Burying the Honeysuckle Girls (19 page)

Chapter Thirty

Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Tuscaloosa, Alabama

When I next emerged from the fog, I found I had become, at long last, an official patient of Pritchard Hospital. It was a little strange how unsurprised I was to be locked inside the gray walls. How natural it felt—like destiny had finally settled over me, a familiar blanket. The place had been home to my mother and grandmother. Now it was mine.

They said an orderly had found me wandering in the soccer field near the new hospital around dawn, vomiting in the grass. They’d taken me to the hospital but didn’t need to pump my stomach. I hadn’t taken enough pills to kill me.

In other words, Wynn had done his job well.

After my forty-eight-hour hold at DCH Regional, they’d bundled me into an ambulance and shuttled me across town to Pritchard. Because it appeared as if I had attempted suicide (and because, in my haze, I’d mentioned I’d been in one of the rooms at Old Pritchard when I took the pills), my brother had gotten an involuntary-commitment order from a judge. The admittance nurse informed me I was a patient indefinitely, that I may as well settle in. I didn’t have any clothes, so one of the nurses found an old pair of sweatpants and a Crimson Tide T-shirt from the donation closet.

I wondered if Wynn had found the cigar box back at the hotel in Birmingham. It was impossible to know. That he’d somehow gotten to Terri Wooten was clear—she must’ve told him she and Traci were expecting me that afternoon. The thought of Wynn tracking me like a wounded deer turned my knees to jelly.

My brother was a ruthless bastard; there was no denying it now. And I hated him.

I sat on the narrow bed, knees tucked up under my chin, staring at the gray cement-block wall of my room while the nurse ran down the schedule: meds in the morning, breakfast, group, therapy (art, music, or puppies, my choice), lunch, free time, meds again, then lights out at nine thirty. If I stayed here long enough, they’d let me work in the kitchen or the laundry or with the grounds crew. Joy.

Wynn had won. My dad was two hundred miles away, dying, and I couldn’t get to him. Even if I could, I wouldn’t be able to make him understand what I was dealing with. I couldn’t coax the truth out of him; he was probably too far gone by now.

If my father died while I was locked up, Wynn would be appointed trustee, or guardian, or whatever it was they called it, over my portion of the estate. Giving him complete control over every cent and, it followed, my future. I could be locked up for as long as he wanted while he walked around in complete freedom. Flush with cash for his campaign or a cruise to the Caribbean, or whatever the hell he and Molly Robb had on the agenda.

I could tell someone the truth. I could tell them he’d forced me to overdose, but who was going to believe me—a known addict—over Wynn, son of Attorney General Elder Bell, state legislator and highly respected candidate for governor? Look at Trix and Collie. They hadn’t had a fair trial. They’d been thrown in here like trash. Left to rot and die.

The nurse was staring at me. She must’ve reached the end of her spiel.

“Okay. Thank you,” I said.

She pursed her lips. “I said, do you have any questions?”

“No,” I said. She started for the door. “I mean, yes. I left my car in Birmingham. What do you think happened to it?”

“It was probably towed.” She left.

Great. Jay’s car was in an impound lot somewhere, and Wynn had my purse and probably the rifle. God knows what had become of the cigar box, back at the hotel. Wynn had done one hell of a job on me. I was fucked six ways to Sunday.

New Pritchard was nothing more than an uglier, more up-to-date version of Old Pritchard. Three depressing stories of bricks and mortar—a soul-killer of a building.

I decided if there was anything that could suck the hope right out of you, it was trying to watch the
Today
show in the buzzy, mercury-vapor glow of fluorescent lighting on a TV that was imprisoned in a metal cage and suspended nine feet off the floor.

Everything was gray. The cement-block walls, the epoxied floor. The doors, the windows, the wire mesh on the doors and windows. Even the patients were gray. Most of them seemed pretty docile, and for that, I was grateful. They whiled away the day playing cards or Scrabble. Others wrote in journals, watched TV, or stared out the windows. The disturbed ones shuffled ruts down the hallway, sat motionless in wheelchairs, or jabbered incoherently at invisible companions. At least two regularly shit and pissed themselves, overflowing their adult diapers on a regular basis. The smell could practically peel the skin off your face, and someone would always have to go find an orderly to clean the mess up.

The first afternoon, I met with my appointed psychologist—a young girl with a tousled, asymmetrical haircut and pink-crystal nose ring, who looked to be just hours out of her master’s program. We sat on a (gray) sofa in the (gray) hallway and talked while people passed back and forth, which I guess was a tactic to make the session seem less threatening. One patient, a gaunt teenage girl, leaned against the wall and glowered at us.

“So tell me about what happened, Althea,” Dr. Hipster said.

“My brother forced me to take pills so it would look like I tried to kill myself.” I smiled at her.

Her expression remained placid. “Your brother?”

She knew who Wynn was. Everybody did.

Her eyes swept over the clipboard in her hands. “Why do you believe he forced you to take pills?”

“I don’t believe. I know. And I . . .” I touched my jaw, and it throbbed in response. All of a sudden, I felt exhausted. “I think there’s something he doesn’t want me to know. Something about my family, something terrible that keeps happening to the women in our family . . .”

I trailed off. She was looking at me like she already knew everything I’d just said. Like she’d heard this before because Wynn had briefed her. Warned her I would lie about him. I shut my mouth.

“You have a lengthy history of addiction.” Dr. Hipster returned to her clipboard. “And a recent diagnosis of schizophrenia from your previous psychiatrist. Are you aware of that?”

So they’d made it official. I was a bona fide schizophrenic. Another crazy mountain girl, just like the rest of them.

The doctor flipped a page. “I understand you have a prayer you like to say?”

“Is that a crime? Praying?”

She pursed her lips. “You know, Althea, schizophrenia is no laughing matter.”

“I wasn’t making a joke.”

No response. “But the illness can be managed so that you can live a full, productive life, maybe even at home, surrounded by your loved ones.”

I sighed.

“Are you willing to do what it takes to get better? To listen and learn? Will you trust the process and the doctors here?”

My skin broke out in gooseflesh. “I’ll do whatever it takes,” I said.

Before dinner, we dispersed for free time. The teenager from the hallway stopped me outside my room.

“You almost died?” she asked.

I pushed open my door. “So they say.”

“Who did you see when . . . you know . . .” Her eyes were two desperate shadows. “Jesus? Or a light or something?”

I thought back to the filthy room, the beam of the flashlight, the broken windows. My brother and the pyramid of pills rising out of his hand.

“I didn’t see anyone,” I said after a couple of seconds. “Sorry.”

Dinner was in a dingy cafeteria on the first floor. The patients filed past pans of glistening patties of meat, gray vegetables, and wedges of something I guessed was pie. I took my place in line, keeping an eye on an orderly—a young guy, skinny, with braces, who was pushing a garbage can on wheels around the perimeter of the room.

I took my tray to a table, started pushing the food around in the gravy or sauce or whatever it was, and watched the orderly. He slouched around the room, dumping trays and picking wadded napkins up off the floor. When his can was full, he started toward the back of the cafeteria.

I jumped up and, checking to make sure nobody was watching, followed.

In the kitchen, one guy stood at the sink, going at a stack of pots with a sprayer, his back to me. I scanned the rest of the room, the jumble of freezers, ovens, and shelves stacked with huge cans of vegetables. There was no one else here. I could hear the orderly in the back of the room, jostling the cans. I slipped past the sink, past the shelves of bowls and pots and enormous steel utensils, and turned the corner just as he’d pushed the door open and kicked down the metal doorstop. Between us there was a cluster of cans, all full, ready to be bagged and dumped. The orderly reappeared, and I ducked back behind a massive steel refrigerator.

“Dude, give me a hand!” he yelled into the kitchen.

“What?” came from the guy at the sink.

“Come back here and help me!”

There was no answer and the orderly heaved a sigh, then fought through the cans back into the kitchen.

I scooted out from behind the refrigerator and darted out the door. Crossed the paved area and ran to the administration building.

About fifteen minutes later, as I was leaving, two burly orderlies met me at the door.

“No need to manhandle me,” I said to the huge guy who’d hooked my right arm. “I just got lost.”

He chuckled. “Whatever you say. But rules are rules. No patients allowed in admin.”

“Did Denise call you?” When I’d casually slipped past the woman’s deserted desk and down the hall into Beth’s office, I’d assumed she was in the bathroom. Excavating her teeth, probably. Disgusting Denise.

“The food-services guys,” he said.

“Everybody’s doing paint-a-pot in the community room,” the other guy said.

“Paint-a-pot.” I nodded gravely. “Well, thank God you came when you did. I would’ve hated to miss that.”

Even though we were headed back to the land of gray, I was feeling pretty buoyant. Sure, I sucked at being an escape artist. Sure, the meds were dulling me, but I was confident of one thing: sooner or later, Beth would pull her keyboard out from its hidden desk tray and find, taped to the top of it, the hastily scrawled note I’d left her.

Chapter Thirty-One

Thursday, September 27, 2012

Tuscaloosa, Alabama

Three days until my thirtieth birthday, and no word from Beth. Not a peep. Not only that, but I hadn’t been able to get within spitting distance of the admin building. They’d taken away my outdoor privileges and added a couple more pills to my daily cocktail.

At any time, Wynn could pick up the phone and have me shipped off to the other side of the country. Or pop in and strangle me in my sleep himself. I knew this, which should’ve made me a wreck. But it didn’t. I wasn’t afraid.

He must’ve thought I knew something. Information that would be useful to him.

He needed me.

Or maybe I was overestimating my value to Wynn. Maybe it was just the pills blunting the edges. Even though I knew they were leaving their cloudy film over every inch of my nervous system, I found myself looking forward to the morning and evening concoction doled out to me. Nothing could beat it—that smooth, downward glide from dinnertime to lights out.

Nights were another story. That was when the dreams came. Nightmares starring Trix and Collie, Wynn and Walter. Terror and violence. Blood everywhere. Usually around three o’clock in the morning, I’d jerk back to consciousness and lie in my bed, drenched in sweat, trying to slow my racing pulse. Fear surrounded me, filled up the corners of my room, wafted between my sheets.

Maybe that was the real reason I wasn’t scared of Wynn. Maybe I actually wished he would sneak into my room one night and put me out of my misery.

Then, finally, I was told I had a visitor. When I saw her, standing in a block of sunlight by the sagging sofa in the community room, my heart slammed in my chest.

“You look tired, Althea.” Molly Robb held her arms out to me. “But really so much better.”

I didn’t move. She was wrapped in a beige trench, the belt cinched tightly around her tiny waist. I wondered if she had a gun hidden inside the folds. A cloth soaked in chloroform. Nylon zip ties.

“You’re fuller somehow”—her hands went to her cheeks and she patted them, like an overgrown toddler—“in the face.”

“It’s the meds. They bloat you. And thanks so much for mentioning it.”

I stormed out and down the hall. I could hear her scurrying, mouse-like, just a couple of yards behind me. I rounded the corner and slammed the door to my room, but she pushed it open and swanned into the room. I backed against the far wall.

“Get out,” I said. There was a telltale tremor in my voice, and I knew she heard it.

She smiled—a slow, cruel twist of her carefully lined lips. “I’ve already signed you out. Just for a couple of hours, and then I’ll bring you back. I’m taking you to see your father.”

“Dad wants to see me?”

“It’s so near the end,” she went on. “Wynn decided to let you see him one last time before he passed.”

I didn’t move. “He’s . . . It’s really the end? Really?”

She pursed her lips. “I’m so sorry, hon.”

I still didn’t move.

“I know it’s difficult to face this, but you have to be strong. This is your father we’re talking about. You don’t want to let him slip away without having settled your differences and said your good-byes.”

I pressed my fingers to my temples.

I couldn’t think. My brain was so filled with fog.

“Why didn’t Wynn come?” I asked her.

“He’s busy. And we’re a team. We’re all three a team, right?”

She held out her hand, and, God help me, I took it. I let her lead me down the hall and through the ward to the nurses’ station. Then, escorted by an orderly, through the series of steel-cage doors and down the stairs to the lobby. She pulled me by the wrist, kicking open the double doors of the building with her bow-tipped flats. When we hit the parking lot, I finally pulled against her, squinting in the light.

It was one of those September days where the sky was so blue and the leaves so crisply outlined against it, it made your eyes water. But the sun didn’t blind me to the black SUV idling in the far corner of the lot. It wasn’t Molly Robb’s car. My nerves twanged, and I tasted something weird and metallic in my mouth. Fear.

I turned to her. “The staff told Wynn I ran, didn’t they?”

She didn’t answer.

“So now that Wynn knows locking me in this hellhole and drugging me like a fucking circus elephant isn’t going to intimidate me, he’s got to do more.”

She forced a smile. “You’re confused, Althea. No one’s out to get you.”

“Who’s in the SUV, Molly Robb?” I asked.

I saw it then, the flash of hatred in her eyes. The naked disgust. It wasn’t just Wynn who wanted me out of the way. I’d messed up her plans for a glorious career as a politician’s wife, and now she wanted me gone too. To my sister-in-law, I was nothing but a problem to be solved.

“Is my brother going to kill me?” I said. “You’re going to kill me now?”

She clawed at my arm, but I twisted away from her.

“Because I ruined your plans?” I screamed.

She caught my upper arm and clamped down. She leaned into my ear. “Shut up.” She shoved me hard, and I stumbled forward.

“Where are you taking me?” She didn’t answer, just kept pushing me toward the SUV.

I didn’t know if that ominous vehicle was whisking me off to another hospital or back home to see my father or to some isolated spot in the woods outside of town where one of Wynn’s cronies was going to shoot me in the back of the head and leave me for the crows. All I knew was there was no chance, not one chance in hell, that I was going without a fight.

I wrenched away from Molly Robb, dropped to my knees on the asphalt, and started screaming like I had really and truly lost my mind. She turned back to me, her eyes bulging, her hands making helpless flapping motions. I inhaled and screamed again, louder this time, and I saw a back window of the SUV lower.

“Help me!” I screamed into the air, praying those damn orderlies would finally show up when I needed them. I dropped to the pavement, flailing, scratching at the asphalt. And then I heard footsteps pounding from somewhere in the lot.

“What’s going on?” It was a woman’s voice. A familiar one.

“She’s . . . I had permission to take her off campus but she’s . . .” Molly Robb’s voice came out choked.

“Althea?”

I stopped screaming and tilted my face up. Beth loomed over me, her nimbus of curls blotting out the sun. She planted her hands on her hips.

“You can’t take this patient out today,” she said.

“I have written permission from her brother. She’s going to see her dying father.”

“Well, not today. She has a medical appointment.”

I scrambled to my feet.

Molly Robb snorted. “She’ll be back later this evening. Reschedule it.”

Beth waved over an orderly who’d just exited the building. He broke into a jog. She turned back and sniffed at Molly Robb. “I’m sorry. We can’t reschedule. The OB-GYN is only here once a month, and it’s a legal thing. The state gets very particular when we’re dealing with a pregnant patient.”

I almost laughed at the gobsmacked look that came over Molly Robb. She glanced back at the SUV, then at me, then at Beth, her jaw working.

“She’s . . . pregnant?” she asked.

“And has a duodenal ulcer. She’s in no shape to be leaving. In fact, she really should be lying down.” Beth laid a hand on my shoulder. “My supervisor would have my head if he knew you were trying to take her off campus.”

“Her brother—” But then she shut her mouth. I shot Beth a grateful look, and next thing I knew, my trench-coated sister-in-law was heading toward the SUV. In seconds, the black vehicle peeled out of the lot, its tires trailing twin puffs of white dust.

Beth sent the orderly away and hustled me back into the cool lobby. She sat me on the scratchy plaid sofa and took my hand. She searched my face.

“Are you okay?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m fine. I just . . . I don’t know what I would’ve done if you hadn’t shown up when you did.”

“Where was she taking you?”

“I don’t know.” I looked in her eyes. “Away.”

A couple of nurses walked past, and she released my hand. When they’d passed, she leaned closer and spoke in a low voice. “I’m sorry it took me so long to get back to you. I had to think.”

“You did fine. You showed up just in time. And with a great story, by the way. Although maybe a touch over the top, with an ulcer and a pregnancy.”

She didn’t smile.

“Beth?”

“After you left the note, I got your file. The thing about the ulcer’s true.”

As if on cue, I felt a wave of nausea roll through me.

“Go on,” I said.

She ducked her head. “They did a blood test at DCH Regional, that first night.”

“Okay.”

“You are pregnant.”

I put out my hands on my knees, locked my elbows, and stared down at the sofa’s dirt-colored polyester fabric. A million different thoughts flung themselves around the inside of my head, colliding, zinging past each other.

Pregnant.

With Jay’s baby.

A life had started inside me, just weeks ago. It was now a part of me. A part I’d already put in jeopardy when I swallowed those pills. A part that was about to be swept up in a battle I didn’t know how to fight.

Beth’s eyes softened. “Althea. I’m so sorry I had to tell you like this. I’m sorry I told her.”

I felt like I’d been gut-punched. “I don’t care about that. I just . . . Oh God. I’ve been taking all those meds.”

“Whatever they’re giving you is safe. The pregnancy, the ulcer—it’s all on your chart.”

“On my chart? You mean, everybody knows but me? Why didn’t they say anything?”

She shook her head.

“It was Wynn,” I said. “It had to be. He must’ve told them not to talk. He doesn’t want me to know.”

“Althea, why wouldn’t he?” Her eyes had shuttered now, and she had stiffened in her seat. I felt a jolt of fear. She didn’t believe me.

“I don’t know. I don’t know. Because it would make me run, maybe?” I felt a wildness swirling up inside me. A funnel cloud of panic. I wanted to break out of this crazy place and run as fast and far as I could until I lost myself. I gripped the sofa beneath me, holding my body down. I couldn’t lose it now, I couldn’t afford to. I needed Beth’s help. “It’s like I said in the note. Wynn made me take the pills. He wanted it to look like I was trying to kill myself, and he wanted me locked up here. But I didn’t try to kill myself. And I’m not schizophrenic. I’m not. You’ve got to believe me.”

Desperation rose inside me, and the nausea on top of it. I wished I would just get sick right here, right now, all over the stained carpet. I wanted to purge everything—the meds, the fear. The past.

“I do,” she said and laid her hand on mine. “Althea, I do believe you. The minute I saw your name in our intake file, I thought it was odd that your brother had put you here. Pritchard is a state hospital. The end of the line for people who don’t have insurance or who can’t pay for private care. Or who don’t have any family who can take them in.”

I blinked at her, aware of the sensation that something was cracking inside me—the sludge of meds coating my nervous system that had hardened to a brittle shield. Someone was finally listening. I told myself to sit still. Not to rush anything. I swallowed, feeling my face warm.

“And then I got your note.”

I squeezed her hand.

“But, Althea, if your brother forced you to take the pills, if he really hurt you, we should call the police.”

I was sweating now. I could feel a trickle roll down between my breasts. “No. I don’t want the police involved, not yet. I can’t risk it.”

“Risk what? You’re not making any sense. The police can stop your brother. Put him away for what he’s done to you.”

“No. It’s not that simple. I don’t have time. My father’s the only one who knows what happened to my mother. Right now, in the state he’s in, he can’t tell me anything. So I’ve got to find somebody else. Somebody who knew her family. I have to go back to where it all started, and I’ve got to do it in three days.”

“Then call the police. Turn your brother in, and go do what you have to do.”

I gritted my teeth. “I’m telling you, it won’t work. They know him. They’re on his side. Everybody trusts Wynn like they trusted my father. I’m just the schizophrenic, junkie little sister who’s trying to smear the family name.”

“You can hire a lawyer. Take him to court.”

Now wasn’t the time to talk about my approaching thirtieth birthday or red ravens and gold dust and the honeysuckle girl. Maybe all that stuff was real, maybe there was more to my impending doom than just a megalomaniacal brother.

But it didn’t matter right now. And it didn’t change the fact that he was hell-bent on locking me up and maybe even killing me to keep the truth about our family quiet. If I wanted to be free, I had to find the truth before he got to me.

“I can’t explain everything right now.” I lowered my voice. “But trust me. There’s something in my family’s history, something terrible that Wynn is determined to keep quiet. He’s probably going to be furious when he finds out his wife botched the job today. Next time, and there will be a next time, he’ll come for me himself. And there won’t be anything I can do to stop him.”

A doctor, my doctor, swept in through the front door and stopped at the front desk. She spoke to the receptionist, then rested an elbow on the counter. Her gaze wandered over to us. I lifted a hand in greeting, and Beth straightened beside me. She smoothed her blouse.

“I appreciate you sharing this with me,” she said in a loud voice. “And I’ll see what I can do.” Then she rose and disappeared through the front doors.