Every time I walked past Haylee’s room, even with the door shut, I’d stop and listen, recalling the sound of her voice when she was talking on her phone. Sometimes she would pause and call to me. “I know you’re there, Kaylee,” she would say when I was standing just outside. She’d laugh. “My sister is eavesdropping. She’s looking for pointers on how to talk to you boys,” she’d tell the boy she was toying with on the phone, and then laugh at something he might have said.
I’d hurry away, trying to deny to myself that she was right.
Finally, on the third day, when my father returned home from work, he announced that Haylee’s doctor had approved the idea of my visiting.
“As your parent and guardian, I gave Dr. Sacks permission to send Haylee’s doctor your psychological therapy report,” he told me. “Dr. Alexander, Haylee’s psychiatrist, asked to see it first before deciding whether to allow the visit right now. She received it yesterday.”
“Why did she want my report? Why did she want to know about me?”
“She likes to know the minefield she’s crossing,” he said, half kidding. “Anyway, she’s approved the visit, so I’ll take you there this Saturday.”
Now that I was going to do it, I grew very nervous and questioned whether I really should see her. I certainly didn’t want to forgive her, at least not this soon and not without seeing her show some shame and regret.
My father sensed my hesitation. “You don’t have to do this. No one, least of all me, would expect you to care one iota about her ever again. I mean it.”
“We can’t hate each other, Daddy. It’s just not possible,” I said.
Did I believe it myself, even though I sounded so sincere?
He didn’t look disappointed. It was, after all, difficult, if not impossible, for a parent to hate his own child, even a child who had done so much damage to all of us.
After a moment, he smiled. “I wonder if she’ll ever say the same thing about you.”
I couldn’t help but wonder myself. There was only one way to find out.
And like most things you’re not sure of and fear, you half wonder if you’re better off not knowing after all.
2
It was a beautiful September day, too beautiful to spend in the confines of a mental institution, especially one housing people who had committed evil and illegal acts, although I was surprised at how perfectly the grounds were kept. Men were mowing the grass and trimming hedges as
if it were some wealthy person’s estate. There were flower beds with a mixture of red, white, and pink evenly spaced along the front and pretty maple and oak trees with redwood benches beneath some of them. From the road, no one could recognize what this place was. Even the sign announcing it as we drove up the long approach to the stark L-shaped, three-story white stucco building was written in small letters, more like a whisper voiced by someone embarrassed or ashamed.
The windows on the second and third floors were smaller than those on the first. I imagined one of them to be Haylee’s room, but there were no bars. In fact, other than the guard at the entrance, there was nothing dramatic to indicate that the people inside were kept there against their will. No walls or high fences surrounded the property and certainly no barbed wire.
I was still thinking prison. My father hadn’t told me much about the place. He didn’t like talking about his visits here, and I had stopped asking, but a part of me was hoping at least to see it as austere, cold, and ugly. I wanted Haylee to be unhappy from the day she had been brought here. I wanted her to immediately see something that would tell her she was a person not welcome in society and that there would be no rewards for what she had done. This was supposed to be where people were sent when they were wrong, whether they could help it or not.
I was disappointed when we drove up, imagining the first day Haylee was brought here. She hadn’t cringed at the sight of it; that was for sure. Knowing her so well, I thought she had probably smiled, laughing inside at how successful she had been in convincing a judge she wasn’t really responsible for what she had done.
Off to the right, I saw a tall man in a light blue short-sleeved shirt and dark slacks talking to a teenage boy dressed in a black T-shirt with some rock-band insignia in bright green letters around a stark-white skull. He wore jeans and a pair of white running shoes. The man had his right hand on the boy’s shoulder and looked like a coach talking to a member of his team. The boy was nodding his head and listening. He was obviously not an employee.
This answered one of my first questions. The inmates or patients—I wasn’t sure what to call them—weren’t wearing uniforms. It was another disappointment. I knew how much Haylee would have hated that, and I’d been looking forward to seeing her in something drab, something that clearly identified her as a prisoner and not a visitor, and something especially unfeminine.
At least, there was a guard in a dark blue uniform with a large silver badge at the booth you had to pass in order to enter the parking lot. He looked up from a magazine he was reading and waited for my father to lower his car window and hand him his driver’s license. The guard nodded like he recognized him. Nevertheless, he copied my father’s information on a clipboard and handed the license back to him. Then he nodded at me. My father had told me to make sure I brought my driver’s license, too. I dug it out of my purse quickly and handed it to my father, who handed it to the guard. The man looked at my picture and at me, pausing a moment like someone suspicious, and then wrote the information on the clipboard.
How much did he really know about us? I wondered. Had he ever seen Haylee? Did he think my father had somehow gotten permission to take Haylee out for a while and was now returning her? Perhaps he didn’t know or see any of the inmates or patients here. If he was able to see Haylee, I was sure he’d be amazed at how alike we looked, just as most strangers were when they first confronted the two of us, and maybe he’d wonder why one of us had ended up here.
My father gave me my license and drove into the parking lot. I could sense from how tight his jaw was and the stiff way he held himself that he hated being here, detested it, in fact. He had his shoulders hoisted like someone anticipating a blow. After he shut off the engine, he sat for a moment, his teeth clenched, and I was thinking he might be changing his mind.
“Okay, here’s how this is going to work,” he began, sitting there and looking forward as if he were reciting. “There is a lobby much like a hospital lobby. We’re going to sign you in there, too, and then we’ll wait for Haylee’s doctor, Dr. Laura Alexander, to come for you. She will take you to her office and talk to you for a while. She’s going to want to feel comfortable about your visit with Haylee. I’m not sure if she’ll let me go with you to her office.”
“She’s going to want to feel comfortable about my visit? Why does she have to feel comfortable about it?”
“Maybe comfortable is the wrong word. I mean she has to be sure she’s doing the right thing in allowing the visit. She knows what Haylee has done to you. Ordinarily, people who have been victimized by the people in there, injured in some way or another, don’t visit them, even when they are members of the same family. Dr. Alexander doesn’t want anything unpleasant to happen here that might disturb Haylee.”
“What? Disturb Haylee? She’s worrying about disturbing Haylee?”
“You’ll have to understand that her first concern is for Haylee and not you, Kaylee. You’re not her patient; Haylee is. From what I’ve gathered from talking to her about this, I think she’s agreed to your visit because she wants some confirmation that Haylee is truthfully regretful or moving clearly in that direction.”