Free Another Broken Wizard by Colin Dodds Page A

frustration.
    “So, Aileen is out of town. You can sleep in her bed if you want to crash here,” Emily offered at the end of our liturgy.
    Aileen’s room was decorated with a few art prints and a big poster board collage of her friends. I pushed the pillows, stuffed animals and heavy comforter off the bed and pulled a cotton sheet over me. I listened for Emily’s footsteps in the hall. But she wasn’t coming. We weren’t like that.
    Just talking to her had taken some of the week’s weight off my back. I closed my eyes and thought about old friends. First you’re an infant, then you’re a kid, and you get put in a town, then in a school. You pretty much have no say in it. But you find these friends who will always know you, no matter how far you wander. They become another family, the family of your heart, corny as it sounds.
     
     
    15.
    Monday, December 29
     
     
    Out on Park Avenue that morning, Emily laughed at me while I dug a fresh shirt from the open trunk of my rental car and changed between the traffic and the dirty snow bank.
    Emily directed me to Jeff’s group home, at the foot of Vernon Hill. Jeff met us out on the porch, where he was smoking a cigarette. He’d put on more weight since the last time I’d seen him and had to be nearing two hundred fifty pounds. He was always tan, but the brown patches around his eyes had darkened and spread. He was wearing a Pink Floyd t-shirt and a red, beret-type hat I couldn’t quite figure out. He wanted to show us around the group home and introduce us to his housemates. I said that instead, we should go for a drive. A lot of things in life are sad, and maybe you shouldn’t turn away. But you don’t have to dive in face first, either.
    In the car, none of us could come up with a place to go. We drove around a while and wound up at a shopping center near the Millbury line. Its acres of parking lot sat above where they were widening Route 122 to better connect Worcester to the Mass Pike. Not knowing exactly what to do, we went into a big bookstore and got coffee. Jeff, as was his custom, had forgotten to bring his wallet, so I bought his elaborate, chocolate-raspberry-caramel coffee.
“So what’s new, Jeff?” Emily asked.
“You know, just bopping around,” Jeff said, then pursed his lips in an uneasy smile.
“Are you still working at that fake-flower place in White City?” I asked.
    “Uh, what, Michael’s ? No I left there a few weeks ago.”
    “Oh, that’s too bad. What happened?”
    “They wanted me to take these big shards of glass and, like, climb a mound of broken glass and put them on the top of it. It really wasn’t safe, so I stopped showing up.”
    Like most of Jeff’s stories, it didn’t make complete sense, but you could make out a germ of what must have happened.
    “How’s Janine doing?” I asked. Janine was Jeff’s girlfriend, who he’d met in his last group home.
    “She was doing good. But then she got into a fight with this Chinese girl at the club, and it got kind of out of hand and she started cutting herself. So she was in the hospital. Now she’s with her mother until after New Years.”
    I gave Jeff my recap, omitting nothing from him. Jeff chimed in here and there with something strange, or just spacing out.
    “It’s funny how they call it ‘open-heart surgery.’ I wonder if it ever actually does open people’s hearts, like in the other way, like open them to love,” Jeff said.
    That was probably as close as profound as he got that day. Unlike in the movies, where mentally ill characters exist mostly to indulge the screenwriter’s poetic tendencies, schizophrenia had not made Jeff an oracle. A lot of what he said consisted of confused and confusing descriptions of interactions or situations that didn’t completely exist. Nonetheless, we could piece together most of Jeff’s recap. Most of his days revolved around going to the club, a day program for people with similar problems, and hanging out with