Later, Clint would reflect that he should have known Peters was up to something.
The officer was too placid at first, the smile on his face entirely inappropriate to the charges being leveled. Clint was angry, though, angry as he hadn’t been since he was Jared’s age, and he didn’t see what he should have seen. It was as if there was a rope in his head, binding shut a box containing a lot of bad stuff from his childhood. His wife’s lie had been the first cut in the fiber, Aurora had been the second, the interview with Evie had been the third, and what had happened to Jeanette had snapped it. He found himself considering the damage he could inflict on Peters with various objects. He could shatter his nose with the phone on the desk, he could cave in the abusing fuck’s cheek with the warden’s Correctional Official of the Year plaque. Clint had worked hard to exorcise that kind of violent thinking, had largely gone into psychiatric medicine in the first place in reaction to it.
What had Shannon said that time? “Clint, sweetie, if you keep fighting, someday you’re going to win too good.” She’d meant that he’d kill someone, and maybe she had been right. It wasn’t much later that the court granted him his independence and Clint didn’t have to fight any more. After that, his senior year, he had consciously funneled his rage into running track. That had been Shannon’s idea, too, and a damn good one. “You want to exercise,” she had said, “you should run. There’s less bleeding.” He’d run from that old life, run like the Gingerbread Man, run all the way to medical school, to marriage, to fatherhood.
Most of the system kids didn’t make it; foster care was a true case of odds-against. Many of them had ended up in jailhouses like Dooling Correctional or Lion Head Prison up the road, which, according to the engineers, was in danger of sliding down the hill. Indeed, there were plenty of system girls in Dooling, and they lived at the mercy of Don Peters. Clint had been lucky. He had beaten the odds. Shan had helped him. He hadn’t thought of her in a long while. But this day was like a broken water main, there was stuff coming up, a flood in the streets. It seemed that days of disaster were also days of remembering.
4
Clinton Richard Norcross had entered the foster system for good in 1974, when he was six, but the records he’d seen later said he’d been in and out even before that. A typical story: teenage parents, drugs, poverty, criminal records, probably mental health issues. The nameless social worker that interviewed Clint’s mother had recorded, “She is worried about passing her sad feelings along to her son.”
He had no memories of his father, and the only scrap he retained of his mother was of a long-faced girl grabbing his hands, swallowing them up in hers, shaking them up and down, pleading to him to stop chewing his nails. Lila had asked him once if he was interested in attempting to make contact with either of them, if they were alive. Clint was not. Lila said she understood, but, really, she had no idea, and he liked it that way. He didn’t want her to. The man she married, the cool and able Dr. Clinton Norcross, had, quite consciously, put that abandoned life behind him.
Except you couldn’t put anything behind you. Nothing was lost until death or Alzheimer’s took it all. He knew that. He saw it confirmed in every session he held with every prisoner; you wore your history like a necklace, a smelly one made of garlic. Whether you tucked it under your collar or let it dangle loose, nothing was lost. You fought the fight over and over, and you never won the milkshake.
He had passed through a half-dozen homes during his youth and adolescence, none of them like a home if that meant a place where you felt safe. Perhaps it was no wonder that he had ended up working in a penitentiary. The feelings in prison were the feelings of his youth and young adulthood: a sense of being always on the verge of suffocation. He wanted to help people who felt that way, because he knew how bad it was, how it struck at the center of your humanity. That was the core of Clint’s decision to leave his private practice before it had really started.
There were good foster homes out there, more than ever in this day and age, but Clint had never landed in any. The best he could say was that a few had been clean, run by foster parents who were efficient and unobtrusive, doing only what was required to collect their fee from the state. They were forgettable. But forgettable was great. You’d take forgettable.
The worst were the worst in particular ways; the places where there wasn’t enough to eat, the places where the rooms were cramped and dirty and cold in the winter, where the parents had non-paying jobs for you, the places where they hurt you. Girls in the system got hurt the most; of course they did.
Some of his foster siblings, Clint couldn’t find their faces now, but a few remained clear. There was Jason, for instance, who killed himself at thirteen by drinking a bottle of off-brand drain cleaner. Clint could summon up Live Jason, and he could summon up Dead Jason lying in his coffin. That was when Clint had lived with Dermot and Lucille Burtell, who boarded their fosters not in their pretty Cape Cod house, but in a long shed-like structure out back with bare, splintery plywood floors and no insulation. The Burtells held what they called “Friday Night Fights,” with their half-dozen wards as the pugilists, and a chocolate milkshake from McDonald’s for the prize. Clint and Jason had been matched up once, fighting for the amusement of the Burtells and their friends. The arena was a little patch of broken-up concrete patio and the spectators gathered around the edge to watch and lay bets. Jason had been a longshot, scared and slow, and Clint had wanted that milkshake. In the open casket Jason had a nickel-sized bruise under his eye that Clint had given him a few evenings earlier.
The next Friday, after Jason drank Gunk-O and retired from boxing forever, Clint won the milkshake again and then, without thinking about any possible consequences (at least not that he could remember), he threw it in Dermot Burtell’s face. That had resulted in a tremendous beating for Clint, and it hadn’t brought Jason back, but it had gotten him out of that house.
At the next place, or maybe the one after that, was where he’d shared a dismal basement room with good old Marcus. Clint remembered his foster brother Marcus’s wonderful cartoons. Marcus drew people so that they were eighty percent nose, pretty much just noses with wee legs and wee arms, The Nose-It-Alls was what he called his strip; he was really good, and dedicated, too. Then one day after school, without any explanation, Marcus told Clint he’d thrown all his notebooks away somewhere, and he was lighting out. Clint could picture the cartoons, but not Marcus.