Spire in the Woods/10

The first thing I was aware of was the cold. Then the pain in my hands and ribs. Then I noticed the wind. I opened my eyes to see snow glistening in the moonlight, and the long shadows cast by trees. I had stepped off the Spire and dropped only a foot or so, falling to my knees in the snow. My eyes brimmed with tears of joy. I wanted to kiss the ground and throw the snow up in the air, and wallow around in it like a pig in its own filth, but then I recalled the way Scary Kerry had looked at the hospital. The swollen black lumps of necrotic flesh where frostbite had set in.

My mother’s car was a solid hour, hour-and-a-half’s walk away, and I wasn’t moving as quickly as I usually did. I got walking, as fast as I could bear.

I heard the bells, truly heard them, for the last time near the fork where the access road joins Old Ware-Enfield Road, but they didn’t fill me with warmth like they had before. No— they stopped me dead in my tracks. They tugged at my guts. They called me home, but also filled me with the sensation of being watched by eyes in the darkness.

To this day, I still hear them hourly whenever I go off my meds.

There were two police officers waiting for me when I got to my mom’s car. You might think I would have run all over again. After all, it was the fear of arrest that had sent me chasing the bells. But I didn’t. Instead, I cried. It was cold, I was tired, and my whole body hurt like hell. I didn’t care how much trouble I was in. I was just happy to see real people again. People who were alive.

I’d learn later that the police had no idea who I was or what I had done to Ryan Dorset. They were there because I’d parked in front of the same trailer that Fletch had parked in front of back in December. When the owner had gotten up to go to work, and seen my car outside, she called the police. Apparently, in his haste to get the car after Kerry had fallen through the ice, Fletch had driven over one of her trash cans. I’d nearly killed a kid, but I was being arrested because someone else had ruined a garbage can you could get from Home Depot for thirty-five dollars.

I don’t recall the officers’ names, but I wish I did so I could thank them. Their attitude towards me changed immediately when they saw the condition I was in. One of them took a blanket from the trunk and wrapped it around me. They tried to ask me what had happened, but all I could do was cry. I’m not sure I would have had anything to say anyway. Explaining the bells to someone who’s never heard them is like trying to explain the color blue to a dog that was blind from birth.

They ushered me into the back of their squad car and we took off for the hospital, the one Fletch and I didn’t know about. Twelve minutes later, we arrived at Mary Lane Hospital and I was admitted to the ER.

The doctors picked up where the police had left off. “What happened? Were you in a car accident? Were you in a fight?” but I remained unresponsive. They ran their fingers through my hair, checking me for a concussion, but couldn’t find any physical indications, and my pupils responded normally.

“It’s like he’s in shock.”

You don’t say.

Since I wasn’t helping, my clothes had to be cut off of me, just in case there were injuries they weren’t seeing. The right side of my chest was one gigantic purple bruise. I needed five stitches where the splinter had gone into my finger, and another two where it had come out. The rest of my fingers were cleaned and bandaged.

Then one of them had the bright idea of giving me something to help me sleep.

I wish they hadn’t. All I dreamed of was her. Amy Lowell Putnam’s corpse danced on its post, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, as the bells rang.

It was late afternoon the following day before I woke up to find my parents staring at me and my wrist handcuffed to the bed. They were looking at me like I was behind glass at an aquarium, a particularly nasty deep sea fish that turned their stomach. There was pity there, too, but mostly disbelief and fear. I wasn’t really their little boy any more. I was a thing, twisted and disturbed. A danger to myself and others.

Seeing my parents looking at me like that hurt real bad, but it was still preferable to the blank stare of Amy Lowell’s automaton, which was my company at two o’clock. And again at three. And four...

Ryan Dorset’s parents never formally charged me with assault. A civil suit was settled between our families out of court. As a condition to their not pressing charges I had to seek psychological help. I spent the next six months of my life at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts. It was probably for the best.

The first two weeks I didn’t say a word to anybody about anything. I can’t exactly say why. Shame was certainly a big part of it, and I know I was afraid that they’d “think I was crazy.” Then again, given where I was and why, well, the S.S. Sanity had probably already sailed.

After weeks of hearing the bells, and watching the automatons reenact their tableaus, after weeks of seeing Amy Lowell dragged about on her pole, I finally broke down and told them what was happening. A woman I’ll call ‘Dr. Laura’ was assigned to me. She was in her early forties, her hair was always messy, and she used a lot of Yiddish expressions. I didn’t get most of her jokes, but they still made me feel like we were sharing something and that I could trust her.

She diagnosed me as bipolar, believing my attack on Ryan, my experience hearing the bells, and my belief that I’d visited a haunted clock tower in the middle of a reservoir most likely stemmed from what she called a “mixed episode,” a state where symptoms of depression and mania occur simultaneously and auditory hallucinations aren’t uncommon.

Her theory was horseshit, but there’s no way to argue with a psychologist without sounding like one of those guys in the old horror movies screaming, “I’m not mad! I’m not mad!” while an orderly crams them into a straitjacket. You just say, “Wow, yeah. That sounds about right,” and take whatever pills they give you.

You can’t win, but you can lose less badly. And I have to admit that after they began injecting me with Haldol, I stopped hearing the bells every hour.

She may not have believed my story, but Dr. Laura taught me a lot. We would look at the decisions I regretted, and examine not only the effects of those decisions, but everything that led up to them. What was I doing? How was I feeling? We’d list it all, from my emotions to my bodily sensations, and try to find the pattern that led to my worst decisions. She helped me isolate my self-destructive triggers. Then we’d discuss how I could continue on in life and accomplish my goals without stumbling blindly into those triggers.

After I got out of McLean, we thought it was best that I didn’t go back to my high school. My mother bought the state-approved curriculum for home-schooling, and I spent the rest of high school at our kitchen table. We had to meet with the Superintendent of Schools a couple of times. He seemed perfectly happy not to have me in his school system. Can’t say I blamed him, I must have seemed like another Robert Kennan waiting to happen.

In September of 2000, the week before his 13th birthday, my little brother asked if he could be home-schooled too. In his grade, he had been a fairly popular kid, then one day he came home with a bloody nose. Two weeks later, a black eye. A fat lip. A limp. He was being bullied because of me.

I remember one day in particular with perfect clarity, an older boy had knocked him down on the hardwood floor of the gym and dislocated his shoulder. He had to go to the hospital.

My dad went ballistic. He directed most of his anger at Mr. Delvino, the principal, he even threatened to sue the school. But I got some of it too. He gave me a look that practically screamed, “This is your fault.”

When he returned home that night, my brother got me alone and asked me a question.

“Did you rape Alina?”

At first I was shocked. I thought I’d misheard him. I was his brother. And he knew I loved Alina. How could he ask me that?

“The kids at school, that’s what some of them say.”

After the incident in their yard, Alina’s parents had decided to enroll her at Bishop Guertin. She hadn’t wanted to; who wants to leave their friends behind senior year? But between Rob Kennan and myself, they just thought it’d be best for her to get a fresh start. After she left, Sara Cohen had been very vocal in blaming me.

I never held that against Sara. I figured I deserved the fallout for what I had done to Ryan Dorset. But I hadn’t seen this coming. Denials poured out of my mouth.

“Yeah, we had sex, but it wasn’t...” I couldn’t even say it. “She never said no—” that was true. “I never threatened her—” so was that. “I only wanted to make her feel good—” but was that the truth?

Like a lot of people, especially guys, I had an image in my mind of what a rapist was. A lone predator. A man in sunglasses and a hooded sweatshirt, hiding in a dimly lit garage with a knife in one hand and an improvised gag in the other. I had an idea that they were a breed apart. Depraved and wicked. Mean things, aware of the harm and the hurt they cause but determined to do it anyway.

That was my idea of what a rapist was and I didn’t fit any of my own criteria.

Yes, it was true that I had wanted to make Alina happy, but each time I’d kissed her, she’d frozen up. I took it as nerves, but I didn’t stop. Each time I’d run my hands up her body, she’d started to cry. I’d thought it was survivor’s guilt, but even if it was, pushing her clearly hadn’t made her feel any better. And when we...when I had gotten on top of her, and wormed my way beneath her clothes, persisting past stillness and tears, she hadn’t said ‘no,’ but she never said ‘yes.’

What I had thought, what I had wanted, they didn’t matter. Not next to what I did. It’s easy to see that now. At the time, I got defensive, unleashing a torrent of vile obscenities about a girl I’d only moments earlier considered the love of my young life.

That night, once everyone was asleep, I made my first of three suicide attempts. Tiptoeing my way into the garage, I took the garden hose off the wall and pushed one end into the tailpipe of my mom’s car. The other end I ran up through the driver’s side window.

The note I left was addressed to Alina. It read simply, “This is your fault.”

It was pure projection.

I got comfortable and started the engine. As the car began filling with exhaust, I became dimly aware of a sensation creeping up the back of my neck. Was it the carbon monoxide, or was I being watched?

Thump.

Had Amy Lowell been the mystery figure people saw inside Rob’s car the night he killed himself? Did she collect the souls of those she’d condemned? Was that how the automaton’s face had been burnt?

“Let her come,” I thought. “Anythings better than this.”

But the thump I’d heard wasn’t the sound of Amy Lowell Putnam’s post on the garage floor, it was the doorknob slamming into the wall when my brother threw open the door to the house. He saw me and screamed bloody murder until my parents came and the three of them could pull me out of the car.

The garage was beneath my brother’s room. He had heard the engine start, but didn’t hear the garage door open, so after a couple of minutes of wondering he got up to see what was going on.

Next thing I knew, I was sitting in the living room with a splitting headache. My mom was hugging me and crying hysterically. It was the first time anyone had held me in 9 months.

The next morning, I was back in McLean.

Dr. Laura and I spent a lot of time talking about Alina. I was surprised she was still willing to work with me, knowing what I’d done, but she was as patient and kind as ever.

After two months, I still struggling to wrap my head around how anyone could think what I’d done with Alina had been wrong.

To Alina. What I had done to Alina.

“Why didn’t she just say no?” It was a textbook example of blaming the victim, but I genuinely didn’t understand. “I would have stopped.”

“You can never be certain what someone else is experiencing. That’s why you have to ask. And listen, and not assume they want exactly what we want, or that they’ll respond exactly like we respond. Fershtay?”

I nodded. We weren’t in a session. Strictly speaking, Dr. Laura probably shouldn’t have been talking to me at all, and especially not about anything that was at the heart of my treatment, but from time to time, she would. I think she knew I needed the human contact.

“Bubbala, don’t take this as anything but speculation; I can’t know what she was thinking any better than you can. But you might want to consider that the last boy that had a crush on her had killed himself three months earlier.”

I liked it when she called me bubbala. “What’s that got to do with me?”

“She might have thought that if she said no, you’d do the same.”

“Alina,” if you’re out there, and you’re reading this, I am sorry. I apologize unreservedly. It was not your fault. I take full responsibility. If you wanted to press charges against me, I would not refute them. You can get word to me through my parents. If there’s anything you want from me, anything that will bring you the slightest amount of closure, it is yours. I was so stupid. So hurtful. So wrong.

I’m sorry.

In May of 2003 I received my high school diploma. My parents didn’t think I could handle living on my own, but I had to get as far away from the Spire and the way they looked at me and my reputation around town as I could. My aunt lives in San Jose, California, and I managed to get into a vocational school twenty minutes from her house. Eventually, my parents relented and let me go.

Fletch wound up getting into BC, which was a big coup for him. As fate would have it, so did Alina. From what I understand, the two of them actually wound up becoming pretty close. The last time Fletch and I spoke was in November of 2002, right around Thanksgiving. He had stopped hearing the bells before the end of his freshman year.

Two of Scary Kerry’s fingers had to be amputated, along with her thumb. She also lost her left foot from around the mid-calf down. Eventually she recovered from her aphasia but not before the school moved her into the special education-program. She never made it to college. Mrs. Peterson got her a job at Market Basket bagging groceries. My mom sees her from time to time and usually does her best to avoid her register. Neither Kerry nor her mother have asked about me since “the incident.” I don’t know if she still hears the bells, but I doubt it.

As for me, I’m unhappy but alive. I only hear the bells now when I don’t take my Zyprexa, but they’re never too far from my mind. Someday, I’m going to die and Amy Lowell Putnam’s going to claim me. There’s nothing I can do to avoid it. A part of me wishes she’d just hurry up and do it already.

The bells really do sound lovely.