Crystal Grader by Tag Cavello (read my book txt) 📕

Jarett would have none of it. He paused to light a candle at the top of the stairs, and then another in his bedroom. The blizzard screeched at the window, rattling its sash. He opened the closet door and reached up. Seconds later a copper colored steel box was in his hand.

“Okay,” he nodded at her, “let’s do this.”

The certainty in his tone was the most terrifying thing she’d ever heard. Whatever it was he meant to do, there’d be no stopping it. Nevertheless, someone had to try.

After Jarett placed the box on the bed Crystal reached out with her free hand to block the keyhole.

“Jarett, please! Please! You’re not thinking straight!”

“Oh but I am,” he said, brushing her hand aside. From somewhere he’d gotten a small silver key. It shined like an icicle as he placed it in the hole, turned it.

The box clicked open.

“Crystal,” Jarett said, an air of theatricality in his tone as he drew the lid back, “meet Luke.”

“Luke?”

“Why, my gun, of course.”

A gleaming arc of blue steel rose into the air on a hand steady with purpose. Crystal shrank back from it. Never in her life had she beheld a shape so ominous. A curved line silhouetted against the window, just the right size for a finger to squeeze. A black cylinder. An even blacker promise of things to come.

“Jarett, what are you going to do?” she asked, shaking so hard she could barely keep hold on the lantern.

“Nothing complicated, Crystal. Don’t worry.” She heard a heavy click in the shadows. He’d cocked the gun. “It’s just…time to stop making mistakes, that’s all. Time to stop making mistakes.”

And before she could scream for him to stop, Jarett pointed the gun and squeezed the trigger.

29

Lucretia drove to Norwalk as fast as her nerves would allow. That was usually plenty fast enough. Usually…but not today. As she cruised west on route 20, she tried to get her hands to stop shaking, to get her heart to slow down. Wasted endeavors, both. Although her daughter had been in and out of the hospital for years with the condition that ailed her, there was just no getting used to those emergency phone calls from Fisher-Titus Memorial, nor these countryside drives to answer them.

Thus she was forced to drive with extra caution so as not to wind up in a bed right beside Crystal. It took just over half an hour to reach the hospital, where she parked the car crookedly next to an SUV with a JESUS SAVES bumper sticker on the back and ran into the emergency room. A plump woman looked up at her from behind the desk. Lucretia gave her name and was sent into room twelve. Here she discovered a short, oriental doctor and two nurses watching a young woman writhe and scream on the floor.

“Crystal!” she yelled, pushing the doctor back. “Crystal, I’m here! It’s your mom!”

From the cold, hard tiles, Crystal’s eyes looked up. Every muscle in her body had gone tight as a rail. Her teeth were clenched. A trickle of blood ran from her nose.

“Help me! Help me PLEASE!”

“Madame?” the doctor said.

Lucretia glared at him. “What are you doing? Help her!”

“We need to glean the characteristics and effects of the seizure in order to provide proper treatment—“

“You already know that stuff! She’s been in and out of here since she was fourteen!”

“Is your daughter on medication?” the doctor asked, unruffled.

“Of course she’s on medication! Where is Doctor Burdette? Why isn’t he here?”

As she spoke Crystal at last began to relax. Her body stopped shaking. Her breaths came in deep and slow. Lucretia knelt down next to her but was quickly asked by the nurses to let them assist the patient back to her bed.

“Where am I?” Crystal asked, once her head was on the pillows.

Lucretia stroked her hair. “You’re in the hospital, sweetheart.”

“Again?”

“Yes. Did you take your dilantin?”

“I must have forgot.”

“Honey.”

The oriental doctor, who introduced himself as Doctor Fernando, had questions for Lucretia once Crystal’s condition was stabilized. A clipboard rested in his hand, which he paused to scribble on after every answer she gave.

“Does she have epilepsy?” he wanted to know first.

“Brain damage,” Lucretia said. “From a gunshot.”

“My goodness.” His pen scribbled on the board. “And this happened when she was fourteen?”

“Yes.”

“Are the seizures always grand mal?”

“Most of the time.”

“And how often do they occur?”

“Anywhere from once a month to once every three months. Or when she misses her medication.”

“Have there been any surgical attempts to correct the problem over the years?”

Lucretia shook her head. “They can’t. There are…bullet fragments at the base of her skull. She’s inoperable. I have to keep an eye on her, but today she snuck off while I was in the basement doing laundry.”

“Snuck away to the farm?”

“I suppose so.”

She had to pause here for a long breath. A lump the size of a grapefruit threatened to crush her throat. Why, oh why, were these terrible questions being repeated after so many years? Couldn’t once just be enough?

“Is Doctor Burdette in the hospital?” she asked again.

***

And of course he wasn’t in the hospital. He was in Michigan, giving a lecture on the effects of marijuana on the brain. Doctor Fernando decided to keep Crystal overnight. Lucretia stayed at her bedside. They watched cartoons. They ate hospital food. Crystal drank chocolate milk with almost every meal. That was just another thing that had changed. She barely knew what Diet Coke was anymore.

At noon of the following day she was discharged. Lucretia helped her up the stairs to her bedroom. This twenty-five year-old woman, who not so long ago had sprang these steps two at a time in a cheerleading skirt, could no longer maintain sufficient balance to reach the top on her own.

Once in bed she asked to have the television turned on. Disney Junior was her favorite channel. Lucretia obliged. Sophia The First flickered onto the screen, riding the back of a winged dragon.

“Thanks, Mom,” Crystal said.

Suddenly her eyes began to blink rapidly, and for a moment Lucretia braced herself. But then Crystal relaxed. She took a coloring book from the headboard, opened it, and went back to watching TV.

“Your crayons are right behind you, dear,” Lucretia said.

“Okay. Can I have soup later?”

“You can have soup right now, sweetheart. What kind?”

Crystal smiled. And at that moment, that one instant which lasted less than a second, she was the girl who lived in Lucretia’s memory. Bright-eyed. Focused. Intent on what she wanted. Yes, always intent, that was the Crystal of old. She could never seem to take no for an answer. Now she was back. The smiling girl. The girl who shined.

And then, like a ghost seen through a half closed door, she was gone.

“Later,” she said.

“Okay.”

Lucretia hesitated. Desperate to somehow have that moment back, she told Crystal: “Hannah’s on her way down from Cleveland. She’ll be here this afternoon.”

“Why’s she in Cleve…Clevelan?”

“She lives there, honey.”

“She lives in North Fairfield.” The name of this town came out perfectly for some reason, every time she said it. But when it came to how Hannah’s life had turned out, Lucretia was yet to convince Crystal of a different truth.

“Miko lives in North Fairfield,” Lucretia tried again.

Crystal’s eyes looked up from the TV. “Did I tell you we’re getting a divorce?”

“Are you sure you were ever married?”

“Yes,” Crystal said, nodding. “We were happy for awhile. We had Luke.”

“Your baby.”

The smile returned, but it wasn’t quite the same as before. It wasn’t quite right. Crystal had pictures going through her mind that were like the ones in the coloring book. Clearly outlined yet badly filled in. And of course, none of them could be taken off the page.

“Yes,” she said, her tone dreamy. “Is he here, Mom? I want to hold him.”

“He’s here, sweetheart. Let me get him for you.”

Lucretia left the room. She could not let Crystal keep Luke with her all the time, because there were times when he made her lash out, lose control. They didn’t come often, but when they did, Crystal would actually throw him against the wall and start breaking things. Doctor Burdette’s theory on this behavior involved frustration. Luke represented something she wanted but could never have, and rather than accept that, she became angry. Downright furious.

“So she knows that Luke is just a doll?” Lucretia had asked at one time.

“Every so often the reality…manifests itself,” Burdette replied.

But it didn’t manifest itself today. Crystal accepted the doll—a brown-haired Baby Alive—with as much tenderness as a mother holding her newborn for the first time. She cuddled and cooed. She showed it her coloring book. As always, Lucretia stayed for awhile and played the grandmother game. They talked about going shopping for baby clothes and baby blankets. Formula and toys. Sometimes she had fun with it; sometimes it made her bored. Mostly, though, it made her so sad she wanted to run to her bedroom and cry until the world no longer lived.

That was what she was doing three hours later when a knock came at the door. Lucretia looked up from the black, charred book in her hands. Another, final tear fell. And then everything froze.

“Mom?” a voice said from the hallway. “It’s me, Hannah.”

“Oh God,” Lucretia breathed.

Her feet took her to the door fast as she could get them to move. She yanked it open. A crisp, beautiful, blonde-haired lady stood on the other side, dressed in a business suit.

“Hannah!”

“Hey, Mom,” she said, smiling. “How are things?”

“They’ve been better, dear. In fact I could really use a hug.”

Hannah raised her arms. And in that moment Lucretia was so grateful, she burst into tears all over again.

30

The prison psychiatrist’s name was Doctor Mark Cookie. The prisoners all called him Cookie, which was fine, he didn’t mind. To his face he was addressed as Doctor by the staff, but of course, behind his back, they all called him Cookie, too. This didn’t bother him either. People had been calling him by his last name ever since grade school. Even the teachers. He’d been a boy with a sense of humor, and he kind of liked the way it sounded. Plus, all the girls thought it was cute, and who could complain about that?

Today he still found laughter to be good medicine. Not the best, maybe, but pretty good. Over the twenty years he’d been practicing psychology, he’d found that earning a patient’s laughter was almost the same as earning his trust. Thus, he often liked to break the ice with new patients by telling a joke. A good joke, not one of his own. He saved all of his own jokes for his wife, who never laughed. That was his revenge for eighteen years of loveless matrimony.

The patient in front of him now did not look ready to laugh at anything. He was fifty-four years old—the same age as Cookie. He lay on an infirmary bed with one eye closed (it had been punched black by someone very strong), one arm in a cast, and one tooth protruding from an otherwise empty row of bloody gums. His good eye hovered on the doorway behind him, as if at any moment an explanation for all the hell he’d endured would walk through. Cookie looked back, saw nothing, then returned his gaze to the patient.

“Hello,” he said. “My name is Doctor Cookie. I’m the prison psychiatrist.”

The patient kept quiet. In the dim glow of the infirmary lights, he looked like a corpse. Skin pale, lips drawn back. Instinctively, Cookie looked down at his toe for a tag. He couldn’t see the other’s foot, though, and thank goodness. It was under the sheet.

“I’m writing a book,” he went on, “about different kinds of criminals and their motivations. I hope to produce the definitive work.