(2005) Wrapped in Rain Page 2

  "But all those people are dead except me and Mose."

  `Just 'cause somebody dies doesn't mean they leave you." She gently turned my chin toward hers and said, "Tucker, love doesn't die like people."

  "Who's in my dad's stomach?"

  "Well ... " She paused for a minute and then decided to tell me something pretty close to the truth. `Jack Daniels, mostly."

  "How come you don't fill yours with Mr. Daniels?"

  She laughed. "For starters, I don't like the taste of him. And secondly, I want to fill mine with something I only have to swallow once. If you drink Mr. Daniels, he'll leave you thirsty. You have to drink him all day and then every night, and I don't have time for all that foolishness."

  The fire licked the back of the fireplace and painted the wood in white coals.

  "Mama Ella, where's my mom?"

  Miss Ella looked into the fire and squinted. "I don't know, child. I don't know."

  "Mama Ella?"

  "Yes," she said, poking the fire with an iron poker, ignoring my use of her forbidden name.

  "Is my dad mad at me?"

  She squeezed me tight and said, "No, child. Your father's acting up has nothing to do with you."

  I sat in the quiet for a minute, watching the end of the iron poker turn bright red. "Well then, is he mad at you?"

  "I don't think so."

  "Then"-I pointed to her left eye-"why'd he hit you?"

  "Tucker, I think the screaming and hitting has a lot to do with your father's friendship with Mr. Daniels." I nodded as if I understood. "To tell you the truth, I don't think he remembers most of it."

  "If we drink Mr. Daniels, will he help us forget?"

  "Not permanently."

  Miss Ella combed my hair with her fingers, and I felt her breath on my forehead. Miss Ella said that sometimes when she prayed, she felt the breath of God come down and cover her like mist in the morning. I didn't know much about the breath of God, but if it was anything like the breath of Miss Ella-sweet, warm, and close-I wanted it.

  "Can you stop him from being so mean?"

  "Tucker, I'd step in front of a train for you if I thought it would help, but Miss Ella can only do certain things."

  The light from the embers bounced off her shiny face and made her skin look lighter. It also showed the scar above her right eye and the little swelling that remained. She sat me up and squared my shoulders to hers. She rubbed my tummy and smiled.

  "You know sometimes how I walk into your room with a flashlight or a candle?" I nodded. "Well, love is like that. Light doesn't have to announce its way into a room or ask the darkness to leave. It just is. It walks ahead of you, and the darkness rolls back like a tide." She waved her hand across the room. "It has to, 'cause darkness can't be where light is."

  She cradled my hand inside of hers. Hers was wrinkled and callused, and her knuckles were bigger than mine, sort of out of proportion to the rest of her hand. Her silver wedding band fit loosely and had worn thin on the edges. My hand was small and dotted with one or two freckles, and my fingernails were packed with Alabama clay. A cut had scabbed across the middle knuckle of my index finger and cracked every time I made a fist. "Tucker, I want to tell you a secret." She curled my hand into a fist and showed it to me. "Life is a battle, but you can't fight it with your fists." She gently tapped me on the chin with my fist and then put her hand on my chest. "You got to fight it with your heart."

  She pulled me back to her chest and sucked through her teeth like she was trying to pick the corn out with her tongue. "If your knuckles are bloodier than your knees, then you're fighting the wrong battle."

  "Miss Ella, you don't always make sense."

  "In life"-she placed her finger on my knee-"you want the scabs here"-she placed the other on the cracked skin of my knuckle-"not here."

  I pointed at the half-full bottle of hand lotion on her bedside table. "Is that why you wear the Cornhuskers?"

  Dry skin was her nemesis. "The devil's due," she called it. She ashed up whenever she picked collards and turnips or took me out in the fields looking for arrowheads and pottery shards after a light rain. "Whenever you're down there"-I pointed at the floor and the worn, knee-width parallel lines-"you wear it."

  She scratched my back, and the skin around her eyes fell into a smile. "No, child, you won't need the Cornhuskers unless you start working in bleach and ammonia every day."

  I looked down and followed the motions of her finger. "Right now, your people place is about the size of a peach or a tangerine. Pretty soon it'll be the size of a cantaloupe and then one day"-she drew a big circle around my stomach-"the size of a watermelon."

  I covered my belly button because I didn't want anything to get in or out without my permission. "Miss Ella, will you always be in here?"

  "Always, child." She nodded and then stared off into the fire. "Me and God, we're not going anywhere."

  "Never?"

  "Never."

  "You promise?"

  "With all of me."

  "Miss Ella?"

  "Yes, child?"

  "Can I have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich?"

  "Child," she said placing her head to mine and her callused fingers on my cheek, "you can whip it and beat it senseless, you can drag it through the streets and spit on it, you can even dangle it from a tree, drive spikes through it, and drain the last breath from it, but in the end, no matter what you do, and no matter how hard you to try to kill it, love wins."

  That night, in direct disobedience to one of Rex's loudest spit-filled and bourbon-inspired orders, I curled up and slept next to Miss Ella. And it was there, in her warm bosom, that for the first time in my life, I slept through the night.

  Chapter 1

  MAYBE IT'S THE JULY SHOWERS THAT APPEAR AT 3:00 p.m., regular as sunshine, maybe it's the September hurricanes that cut a swath across the Atlantic and then dump their guts at landfall, or maybe it's just God crying on Florida, but whatever it is, and however it works, the St. Johns River is and always has been the soul of Florida.

  It collects in the mist, south of Osceola, and then unlike most every other river in the world, except the Nile, it winds northward, swelling as it flows. Overflowing at Lake George, underground rivers crack crystal springs in the earth's crust and send it sailing farther northward where it gives rise to commerce, trade, million-dollar homes, and Jacksonville-once commonly referred to as Cowford-because that's where the cows forded the river.

  South of Jacksonville, the river's waist bulges to three miles wide, sparking little spurs or creeks peopled by barnacled marinas and long-established fish camps where the people are good and most of their stories are as winding as the river. A few miles south and east of the naval air station-headquarters to several squadrons of the huge, droning, four-propeller P-3 Orion-Julington Creek is a small bulge in the waistband that turns east out of the river, dips under State Road 13, winds beneath a canopy of majestic oaks, and disappears into the muck of a virgin Florida landscape.

  On the south bank ofJulington Creek, surrounded by rows of orange and grapefruit trees, Spiraling Oaks Mental Health Facility occupies a little more than ten acres of black, rich, organic, worm-crawling dirt. If decay has a smell, this is it. It's shaded by sprawling live oak trees whose limbs twist upward like arms and outward like tentacles, the tips of which are heavily laden with ten million acorns horded by fat, noisy, scurrying squirrels wary of hawks, owls, and ospreys.

  Spiraling Oaks is where people go, or are sent, when their families don't know what else to do with them. If there's a precipice to insanity, this is it. It's the last stop before the nuthouse, although in truth, it is just that.

  By 10:00 a.m., the morning shift had changed, but not before administering the required doses of Zoloft, Zyprexa, Lithium, Prozac, Respidol, Haldol, Prolixen, Thorazine, Selaxa, Paxil, or Depakote to all forty-seven patients. Lithium was the staple, the base ingredient in all their diets, as all but two patients had blood levels in the therapeutic range. The other two
were new admissions and soon to follow. This practice gave rise to its nickname-Lithiumville-which was funny to everyone but the patients. More than half the patients were taking a morning cocktail of lithium plus one. About a quarter of the patients, the more serious cases, were swallowing lithium plus two. Only a handful were ingesting lithium plus three. These were the lifers. The go-figures. The nohopers. The why-were-they-borns.

  The campus buildings were all one story. That way, none of the patients could step out of a second-story window. The main patient building, Wagemaker Hall, formed a semicircle with several nurses' stations spaced strategically six rooms apart. Tiled floors, scenically painted rooms, soft music, and cheerful employees. The whole place smelled like a deep-muscle rub-soothing and aromatic.

  The patient in room 1 was a two-year occupant and at fifty-two, a veteran of three such facilities. Known as "the computer man," he was once a rather gifted programmer, responsible for high-security government mainframes. But all that programming had gone to his head, because he now believed he had a computer inside of him that told him what to do and where to go. He was excitable, hyper, and often needed staff assistance to navigate the halls, eat, or find the bathroom-which he seldom did in time or in the appropriate place. That fact alone explained the smell. He fluctuated between climbing the walls and being catatonic. There was no in-between and had not been in some time. He was either up or down. On or off. Yes or no. He had not spoken in at least a year, his face often frozen in a grimace and his body held in odd postures-evidence of the internal conversation occurring inside the shell of a man who once had an IQ of 186 or greater. Chances were quite good that he'd leave Spiraling Oaks strapped to a stretcher and carrying a one-way ticket to a downtown facility where all the doors led in and all the rooms were decorated with blue, fourinch padding.

  The patient in room two was female, twenty-seven, relatively new, and currently asleep under a rather potent dose of 1,200 milligrams of Thorazine. She would pose no problem today, tomorrow, or, for that matter, through the weekend. Neither would the psychotic tendencies that slept under the same sedation. Three days ago her husband had knocked on the front door and asked to admit her. This occurred shortly after her mania, and nineteenth grandiose scheme, had emptied their bank account and given $67,000 in cash to a man who claimed to have created a gizmo that doubled the gas mileage in every car on earth. The stranger gave no receipt and, like the money, was never seen again.

  The patient in room 3 had turned forty-eight several times in his three years here and now stood at the nurses' counter and asked, "What time does the Zest begin?" When the nurse didn't respond, he pounded the desk and said, "The ship has come and I'm going nowhere. If you tell God, I'll die." When she just smiled, he started pacing back and forth, mumbling to himself. His speech was pressured, his mind was racing through a thousand brilliant ideas a second, and his stomach was growling because, convinced his stomach was in hell, he hadn't eaten in three days. He was euphoric, hallucinating with detail, and about five seconds from his next glass of cranberry juice-the nurses' syringe of choice.

  By 10:15 a.m., the thirty-three-year-old patient in room 6 had not eaten his applesauce. Instead, he peered from around the bathroom door and eyed it with suspicion. He had been here seven years and was the last of the lithiumplus-three patients. He knew about the lithium, Tegretol, and Depakote, but he couldn't quite figure out where they were putting the 100 milligrams of Thorazine twice a day. He knew they were putting it somewhere, but in the last few months he had simply been too continually groggy to know where. After seven years in room 6, the staff here could pretty well predict that he would cycle seven to eight times a year. During those times, the patient had responded best to stepped-down doses of Thorazine over a two-week period. This had been explained to the patient several times, and he understood this, but that didn't mean he liked it.

  He fit in well, although at thirty-three, he was much younger than the median age of forty-seven. His dark hair was thinning and receding, and a few gray hairs now surfaced around his ears. To hide the gray, but not the balding and the recession, he kept it cropped pretty close. This trait was unlike his brother, Tucker, whom the patient had not seen since he dropped him off at the front door seven years ago.

  Matthew Mason got his nickname in second grade when, on the first day of class, he wrote his name in cursive. Miss Ella had been working with him at the kitchen table, and he was only too proud to show his teacher that he knew his cursive letters. His only problem was that on this particular day, he didn't close the loop on the top of the a. So instead of an a, the teacher read u and the name stuck. So did the laughter, finger-pointing, and snickering. Ever since, he'd been Mutt Mason.

  His olive skin made him think his mother was either Spanish or Mexican. But it was anybody's guess. His father was a squatty, fat man with fair skin and a tendency for skin moles. Mutt had those too. He looked from the tray to the bathroom mirror and noticed how his once well-fitting clothes looked baggy and hung one size too big. He studied his shoulders and asked himself if he had shrunk in his time here, the seventh time he had asked that question today. Although he had put on three pounds in the last year, he was down from his preadmission weight of 175 pounds. His Popeye forearms, once bulging with strength and hammer-wielding power, were now taut and sinewy. Currently, he was 162 pounds-his exact weight on the day they buried Miss Ella. His dark eyes and eyebrows matched his skin-reminding him that he once tanned easily. Now, fluorescent lights were the extent of his UV exposure.

  His hands had weakened and the calluses long since gone soft. The sweaty young boy who once arm-climbed the rope to the top of the water tower or rode onehanded down the zip line no longer looked back at him in the mirror. He liked the water, liked the view from the tower, liked the thrill of the fall as the zip handle caught and flung him forward, liked the sound of the windmill as it sucked water up the two-inch pipe from the quarry and filled the pool-like bowl standing some twenty feet off the ground. He thought of Tucker and his water-green eyes. He listened for Tucker's quiet voice and tender confidence, but of all the voices in his head, Tucker's was not among them.

  He thought of the barn, of hitting chert rocks with a splintery wooden bat, and of how, as Tucker got older, the back wall of the barn looked like Swiss cheese. He thought of swimming in the quarry, eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on the back porch with Miss Ella, running through the shoulder-height hay at daylight, and climbing onto the roof of Waverly Hall under a cloudless, moonlit night just to peek at the world around him. The thought of that place brought a smile to his face which was odd given its history.

  He thought of the massive stone-and-brick walls, the weeping mortar that held them together and spilled out the cracks between the two; the black slate tiles stacked like fish scales one atop the other on the roof; the gargoyles on the turrets that spouted water when it rained, and the copper gutters that hugged the house like exhaust pipes; he thought of the oak front door that was four inches thick and the brass door knocker that looked like a lion's face and took two hands to lift, the tall ceilings filled with old art and four rows of crown molding, the shelves of leather-bound books in the library that no one had ever read, and the ladder on wheels that rolled from one shelf to the next; he thought of the hollow sound of shoes on the tiled and marbled floors, the dining room table inlaid with gold that seated thirteen people on each side, and the rug beneath it that took a family of seven twenty-eight years to weave; he thought of the chimney sweeps that nested in the attic where he kept his toys, and then he thought of the rats in the basement where Rex kept his; he thought of the crystal chandelier hanging in the foyer that was as big around as the hood of a Cadillac, the grandfather clock that was always five minutes too fast and shook the walls when it chimed each morning at seven, and the bunk beds where he and Tucker fought alligators, Indians, Captain Hook, and nightmares; he thought of the long, winding stairs and the four-second slide down the wide, smooth railing, the smell and
heat from the kitchen, and how his heart never left hungry; and then he thought of the sound of Miss Ella humming as she polished one of three silver sets, scrubbed the mahogany floors on her knees, or washed the windows that framed his world.

  Finally, he thought of that angry night, and the smile left his face. He thought of the months that followed, of Rex's distance and, for all practical purposes, disappearance. He thought of his own many years alone when he found safety amid the loneliness inside abandoned train cars rattling up and down the East Coast. Then he thought of the funeral, the long, quiet drive from Alabama, and the way Tucker walked off without ever saying good-bye.

  No description fit. Although abandoned got close. Rex had driven a permanent, intangible wedge between them, and it cut deeper than anyone cared to admit. In spite of Miss Ella's hopes, hugs, sermonettes, and callused knees, the blade, bloody and two-edged, proved too much, the pain too intertwined. He and Tucker had retreated, buried the memory, and in time, each other. Rex had won.

  In one of her front-porch sermons spoken from the pulpit of her rocker, Miss Ella had told him that if anger ever took root, it latched on, dug in, and choked the life out of whatever heart was carrying it. Turned out she was right, because now the vines were forearm-thick and formed an inflexible patchwork around his heart. Tucker's too. Mutt's was bad, but maybe Tuck's was the worst. Like a hundred-year-old wisteria, the vine had split the rock that once protected it.

  During his first six months at Spiraling Oaks, Mutt had responded so poorly to medication that his doctor prescribed and administered ECT-electroconvulsive therapy. As the name implies, patients are sedated, given a muscle relaxer to prevent injury during convulsion, and then shocked until their toes curl, their eyes roll back, and they pee in their pants. Supposedly, it works faster than medication, but in Mutt's case, some hurts live deeper than electricity can shock out.