The Great Forgetting (11 page)

He sat in the passenger seat of her Ford Escort and braced himself. She reached into her purse, resting in the space between the seats, and fished out a Winston Light. Her hands trembled as she lit the cigarette. She pulled deep and exhaled out the window and then was a little better. She started the car and they drove down Tallmadge, away from the center of town. He had a feeling there was no destination but privacy.

“I don't know what you were thinking, Johnny.”

“What do you mean?”

She shook her head but did not look at him. “You're not smart enough to be able to lie to me, yet,” she said. She took another long drag. “If Sam's brother, or her father, if either of them had found out first, they might have killed you. I really think they might have. Do you know how that makes me feel?”

He couldn't look at her. So he looked out the window and counted the trees.

“Her brother, Mark, is dangerous,” she said. “The school was notified when Sam's family moved here from Warren. A cop come down from the city to brief the guidance counselor. Family shipped Mark off to the military instead of a psych ward. And that probably makes him even more dangerous.”

“I don't understand.”

Virginia sighed. “We live out here so that you don't have to know things like this,” she said. “You'll hear it at school eventually. No getting around it. Surprised Jean doesn't know yet. Hell. Maybe she does. I don't know her as well as I used to.”

They passed over Berlin Lake, the muddy water stretching out from under the bridge on either side, stagnant water so hot the fish were dying. Beyond was North Benton and still she did not turn off. It was like she was distancing them from the news itself. Or trying to. The way Einstein had wanted to drive away from the clock tower so that it was never noon. As she spoke, Jack focused his attention on an aspen leaf that had gotten stuck under one of the windshield wipers.

“Mark was raping Sam, Johnny. They caught him at school with her behind the bleachers. And if it was happening there, out in the open, you can imagine what was going on in their home.”

“No,” he said.

“Mark was still a minor by a few months. Family got a lawyer, kept Mark out of jail. When it was over, they moved away and the father forced Mark into the navy. Their mother died in the middle of it all. Wrapped her car around a tree. They called it an accident.”

“Pull over.”

Virginia skidded the Escort onto the shoulder and came to a quick stop. Jack threw the door wide, leaned out, and puked into the grass. The bile stung his throat and cleared his head. He spit a few times until the nausea subsided, then pulled the door closed.

“How did it happen?” she asked. “You and Samantha.”

“I don't know,” he said. “It just happened. The fair.”

“Johnny. You can't see her again.”

“I heard you.”

“She's bad news. If she's not crazy already, she will be. You can't escape those memories. She's not safe, Johnny. She's a little barracuda. Understand?”

He did. But he didn't want to. He shook his head.

“She's also in the eighth grade,” Virginia continued. “You're a junior now, kiddo. This is all kinds of trouble.”

“Okay.”

“She'll ruin your future.” Virginia flicked the spent cigarette out the window and then pulled the car back onto the road and turned back toward home.

But Jack knew he couldn't stay away. Every time he closed his eyes he saw Sam. He could feel the pressure of her lips on his own, the way her upper lip was always chapped and cracked.

That night at Claytor Lake he found a note from her folded into the nook of a chestnut tree that gave them shade.

I know you know. Please stop. It's okay. I don't even care.

That night the heat wave broke. A wave of cool air blasted the house at 3:00 a.m., knocking slate shingles off the eaves. Morning brought rain, and it didn't let up for three days. Ten homes along the Cuyahoga were swept into the river, gobbled up and spit out as timber into Lake Erie. The world, after, felt new.

Jack kept the note with him and thought about what to do. A week later, he taped it to his bus window with his own message written in black marker on the back. Her bus faced his in the parking lot when school let out. A simple message, but profound:
I love you.

Such public displays are never overlooked in school. They become one of those stories told in the lunchroom for years. A junior proclaiming his love for a lowly eighth-grader? That's good stuff.

As his bus pulled away that day he saw her smile. Smile and nod and mouth one word: “Okay.”

*   *   *

When Sam awoke, the sun was low on the horizon. She pulled herself up enough to rest her head on Jack's chest. Her right hand drew words on his skin that he could not read.

“Stay,” she said.

“Okay, then.”

7
    Cole's mother, Imogen, was a fit aristocrat with bright gray hair that ended harshly at her shoulders, as if it had been snipped off in one go by a pair of giant shears. She was the creative VP for a midtown advertising firm. She had written the slogan for Rivertin, the drug her son had overdosed on:
Return! Revive! Rivertin! Forever better.

By the time Imogen flew to Akron the doctors had pumped Cole's stomach. The boy lived. Another five minutes was all it would have taken. She was angry. At everyone, it seemed, but Jack.

He came at her request to a meeting with Haven's director, Dr. Jimi Frazier, two days after Cole's attempted suicide. The director's office was high-ceilinged and lit by soft lamps. There was a gurgling pebble fountain in the corner and an array of diplomas and pictures on the wall behind his mahogany desk. Imogen sat across from Frazier, next to Jack, in a cushioned chair, legs crossed at the ankles, eyebrows furrowed.

“Do you know what it's like to entrust the well-being of your only child to someone, Dr. Frazier?” she asked.

Frazier was stoic, unreadable. “I have grown kids in the world, Imogen,” he said. “I know what it's like to fear for them.”

“This place is supposed to be safe.”

“Yes.”

“It's supposed to be a goddamn
haven
, Jimi.”

“Yes.”

“So how did this happen?”

“Your son is clever. One of the most intelligent young men we've ever treated. If he wishes to kill himself he will find a way. Here or elsewhere. What we have to do is treat that impulse. Cole has to
want
to live.” He looked from her to Jack. “We were making progress until Mr. Felter intervened.”

“Are you blaming me for this?” asked Jack.

“Before he disappeared, Dr. Sanders filled Cole's mind with false hope,” Frazier said to Imogen. “He promised Cole that his friend Jack would have all the answers. When Jack didn't provide them, that three-year-old delusion came crashing down.”

“That isn't how it played out,” said Jack.

Imogen lifted a hand to quiet them. “Here's what I see. I see that it took your staff over a year to get my son to communicate again after Dr. Sanders left. And I see that it took Jack all of thirty seconds. For whatever reason, my son is responding to him. I know he's not a doctor. But he
is
a teacher. He knows something about kids. I want Jack to find out why my son tried to kill himself—”

“Wait,” Jack started, “I couldn't—”

“And in the process, Jack might be able to get some answers about Dr. Sanders's whereabouts. And that, I believe, would help the both of you. Aren't you looking for him, too?”

Frazier leaned back in his seat and rubbed his bald head.

“Cole really does want to see you again,” said Imogen. “You're the only one he's asked for.”

“I'm not a shrink,” said Jack.

“He doesn't need a shrink. He needs someone he can trust. He's trying to tell us something. We need someone to figure out what it is. I can't do it. I can't talk to him like that. I look at him, all I see is his father.”

8
    Imogen walked Jack to his car. The day was bright, sunlight reflecting off the whitewash of the Haven home. She placed a hand on his arm.

“Jack,” she said, her voice wavering. “Have they told you about Cole's compulsion to pull people into his delusions?”

“Yes,” he said.

She batted away a stray strand of hair and seemed to consider her next words. Finally she said, “Let him.”

“What?”

“Let him draw you in. I think the only way we find out what's going on with my son and what happened to your friend is for someone to really see what's cooking inside his brain. And you seem healthy enough for it.”

If you only knew, lady
, he thought.
If you only knew how I got these marks on my neck.

When he didn't say anything, she continued. “I think his other doctors were too quick to dismiss everything Cole told them.”

“Like what?”

“Cole believes his father was a secret government agent who collected Nazi artifacts.”

Jack shrugged. “You think, what? There's something to it? Was your husband working for the government?”

“If you'd asked me a year ago I would have said, unequivocally, no. He was a day trader. No way. He couldn't hide something like that from me. I mean, it sounds crazy, right?”

“It does.”

“About a year ago I moved out of our home on Long Island and into an apartment in the city. During the move, I found some things my husband had hidden from me.”

Imogen reached into her pocket and came out with something in her hand. She passed it to Jack. The object felt cool wrapped inside his fist.

He opened his hand. It was George Washington. “A quarter?” he asked. It was dated 1957.

“Turn it over.”

On the reverse, where a bald eagle should have been, was a swastika. In place of
E pluribus unum
were the words
Arbeit macht frei
.

“What the hell is this?” he asked.

“I have no idea, Jack. But I found it tucked into the pocket of my dead husband's favorite suit.”

 

THREE

COME WANDER WITH ME

1
    Cole smiled. “You look good, Jack,” he said. “Less suggestible.”

The boy sat on his bed in his room at Haven. He was dressed in pale pajamas. There were deep dark circles below his eyes and thick black wires trailed from under his shirt to a heart monitor beside the bed. The white machine beeped softly in the corner.

Cole's bedroom resembled a boarding school unit. The walls were painted a bright, textured blue. There were posters everywhere. Broadway shows, mostly, with a one-sheet for
Wicked
by the window. A wide desk from IKEA was covered in magazines—
Wired
,
Entertainment Weekly
—its shelves stuffed with dog-eared paperbacks about government conspiracies. A wide-screen TV hung from the ceiling, connected to three different gaming systems, including a vintage Nintendo 64.

Jack sat in a leather recliner beside the bed. It was Monday, eleven days after Imogen had showed him that incongruous quarter, a week since he'd begun to boil his own drinking water, a habit both Jean and Sam monitored with growing concern.

“You met my mother, I guess.”

“Yes,” said Jack. “She's … persistent.”

Cole laughed. “She gets what she wants.”

“What was your father like?”

“Not yet,” said Cole.

“Then what do you want to talk about?”

“Gradients.”

“Gradients?”

“Do you know what a gradient is?”

“Like when a road goes up a hill?”

“Sort of. But I mean gradients for the
mind
. It's a common psychological tool. It's actually a big part of Scientology.”

“Are you a Scientologist?”

“I'm not crazy, Jack. But I read about them. Scientologists have this thing called ‘auditing,' where you relive the traumatic events of your life over and over and over. What they're really doing is molesting memory. Raping your brain. But we can use some of their methods. I'm going to teach you to safeguard your memories, the memories the government wants to take away. To do that, we'll use a gradient.”

Jack nodded to let Cole know he was listening. His fingers tingled. It was hard to listen to the boy's voice. He sounded so confident.

“A gradient,” Cole continued, “is a system of baby steps toward something bigger. Little truths that prepare you for some ultimate understanding. In Scientology, right, those kooks believe that seventy-five million years ago this alien Xenu flew to Earth in a DC-8 jumbo jet with his enemies' souls in the cargo hold. If you told someone that story when you introduced them to Scientology, they'd think you were batshit crazy. So what they do instead is use a gradient of smaller ideas to slowly prepare a person for this big mind-fuck at the end. When you first join Scientology you learn simple stuff like how L. Ron Hubbard was the shit and how to purify your body and crap.”

Jack nodded.

“Or,” said Cole, “think of it like this. You don't teach a kindergartener calculus, right? If you gave them a triangle and told them to give you the angle of each corner, they'd chuck a block at your head or something. You teach a kid addition and subtraction first. Then multiplication. Division. Algebra. Trig. Then calculus. That's a gradient. Storytellers do this all the time to gain the reader's trust. Intro the characters. Intro the mystery. Intro the setting. Then: bam! You gotta ease them into it. If Stephen King had started
It
by saying, ‘Hey, there's this alien from another planet that looks like a spider but pretends to be a clown that lives in the sewer and feeds on the fears of children,' you'd probably not pick it up because fuck that crazy shit.”