Creative Writing - the Brookehaven Athens Clinic

The Brookehaven Athens Clinic. The name makes it sound like an exuberant place that could be filled with nice, caring doctors, sweet charming nurses clarity coming in through the windows of the patients to give them hope and look towards tomorrow. That’s what someone who passes by might think.

I should probably mention that Brookehaven is no ordinary clinic. It’s a psychiatric clinic. It’s where all the crazies go to be contained or possibly fixed.

Every patient has their own shanty prison room which has a bed if you’re lucky. The door is made of steel and has a little barred window. Patients have an hour in the open room, where music is played and they have a little free time usually with their pallets painting caricatures as time goes by. Doesn’t sound too bad right? It wouldn’t be if the doctors weren’t ostensibly insane themselves. They take the patients who are better off dead and preform experiments on them.

Everyone in here are here in retribution as in either criminally insane, mentally, insane, or just sick. Anastasia was supposed to be caring for her sister’s infant twins but she instead drowned them. Carl Spivery was a killer who raped and murdered twenty-four women on Valentines day in four years. Grace Thredson is a schizophrenic.

The difference between myself and everyone else in here, is the fact that i’m not insane. I don’t have a mental disorder nor have i ever killed anyone they think I did though. By they, I mean the police, and the judge. No one knows what really happened except for myself, and two others. By now you’re probably wondering how I ended up in this ramshackle, so let me tell you. When I was born, my mother gave me up for adoption. I was adopted by the most amazing parents. Angela and Francesco Giordano. They adopted me when I was only eight months old. I would soon learn, I couldn’t escape tragedy. They died in a car accident when I was fifteen, and I went back to the orphanage.

One year later, I was adopted by John and Agatha Moreau. The Moreau’s needed someone to help care for their three kids. I was luckily chosen. The Moreau’s cared about money and money only. They never paid attention to their kids, who were the only things I had keeping me there. I could have eluded to another place but I couldn’t leave those beautiful kids behind. They were nothing like their parents, thankfully, and were the perfect kids who loved me as much as I loved them. Elizabeth was eight years old, Michael was six years old, and James was four years old. The Moreau’s lived in Maine, but after they adopted me, they decided to move to Revere, a small town in Massachusetts, to make a new start for a new family.

We moved into an old Victorian house in a rather placid neighborhood. There weren’t many people in Revere, and really nothing to do. It was about fifteen minutes from Boston, which is where John opened a new practice, since he was a licensed doctor. He was never really home, always busy at the office. Agatha didn’t have a job, and wasn’t like most wives who took care of the children, cooked, and cleaned the house, She was out most of the day, shopping and doing who knows what else. I was left to take care of the house, cook, and care for the kids, making sure the two oldest went to school and picked them up from the bus stop. I couldn’t go to school because I was busy doing everything else. I eventually got used to the routine.

Across the street was a impoverished home. In the top window however, I saw a young boy who looked to be about seventeen. I walked to the house and knocked on the door. It was dark and i called out, hoping he would answer. I walked up to the staircase but it didn’t seem like he would be coming down anytime soon. I turned around and saw him standing in front of the door. startled, i wondered how he made it down so fast without me noticing. He had shaggy brown hair, hazel eyes, average height, and meager. We started talking then, and although we had just met, we had gotten to know each other pretty well. His name was Ian Peters. He told me of his story. He lived by himself in the house which he was raised in. He never knew his dad, and his mother passed away a while ago. He had someone who brought him food and other necessities, and the bills for the house were taken care of. He finished high school but didn’t go to college and spends most of his days at home mostly. I asked if he ever went out, since being home all day could get a little boring. He replied saying he couldn’t go out. Skeptical, I asked what he meant.