“Maybe we should have canceled it, Brian. It doesn’t feel right going out now. We should be helping with the searches.”
We were all in the car in the driveway waiting to back out, but a white van was blocking the way.
“They’ve got hundreds of people helping, Sheila. That policeman said we can help when we get back.” He nodded his head toward Officer Campen, who was standing by Mr. Charles’s gate. Dad had spoken to him about moving the van so that we could get going.
“… so sorry to bother you now, but we’ve got to get to an appointment for my son. We’re seeing a specialist …”
I felt sick and my knees were trembling. I just wanted to go back inside.
“I don’t mind going another day. Perhaps it would be better to wait,” I said. Mum looked over at Dad, but they both ignored me and Mum changed the subject.
“That poor Casey. Imagine being dragged out of bed this morning like that. She could have waited until she’d woken up, surely?”
Casey and Teddy’s mum, Melissa Dawson, had come straight from the airport and picked her daughter up at 5 a.m. I’d slept through the whole thing.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a child hugged quite like that before. I thought she was going to suffocate her!” Mum said. “At least it’s good news about Mr. Charles.”
Mr. Charles had gotten back from the hospital at 6:30 a.m. I had been right—it was indigestion.
Dad turned the engine on as if that would speed things up a bit.
Out my window I saw Melody, black cardigan on, arms folded, as she headed to the alleyway next to Old Nina’s house. She looked up at me and nodded and I nodded back. I’d quickly emailed her first thing this morning.
To: Melody Bird
From: Matthew Corbin
Subject: Next Assignment—The Rectory
See what you can find out about Old Nina? Take a look around!
Matthew
I twisted around to take a look at the old Victorian house. The lamp was still off.
“I wonder where Casey and Teddy’s dad is? You’d have thought he’d be around, wouldn’t you?” said Mum. She pulled her sun visor down and checked her reflection in the mirror. “Penny was on the news this morning. Only for about four seconds; she wasn’t on for as long as you were, Matthew.”
I cringed.
“They asked her how the neighbors were feeling and she said, ‘We’re all praying for little Teddy.’ That was nice, wasn’t it? She was wearing that cream blouse she wore to her niece’s wedding last year. And she’d put lipstick on. Bright pink. I don’t think that was appropriate. A touch of gloss would have been better.”
We were all quiet for a moment.
Dad fiddled with the air-conditioning and a cold blast of air hit my forehead. I was just going to ask if I could go back inside to wash my hands when two people appeared from around the side of Mr. Charles’s house wearing white jumpsuits.
“Forensic scientists,” I whispered. I recognized them from TV.
I watched as one of the forensic team peeled off a pair of latex gloves and pushed his white hood back as he walked to the van. If I had access to that kind of clothing I’d be fine. Cocooned in a protective layer—it looked perfect to me. The van moved out of the way and my stomach flipped as we slowly reversed out onto the road.
I was using my notebook again. The one I have in my head, not my pocket.
Tuesday, July 29th. 10:00 a.m. Dr. Rhodes’s office.
Number of people in office = 4
Number of people happy to be in office = 1 (and that’s only because she’s being paid)
Number of leaflets relating to mental health = 16
Number of leaflets with photographs of teenagers rubbing their foreheads = 3
Dr. Rhodes wasn’t what I was expecting. She was tiny, and her hair was fire-truck red and piled up high on top of her head (possibly to make herself appear taller), and her nose was pierced with a small diamond that glinted when she moved. She sat on a high-backed chair with a writing pad on her lap. Her feet barely reached the floor.
Dad, Mum, and I were all enveloped in a squishy, brown leather sofa the same shade as Mum’s spray-tanned legs. Dad kept coughing like he was clearing his throat to make some kind of joke, which thankfully never arrived. Mum talked constantly about Teddy going missing and how we really didn’t feel right being here at a time like this. Her posh voice was in fine form.
“We were going to cancel, weren’t we, Brian? We didn’t know what to do. I said it didn’t seem right, just carrying on as normal. Not that this is normal. But, well—you know what I mean …”
Dad rubbed his forehead and groaned quietly, but I don’t think Mum heard him.
Dr. Rhodes agreed that this was indeed a terrible situation and managed to reassure Mum that being here wasn’t being disrespectful in any way. Mum breathed a sigh of relief having been given the all clear from a professional.
On my knees rested a black, highly dangerous clipboard that had a “checklist” that she said we’d complete together in a minute. The pen kept rolling down the paper, and I pressed one latex-gloved fingertip against it to keep it still. (I couldn’t cope without wearing a glove on both hands for this, so now I had none left at all. Latex gloves = 0.)
My secret was out.
“Can I just ask who has been providing your son with gloves?” Dr. Rhodes asked with a smile.
Dad coughed again and glanced over at Mum. I quickly looked down at the form and pretended to be absorbed in the questions. One asked if any of my obsessions were accompanied by “magical thinking,” and I wondered if that had anything to do with card tricks.
“Well, doctor. I can tell you that I certainly didn’t know that my wife was supplying our son with gloves. And if I had known, I certainly wouldn’t have agreed to it.”
Every time he stressed a word he dipped his head forward like a bird pecking at a feeder.
“Brian, you’re making it sound like I was doing something criminal! It was only to protect his poor skin.”
Dr. Rhodes opened her mouth to chime in, but they were off.
“Protect him? How is that going to protect him? It’s only going to make things worse.”
“But you didn’t see the state of his hands—they were blistering from the bleach!”
Mum screeched the word bleach, and to be honest, she sounded a little bit crazy.
“But giving him gloves is only going to make him do it more, isn’t it? It’s not rocket science …”
“They were blistered, Brian,” said Mum, her face turning scarlet beneath her fake tan. “Blistered!”
She made it sound like a swearword. I sank down farther into the sofa, trying desperately to avoid the stray globules of saliva that were flying around. Dr. Rhodes put both her hands up to calm them down, and amazingly it had an effect. Maybe she knew how to use some of that “magical thinking.”
“Mr. and Mrs. Corbin, I can honestly see both of your points of view. Mrs. Corbin, I completely understand why you would want to protect your son if he’s beginning to unintentionally hurt himself, and yes, Mr. Corbin, we do find that a patient will make quicker progress if those around them do not aid their compulsions.”
My parents did some synchronized arm folding accompanied by huffing as they sat back into the deep sofa, clearly each thinking they’d won.
“Now then …” The therapist paused to put on a pair of bright green framed spectacles as she consulted her notes. “I understand that you’ve been finding it hard to go to school lately. Can you tell me why that is, Matthew?”
I opened my mouth, not sure how to start, and Dad filled the silence.
“He’s scared. Of bugs and stuff.”
“It’s not bugs, Brian. It’s germs … germs! He thinks he’s going to get sick. Don’t you, darling?”
Dr. Rhodes interrupted, saying that this was more common than we realized. She said that in a school of three thousand students there were probably around twenty young people affected with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. That was what she believed I had: OCD. But we needed to fill in a checklist to make sure.
Dad was off again.
“It’s probably because he’s grown up with you vacuuming the house every ten minutes. It’s no wonder! You’ve always overdone the housework.”
Dr. Rhodes took her glasses once more and glanced up at a clock on the wall. I looked as well and wished I hadn’t. We were approaching tenplusthree past ten. This wasn’t good.
“I’m just tidy, Brian. There’s nothing wrong with that. And if you didn’t leave all your stuff lying around all the time …”
Dad twisted across me, his bare skin pressing onto my shirt. Onto my arm.
“Oh it’s my fault again, is it? It’s always me!”
“Dad … you’re touching my arm.”
Dr. Rhodes leaned forward and squirmed in her chair. I watched the second hand on the clock pass the three.
“Mr. and Mrs. Corbin, it doesn’t work like that. In fact, OCD isn’t always about germs or cleanliness. If we could just—”
“Well, you’re not exactly a tidy man, are you, Brian? I mean, look at the state of the shed! You just open the door and fling everything in there—”
“Don’t you start on about my shed again—”
“—and then you go on and on about not being able to find anything—”
“No I don’t! I never moan about that …”
His arm brushed against mine again, and I moved away as much as I could without touching Mum.
“Dad …”
Dr. Rhodes took her glasses off and pinched the bridge of her nose.
“If you put things back where they belong, you wouldn’t make such hard work for yourself, would you?”
“Dad! Please move over a bit … You’re touching my arm!”
His attention turned to me, his face now as red as Dr. Rhodes’s hair. I’d pressed myself as far away as I could.
“Oh I’m touching your arm, am I? Am I not allowed to touch my own son?”
He twisted himself around and I leaned back as far as I could.
“What about a hug? Or a kiss on your birthday? When you get your exam results? When you pass your driving test? How about we shake hands on it, eh?”
He directed his hand toward me, his fingers tight together and his thumb pointing upward. His hand, which had felt so strong, so safe, when I’d held it as a young child, now filled me with terror. I hid my gloves under the clipboard, and Dad’s hand fell onto his lap. His face crumbled and he turned away and quietly began to cry. I thought I should say something, but my throat was shut tight. And besides, I’d looked at the clock on the wall, and the bad luck minute was here. I kept as still as I could and counted to seven repeatedly in my head. Fortunately Dr. Rhodes stepped in.
“Actually, Mr. and Mrs. Corbin, maybe this is a good time for you both to have some time-out and for me to have a little chat with Matthew on my own. Then we can decide together how we’re going to tackle this thing. Okay, Matthew?”
She looked directly at me and smiled, pretending that my dad wasn’t crying and everything was just fine. I lost track of my counting and started again.
“There’s a coffee shop next door. Go and get some fresh air and come back in about half an hour. That sound okay?”
Mum and Dad looked almost relieved to escape and they levered themselves out of the sofa, shuffling out with hunched shoulders and closing the door behind them.
“Okay. Now we can have a proper chat,” said Dr. Rhodes, smiling kindly.
She scribbled something on her pad, then looked up at me. I kept an eye on the clock. Twenty seconds to go.
“So, let’s start again. How are you, Matthew? How does it feel being here today?”
Silence.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven …
My eyes darted to the clock again and she followed my gaze.
“Is there a problem, Matthew?”
Silence.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven …
She tilted her head and waited. The second hand passed the twelve and I took a deep breath.
“No, no problem,” I said.
She frowned. I got a feeling she’d been able to look straight into my head and see all the numbers floating around as I counted. Adding seven onto the bad number made twenty and neutralized its power. She knew that. She knew exactly what I’d been doing.
“What do you want to get out of these sessions, Matthew?”
I shrugged.
“I don’t know really.”
I suddenly felt ridiculous sitting there with my stupid plastic gloves. She waited, her pencil poised as she put her head to one side. I opened my mouth but couldn’t seem to get any words out. The urge to escape from there, to get home and wash, was unbearable. My arm where Dad touched me was tingling with all of the germs that were now crawling under my sleeve.
“Can you remember when you first began to feel the urge to wash?”
I rubbed at the scar above my eyebrow. The mark that showed I was responsible for my own brother’s death.
“A few years ago, I guess.”
Dr. Rhodes smiled.
“And your parents said that things have gotten worse quite recently. Do you know why that is? Do you know what has made you feel more anxious?”
I looked at my knees, and in my mind I pictured Hannah Jenkins next door. Her heavily pregnant stomach with its tiny helpless life cocooned inside. I shivered.
Looking back up at Dr. Rhodes, I shrugged.
“No. No idea.”
The therapist leaned back in her chair.
“Okay, Matthew, let’s leave that for now and start with the form I’ve given you, shall we? Let’s see if we can see what area is bothering you the most.”
I finished the form and was pleased that I hadn’t ticked every box; in fact, I’d only ticked about a quarter of them. She was right, though; it did look like I had Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.
“Would you like me to explain what that means?” she asked, and I nodded.
“The ‘obsessive’ part refers to what is at the forefront of your mind for a lot of your day. For you, that’s germs and illness. With OCD, an obsession can cause a huge amount of distress and really have an impact on your daily life—stopping you from going to school, for example.”
She was certainly right about that bit.
“The ‘compulsion’ part means your urge to clean all the time and your need to do it over and over again until it feels right.”
She waited, letting me take it all in.
It also turned out that I did have “magical thinking” after all, but it had nothing to do with tricks. Apparently I believed that my actions and thoughts were able to “magically” prevent some catastrophic illness from hurting me or my family, even though I knew deep, deep, deep down that all of my actions were completely ridiculous and this way of thinking didn’t really have any power at all. All the cleaning was, well, just a waste of my time and energy.
So now that I know that, can I just go home and wash my hands? I wanted to say.
Dr. Rhodes asked if there was anything else I wanted to add, anything that wasn’t covered in the questions. I thought perhaps I should mention Callum, but I couldn’t bring myself to even say his name.
I shook my head, and she started talking about a technique that was going to help me called cognitive behavioral therapy. She said that together we were going to retrain my brain to stop thinking the way it does and that, after a while, I’d stop doing the things I kept doing. It wasn’t going to be easy, especially the exposure therapy, but I’d made the first step by being there and …
I stopped listening because my ears were buzzing and panic was bubbling in my stomach. I wanted to get the hell out of there. She was talking about some relaxation techniques and asked me to close my eyes and imagine my stomach was a deflated balloon that I needed to blow up. I glanced at the clock, closed my eyes, and began to write my mental list:
Tuesday, July 29th. 10:57 a.m. Dr. Rhodes’s office.
Facts about Dr. Rhodes:
She’s a big coffee drinker (the smell of coffee has been absorbed into the walls)
Likes antiques, gardening, American thrillers (bookcase observations)
One daughter. Single mother? (child’s drawing propped up on a bookcase shelf of two stick figures, one larger than the other; both are wearing triangular skirts and they are holding hands)
Daughter recently visited a doctor or hospital (on the sole of her shoe there is a round sticker of a smiling giraffe saying, “Star Patient”)
“… and now … slowly open your eyes and take one more deep breath …”
I opened my eyes and resisted looking straight at the clock. Time had to be up by now. I gave her a smile, trying to look relaxed, trying to look like a star patient who was feeling better and ready to go home now, thank you very much.
“Can I use your bathroom, please?”
I perched on the edge of the sofa and wriggled a little as if I really had to go. Dr. Rhodes gave me a look. A look that said, I’m a highly experienced psychotherapist and I know exactly what you are doing.
She paused for a moment, leaving me in suspense.
“Of course, it’s just outside on the left, and if you could send your parents back in on your way out that would be …” But I’d gone. I rushed past Mum and Dad, who were hovering by the door, and ran to the small bathroom, locking the door behind me.
The stall was modern, sleek, and had a small pot of potpourri on the back of the toilet tank. I quickly unbuttoned my shirt as I filled up the sink with hot, clean, cleansing water. After taking my shirt off, I tucked it into the waistband of my trousers to keep it safe and peeled my gloves off, pushing them into my back pocket. Without touching anything else, I dipped my right arm into the scalding water and used my left hand to scoop the water up and over the top of my arm, washing away all of the germs that Dad had passed on to me.
We drove home in silence. I had put my gloves back on but they felt wrong. They felt dirty. As we approached Chestnut Close, Dad pulled over next to the yellow tape that stretched across the end of our road. A large news truck was parked nearby and a small group of journalists looked up at us as we sat there, waiting to be let in.
Mum’s window went down as a policeman approached with a clipboard. I hadn’t seen this one before; he was older and his uniform looked much too tight around his stomach.
“Afternoon,” he said. Mum gave him our names and address and he looked at his list.
“Number nine,” he repeated back to her. “Right next door then?”
“Yes, it’s not been very nice, officer,” said Mum.
I leaned forward.
“Can we just go? I really need the toilet.”
“So you must be the boy in the window,” said the policeman, waggling his pen in my direction. “Matthew, isn’t it? You saw him before he went missing, didn’t you?”
“Yes, yes he did, officer,” said Dad, sounding strangely proud.
The policeman scribbled something down.
“What are you doing out then? I thought you were one of those reclusive types.”
“He’s started therapy today actually,” said Mum.
“Can we just get home? Please!” I said. Mum wound her window back up and the policeman unraveled one end of the tape, leaving just enough room for Dad to drive through.
Gordon was walking down the road toward his house and Mum wound her window back down again as we pulled up beside him.
“Any news, Gordon?”
He shook his head as he fanned his face with his hat. His wispy hair was wet with sweat. He looked exhausted.
“No. Nothing. We’ve looked everywhere. Everywhere.”
He was so tired he could barely speak.
“And how’s Penny? Tell her to pop over any time, won’t you?”
Dad groaned, probably too loudly. He couldn’t stand Penny. He called her an interfering old bat.
Gordon wiped the sweat from the back of his neck.
“Oh, Penny’s Penny. You know what she’s like, always keeping busy.”
His shoulders slumped forward as he plodded on back toward home.
We pulled into the driveway and Dad turned the engine off as we all looked at number eleven in silence. Standing on Mr. Charles’s path with her back to us was Melissa Dawson, Teddy and Casey’s mum.
An officer in a suit was talking to her, gesturing at the roses as if he was just giving gardening advice and not talking about her missing son. She stood with her arms folded tightly, her head twitching briefly as if the shock was still pulsing through her. The policeman carried on; his hand waved toward the gate, which had been locked and then unlocked, then toward the house where Casey and Mr. Charles had been, and then he pointed up at our window, the office window where I had watched Teddy picking the petals.
Melissa Dawson turned to see, her face agonized, her eyes watering, and then, like a broken elevator, she plummeted to the ground, settling into a heap onto the concrete. Mum gasped and put her hand to her mouth. The man in the suit shouted to one of his colleagues and bent down beside her as she began to wail. The noise was unlike anything I had ever heard before: animal-like and agonized. I put my hands over my ears, feeling the germs from my used gloves spread all over my face. The man patted her rhythmically on one shoulder, and then a policewoman appeared and they pulled her up and into the house.
“Oh Brian, that poor woman,” Mum sobbed. Dad seemed unable to speak.
When we got inside I kicked my shoes off and ran upstairs. In my room I stripped down to my boxer shorts, feeling the Wallpaper Lion laughing at me. I threw the dirty clothes outside my door and peeled off my very last pair of gloves, now ruined with sickness and disease. Back in my room I grabbed my cleaning supplies and began to spray myself with the antibacterial spray. My skin tingled as the cool mist left tiny, miniscule droplets on my arms and legs, and then I grabbed my notebook from my bedside and angrily scratched at the paper.
Tuesday, July 29th. 11:34 a.m. Bedroom.
Number of Wallpaper Lions = 1
Number of filled notebooks = 8
Number of unused notebooks = 4
Number of half-filled notebooks = 1
Number of missing neighbors = 1
Number of useless twelve-year-olds = 1