Nothing as Whole as a Broken Heart

“All happy families resemble one another,
each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way…”
Leo Tolstoy

Grace Paulson chalked Tolstoy's words onto the blackboard. “The author's remarks from the opening of Anna Karenina… what do they mean to you? Take a few minutes. Collect your thoughts and put them down in a short essay.”

A skinny girl in the front row raised her hand. “Can we give personal examples?”

“Nothing scandalous,” the teacher cautioned, tongue in cheek. Students tore sheets of lined paper from loose-leaf notebooks and began scratching out their feelings about domestic bliss and the lack thereof. A lean brunette on the front side of forty, Grace scanned the mélange of sleepy faces. The fleeting thought occurred to her - in a year's time, her daughter, Angie, would be old enough to sit in her junior class. What a hoot! In the rear of the room, Jerome Spellman fumbled with a wrinkled sheet of lined paper. The boy had nothing to write with. “Jerome, do you need a pencil?”

Without raising his eyes, the boy shook his head both vertically and horizontally all at once. Grace had long since given up trying to read Jerome’s body language. He picked his nose in class and scratched his privates. Or sometimes he did neither and just slumped dully like an extra in some B-rated horror movie - Night of the Living Dead.

Wednesday morning toward the end of third period, Dr. Rosen stopped by Grace's classroom. With his bristly moustache and mop of curly brown hair the school psychologist reminded Grace of a Hassidic rabbi. Dr. Rosen wore a dozen different hats at Brandenberg. He tested special needs kids to determine grade levels and where their educational weakness lay. He also counseled kids with emotional problems and ran a play therapy group at the elementary school. “You wanted to see me?”

She led the psychologist into the corridor. “Jerome Spellman’s a zombie. The other kids are afraid of him.” The psychologist cleared his throat but did not respond.
“You heard what happened in the cafeteria yesterday?”

During lunch at Brandenberg High School, an entire table emptied out to make room for one student, Jerome Spellman. When the boy lowered his food tray, every boy and girl within thirty feet noiselessly drifted away - a mass exodus. And there he sat - the school weirdo, misfit, whacko, loon - chewing on a boiled hot dog, oblivious to the rest of the universe. Indifferent and utterly unconcerned. “Jerome’s simple schizophrenic.”

“Simple as opposed to what?” Dr. Rosen ignored the remark. “He smells rancid lately. Several of the kids asked to have their seats moved.”

“Then move their seats.”

“That’s a convenient remedy.”

“Simple schizophrenia is a progressive disease. There’s no known treatment or cure. One telltale sign is a disregard for personal hygiene. They stop bathing,… brushing their teeth.” Again Dr. Rosen lowered his eyes and stroked his bushy moustache. Everyone knew the man was brilliant. He’d passed the brutal Massachusetts psychologists’ licensing exam on the first try, a feat few professionals could boast. Only a year into his accreditation, he edited the association's monthly newsletter. And yet, his fatalistic attitude toward Jerome Spellman was unnerving.

“What about medication?”

“Doesn’t work.” The psychologist looked morose.

"Counseling?"

He just stared at her with a leaden expression. Several students milling about in the hallway were staring at them. Grace lowered her voice so the others couldn’t hear. “The kid belongs in a mental hospital.”

“Snake pits like the MIMH are where most simple schizophrenics eventually end up. So why kick Jerome out of public school, if he isn’t going to fare any better at a state mental hospital?” The psychologist removed his glasses and massaged his eyes in an undulating motion. “Is he learning anything in class?”

“No, nothing. He's flunked every test to date. When I call on him, half the time he doesn’t even respond so I move on to the next kid.”

“But you have a good relationship with Jerome?”

Grace blinked and peered at the man. "He's a zombie. He lives on another planet."

“If the opportunity presents itself between classes, ask Jerome about his plans for the future, any goals or aspirations, and let me know what he tells you.”

Goals or aspirations. Jerome Spellman was courting straight F’s. The boy had failed every test and homework assignment since the beginning of the academic year by either not participating or writing gibberish. Grace filed Dr. Rosen’s strange request away in the back of her mind. “Parent-teacher conferences are next week.”

“I’ve been in regular touch with his parents since September, and they understand the nature of the problem. It’s a pernicious disease and it’s not their fault.”

“I didn’t suggest it was,” Grace returned defensively and reached for the doorknob.

“Jerome’s not to blame either,” he added. “It’s just the way things are.”

Back in class, Grace stared listlessly out the window. The infamous MIMH that Dr. Rosen alluded to was the Massachusetts Institute of Mental Health. The state mental asylum was a dumping ground for the mentally unbalanced, criminally insane, destitute, morons and assorted lost souls. In a perverse sort of way, Dr. Rosen was right. Why subject sixteen year-old Jerome Spellman to such a fate any sooner than necessary? The bell rang. Students collected their backpacks and flitted off to their next class. All but Jerome. Passing Grace’s desk, his apathetic eyes brushed her face, but there was no warmth, no humanity. Long after he was gone, the air reeked of the most hideous stench.

It’s just the way things are.

Dr. Rosen, the school psychologist, had warned Grace never to force the issue. In early September, the soft-spoken man drew a small circle on a piece of paper, and then sketched a much larger orb next to the first. “This is the universe normal people inhabit.” He waved the tip of the pencil over the larger of the two. “This nether region is where Jerome currently resides. Don’t cross the invisible boundary.”

The invisible boundary was a euphemism for the Minotaur’s maze of insanity. Dr. Rosen didn’t put it quite so bluntly, but the message was clear: crazy people can’t handle stress. A belligerent tone or threatening gesture could precipitate a full-blown catastrophic reaction. Jerome's was an insidious, incurable disease. Stay outside the circle of craziness.

Now Dr. Rosen wanted feedback. Grace intended to speak with Jerome, but, when class ended, the boy lowered his head and slunk out of the room like an adolescent battering ram, almost knocking one of his classmates over as he dashed out into the hallway. Inhabiting his own hermetic universe, nothing he did was intentionally malicious. “Hey, watch it!” the offended party shouted. Jerome never looked back.

* * * * *

Over the holiday weekend, Grace and her daughter were hiking the northernmost stretch of the Appalachian Trail. “Well, I guess it’s just us girls.” Grace's husband was away on a business trip. She was loading provisions in a backpack, the lightweight frame propped up against the door jamb. There wouldn’t be refrigerators where they were going. No stoves, central heating, flush toilets or other basic amenities. “We’ll park twenty miles below the base of Mount Katahdin and hike north. Climb to the summit then retrace our steps.”

Angie handed her mother a stack of wooden matches sealed in a watertight metal tube. The fifteen year old girl was a plumper version of the mother with dirty brown hair and easygoing temperament. “How high?”

“Five thousand two hundred and sixty-eight feet.”

“Twelve feet less than a mile.”

“That's a vertical mile.” Grace smiled laconically. “Only if you zoom straight up like a helicopter.” She took the matches and stashed them in a side pocket next to the spare flashlight batteries. The tent was tiny, just large enough for two.

Grace was imposing a three-day moratorium on all thoughts about Jerome Spellman and similar, impending calamities. The trip was planned as R and R - strictly a mother-daughter, getaway weekend. In the morning, they drove north on route 95, crossing the New Hampshire state line around ten a.m.. They reached north central Maine by early afternoon and parked the car in a small lot just off the trail. The weather was warm and muggy. “Get your pack up high on your shoulders,” Grace cautioned, “so the weight’s evenly distributed.”

A clutch of hikers - some lugging huge quantities of gear and others traveling light - passed leisurely in either direction. No one seemed in any great hurry. Grace knelt down and fingered a smallish leaf, red fading to yellow.

“It’s just a maple leaf,” Angie flexed her shoulders. The pack felt comfortable, not too heavy.

“Aspen, from the genus, populus,” her mother corrected, indicating the serrated points arranged symmetrically across the leaf. Throughout high school she had dreamed about becoming a botanist or, perhaps, an ornithologist. Plants and birds were so much easier to quantify and qualify than humans. Somewhere she got sidetracked. “The flattened stalks,” She held the delicate plant up for her daughter to see, “make the leaves tremble at the slightest breeze. A very noisy tree.” She let the leaf slip from her fingers. With the sun drooping over their left shoulders, they looked north toward the summit of Mount Katahdin in the far distance. “Let’s go!” They struck off down the gravelly path at a loping gait with Angie bringing up the rear. A half-mile down the rough trail they came to a pond, edged by thick stands of beech with a smattering of hemlock and white pine. Except for a few gray squirrels, they saw no animals. Passing through an open field at the far end of the pond, Grace pointed out the variety of wildflowers - an endless succession of lady’s slipper with their pouch-like lips, black-eyed Susan and meadow lily. “That a jack-in-the-pulpit.” She pointed to a leafy plant. “Also known as Indian turnip. The local natives ate the roots as a main part of their diet. Some old-timers probably still do.”

Around six, though the sun was still high, they stopped for supper. Using water from a nearby stream, Grace boiled a pan of whole grain, basmati rice over an open fire. As it cooked, the rice released an aromatic, nutty odor. In a separate pan she sautéed onions and green peppers. Other hikers passed on the trail. A young boy waved and his father tipped his hat. Everyone seemed intent on getting to his or her destination before the bruised light bled out of the sky. The temperature had dropped a few degrees, but it was still warm.

"Do you know Jerome Spellman?" A mental lapse, Grace had forgotten about her earlier resolution to focus exclusively on the trip.

"The weirdo?"

Grace cringed. "He's not doing well."

"Yeah, I know." There was an awkward pause. “Doris Fuller's mother waitresses over at Ryan's Diner." The girl stumbled awkwardly over several words and had to pause to compose herself. “The family lives just up the street from the Spellman's house on Hemlock Drive. Nice people. The father works for a brokerage firm. The mother sells real estate.”

“Mrs. Fuller knows the parents, then?”

Angie shook her head. “No, only to wave when they drive by in the evening. But Jerome stops by the restaurant for breakfast every Saturday morning.”

“That’s nice.”

“Not really. You see, he’s got this crush on Doris' mom.”

Grace groaned inwardly. She had met Rita Fuller, a pretty woman on the front side of forty with dirty blond hair that cascaded down her back in ringlets, once or twice at PTO meetings. Grace was trying to picture a glassy-eyed Jerome Spellman engaged in romantic repartee with a woman old enough to be his mother. “He’s got mental problems,” she stated the obvious.

“Last Saturday, Jerome stopped by the diner and took a seat at the far counter where Mrs. Fuller was working. He eats his food, then, like some under-aged Don Juan, plunks a twenty dollar bill down next to his plate and tells the woman to keep the change.” “A breakfast special,” Angie added, “costs less than five dollars, and that includes coffee with a free refill.”

“So what’d Mrs. Fuller do?”

“She handed Doris three five-dollar bills and asked her to return the money to the parents.”
Grace felt a tightness in her chest. “And?”

Angie was staring at the greasy cooking pan. The fire had died down to a pile of glowing embers that emitted a comforting, smokeless glow. “The way Mrs. Spellman apologized, you might have thought Jerome committed the crime of the century. She promised they’d make sure he only had enough cash to cover the cost of the meal and a small tip if he went for breakfast in the future.”

So much for leaving the work-a-day world behind. Grace let out a deep sigh. “We might as well camp here for the night,” she announced. “I’ll put some coffee on before we unpack.”

Angie took the blackened pan down to the stream, rinsed the last few grains of rice away and filled their canteens with fresh water. When she returned to the campsite an elderly man with a white beard and rickety legs was sitting on a stump. “Mr. Anderson,” Angie’s mother announced, “will be joining us for coffee.”

The old man smiled displaying an expanse of pink gums but not very much in the way of teeth. Reaching into his pocket, he withdrew an ivory flower surrounded by red berries. “For the girl.”

“Dogwood?” Grace said. “They seldom flourish this far east.”

The old man nodded. “Some people call them bunchberry, but it’s just a different name for the same plant.” Mr. Anderson wore a tan-colored hearing aid and his left hand trembled when he rested it in his lap; it was unclear if he suffered from a chronic illness or was just tired. Despite the warm weather, he wore a long sleeve flannel shirt buttoned at the wrists. Grace fixed the coffee and passed around sugar cookies.

The old man’s wife had passed away the previous spring. The year before she died, they hiked the Appalachian Trail as far down as Hump Mountain along the Tennessee-North Carolina border, crossing through rugged hill country where several inches of snow had fallen the previous day. “Toes got frostbitten, but it still turned out okay.” Mr. Anderson took a sip of coffee and sloshed the dark liquid in the warm, tin cup. “Met some real decent folk, along the trail.”

He threw the last of his coffee into the fire sending up a fitful tongue of orange sparks. The more he lingered the more melancholy the old man seemed. As the threesome rested by the campfire, Grace no longer noticed the huge gaps between the teeth that were and the teeth that might have been,. The songbirds had bedded down for the night, their incessant trilling upstaged by the rhythmic clatter of crickets and bullfrogs. “Tell you a funny story before I go,” Mr. Anderson said. He rested his good hand over the other and the trembling momentarily subsided.

“A boy wakes up one morning to find his faithful dog missing. He fashions a sign on a piece of cardboard. The sign reads: Lost Dog. Walks with limp - got run over, sideswiped by tractor-trailer last spring; gimpy hind leg; cataracts both eyes, left ear chewed off in mishap with homicidal pit bull.” The old man paused for dramatic effect. “ Answers to the name Lucky.”

Answers to the name Lucky.

The two women waved as the old man disappeared down the trail into the darkness. Grace understood perfectly well that most people, regardless of outward appearances, were chewed up and run over by the vagaries of life. You could have a hearty laugh while sitting at a campfire; the trick was to maintain one’s composure after leaving the solitude of the Maine woods and rejoining the money-grubbing rat race. “That’s our destination tomorrow,” Grace pointed at a bright star above a ridge of spruce. “Polaris, the North Star. It hangs like a jewel on the end of the Little Dipper and points the way to Mount Katahdin.”

“I’m going to bed,” Grace said. She wondered if Mr. Anderson’s left hand had stopped trembling. And did he yearn for his soul mate when he lay in his sleeping bag? Did he dream of their wintry exploits on Hump Mountain? He wouldn’t have to worry about frostbite tonight.

Around midnight, Angie heard her mother stir. Grace rolled out of the sleeping bag and went outside. “What’s the matter?” Angie asked when she returned.

“Had to pee.” Grace crawled back into the sleeping bag and lay still.

“I hope Mr. Anderson’s all right,” Angie whispered. “I mean, what if something happened to him out her in the middle of the woods?”

Somewhere deep in the hills an owl let looses with a prolonged, throaty hoot resonant as a foghorn. The crickets and frogs were unimpressed. Mr. Anderson was probably fast asleep, dreaming about his lost youth and all the wonderful adventures that still awaited him on the A.T.. Grace reached out and brushed her daughter's cheek with her fingertips. "Say a prayer, then."

"Yes, I'll do that."

Perhaps you could remember Jerome Spellman in your prayers, too." The girl grunted sleepily and rolled over in her sleeping bag. A few minutes later, Grace could hear her daughter’s steady breathing.

Say a prayer… Jerome Spellman was a hopeless case. According to Dr. Rosen, drugs were useless, therapy utterly futile. A universe full of prayer and good intentions wouldn't make a bit of difference against a relentless, inexorable disease. Where Jerome Spellman was concerned, God had officially gone AWOL.

In the morning Angie woke to find her mother’s sleeping bag empty. Grace returned before the girl had wrestled her hiking boots on. “Come with me!” She dragged Angie along the trail past the stream, then down a narrower footpath. At the bottom of a stony trail, the trees fell away to reveal a sandy pond rimmed with hawthorn and Canadian yew. “A blizzard of rainbow trout! Look for yourself.”

Angie stood with her boots nipping the water and watched as a steady procession of speckled fish cruised in and out of the shallows. “There’s enough protein to feed an army.”

“Or hungry Indian tribe,” her mother interjected. Grace began pulling her clothes off, flinging her blouse, bra and shorts in a pile.

Angie’ face flamed brighter than a sugar maple in late October. “Are you nuts?”

“It’s seven o’clock in the morning. No one’s probably been by this pond in weeks. Most of the hikers won’t be back on the trail for another hour or two.” Her mother waded into the water up to her knees and, bending low, began slapping water on her arms and breasts. Grace’s body was still strong and athletic, prettier than most women’s her age.

If anyone had suggested a mere five minutes ago that Angie would find herself skinny-dipping with her mother in the boondocks of Maine, she would have rolled her eyes and deemed them certifiably insane. The young girl pulled her T-shirt up over her head in one smooth motion. “How’s the water?”

“Warm as a bathtub.” Her mother was floating on her back toward the middle of the pond. Angie could feel a scaly body brush against her calf as she waded up to her hips.

They reached the base of Mount Katahdin in the early afternoon, but the weather turned gray and heavy rain pummeled the trail into a muddy mess. “This certainly isn’t fun,” Angie grumbled. A group of hikers returning from the summit looked beleaguered, worn out and miserable. Her mother spoke with one of the climbers. “It’s tough going. There’s a raw wind and, without sun, the temperature is good twenty degrees colder.”

They went and huddled under a lean-to with a dozen other campers. Half an hour later the rain was still pelting the ground relentlessly. “We’ll climb tomorrow,” her mother announced. “I’ll go pitch the tent and we’ll make do until this awful weather breaks.”

“Everything soaked. There's no a decent place to put a tent.”

“We’re all in the same boat.” Grace gestured at the rest of the hikers. “You’ll just have to make do.” She left Angie crouched under the lean-to and went off to see about the tent.

The young girl began to cry but nobody noticed. They didn’t notice because all the hikers were soaked to the bone and Angie's tears just looked like so much extra precipitation. A half-hour later, Grace returned. She managed to pitch the tent beneath a large tree. The ground was covered with a bed of pine needles, which held up reasonably well under the rain. Angie crawled into the tent and unwrapped her sleeping bag. Then she slithered in, zipped it up around her neck and, with the rain mercilessly slashing the canvas at a forty-five degree angle, went to sleep.

No matter that it was two in the afternoon, that she hadn’t bothered to change out of her damp clothes or eaten anything since breakfast. Angie dozed and when she woke, she slept again. She snoozed through eleven straight hours of rain; when the girl woke, the sun was shining, she felt refreshed and sublimely happy. Her mother was already cooking up a pan of fried salami. She handed Angie a cup of coffee. They ate quickly without much conversation, and were back on the trail within an hour.

“Tuckahoe,” Grace indicated a plant growing in the cleft of a lichen-stained rock. “Also known as Indian bread. The roots are quite tasty or at least some Native Americans think so.”

They reached the summit of Mount Katahdin by early afternoon and lingered for an hour with a dozen other hikers. On the way down they recognized Mr. Anderson. The grizzled veteran gave them a toothless, thin-lipped smile as he plodded past. He wore a knapsack without a frame and a knobby walking stick. “Traveling light in his twilight years,” Grace observed.

“How old do you think he is?”

“Hard to say. Eighty give or take a decade.” Angie couldn’t be sure if her mother was pulling her leg. What would make an old man in poor health want to be out in the wilderness alone and unprotected? The same torrential downpour that trapped them for most of the previous day had menaced him, too. But the adaptable and resilient old man had made it through with his sunny disposition intact. Mr. Anderson's life was a richly variegated tapestry of misadventures and blithe perambulations. At this late juncture, when the dross sifted free of precious moments, it was a life well lived.

Grace suggested that they head south until the setting sun got caught up on the treetops before pitching camp. They had been moving slowly down a rutted path when Angie grabbed her mother’s arm and brought her up short. A hundred feet away in a secluded pond stood a full-grown moose. The large, palmate antlers showed that it was a male. He dipped his head beneath the water and, when the broad muzzle reappeared, it was full of soggy vegetation ripped from the muddy water. They stood and watched the animal forage its way downstream before moving off down the trail.

Later that night after they had eaten their whole grain rice and vegetables followed by scalding coffee and sugar cookies, Grace mused, “I would tell you how much I love you, my darling daughter, but something essential always gets lost in the unwieldy fabric of language,... the wordiness.” She took Angie’s face in her callused hands and planted a moist kiss on either cheek. “Better that we should muck about with the likes of Mr. Anderson or watch a bull moose at dinner.”
“Or skinny-dip with rainbow trout.”

Grace’s sly smile was wasted on the darkness. “Yes, that too.”

* * * * *

“Jerome, hold up a minute.” Jerome Spellman was ready to bolt as soon as the bell range, but Grace’s no-nonsense tone brought him up short. She waited quietly for the classroom to empty out then indicated a chair next to her desk. The lanky boy slumped into the seat with his legs splayed at an odd angle.

“School year’s coming to an end,” Grace spoke casually. The boy’s jaw was slack, eyes shrouded over. A moist blob of mucous trailed down the top lip toward the corner of his mouth. “Have you thought at all about what you might want to do after high school?”

“Get a job.” His eyes drifting toward the open doorway, Jerome shifted impatiently in the seat. “Something important.” He scratched his crotch with broken nails. “Investment broker, maybe.”

“Well that’s a fine position. Where did you get such an idea?”

“That’s what my father does.” Jerome sat straighter in the chair and his face contorted in a mawkish grin. “I’m gonna need a lot of do-re-mi.”

“Yes, we all - ”

“I’m getting married after school lets out. Middle of summer,… beginning of fall.”

Grace felt her casual demeanor crack. “I didn’t know you were seeing anyone.”

Bad move! What was it Dr. Rosen had said about staying outside the circle of craziness?

Jerome smirked and mashed a wrist over his nose clearing away the glistening mess. “I met this waitress down at the diner. She’s married but gonna get a divorce so we can be together.”

“You’re seeing a married woman?”

A moment ago, he couldn’t escape from the classroom fast enough. Now Jerome's buttocks were epoxied to the chair. He glanced up at her momentarily. “Thing is, you gotta plan ahead.”

Grace felt a chill bleed through her body. The boy was carrying on an interior monologue, exclusively talking to himself. The teacher's presence in the room was unnecessary. Incidental. Jerome Spellman was a prisoner locked away in the solitary confines of his twisted imagination. He needed no one to validate his hallucinatory life view. “Most people,” she said weakly, “start at the bottom and work their way up the corporate ladder.”

Another plug of mucous was visible dangling in his left nostril. The wetness emerged as a turgid mass and began the slow trek south across the hollow above his upper lip. “Naw, that’s not my style.” Jerome rolled off the chair and grabbed his backpack. “Gotta get to my next class. Sure was swell talking with you.”

* * * * *

In late April, Principal Skinner approached Grace in the parking lot. At six foot five, two hundred and fifty pounds, even some male staff were intimidated by the hulking bear of a man. “Last month Dr. Rosen petitioned the school committee for two hundred dollars to have a psychiatrist, at Beth Israel Hospital evaluate Jerome Spellman.”

“Does the psychiatrist come here or Jerome travel to Boston?”

“Neither,” the principal was staring at the front of the school where a caravan of yellow buses was pulling up at the front of the building. A group of walkers dragging rolling backpacks emerged from the building heading for home. “Tuesday Dr. Rosen brought his test results to the psychiatrist’s office in Boston and they discussed options.”

Options - like whether or not to keep a sixteen year-old in public school or cart him off to the funny farm.

“Excuse me just a moment,” Principal Skinner said. A parent, who was walking a large German shepherd on a leash with a choke collar, arrived to collect her child. The dog waited until they reached the bus loading area and, as if on cue, moved his bowels. The principal instructed one of the teacher’s aides to get a janitor to dispose of the unsightly mess. “Children! Children!” Two girls were chasing each other near the crosswalk as the busses were loading and the principal rushed off to settle the girls back down.

“Where was I?” the man asked when he finally returned.

“Options,” Grace said. In a moment all the buses would pull away with their precious cargo and the bedlam would fade away to nothing.

“The assessment from Boston was bleak,” he muttered. “The psychiatrist said, ‘Think positive but prepare for the worse’.”

The school spent two hundred dollars for seven words of advice. That matriculated out to twenty-eight dollars a word. “Which is exactly what Dr. Rosen told me at the beginning of the school year,” Grace replied.

Principal Skinner watched the last bus pull away from the school. Just moments earlier a custodian shuffled out of the building with a flat shovel. He scooped up the dog feces with a deft motion, dumped it in a plastic shopping bag, and then hurried off to dispose of the mess. The principal rubbed his hands together and rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet. “This is a public school. We have an obligation to serve the community as a whole.”

“Jerome isn’t a monster,” Grace ventured. “He just lives inside his head. Maybe if - ”

“The Spellmans belong to my church,” he cut her short. “I golf with his father. They’re decent, down-to-earth people.” He raised his arms in a gesture of futility. “How the hell do I tell them to think positive but prepare for the worse?” The man was hinting at a deeper truth. Brandenberg Middle School made every effort to accommodate students who didn’t fit the mold, but Jerome Spellman was too far gone, his behavior absurdly dangerous. The principal went back to his office.

Everyone was gone. The natural order was beginning to reassert itself. Frogs croaked in the culvert near the track field. In a cluster of white-barked birches, a chorus of raucous birds was chortling like crazy. The deciduous trees, stripped bare in the late fall, were only just beginning to bare their delicate buds. The air reeked richly of percolating promise and rebirth. A warm breeze caressed Graces neck before skittering off into a stand of Eastern white pines.
What was it she had read just the other day in a collection of spiritual verse? A quote from the 17th Century Rabbi Nachman from Bratzlav: There is nothing as whole as a broken heart.

* * * * *

Friday morning before class, the school receptionist stuck her head in the doorway. “Principal’s looking for you.”

When Grace reached the administrative office, Principal Skinner and Dr. Rosen were chatting in hushed tones. A Maalox bottle was sitting uncapped next to a plastic container of extra-strength Tylenol. “Jerome Spellman’s over at Butler Hospital,” the principal said soberly. “Police took him last night in a paddy wagon.”

“The boy barricaded himself in his bedroom,” Dr. Rosen continued, “wouldn’t undo the lock. When the cops finally broke down the door, they found Jerome huddled under the bedcovers mumbling incoherently. He went quietly, though… made no fuss. The admitting psychiatrist at Butler put him on a locked ward. There was no need to medicate or restrain him. The boy just wanted to be left alone.”

“Orderlies gave him a bath,” Principal Skinner added. “First in months, from what I gather.” He poured some Maalox into a small plastic cup and tossed the pink liquid down. “We don’t anticipate Jerome returning to Brandenberg High School.”

“Well, at least it’s not the MIMH,” Grace muttered.

The boy’s classmates would catch on in a hurry that something was up. The kid was never physically sick and hadn’t missed a single day of school since September. Gossip and wild rumors would blossom like late summer weeds and then just as quicky wither away. The queer boy had no friends. The Spring Fling dance was coming up plus the junior class trip to New York to see the Rockets at Radio City Music Hall. Jerome Spellman would be old news long before then. Like the psychologist said, it wasn’t anyone’s fault. And yet, if the tortured expression on Principal Skinner’s face was any indication, grownups didn’t handle mental illness any better than their adolescent counterparts.

There is nothing as whole as a broken heart.

"Jerome was partial to those cinnamon raisin buns they sell over at Ryan's diner,” Grace’s voice faltered slightly. “You know, the ones with the sugary glaze. You nibble at them with sticky fingers or unfurl the pastry by pulling the dough apart from the outside edge toward the center. They tasted just as good either way.” The Principal smiled bleakly. Dr. Rosen, the man who wrote his doctoral thesis on Piaget, the Swiss developmental psychologist, wagged his shaggy head. As Grace explained it, she would stop by the diner after school let out and pick up a couple of pastries. Of course, she would call to determine visiting hours before heading over to the hospital.