You Are Not a Stranger Here - Adam Haslett [13]
“About a year after he started hanging around the Green boy, I was sitting in the drive waiting for him to come out—he’d spent all day in that barn, we were late. Before he left the porch, he took his instrument out of the case.”
Her jaw tightened, her lips barely moving.
“We’d bought the violin together. Years ago, on a trip to Saint Louis. His father had given him the money and he’d stood on his toes to hand it to the salesman. That day I was waiting in the car to take him to his lesson, he walked up and smashed his violin on the hood. Said he was tired, didn’t feel like going that afternoon. That’s what he said: tired. Just like that. Walked back into the barn.”
In her voice, there was only the blankness of reporting. Not a trace of sorrow.
“You’re a doctor in these parts,” she said. “You must know all about methamphetamine.”
Frank nodded. He’d seen some of it in the clinic, and heard more. It had become the drug of choice for kids out here, cheaper than coke and without the hippie connotations of pot. In the end, it wasn’t the drug itself that got people but the lack of sleep it caused. After three or four days of no rest the body collapsed or slipped into psychosis.
“I told his father he had to do something, had to go to the Greens, or down to the school, find out who they were getting it from. But Jack—he didn’t have it in him. The bank had been shut three years, he was scared of everything by then.
“I suppose I should have put Jason in the car and driven him out of here, gone with him somewhere. I didn’t, though. I just took it from him whenever I could. I searched his room every day for those little envelopes of crystals. I checked the pockets of his trousers, begged him to stop. You know, once I even told him I’d buy him marijuana instead. His own mother. When the police finally caught the two of them buying it in the parking lot down by the market, I was glad. I thought it would shake him up. He spent three months up at Atkinson, at the juvenile center.” She caught Frank’s look. “You think that was a mistake.”
“It’s a rough place, but it was out of your hands.”
“Well, you’re right. It didn’t help. He was worse when he got back, angrier, more confused. And he still did it. I don’t think he even stopped while he was in there—how that can be, how they can run a jail where children can get drugs, I just don’t know how that can be . . . and of course he was so young, just sixteen, boys at that age—” She broke off. “All those hormones in him . . . I suppose the drug—” She stopped again, covering her mouth with her hand.
“I was here, in the living room. It was a Sunday. Jack had taken the kids over to visit his sister. Jason had been so erratic those last few days, we were trying to keep the younger ones away from him. He’d been out till dawn that morning and the morning before and then up there in his room all day, but not sleeping, I could tell he wasn’t sleeping. I was waiting for him to come down to eat something. I kept thinking, just one more conversation, we’d talk and somehow . . .
“I was right here on the couch. I heard his door open, and then I heard him crying. It was like years ago when he was a boy and he’d had an upset at school and I’d sit with him out there on the porch with his head in my lap