In the Shadow of Mount Pleasant
V Mag at UVA
The middle of the hour fell upon them with fraught silence. The session had begun as it always did, the conversation growing steadily in heat as the two men spoke – boiling, boiling, boiling. They were both exhausted, tired of the repetitious debate they’d been caught in for so many weeks. These were the final quiet moments of an uneasy truce, one that both men knew would shortly reach its end.
Dr. Lindsey was the first to speak. “I know that you don’t take this seriously, but I do. The court definitely does. And I can’t keep being so lenient if you won’t accept my help.” The man stared absently out the window. It seemed he hadn’t heard the doctor say anything at all. Finally he turned, sighing softly as he met the other man’s gaze. “I’m not trying to be difficult, Frank. I’m honestly just trying to wrap my head around why I’m here at all.”
“You threw a laptop at your editor.”
“I’ve known James for over twenty years – he was at my wedding! Besides,” he paused, holding back a smile, “I didn’t throw it at him. I threw it near him. There’s a difference.”
Dr. Lindsey stood. “If you’re going to be flippant, our sessions end here.” The man on the couch lazily turned his gaze back to the window. He did not move.
Lindsey rubbed his forehead, frustrated. He could feel a headache coming on. “Have you reached out to your father yet?”
“What’s the point?” the man asked. “He’s a dead man – or, he might as well be, at this point.”
“Where are they keeping him?”
“St. Andrew’s. It’s a good place, I’ve heard. Good patient care.”
“You’ve never been?”
“No. I don’t like hospitals.”
“Not many people do,” Lindsey said, resting his hands on the back of the worn leather chair he’d been sitting in moments before. “But that’s not why you haven’t visited him.”
“Really? How’d you figure that one, Frank?” the patient scoffed. “If you want me to visit the old man so badly, why don’t you just say it? Maybe we could go down to St. Andrew’s next week, drop in for a little surprise family counseling. Hell of a reunion that’ll be – the old man, me, and the quack.”
“I never said I wanted you to visit him. I’m not so sure that would be a good idea for you. Not at this point, at least. But you have… mixed feelings about his passing, feelings you’re not willing to acknowledge. I don’t want you to visit him, I don’t even need you to reach out to him, but I need you to get to a point where you’d be willing to do those things.”
“Mixed feelings?” The man on the couch sat up, meeting the doctor’s eye. “Frank, he’s a terrible, miserable old man. And we haven’t exactly been close lately. My feelings are just about as clear as they could be.”
“Really?” Lindsey asked. “I’ve spoken with James, with your wife – you haven’t been yourself lately. They’re worried about you. Your behavior. The fact that you’re in here, speaking with me, is the only reason you aren’t facing a lawsuit right now. This isn’t what a man at the peak of his mental health looks like.”
The man leaned back into the couch, closing his eyes. “I can’t argue with that, I guess,” he said after a brief pause. “But I still don’t like it. I don’t see the point. It’ll only be a few months until he’s gone. And once he is, there will be nothing left.” He smiled. “These sessions might start to get boring, you know?”
“I find it hard to believe you of all people would say that,” the doctor said grimly. Standing up from the tall chair he’d been leaning against, Lindsey began to pace across the room. The sound of raindrops pattering against the window rang against the hollow silence of the room. “I can tell you one thing for certain,” Lindsey finally said. “If you ever want to be rid of all this – this weight you’re carrying – you can’t afford to spend the rest of your life running from whatever it is that’s haunting you.”
“Your homework this week is to write me a story,” he continued. “You and I won’t be having a productive conversation anytime soon, I can see that much by now. But this seems like a good solution for someone with your particular talents.”
“Write? Write about what?”
“Whatever you want. Your father, maybe – or your mother?” He smiled. “Just give me something I can work with.”
For the first twelve years of my life, the world I knew was perfect. I was too young to see the cracks forming in its foundation, too young to know to look for them. What could I have even done if I’d known they’d been there?
I was thirteen when I moved to Twin Falls, hidden in the valleys of southern Appalachia. The house, which had belonged to my grandfather before he passed, stood just five minutes outside of town – closer to twenty minutes walking. The area was beautiful, if sparse, blanketed with a quiet somberness I’d never known growing up in the city. The valley was remarkably empty: a sea of yellow grass marked only by the occasional farmhouse or street sign. Country roads spread like veins through the fields, connecting a web of scattered homes to the township in winding gravel flows. The tree line grew thick along the edges of the basin, creating a dense forest that surrounded the town. And always resting over the valley was the shadow of Mount Pleasant.
Mount Pleasant was the tallest peak in the county, a silent monolith towering above the little town. Our house stood less than a mile from the base of the mountain, though I’d never been up there. I had learned at a young age not to trust that place. My grandfather had told me stories when I visited him as a child, about the old asylum on the far side of the ridge. It was the first mental ward in the state, until it burned down in the 1890s. Local kids still visit the ruins, he told me, not that there’s much left you could identify as a building. “But at night…” He would pause dramatically, “I’ve seen them. Ghosts. The ones who died in the fire. Sometimes, if you look carefully, you can see them, just beyond the treeline. Calling out to you. In fact, maybe they’re here… NOW!” And then he’d pick me up and throw me in the air, laughing, leaving me only slightly traumatized but deeply amused.
Mom couldn’t bear to sell the house after he died. She said we could use it as a summer home, though years went by and we never went back. That is, until we moved there permanently. We left at night; our exit was silent and without warning. She had packed the suitcases so that her husband wouldn’t notice and, waking me up from a deep sleep, led me to the car. Archie, our dog, was waiting for me in the backseat, along with a few sets of clothes and some things I needed for school. And without a word she drove away. We went back to Twin Falls, to the town she’d grown up in, and left it all behind.
I can’t say I was thrilled about the transition. I was 13 and had just begun to understand where I stood in relation to my friends and classmates back home. The school in Twin Falls had less than 200 students ranging from kindergarten to 12th grade, with only four others my age: Will Cotter, who was six feet tall at 13 years old, Amos Wright, who’d decided to cut the sleeves from all his T-shirts the summer before I arrived, and Billy – whose last name I can’t remember for the life of me. The three of them would go hunting after school, as they had done together for the last 10 years of their lives. They would sometimes invite me to come along. I didn’t own a gun, nor did I know how to use one, both of which prevented me from ever joining them. But I think most of all I simply hated the thought of killing an animal.
The fourth member of our class was Lydia Dunn. She mostly kept to herself, being the only girl our age. She lived on the same road as me, only about half a mile further from town (which, in that part of the country, meant we were next door neighbors). As such, we would share the path home after the school day was over. I always kept my distance from her as we walked home, either lagging behind or accelerating ahead of her pace. She never seemed to care.
My life felt like a dream in the weeks following the move. That is, nothing felt real. The scattered days I’d spent in Twin Falls throughout my childhood came rushing back to me in a wave of hazy memory: the sights, the smells, the feelings. I was shocked to find the cords of the rope swing on the lonely apple tree in the backyard hadn’t rotted. I was shocked to find the cords hadn’t rotted. It’s a strange thing to return to the places of your childhood as an adult, to learn that the people you’ve been and things you’ve seen aren’t as fictitious as you sometimes believe them to be. My grandfather lifted me from the ground so that I could reach the tree’s branches, the sun dappled leaves swirling around my head as I picked the fruit. I still remember its taste.
The weeks passed, and I settled into a routine. I made a point of hanging out with the other boys at school and spent most of my free time wandering around town. I persuaded my mother to let me buy a bike (my old one was still at home) and began to explore the rest of the valley. This also meant I no longer had to worry about keeping my distance from Lydia on our walks home; I would fly past her on my new wheels.
I once asked Amos if he knew of any trails that led to the old asylum on the other side of the mountain. He shook his head, confused. “I’ve never heard of an asylum.”
The nights were the hardest part of living in Twin Falls. It was too dark to ride, and my friends lived on the other side of the valley. I begged my Mom to let us get a TV, but we were tight on money as it was. This was the point in my life where I first began to enjoy writing. They say all artists are crazy; I guess the isolation was all that was necessary to get me there. I started with pencil and paper, until Mom found Grandpa’s old typewriter. Once I got good at typing, I was working non-stop; whether I was in class or at home I was telling myself stories to pass the time.
I came home one day to find Archie running loose around the yard. The front door to our house was completely open. I entered the living room cautiously, ushering the dog along with me, and shut the door behind us so we wouldn’t waste the AC. Mom was crying in her bedroom with the door shut, and a letter from my father lay on the kitchen table. I didn’t need to read it.
That night I wrote a ghost story. There was a man, the head doctor at the Mount Pleasant State Institute for the Criminally Insane, but he was far more in need of help than any of his patients. He had no regard for their well-being; he was a monster who preyed on the people he was supposed to protect. In the end he burned down the asylum with everyone inside – even himself. But even the grave detested him, and it spat him out to roam the earth as a shadow. It was my finest work up to that point.
It was late when I finished writing. The valley got dark at night, especially when the moon was low enough to be eclipsed by Mount Pleasant. The roar of chirping insects flooded the room through my open window. Lazily, I rolled over in bed and gazed into the night. Maybe if I hadn’t looked, he wouldn’t have been there. But I did look, and there he was. It was too dark to see well, but there was a man, a silhouette, standing beneath the apple tree in the backyard. I froze, staring into him, certain he could see me. Eventually I rose, drawing the curtains shut. The shadow watched me patiently. I lay in bed sleeplessly for the rest of the night, trying to forget what I’d seen.
My writing steadily improved, but I never showed my work to anyone. It became the best of distractions for me. My teachers became frustrated with me scribbling in my notebook while I should’ve been paying attention in class. The other guys didn’t care if I spent all my time writing; I doubt they even noticed it. We all got in trouble for goofing off in class. Only Lydia saw the intensity with which I’d been working, though I didn’t realize it at the time. She approached me one day during our lunch period and sat down across from me. I was alone, doodling in one of the many notebooks I’d grown accustomed to carrying around with me. “I drew you.” She slid a blank piece of paper across the table to me. It took me a minute to process what was happening. I gently lifted the parchment and flipped it over to find an impressive rendering of my face on the other side. She’d somehow captured the light and dark and depth of my eyes in simple strokes of her pencil. If you looked closely, you could make out where her hands had left their mark in the shade of my cheeks or the ghost of a line that hadn’t been erased quite enough. But it was still good. Very good.
“Why?” I asked. We’d never spoken outside of class. She paled slightly, clearly not expecting that to be my response, and pulled the paper back. I felt a flush of embarrassment as I realized what I’d done, but I didn’t know what to say. We sat there in uncomfortable silence for a moment that couldn’t seem to end. Finally, she spoke.
“Well, I’ve shown you some of my work. Now you have to show me yours.”
“What?” I fumbled, resting my folded arms across my notebook.
“You’ve seen my drawing, now you owe me one of yours.”
“I don’t draw.”
“Then what’s in that notebook? I always see you head deep in it. Mrs. Taylor just about had to pry it from your hands yesterday in class, and I thought-” she cut herself off as a faint blush spread across her face. I felt the knot in my stomach begin to loosen. “Just show me what’s in there. You owe me.”
I held my ground, not wanting to show anyone the most intimate of my possessions, but it only took a minute for me to fold. I opened the book and flipped to the page I’d been doodling on: a half-finished portrait of a monkey mid-swing. It was the type of image a mother would proudly display on her refrigerator door, a demonstration of her offspring’s newfound ability to wield a pen. In other words, it sucked.
“This sucks.” she said.
I felt my face grow red. It was a shameful comparison of our artistic talents, but it was better for her to see my monkey than any of the stories I’d written. “I really liked your drawing,” I said, not sure what she was thinking in that moment. “Though, honestly, I’m not much of an artist.” She pushed the notebook back to me, awkwardly revealing her growing disinterest. I felt a sense of humiliation growing within me unlike anything I’d ever felt before.
“I do write a lot though,” I said, flipping to one of my more recent pieces. It wasn’t finished (and in retrospect its quality was closer to a scribble than the Mona Lisa), but she seemed to like it. I let her leaf through the notebook, reading through the notes, scribbles, and stories I’d never dreamed of showing anyone else.
We walked home together that day, continuing our conversation from lunch. I stopped riding my bike to school after that. In the mornings, I’d wait for Lydia to pass my house, and I’d walk with her into town. She was a prolific artist; she saw the world unlike anyone else I’ve ever known. Once something caught her eye, it lit a spark that would only grow and grow until it burst into flame, a fire that burned for her to share with the world. She loved drawing, painting, photography – anything that gave life to her vision. She quickly became my closest friend in the valley, and I was hers.
Archie went missing in late November. We looked everywhere for him, but the valley was far too big for an exhaustive search. “He’ll come home,” Mom said. “Dogs always come home.” Still, I hated the idea of leaving him alone with the creatures that hunted the fields at night. The last minutes of twilight trickled away, but I refused to lose hope. It wasn’t until I saw the man on the edge of the treeline that I understood he wasn’t coming back.
I began to see the man more and more. He was there in the woods while I rode my bike, he waited for me on the edge of town and in the field behind the school. And he was there under the apple tree at night – always, always there.
When I came home from school one day, my father’s truck was in the driveway. I grabbed my bike and rode away, late into the night. He was gone by the time I got back. More letters followed, some for me, but none were answered.
Winter came, and the cold weather drove me indoors for more time than I would’ve liked. I stopped writing, suddenly losing whatever feeling compelled me to do so in the first place. I could tell Mom didn’t want to stay in the valley much longer. All the time she’d grown up here she had wanted to leave, and even the force which had compelled her to return was not enough to make her want to stay. I probably wasn’t the only one with ghosts in that town.
“You can hardly blame her,” Lydia said as we walked through the snow together. “There’s not a person in town who wouldn’t leave in a heartbeat if you gave them the chance.” I said nothing, watching as my feet cut through the even sheet of white beneath them. Lydia smiled at me. “You actually like it here, don’t you?”
She was right, though I hadn’t realized it until that moment.
“Don’t you?” I asked after a beat. She shrugged. “I won’t be here forever. The valley’s fine for me now, in this moment. But I don’t want to be the type of person who’s okay with it always being that way. There’s too much in the world.”
We kept walking. I don’t remember what else we talked about, but she followed me into my house when we got there. She usually went straight home. We were alone, Mom had probably gone into town. I showed her the apple tree in the backyard and she sat on the swing. The branches were bare and covered in snow. There would be apples in spring, I told her.
I had an old Polaroid camera in the house, it was my mother’s from when she was young. I ran inside to show it to her. I still have some of the photographs she took that day. In fact, they may be the only piece of Twin Falls that still belongs to me. There’s one of me, with the house in the background, and one of Mount Pleasant in the winter sky, and one where you can see the town off in the distance, hidden in the fields of snow.
I waited in the kitchen as I watched her leave. The pictures sat on the counter. They needed time to develop. It wouldn’t take long for them to be ready. The ink, at first a blank canvas, underwent a gradual transformation: first there were only shadows, growing in depth and texture until they fully embodied the memory of what they were. One picture never fully developed. Lydia sat on the swing: her outline was there, and the tree, the mountain, the sky and the snow. But she never returned. The man in the background, off in the treeline, was present as always.
I ran after her. The sun sank low in the sky, and the wind and snow cut against my face. Shadows grew long as Mount Pleasant spread its wings. I got to Lydia’s house, old and broken and empty. I ran inside and called her name to a hollow silence.
I walked home crying. The snow melted around me and daybreak came. Yellow fields emerged as the sun gave birth to new grass. The shadow followed me far down the road, but I didn’t care. There was the house, not far ahead, only miles away. Behind the house, the apple tree was in full bloom. I went inside, calling for my mother. But she was gone. I lived with my father until I was old enough to make it on my own. The town, and everyone who lived in it, passed away into the shadowy depths of my memory, a brief and pointless part of my life.
I returned to Twin Falls a few years ago. The state had paved a highway through the valley, taking most of the town with it. What was left was nothing familiar, only a ghost of what I’d known.
All I really have left of my childhood is intangible, and it may be better that way. Some memories hurt – not because they’re bad memories, but because they belong to another time, another place, another person. They belong to a version of you that’s passed on. Some memories are like glass; you can see the entire world from the other side, but trying to reach through will leave you with nothing but a bleeding hand and a shattered reflection. Some memories will cut you even if you don’t extend your hand at all. Some memories just hurt.
The man stared blankly into the screen and turned off his computer. What he’d written was more than enough. He rose, crossing over into his kitchen. Resting on the counter was a stack of apples his wife had bought, though he would never eat them. They were waxy and flavorless, nothing like what they had in the country.
It was 3 AM. He’d be sleeping on the couch tonight; he didn’t want to wake up his wife. He wished he could’ve gone to bed sooner, but he had never been good about cutting himself off once he started writing. He wondered if he’d just wasted his night.
He lifted the edge of his pull-out couch and spread out a blanket before him. He wasn’t tired, but knew he should sleep. He was still haunted by the memories he’d been forced to dredge up over the last several hours. It was therapy, but there was nothing cathartic about it. From the darkness a familiar shadow appeared before him, closer than it had ever been before. It had no features, only a pair of mournful eyes. It had been years since the man had seen it.
He stared into the eyes and the eyes stared back. He felt no terror, no anger; he had none left for the thing. They stood there, together in the silence, for quite some time. Finally, the man turned away. Walking over to the landline, he reached into his pocket for the balled up paper note he’d made some weeks ago. He dialed the number written on it – St. Andrew’s Community Hospital.
“Hello? Yes. I know. Jim Coneway… I’m his son. Yes. How is he doing? Yes, I’ll hold.”