1

Day One

The blue sedan brought me to Regent that morning. August 15, 1984. The year I was supposed to finish high school. The car pulled away without a glance back. And my foster family bobbed away down the gravel drive. Only the I Love Gumby sticker fixed askew on the rusted bumper gave a determined wave goodbye.

When the dust settled, I chucked my suitcase on the ground near an old maple and sat on the case. It had been packed for me in festive urgency five o’clock that morning—festive for my leaving and an urgency to make sure I wouldn’t turn around and come back. Not that I would have.

I had no idea what was even inside the suitcase.

A toothbrush, I hoped.

I didn’t care about the rumors. The ones Stuart, the real son, offered on the ride over in the backseat of the sedan. That Regent had been an insane asylum back in the ’50s. Upstate New York’s finest full-blown nuthouse. Cages. Electroshock Therapy. The whole thing. That the Victorian mansion was painted yellow to soothe the inmates when the medicine wore off. And that the government had closed it down in ’66. Stuart said the staff stayed on to run the boarding school. And that the teachers were better at administering Thorazine than explaining algebra. When I asked him what Thorazine was, he laughed and said I’d find out.

I was in no hurry to go inside. Eventually, I would have to. Or make my getaway. Mark out my own destiny. Maybe even find my father. The note presented to me on my tenth birthday was the only token of him I had. My foster family said he never visited. Or called. That fame, not fatherhood, was what he sought. Fame down in the village. I learned later that meant Greenwich Village in New York City and that his fame meant selling paintings on the street. At least that’s what my foster parents said. I never met him. And I never read the note.

But it was there—always there—deep in the pocket of my jeans, like a stone in a shoe, grinding for my attention. Opening and reading it would have solidified everything I didn’t want to know—why he left and why he never came back. And once I knew, I could never not know. So, I kept it sealed.

I leaned against the tree, twenty feet from the entrance. The crows marched around inside the black iron gates as if they had sieged the yard and driven out the songbirds.

If the songbirds had been there at all.

And the warring had just begun.

“Welcome to Regent, Justin Davis. We’ve been waiting for you.”

I thought the crows spoke until I saw the wiry woman in spinster black. She had appeared from nowhere. A sudden apparition in a bad dream. She stood on the mansion’s front porch, poised on the edge of the top step. Her words reached me unhindered, even with the distance between us, as though she said them directly into my ear.

Maybe the wind picked up and the sky grew darker, or I imagined it, but I stood because I couldn’t confront a phantom sitting down. Planting my sneakers in the dry gravel, I squinted against the dust. My open flannel, hanging loose over a concert T-shirt, mimicked the flapping of her dress.

A flagrant signal to the standoff.

Her smile stretched wide as though we played a game. A cat and mouse game. Where, should I have the courage to run, she would delight in the chase. She folded her arms and widened her stance. “Come now. Let’s go inside, shall we?”

         Though my body was primed to run, I didn’t turn away. I hefted my suitcase instead and followed the sparse woman up Regent’s wide front steps because that’s what I had been taught to do. Follow.

The cemented lions that had guarded the entrance for the mentally deranged adult now poised before the socially unhinged teenager. Six of one, half a dozen of the other, my foster mom would say. I heard her voice in my head now like a chant, and I finally figured out what it meant—Six, or half a dozen—it’s the same thing. It doesn’t matter, and who really cares?

I climbed the stairs, the swish of black two steps ahead of me.

At the top, and against the base of one of the lions, sat a girl in a gray work suit. She had a book in her lap and brushed away a tangle of sooty curls. With a hand over her brow to shield from the dust or sun or both, she scanned my passing with a frown. She said nothing, but I read the silent words. You’re invading my space. You shouldn’t be here. You don’t belong.

I wanted to tell her not to waste her scowl since I knew that already, but I was past the lions and through the front door.

The entryway washed cold, colder than outside, like the damp rawness of a root cellar. Crown molding with fancy carvings lost its flair in the chipping paint and cracked walls. A carpeted runner trailed down the broad hall and gave up midway to let the wood planks carry on unchecked in a network of offshoots. Like you were dropped in the center of a maze with no direction out, except to turn around and run.

One of these offshoots had a sign—a warped, wooden sign hanging across the hall’s entrance. It marked the way to the office of superintendent. Down this tight hall, I was escorted. Pressed through as though I had drunk Alice’s cup and chased the white rabbit. The spinster before me, a residuum of some withered queen. She tapped on the door at the end of the hall with a bony knuckle, waited for a reply, and entered.

The superintendent’s stately quarters hoarded all of Regent’s glory. The parched wood had been oiled, the patches fixed, and the sunlight filled the room through broad swathes of cleaned panes. An enormous desk, as wide-girthed as its owner who stood before it, failed to fill the great room. I was certain the broad door at the back supplied his entry and exit, for it was unlikely he fit down the narrow hall that brought me to him.

“Justin Davis. Justin, Justin. Here we are.” The man writhed before me as though a slippery fish had found its way inside his pants as he confiscated my suitcase and tucked it out of sight. The movements jiggled his double chin and plastered a jovial smile to his pale lips. “Welcome to Regent, Justin. I’m Mr. T. W. Becket, guardian of the misguided.” He slid a file off his desk into his oversized hands. “You look a little roughed up, kid.”

The marks had failed to fade completely, and I still favored my right leg.

When I didn’t answer, he flipped through the pages of my file with my name written on the tab in black marker. My name—but not my name.

For the last three years, I had been Justin Davis. I had gotten used to it by then, but it failed to generate any sentiment of ownership—it wasn’t who I was. When I was Justin Michaels, my birth name, I was too little to remember. But, the foster parents, on that remarkable tenth birthday when they had given me my father’s note, also reported that my mother died weeks after my birth—and probably because of it. That the barbiturates found in my blood stream had mixed with her postpartum depression and compelled her to suicide.

Who tells a ten-year-old that?

I was a Johnson once too, and maybe a Reynolds. I don’t remember the rest.

“What’d you do to get in here, kid?” Mr. Becket lifted his eyebrows. “Set fire to something? Steal from your daddy? What?” His protruding tongue anticipated the seedy details I denied him. “Or did you kill somebody?” He hugged the folder to himself and scratched at his hand, squinting at me tight so the sin would pop. “Well, I’m sure it’s all in here, and I’ll get to readin’ about it soon enough.” He pointed the folder at me, and his eyes glistened. “Either way, it’s my job to make you all better, son. The perfect gem for society’s strand of pearls—that’s what you’ll be.” He removed the backward baseball cap from my head and tossed it on his desk. “A gem. I promise you that.”

His belly jiggled in a trapped laugh that never reached his mouth.

I was back on the driveway in my mind with ten more seconds to run.

I would have run that time.

Mr. Becket pulled an item from his pocket and, with heavy breath to traverse the space, moved to the corner of the room. It was the first I noticed the dollhouse set on a small table. A simple, two-story house with three sides and an open front. Nothing fancy or embellished. The homemade kind. The house was furnished with wood block replicas of tables, chairs, couches, and beds. He replaced a doll, which had been the object in his hand, back into the house to complete the family of dolls.

I had seen them used before. Play therapy, the social worker had called it when she presented the dolls to me on more than one occasion when I was younger. She had told me to place the dolls in the house, in the rooms they belonged, and tell her about each one. When I pocketed the mother doll and ripped off the arm of the father, she took copious notes.

Mr. Becket was on the opposite side of the room when my attention returned. From a side closet, he produced a plastic-wrapped bundle. Compliments of Regent, I received two gray work suits fit for a coal miner, four white T-shirts, five pairs of underwear, and three pairs of socks.

And I lost everything else.

“Okay, drop ’em. No civilian clothes past my door. Don’t know what you could be hiding in there. Let’s go. Off.”

I hesitated, then took off my clothes.

“How old are you, Justin?”

“Seventeen.”

He kicked away my clothing and pointed his chin at the new packet. “Put your name on all those. Things go missing pretty darn quick around here.” He handed me a black marker, but before he released it entirely, he said, “Did you get your bright blue eyes from your mama?” 

His question rattled me. Not so much because his words were too familiar while I stood in my underwear, but because I had not thought of my mother’s eye color until then. I had seen her only as an image undefined. A hazy form without detail, yet holding the essence of who she was. Now I thought about the details. Did I have my mother’s eyes?

I wrestled on my one-piece, one-size-fits-all work suit, wanting it to swallow me alive.

“Very good, very good.” Mr. Becket reached into a drawer inside his desk and pulled out a pair of scissors. He took my wrist in his meaty hand. “You won’t be needing these here, Justin Davis.” With one powerhouse squeeze, he cut through my stockpile of woven bracelets.

They fell to the planked floor.

He scuffed them toward the garbage bin with his shiny brown shoe. “No need for embellishments on such a handsome young man.” He returned the scissors and grabbed something else from the drawer. “You’ll just need this while you’re here at Regent . . .” He snapped around my wrist a metal band with the number 412 engraved into it.

He adjusted the collar of my work suit. “There we go. Snug as a bug in a rug.” He winked. “Now, I wouldn’t try to leave with that bracelet on. Could be quite shocking.”

The twinkle in his eye said he might like to see that.

“We’re going to get along just fine, you and me. Just fine.”

Without warning, he gathered me up in a vice grip so unnaturally strong I couldn’t escape.

 “Welcome, welcome, Justin Davis.”