Scott Nicholson - The Home

He heard the familiar bustling of Miss Walters, the beeps as she listened to the messages on the answering machine, the sliding of file cabinet drawers. Ordinary sounds marking the start of another day. The rich smell of coffee crawled through the crack under the door. Bondurant wiped his sleeve across his mouth and rose unsteadily from his chair.

He stumbled to the door and knocked. It was unusual behavior, knocking from the inside, but Bondurant appreciated the substantial weight of the oak beneath his knuckles. All real and solid things were to be cherished.

"Miss Walters?" He sounded to himself as if cotton balls were tucked in his cheeks.

The door opened a crack, and for a moment, Bondurant was afraid the vanishing woman from the night before was waiting, her forehead scar smiling.

But there stood Miss Walters, in the dreary cardigan she wore on Thursdays. She looked at him, sniffed, then nodded as if reluctant to notice too much. "Good morning, Mister Bondurant. You're here early."

"Umm… do I have any appointments?"

"Not until ten. You and Dr. Kracowski are penciled in for a meeting in Room Twelve. A couple of the board members are popping in for a visit."

Board members. Bondurant stiffened.

There were nine on Wendover's board, all of good, white, Protestant stock, seven of them males. The board met every three months, and the order of business consisted largely of self-congratulatory pats on the back followed by a lavish tax-deductible meal. But every once in a while, some of the directors felt the need to see clients firsthand so they could don expressions of appropriate pity when begging for grant money or private donations.

L. Stephen McKaye and Robert Brooks were two of the most outspoken directors and occasionally voted against the majority on policy decisions. They weren't easily fooled. Bondurant headed toward the coffeepot. He had a mission now, a role to play, business as usual. He would drive himself to a state of artificial alertness.

"You haven't seen anyone else?" he asked.

Miss Walters sat at her desk and rummaged through yesterday's mail. "Whom do you mean?"

"A woman. Maybe a housekeeper working on contract? Gray hair, hunched over, a scar on her face, older than you."

"Older than me?" Miss Walters fussed with a button on her sweater.

"I didn't mean that as an insult."

"I didn't see anybody." Bondurant chewed on a swig of coffee. "She was dressed in a dirty gray gown."

"She'd fit right in around here." Her eyes moved across Bondurant's rumpled suit.

"Let me know if I have any other meetings. It's Thursday, isn't it?"

"All day long, last I looked. Except you know how us old people get a little bit confused."

Bondurant closed his eyes and steadied himself against her desk. He could fake it. All he had to do was concentrate on the pounding of his pulse through his temples and he could almost forget that he'd seen a woman disappear.

He'd faked worse, such as the incident reports that went to the state after a couple of Kracowski's "treatments." Officially, he had blamed one client's bout of unconsciousness on self-asphyxiation and the other's on an asthma attack. Both conclusions reached of course, after a "lengthy internal investigation." If he could slip those reports by the Department of Social Services, then he could feign sobriety in front of two directors.

And he could also deceive himself into believing that ghosts didn't exist.

"You want me to refill that?" Miss Walters said.

He opened his eyes. "Sorry, just a headache, that's all."

Miss Walters knew better, but she was well practiced at faking it.

At least Thirteen had a window in the door. Not the kind of place you'd want to stow a claustrophobic, but you could turn around in it. Freeman had been in worse. Even the mirror on the wall didn't bother him. All group homes had these little "time-out rooms" with the two-way mirrors. If you had a bug in a jar, it wasn't much fun unless you could watch it crawl.

Randy had shown up in the middle of language arts class right when Freeman was almost bored out of his brain by Herman Melville. Randy said something to the teacher and escorted Freeman down the narrow hall to Thirteen, punched some numbers on the door's electronic lock, then sat him on the cot. Randy had Freeman unbutton his shirt, then applied electrodes to his chest and his temples. Freeman hadn't worried, because people didn't shock kids anymore. They were probably monitoring his heartbeat to gauge his reaction to stress and fear.

He kept his cool even when Randy had him lie back on the cot and fastened leather straps across his upper chest and waist. When Dad had given him treatments, he'd often inserted a hard piece of wood in his mouth so he wouldn't bite his tongue. No mouthpiece, no shock. So this was no problem. He stared at the mirror and relaxed as Randy left the room.

Somebody was undoubtedly on the other side of the mirror, making careful note of his reactions.

He let his knees twitch, then threw in some spasmodic eyebrow movements. Let them think he had Tourette's Syndrome. He'd met some Tourette's sufferers, and the condition was a real bitch, but at least you could get away with some random cussing and spitting.

The gimmick got old fast. The morning had dawned overcast, and Freeman had felt the weight of the sky on him even before rolling out of bed. Getting dressed was an effort, even with Isaac making his goofy narcolepsy face by squinting his eyes and blowing a raspberry snore. Freeman was going from In-Between to the Gray Zone and was probably on the elevator bottoming out at Pitch Black Basement.

Blame the brain chemicals. The shrinks said his mood swings were all the fault of serotonin, which didn't seem to regulate itself inside his head. Love and chocolate, they said, both gave you the same kind of high. He didn't know about love, but he knew a chocolate bar was pretty valuable inside a group home.

He'd never heard of either of those giving you the ability to read minds; unless you counted Mom, who seemed to know everything Dad said before he said it, and reminded Dad of it constantly. Maybe that's why Mom was dead and Freeman was sitting under a shrink's magnifying glass. While Dad was bouncing around in a rubber room somewhere.

But that line of thought was not going to do anything to help fight the depression that was coming on. No matter which textbook the psychiatrist showed you, there was no escaping the idea that depression was your own fault, that you should somehow be able to just "make yourself happy." That was a snake-eating-its-own-tail argument, because you then felt sorry for yourself because you couldn't fix what was wrong. Guilty by reason of self-awareness.

"Why blame yourself?" he said aloud. A small air vent in the ceiling undoubtedly held a microphone. These guys were pretty smart, up on all the mental espionage tactics. No doubt the Trust had a mole in here somewhere. Maybe they could open a drive-through therapy business. Pull your car up to the window, blather out a list of symptoms, and receive a paper slip as you paid your bill.

The slip could contain Chinese fortune-cookie platitudes, like "All the truth you need lies within," or "The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." You could even sell French fries on the side, or maybe an add-water baptism or instant communion "Who else is there to blame, Freeman?"

Freeman's eyes twitched again, though this time involuntarily. The amplified voice had no doubt come from the face behind the mirror. Freeman wished he were on an up, so he could triptrap the hidden person and nip the brain drain in the bud.

"I don't blame my own face," Freeman said.

"Excuse me?" came the male voice.

"I was just thinking that whoever's talking must be watching me from behind the two-way mirror. Because I'm certainly not talking to myself."