The Aqua Net Diaries (24 page)

We stood there staring at her. She was the first truly horrible person Joey, Holly, Ronnie, Eric, and I had ever met, with her cold voice and her pinched bird face. She looked at my mom again, impatient.

My mother then gave Dr. Lutz a southern-lady piece of her mind. Mr. Johns—usually so reticent, so happy to be in the background—stepped in and joined her. But Dr. Lutz was unyielding. There was nothing she would do.

It was the first time we cried as friends. We hugged one another and held on together, all in a group. Ronnie swore and punched a metal trash can and nearly broke his hand. Joey ran away to an empty stadium, surrounded by empty bleachers, and cried a part of his heart out. Holly and I walked and walked all over campus, arm in arm. We cried and looked at the stars, and every now and then we saw an angry blur run by and it was Eric or Ronnie.

• • •

Back at the dorm, the disappointment of the day caught up with us. Mitchell Kraemer stayed with us as we lassoed people with a rope in the hall and spent the evening screaming up and down the halls. We played hide and seek. We arranged our history team set inside the elevator, complete with all our antique props, the ones we were so proud of. I put on my hoop dress and Ronnie put on his Yankee blue uniform, and every time the door opened the five of us stood there in full Civil War attire, welcoming people to our reduced but marvelous Confederate world of 1866.

When we got tired of this, we went back to the boys' room and talked about what had happened to us. Eric cried then for the first time, sitting on his bed, leaning against the wall. I was across the room from him at the foot of Ronnie's bed next to Ronnie. Joey was next to Eric. Holly was sprawled on a chair, Mitchell on the floor. As Eric was talking, Joey pulled out a toy gun that belonged to his little brother Matthew, who was seven, and pointed it at Eric who jumped about twenty-five feet into the air. “You asshole,” he said when he could talk again. But we were laughing, which felt good.

“Let's go to D.C.,” said Ronnie.

So at two in the morning, the five of us, with Mitchell, got into Ronnie's car and drove downtown to the Lincoln Memorial. Together we climbed the steps and stood in front of Abraham Lincoln, the true inspiration for our play. Then we stood looking up at the very words we had spoken.
With malice toward none; with charity for all …
We read the words out loud just as we had read them in our performance, saying the last lines together.

I pulled out my camera and gave it to Mitchell. Joey, Holly, Ronnie, Eric, and I stood underneath the words of
Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address. We posed for a photo and then the five of us stood once more in front of Abraham Lincoln. We stood there a long time, and after promising we would be friends forever, we headed back down the steps.

We knew that we didn't have it in us to re-form the team senior year and come up with another project. Several weeks after we returned from Maryland, National History Day officials wrote us to say that the history team would be receiving national medals in a special ceremony in Indiana and official letters of regret. They would also be paying special attention to their scoring methods and reevaluating those methods, based on what had happened to us. For us, it was small compensation for the loss we'd endured.

But there was so much we had gained. We were different, diverse, but we had come together and worked together and were disappointed together and had our hearts broken together. After a while we forgot that Tom Dehner was ever on the team. It seemed like Eric had always been there, from the very start.

After it was all over, Ronnie wrote me a letter. I was in New York City for the summer with my mom.

The Richmond State Hospital

No smoking, loud talking, spitting on the floors or stoves will be tolerated.

—General Rules of St. Stephen's Hospital, Richmond, Indiana, 1884

Christmastime in Richmond meant several things: snow days, freezing temperatures, the live manger scene at First Methodist Church on National Road West, Christmas lights and decorations on the downtown Promenade, our dog Tosh howling along with the piano as my mom played our favorite Christmas carols, and long lists to my grandparents detailing every single thing I wanted (posters of Duran Duran, Cheap Trick, and Rick Springfield; T-shirts with cute sayings on them; Esprit clothes; new record albums from all my favorite bands …). It also meant Lois Potts's annual
Quaker Christmas project for the community. This was when Lois Potts—my former Girl Scout leader, the same Lois Potts who had chosen me to play the Virgin Mary and her daughter Kimberly to be Joseph in the yearly Christmas pageant the first year I lived in Richmond—organized members of Clear Creek Friends Meeting to visit the sick at Reid Memorial Hospital or sing carols to shut-ins or take the old people who lived at Golden Rule Nursing Center on a field trip to Richmond Square Mall.

In December 1985, Lois Potts announced that she was going to take her Christmas cheer to the Richmond State Hospital, which, until 1927, had been known as the Eastern Indiana Hospital for the Insane. We were all terrified of the Richmond State Hospital and the people who lived there—crazy people, mentally disabled people, violent people of all ages. There were even criminals who were too wicked and wild to be kept in the tiny Wayne County Jail downtown across from the Courthouse. Growing up, my friends and I lived in fear of someone escaping. Heather Craig lived near the hospital and I was almost too scared to spend the night at her house. Whenever we heard a strange noise outside, we were sure it was an escaped mental patient walking on the roof or hiding in the bushes.

When Lois Potts announced she was going to the State Hospital to sing carols and take presents, no one—adults or kids—wanted to go with her. Finally, my mother, who was both practical and kindhearted, said that she would go. She was one of the few people I knew who was not afraid of the Richmond State Hospital or the people who lived there. My father was busy, of course, but my mother would take me along. And Joey, because he was my best friend (even though he was Catholic and not Quaker), would go, too.

To prepare, my mother chose some of her favorite carols, and Joey and I practiced a dramatic reading of
'Twas the Night Before Christmas,
which we were going to deliver speech-team style, as we had many a scene from a play, in a kind of duet.

So it was that four days before Christmas break, the four of us met in the main building of the Richmond State Hospital: Lois Potts (mid-forties—dark short-cropped hair, black-rimmed glasses, no-nonsense manner, resembling a great overbearing string bean); my mother (early forties— slim, blue-eyed, black-haired, pretty, wearing some sort of mid-1980s outfit befitting a Richmond housewife); Joey (eighteen—blond, glasses, pretty); me (seventeen—brunette, pretty, and boy crazy as could be).

We were not alone. This was ward-party day at the hospital. There were Santa Clauses of various shapes and ages, and bags of gifts (two each for every patient in the twenty-three wards) and holiday goodies and punch. The Old National Road Chapter of Sweet Adelines, a women's barbershop singing group, was there to perform songs for one of the women's wards. Volunteers were there from the Eastern Gateway Kiwanis Club and Home Bible Study of Adams County, as well as West Richmond Friends Meeting, which was not to be confused with us. West Richmond Friends had been coming to the hospital at Christmastime for years, ever since a man named Orval Fetters started the tradition.

A luncheon was prepared for all of the volunteers by Frances Lippke of the hospital's dietary department, and then we were sent out to spread Christmas cheer to the crazy people.

When it came time for our particular ward assignment, one of the guards signed us in and said, “Now I'll escort you to the maximum security building.”

Lois Potts, whose arms were filled with bags of wrapped presents, didn't bat an eye. My mother, whose arms were also filled with bags of wrapped presents, said, “Excuse me?”

The guard said, “It's one of our Acute Intensive Treatment Wards. We keep them in a separate building because of security risks. We have to with the eighteen- to thirty-five-year-old maximum security male inmates. A lot of 'em are violent or dangerous to themselves or others. But don't worry. We'll have a guard with you at all times. If anything happens, we'll get you out of there.”

My mother and Joey and I stood there, staring at the guard, staring at one another. Lois Potts said, “Lead the way.”

The maximum security building was barred up and locked tight as any prison, and I knew about prisons because I had a fascination with them that went back to childhood, so much so that, at the age of nine, I had created a prison mystery series in the vein of the Nancy Drew stories:
Debby, who was the prettiest of the group, was full of mysteries and puzzles. She sang and danced in nightclubs and spent her time at home reading. Debby turned into the driveway which led to Sandsky Prison. She parked the car and climbed out. “Ah, smell that fresh air!” she said, spreading her arms far apart.

My parents weren't sure where this fascination came from—it was just one of those mysterious, unexplainable interests of mine, like my unreasonable love and affinity for Jesse James, Sweden, tambourines, and Kraft Macaroni & Cheese.

The maximum security ward looked a lot like a prison, so much so that a tiny part of me did a thrilling little jump as the guard let us in.

The inmates, as they called them, were very happy to
see us. These were men, black and white, big and strong, tall and short, broad and skinny—but most of them big and strong and broad—who, as my mom said later, looked as if they had not seen a female in years. They remained happy—and friendly, and surprisingly well-behaved—throughout the singing of Christmas carols (Lois Potts banging away at the piano), the opening of presents, and the eating and drinking of refreshments.

At one point I went into the kitchen to look for some more paper cups, and a boy followed me in there. He was maybe a couple years older than I, with feathered blond hair that was also a little wavy. He had dark eyes and he was good-looking in a bad news kind of way. He shambled when he walked and had an air about him like he had been horribly wounded and hurt by someone somewhere down the line. He reminded me of Matt Dillon in
Rumble Fish.

“Hey,” he said. He kind of slumped against the counter.

“Hey.”

“You got any cigarettes?”

“No.”

He shrugged, and then he smiled and it was wicked and sweet all at once, and I thought,
Uh-oh.

He said, “What's your name?”

I said, “Jennifer,” wondering if I should have told him my real name, if maybe now he might break out one night and come find me. He was, after all, a patient in the eighteen- to thirty-five-year-old maximum security all-male ward at the state mental health facility.

He said, “I'm Andy. What year are you?”

“Senior.”

He nodded. “I was a senior when they busted me.”

Thrillthrillthrill.
“What did they bust you for?”

“Drugs. I was stupid. And now I'm here getting clean.”

It was the same little thrill I felt when I looked at the cover of Cheap Trick's
Heaven Tonight,
at Tom Petersson's bloodshot eyes, and imagined all the wicked and unspeakable things he had done even minutes before the picture was snapped—smoking, drinking, having sex, maybe even taking drugs.

Andy said, “Maybe I could call you sometime.”

I was trying to picture him calling and my dad answering in one of his many foreign accents. “Do they ever let you out of here?” I said. Where would we go? I tried to imagine us at a football game or at Noble Roman's or Clara's or at Rip's house for a party. Would I have to drive? Was he allowed to drive? Did he even have a license?

“No, but I don't have much longer. I'd like to take you out.”