False Memory

either! You call me anything but Skeet, then I’ll strip naked, set my hair on fire, and throw myself through that freaking window. Okay? You understand? Is that what you want, me taking a flaming-naked suicide leap into that pretty little garden of yours?”

Smiling, shaking his head, Tom Wong said, “Not on my shift, Skeet. The flaming hair would be an amazing sight, but I sure don’t want to see you naked.”

Dusty smiled with relief. Tom had struck the perfect note.

Slumping in the armchair again, Skeet said, “You’re all right, Mr. Wong.”

“Please call me Tom.”

Skeet shook his head. “I’m a bad case of arrested development, stuck in early adolescence, more screwed- up-twisted-up-tangled-up than a couple earthworms makin’ babies. What I need here aren’t a bunch of new friends, Mr. Wong. What I need here, you see, are some authority figures, people who can show me the way, ’cause I really can’t go on like this and I really do want to find the way, I really do. Okay?”

“Okay,” said Tom Wong.

“I’ll be back with your clothes and stuff,” Dusty said.

When Skeet tried to get to his feet, he didn’t have sufficient strength to push himself up from the chair.

Dusty bent down and kissed him on the cheek. “Love you, bro.”

“Truth is,” Skeet said, “I’ll never pay you back.”

“Sure you will. The lottery, remember?”

“I’m not lucky.”

“Then I’ll buy the ticket for you,” Dusty said.

“Hey, would you? You’re lucky. Always were. Hell, you found Martie. You walk around in luck up to your ears.”

“You have some pay coming. I’ll buy you two tickets a week.”

“That would be cool.” Skeet closed his eyes. His voice settled into a murmur. “That would be…cool.” He was asleep.

“Poor kid,” Tom Wong said.

Dusty nodded.

From Skeet’s room, Dusty went directly to the second-floor care station, where he spoke to the head nurse, Colleen O’Brien: a stout, freckled woman with white hair and kind eyes, who could have played the mother superior in every convent in every Catholic-themed movie ever produced. She claimed to be aware of the treatment limitation special to Skeet’s case, but Dusty went through it with her anyway.

“No drugs. No tranquilizers, no sedatives. No antidepressants. He’s been on one damn drug or another since he was five, sometimes two or three at once. He had a learning disability, and they called it a behavior disorder, and his old man had him on a series of drugs for that. When one drug had side effects, then there were drugs to counter the side effects, and when those produced side effects, there were more drugs to counter the new side effects. He grew up in a chemical stew, and I know that’s what screwed him up. He’s so used to popping a pill or taking an injection that he can’t figure how to live straight and clean.”

“Dr. Donklin agrees,” she said, producing Skeet’s file. “He’s got a zero-medication advisory in place.”

“Skeet’s metabolism is so out of whack, his nervous system so shot, you can’t always be sure what reaction he’ll have even to some usually harmless patent medicine.”

“He won’t even get Tylenol.”

Listening to himself, Dusty could hear that in his concern for Skeet, he was babbling. “He nearly killed himself once with caffeine tablets, they were such a habit. Developed caffeine psychosis, had some amazingly weird hallucinations, went into convulsions. Now he’s incredibly sensitized to it, allergic. You give him coffee, a Coke, he could go into anaphylactic shock.”

“Son,” she said, “that’s here in the file, too. Believe me, we’re going to take good care of him.” To Dusty’s surprise, Colleen O’Brien made the sign of the cross and then winked at him. “No harm is going to come to your little brother on my watch.”

If she had been a mother superior in a movie, you would have had full confidence that she was speaking both for herself and for God.

“Thank you, Mrs. O’Brien,” he said softly. “Thank you very, very much.”

Outside again, in his van, he did not at once switch on the engine. He was trembling too badly to drive.

The shakes were in part a delayed reaction to the fall off the Sorensons’ roof. Anger shook him, too. Anger at poor screwed-up Skeet and the endless burden he imposed. And the anger made Dusty tremble with shame, because he loved Skeet, as well, and felt responsible for him, but was powerless to help him. Being powerless was the worst of it.

He folded his arms across the steering wheel, put his forehead on his arms, and did something that he had rarely permitted himself to do in his twenty-nine years. He cried.

11

After the session with Dr. Ahriman, Susan Jagger appeared to be restored to her former self, the woman she had been prior to the agoraphobia. As she slipped into her raincoat, she declared that she was famished. With considerable humor and flair, she rated the three Chinese restaurants that Martie suggested for takeout. “I don’t have a problem with MSG or too many hot red peppers in the Szechuan beef, but I’m afraid I must rule out choice number three based on the possibility of getting an unwanted cockroach garnish.” Nothing in her face or in her manner marked her as a woman in the nearly paralytic grip of a severe phobia.

As Martie opened the door to the fourteenth-floor corridor, Susan said, “You forgot your book.”

The paperback was on the small table beside the chair in which Martie had been sitting. She crossed the room, but she hesitated before picking up the book.

“What’s wrong?” Susan asked.

“Huh? Oh, nothing. Seem to have lost my bookmark.” Martie slipped the paperback into her raincoat pocket.

All the way along the corridor, Susan remained in good spirits, but as the elevator descended, her demeanor began to change. When they reached the lobby, she was whey-faced, and a tremor in her voice quickly curdled the note of good humor into sour anxiety. She hunched her shoulders, hung her head, and bent forward as though she could already feel the cold, wet lash of the storm outside.

Susan exited the elevator on her own, but four or five steps into the lobby, she had to grip Martie’s arm for support. As they approached the lobby doors, her fear reduced her nearly to paralysis and to abject humiliation.

The return trip to the car was grueling. By the time they reached the Saturn, Martie’s right shoulder and that entire side of her neck ached, because Susan had clutched so tenaciously and had clung so helplessly to her arm.

Susan huddled in the passenger’s seat, hugging herself, rocking as if racked by stomach pain, head bent to avoid a glimpse of the wide world beyond the windows. “I felt so good upstairs,” she said miserably, “with Dr. Ahriman, through the whole session, so good. I felt normal. I was sure I would be better coming out, at least a little better, but I’m worse than when I went in.”

“You’re not worse, honey,” Martie said, starting the engine. “Believe me, you were a pain in the ass on the way in, too.”

“Well, I feel worse. I feel like something’s coming down on top of us, out of the sky, and I’m going to be crushed by it.”

“It’s just the rain,” Martie said, because the rain drumming on the car was cacophonous.

“Not the rain. Something worse. Some tremendous weight. Just hanging over us. Oh, God, I hate this.”

“We’ll get a bottle of Tsingtao into you.”

“That’s not going to help.”