We'll Never Be Apart (16 page)

“Two days.” Out of the corner of my eye I see Donny shake his head. He mouths the word
hours
at me. I quickly try to cover my mistake. “A couple of hours, I mean.”

Dr. Goodman swivels around and looks at Donny. “We were all very concerned about you, Alice,” he says, turning back to me. “Do you remember what you did? Why you're here?”

I don't see any reason to make small talk. We both know what he's doing. Dr. Goodman is here to assess me, to evaluate my current level of psychosis and determine if I'm fit to return to the general population.

“I cut my hair,” I say.

“Yes.” He goes silent. I don't know why he always waits for me to fill these conversational lulls. “I'd like to help you understand why.”

I lay my head back on the pillow and stare at the ceiling. I wish I had a piece of origami paper. My nose itches. Involuntarily my hand moves to scratch it, but the restraints hold me in place.

Doc sighs. “I don't believe you meant to harm yourself, Alice. Although you did impulsively alter your appearance, and some psychologists would categorize that as a breakdown.”

I categorize it more as a break
through,
but something tells me to keep my mouth shut.

“Still, it's against the rules to have razors without staff supervision. And anytime a patient is caught with a dangerous object, necessary precautions must be taken.”

Doc asks me if I'm hiding anything else.

I shake my head no.

He asks me if I'm ready to go back to my room and be with the other patients.

I nod my head yes
.

He asks if I'm feeling sick.

Again, I shake my head no. My stomach feels queasy and I still feel a little sluggish, but I attribute that to the amount of drugs cartwheeling through my system. Doc says something to the nurse about releasing me. He wants to send me back to my room, but he is going to restrict my privileges.

The nurse unbuckles my restraints and I rub my wrists where there are red marks. She offers me a wheelchair and I fall clumsily into it. My legs are watery, and I'm not sure I can stand just yet. Donny wheels me to my room and helps me into bed. I lie on my side and face Amelia's bed. The mouse is gone and the bed has been slept in. Amelia must be back. I wonder if she got in trouble for the razors. I look over to my dresser, where my little paper zoo is supposed to be, but it's gone. So is my stack of origami paper. I close my eyes and curl into a tight ball. Sour darkness has crept in. It fills the space where Jason used to be. Now there's only dust, dry dust that fills my throat. One of these days I might just let it choke me.

F
ROM THE
J
OURNAL OF
A
LICE
M
ONROE

 

Some kids from the neighborhood told me that the cops found Roman's body among the black and charred ruins, his hand still clutching a beer. Uniformed men carried the body out in a bag, but the thick plastic couldn't contain the smell of toasted skin and sour beer. The odor got into the trees and hung around the neighborhood for days.

The day after the fire, Jason got his first tattoo. While the scent of gasoline still clung to his T-shirt, we went to Tiger Lily, a tattoo and piercing parlor where the owners didn't check IDs and in exchange customers didn't check the cleanliness of the needles. The floors were sticky, and it reeked of cigarettes and other things people smoke. It was the kind of place where hepatitis and gonorrhea meet to have parties.

Jason slipped the tattoo artist some cash and told him what he wanted done. Then he pulled off his shirt and lay across the table. I stood in the corner while Cellie flipped through the tattoo books. A giant guy with inked sleeves offered Cellie and me a beer. I shook my head but Cellie nodded, giggling as the guy handed her a cold one from the mini fridge.

“Thanks.” She tipped the neck of the open bottle toward him. He did the same and their bottles clinked together in cheers.

The giant guy lifted a blond eyebrow at her. “You wanna see my tattoo booth?”

“Lead the way,” Cellie said. She turned and followed him, vanishing into a back room. I started to go after them. I was worried about her.

“Alice.” Jason called to me.

I chewed my lip and hesitated, my eyes refusing to leave the doorway Cellie had disappeared through.

“It's okay, baby. Leave her be. Come hold my hand.” He reached for me. I didn't take his hand but I moved so I was close to him. I watched the needle work into his skin, turning pink flesh into black ink. I thought about the three of us in that closet all those years ago. I worried that Jason had somehow hung up his soul in there, and since then he had never really figured out how to put it back on.

When the tattoo artist was done, Jason stood, flexed his broad shoulders, and showed me the tattoo. The words
God's Will
were scrawled between his shoulder blades in an Old English–style font.

Over the next year, Jason got more tattoos. They were all trophies of the fires he'd set. A thicket of trees spanned his lower back. A unicorn covered his wrist. All the familiar images were wrapped in fire, the flames lovingly intertwined like the arms of a mother.

 

Jason got a job working construction under the table. He managed to scrounge up enough cash to buy a beat-up Oldsmobile from a woman down the street who needed the money to bail her kid out of jail. The car was a clunker and made a strange wheezing noise whenever it braked, but it provided us with a freedom we had never thought possible. During the summer, we'd load up the trunk with blankets and drinks and head down to the river.

The river was a yawning eighty-three-mile tributary that stretched from old-growth forests to agricultural fields. When it got hot enough, locals would gather at its rocky beaches with makeshift rafts and coolers of beer. Every summer the coast guard would issue warnings about the dangerous current, and every summer some drunk kid would decide to go for a swim or jump off one of the rocky cliffs and drown.

Jason sprawled out on a blanket and rested on his stomach while I rubbed sunblock on his back. I traced the letters of his God's Will tattoo and thought about our time at Roman's house, how Roman would preach on Sundays, his hands always curled into fists that came crashing down like fire and brimstone.

“Do you believe in God?” I asked.

He turned his face toward me and closed his eyes, squinting against the bright sun. “No. I don't believe in anything. Not anymore.”

His answer made me sad. “Nothing?” I finished rubbing in the lotion and wiped my hands on the blanket.

He popped one eye open and smiled at me. “Well, maybe not
nothing.
” He grabbed my wrist. “I believe in you and me.”

I eyed Cellie, playing in the water. She was looking for crawdads. Jason had said that if she caught enough, we could boil them. He said they made a funny noise in the water, like screaming. Cellie had already found two and deposited them in our cooler. She turned to me and waved, but her happiness quickly dimmed as soon as she saw that Jason and I were holding hands. She'd been a little more clingy than usual lately. After setting the fire at Roman's, she'd stayed closer to me. I thought she was worried about Jason's reappearance in our lives and how close to him I had become. Sometimes she'd pull me aside and remind me of my promise all those years ago, that we would never be apart. I'd do my best to reassure her, stroke her hair or pat her arm, but I was starting to feel like she didn't believe me. And Jason's words,
I believe in you and me,
were worrisome because I wanted him,
needed
him to consider Cellie, too, when he thought about us.

“And Cellie, too. Right?” I asked him.

He brushed some hair back from my face. “Of course, baby. You, me, and Cellie. Always.”

CHAPTER

I
DON'T FEEL LIKE TALKING.
It's been twenty-four hours since I've been released from seclusion, and I've stayed in my room the entire time. Aside from getting up to go to the bathroom, all I do is sleep, and when sleep doesn't come, I lay in bed and watch the rain hit the window. Dr. Goodman comes and says I am being uncooperative and only hurting myself. I tuck my chin and let my eyes flutter shut. He can't even imagine how much it hurts.

Just as I thought, Amelia has come back from the Quiet Room. But she's not the same. She sits across from me and seems lost. She is a wisp of smoke, a husk of her former self. All that pixie energy has fizzled and gone flat. She reminds me of Susan, Roman's wife, already dead on the inside. While I watch the rain, she watches me. She's waiting for me, I know it, waiting for me to come out of . . . whatever this is. But I don't have it in me, not right now. Not yet. Maybe never.

Someone enters the room. I don't look up to see who it is. I can't even muster interest or concern. But based on the slow, hesitant footsteps, it's not a tech, a nurse, or Dr. Goodman. Their strides are always self-assured and mission driven. A smell of fabric softener precedes the person. It's Chase, using his handy key to come check up on his super-special friend. Me.

“You can't be in here,” Amelia says, but he ignores her.

Chase comes and stands in front of me, so that his thighs are at my eye level. One hand is jammed in his pocket and the other holds his giant headphones and his iPod. I squeeze my eyes shut and press deeper into the pillow.

“I dig the new look,” he says. “It's very Bettie Page.”

Amelia snorts at the end of the bed, and I imagine an eye roll along with it. There's the sound of angry footsteps followed by the door slamming. Chase and I are alone. For a moment the pitter-patter of rain fills the room. I wish he would go away.

“Don't feel like talking? That's all right, I understand.” He pauses for a moment, and I can feel him studying my profile. “I just came to bring you something. My sister, she got into moods like this. I made her a mix. It's mostly awesomely bad eighties hits. It always helped her, made her smile.” There's the feeling of someone's skin close to mine—a slight change of temperature in the air and then the cool plastic of cushioned headphones resting over my ears. “Just make sure you hide it if they come in and check on you.” He pulls away, but before he does, the music begins. He touches the red band on my wrist, gently. Then he's gone.

When the music has been playing for a while, when the room stays still and no one enters for a long time, I let my hand drift over and close my fingers around the iPod. Clutching it, I bring it up and hold it against my chest where it hurts the most. I look down at the screen and click backwards to see the playlist. It's titled “Maya's Comatose Mix, Music to Emotionally Break Down, Cry, and Be Depressed To.”

Another song starts and a tiny fissure, a hairline fracture, starts to form in my closed-off heart. Light begins to pour through a pinhole in the dark. Stupid Chase and his epically bad taste in music. A small, very small smile touches my lips. I turn up the volume and let Styx's “Come Sail Away” drown out the shadows and take me into a merciful sleep.

I ignore the surprised looks as I walk down the hallway the following evening. I listened to Maya's mix for hours, the songs playing while I drifted off to sleep and when I was eventually drawn from it. When I woke, my stomach grumbled, and for the first time in the last three days I was hungry for food, for company, for life. The clock on the wall indicated that it was free time. So I got up, stuffed Chase's iPod and headphones into my hoodie pocket, and left my room.

A couple of techs line the walls a few feet away and eye me as if I'm a bomb under a car or the pedophile next door. I run my hand through my hair and pull up my hood.

I get to the community room. Patients are scattered all over; some of them rock back and forth, some pace, and some sit in pairs playing games or chatting with each other. I scan the room, searching for a black hat or a wave of pink hair. No Amelia. But I see Chase. He's sitting on the couch that appears to be perpetually frowning, watching
Back to the Future.

I go and stand in front of him so that I'm blocking his view of the television. I withdraw the iPod and headphones and throw them into his lap. “You have shitty taste in music.”

He catches them. A slow smile, part relief and part happiness, creeps across his face. He looks up at me. “There's that dirty mouth again.” He pats the seat next to him. I sit down and pull my legs up to my chest. I play with the grommets on my shoes. I wish I had origami paper, but Dr. Goodman took all of my sheets. He said they were getting in the way of my progress, that I use them to deflect and shield myself from others.

There's an explosion on the television, the crackle of electricity, and a man with white hair shouts, “Roads . . . Where we're going, we don't need roads.”

“This movie sucks,” I say.

“Well, aren't you just all sparkles and unicorns today.”

The word
sparkles
makes me think of the Fourth of July bonfire—brilliant colors, Roman's burning house, and Jason's sick happiness. I bow my head in my hands. Before I can stop it, I'm quietly weeping, big, soft, silent tears that leak through my fingers and run down my arms.

“Hey.” Chase turns to me. “Hey.” He pulls my hands from my face. “Your hair will grow back, and you know I dig the new look—I've always had a thing for pinup girls.”

Despite trying not to, I give him a watery smile. But he doesn't understand. I'm not crying because of my hair, that's the least of it, a piece of sand in the desert. “I think I'm falling apart,” I say, and the honesty of the admission startles me.

He shrugs like it's nothing. “People come undone all the time, Alice. We're all unraveling here. You've just done it in the most spectacular way. In fact, you could be our queen,” he jokes.