He’s opening the door for me to leave—and I want to, believe me. But I’m stuck here in my chair. Nobody’s ever gotten violent like that with me before and I can barely move. I look up to see him gesturing for my exit and manage to rise shakily to my feet.
“You came here without any trouble, Ms. Bushman.” I can see the muscles tighten underneath his beard as he smiles. “But it seems you will be in trouble soon, very soon, if you are not more careful.”
The door slams in a flash.
As I approach the secretary in the back corridor, I force a smile and put my hands, which are still trembling, deep into my pockets. “What’s Jim’s schedule like?” I ask quietly, trying to sound pleasant. “He said to ask you about another appointment. Sorry about the loud noise.”
“Oh, he’s always slamming his door—so, today’s Thursday.” She thumbs through a planner. “Generally any time after school works . . . except for all day tomorrow.” She nods. “Yeah, Friday is Jim’s day with his nieces and nephews, and also he goes to the gym, and he also does other things, so, like, he’s not here at all tomorrow, apparently.”
“Thanks,” I say, moving toward the door.
“Wait, you don’t want to make an appointment?”
“I changed my mind,” I tell her.
Outside, across the street, Davey is sitting in Rhonda’s passenger seat with the window rolled down, using the binoculars I brought along.
“He basically threatened me,” I blurt. My hands are still shaking. “Tomorrow I can break in through one of the rear windows.”
“Wait, what?” Davey leans out the window. “What do you mean he threatened you?” He peers over my shoulder with a menacing look. “I’m going in.”
“No,” I tell him, remembering Libby and the recycling bin—not to mention Jim Steele saying he’d call the police, with whom I’ve already got a pretty unstable relationship, let’s be serious. “It’s fine, I mean, the guy just plays hardball.” I take a deep, uneven breath. “I didn’t get any actual evidence that he did anything. Honestly, I don’t even know what I’m looking for, really. Which is why we’ve got to come back tomorrow when he’s not here.”
Davey gestures at my waist. “Can I listen to the recorder?”
I finger my utility belt. “Not right now,” I say, and pull the hem of my sweater over the empty spot. If Davey knew about Jim smashing the Dictaphone, there’s a chance he might throw himself through Jim Steele’s office window and strangle him. “But I might have to run some things by you as far as, like, murderer behavior.” I rack my brain for anything concrete. “What about long fingernails—like extremely, disgustingly long?” I’m kicking myself because I can’t remember much besides those fingernails and the sight of Uncle Jimmy destroying my Dictaphone. “Does that remind you of the killers you knew?”
“Soldiers,” he snaps.
“But do you see similarities?”
He flops back into the passenger seat. “Listen, I know I had some opinions early on. But I just don’t know if I can go there, okay?” He looks pale, angry.
I walk around the van and climb into the driver’s seat, waiting for Davey to yell at me—he looks so mad. But instead he reaches over and ruffles my hair. “We’ll get better at this,” he says. “You photocopied the journal, right?”
“Yeah, of course, I know what I’m doing,” I respond, wanting him to touch my head again. “So, tomorrow I’ll skip school and we can break in while Uncle Jimmy is off with his nieces.”
“You’re not scared at all, are you?” he says. “This is like a fantasy for you.”
I bite my lip. “No, it’s real,” I say. “It’s perhaps the most serious thing in my life, actually.”
Davey flops his head against the headrest and the sun falls on his face in a half circle. “For me, it’s like a video game again.”
I remember Ralph telling me once that army people get trained to kill by playing video games. “My neighbor says sometimes he thinks life is a video game,” I blurt, suddenly missing Ralph. I never stay annoyed at him for long. “When he’s playing he’ll start talking like the characters.” I smile.
Davey shakes his head. “I don’t trust my brain sometimes.”
My smile trembles and my stomach kind of lurches. “I wish you wouldn’t say that.” It’s not that he’s got a temper, or even what Ruth said in her diary about him crying on the letters he sent her that makes me nervous. But here’s Davey telling me again he doesn’t trust himself, that he’s on some kind of slippery slope, maybe. And if that’s true, then maybe he’ll take me down with him.
I keep opening my mouth and shutting it. I want to tell him, You know how my mom died, right? She went crazy and I was scared of her at the end. Please don’t make me scared of you. But that’s my own stuff. I already gave him some of that in the car last night on the way back from Mrs. Klitch’s. So instead I blurt, “You’re fine.” It comes out sounding like a promise to us both.
Davey doesn’t say anything.
“Listen, do you maybe want to come over for dinner?” My heart is racing. “Dom’s making something called Hot Dog Jumble—I think you’ll like it.”
Davey nods and I tell myself that he got home from the war in time. That other people might be scarred for life, but not us. Not if I have anything to do with it.
Basically, the story is this: my mother died of brain cancer. Before she got sick, she collected wind socks and made pancakes and thought I was the funniest person in the universe. But for the last few months of her life, before she went into hospice, she was a raving lunatic. Her brain was cobwebbed with plaque and tumors. She’d see alligators in trees. Bats and snakes flew out of walls at her, and she’d scratch herself trying to get them off her face. Cutlery would turn into slugs on her plate and make her vomit. Once they brought over the hospital bed, Dom started sleeping on the living-room carpet right next to it, because he thought it made her feel better. But then one night she woke up and thought he was some kind of monster. Only by that point she couldn’t articulate much at all, so we never found out if he was a hybrid jaguar-lion, or a serpent with a boar’s head, or what.
“Big,” she kept saying, trying to explain. “B-b-b-i-g.”
She wore her delusions like a mask, and after a few weeks they were our nightmares, too. It used to be that I’d have bad dreams and she’d reassure me that none of it was real. After she got sick, I couldn’t even talk to her. She was so afraid, and I found myself sneaking into the living room at night to make sure she wasn’t convulsing with night terrors. Dom would lead me back to my room, but I kept trying to see her monsters out of sympathy. I imagined them living in a creepy castle surrounded by storm clouds, and visiting our house in shifts. I spun my brain creating them, squinting until bright spots formed behind my eyelids and I could carve out creatures with the stardust. I’d pretend so hard that they were real—mostly to pretend she wasn’t crazy, which she was. I tried so hard to convince her she was sane that I sort of went crazy, too.
After she got moved to hospice, Dom dragged the sleeping bag back upstairs, and I slept in it on the floor next to their bed, which was now his bed. The beasts I’d created all retracted their claws. Their fangs fell out and their eyes dimmed. I started making cribs for the imaginary creatures out of towels and putting them to sleep at night. In my mind, they were dying with her. And after a few more months, we got the phone call that she’d stopped breathing, and they were gone entirely. But I guess I still have this fear that you can catch invisible things from other people. That someone else’s insanity can creep under your skin and fry your brain.