Chapter 22

What’s Your Name? Who Are You?

As soon as we get home, my mother makes me eat two bananas, because she thinks all the running depleted my potassium and that’s why I fainted. Then she brews me one of her teas and loads it up with honey. What I’m really craving is something more substantial, though. So Dad takes pity on me and grills up some burgers and hotdogs. Afterwards, we watch a couple of old CSI episodes together and then I head up to bed early.

In my room, I grab Jackson’s cashmere sweater off the floor. He hasn’t asked for it back yet and wearing it makes me feel warm and safe. When it comes to stealing other people’s clothes, I have no conscience. Nobody should ever lend me anything. I guess I like wearing my friends’ stuff because sometimes I miss them when they’re not here.

Jackson’s gesture, on the night of the séance, was very sweet. When I wear the sweater he lent me, I feel his kindness all over again. It’s kind of like the sweater’s giving me a hug. I feel safer, like I’m not alone.

As I drift off to sleep, my mind cruises through all the discoveries we made this afternoon and all the unanswered questions we unearthed.

At midnight I wake up shivering, even though the covers are snuggled up around my neck.

He gives the doorknob a half-hearted jiggle. The door’s open, but he rattles the doorknob anyway, to let me know he’s here. But he’s not inside of my dream this time. He’s really here. Drawing some icy-cold air into my lungs, I sit up, to make sure I’m really awake. His frigid breath hovers around my face, causing me to shiver. But I’m not afraid, just freezing.

When I realize that Wyatt’s still asleep, inhabiting his own body, safe in his own bed, I experience a sense of relief. The lost soul of the unnamed patient isn’t seizing control of him. My nameless companion has drifted in to visit me while I’m alone. And I’m not afraid because my mother explained that he would never harm us.

Collapsing back down onto my pillow, I pull the covers up to my chin. “Hey, if you’re going to keep hanging around, I’m going to have to give you a name.”

His voice rises up, out of the cold, and into my thoughts. “I think my first name is Anthony.”

“You have a voice! Without Wyatt, you have a voice.” His frigid breath floats over my skin as his name echoes inside my head. We inhabit this moment together: Anthony and me. He has a name.

“What is this, Annabelle? I’ve found myself and my voice. If not for you and Wyatt it never could’ve happened. In life, Daniel chose not to speak, but I couldn’t. Speech was impossible for me. I remember someone yelling ‘Anthony,’ just once, perhaps hoping to discover some sign of humanity within me. Someone screamed out my name.”

“Who said it?”

“I can only hear it in my memory, which has never had words before. When I was alive, I didn’t understand words, but for some reason, at that moment in time, I suddenly knew the difference between speaking and inarticulate screaming. Someone yelled, ‘Anthony.’ It was my name and somewhere, inside a deeply buried part of my soul, I knew it. Maybe, when I was really young, I heard someone say it and that memory emerged somehow.”

“Then what happened? Try to remember.”

“I had that one moment of clarity. I recognized my name. That’s all. I’ve only recently been able to think in language; since I found you and Wyatt. I don’t know whose voice spoke my name. I can’t envision a face, just the name Anthony, screamed out loud in that horrible room. I can’t remember words, but I can remember feelings: fear and hurt and sorrow, from both physical and emotional pain.”

“Pain! They hurt you?”

“They dowsed me with freezing cold water to shock me into submission. But sometimes they strapped me into a tub of warm water to try to calm me down. When I wasn’t thrashing around in that godforsaken hell-hole of a room with poor Daniel quivering in a corner, I was always restrained in some way. They bound me with leather straps and shot bolts of electricity through me as I howled and screamed and writhed like a wild creature.”

“You weren’t a wild creature, Anthony. You were a boy and someone gave you a name.”

“I’m only human because I know you, Annabelle, and I’ve discovered my humanity too late.”

“No, the part of you continuing on after your death has a purpose. You have a mission. We need to discover more. I know enough from talking to Wyatt and Nathaniel to realize there are facts that need to be revealed before you can leave us. You have a very important story, Anthony. Tell me more. Tell me everything you can remember. If we figure out what happened to you, maybe you can finally leave this earth and find someplace where you belong.”

“I don’t want to go anywhere. Now is all that matters. I don’t care about my life, my past. I only want to be here with you. In life I heard only noise and felt only pain. I experienced confusion and rage. I acted out my impulses and reacted to others by screaming, hitting, kicking, biting. I grabbed whatever I could get hold of. I dug my fingernails into human flesh and tore at it with all my strength. I remember the restraints and the shots, the injections that sent me away. My consciousness disappeared.”

“You acted out your emotions because you couldn’t express them any other way.”

“Exactly. I lived a life without the connections language helps us form. All I heard were sounds and I screamed and howled in reply, trying to drown out the hideous racket. I heard everything at once, crashing into my ears, exploding my senses. I heard many things on earth: disembodied noises and creatures, not all of them human. I heard countless sounds from hell. When I tried to end the unbearable clamor, only incoherent noise rushed up; through my throat and out of my mouth.”

“And what about Daniel?”

“Daniel was silent. He never spoke or cried out. He shrank into corners, trying to disappear from life; he didn’t rage against it. He felt petrified of everything, even me. Who can blame him? He was also scared to death of the way his body convulsed sometimes.”

“He had epilepsy. He suffered from seizures. He was a selective mute, capable of speech but unable to speak, for psychological reasons.” After I explain this to Anthony, I decide to ask the most important question of all, hoping he’ll be able to remember and make some sense out of his experiences. “What happened that night, Anthony, the night Daniel died?”

“I don’t remember. Think about it, Annabelle. I can only speak at all right now because I’ve visited the incredible library that is Wyatt’s brain. When I was alive, my mind wasn’t like that. As soon as you met Wyatt, everything changed for us. So much more became possible. I felt a connection with him immediately, but he hesitated, even though I suspect he knew all this was inevitable. I could feel his loneliness, how his talent isolated him from others, from his family, from his mother and his father. Like my parents, his mother wanted to lock him away, except he was older when it happened, and his uncle helped him.”

“But you never had anyone like Oliver to help you.”

“Nobody cared about me. I think that when my family sent me away, I must have been no more than a helpless baby. They locked me up in Wild Wood Hospital and there was nothing I could do to stop them. Everyone knew I’d grow up and grow even more repulsive, more uncontrollable.”

“No one tried to understand.”

“There are so many parallels between Wyatt and me. The way we feel about you is our most important connection.”

“Anthony, I care so much about you and Wyatt. I feel that connection, too.”

“When he finally got you alone that Sunday afternoon, he held you and your heart beat with his. I pushed at the door of his consciousness and he opened it for me.”

“You took over Wyatt’s body for the first time.”

“I looked around in his mind, but not with my eyes. I became aware of his thinking process, like a waking dream. I had access to his memory. If I felt an emotion or had a thought, the right words materialized. And I could make the words come out his mouth. But the best thing was watching your face when my words reached your ears, watching the light in your eyes intensify as you understood what I said.”

I want to hug Anthony, but he’s only a disembodied voice.

“I’m able to inhabit Wyatt’s body, Annabelle, but I only come close to being human because I know you. Wyatt and I both see you for what you truly are, someone whose beauty shines through from the inside to the outside like no other. The bond was formed. We three can’t be separated; not until we know the truth.”

“What truth, Anthony? The truth about the night you died?”

“Annabelle, what if I killed Daniel that night?”

I have to answer honestly and struggle to find the words. “I don’t know. But Anthony, you need to believe that you wouldn’t have done it intentionally. I know you would never have deliberately hurt Daniel. I truly believe that. We’ll help you. We won’t stop trying ’til we know for sure what happened. I promise.”

“I can’t think any more. I’m losing strength. Go to sleep. I have a little energy left. Let me use it to watch over you. Just leave the door open. I hate closed doors because I spent my whole life locked up behind them.”

That’s why he rattled the doorknob and opened the door!

“I’ll leave every door open from now on, Anthony.”

“In my life, in that horrible place, I hated to be locked up, restrained. I loathed being touched by those people. Now I exist only because I hope to be touched by you. When I’m in Wyatt’s body, I live and breathe and speak only so I can be close to you. Sleep, sweet angel. No one can hurt you while I’m here.”

After decades of waiting, watching and hoping, Anthony found me and now he’s experiencing something he never felt during his short tragic life. I’m his only hope. I keep thinking about this until I finally drift off to sleep, thankful that I’m loved by my family, by my friends and now by Anthony. When he lived and walked on this earth, Anthony never felt loved by anyone.