Above (21 page)

She knew the way the Cold Pipes smell. I shiver.

Whisper don’t look at me when he’s gone. She sinks her chin onto her knees and balances the file in one wrinkled hand to read, squinting against the afternoon coming down through the windows. Looking for shadows.

I watch her a minute or two and then pick myself up, stretch out my legs, and go into the kitchen to find Doctor Marybeth.

She’s still shadow-worn. I can see it in the bend of her head, slight and angled as she looks out her own back window. I can see it in the way her own shadow joins to her heels dark and thick, just out of focus, just out of true. The shadow that’s Corner’s rustles in the dark, moving at my footsteps. It clings tight to her heels like a baby child.

“Does it hurt?” I ask, not meaning to until it comes out, slipped out in the dark where such questions are easier. Corner’s shadows burned cold when they poured down my throat, but they didn’t
stay
in me. They didn’t curl up inside and dog my sleep.

“Yes,” she says, low-voiced, unturning. “It whispers when I step out of the light. It wants me to let it die. And I want to.”

She stops; more runs out of voice than stops talking. “Matthew, I don’t know that I did the right thing that night.”

The shock takes me through and through, like lightning.

“Of course you did,” I breathe, wanting to take both her arms in my hands and turn her to see the pure heat of my believing. There was no way to not tell Corner ’bout losing its Sanctuary, and no way to not offer a place to stay. And giving it something to let it die —

“She was hurting,” Doctor Marybeth says, small as a little kid. “I should have done it. Then she wouldn’t have gone bad somehow.”

I think about it: no Corner. No Atticus dead and lightless in his own blood, no Beatrice, no Above. Just Ariel and me down Safe in our wing-house, keeping on with the living we were fighting to do before.

Until she ran away again. Until she turned and went running, and Atticus held her to that very last chance, and she became the second Beast exiled from Safe.

And you, all fool and red-mad, would have followed.

“No,” I say, staving off the vision of myself dark in the tunnels, wandering forever from the fear of going Above.

“No?” Doctor Marybeth asks, half-turning; mistaking it for something said to her. But it should be something said to her too, so I don’t tell her ’bout last chances and bad dreams, the kind you can still have while waking.

“No,” I say again, putting on calm, putting on soft. “You said you swore an oath when you became Doctor. Not to hurt.”

“Yeah,” she says heavy, and turns all the way and puts her hands on her belly where her swearing’s kept. Her hair’s in her face. I can’t see properly her eyes.

“That would’ve been hurting.”

“
This
was hurting,” she snaps back.

“You couldn’t know it then,” I say soft. And don’t think about real hurting, about fists and shoes and elbows smacking over and over into the wall of someone’s skin and bones. The kind where there’s no might-have-been.

“No,” she says finally, quiet and kind of beat-up, and I can’t tell if I’ve talked myself into winning or losing when she lifts up empty, shadow-bleak eyes. “What d’you want, Matthew?”

I shift my feet. I try to slide my wrapped-up hands in my pockets, but the bandage catches and I take them out again. “Doctor Marybeth,” I ask, thick and feeling worse for the asking, for the knowing, for everything. “Did you get the other file?”

She pauses. Her mouth crimps. “Bring me my bag.”

When I asked for the file, Doctor Marybeth put me questions, like she was the Teller and I had the Tale. She asked me the day and time of Ariel’s finding, the color of the clothes and shoes she wore. She bade me draw the letters and pictures on the bracelet I cut dirty from her wrist and explained them to me: numbers, family name. Initial. “I’ll see,” she said, tucking the paper deep away, “what I can do.”

Doctor Marybeth is as good as her word. She peels open a side pocket on her bag with careful fingers. Pulls out, brighter and less creased, another copied-out file. “Let’s take this outside,” she says, a glance over the shoulder, and opens the back door for me.

We pace out onto the lawn and sit down, cross-legged. She reaches over. Puts it into my hands.

“You found where she was,” I say, simple, ’cause putting all I feel into something complicated would tangle it up, draw the knot, and choke me blue and hushed before morning. The file is stiff and tidy. It doesn’t feel half as wicked as the wicked I know’s inside.

“I did,” she says grave. “Queen Street Mental Health.” A pause. “The inpatient facility.”

I can’t hear for the dead quiet in me. Plastic bracelets and Whitecoat words. Isolation bunks. Needles.

I knew it all along, and I didn’t want to know it.

“That’s like Lakeshore, isn’t it,” I say, voice shadowed from that choke-thing in my throat.

Doctor Marybeth opens her mouth, then closes it, and I can see the spark of her looking to argue that they don’t do things like that no more. “That’s like Lakeshore,” she says finally, and shuts her mouth tight.

To hell with the Tales people should tell for themselves. I open the file.

“Tell me what this word means?” I say after a moment. She looks to where my finger’s pointing and tells me. She tells me that and the next and all of them and holds my hand, tight between both of hers like I’m her little kid. And maybe I am, since she brought me out from my mama’s dark into lighter dark with her own two hands years past and long ago.

She holds it while I read Ariel’s file, and she don’t let go.

There’s a name for what she is. It’s nothing to do with bee’s-wing, and it’s only part to do with the hurt other people laid down on her in the Tale I built in my head where it could all be fixed with loving. It’s many-lettered like all Whitecoat words. And from Doctor Marybeth’s face, the care she takes to talk gentle and hold my hand loose so I can draw it away, I can tell she thinks it’s so.

“It’s not true,” I say, faintly, like someone who’s been long Sick themself. “It’s just that people hurt her.”

“I think people hurt her,” Doctor Marybeth says, careful and soft, her eyes nothing but a slow concern. Doctor-face. Doctor-voice. “But I don’t think it’s just that.”

The file says hearing things. It says seeing things. It says raging, and fear, and not knowing all the time what’s true.

“What do they do?” I say when I’ve finished the part called
diagnosis
, past the weight in my throat, the knot drawn thinner that makes it hard to talk.

“Therapy,” she says. “Medicine to keep them from hurting themselves. Special houses, sometimes, with people who know how to talk the right way.” A stop, a stutter even someone not trained as Teller would hear. “Sometimes electroconvulsive therapy.”

“What’s that mean?” I ask, head coming up.

“Electricity,” she says, smaller. “Shocks.”

“Like Jack,” I whisper. “Like Jack taking your hand all the time.”

Her face closes in for a minute. I wonder how many times she’s taken hold of Jack’s hand.

“Nobody should do that to my Ariel,” I whisper. “I’d kill them.” Forgetting for just a second, and then the flush comes slow up my cheeks.

Doctor Marybeth doesn’t say
no you wouldn’t
or
don’t be silly
or think I’m fooling ’round. She looks at me very slow and grave and says: “That wouldn’t help you nor your little girl.”

“She’s just as old as me,” I say faint, defensive; so used to defending.

“Older,” Doctor Marybeth says. “But some people stay young longer,” and I got nothing to say to that.

I read on. I read
treatment
, and I wish to everything I hadn’t.

“Why do people do this?” I ask her at the end, when I have to put it away so my tears don’t spot the page.

“They just wanted to help her be normal,” she says, simple, and cups her hands together, holding on to her own private impossibilities.

I cry it out. Doctor Marybeth lets me, is so gentle and tiptoe and kind that the red hatred comes up and I have to sit still, breathe slow once I can breathe without hitching, to let it down to where I feel nothing at all. The tree-shadows move across the yard. A black squirrel follows one, tail twitching and rustling like it’s worse than Sick. I tighten my hands up and try not to think.

“What’re you gonna do?” Doctor Marybeth asks eventually.

Burn that file
, I think, but no. Burning won’t stop the Sick that lives in my Ariel’s heart. “I don’t know,” I say, knowing I’m nothing but an echo, a shadow of the boy who begged to buy Ariel a peach. “Talk to her.” If she lets me. “Help her. Try to make her Safe.”

It comes out like the rattle of empty cans.

“Matthew,” Doctor Marybeth says, clear and distinct, and I turn to look at her already before she takes my face in her hands. “Promise me something.”

“What?” I whisper, surprised at her touch. It doesn’t chill like shadows but feels warm and regular as always, warm like someone vital, living.

“Before you decide a thing more with your Ariel, you talk to me. And if she can’t find her way in Safe, let me take her somewhere she can get well.” She lifts her hands off my face and raises one before I can say a word. Her eyes are deadly grave. “Not Whitecoats. Not Lakeshore. Well.”

She don’t wait for my reply.

She knows I won’t refuse her.

Jack comes outside in the evening light, when it’s dark enough that he’ll go outside even with his bound-up hands. The lights are burning in the neighbors’ houses, but inward; the dun light of bedroom lamps or the bright one of dinnertimes, the flicker of the television that Doctor Marybeth barely ever turns on.

I’ve been sitting most of the evening with the file in my lap.

I look up at him quiet, my own bandaged hands tied loose enough that they’re starting to itch. He stops halfway through Doctor Marybeth’s yard, his foot just shy of her thick-stemmed garden, and stands in the shadow of a tree, in the darkest dark he has.

“What went on with you and the girl?” he asks, hands in gloves tucked in pockets.

I stick my hands in my own pockets and look at the grass that pricks between my bare toes. At the smudge of spilled-out blood on the knee of my jeans. Jack’s known me since I was four and shy and Mamaless. He’ll find me out if I go lying.

“She wasn’t where I left her,” I start, breathing the grass and trees and hot thick evening to brace me ’gainst my own Tale. “She went away before I came back, and I had to hold fire to another one’s face so he’d tell me where she’d gone.”

“That won’t make trouble,” he says, flat. Threatening it into being.
This better not make trouble.

“It won’t.” And I’m pretty sure that of all things, from the silence Darren kept even when I shook and scared him behind the sealed bathroom door, that won’t.

Jack is watching me under his thick old prickle-brows. He nods once:
Go on. Tell on.

“She went back to the one who hurt her. The one who — who broke her,” I stutter, and my hands curl into hurting fists all of their own design. It pulls the skin where they’re wounded, and they sweat under the bandages. It’s not hot enough, eveningtime, for them to sweat so. I still want to hit him.

I want worse to hit myself.

“And?” he says. A hand on the back. My own tricks used against me.

“And I hit him and I kicked him ’til he half died,” I blurt out, and my shoulders hunch down like tunnel-walk, though there aren’t no tunnels for hours. “I thought he died,” I correct. “There were police. We didn’t stay.”

“You’re not all the way sorry, are you?” he says.

Jack has known me since I was four years old.

I shake my head, tiny slow.

Jack’s breath goes out with a huff that shakes me through. But there’s no
Killer!
come out on the tail of it. There’s no red in his eyes when I dare to look up.

He doesn’t send me away.

What he says is: “That’s grave, Teller,” low as low, not changing one whit except to shift his weight left foot to right. “Grave indeed.”

I don’t speak up to agree.

“And that’s why she won’t come out,” he says, push push push.

I hate him for a second, right red and complete.
Yes
, I want to say.
Yes, that’s why she hates me so hard. Because I took away her bad lover.
And she’d never say different. She’d not raise her voice to give answer. I’m the one who bears the Tales, and the Tales I tell are true.

She’d just run. She’d grow wings and fly away from my lying, and it’d be no more than I deserved for finding ways to leave bruises without touching skin to skin.

So: “There’s more,” I whisper. “I got mad at her after.”

Jack’s eyebrow goes up.

“I shouted,” and my voice has gone small. It’s gone soft from the ache to not be saying this, for no one to hear the words I make it say. “I shouted right in her face, and I scared her. I grabbed her,” I say, down to a mutter. “It bruised.”

“And she turned,” Jack finishes for me, because he’s got some mercy in him after all. “And marked up your hands.”

“I didn’t want her to run no more,” I whisper, and there’s not red but tears in my eyes, not mad but hurting. “I try to be good with her, talk soft and make Safe, and I told her all the stories so she’d know we wouldn’t hurt her. But she just keeps running, and I know I’m not good with this but I just wanted her to stop —”

Jack is good and kind. Jack looks away while I do my crying, and he doesn’t say nothing about it from the time my voice goes down and my shoulders start to quiver to when I get my breath back under rein again, swallow up the little gulps.

“I just wanted her to stop running,” I finish, like there was never a break in the Tale. “I gotta find the right words.”

“No, Teller,” Jack says, and it’s heavy, heavy like he’s walked a long road today and has walking yet to go. “There’s never been a thing wrong with how you do your talking.”