"I want to go to my room."
Alex was a bit puzzled by her behavior, as he frequently was, but he went along. "All right, Mom. We can sit in there. It"ll be nice, just the two of us."
She held his arm in a tight grip as they walked back down the depressing hall. Alex walked. She shuffled. She wasn"t an old woman, but her spirit always seemed broken.
It was the Thorazine and other powerful antipsychotic drugs that made her that way, and made her shuffle. Dr. Hoffmann said that Thorazine was all that kept her functioning as well as she did, and that without it she would become so violently psychopathic that she would have to be restrained twenty-four hours a day. Alex certainly didn"t want that for her.
When they went into her simple room she shut the door. The doors didn"t lock. She opened it and checked the hall three times before she seemed satisfied. Her roommate, Agnes, was older. She never spoke. She did stare, though, so Alex was glad that she had stayed in the sunroom.
The TV, bolted high on the wall, was on, but the sound was muted. He rarely saw the TV turned off. The sound was usually muted, though. He"d never seen his mother change the channel. He didn"t understand why she and Agnes wanted the TV on without the sound.
"Go away," Alex"s mother said.
"After a while, Mom. I"d like to sit with you for a time."
She shook her head. "Go away and hide."
"From what, Mom?"
"Hide," she repeated.
Alex took a deep breath. "Hide from what?"
His mother stared at him for a time. "Twenty-seven," she finally said.
"Yes, that"s right. I"m twenty-seven today. You had me twenty-seven years ago, nine in the evening on the ninth of September. That"s the date today. You had me here, at this very place, back when it was a regular hospital."
She leaned close and licked her lips. "Hide."
Alex wiped a hand across his face. "From who, Mom?" He was tired of the pointless, circular conversation.
His mother rose from where she sat on the edge of the bed and went to a small wardrobe. She pawed through the items folded on the shelf. After a brief search she came up with a shawl. At first, Alex thought that she was cold. But she didn"t put the shawl around her shoulders.
She stood before the small dresser and draped the shawl over the polished metal square, bolted to the wall, that served as a mirror.
"Mom, what are you doing?"
His mother turned back with fire in her eyes. "They look at me. I told you. They look at me through the windows in the walls."
Alex was starting to feel creepy.
"Mom, come sit down."
His mother sat on the edge of the bed, closer, and took one of his hands in both of hers. It was an act of affection that unexpectedly brought a tear to Alex"s eye. She had never done such a thing before. Alex thought that it was the best birthday present he could have gotten, better even than fifty thousand acres of land.
"Alex," she whispered. "You must run and hide before they get you."
It was startling to hear his name from her lips for the second time in the same day. It took a great effort to summon his voice.
"And who is it that I should hide from, Mom?"
She glanced around and then leaned closer so he could hear her whisper.
"A different kind of human."
He stared at her a moment. It made no sense, but something about it sounded serious, sounded sincere.
Just then something on the TV caught his eye. He looked up and saw that it was the local news. A police spokesman was standing before a cl.u.s.ter of microphones.
A news crawler moving across the bottom of the screen said "Two Metro officers found dead."
Alex reached over for the remote and turned up the sound.
"Do you know why they were there, in behind the warehouses?" a reporter asked through the clamor.
"The Center and Ninetieth Street section was within their patrol area," the official said. "Alleys throughout there provide access to loading docks. We check them often, so there was nothing unusual about them being there in that location."
Alex remembered when Ninetieth Street, about ten or twelve miles from his house, used to be the outskirts of town.
Another reporter shouted the others down. "There are reports that both officers were found with their necks broken. Is that true?"
"I can"t comment on such stories. As I"ve said, we will have to wait for the coroner"s report. When we have it we will release the findings."
"Have the families been notified?"
The man at the microphone paused, obviously having trouble getting words out. Anguish shaped his features. He kept swallowing back his emotion.
"Yes. Our prayers and sympathy go out to their families at this difficult time."
"Can you release their names, then?" a woman waving her pen for attention asked.
The official stared out at the tight knot of reporters. His gaze finally dropped away. "Officer John Tinney, and Officer Peter Slawinski." He started spelling the names.
Alex"s whole body flashed as cold as ice.
"They break people"s necks," his mother said in a dead tone as she stared at the TV. He thought that she must be repeating what she"d just heard. "They want the gate."
Her eyes went out of focus. He knew; she was going back into that dark place. Once her eyes went out of focus like that she wouldn"t speak again for weeks.
He felt his cell phone vibrate in his pocket. Another text message from Bethany. He ignored it as he put an arm tenderly around his mother"s shoulders.
ALEX SAT FOR A WHILE just holding his mother, trying to imagine what madness haunted her. She no longer seemed to know that he was there.
The worst part was that he had no hope. The doctors had said that she would never get better, never be her old self again, and that he needed to understand that. They said there was brain damage that couldn"t be reversed. While they weren"t exactly sure what had caused the damage to her brain, they said that, among other things, it caused her to sometimes become violent. They said that such damage was not reversible. They"d said that she was a danger to herself and others and always would be.
After a while Alex gently laid her back on her bed. She was as limp as a doll-just a bundle of bone and muscle, blood and organs, existing often without conscious awareness, without anything other than a vestigial intellect. He fluffed up the pillow under her head. Her empty eyes remained fixed on the ceiling. As far as Alex knew, she didn"t know where she was, or that there was anyone there with her. She was for the most part dead to the world; her body just hadn"t fully caught up with that fact.
He pulled her shawl off the mirror, folded it, and replaced it in the wardrobe before sitting again on the edge of the bed.
When his phone rang he pulled it out and answered.
"Hey, birthday boy," Bethany said, "I have a big surprise for you."
Alex made an effort to keep the annoyance out of his voice. "Well, I"m afraid that-"
"I"m sitting outside your house."
He paused a moment. "My house."
Her voice turned flirtatious and lilting. "That"s right."
"What are you doing there?"
"Well," she said in an airy, intimate whisper, "I"m waiting for you. I want to give you your birthday present."
"Thanks for the thought, Bethany, but I really don"t need anything, honest. Save your money."
"No money involved," she said. "Just get your tail home, birthday boy. Tonight you"re going to get yourself laid."
Now Alex was really getting annoyed with her. He thought it easiest not to say so, though. He didn"t want to have a fight with a woman he hardly knew. There was no point to it.
"Look, Bethany, I"m really not in the mood."
"You just leave that to me. I"ll get you in the mood. I think you ought to get lucky on your birthday, and I"m just the girl to make it special."
Bethany was an attractive woman-in fact she bordered on being voluptuous-but the more he got to know her the less and less attractive Alex found her to be. She had nothing more than a superficial allure. He couldn"t talk to her about anything meaningful, not because she wasn"t intelligent enough, but because she didn"t care about anything meaningful. In a way, that was worse. She was a living, breathing example of superficial, and willfully so. She seemed to have no interests other than that she had a kind of odd, narrow focus on him and the two of them having a good time-or, at least, what was a good time by her definition.
"I can"t, right now," he said, trying not to sound angry, even though he was getting angry.
She let out a low, breathy chuckle. "Oh, I"ll make sure you can, Alex. Don"t you worry about that. You just get yourself home and let Beth take care of everything."
"I"m visiting my mother."
"I think I can throw a better party. Promise. Just come give me a chance to make your birthday something you"ll never forget."
"My mother is in the hospital. She"s ill and not doing well. I"m going to be sitting with her."
That finally threw Bethany into silence for a moment.
"Oh," she finally said, the s.e.xiness gone from her voice. "I didn"t know."
"I"ll call you later," Alex said. "Maybe in a few days."
"Well," she said, sounding uncertain and reluctant to end the conversation so quickly, "I"m sure your mother is going to need to get her rest. Why don"t you call me later today, after your visit?"
Somehow, it didn"t sound quite like a question. It sounded more like an instruction. He hadn"t wanted to have this conversation-not at the moment, not sitting there with his mother-but Bethany was giving him no choice.
"Look, the truth is I don"t think I"m the guy for you. You"re an attractive woman, you really are. There are a lot of guys who like you. I think you"d be better off with one of them instead of me. You"d have a lot more fun with them, with guys who are interested in the same things that interest you."
"But I like you."
"Why?"
"I don"t know." She paused a moment. "You get me hot," she finally said, falling back on her l.u.s.ty voice, as if l.u.s.t was magic that could banish any objections. He imagined that it very well might with most men, but he wasn"t most men.
"I"m sorry, Bethany. You"re a nice enough person, but we"re just not right for each other. It"s as simple as that."
"I see."
He didn"t say anything, hoping that she would leave it at that and not decide to make it ugly. It wasn"t like they"d been seeing each other for any length of time. There was no reason to make a big deal out of it. It had been a couple of dates, nothing more. He"d kissed her a few times. That was it. She"d made it clear that he was welcome to go farther, to go as far as he wanted, but something had made him keep her at arm"s length. Now he was glad he had.
"Alex, I"ve got to go. I need . . . I need to think about this."
"I understand. You think about it, but I think it"s best if we go our separate ways."
He could hear her breathing for a moment; then, without a further word, she hung up on him.
"Good," he said under his breath as he used his thumb to push the phone back into the pocket of his jeans.
He glanced over at his mother. She stared unblinking at the ceiling.
Alex picked up the TV remote when he saw another report about the two murdered Metro officers. The place they"d been found was a good dozen miles from where he had met Officers Tinney and Slawinski earlier that day.
It shook Alex to realize that the two men were dead. If he found it shocking, he could only imagine how horrifying the news had to be for those close to them.
Both men had seemed so competent, so in control. He"d seen them for only a few minutes, but it seemed impossible to think that both of those men could be dead. The swiftness of such a thing left Alex feeling shaken and even more depressed.
He envied people who enjoyed their birthdays.
Just then his phone rang again. He was reluctant to answer it, thinking it would be Bethany with a list of grievances over her hurt feelings and wanting to rant at him, but when he checked the small exterior display window it said OUT OF AREA.
Alex flipped open the cover and put the phone to his ear. "h.e.l.lo, this is Alex."
Weird, garbled sounds and disembodied whispers crackled through the receiver. The sounds made his mouth go dry.
Alex immediately flipped the cover closed. He stared at the phone a moment, then finally slipped it back in his pocket.
The sounds had been so unusual, so haunting, that he distinctly remembered hearing them before. It had been the call he had gotten earlier, just as he had been about to leave his grandfather"s house, just after he had learned about the land that came to be his on his twenty-seventh birthday.
He remembered that he"d gotten the call right after he had thought that someone had been looking at him through the mirror. It had also been shortly after he had asked if Ben thought he would end up crazy like his mother.
Alex glanced at the polished metal mirror before looking around at the mint-green room. He wondered if he was destined to end up spending the rest of his life in a place like this, like his mother.
He wondered how he would know if he had gone crazy. He didn"t feel crazy.
He bet that his mother didn"t feel crazy, either.