I was still a girl and Daddy still needed courage. The tall city buildings didn't belong to Someplace Else; they belonged

to crazy people. Seven-story buildings air conditioner cool LU V I C K E RS

with elevators and generators, and giant fans. Most were white-painted brick; some even had gingerbread trim and huge wraparound porches.

At the hospital, there was a sewage treatment plant, a

water tower, a red-brick smokestack taller than any building within thirty miles, a fire station, a police force, and a baseball diamond right next to the laundry where my grandmother had worked washing the patients' sheets and clothes before she died. The field where we had our Halloween carnival belonged to the patients, and some of them came, too;

mostly chain-smoking men with nervous yellow hands who walked over the damp grass to play Go Fish and Pickpocket. For a dime, children could ride screaming through the hospital grounds on the back of an antique fire truck, their arms waving above their heads, their warm bodies lurching together in a knot as the fire chief swung around curves, driving like a maniac, trying his best to scare everyone. Even the fire truck belonged to the patients.

Across the grounds, at the hospital, the patients had an auditorium where they went to watch scratched-up Westerns or listen to the high-school band mangle some music. They even had a playground with chin-up bars and a swing, although the only person who ever used the swing was a patient named Zack Bell, a curly-haired man who swung for hours at a time, his head bowed, his eyes closed, his hands folded in his lap. Kids at school said his brain had been eaten up by syphilis. Mama had hushed me when I asked her what syphilis was.

The hospital was the city, more of a city than Chattahoochee ever was. If you mentioned Chattahoochee, most people thought you were talking about the hospital anyway. They

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didn't even know there was a town. There wouldn't have been one if it weren't for the hospital. Chattahoochee was stubby, strung down Washington Street like a row of dusty shoe boxes between two traffic lights. Nichol's Flower Shop and the field where we had our carnival sat on one end, and the

Riverview Bait and Tackle and Galloway's Restaurant sat on the other. Everything from the Jitney Jungle to Chattaburger was clumped in between like some toy town a kid threw together.

Downtown Chattahoochee was small, but it made me

feel smaller, squashed, especially when I rode my bike over weeds springing from the cracked sidewalk. I knew I didn't belong on those narrow streets, couldn't make myself fit between the lines. At least some of the patients got to leave; they wouldn't memorize the cracks in the gray sidewalk, wouldn't remember where the clumps of dandelions grew. They wouldn't stand in front of the plate-glass window

of Nichol's Flower Shop, staring past their reflections at buckets of carnations, chrysanthemums, and roses, the only kinds of flowers you could get in a small town. They wouldn't wonder, Where are the birds ofparadise? Where are the blue orchids?

They would never stand in the dim oily-smelling shoe

fix-it shop with Mr. Gleason, a man with thin white hair, hands creased and blackened with grease, a wooden leg darkened to the color of tea. They would never see the piles and piles of stiff and curling leather shoes people dropped off but never picked up. Like they knew they weren't going anywhere, shoes or not.

They wouldn't memorize the porches on the fronts of wooden houses, or wonder who was sitting in the shadows 23

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behind the gray screens, or imagine what the shadows said

to each other, or what they would've said if they knew how things really were, the way I did. I imagined the whole town murmuring as I walked down the street, She's got a nutty mother; herfather can't pay the bills; she acts like a boy. But that wasn't the half of it.

We might as well have been a circus act as far as our neighbors went. I figured they could hear Mama yelling bloody murder at us all the time, and I didn't want to have anything to do with them. I never had kids over to my house, especially not Rae Miller—Mama didn't want me anywhere near her because she was white trash. She wanted me to be friends with this girl named Brenda Thomas. I never did invite Brenda over, even though Mama liked her. Brenda was the Right Kind of Girl, Mama said, meaning her daddy was a big shot at the hospital, but I don't think Mama noticed that none of us ever had kids over, especially not the right kind. Couldn't she see James marching across the front yard, alone,

carrying a garbage can lid for a shield, shooting imaginary soldiers, then turning the gun on himself? Couldn't she see how Maisey cowered when she screamed, "I wish I'd never had you?"

I'd seen enough when I went behind Brenda's doors one

time to know that Mama wasn't the right kind of mama. Brenda's living room was a shag-carpeted museum of Brenda. The walls were plastered with hand-tinted photographs of Brenda as a baby, as a toddler, as a first-grader. Mrs. Thomas bronzed Brenda's baby shoes herself, then used them to decorate a lamp. She recorded the first five years of Brenda's life in one of those memory books—actually writing down important dates: first step, first word, first tooth. She did

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things right. She even had one of those Kool-Aid pitchers you order off the pack of Kool-Aid, along with the matching cups.

I knew Mama couldn't compete—she bought three of

those memory books, one each for me, James, and Maisey, filled in the parts about how long we were and how much we weighed at birth, then stopped. She threw them in the trash one day when she was cleaning out the closets. That I could live with, but I didn't want my friends to find out that she could cuss a blue streak, or that she'd climb a tall tree to get away from us. I didn't want them to find out that she didn't love me in the same easy way their mothers loved them, that she'd let me drown. She did let me drown.

She sure didn't bronze our baby shoes. I mean, she loved

us, but she didn't like us all the time. Especially me. And she wasn't afraid to say so. Not even with an audience. That was the kind of house I lived in. No one could come in. Sometimes, I rode my bike all over town to get away from the bad weather Mama brought into our house. But after my drowning, the water-colored sky came down anyway, hovered right over Washington Street, flattened me into the blue-gray pavement, pressed the air right out of my body. If I took thirty seconds and pedaled all the way through town past Galloway's and the bait shop, I could look off into the smoky distance and see the tops of oaks and pines lining

the banks of the Apalachicola River. They looked like hills, gray in the distance, then gray-blue the closer they got, then blue. Right before the bridge, the road dropped off into a jungle of green. When I saw this green, I broke through all that water to the surface. I could breathe again. That green was the beginning of the Distance, the place I longed to go

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to, a place where the voices would disappear, where no one would know my name. A place I could breathe myself into being.

A person just driving through Chattahoochee, though, probably wouldn't feel drowned. They wouldn't be able to tell the difference between the townspeople and the patients, either. Sometimes it was hard even for me, especially with Mama straddling the line. I went to school with the daughter of one of the psychiatrists—the butcher at the Jitney Jungle caught him shoving plastic-wrapped steaks and pork chops down his pants. He wasn't any saner than Innertube. Mama said Innertube had been so wild when he came to the hospital that he'd been given a lobotomy to calm him down. Now he was a perfect angel.