Were they still watching? Michael wondered now, as he passed through the crowd and searched for an Avis or a Hertz or a Budget Rent-A-Car. Were they still watching the house or were they now watching him?
He had spent that first night in a hotel, trying to decide if Teri was drawing him into one of her “tricks of the mind” as he had come to thing of them, or if through some incomprehensible quirk of events, Gabe really was back, alive and well, and not a day older. It had been another shade of the paranoia, he supposed now, looking back on it. In the end, paranoia or no, Michael had decided to do something he hadn’t done in years. He had decided to trust his instincts. After all, what did he have to lose? Even if it was all an elaborate fantasy playing out in Teri’s head, at least he could put his mind at ease. Maybe, at the same time, he could even aid Teri in finding the help she needed. He owed her that much.
The next day, he called into the office sick. Janyce, his secretary, had gone over the week’s appointments with him and they had shifted things around to the point where he felt he could probably steal a week without any major projects suffering.
“I hope you’re feeling better soon,” Janyce had said in the wrap-up.
“Me, too,” Michael responded.
“If anything should come up—?”
“You can reach me here at home,” Michael said, surprised at how quickly the lie had come to mind, how easily it had tumbled out of his lips.
He hadn’t had the same success in getting a flight out of town, though. That had been anything but easy. The attendants of the only major carrier had been on strike for nearly two weeks, and the day before, the mechanics union had joined them. Everything at the airport had ground to a standstill. It had taken him another day to arrange for a commuter flight to take him to Chicago. From there, he caught a flight to San Francisco and from San Francisco – where he had wasted another four hours – he finally caught a second commuter flight, this one into Northern California.
And here, at long last, he was.
[67]
Gabe woke up disoriented and feeling lousy. He had drifted in and out of wakefulness for hours, only dimly aware of his surroundings or the new cast on his arm. What had happened yesterday seemed faraway and dream-like. He remembered the accident, however. And he remembered seeing his mother in the back window of the other car. The expression on her face had been something like that of a woman being burned at the stake. It had been that horrible. He didn’t think he would ever forget that image of her.
He sat up and saw that he was alone. Someone had dimmed the lights, and a dull hazy cast hovered over the room like a late morning fog. He had been placed in what appeared to be the middle bed in a line of maybe ten or twelve that stretched from one end of the cavernous room to the other. More important, though, he remembered this place. He had been here before. This was where he had found himself after the bike accident, the one that hadn’t been an accident at all, according to his mother.
Gabe fell back against the pillow, suddenly aware of the plaster cast wrapped around the lower part of his right arm, between the wrist and the elbow. It smelled chalky, a little musty, not unlike the plaster leaf molds he had sometimes made at summer camp. There wasn’t a mark on the cast, not a smudge of dirt, a slight indentation.
In the second grade, he had bent a finger back while playing wall ball and everyone had thought it was broken because it had swelled up so badly. Then the x-rays had come back and the doctor said it was just a strain and not to worry. But this was the first time Gabe had actually broken a bone.
He pulled the covers back and climbed out of bed. Someone had taken his clothes while he had been sleeping. He was dressed in his under shorts now, and a hospital gown. Cool air slipped through the long slit in the back and whirled around his legs like cotton candy spinning around the inside of a glass box. He reached back and tried to gather in the flaps as he followed a pattern of diamonds, black on white, across the floor to the only door exiting the room.
The door was painted a dull navy gray. It was made of metal, and there was a small observation window just above adult eye level. On his tiptoes, it was still too high to see through.
Gabe gave the handle a jiggle. It was sloppy loose, with enough play to make him think it might fall off in his hands. But the door didn’t open. Apparently, it was locked from the other side. They had kept it locked the last time he had been here, too. Except when Miss Churchill was in the room.
“Hello?”
No response.
“Anybody out there?”
Another jiggle of the handle, and a lonely echo came back from the other side, like a ghost trying to tap out a message in Morse Code.
“Hello? Anybody?”
Gabe leaned against the door a moment, frustration building, and when he pushed away, he slammed the heel of his foot into the metal surface. It made a hollow, reverberating sound. He kicked it again, again with the flat of his foot, again with no response from the other side.
After a while longer, he retreated back to his bed.
He sat there, brooding, and staring endlessly at the door.
Sooner or later it had to open.
[68]
“He keeps that up and next thing you know they’re gonna have to put a cast on his foot,” the man said lightheartedly. He was sitting in a small room, with a bank of video monitors across the wall in front of him. The lights were out. The screens cast a dull, gray mood into the room. Work shifts usually ran a maximum of four hours, anything longer and the cast of the screens had a tendency to wear heavily on the eyes. When the eyes got tired, the mind got tired, and that was when you missed things.
“They oughta cast his whole damn body,” his partner said, placing an eight of hearts on a nine of spades and turning up his next card. It was a king, and there was nowhere to play it, so he buried it in the middle of the deck and turned up the next card. This one was a little better. A seven of spades.
“How do they do that?”
“What?”
“Cast your whole body? I mean, what do you do if you have to take a leak?”
“Catheter,” his partner said, without looking up. He cleared a column and went searching through the deck for a king to drop there.
“Ugh!”
“You said it, man.”
On the monitors, the boy plopped back into bed, looking restless and unhappy. He was fully awake now, and unless they gave him something to help him sleep again, he was going to be pacing like a caged animal the rest of the day.
“I think we’re going to have to order up some nourishment for the little guy.”
“You better clear it first.”
Off to the left, the only door leading into the small room swung open and D.C. poked his head in. He was a man who liked to keep an eye on things, a coach who would much rather play the game himself if he were still as sharp as he had been when he was younger. Not to imply that he was old. That would be misleading. He was in his late thirties by appearances, his hair dark brown, his eyes intolerant, his face a mask that gave away nothing. Beneath the facade, he was a much older man, intelligent and no-nonsense, often cynical.
“How’s the kid doing?”
“He just woke up; looks a little restless.”