made metal bike racks for local businesses. Sula had welded dozens of the huge racks in her year at CAT and had loved every fiery seam.
She’d also been encouraged to write a few news stories for its monthly cycling publication and that had sparked her interest in journalism. It had not been a traditional high school experience, but in many ways it had been better. The co-op owners were sweet passionate people, and its few students were misfits, which meant they were more interesting than most kids their age.
The weld took forty minutes and didn’t turn out as well as she wanted. She could grind it down to make it look okay but that wasn’t good enough. Two sculptures she’d created in classes at the university had won awards at local art shows and she hoped to enter this one in a statewide show in Portland this fall.
She would cut the piece off tomorrow after it had cooled and start over. Sula put away her tools, read a few chapters in a book about freelance reporting, then headed for bed. Tired as she felt, her brain kept leaping from one wild thought to another. The talk of suicides that morning had triggered childhood memories that had plagued her all day. She had managed to shut most of them down as they surfaced. But now the scene in which her father played Russian Roulette at the kitchen table with a loaded pistol could not be repressed.
His sweaty forehead, the pink flush of skin, the blank stare. For a moment this afternoon, Rudker had reminded Sula of her dad, sitting at the yellow Formica table on that summer evening two days before her tenth birthday. Fate had intervened in the form of a barking dog and her father had survived-to play variations of the suicide game again and again, until one day he lost.
Chapter 4
Tuesday, April 13, 7:42 a.m.
Robbie picked six white pill bottles off the conveyor belt, wrapped clear tape around them to create a bundle, then slid them into a box and taped it closed. Then he did it again. And again. For eight hours a day, unless the plant was on overtime. Some days he got so bored in the afternoons he nearly walked out. But so far, he’d resisted the urge. He could not afford to be unemployed again. Before he’d started taking medication, he’d lost a few jobs because he was occasionally too despondent to get up in the morning.
He forced himself to look at the bright side. Clean, easy work for $8.50 an hour was considered a great job these days, and most of the people at Prolabs were quite nice. Keeping that in mind, the morning passed quickly. When the lunch buzzer rang in his ears, relief washed over him. He set down the six-pack and joined the moving wall of people in the corridor. From the back, they all looked the same. White lab-style coats, white booties, and white hair caps. He’d felt silly the first few times he suited up, but even the big bosses in suits and ties put on sanitation gear before entering the factory.
Sometimes the white walls and stainless steel machinery made him a little snow blind, but it was still better than the stinking, wet mess of a dishwashing job he’d had before. This job didn’t make his father proud but it was a step in the right direction. Plus, working at a pharmaceutical factory gave him good material for his occasional stint at a local standup comedy club. Writing and performing comedy gave him a way to turn his gloom and doom personality into a positive, if fleeting, experience.
The group moved silently until they entered the changing room. As booties and hair caps came off, their voices burst forth.
“Want to run over to Taco Time?”
“Did you see Rudker’s new wheels? The SOB is driving a Commander.”
“No shit. What do they cost? Forty grand?”
Robbie ignored them, changing as quickly as he could. He wanted to get to the lunchroom in time to snag a seat next to Julie the receptionist. Lunch hour was the only time he was able to see her. He shoved his booties and hair cap into the wall slot for disposables and hung the white coat in his locker. He grabbed his lunch sack, hurried out into the exterior walkway, then broke into a jog.
“Hey, Robbie, what’s the hurry?” Mark, the mixing room operator, was going the other direction and mockingly jumped out of his way.
“I heard Santana was playing in the lunch room and I wanted to get a good seat.”
Mark was kind enough to laugh.
Robbie pushed through the double doors only to discover he was too late. Julie’s table was full. Melissa and Monica, both secretaries, sat on either side, and three guys from the tablet press room sat across from her. Damn. He wanted to ask her out, but he felt like he had to give her a chance to get to know him. Otherwise, she would probably turn him down. She was pretty and popular and he was just okay. Okay looking, okay body, taller than most girls, and smarter than most guys. So far he’d only managed to sit with Julie twice in two months.
Robbie looked away so she wouldn’t see him staring. Disappointment made his legs heavy and he plopped down at the nearest table. Knowing how quickly he could slide into despair, he focused on his food: two slices of leftover pizza, a banana, and a twin pack of Twinkies. Not bad. It was better than Cup-O-Noodle, which he often ended up with because he’d hit the snooze button one too many times and had to run out the door.
“Hey Robbie, need some company?” Matt, a thin young man about his age who worked the other end of the packaging line, sat down across the table. He laid his hands out flat, the small triangular tattoos showing. It was obvious he had no lunch.
“What’s new?” Robbie tried to be friendly.
“I had to get a new battery for my piece of shit car and now I’m broke.”
“Cars are like black holes. You put your money in and it never comes back out.” Robbie put a slice of pizza on a napkin and pushed it across the table to Matt. “Here, I’m not that hungry.”
“Thanks, man.”
A little later he gave him one of the Twinkies too.
On his way out, Robbie stopped by the bulletin board, hoping Julie would walk by on her way to the front office. A company flyer caught his eye. In large purple type it asked: Do you suffer from depression? If you have three or more of these symptoms, you may benefit from a new medicine. To find out more about a clinical trial for an experimental new drug, contact Adriana at Oregon Research Center.
Robbie knew the list by heart. He was a poster child for most of the symptoms-a sense of hopelessness, inability to concentrate, insomnia. The trial intrigued him. He’d been taking Zoloft for a year and a half now, and it wasn’t working that well for him any more. Before the Zoloft, he’d been on Paxil for almost a year. That drug had made him feel emotionally numb and he’d hated that more than being depressed. Feeling bad was better than feeling nothing. Eventually, he’d asked his mother’s doctor to write him a script for something else.
He’d never been in a clinical trial before. He visited online forums cheerily hosted by pharma companies like Prolabs that were keeping all the depressives medicated. Many of the people he chatted with had been in studies, and overall they reported good experiences. Often the research centers paid a nice compensation fee for time and travel expenses.
As he stood thinking it over, the second lunch buzzer rang. Robbie took a moment to memorize the phone number. He had decided to give the trial center a call. He could help Prolabs test one of its products, pick up a little extra cash, and maybe start feeling better too.
For now he had to get back to the packaging line. The fact that his father was CEO of the company didn’t mean he could get away with being late from lunch break. He used his mother’s family name, so most of the people he worked with didn’t know he was Karl Rudker’s son. He didn’t want people either sucking up to or avoiding him because of his supposed connections. Hah! He and his father hadn’t spoken for months.
The supervisors knew who he was and he tried to be an excellent employee. Even though they hadn’t gotten along for years, his father’s expectations were buried deep in his DNA.
Sula walked into Prolabs with a sense of apprehension. She hadn’t fallen asleep until after one o’clock, then she’d had a long unsettling dream in which Rudker had chased her through a warehouse and she kept running into stacks of boxes. She was still unnerved by the whole encounter yesterday. Rudker’s threat had been intense and personal and she suspected she hadn’t heard the last of it.
Sula handed her brown leather backpack to the security man and passed through the metal detector. “Good morning, Cliff.”
