The Bad Place Read online

  night, whisked away by some power he could not fathom, and that she was forever beyond his reach.

  His childish fear made him feel foolish, but he rose onto one elbow and turned on one of the wall-mounted bedside lamps.

  When he saw Julie lying beside him, smiling, her head raised on a pillow, the level of his inexplicable anxiety abruptly dropped. He let out a rush of breath, surprised to discover that he’d pent it up in the first place. But a peculiar tension remained in him, and the sight of Julie, safe and undamaged but for the scabbing spot on her forehead, was insufficient to completely relax him.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked, as perceptive as ever.

  “Nothing,” he lied.

  “Bit of a headache from all that rum in the eggnog?”

  What troubled him was not a hangover, but the queer, unshakable feeling that he was going to lose Julie, that something out there in a hostile world was coming to take her away. As the optimist in the family, he wasn’t usually given to grim forebodings of doom; accordingly, this strange augural chill frightened him more than it would have if he had been regularly subject to such disturbances.

  “Bobby?” she said, frowning.

  “Headache,” he assured her.

  He leaned down and gently kissed her eyes, then again, forcing her to close them so she could not see his face and read the anxiety that he was unable to conceal.

  LATER, AFTER showering and dressing, they ate a hasty breakfast while standing at the kitchen counter: English muffins and raspberry jam, half a banana each, and black coffee. By mutual agreement, they were not going to the office. A brief call to Clint Karaghiosis confirmed that the wrap-up on the Decodyne case was nearly completed, and that no other business needed their urgent personal attention.

  Their Suzuki Samurai waited in the garage, and Bobby’s spirits rose at the sight of it. The Samurai was a small sports truck with four-wheel drive. He had justified its purchase by pitching its dual nature—utilitarian and recreational—to Julie, especially noting its comparatively reasonable price tag, but in fact he had wanted it because it was fun to drive. She had not been deceived, and she had gone for it because she, too, thought it was fun to drive. This time, she was willing to let him have the wheel when he suggested she drive.

  “I did enough driving last night,” she said as she buckled herself into her shoulder harness.

  Dead leaves, twigs, a few scraps of paper, and less identifiable detritus whirled and tumbled along the windswept streets. Dust devils spun out of the east, as the Santa Anas—named for the mountains out of which they arose—poured down through the canyons and across the arid, scrub-stubbled hills that Orange County’s industrious developers had not yet graded and covered with thousands of nearly identical wood-and-stucco pieces of the California dream. Trees bent to the surging oceans of air that moved in powerful and erratic tides toward the real sea in the west. The previous night’s fog was gone, and the day was so clear that, from the hills, Catalina Island could be seen twenty-six miles off the Pacific’s distant coast.

  Julie popped an Artie Shaw CD into the player, and the smooth melody and softly bouncing rhythms of “Begin the Beguine” filled the car. The mellow saxophones of Les Robinson, Hank Freeman, Tony Pastor, and Ronnie Perry provided strange counterpoint to the chaos and dissonance of the Santa Ana winds.

  From Orange, Bobby drove south and west toward the beach cities—Newport, Corona Del Mar, Laguna, Dana Point. He traveled as much as possible on those few of the urbanized county’s blacktop byways that could still be called back roads. They even passed a couple of orange groves, with which the county had once been carpeted, but which had mostly fallen to the relentless advance of the tracts and malls.

  Julie became more talkative and bubbly as the miles rolled up on the odometer, but Bobby knew that her spritely mood was not genuine. Each time they set out to visit her brother Thomas, she worked hard to inflate her spirits. Although she loved Thomas, every time that she was with him, her heart broke anew, so she had to fortify herself in advance with manufactured good humor.

  “Not a cloud in the sky,” she said, as they passed the old Irvine Ranch fruit-packing plant. “Isn’t it a beautiful day, Bobby?”

  “A wonderful day,” he agreed.

  “The wind must’ve pushed the clouds all the way to Japan, piled them up miles high over Tokyo.”

  “Yeah. Right now California litter is falling on the Ginza.”

  Hundreds of red bougainvillea blossoms, stripped from their vines by the wind, blew across the road, and for a moment the Samurai seemed to be caught in a crimson snowstorm. Maybe it was because they had just spoken of Japan, but there was something oriental about the whirl of petals. He would not have been surprised to glimpse a kimono-clad woman at the side of the road, dappled in sunshine and shadow.

  “Even a windstorm is beautiful here,” Julie said. “Aren’t we lucky, Bobby? Aren’t we lucky to be living in this special place?”

  Shaw’s “Frenesi” struck up, string-rich swing. Every time he heard the song, Bobby was almost able to imagine that he was in a movie from the 1930s or ’40s, that he would turn a corner and encounter his old friend Jimmy Stewart or maybe Bing Crosby, and they’d go off to have lunch with Cary Grant and Jean Arthur and Katharine Hepburn, and screwball things would happen.

  “What movie are you in?” Julie asked. She knew him too well.

  “Haven’t figured it yet. Maybe The Philadelphia Story. ”

  By the time they pulled into the parking lot of Cielo Vista Care Home, Julie had whipped herself into a state of high good humor. She got out of the Samurai, faced west, and grinned at the horizon, which was delineated by the marriage of sea and sky, as if she had never before encountered a sight to match it. In truth it was a stunning panorama, because Cielo Vista stood on a bluff half a mile from the Pacific, overlooking a long stretch of southern California’s Gold Coast. Bobby admired it, too, shoulders hunched slightly and head tucked down in deference to the cool and blustery wind.

  When Julie was ready, she took Bobby’s hand and squeezed it hard, and they went inside.

  Cielo Vista Care Home was a private facility, operated without government funds, and its architecture eschewed all of the standard institutional looks. Its two-story Spanish facade of pale peach stucco was accented by white marble cornerpieces, doorframes, and window lintels; white-painted French windows and doors were recessed in graceful arches, with deep sills. The sidewalks were shaded by lattice arbors draped with a mix of purple- and yellow-blooming bougainvillea, from which the wind drew a chorus of urgent whispers. Inside, the floors were gray vinyl tile, speckled with peach and turquoise, and the walls were peach with white base and crown molding, which lent the place a warm and airy ambience.

  They paused in the foyer, just inside the front door, while Julie withdrew a comb from her purse and pulled the wind tangles from her hair. After stopping at the front desk in the cozy visitors’ lobby, they followed the north hall to Thomas’s first-floor room.

  His was the second of the two beds, nearest the windows, but he was neither there nor in his armchair. When they stopped in his open doorway, he was sitting at the worktable that belonged to both him and his roommate, Derek. Bent over the table, using a pair of scissors to clip a photograph from a magazine, Thomas appeared curiously both hulking and fragile, thickset yet delicate; physically, he was solid but mentally and emotionally he was frail, and that inner weakness shone through to belie the outer image of strength. With his thick neck, heavy rounded shoulders, broad back, proportionally short arms, and stocky legs, Thomas had a gnomish look, but when he became aware of them and turned his head to see who was there, his face was not graced by the cute and beguiling features of a fairy-tale creature; it was instead a face of cruel genetic destiny and biological tragedy.

  “Jules!” he said, dropping the scissors and magazine, nearly knocking over his chair in his haste to get up. He was wearing baggy jeans and a green-plaid flannel shirt. He seemed ten y
ears younger than his true age. “Jules, Jules!”

  Julie let go of Bobby’s hand and stepped into the room, opening her arms to her brother. “Hi, honey.”

  Thomas hurried to her in that shuffling walk of his, as if his shoes were heeled and soled with enough iron to preclude his lifting them. Although he was twenty years old, ten years younger than Julie, he was four inches shorter than she, barely five feet. He had been born with Down’s syndrome, a diagnosis that even a layman could read in his face: his brow was sloped and heavy; inner epicanthic folds gave his eyes an oriental cast; the bridge of his nose was flat; his ears were low-set on a head that was slightly too small to be in proportion to his body; the rest of his features had those soft, heavy contours often associated with mental retardation. Though it was a countenance shaped more for expressions of sadness and loneliness, it now defied its naturally downcast lines and formed itself into a wondrous smile, a warm grin of pure delight.

  Julie always had that effect on Thomas.

  Hell, she has that effect on me, Bobby thought.

  Stooping only slightly, Julie threw her arms around her brother when he came to her, and for a while they hugged each other.

  “How’re you doing?” she asked.

  “Good,” Thomas said. “I’m good.” His speech was thick but not at all difficult to understand, for his tongue was not as deformed as those of some victims of DS; it was a little larger than it should have been but not fissured or protruding. “I’m real good.”

  “Where’s Derek?”

  “Visiting. Down the hall. He’ll be back. I’m real good. Are you good?”

  “I’m fine, honey. Just great.”

  “I’m just great too. I love you, Jules,” Thomas said happily, for with Julie he was always free of the shyness that colored his relations with everyone else. “I love you so much.”

  “I love you, too, Thomas.”

  “I was afraid ... maybe you wouldn’t come.”

  “Don’t I always come?”

  “Always,” he said. At last he relaxed his grip on his sister and peeked around her. “Hi, Bobby.”

  “Hi, Thomas. You’re lookin’ good.”

  “Am I?”

  “If I’m lyin‘, I’m dyin’.”

  Thomas laughed. To Julie, he said, “He’s funny.”

  “Do I get a hug too?” Bobby asked. “Or do I have to stand here with my arms out until someone mistakes me for a hat-rack?”

  Hesitantly, Thomas let go of his sister. He and Bobby embraced. After all these years, Thomas was still not entirely comfortable with Bobby, not because they had bad chemistry between them or any bad feelings, but because Thomas didn’t like change very much and adapted to it slowly. Even after more than seven years, his sister being married was a change, something that still felt new to him.

  But he likes me, Bobby thought, maybe even as much as I like him.

  Liking DS victims was not difficult, once you got past the pity that initially distanced you from them, because most of them had an innocence and guilelessness that was charming and refreshing. Except when inhibited by shyness or embarrassment about their differences, they were usually forthright, more truthful than other people, and incapable of the petty social games and scheming that marred so many relationships among “ordinary” people. The previous summer, at Cielo Vista’s Fourth of July picnic, a mother of one of the other patients had said to Bobby, “Sometimes, watching them, I think there’s something in them—a gentleness, a special kindness—that’s closer to God than anything in us.” Bobby felt the truth of that observation now, as he hugged Thomas and looked down into his sweet, lumpish face.

  “Did we interrupt a poem?” Julie asked.

  Thomas let go of Bobby and hurried to the worktable, where Julie was looking at the magazine from which he had been clipping a picture when they’d arrived. He opened his current scrapbook—fourteen others were filled with his creations and shelved in a corner bookcase near his bed—and pointed to a two-page spread of pasted-in clippings that were arranged in lines and quatrains, like poetry.

  “This was yesterday. Finished yesterday,” Thomas said. “Took me a looooong time, and it was hard, but now it was ... is . . . right.”

  Four or five years ago, Thomas had decided that he wanted to be a poet like someone he had seen and admired on television. The degree of mental retardation among victims of Down’s syndrome varied widely, from mild to severe; Thomas was somewhere just above the middle of the spectrum, but he did not possess the intellectual capacity to learn to write more than his name. That didn’t stop him. He had asked for paper, glue, a scrapbook, and piles of old magazines. Since he rarely asked for anything, and since Julie would have moved a mountain on her back to get him whatever he wanted, the items on his list were soon in his possession. “All kinds of magazines,” he’d said, “with different pretty pictures... but ugly too . . . all kinds.” From Time, Newsweek, Life, Hot Rod, Omni, Seventeen, and dozens of other publications, he snipped whole pictures and parts of pictures, arranging them as if they were words, in a series of images that made a statement that was important to him. Some of his “poems” were only five images long, and some involved hundreds of clippings arranged in orderly stanzas or, more often, in loosely structured lines that resembled free verse.

  Julie took the scrapbook from him and went to the armchair by the window, where she could concentrate on his newest composition. Thomas remained at the worktable, watching her anxiously.

  His picture poems did not tell stories or have recognizable thematic narratives, but neither were they merely random jumbles of images. A church spire, a mouse, a beautiful woman in an emerald-green ball gown, a field of daisies, a can of Dole pineapple rings, a crescent moon, pancakes in a stack with syrup drizzling down, rubies gleaming on a black-velvet display cloth, a fish with mouth agape, a child laughing, a nun praying, a woman crying over the blasted body of a loved one in some Godforsaken war zone, a pack of Lifesavers, a puppy with floppy ears, black-clad nuns with starched white wimples—from those and thousands of other pictures in his treasured boxes of clippings, Thomas selected the elements of his compositions. From the beginning Bobby recognized an uncanny rightness to many of the poems, a symmetry too fundamental to be defined, juxtapositions that were both naive and profound, rhythms as real as they were elusive, a personal vision plain to see but too mysterious to comprehend to any significant degree. Over the years, Bobby had seen the poems become better, more satisfying, though he understood them so little that he could not explain how he could discern the improvement; he just knew that it was there.

  Julie looked up from the two-page spread in the scrapbook and said, “This is wonderful, Thomas. It makes me want to... run outside in the grass... and stand under the sky and maybe even dance, just throw my head back and laugh. It makes me glad to be alive.”

  “Yes!” Thomas said, slurring the word, clapping his hands.

  She passed the book to Bobby, and he sat on the edge of the bed to read it.

  The most intriguing thing about Thomas’s poems was the emotional response they invariably evoked. None left a reader untouched, as an array of randomly assembled images might have done. Sometimes, when looking at Thomas’s work, Bobby laughed out loud, and sometimes he was so moved that he had to blink back tears, and sometimes he felt fear or sadness or regret or wonder. He did not know why he responded to any particular piece as he did; the effect always defied analysis. Thomas’s compositions functioned on some primal level, eliciting reaction from a region of the mind far deeper than the subconscious.

  The latest poem was no exception. Bobby felt what Julie had felt: that life was good; that the world was beautiful; elation in the very fact of existence.

  He looked up from the scrapbook and saw that Thomas was awaiting his reaction as eagerly as he had awaited Julie’s, perhaps a sign that Bobby’s opinion was cherished as much as hers, even if he still didn’t rate as long or as ardent a hug as Julie did. “Wow,” he said softly. “Thomas
, this one gives me such a warm, tingly feeling that... I think my toes are curling.”

  Thomas grinned.

  Sometimes Bobby looked at his brother-in-law and felt that two Thomases shared that sadly deformed skull. Thomas number one was the moron, sweet but feebleminded. Thomas number two was just as smart as anyone, but he occupied only a small part of the damaged brain that he shared with Thomas number one, a chamber in the center, from which he had no direct communication with the outside world. All of Thomas number two’s thoughts had to be filtered through Thomas number one’s part of the brain, so they ended up sounding no different from Thomas number one’s thoughts; therefore the world could not know that number two was in there, thinking and feeling and fully alive—except through the evidence of the picture poems, the essence of which survived even after being filtered through Thomas number one.

  “You’ve got such a talent,” Bobby said, and he meant it—almost envied it.

  Thomas blushed and lowered his eyes. He rose and quickly shuffled to the softly humming refrigerator that stood beside the door to the bathroom. Meals were served in the communal dining room, where snacks and drinks were provided on request, but patients with sufficient mental capacity to keep their rooms neat were allowed to have their own refrigerators stocked with their favorite snacks and drinks, to encourage as much independence as possible. He withdrew three cans of Coke. He gave one to Bobby, one to Julie. With the third he returned to the chair at the worktable, sat down, and said, “You been catchin’ bad guys?”

  “Yeah, we’re keeping the jails full,” Bobby said.

  “Tell me.”

  Julie leaned forward in the armchair, and Thomas scooted his straight-backed chair closer to her, until their knees touched, and she recounted the highlights of the events at Decodyne last night. She made Bobby more heroic than he’d really been, and she played down her own involvement a little, not only out of modesty but in order not to frighten Thomas with too clear a picture of the danger in which she had put herself. Thomas was tough in his own way; if he hadn’t been, he would have curled up on his bed long ago, facing into the corner, and never gotten up again. But he was not tough enough to endure the loss of Julie. He would be devastated even to imagine that she was vulnerable. So she made her dare-devil driving and the shoot-out sound funny, exciting but not really dangerous. Her revised version of events entertained Bobby nearly as much as it did Thomas.

  After a while, as usual, Thomas became overwhelmed by what Julie was telling him, and the tale grew more confusing than entertaining. “I’m full up,” he said, which meant he was still trying to process everything he had been told, and didn’t have room for any more just now. He was fascinated by the world outside Cielo Vista, and he often longed to be a part of it, but at the same time he found it too loud and bright and colorful to be handled in more than small doses.

  Bobby got one of the older scrapbooks from the shelves and sat on the bed, reading picture poems.

  Thomas and Julie sat in their chairs, Cokes put aside, knees to knees, leaning forward and holding hands, sometimes looking at each other, sometimes not, just being together, close. Julie needed that as much as Thomas did.

  Julie’s mother had been killed when Julie was twelve. Her father had died eight years later, two years before Bobby and Julie had been married. She’d been only twenty at the time, working as a waitress to put herself through college and to pay her half of the rent on a studio apartment she shared with another student. Her parents had never been rich, and though they had kept Thomas at home, the expense of looking after him had depleted what little savings they’d ever had. When her dad died, Julie had been unable to afford an apartment for her and Thomas, to say nothing of the time required to help him cope in a civilian environment, so she’d been forced to commit him to a state institution for mentally disabled children. Though Thomas never held it against her, she viewed the commitment as a betrayal of him.

  She had intended to get a degree in criminology, but she dropped out of school in her third year and applied to the sheriffs’ academy. She had worked as a deputy for fourteen months by the time Bobby met and married her; she had been living on peanuts, her life-style hardly better than that of a bag lady, saving most of her salary in hope of putting together a nest egg that would allow her to buy a small house someday and take Thomas in with her. Shortly after they were married, when Dakota Investigations became Dakota & Dakota, they brought Thomas to live with them. But they worked irregular hours, and although some victims of Down’s syndrome were capable of living to a degree on their own, Thomas needed someone nearby at all times. The cost of three daily shifts of qualified companions was even more than the cost of high-level care at a private institution like Cielo Vista; but they would have borne it if they could have found enough reliable help. When it became impossible to conduct their business, have a life of their own, and take care of Thomas, too, they brought him to Cielo Vista. It was as comfortable a care institution as existed, but Julie viewed it as her second betrayal of her brother. That he was happy at Cielo Vista, even thrived there, did not lighten her burden of guilt.

  One part of The Dream, an important part, was to have the time and financial resources to bring Thomas home again.

  Bobby looked up from the scrapbook just as Julie said, “Thomas, think you’d like to go out with us for a while?”

  Thomas and Julie were still holding hands, and Bobby saw his brother-in-law’s grip tighten at the suggestion of an excursion.

  “We could just go for a drive,” Julie said. “Down to the sea. Walk on the shore. Get an ice cream cone. What do you say?”

  Thomas looked nervously at the nearest window, which framed a portion of clear blue sky, where white sea gulls periodically swooped and capered. “It’s bad out.”

  “Just a little windy, honey.”

  “Don’t mean the wind.”

  “We’ll have fun.”

  “It’s bad out,” he repeated. He chewed on his lower lip.

  At times he was eager to venture out into the world, but at other times he withdrew from the prospect as if the air beyond Cielo Vista was purest poison. Thomas could never be argued or cajoled out of that agoraphobic mood, and Julie knew not to push the issue.

  “Maybe next time,” she said.

  “Maybe,” Thomas said, looking at the floor. “But today’s really bad. I ... sort of feel it ... the badness . . . cold all over my skin.”

  For a while Bobby and Julie tried various subjects, but Thomas was talked out. He said nothing, did not make eye contact, and gave no indication that he even heard them.

  They sat together in silence, then, until after a few minutes Thomas said, “Don’t go yet.”

  “We’re not going,” Bobby assured him.

  “Just ’cause I can’t talk ... don’t mean I want you gone.”

  “We know that, kiddo,” Julie said.

  “I ... need you.”

  “I need you too,” Julie said. She lifted one of her brother’s thick-fingered hands and kissed his knuckles.