of course they all will. The Clarences, the Zimmermans and Schmecks, they will all have noticed the prowler on Cedar Street, they will all be at their windows to watch that crazy Charles Hallingdahl get taken away. Again. At the screen door Charles stops, and Karena hears the sheriff murmur something like,
Just a couple more steps, buddy. Just a little farther. That’s right.
Charles looks back at Karena, weeping, terrified. He tries to smile. Then they are through the door.

T
he Black Wing Asylum for inpatient care is a former elementary school perched on the bluffs of the Mississippi, halfway between New Heidelburg and Rochester. A few days after Charles has been taken away Karena makes her first visit there, stepping timidly through the corridor she’s been directed to, clutching a slip of paper with Charles’s room number on it in one hand. Her brother has been a good patient so far, the nurse at reception said. He hasn’t given them any trouble, hasn’t even had to go to lockdown once, so he’s been assigned a Level 3 Room. Karena has no idea what this means. She’s totally lost and incidental in this place that has sucked in her twin. She doesn’t know how anything here works. She tiptoes along consulting the room numbers, trying not to see the other rooms’ inhabitants: a man listing in a wheelchair, a woman making barking noises, a girl pulling her own hair. The walls are Depression green below the waist, the ceilings high, the very tall windows reinforced by bars and chicken wire. But at least they have windows in this unit.

Charles’s room is 327, and at 325 Karena stops. She is alone because Siri is at the Back-to-School Bake Sale, and Frank, of course, is in court. They have all agreed it’s especially important to put on a brave face at a time like this, to go about business as usual. At the moment, though, Karena dearly wishes Siri were with her, or even Frank. She takes a deep breath, knocks on her brother’s door, and pushes it open.

But then she sees there’s nothing to be afraid of, because it’s Charles, after all. Just Charles. He isn’t straitjacketed or bound in any way, not spread-eagled in restraints as Karena had feared. Just sitting Indian-style on one of two beds in a T-shirt and pajama bottoms, his elbows balanced on his knees, his hands dangling from his wrists. Looking out the wired and barred window at the lawn.

“Hey, brothah,” Karena says, buoyant with relief. She walks to the other bed—empty, thank God—and sits. “Here I am, as promised, in the flesh. How’re you doing?”

But Charles doesn’t answer or turn, and Karena feels a little chill of fear. She ducks her head so she can look into his face, and then she sees the difference, all right. Her brother is a zombie. His mouth hangs open slightly, his eyes half closed. His hair looks oily and matted. One of his hands ticks, jumping over and over. He stares dully out the window at the pallid light of the overcast day.

“Oh, no,” Karena whispers. Oh, Charles, she thinks. What have they done to you?

She moves over to the other bed and sits next to her brother. He doesn’t move. He doesn’t smell like himself, of Irish Spring and fast food, but of rubbing alcohol and urine. Karena’s heart breaks—she can feel it, a literal pain in her chest, her throat. She moves closer still, her hip against Charles’s, and pets his stiff hair.

“Hey,” she says softly. “It’s me, Charles. K. Can you hear me? I’m here.”

Slowly, slowly, Charles turns his head. It seems to take him five minutes to look at her. His mouth twitches at one corner, and Karena realizes he is trying to smile.

“Hi, K,” he says. “Iss . . . you?” His voice is low, slow, draggy, a 45-rpm record played on the 33 speed.

“It is,” says Karena. “It’s me, Charles. Here I am.”

What have they got him on? she thinks. What the fuck have they put him on? Karena is used to seeing Charles on different medications, but she has never seen him like this. Charles is drooling a little, his chin wet. In that infinitesimal slow motion, he lifts his arm, up, up. Wipes his mouth. Gazes at his hand.

“K,” he says. “I guess . . . they got me. Pretty . . . drugged up.”

“A little maybe,” Karena says. “I guess they’re trying you on something new. How are you feeling?”

Charles is still examining his hand, but at the question he raises his head, with enormous effort, and looks at Karena with his half shut eyes. His head wobbles back a bit on his neck. A runner of spit starts to come from his mouth, stretching and dangling, and Karena is reminded of Silly Putty, how she and Charles used to grab one end each of the stuff and pull in opposite directions until it spun out into airy nothingness.

She looks around for Kleenex, but seeing none, she is about to wipe Charles’s mouth with her sleeve when he sucks the spit up himself, like a strand of spaghetti—
fsoop!

“Sorry,” he says. “ ’M . . . so gross.”

“No,” says Karena. Her throat aches and aches. “You’re not, Charles. Never.”

He lets his head tip back a little more so he can see her.

“C’n . . . I ask. A favor?”

“Sure. Of course, Charles. Anything.”

“My . . . ledger,” he says. “My . . . storm. Ledger. Could you . . .”

“Bring it?” Karena finishes for him. “Sure. Right away. Do you need anything else?”

But Charles’s head swings sideways, and after a minute the rest of him follows. He turns toward the window again.

“Charles?”

Charles gazes out at the lawn, or maybe at something only he can see, or maybe at nothing. His chin droops toward his chest.

“Okay, Charles,” says Karena.

She gets up and bends to kiss him. She is crying a little.

“I’ll be right back,” Karena says.

He is struggling to say something, and Karena leans closer.

“What? What’s that, Charles?”

“Pruh,” he says. “Pruh. Pruh. Promise.”

“Oh,” says Karena, straightening. “Of course. Yes. I will. I do, Charles. I promise.”

She waits for a minute in case he says anything else, then kisses him and backs out of the room.

Once she’s out in the hallway, Karena starts to run. She sprints through the corridor as if someone’s chasing her, bursts through the unit’s doors, explodes into the lobby.

“Hey,” the nurse behind the desk calls, rising. “What’s going on? Everything all right in there?”

But Karena doesn’t answer. She doesn’t have time to. She is on a mission. She has to get that ledger to her brother. She runs down the front steps, jumps into Siri’s Jeep, guns it out of the lot. Then she is turning onto the River Road and speeding back up through the bluffs and Looney Valley to the plateau, the farmland on which New Heidelburg sits.

It should take a half hour to get home, maybe forty minutes; that’s how long it took Karena to get to Black Wing, but she was going the speed limit then. Now she is driving seventy, then seventy-five, eighty. The speedometer really jumps up once she hits Highway 44. She blows past slower vehicles, sedans and pickups, giving the finger to a startled farmer on a Harvester who doesn’t get onto the shoulder fast enough. She passes an Amish buggy with enough speed to rock it on its wheels. She chain-smokes and looks at herself in the rearview—face tight and patchy from crying, hair wild in the humidity—and presses her foot to the accelerator. “Get out of my way,” she yells at the other vehicles. “Get out of my fucking WAY!”

She lights another cigarette. God, what have they
done
to him? If Karena didn’t know better she’d think they gave him a lobotomy—or God, oh no, was it electroshock therapy? Was it? The thought makes her screech off onto the shoulder and throw the door open, to vomit. But when she just retches and retches, her head hanging over the gravel, she pulls back in and gets back on the road. No. It can’t be. They wouldn’t do that to Charles, would they? Karena would have known, wouldn’t she? Wouldn’t she have felt it, something so drastic, Charles’s fear and terror and panic as they strapped him down, inserted the bit between his teeth like a horse, then threw the switch?

Although maybe they did, since Charles is so resistant to medication, refuses to take it—and no wonder. The lithium, what Dr. H had him on initially, nearly killed him with its side effects, the cure almost worse than the disease. First the blackheads, massing across his forehead like thick pepper. Then his stomach, attacks of diarrhea so bad Charles was afraid to leave the house, to venture more than a few feet from a bathroom. Then his inability to concentrate, to read, to think.
It’s like my thoughts have to squeeze through a little door in my head, K,
he told her during the first week.
They’re so slow. I just feel so stupid. I am not myself.

And his hands. His poor hands. The second Sunday after Charles’s diagnosis, the Hallingdahls were out again with the Budges, this time at the church supper up in Little Springs, where Frank and Mr. Budge had recently won a water rights case. They were celebrating. They were showing that everything was fine. They were sitting in the basement of the Little Springs Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, at a big round table with the Budges and a quartet of farmers and their wives, and everyone was discussing the case except Karena, who was watching in horror as her brother, his barbed-wire scratches from the Starlite incident still fading on his neck and face, tried to eat his sloppy joe. He bent over his paper plate, gripping the bun in his shaking hands. Meat scattered out of it, onto the table, his lap, the floor. Conversation slowed, then ceased. Carefully Charles set down the sloppy joe and attempted some potato salad. Potatoes pattered off the fork in gluey lumps. Frank cleared his throat and smiled around at everyone.
Excuse me,
he said. Then he tucked his napkin into his collar and moved over to feed Charles some hamburger.

It took about twenty-four hours for the story to spread through town, that Charles Hallingdahl had gotten hold of some weird drug, like bad coke maybe, that made his hands shake so he had to be fed by his own dad like a baby or a retard. Behind the scenes the medications were quickly adjusted. Yet for every change Dr. H made to the cocktail, there was some new and horrible trade-off. Charles’s hands stabilized, but he developed a stutter. When he could speak clearly again, a rash appeared. There were night sweats, nightmares, hiccups, pustules, humiliations of such endless creativity and caliber that even Dr. H finally admitted,
It seems Charles is unusually sensitive to medication.
They returned him to the lowest possible dosage of lithium, but of course by then Charles didn’t want to take it. Karena doesn’t blame him. It is so unfair, she thinks, that her brother should have to pay this high a price for something that’s not his fault to begin with. Yes, Charles is a genius, and he loves his manias. But Charles’s disorder is the gift nobody wants to get given. There is no cure for it, no solution. Either Charles takes his medication and suffers, or he doesn’t and everyone else does. It is colossally, sickeningly, definitively unfair.

When Karena reaches the house it is empty and quiet, the humidity trapping and amplifying the family’s smells: the tuna hot dish Siri made last night that nobody wanted, her cigarette smoke, musty carpet. The light is sad and green, that patient watery light that precedes a rain. Karena runs down to Charles’s lair. Where is it? Where is the storm ledger? She spies it on Charles’s card table and grabs it. The lair is a bad place to be without Charles, a dead battery. Even the lightning lamps are quiet. Karena tucks the journal into her jeans jacket and thunders up the stairs.

She drives back to Black Wing just as quickly, but once she’s in the lot she sits in the Jeep and smokes her last cigarette. The nicotine makes her a little nauseous, and Karena realizes she’s had nothing to eat today, she was too nervous at breakfast. It is past three o’clock now, and the day has brightened a bit, the sun not strong enough to come out but making the sky a blinding white. Karena smokes and looks at the asylum, a tall old redbrick building on a vast green lawn. She tries to pick out her brother’s window. She fails. She finishes the cigarette, butts it, gets out. Sticky condensation dots her hair and skin from the trees.

She takes Charles’s storm ledger out of her inner pocket and grips it in both hands. Looks resolutely at the asylum. Time to go in.

But she can’t.

She does try. She really does. She tells herself, Just do it now. She tells herself, You promised. Stop being a baby. She tells herself, You have to. It’s Charles, Charles in there. Charles. Her brother. Waiting.

But Karena can’t go in.

She doesn’t know how long she stands in the parking lot, clutching the ledger, finally not even arguing with herself anymore but just staring at the asylum. Long enough for the ledger’s cover to grow damp and imprint some of its marbled pattern on her hands. Then a crow caws, and a droplet falls on Karena’s head from somewhere, and she gets moving.

She returns to the Jeep. Scrabbles in the glove compartment among the flashlights and napkins and packets of old orange crackers for a pen. She sets the ledger on the hood of the Jeep and tears a page from the back of it. Scribbles on it—her normally neat handwriting jumping all over the place—
Property of Charles Hallingdahl, Rm 327. Please make sure he gets this!!!!

Using one of the bobby pins she also finds in the glove box, Karena secures this note to the front of the ledger. She darts up the asylum’s stone steps and starts to push open the door, but she can’t. She is such a fucking coward she can’t even do that much. Instead she sets the ledger on the top step beneath the overhang, propping it against a sad-eyed stone lion. Halfway down the steps she pauses, rips off her jacket, and jogs back up to wrap the ledger in it. She doesn’t want it to get wet. Hands shaking, throat dry, heart pounding in it, Karena again gives the ledger to the lion, tucking the bundle beneath the animal’s stone mane. Says, “Take good care of it.” Takes one last look at it. Then runs.