The Law Of Nines Part 4

"It's your birthday, Alex. Now you can buy yourself a proper present. The kind none of us could ever afford for you."

"I never really wanted for anything," Alex said in quiet protest as he laid a hand gently on his grandfather's shoulder. "I always had everything I needed, and what I really needed the most."

"Kind of like my coffeepot," his grandfather muttered. "Never wanted anything better." He abruptly turned back, looking uncharacteristically stern. "Sell the land, Alex. It's just trees and rocks-it's good for nothing."

Trees and rocks sounded good to Alex. He loved such places. That was his favorite thing to paint.

"Sell it, that's my advice," Ben pressed. "You've no need of Castle Mountain."

"Castle what?"

"Castle Mountain. It's a mountain that sits roughly in the center of the land."

"Why's it called Castle Mountain?"

Ben turned away and worked for a time bending the tubing on his essence extractor to some plan known only to him. "People say it looks like a castle. Never saw the resemblance, myself."

Alex smiled. "I don't think Indian Rock looks much like an Indian."

"There you go. Same thing. People see what they want to see, I guess." Ben didn't look back as he handed the papers over his shoulder. "Get the deed transferred, then sell the place and be rid of it, that's my advice, Alex."

Alex slowly made his way to the stairs as he considered it all. He paused and looked back at his grandfather.

A dark look shadowed Ben's face. "This is one of those things that I mentioned before, Alex, one of those things that doesn't make proper sense."

Alex wondered at seeing such a forbidding look for a second time that day. "Thanks, Ben, for your advice."

His grandfather turned back to his soldering. "Don't thank me unless you take the advice. Unless you heed it, it's just words."

Alex nodded absently. "I'm going to go see my mom."

"Give her my best," Ben murmured without turning.

His grandfather rarely went to visit his daughter-in-law. He hated the place where she was confined. Alex hated the place, too, but his mother was there and if he wanted to see her he had no choice.

Alex stared down at the envelope in his hand. It seemed that such an unexpected birthday present should make him happy, but it didn't. It only reminded him of his dead father and his mother lost to another world.

Now this unknown connection to the past had found him.

Alex ran his fingers lightly over the age-dried label made out to his father. A faded pencil line ran through the name. Above, in the same nearly vanished, ghostlike pencil, was written his mother's name. Her name was stricken through with a dark, angry line drawn in black ink.

Above that, in his grandfather's handwriting, it said "Alexander Rahl."

When Alex reached the landing on the stairs he thought that he saw someone out of the corner of his eye.

He turned only to see himself looking back from a mirror.

He stared for a moment; then his cell phone rang. When he answered it, he could hear only weird, garbled sounds, like disembodied whispers churning up from somewhere deep on the other side of the universe. He glanced at the display. It said OUT OF AREA. No doubt a wrong number. He flipped the cover closed and slipped the phone back in his pocket.

"Alexander," Ben called.

Alex looked back, waiting.

"Trouble will find you."

Alex smiled at his grandfather's familiar mantra. It was meant as a world of love and concern wrapped in a call for vigilance. The familiar touchstone made him feel better, feel resolute.

"Thanks, Ben. I'll talk to you later."

Alex picked up the painting that he had brought from the gallery and headed up the stairs.

ALEX HAD BEEN FORTUNATE. His Jeep Cherokee had started on the first try.

After the long drive to the older part of downtown Orden, Nebraska, he parked near the end of a side street that sloped off downhill. That way, if his Jeep wouldn't start, he could let it roll to get the engine to turn over.

In this older section of town there wasn't much parking other than on the tree-lined streets. The needs of a hospital, parking being only one of them, had long ago rendered the facility obsolete and so it had been converted to a private asylum: Mother of Roses. The state paid for patients, like Alex's mother, who were placed there by the order of the court.

In the beginning Ben had tried to get his daughter-in-law released into his and Alex's grandmother's custody. Alex had been too young to understand it all, but the end result had been that Ben had eventually given up. Years later, when Alex had pursued the same course, he had likewise gotten nowhere.

Dr. Hoffmann, the head of the psychiatric staff, had a.s.sured Alex that his mother was better off under professional care. Besides that, he said that they could not legally give him the responsibility of caring for a person who in their professional opinion could still become violent. His grandfather had put an arm around Alex's shoulders and told him to come to terms with the fact that while there were those who went to Mother of Roses to get help, to get better, his mother would likely die there. It had felt to Alex like a death sentence.

The mature trees on the streets in that part of town and on the limited grounds of Mother of Roses asylum made the place look less harsh than it was. Alex knew that the somewhat distant hill where he'd parked made a convenient excuse to delay walking into the building where his mother was imprisoned. His insides always felt like they knotted up when he went into the place.

On the way over he had been so distracted by scattered thoughts competing for attention that he'd nearly run a red light. The thought of Officer Slawinski scowling at him had dissuaded him from trying to make it through the yellow. As it turned out, the light had switched to red before he'd even reached the crosswalk.

For some reason it felt like a day to be careful. Staring up at the glow of a red light that had come quicker than expected had felt like cosmic confirmation of his caution.

Walking beneath the enclosing shade of the mature oaks and maples, Alex headed around the side of the nine-story brick building. The front, on Thirteenth Street, had broad stone steps up to what he supposed was a beautiful entrance of cast concrete meant to look like a stone facade of vines growing over an ornate pointed arch framing deep-set oak doors. Going in the front was a lot more trouble because it required going through layers of bureaucracy needed for general visitors. Close family were allowed to go in through a smaller entrance at the rear.

Gra.s.s under the huge oaks in back thinned to bare dirt in patches where the ground was heaved and uneven from ma.s.sive roots hidden beneath. Alex glanced up at the windows all covered with security wire. Flesh was no match for that steel mesh. The back of the building was more honest about what it was.

The sprawling lower floors of the hospital were for patients who went to Mother of Roses for treatment for emotional disorders, substance abuse and addiction, as well as rest and recovery. Alex's mother was imprisoned on the smaller ninth floor, a secure area reserved for patients considered dangerous. Some of them had killed people and had been found to be mentally incompetent. Several times since Alex's mother had been confined at Mother of Roses there had been serious attacks on other patients or staff. Alex always worried for her safety.

He scanned the top row of almost opaque windows, even though he had never seen anything more than shadows in them.

The steel door in back had a little square window with safety wire crisscrossed through it. When he pulled open the door he was. .h.i.t by the hospital smell that always made him resist taking a deep breath.

An orderly recognized him and nodded a greeting. Alex flashed a wooden smile as he tossed his keys, pocketknife, change, and phone in a plastic tub on a table to the side of the metal detector. After he pa.s.sed through without setting off the buzzers, an older security guard, who also knew Alex but didn't smile, handed over the phone and his change. He would keep the knife and keys until Alex left. Even keys could be s.n.a.t.c.hed from a visitor and used as a weapon.

Alex bent at the steel desk beyond the metal detector and picked up a cheap blue plastic pen attached by a dirty string to the registry clipboard. That string was the most lax security in the entire building. The woman at the desk, Doreen, knew him. Holding the phone to her ear with a shoulder, she flipped through a ledger, answering questions about laundry deliveries. She smiled at Alex as he looked up from signing his name. She'd always been nice to him over the years, sympathizing with him at having to visit his mother in such a place.

Alex took the only elevator that went to the ninth floor. He hated the green metal doors. The paint had been scratched off in horizontal patches by med carts. .h.i.tting into it, leaving dirty metal to show through. The elevator smelled musty. He knew the tune of every clunk and clatter it made on the way up, antic.i.p.ated every s.h.i.+mmy in its labored travel.

The elevator porpoised to a stop and finally opened before the ninth-floor nurses' station. Locked doors led to the women's wing on one side, the men's on the other. Alex signed his name again and put in the time: three p.m. Visitors were carefully monitored. He would have to sign out, with the time, when he left. The elevator door at the top was kept locked and no one would unlock it without a completed sign-in-and-sign-out sheet-a precaution against a patient talking his way past a gullible new employee.

An orderly in white slacks and smock came out from a small office in the back of the nurses' station, pulling his keys out on a thin wire cable extending from the reel attached to his belt. The orderly, a big man who always hunched, knew Alex. Just about everyone working at Mother of Roses knew Alex Rahl.

The man looked through the little window in the solid oak door and then, satisfied that the way was clear, turned the key in the lock. He yanked open the heavy door.

The man handed over a plastic key for the buzzer on the other side. "Ring when you're finished, Alex."

Alex nodded. "How's she doing?"

The man shrugged his rounded shoulders. "Same."

"Has she caused you any trouble?"

The man arched an eyebrow. "She tried to stab me to death with a plastic spoon a few days back. Yesterday she jumped a nurse and would have beaten her senseless if another orderly wouldn't have been ten steps away at the time."

Alex shook his head. "I'm sorry, Henry."

The man shrugged again. "Part of the job."

"I wish I could make her stop."

Henry held the door open with one hand. "You can't, Alex. Don't beat yourself up over it. It's not her fault; she's sick."

The hall's grayish linoleum floor was struck through with darker gray swirls and green speckles, presumably meant to add a little bit of interest. It was as ugly as anything Alex could imagine. Light from the sunroom up ahead reflected off the ripply floor, making it look almost liquid. The evenly s.p.a.ced rooms to each side had varnished oak doors with silver metal push plates. None had locks. Each room was home to someone.

Cries coming from dark rooms echoed through the hall. Angry voices and shouts were commonplace-arguments with imaginary people who bedeviled some of the patients.

The showers at the rear of the bathroom were kept locked, along with a few of the rooms, rooms where patients were placed when they became violent. Locking a patient in a room was meant to encourage them to behave and be sociable.

The sunroom, with its skylights, was a bright spot in a dark prison. Varnished oak tables were neatly s.p.a.ced throughout the room. They were bolted to the floor. The flimsy plastic chairs weren't.

Alex immediately spotted his mother sitting on a couch against the far wall. She watched him coming without recognizing him. On rare occasions she did know who he was, but he could tell by the look in her eyes that this time she didn't. That was always the hardest thing for him-knowing that she usually didn't have any idea who he was.

A TV bolted high on the wall was tuned to Wheel of Fortune. Wheel of Fortune. The gaiety and laughter from the TV struck a stupefying contrast with the somber dayroom. A few patients laughed with the TV audience without comprehending what they were laughing at. They only knew that laughter was called for and so they laughed out of a sense of social duty. Alex guessed that it was better to laugh than cry. Between the laughter, some of the younger women glared at him. The gaiety and laughter from the TV struck a stupefying contrast with the somber dayroom. A few patients laughed with the TV audience without comprehending what they were laughing at. They only knew that laughter was called for and so they laughed out of a sense of social duty. Alex guessed that it was better to laugh than cry. Between the laughter, some of the younger women glared at him.

"Hi, Mom," he said in his sunniest voice as he approached.

She wore pale green hospital-issue pajama pants and a simple flower-print top. The outfit was hideously ugly. Her hair was longer than the other residents'. Most of the women had their hair cut short and curled. Alex's mother was protective of her sandy-colored, shoulder-length hair. She threw fits if they tried to cut it. The staff didn't feel it was worth a battle to cut it short. Occasionally they would try, thinking she might have forgotten that she wanted it long. That was one thing she never forgot. Alex was glad that she had something that seemed to matter to her.

He sat on the couch beside her. "How are you doing?"

She stared at him a moment. "Fine." By her tone, he knew that she didn't have a clue as to who he was.

"I was here last week. Remember?"

She nodded as she stared at him. Alex wasn't sure if she even understood the question. Sometimes she would say things that he knew weren't true. She would tell him that her sister had visited. She didn't have a sister. She would say that she had gone shopping. She was never allowed to leave the confines of the ninth floor.

He ran his hand down the side of her head. "Your hair looks pretty today."

"I brush it every day," she said.

An overweight male orderly wearing s.h.i.+ny black shoes that squeaked rolled a cart into the sunroom. "Snack time, ladies."

The top of the cart displayed a few dozen plastic cups half filled with orange juice, or something that resembled orange juice. The shelves in the cart held baloney-and-lettuce sandwiches on wheat bread. At least, Alex a.s.sumed it would be baloney. It usually was.

"How about a sandwich, Mom? You're looking kind of skinny.

Have you been eating?"

Without protest she rose to take a sandwich and gla.s.s from the man with the cart when he rolled it near. "Here you go, Helen," the man said as he handed her a plastic cup of orange juice and a sandwich.

Alex followed as she shuffled to a table off in the far corner, away from the other residents.

"They always want to talk," she said as she glared at the women cl.u.s.tered on the other side of the room, where they could see the television. Most of the people in the place talked to imaginary people. At least his mother never did that.

Alex folded his arms on the table. "So, what's new?"

His mother chewed a mouthful for a moment. Without looking up she swallowed and said under her breath, "I haven't seen any of them for a while."

"Is that right?" he asked, playing along. "What did they want?"

It was hard to make conversation when he didn't know what she was talking about half the time.

"What they always want. The gate."

"What gate?" He couldn't imagine what she imagined.

She suddenly looked up. "What are you doing here?"

Alex shrugged. "It's my birthday, Mom. I wanted to spend it with you."

"You shouldn't spend your birthday in this place, Alex."

Alex's breath halted for an instant. He could count on the fingers of one hand the times she had called him by his name except when prompted.

"It's my birthday. It's what I want to do, Mom," he said quietly.

Her mind seemed to drift away from the subject. "They look at me through the walls," she said in an emotionless tone. Her eyes turned wild. "They look at me!" she screamed. "Why won't they stop watching me!"

A few of the people on the other side of the room turned to look at the screaming woman. Most didn't bother. Screaming in the inst.i.tution wasn't an uncommon occurrence and was usually treated with indifference. The orderly with the cart glanced over, appraising the situation. Alex put a hand on her arm.

"It's all right, Mom. No one is looking at you now."

She glanced around at the walls before finally appearing to calm down. In another moment, she went back to her sandwich as if nothing had happened.

After she took a sip of orange juice, she asked, "What birthday is it?" She put the sandwich up to her mouth.

"My twenty-seventh."

She froze.

She took the sandwich out of her mouth and carefully set it down on the paper plate. She glanced around, then seized Alex's s.h.i.+rtsleeve.