Bones & All (22 page)

The doctor came in. She had short red hair and thick wire-rimmed eyeglasses, and she seemed to be a little older than Mama. “Good morning,” she said crisply as she seated herself at the desk. “I am Dr. Worth, the director here at Bridewell. I'm told you wish to visit Francis Yearly?”

I nodded. “If you need proof that I'm his daughter, I have my birth certificate right here.” I slid the folded blue paper across the desk, but she didn't look at it, just opened the manila folder she'd carried into the room.

“I'm afraid Mr. Yearly is very sick,” she began as she looked over the document inside. “My concern is that a visitor after all these years might prove too upsetting for him, and for you.”

“You mean he's never
had
a visitor?”

She gave the chart another perfunctory glance. “That's correct.”

“Was no one allowed in, or … did no one ever come?”

The doctor assembled her features into a mask of professional sympathy.

“I never knew where he was,” I said. “If I'd known, I'd have come much sooner.”

“Please don't feel any regret on that account. Truth be told, I could not in good conscience have allowed a minor in to visit a patient in his condition.” She closed the folder and opened my birth certificate. “You're only sixteen. Where is your mother? Does she know you're here?”

With my eyes I traced the squiggly outline of the ceiling stain, a big brown blotch becoming the map of a lost continent. “She couldn't come, but she … she knows I'm here.”

“I really shouldn't let you in to see him without your mother present.”

I leaned forward and clasped the edge of Dr. Worth's desk. I was literally holding on. “I know my father isn't well, doctor. I just need him to know I'm finally here.”

“Do you live with your mother?”

“Not anymore, no.”

“Where are you living, then?”

I swallowed. “With a friend?”

Dr. Worth eyed me above her reading glasses. “I see.”

“Will you let me see my father?”

She sighed. “It's unlikely he'll understand who you are. I know you're anxious to see him, but no one is ever truly prepared for that.”

“Yes,” I said. “I understand.”

Dr. Worth leaned forward and pressed the intercom button on her phone. “Denise, could you page Travis to my office, please?”

While we were waiting I glanced out the window. The truck was gone. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.
I will never see him again.

A minute later the door opened and a man in gray hospital scrubs came in. He was tall, a bit overweight, and in need of a haircut. There was something very gentle and teddy-bearish about him, and even in that first second I knew he would be kind to me.

“Travis, is Mr. Yearly awake?”

The orderly smiled and greeted me before answering, “Yes, Doctor.”

“And how is he today?”

“Fairly good to good. Alert. He ate most of his breakfast.”

The doctor nodded and turned back to me. “I will let you in to see your father for ten minutes. For your safety, Travis will remain with you for the duration of the visit.”

For my safety?

*   *   *

Maybe you think you know what an insane asylum is like on the inside, but you're probably wrong. There are no raving madmen reaching between the bars to grasp at you, no frantic struggles dissolving into tears and sedation and straitjackets—none that I saw, at least. The radio was tuned to a classical station in the common room, where people of all ages played checkers or solitaire, wrote letters, or painted in watercolors. Some wore pajamas and some were fully dressed. No one was talking to themselves or to each other.

A pale-haired girl in a shapeless gray sweater sat in a chair by a window overlooking the woods behind the hospital, her hands curled in her lap like an old woman's. There was an eager, almost hungry expression on her face, as if she were only biding her time until the fairies came in the night to rescue her. I thought of Rachel.

Some of the older patients were in wheelchairs. If they looked up as we passed I expected to see some spark of curiosity, but a glance satisfied them that I wasn't bringing them food or medication and so, for their purposes, I didn't exist.

A woman in a wheelchair was knitting a scarf with blunt-tipped plastic needles. The scarf seemed to go on for yards and yards, changing colors and folding itself into piles in her lap before disappearing into a large floral-patterned handbag on the floor beside her. She plowed on with competent, listless movements, not even looking at her needles as she knit. A scarf for a giant, or a scarf for nobody.

Travis led me through a series of swinging doors and down a long corridor, and when we reached the door at the end of the hall he took a ring of keys from his belt. My father was locked inside three times over. My heart lodged itself in my throat.

A man was sitting at a small padded table, his back to the door, and he didn't turn as we entered. I caught sight of his bed before I saw his face: white pillow, white sheet, leather restraints hanging from the handlebars on either side, waiting for naptime. I ventured into the room, watching the profile of the man in the chair with each step.

“There's someone here to see you, Frank.” Travis spoke with exaggerated tenderness, as if my father were a small child. “Someone you've been waiting for, for a very long time, right?”

The boy in the yearbook photo was long gone. My dad lifted his pale and watery eyes to my face, and I saw his gray-stubbled jaw and neck muscles straining. But he didn't smile, and he didn't speak.

“Hi,” I whispered. “Hi, Dad.”

Dad:
another word in that imaginary language. As I spoke his eyes went wide, tears fell down the sides of his cheeks, and he worked his jaw more strenuously. His lips moved, but I couldn't make out what he was trying to say. My heart clenched.
He'll never sing as he cooks our breakfast.

“Can't…” I began. “Can't he speak?”

“It's the medication,” Travis said gently, coming from behind me with a chair. “Here. Why don't you sit down?” I seated myself as the orderly laid a hand on my father's. His other hand, his right, was under the padded table. “It's okay, Frank. Rest easy. It's okay.” To me he said, “In the beginning I told him it was too early to expect you, that you'd be much too young to make your way here on your own, but I don't know that he understood.” He paused. “I have to say, I wasn't expecting you for a good few years yet.”

This man, whom I had only met a minute ago, knew who I was and why I was here. I didn't know how to feel about that, so I just said, “I guess you've been working here a long time, then.”

Travis gave me half a smile. “Time goes faster the older you get. Makes sense, I guess. A day becomes a smaller and smaller fraction of your life.”

I looked at my father. “Can I touch him?”

The attendant nodded. “Just briefly though. And give him space if he gets upset.”

“Is he upset now?”

“Not upset, no. Just overwhelmed.”

I reached for his hand—as limp and clammy as I expected it to be—and I watched my father fix his eyes beyond my shoulder, where Travis was opening his bedside drawer. “There's something he wants you to read,” the attendant said.

I glanced back at my father, who was still looking anxiously after Travis. “How do you know?”

“It was my very first week on the job, the night your father came to Bridewell. We've always felt like we've been walking this road together, haven't we, Frank?”

Frank nodded, or tried to.

“How long has he lived here?”

“Just about fourteen years.” Travis found what he was looking for and laid it on the table in front of me. In that first moment I was convinced the attendant had delivered my own journal. It was older, of course: a marbled black-and-white composition notebook, the cover yellowed with age, the pages inside crinkled from old spills. Horribly, horribly familiar.

I looked to Travis, who now stood by the door like a sentinel. “Should I…?”

The orderly nodded. “He wants you to read it. He wrote it for you.”

I opened the notebook and found the first page covered in a masculine scrawl, just this side of legible. This was my father's handwriting? I glanced up at him—his eyes were still wet with unshed tears—before I began to read.

Hello there, little Yearly. I wish I knew your name, but I don't even know if you are a boy or a girl. Man or woman, by the time you read this.
If
you read this. I want so badly for you to come, but I'm afraid of what you will think of me. I'm afraid you will hate me, and if you do I will understand. Maybe your mother will never tell you about me, and if that's the case I know it is for the best.

Still I will write, in case you come. Otherwise, by the time you get here, I am afraid I will not be able to answer your questions.

I turned the page.

I don't remember my real parents. To this day I cannot even remember the name they gave me. The time I had with your mother is the only time that is still clear to me. Sometimes I wake up in this cold, empty place and feel happy in my heart, like she was in bed beside me all night long. I think I can smell her shampoo on the pillow, and bacon frying in the next room, and I hold on to that moment for as long as I can.

Otherwise my memory is full of blanks, and I know that the longer I am here the less I will remember. But I am safe, little Yearly, and so are you.

I felt a cold trickle down the length of my spine. My father didn't know about me. It had never occurred to him.

I often wondered why the Yearlys kept me. But I guess they couldn't send me back without feeling they had gone back on a promise, and that would have made them bad people. No one, not even me, wants to think they are a bad person.

I had three square meals a day and a warm, clean bed, but I was so unhappy because I could not escape the ghost of Tom. Sometimes they spoke of him as my older brother (on her bad days Mother Yearly set a fourth place at the dinner table), and other times they called me Tom. But most of the time I was what I was, an unsatisfactory replacement. If Tom were here he'd show you how to ride your bike. Tom would have gotten straight As. Tom would have gone to Harvard or Stanford. Tom rescued broken birds. Tom would have been a veterinarian, a doctor, or maybe a lawyer or an engineer, a Somebody, unlike YOU, Frank, who will only amount to a Nobody.

Even when I slept I wasn't free of Tom. Sometimes I dreamed I was awake, and he would ooze down out of the ceiling and perch on the dresser with red glowing eyes and his pointer fingers pulling at the sides of his mouth and his long, thin tongue flicking like a snake's.

Even during the day I could not shake the feeling that someone was watching me. At school sometimes I would look out the window and see a man in a red flannel shirt leaning against the fence, and he was looking right at me. Waiting for me. I never saw him when I was outside, but I was always afraid I might.

I left the Yearlys as soon as I finished high school, and I wanted to go to college but I never got there. When you have no money it is easy to tell yourself you will go to college once you get yourself a job and save up enough for tuition. Then all of a sudden you look in the shaving mirror one morning and know that if you went now the kids in your class would laugh and call you “old-timer.” I hope you go to college. I don't know that it would have made a difference in my life, but I feel sure it will make a difference in yours.

In this blank white room of dead bolts and restraining belts, college seemed more impossible than ever. I glanced at Travis. “My ten minutes must be almost up.”

He paused to think, then nodded. “I'll be right back.”

Now I can tell you about Janelle.

I had many jobs in many places. I didn't have trouble making new friends, but sometimes they turned out not to be friends after all and when I found out they had lied or cheated me I could never seem to walk away.

When I was 22 I got a job as a forest ranger (I shuddered) at Laskin National Park. My job was mostly to patrol the campsites to make sure no one was dumping trash or cutting their own firewood. Janelle sat at the gate shack window taking entrance fees, and on my first day I came in and we talked and even then, just laughing over the inflatable woman in a red wig sitting in the passenger seat of a single man's car, I knew I would always love her. Your mother is a beautiful woman, but there is so much more to her than looks. The good thing about park jobs is that there is plenty of free time to go swimming or hiking (or if you are working, it is easy to sneak away). I admit that neither of us worked as hard as we could have.

Travis came quietly back into the room. “Dr. Worth is in the north wing with another patient,” he said. “It's safe for you to stay a little while longer.” He rested a large white hand on Frank's shoulder. “Ready to show her the pictures?” My father dipped his chin, and Travis produced a second object from the bedside drawer, a little leather photo album stamped in gold leaf:
OUR PERFECT SUMMER
. On the inside cover, in my mother's handwriting, I saw
J.S.
+
F.Y.
printed inside a neat red heart, and
1980
beneath.

Silently I turned the pages. Mama on a wooded trail in a crisp green jumpsuit uniform, her long golden legs shod in sturdy hiking boots. Mama, peaches and cream, long before she'd ever had to color her hair in the bathtub. Mama on horseback. Mama laughing over a hot fudge sundae, the camera lens reflected in the diving spoon. Mama, before I ruined her life.

When the summer was over we arranged to stay at one of the caretaker's cabins on Plover Lake, and the rich people paid us to sweep their porches and make sure their pipes didn't freeze. We had friends we had made in the rangers, Sam and Flip and Robby, and on Thursday nights they would come over for drinks and poker and we played in front of the woodstove. One time the lake froze solid and we drove Flip's truck out to the center just for the heck of it. It was dangerous, but we got a thrill. When we came back inside, Janelle had grilled cheese and hot cocoa ready for us. Your mother was never much of a cook, but when she did cook it hit the spot.