CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The rest of the day was uneventful. We passed the hours watching past seasons of Futurama, while Jenn slept her hangover away. Every little creak from the apartment, every blast from the monorail, or fart from Fat Rabbit had us both jumping in our seats. To say we were on edge was a bit of an understatement.
Finally, at 6 p.m. (a bit later than we left on Tuesday), we got into the Highlander and headed off toward Riverside. We were both mostly silent during the ride, too tense and overwhelmed to talk. I was scared of what we would find in the building. I knew there was some truth in what that Spook Factory chick had said about certain buildings and people being conduits to the unknown. Wherever I was, I attracted these things and it was bound to intensify in a haunted, historical place with a sordid past.
I eyed Dex occasionally as he drove, making sure he wasn’t overly tired from the Valium. So far, he seemed to be making good on my mix. The placebos obviously weren’t harming him, and the Valium would have just calmed him down a bit (which was never a bad thing), so all that was left was him dealing with his “visions.” But as long as he knew that I could see what he saw, we would be OK.
Still, there was something he had said earlier that I kept running through my thoughts during most of the day, and certainly on the drive over through the mounting darkness and the rain that occasionally splattered our windshield. It was “It’s not just Abby. I have a past that I can’t run away from.”
Not just Abby. What else was he haunted by?
But I couldn’t dwell on that forever. I was sure, especially now that he was off the pills, it would rise on its own, during some other time.
I wasn’t looking forward to that.
“You nervous, kiddo?” he asked as he pulled the car up the long, tree-lined driveway, past the cheesy Riverside logo and the flickering lamps.
“Yes,” I said, letting out a low breath.
“Me too,” he admitted. He pulled the car into the parking spot and turned off the car. Even though it was the same building as before (Block C was around the corner and in the woods a bit, naturally), it still looked scary and foreboding. I guess this time we knew exactly what – and who – lurked inside.
We sat in silence for about a minute, listening to the occasional gust of wind or sporadic rain.
“Having second thoughts?” I asked.
“Yes. You?”
I couldn’t help but smile. “Yes.”
He reached into the front pocket of his black cargo jacket and took out the packet of rolling papers. From the other pocket he took out a small bag of weed.
He started cutting up the weed with a tiny pair of scissors he brought out of yet another pocket and shot me a quick, rather sheepish, look.
“You don’t approve.”
“I…just don’t know if now is the time to light up.”
“When was the last time you smoked pot?” he asked curiously, and started to divide the smelly grains into an open piece of rolling paper. I was amazed at how well he could see in the dark.
“I don’t know,” I started, and thought back. After high school, maybe. After the sessions with Doctor Freedman, after I crashed the car, after my parents freaked out. After the accident. “Long time ago.”
“I think this helps me. It at least makes me feel better. Maybe dulls one part of the brain while the other one lies open. My medication is obviously not doing its job anymore and I’ll be damned if I’m going into this situation totally unaware.”
I could understand that. “I’m not judging.”
“Oh, but you get that little Perry twinkle in your eye.”
I smirked at that. “I have a twinkle?”
“Oh yeah. It’s gorgeous.”
I felt embarrassed and looked out the window.
“No really,” he said. I looked back, caught by his sincerity. He rolled the smoke up, brought it up to his mouth, and ran his wide tongue along the length of it.
My inner thighs had been that joint at one point.
“Well…as I said, I’m not judging,” I told him, pushing that naughty thought out of my mind. “Lord knows I’m no angel.”
“So what was your drug background, if you don’t mind me asking.”
I kinda did mind. I really didn’t want to go dragging that back up. And I know I had explained some of it, the Cliff Notes version, to him at some point. But as he rolled down the window and lit up the joint with his gold lighter, it reminded me that I missed that part of my life. Not the drugs, but just being young and stupid. I was too afraid to be young and stupid again. At twenty three, I felt terribly immature and strangely old at the same time.
“I think I already told you.”
He inhaled and blew most of it out the window and nodded. “You did. You mentioned you did coke once or twice. Pot. Booze. Pills. Sounded like the normal teenage experience to me.”
Normal or not, it sounded heavy coming out of his mouth. But if he could be honest with me about his pills, I could be honest about this. And I really had nothing to hide, not from Dex anyway.
“It was a little bit worse than that.”
He turned in his seat to face me, undoing his seat belt and bringing his foot up on his seat.
“What was your accident?”
“My accident,” I repeated. Drugs were one thing. The accident was another.
“You always blamed whatever accident you had on the drugs. I just wanted to know what the accident was.”
Did I even remember what the accident was half the time? I remembered a fire. A shimmer in the air. I think I was just really high. Jacob was there. He started the fire and I got blamed. That was it, really. But I was having this conversation in my head and not with Dex.
“Someone started a fire at a party I was at. I got blamed. I mean, for the company I kept.”
I looked down at my hands, at the pale glow cast on them from the nearby lights.
Dex frowned while he inhaled and shot the smoke out of the corner of his mouth. His brow never relaxed.
“Reason I ask is that this morning, you were muttering something in your sleep. Which is why I woke you up.”
I looked over at him, startled. “What was I saying?”
“You were saying something about the drugs. That it was the drugs’ fault you saw…the demons.”
The word demons hit me like a brick. I felt breathless. Demons? It didn’t bring up any memories but it brought about the most disgusting, helpless feeling that crawled through my insides, just underneath the skin.
“What is it?” he asked.
I shook my head, not sure how to even answer that. “I don’t know.”
He watched me for a few beats, then nodded, satisfied. He put the joint out in the car ashtray and stuck the rest in the baggie with the weed and put it back in his pocket.
“Well, I suppose we should go in,” he said, and opened the car door.
We got out into the chilled air and walked over to the building. I kept thinking about the demons. What did it mean? Had I been seeing things back then? Actually seeing things? And what, if anything, did they have to do with the accident? My brain was sluggish and slow, like memories were trapped around certain corners and it would take a lot of poking about to finally discover them. I didn’t like that idea. There were some parts of my head I felt were better left undiscovered. Hidden, buried away.
We approached the front doors and were surprised to see Roundtree on the other side of them.
“Looks like Nurse Ratchett was waiting for us,” Dex said out of the corner of his mouth. We waved and she opened the heavy doors with a grunt.
“You’re back. I was told. I’ll go get the doctor.”
She turned and scuttled down the hall.
“Still think she likes you?” I asked him, poking him in the side.
He squirmed. “Yes. I’m telling you, I win over everyone, sooner or later.”
He pointed his finger at me like a gun and cocked it with his thumb. “You included, kiddo.”
I rolled my eyes. As silly as he could be at times, I was grateful for the playfulness dispersed among the other topics. Sometimes I wondered how things would be if it were just Dex and me on some tropical beach somewhere, free from games and ghost hunting and lies and responsibility. I actually thought about it quite often. It was kind of my happy place when the chips were down.
Soon Doctor Hasselback was coming toward us in a heavy overcoat with a fedora on his head, looking like something out of a classic film like The Lost Weekend. He waved the keys at us.
“I’ve got to let you in,” he said, stepping out into the cold and nodding at Roundtree. She went back to her post, the door slamming shut behind her. Hasselback gave us a terse smile.
“Nice to see you two again,” he said. “I trust that everything went well the other day.”
“Yes,” Dex said, smiling. “And I’m assuming everything went well on your end.”
The doctor shrugged and walked off toward a path that led around the building. We followed him and his coat that billowed behind him.
“So what did you find?” he said, yelling over his shoulder at us.