Ferris Lane

Ferris Lane

I drove 25 minutes south out of Milton, down the road that runs along the Hudson with the fall wind coming across the water.

Poughkeepsie met me with a light rain that blurred the windshield and put a gray film over the old brick blocks.

Deakins's house sat at the end of a dead-end street. It was small, ash-gray paint coming off it in flakes, hunched beside a garage roofed in rusted sheet metal.

I stopped at the curb and looked through the rain.

Thirty-one years ago the man inside that house was the worst thing in my life.

I got out, went up the rotted wood steps, and knocked.

Clack.

The door opened.

A 61-year-old man stood in the doorway.

Time had drawn off the height he used to have and left a frame of bones in a cardigan the color of oatmeal. A clear plastic line ran under his nose and down to a small portable oxygen tank on his hip. He breathed with a rasp, and every breath came with a shake somewhere inside his chest.

I stopped with my hand still on the doorframe, because of the smell coming up out of the folds of his cardigan.

Fake mint candy.

The sweet, hard smell of it went straight up my nose, the same thing he had used 31 years ago to cover the cigarettes he had quit, through 29 days of work on a 15-year-old in a holding room.

His hands were what I looked at now: the skin gone thin and spotted over the tendons, the nails cut short and square, one knuckle swollen out of line with the others.

He kept his right hand on the regulator dial, the thumb going over the knurl and back, though the needle never moved off two. His sentences came out in runs of five or six words and then stopped while he took the next breath. He took it in the same place every time, so the pauses fell where commas would have gone. The tank answered each one with a hiss a second long.

Behind him the front room had one lamp going and a stack of mail nobody had opened. The house smelled like a cabinet that stays closed, and under that, steady, the dry plastic air coming off the tank.

On the wall behind him hung a framed commendation and, beside it, a rectangle of paint two shades lighter than the rest, 14 inches by 11, the nail still in the middle of it. A concentrator sat in the corner with 25 feet of clear tubing coiled on top. A second pair of reading glasses lay folded on the windowsill, the same brown frames as the pair on his face.

The front window looked out on the garage across 10 feet of wet grass. Through the garage window I could see the back half of a car under a tarp, sitting low on both rear tires. The inspection sticker on the rear glass had gone the color of weak tea. Grass had come up through the gravel under the bumper.

Deakins looked at me. Behind the reading glasses the old clouded eyes narrowed a little. He wasn't surprised. He didn't ask who I was.

"Come in, James," he said, in a voice like two pieces of rusted stone going over each other. "You're later than I figured."

We sat across from each other at a wobbly wood table in the middle of the front room. There was nothing on it but a dish of cellophane-wrapped mints and Deakins's oxygen tank going hiss... hiss... on a steady beat.

I took out the recorder and set it on the wood. Then the copies of the psych reports, the yellowed newspapers, and the notebook with the suggestion coordinates I had just gotten out of Emily.

Deakins took off his reading glasses, unwrapped a mint, and put it in his mouth. The cellophane came apart loud in the quiet room. He sat back with his hands folded on his sunken stomach.

"Start," he said, flat. "I'm listening."

I started talking.

I left nothing out. I told him about 10 years of being dosed every night with a solution that opened up a band of nerve frequency. I told him about the glass oil bottle on the nightstand, about the transmitter named Emily, about Ethan in the basement down on the flats, about the name Kessler, and about what the psychological cleaning program had actually been when it took my adoptive parents 31 years ago.

I talked for more than an hour without stopping.

Deakins didn't interrupt me once.

He sat still as a rotted wood carving, and the only sounds were his breath going through the oxygen line and the mint knocking against his teeth, click... click..., on a schedule.

But every time I got a sentence out in the present, my head snapped back to the 29 days in the windowless room...

Crime scene photograph one.

The fluorescent tubes ran around the clock and came down flat on the cold steel table. Deakins at 30 leaned forward and pushed a can of soda toward me, the gray coming into his hair falling over his forehead. He put on the sympathetic smile he had worked out in advance:

"I know you didn't mean to, James. You were 15. You were angry at them, weren't you? Go back over it. All you have to do is tell me your hand touched the axe..." There was no axe in the file. The released file said no weapon was recovered, and it said that for 31 years.

Crime scene photograph two.

Night 24. Deakins had me backed into the dark corner of the room, and he kept his voice down, close enough that the fake mint came off his breath and onto my face:

"The man who did that to your parents ate dinner tonight. He'll sleep through the night. He gets to do that because you won't open the door in your head. I'd like you to tell me who you're keeping it shut for."

Crime scene photograph three.

Steel cuffs ticking on a 15-year-old's wrists at the bottom of the staircase in the Milton house. Deakins put both hands down on my shoulders like a clamp and turned my face toward the dried black blood on the dining room floor:

"Look at it, James. That's what the blood of the people who raised you looks like when it dries. You stood right here and watched them go. Say it."

The price of sitting across from this man today had been 29 days of my nerves coming apart into pieces.

I finished.

The last of it went into the air and stopped. The room dropped into a close silence. Outside, the rain kept hitting the metal roof of the garage.

Deakins raised one hand slowly and pulled the two lines out of his nose. He put his head down on the table and a cough came up out of the bottom of his chest. It went on close to two minutes and shook him end to end, and his face went red and then gray.

He took out a yellow-stained handkerchief, wiped the spit at the corner of his mouth, and brought his head up to look at me.

"That's all of it?" he asked.

"That's all of it," I said, with my hands folded in my lap.

Deakins put both hands on the table and pushed himself up. The cough had taken what he had, and his body was still going with it, and the eyes behind the glasses stayed on me.

"Come with me."