Second Sight (16 page)

It was odd, Sherry thought, how the same drive to some distant place never seemed as long the second time around. They reached Stockton in less than four hours, which included a three-mile stretch of construction on I-87 with hundreds of orange cones and not a single highway worker.

Once they left the interstate she saw tulips beginning to bloom. They had long been out of Philadelphia and Sherry was surprised once more at the cool temperature and the number of chimney fires and the smell of burnt wood in the air.

“Betsy working today?”

Brigham shook his head.

“Well, are you ever going to tell me what she is doing?”

“She said she’d meet us at the tavern at two.”

“You know, I’m so glad I have eyes to witness this one remarkable event in my life.”

“Oh, stop being so dramatic.”

“We’ll make it there by then?” she asked.

He nodded.

Sherry reached to touch her Braille watch and smiled inwardly at the gaffe—for what, the thousandth time, was it? She glanced down and judged they were less than twenty minutes away. She pulled the visor down and checked herself in the mirror. She couldn’t say if it was because she cared what she saw or if she was only making up for all the times she hadn’t been able to do it before.

“Did you date a lot before you met your wife, Mr. Brigham?” Sherry asked.

“I dated a few women,” he said, not committing to a number.

“How did you know Lynn was the one?”

Brigham looked at her, then back at the road.

“You just know,” he said. “It isn’t about any one thing.”

“Did you ever have regrets?”

“None that mattered,” he said.

“Did you ever wonder if she had regrets?”

Brigham was silent for a while, but Sherry sensed he was mulling it over.

“I think I could have spent more time with her,” he said at last.

“Because you were in the navy?”

“Because of that, because of the committees I was on, because I thought I was indispensable to the government.”

“She was happy, though. You two were happy?”

“She never said different.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to put it that—”

“There were never any bad anythings,” Brigham said grouchily. “We were apart a lot, is all. I don’t think either of us would have chosen differently if we had a second time around.”

Stockton was all but deserted on a Wednesday afternoon. A wind was coming out of the north and whipping new buds on the trees. A stop sign wobbled on its post and the single flashing traffic signal in town was swinging on its cable.

“Looks like an
X-Files
episode,” Sherry said. “Where is everybody?”

Brigham turned to look at her. “Is that what you do all night long? Watch TV?”

“Just rounding myself out,” she said defensively.

The parking lot of Grant’s was empty but for a red Saab; likewise the small public parking lot across the street, where someone had chained an old bicycle.

Brigham held Sherry’s arm as they pushed through the gusting wind to the door.

The lobby smelled like old leather and sawdust; the hallway to the dining room hinted of delicious smoked food from the grill.

“Now I’m hungry,” she said. “For red meat.”

“We can do that.” Brigham removed his sports jacket and pulled Sherry’s sweater from her shoulders.

Betsy was in a corner of the dining room, next to a woman with completely white hair. There was an old album on the table between coffee cups and empty soup bowls. Betsy stood and offered them hugs rather than handshakes, a gesture that might only reflect small-town friendliness or perhaps was calculated to beguile Mr. Brigham.

Betsy introduced them. “Carla McCullough Corcoran, Sherry Moore”—they shook hands—“and Mr. Garland Brigham.”

“Pleased, Mrs. Corcoran,” he said.

Brigham and Sherry took seats opposite the women.

“I can’t believe that someone has mentioned my Jack’s name after all these years.” Mrs. Corcoran reached out and cupped both of her hands over Sherry’s and then Brigham’s.

Carla had a soft face and beautiful blue eyes. Sherry noticed that her nails were filed and polished, her hair was smart and short, and she wore a lamb’s wool sweater with a pair of designer stonewashed jeans.

“We can’t thank you enough for seeing us, Mrs. Corcoran.”

“Oh, pooh.” She took her hands away and waved them over the table. “But it’s not exactly Jack you’re interested in?” Carla had a knack for using her eyes, centering on you, making you feel as if you were the object of her attention, and the only object. Betsy had mentioned that Carla was a retired schoolteacher, and Sherry was sure she had used the technique to effect in many a classroom over the years.

“I met a man in Philadelphia,” Sherry started to say. “Not really met, but he was…”

“I know who you are, Miss Moore,” Carla said kindly. “I think you mean to say you met a dead man.”

Sherry laughed with embarrassment, determined not to underestimate this woman.

“He was from the hospital here, Betsy told me.”

“Yes, yes,” the old woman said.

“Betsy said you knew about him too?”

“Of course I did.” She laughed. “Everyone in town knew about him. The staff always joked how at least that poor boy was getting his money’s worth out of Uncle Sam. After a while the townspeople began to ask about how he was doing every year, glad to hear he lived another one on the government’s dime.”

“The town doesn’t much hold the government in esteem.” Brigham didn’t quite phrase it as a question.

“Oh, we’ve got nothing against the government….” Carla shook her head slowly, eyes alive with light. Happy eyes, Brigham thought. “No different than any other town around the country. But there was a time here we were all part of something bigger. Back then a lot of strangers came through town, quiet people, maybe even scared people, we thought. They were from the military, of course.”

Carla picked up a pack of soup crackers and worked at tearing them open. “You ever see anybody that looked like they were crumbling under the weight of their own knowledge?” The old woman turned her eyes on Sherry. “You ever felt like that your
self? Like you heard something that changed your life and you couldn’t unhear it again?”

Sherry thought of New Mexico and nodded. “Yes. I think I know what you mean.”

Sherry found that she very much liked the manner of Carla McCullough Corcoran.

“That’s what they reminded me of. Some of them came to the hospital after my husband brought the boy there. There were a couple of high-ranking officers, he said, from that army base of theirs, and the asylum administrators let the army do pretty much as they pleased back then. When the staff began to ask about the boy’s relatives, they sealed off the room and had their own doctors brought in. I heard all this much later, of course. After Jack was gone.”

Betsy nodded, as if remembering the times she had heard the same story, over and over.

“A day after they found him at the foot of Mount Tamathy they concluded he was brain-dead.” She glanced at Betsy. “They’ve got better words for that now, I’m sure, but it’s all the same. Anyhow”—she looked back at Sherry—“they just left after that. Betsy knows more about the rest than I do. I heard the army’s doctors spent some time with the asylum’s administrator and the administrator later announced to the staff that Thomas Monahan had no living relatives and he was moved to the old E Annex, where they kept terminal patients back then.”

“Your husband was in charge of security at the hospital.”

“It really was an asylum,” Carla smiled. “Still is. Asylum’s not such a bad word. Means shelter from danger, refuge.”

After a pause, Carla opened the photo album she had brought. “That’s Jack,” she said, her little finger poking at a tall man sitting at a dining room table.

“Handsome,” Sherry said softly.

Carla nodded, never taking her eyes from the picture. Sherry watched her gaze drift ever so slightly, teeth catching her upper
lip. She flipped pages. “He was the first one to find Monahan.” She sighed, stopping at a page and turning the album to face Sherry and Brigham. “That’s the only thing Jack ever said about the whole thing. That he found the boy. Oh, look here.” She pointed. “This is what the asylum looked like back then. They’ve fixed it up quite a bit now.” She scrunched her face. “Now that mental illness is respectable.”

“Monahan was AWOL when your husband found him.”

“Well, no one ever came out and said so, but he’d been running in the opposite direction from the base when he was seen that morning, so you can draw your own conclusions.” Carla looked around the table. “Still in uniform. Jack said he’d jumped from the Tamathy summit.”

“That’s what he said? He used the word ‘jumped’?”

She nodded. “That’s what he said to me. I guess no one could prove it one way or another, ’cause the boy never came to consciousness again.”

“They documented this, of course? Took a report of some kind?”

Carla nodded. “Jack kept a security log of all incidents on the property. He was very meticulous about things like that.”

“But it wasn’t there in the seventies when I was at the asylum,” Betsy said. “Security looked for it, we all looked for it. Believe me when I tell you, it isn’t in that building.”

“So the army got to it?”

“All other records from the fifties and sixties are in archives in the basement.” Betsy shrugged. “Besides, I’ve never heard a better explanation.”

“What about the administrators?”

“You saw the portraits in the lobby,” Betsy said. “They changed administrators like you change tires over the years. Who could doubt the government had one or more of their own people in charge in the last fifty years?”

“What else did your husband say about it?”

“Really nothing.” Carla’s eyes locked on Sherry’s and she wagged a finger. “And that was unusual for Jack. I knew it had happened an hour or two after they got him to the emergency room. Jack came home tired. He’d been searching the mountain all day and now he had the boy’s blood all over him. He said he just wanted to shower and change.” She resumed slowly flipping through the album. “He was upset, I could tell. He’d just found this boy dying at the bottom of the rocks, and that’s not easy, I don’t think it matters how much bad stuff you’ve seen before. It can’t get all that much easier.”

Her eyes turned slightly to the right, but she wasn’t so much looking at the rough wood wall as looking through it.

“You know, he mentioned the boy’s eyes,” Carla said discordantly. “They were bleeding from inside his head.”

The memory must have taken her by surprise, Sherry thought.

“He said he’d never seen anything like that boy’s eyes before. That’s when he was walking out the door to go back to the asylum. It seemed to me then that there was something else he wanted to say, but I figured we’d talk it out later when he got home, that’s the way he was. But he didn’t talk it out later. Not ever. It was like it never happened after that day and the one time I prodded he had nothing at all to say.”

“Which was strange?” Betsy nodded encouragingly at Carla.

Carla shook her head. “Which wasn’t like him at all. We talked about everything that bothered him at work. Jack wasn’t a man of many words. Not out in public, but we had a different relationship. He confided in me about everything and I confided in him. We took on life as a team. I don’t know how these young working couples do it today. They go out to their own lives every day and meet for a few hectic hours in the middle, picking up or dropping off children, maybe even trading them for a night or a weekend, and they never talk. How anyone can take all the world
has to throw at you alone is beyond me. I mean, you do what you’ve got to do, but it’s a whole lot easier to share your problems with another person. Life was a lot less stressful when I had Jack. Colter, my current husband”—her eyes moved to Sherry, then Brigham—“he has friends of his own. He owns a golf course on the Ashokan, so he gets his stress out on the green, or more likely, in the clubhouse.” She grinned. “We don’t talk like Jack and I did, but then everyone is different.”

Carla touched the album with a finger. “Jack had opinions about what went on up there at that army base. I know he did. But he didn’t say a thing about it in front of me.” She took a drink of water and dabbed her lip with a paper napkin.

“I talked to Emmet Fry at a company picnic years later. He was Jack’s deputy at the time and became the chief of security after Jack died. Anyhow, Emmet asked me if Jack had ever talked to me about the incident with the Monahan boy. I told him what Jack had said about the boy jumping from the rocks and he looked surprised, like he’d never considered the idea that the boy committed suicide before. He said, Carla, are you sure Jack said the boy jumped? And I told him yes, I was sure. That was exactly the word Jack used. Then Emmet told me he and Jack had seen freshly dug graves inside the fence of Area 17, way around on the far side of the base. That was the last time he or I ever spoke of it.”

Carla shook her head and looked around the room. Her eyes were getting watery and she was rubbing a finger back and forth across the table. She leaned toward her friend. “Emmet’s been gone almost a dozen years now, wouldn’t you say, Betsy?”

“About that, dear,” Betsy answered.

“Jack wasn’t right after that day.” She began to draw figure eights on the tabletop with her finger. “I think he was afraid of something. I think he was afraid for both of us.”

“Afraid of the army, you mean?” Sherry asked.

The old woman shrugged. “Who else?”

“Jack died right after the incident, Carla?” Sherry said.

The woman nodded. “Five weeks later.”

“Nothing else was happening in his life at that time?”

She shook her head, still drawing figure eights. Her eyes had lost focus, as if she had left them all sitting there at the table and gone away for a time. Then she laughed all at once and sat back, folding her arms across her chest. “The time capsule.” She smiled.

“Time capsule?”

“They were all the rage back then, ever since the World’s Fair in 1939,” Carla said. “They buried a big one that year in Manhattan that was to be opened in five thousand years. The thing weighed something like eight hundred pounds. Westinghouse manufactured it, I remember, and it was filled with crop seeds and literature, threads and microscopes, newsreels, phone books, and on and on. After that a lot of schools started making their own time capsules and of course when students of one school heard about it they told others and pretty much every school ended up having to bury one of the darned things.