Jaden Baker (64 page)

It was the part she could not understand because she didn’t know.

“It’s like I’ve said before,” he said, his voice low and patient. “They know how to control me. They’ve taken measures to ensure it. The day we met, when I woke up in the hospital, I was under an X-ray machine. A doctor and a nurse had me laid on the table and I saw them looking at an image of my head. There were wires in my brain.” He paused to read her reaction. Libby’s eyes were wide again. “I don’t know what those wires do, but I’m convinced they were put there to control me. Chunks of time went missing, when I was back there. One second I’d be sitting then standing across the room with no memory of doing it.

“I’d love to destroy all of them and take my life back, but I can’t. They put something in my head. I’ve been on a radio and television blackout since I got away, because I’m sure that they can somehow...” he searched for the right word, “trigger me.”

Libby frowned for a moment, then left the room without a word, and headed down the hall. Jaden didn’t have time to follow her, as she returned seconds later with her laptop and set it on the dining room table. She put her glasses back on and opened a web browser.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“You said Joseph Madrid was...”

“Yes,” he said, sitting next her.

“Okay. He’s a child psychiatrist,” she said, eyeing him for a moment. “He’s won a lot of awards.”

“You know him?” he asked her, but as soon as he asked he knew the question was stupid. Dalton and Madrid had a relationship of some kind, a trust. Whatever it was now, obviously in the past Libby would have encountered Madrid.

“He and my father were close for a long time,” she said, typing on the computer. “He admired and looked up to him—my dad that is. They had a falling out just before I ran away. I don’t know if they reconciled or not. Anyway, Madrid’s been in psychiatry for a long time, nearly thirty years.” She was reading from something now. “He left his job as a business man, a successful one, to enter psychiatry for children.”

“What are you looking at?” he asked her.

“The Archcroft website. There’s a brief biography of Joseph Madrid, along with a photo. It says he entered psychiatry to help children...” she drifted off, biting her bottom lip and frowning again.

So Madrid was a shrink. It made sense. He knew which buttons to push. Manipulative, sadistic, and cruel, Joseph Madrid knew exactly how to torment him body and mind.

“Well, there’s no catalyst,” Libby said, reading over the biography again. “We’re missing Severus Snape.”

Jaden grimaced. “What?”

“Snape. Oh,” she said, “that’s right, you’ve not read that one.
Un
believable. What we’re missing is the reason for it all, the string that holds everything together. The source. Madrid is one of the founders of Archcroft, at least that’s what I think. But there’s no reason for why he founded it, why he became a psychiatrist, nothing. It just says he left his job, entered psychiatry, and has been winning awards for the work he’s done ever since.” She shut the top of the computer. “Which tells us a lot. He knows a lot of, you know, mental things. Okay, this is going to sound cheesy, but maybe he hypnotized you.”

“How would he do that?”

“That’s where it gets tricky. See, unlike what a lot of people think, you can’t hypnotize anyone who doesn’t want to be, and you can’t get them to do something they don’t want to do. It’s not like
Manchurian Candidate
. Madrid couldn’t get you to kill someone if you didn’t want to, he couldn’t get you to do anything you ultimately didn’t want to do.”

Jaden felt sick to his stomach. The beatings, the burnings, the torturing, all of it was punishment for not doing
exactly
as Madrid had instructed. Following his orders to the line was the only way to make the pain stop. Maybe Madrid hadn’t asked for the unthinkable, maybe he asked for just enough so Jaden would go along willingly.

“What does it look like? How does it happen?” Jaden asked her.

She slid back in her chair and held a breath. “I’m not sure. I think you’d have to be open to suggestion and maybe sleep deprived so your inhibitions were weakened.”

Yes, both of those things had happened. He had been forced to stay awake for so long he could barely stand it, then Madrid ordered him to sleep. Was that when and how it happened? Probably. Libby’s explanation made sense. If hypnosis had been used to plant suggestions, but couldn’t be used to get him to do something he didn’t want to, that’s why they’d resorted to other means. That’s why there were wires in his head. They controlled something. They controlled him.

Revulsion and anger surged through him. Madrid took more than his mind. He was an object, part machine, something that could obey an order. With a flip of a switch, he wouldn’t be him anymore. It all started with a little hypnosis. If he hadn’t been so angry, Jaden might agree with Libby. It was cheesy. It was cheap. But because it was him, it was serious.

Actually—honestly—it hadn’t started with hypnosis. It had started with surrender. Madrid had asked for Jaden’s mind, and Jaden had, unwillingly, given it.

He pushed away from the table and paced, angry at himself for his past weakness, for not holding on through the pain.

Libby stood too. “Is there something I can do?” she asked.

When Jaden didn’t answer, she didn’t say more.

Maybe she sensed he wanted to be left alone. He heard her leaving. But from the hallway she called out: “Oh, the dogs and I found Cat. He’s hiding in the linen closet.” Then she went outside, leaving him with his thoughts.

Using a sheet of copy paper swiped from Libby’s printer, Jaden sketched the profile of his brain, and tried remembering where the wires had gone. If he hadn’t been in such a hurry to get out of the hospital, he would have taken the films.

Libby was outside with her dogs and horses, raking manure in the field. He watched her from his bedroom window and felt obligated to help. There was no way to confirm the purpose of the wires safely, and it did him little good to continue dwelling on them.

The paths before him were limited and narrow. So long as Madrid was alive and hunting him, Jaden could not lead an open life, not until he learned how to disable whatever it was Madrid had done. His original plan of running from Washington and living elsewhere was an idea he resented now. For the whole of his life, he lived on the edge of society and had longed, on some level, to be a part of it. Everyone else was the stream, and he just a rock on the shore, watching the world flow by. Then Libby had swept him up. The thought of leaving her, of going somewhere without her—he couldn’t stand it. She was his connection to reality. Madrid may have taken everything else, but he would not have his life with Libby. Jaden would fight for that.

He took a last look at his rudimentary sketch of his brain, then crumpled it up and went outside.

“Need help?” he asked as he took an extra rake and came in through the fence.

She glanced at him over her shoulder as she scratched the neck of Adama. “Uh,” she said, looking around the pasture. “I need to clean the water trough and dump that poop way down there,” she said, nodding to the bottom of the field where a blanket of crushed manure lay, grass sprouting from it.

“You recycle it?” he asked.

“Nifty, huh?” she said, smiling.

“It’s gross.” He dropped the rake and walked to the water trough. It was a quarter full with dark water, hay, and algae. With a flick of his fingers, the trough turned on its side and the water dumped out, splashing on the hardened ground. The manure was in a two-wheeled wheelbarrow. Libby’s eyes popped as she watched it wheel itself down the pasture hill, dumping itself out, the manure spreading evenly across the ground. Then the hose uncoiled itself and Jaden grasped the nozzle and blasted the grime from the trough by placing his thumb over the nozzle.

“You’re handy,” Libby said, grinning at him.

“That’s the idea,” he said, setting the trough upright and laying the hose inside it, watching the water pool inside as it filled.

“What are you going to do?” she asked, her tone somber.

“I don’t know,” he said. “You have any ideas?”

Surprisingly she nodded. “Do you really want to hear it?” Her mouth and eyes were serious.

“Yes,” he said.

“Okay,” she said. “Let me just say that I speak the following with all the kindness I possess,” she studied him, her hand on her chest.

He nodded for her to continue.

“I think you need to get over it,” she said.

His eyebrows came up. “Come again?”

“Get over it.” Her expression was set, fierce.

“Get over it?” he repeated. “Just like that?”

“Get over it however you need to, but yes.”

Unfathomable. How could she stand in the middle of a horse pasture, living in her comfortable house in a quaint area of the Pacific Northwest, where she worked from home, and have the audacity to tell him to “get over it”? Obviously his generalized story of last night had not illustrated the stakes. Her idea of a poor childhood was absent parents who couldn’t give a shit about her, because they were too busy tinkering with the boy below them. What the hell did she know about this? What did she know about any of it?

Ten years of living outside, keeping himself clear of attention and curiosity, had taught him patience and how to reign in any flare of anger he might feel. But so fiery was his temper that Jaden had to walk away from her to catch his breath and count to ten. He told himself Libby did not, could not, understand what Archcroft had done to him. Was that a valid excuse? How could she speak with so much authority? Jaden cared about her—he had never been happy until he met her—but she had no right to tell him to simply “get over it.”

“You know something?” Jaden said, facing a fence post, surprised by his calmness. “When people talk, they look in your eyes.” He came back to her, crossed his arms. “It’s one thing I like about people. Conversations are eye to eye. Most don’t notice the scars on my hands. Those who do believe the lie I feed them, a fishing accident. My hands are the one thing I can’t cover all the time.

“You want to hear a story? For two of the six years I spent underground, I lived in pain, pain so bad I couldn’t sleep, even if I was allowed to. And on one of those happy nights, a man came into my cell. I knew he wasn’t supposed to be there, no one was. He came in with handcuffs and a baton.”

Libby crossed her arms, but not out of defense or anger.

“Like you have already pointed out, I let them control me. You’re right, I gave them everything, even my own mind, which I promised myself in the beginning I’d never give. Well, this man wanted to take more.” He stepped closer, staring into her welling eyes. “He cuffed me and shoved me to the wall, choking me, and said I had to do whatever he told me.

“I wasn’t going to give him anything. I overpowered him, grabbed the baton and caved his fucking head in.”

Libby touched her face and shivered.

“I’m not sorry. He didn’t deserve to live. But that wasn’t the end. The next day, when everyone saw Hoganoff’s dead body in my cell, they looked at me like I wasn’t there. Everything I did in that place, every move made, was watched. I couldn’t sleep without being given expressed permission from Joseph, so I knew killing one of his people would mean trouble.

“They took me up to a room, and two men held me down,” he said in a low voice. “Joseph Madrid came in with a hot branding iron and told me how dare I. He told me I was his property, and didn’t have any rights over myself.”

Their eyes were locked together. She needed to see to understand. A story was only a compilation of words until it had imagery. In ten years he had shown no one. Libby was the first.

He lift his shirt.

Burned into his skin, northwest of his navel, was a large “A” the height and width of Libby’s palm. The skin was shiny, melted over ten years ago by a hot iron.

Tears rolled down Libby’s cheeks. Her watery gaze moved from his eyes to the scar on his stomach. With a finger she wiped her eyes, but used her other hand to reach to him, touching the old burn.

Her touch was gentle and warm. Her fingers lightly touched his stomach as they slid to his back. Lips trembling, she asked something he did not expect: “What else did he do?” Like her touch, her clement soft voice enchanted him, juxtaposing her intense stare.

“What?” he asked, afraid he hadn’t heard correctly.

Libby smiled sadly. “What else did he do?”

“Why do—”

“This is poison,” she said, her hands gripping his waist. “It needs to come out of you. So tell me. Please tell me. You want me to understand? You have to tell me. What else did Madrid do?”

Her voice was calm, the tears were dammed by her lower eyelids. Staring at her, listening to how she spoke, Jaden wasn’t afraid of losing her esteem. She truly wanted to know, to understand and believe him.

“Are you sure?” he asked, his insides felt ready to burst. It was not sadness, or shame. Her question, poised with delicacy and care, was an admission of her true desire to know and connect with him. Knowing was acceptance.

She nodded.

In that horse pasture, surrounded by trees and an almost surreal, picturesque mountain landscape, Jaden told her everything. He always believed talking about the past would not lessen the present pain. And it didn’t. What had been done would always be so. Relaying the stories to another did not make the memories easier to bear. Lies, fake stories he told for ten years, masked real events. He told lies so people would not see him differently, so they wouldn’t see him at all. For ten years his fear, second to being found, was the possibility he would never know closeness to another. In order to be close to her, she had to know everything. Though Libby could never fully understand, and he hoped she never would, knowing the truth of him and what fires he’d passed through, was liberating. There would be no hiding, no excuses.