By Reason of Insanity Read Free Page B

burned boy.
    “Where is he?”
    “I put him here in 412.”
    “How bad is it?”
    “Hyperemic and vesicant damage from the neck to the waist. Same for the left arm almost to the wrist. Some plasma leakage already. Could be worse, I guess.”
    “You’re an optimist, Doctor.”
    “I have to be in cases like this or I’d go nuts.”
    “We all would.”
    “Is the mother in the hospital?”
    “Home. Or somewhere. I think she got scared.”
    “The son of a bitch.”
    “Daughter.”
    “What’s that?”
    “Daughter of a bitch. She’s a woman, isn’t she?”
    “She’s still a son of a bitch.”
    A nurse came into the room.
    “Joanne, make sure someone stays with him tonight. Just in case.”
    “Yes, Doctor.”
    “Christ, he’s tiny.”
    “How old is he?”
    “Three.”
    “Oh my God,” said the administrator.
    “There are two others worse than this in the burn section downtown.”
    “The Ames girl?”
    The resident physician nodded. “Of course she’s older.”
    “Yeah, she’s five.”
    “What’ll happen to him when he gets out of here?”
    “Go back home, I guess.”
    “Back to more of that, you mean.”
    They stood at the foot of the bed watching the boy, unconscious now. He was wrapped in white.
    “Can’t he be taken away from her?” asked the nurse, her voice cracking. “I mean, can’t somebody—” She stopped, her eyes watery.
    The administrator shook his head. “There are cases like this all over the city,” he said quietly. “Thousands of them. Parents who burn their children, beat them, starve them. Sometimes they kill them. And if they don’t, they get scared and come running to a hospital. It’s always an accident.” He removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “The hell of it is you can’t prove anything most of the time. The boy could’ve burned himself accidentally.”
    “Not hardly likely,” said the intern.
    “Not likely,” agreed the administrator wearily. “But without definite proof the hospital can’t go to the authorities. No one can.” He replaced his glasses.
    “And so she gets a second shot at the boy, and then a third.”
    “Only if he’s lucky.”
    “Lucky?”
    “If he’s lucky enough to survive the second,” whispered the resident physician, walking toward the door.
    “You can never tell how these things work out. No one knows for sure.”
    “I know one thing for sure,” said the intern vehemently in the hall. “One thing I know for goddam sure.” His voice shook with anger. “That boy in there is doomed. No matter what happens, he’s doomed.”
    The others nodded, their lips tight, their eyes sad.
    “Doomed,” he repeated.
    Doomed or otherwise, the boy was visited every day by his mother, a bundle of concern. When she finally took him home she bought him a pint of chocolate ice cream, his favorite. The next day she banged his head on the side of the bathtub when he accidentally splashed water on her. Screaming, he fainted.
    Sara decided that she had better give up drinking in the house. Frightened now, because she still had feeling for the child even though he was a hated male, she sought help from a self-styled minister of the Astrological Church of the Planets, one of the many religious sects that seemed to grow like crabgrass in southern California. He listened politely to her problem, then told her that for a fifty-dollar offering to the church he would study her astrological chart. Two days later he sadly informed her that she labored under a double cosmic cross, “perhaps the gravest sign in the heavens.” However—and here he brightened considerably—her planets were such that she would soon enter a peaceful phase, one filled with great opportunities and rich rewards. How soon? He couldn’t tell unless he did her horoscope, which would require a further offering of course. Sara thanked him and left, stopping in the bar next door for a glass of wine.
    After the third glass she felt better, thinking about the peaceful phase