The Fall of Never by Ronald Malfi
“Are you cold?”
“Maybe a little,” she said. “But it’s nice out.”
“I can take you home whenever you get too tired.”
She thought about home—about the compound, that looming black structure with its conical towers and obelisk roofs, its yawning doorways and narrow, powder-stained windows. And the woods, dark and brooding and solid with frost. She had no desire to return to the house any time soon.
“I wouldn’t mind seeing some of your work,” she said to him.
Gabriel Farmer lived in a single-bedroom apartment south of downtown Spires. It was a small place with a one-window view of a thick shade of trees (which blocked what could have been a beautiful though distant view of Lake Champlain) and a star-cluttered night sky. Stepping inside the apartment, it struck Kelly as odd to imagine that little boy with glasses and bleeding knees down by the brook to have grown up. And here—the walls natural wood paneling; the tiny entranceway and living area as pristine as one could want; obscure paintings on the far wall, hung in almost a functional formation. It was the fastidious home of a perfectionist.
“This is nice,” she said, following Gabriel to a small love seat.
“Quaint,” he said, shrugging.
“You make quaint sound bad.”
“It’s usually what people say when they mean ‘barely adequate.’”
“I didn’t say quaint. I said nice.”
“Noted.”
She watched him disappear into the tiny kitchen nook and hit the refrigerator. “What can I get you?” he called.
“A beer will be fine.”
Her eyes wandered over the paintings on the walls. There were also some more in the narrow hallway leading to what was most likely the bathroom and bedroom. Some were abstract, a wash of monochromatic tones that reminded her of soft jazz, particularly the sounds of brass instruments. Other paintings depicted cottage-like houses in the middles of dense forest, their doors and windows and sidings painted the sharp and jarring colors of penny-candy.
“Are some of these yours?”
He returned with two bottles of Amstel Light, handed one to Kelly and remained standing. “The paintings? Yes.”
“They’re beautiful.”
“Stages,” he said. “From high school on up. I hit a certain mood and I just couldn’t shake it. The only way to move on is to let it take over. Those colors in that painting there? Those—”
“Yes.”
“My ‘wind’ phase.”
“Oh?”
“Damn thoughts hit you sometimes and you know it’s going to be a pain in the ass. It’s like describing the color blue to a person who has been blind their whole life. How the hell do you do it? Those colors—it dawned on me one afternoon to paint wind. Not leaves or plastic bags or anything blowing in the wind, but actually paint the wind itself. As colors. So that first one there—that blue one—was the first one I painted. Because the day was cold, I painted it blue and was mildly satisfied. Then a month later it started getting warmer and I happened to glance at the painting and think, no way, wind isn’t blue, it’s red, and what the heck had I been thinking painting it blue. So that’s where the red one comes into play. God, I was so naïve then…”
Kelly laughed. “Yes,” she said, “and the green and the yellow and the orange and the black?”
“All there. Days have a way of changing. I figured wind is just days. Or days changing. I don’t know, I guess that doesn’t make any sense.”
“Sure it does.”
“Well, you’re just a crazy artist like me.”
She shook her head, looked at the mouth of her beer bottle. “No, not like you.”
“Sure.” He maneuvered around the side of the love seat and hefted two canvases from against the wall. He turned them around so Kelly could get a good look. “Just a glimpse of what I was telling you about.”
The first painting was of an elderly woman seated in a straight-back chair before a window, her silvery head bent down and resting on her left collarbone, eyes closed. One hand hung loosely over the chair and dangled. A yellow bar of sunlight came in through the window and cast an eerie, angelic glow over the woman’s body.
The second painting was only half finished, and depicted an old man positioned in a similar fashion on a park bench beneath the gentle sway of a weeping willow.
“They’re both dead,” she marveled. “My God, they’re so beautiful.”
Gabriel smiled. “Then I’ve succeeded.”
“You certainly did. You have such a great talent, Gabe. You always did.”
“No,” he said, replacing the paintings back against the wall, “I just have an excellent Muse.”
He took a seat beside her on the love seat, also staring at his own beer. Kelly sensed there was something important on his mind before he even started speaking again.
“I hope I don’t come off as too forward or anything now,” Gabriel began, his eyes still down in his lap, “but I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t thought about you after you left. And, well, it was never really clear to me why…I don’t think…” He cleared his throat, tried again. This time, he brought his eyes up to meet her. “For a long time after you went away, I tried to understand a few things.”
She knew where he was headed. And no, she didn’t fault him for his curiosity. He’d been her friend once, or at least tried to be, and he was owed something, wasn’t he? In his own small way, he’d been affected by what happened to her back then too.
“When I went away,” she said. “You’re talking about the institution?”
“When you left, I wanted to say something to you, to see if there was something that maybe I could have done. I don’t know.”
“There was nothing you could have done.”
“And then after that—well, you never came back, Kelly.”
“I don’t think I could even if I wanted to. There was just too much bullshit, you understand?”
He shook his head. “Yes and no,” he said. “I mean, I don’t understand. Not all of it. I didn’t then, and I still don’t even now. And I don’t mean about the institution. Back then—sometimes it was like we were the best of friends—”
“You were my only friend.”
“But then other times it seemed like you wanted nothing to do with me. And then that day I came over, and what happened down in the woods, and that’s when you closed up. Just like that. Never said anything to anyone after that. You scared me and I missed you.” He tried to laugh but it came out too jittery. “Shit, kid, I’m sorry. You didn’t come back home to hear any of this.”
“No. It’s all right.”
“So what happened to you? Why’d you go away? And do I even have the right to ask that of you? I mean, we’re really just two strangers sitting here…”
“It was a nervous breakdown,” she said.
“You were fifteen.” As if this was proof against her own reasoning.
“It was a head-thing, a mental thing. I just broke down.”
“What did it to you? Did something happen?”
Again, she thought about meeting little Gabriel Farmer in the forest that day. She’d watched him blot blood from his knees, then also wipe it off her own forehead (although she could not recall what had happened to her). They’d talked, and he had sketched her face in the dirt with a stick, and that had made her laugh. Gabriel Farmer, falling off the damned rope swing and cutting both his knees. Had he ever made it to the top of the tree that year? She didn’t think she ever saw him climb so high. Was it possible that he’d made it to the top sometime after she’d gone away? Maybe one day by himself, maybe even angry with her for leaving him, he’d gone back down into the forest and climbed that towering tree straight to the top, or as high as his weight would allow. And he’d been a twig of a thing, so that would have been pretty high. My God, did he go back and climb it all by himself? What if he’d fallen? He could’ve been killed.
“I don’t know what set it off,” she said and it was t
“How long did you stay in there?”
“Three years. I signed out when I was eighteen.”
“Was it bad?”
“The hospital?”
“Was it cruel? I just have this image of barred windows and people screaming crazy behind locked doors. I couldn’t shake that image for a long time after you went away.”
Went away, she thought. My God, it makes me sound like a certified psychopath.
“It wasn’t too bad, but I don’t remember it very well,” she said, but could easily summon the institution in her mind: peeling walls and dried vomit on the communal sofa in the TV room. Loose-leaf pages taped to the hallway walls: crude drawings done in crayon and watercolor. The regiment of nurses was unrelenting. They were everywhere. And then that breaking point—that key point in time when she felt like she suddenly opened her eyes, really opened them, and realized where she was and why she was here. And thought, What if I never get out of here? What if I’m locked up in this place for the rest of my life? What if I die in here? And she thought maybe that was a very real possibility, that maybe a great number of these young girls in here would simply grow old and die while locked away like broken dolls in a trunk. And then what? What did they do with the bodies, the corpses? Did they chop them up and serve them on those steel lunch pallets, serve them with those rock-hard biscuits and half-frozen slaw? There was no shaking the initial suffocation. The rooms were too small, and two, sometimes three to a room. The beds were white and sterile. The sheets were tissue paper, the pillows hard. She’d seen girls cut themselves and bleed there, but that was usually the worst of it. No one died. At least, to her knowledge. Though there were screams—mostly at night, and muffled through the walls and echoing down the hallways. Screams of pain and the unrelenting sobs of the frightened. She’d been a sobber, too, on more than one occasion. Futile sobs: no one came running, no one listened, no one cared in that cold, cold place. And in many ways, it was very much like home.
Kelly thought: I remember Mouse and the two dead girls on the third floor. The thought shook her and initially made no sense.
“You look sad,” Gabriel said.
She looked at him, then looked down again, feigning interest in the creases of her hands, the label on the bottle of beer. “I was in there for three years,” she half-whispered. “And maybe that was what I needed, but three years? How do parents send their children away to places like that? Send them away and just forget about them? In three years, my parents never came, never stopped by to see if I was even still alive.”
“I’m sure they were just worried about you. Maybe it would have been too hard on them to come.”
“Well, it was hard on me not seeing them. Sometimes,” she said, her voice dropping down a notch as if they were about to share some intimate secret, “I think my parents didn’t even know I was alive. Like they’d forgotten all about me.” And she could see them in her mind’s eye, standing in that bright yellow office at the institution—both of them with their heads bowed, their eyes unable to focus on her. Her father had almost said something just before she was taken away down the hall, but in the end words had proven too difficult for him. And then they were gone.
She could feel herself on the verge of tears. Coward, she thought.
“I’m sorry,” Gabriel said. “I’m sorry it was that bad for you.”
“I wonder if they were the reason I broke down when I was fifteen,” she said. It was a matter-of-fact statement, resonating with the quality of a well-worked notion, although this was truly the first time such a thought had ever occurred to her.
“Why?” Gabriel said. “What could they have done?”
“Maybe nothing,” she said, “and maybe that was all it took. Maybe their absence as parents caused that breakdown.”
There was a long silence that followed. Then Gabriel said, “You’re thinking of your sister?”
“I am.”
“What are you thinking?”
“Just that it’s odd how she’s in a bad place right now too. Right in the middle of her childhood.”
“Right at the age of fifteen,” Gabriel added. “Just like you.”
“Fifteen,” she muttered. The corresponding ages hadn’t occurred to her before.
“But it’s something different with Becky,” Gabriel said. “I mean, the poor thing was attacked and nearly…” He trailed off, sparing Kelly’s feelings. “Maybe there’s something more there and you’re just using the similar events of both your lives to cover up what’s really the problem.”
“So what’s really the problem?”
“Maybe,” he said, “you feel bad for leaving your family behind. Maybe you feel bad for leaving Becky behind.”
The concept was nothing new—in fact, she’d thought it herself several times—but Gabriel’s words struck her like a hammer whacking a gong nonetheless. She’d just needed to hear someone else say it.
“I think maybe you’re right,” she said. “So how do I fix that? How do I make up for lost time and fix those mistakes?”
For some reason, she anticipated some grand solution to come from Gabriel Farmer—something that would make everything all better and heal old wounds, erase the ugly scars.
“I don’t know,” was all he wound up saying.
Just as Kelly and Gabriel entered Gabriel’s tiny apartment, Detective Felix Raintree parked his sedan outside the police station. He wasn’t thinking about old wild-eyed Graham Rand; rather, he was silently observing the weather. It had gotten cold feverishly quick this year, and winter wasn’t even fully upon them. Lawns were already stiff with frost. Windows had been shut and locked weeks ago, heaters already pumping.
Going to be brutal this year, he thought to himself as he mounted the front steps of the station.
Inside, Annie Haas, the station’s dispatcher, sat at her desk with her face buried in a desk drawer, as if searching for something. Behind her on the desk was a small Philco radio from which Billie Holiday gently worked through “Solitude.” Annie, who normally communicated an air of pleasant contentment to those around her, looked frazzled and even a bit irritated. As Raintree approached her desk, she looked up sharply and nearly sighed with relief at the sight of the detective.
“Felix,” she said.
“What’s the matter? You look distraught.”
“Mr. Rand. He’s just been getting me so uptight and nervous, walking around the way he was.”
“Where is he?”
“I told him to wait in your office.”
“Sheriff?”
“He went home,” Annie said. Raintree had a distaste for Sheriff Alan Bannercon, a young fellow from Shitpoke, Kentucky who, the detective surmised, would probably have himself a difficult time if he ever had to distinguish his handgun from his nose-picking finger.
“And Sturgess?”
“Out on a call. Mr. Rand was quite adamant about speaking with you, Felix.”
“Rather,” Raintree mused. He slid off his overcoat and, standing on one foot, leaned over Annie’s desk to peer through the wire-mesh glass wall and into his own office. The shades were half-drawn. He could make out a flannel hunting jacket pacing back and forth from behind them.
Felix Raintree really had no problem with old Graham Rand—he was a lonely, keep-to-himself widower with an excruciatingly dull life and a severe imagination that compensated for such dullness. To date, and since the death of his wife three years ago, Graham Rand had professed to several members of the Caliban County Police Department that he’d seen the ghost of his dead wife roughly sixty-three times since her demise. Sometimes she was standing out in the yard, half-hidden behind a huddle of blue spruce; other times, he claimed to have opened the bathroom door only to find the poor dead woman using the toilet, or sponging herself in the bat
Raintree knocked his boots against the wall, leaving splatters of melted frost on the linoleum. “Coffee on?” he called to Annie.
“I’ll put some on.”
“Don’t bother,” he said and entered his office.
Graham Rand was seventy-seven and looked twice that. He was as thin and as spindly as an uprooted weed. To Raintree, Rand’s face looked as if someone had untied some essential knot at the back of the old man’s head, allowing nearly eight decades of cheesecloth flesh to hang loose. He had the jowls of a junkyard bulldog and the head-works of a common house rodent that’d been cracked over the cranium one too many times with the business end of a broom.
Rand paused in midpace as Raintree entered the office, his hands frozen in a death-grip around his wool hunting cap. His granite-colored eyes were wide and obtrusive.
“Detective,” Rand said.
“Graham,” Raintree said, moving behind his desk and taking a seat. There was a sharp draft coming from a crack in the windowpane behind his head—he could feel it on the nape of his neck when he leaned back. “You could take a seat.”
“Thank you.” The old man dropped into the wooden chair on the other side of Raintree’s desk. So thin, he appeared to be swimming inside his hunting coat.