Chapter 2 #4
We hid in the shadow of a stone portico.
It also, blessedly, protected us from the rain, which kept falling harder and harder.
Adam was breathing as hard as I was. His blond hair was soaked, matted to his forehead.
Mine was, too, half unraveled from my braid.
He reached up and pulled the limp red ribbon free.
“Why do you always wear this?” he murmured. “Is it so I can find you in a crowd?”
“Why would you need to find me in a crowd?”
I watched, hypnotized, as he pooled the ribbon in his palm. “Because, Ellie,” he said, “I am starting to think losing you might be the worst thing in the world.”
I swallowed. “Evie is—-”
“Not you,” Adam finished. He slipped the ribbon into the front pocket of his jeans.
“We’re friends,” I reminded him. Reminded myself.
A better friend would have shut this down. A better friend would have walked away.
“There’s another Brown tradition,” Adam said. “If you kiss someone under Soldiers Arch, you’ll marry them.”
The rain was a cocoon, and I felt myself transforming. “Where’s that?”
Adam’s eyes flicked up to the stone shielding us from above, then locked on mine.
He tasted like whiskey; I had the fleeting thought that I could get drunk on him. His hands speared into my wet hair. His hips were flush against mine. He erased Chad’s groping touch from my memory.
In a herculean attempt at self--control, I shoved Adam away. “I can’t.”
“She doesn’t have to know.” He held out a hand, the way you might gentle a feral animal.
Maybe that’s why I believed him.
The world comes back to me in fits and starts, voices that whisper, voices that yell.
I remember a gurney. I remember psalms being sung and realize I was the one singing them.
My legs are wet, and then they aren’t. There is a slot in the door of my room and every now and then, eyes peer through. See the animal in its cage.
When I wake up, a nurse is in my room. “Hi there, Sleeping Beauty.”
My throat is a rusty saw. “Where am I?”
“You’re in the state psychiatric hospital in Atlanta.”
At that, I go very still. I probe every corner of my mind but . . . the voice is gone. There is now a ragged edge in my brain, like several pages have been torn away from the story of me.
I look down. I am wearing sweatpants without a string and a sweatshirt. Thick white socks. Beside the bed are rubber slides. My hair feels oily.
“What . . . day is it?”
“Friday. September fourteenth,” she says.
What happened to Wednesday and Thursday?
When my gaze falls on my bandaged wrists, I have a sudden vision of two men in scrubs holding me down while I thrashed as a woman pinched my nose and forced my mouth open. The way you get a dog to swallow a pill.
There is a meal on a cafeteria tray beside the bed—-congealed oatmeal and dubious fruit. I should be hungry, but I’m not. Through the open doorway I see others dressed like me.
“Do I . . . have to stay here?” I ask.
“Here, like the hospital? Yes. There was a hearing to keep you committed, as you posed a danger to yourself.”
I turn, staring out the window. Out there, people are going to work and drinking coffee as if it is just another morning. As if planes stay in the sky and buildings don’t fall.
The nurse misinterprets my silence. “Your doctor is going to want to talk to you, now that you’re awake. But if you want to wait in the common room, that’s fine, too.”
After she leaves, I try sitting up. It takes me a while to stand without wobbling. When I move, my limbs are in slow motion.
As I shuffle down the hallway, I pass two men—-one with his hand down his pants, and the other who has a blaring transistor radio pressed to his ear. There is a bathroom that smells like urine and a sign on a shuttered window that says meds: 3 p.m. A phone rings. A woman sobs.
I reach the common room. Before I realize what I’m doing, I reach out with one finger to touch the shoulder of a woman playing solitaire. I don’t trust myself to know what is real, and what I have imagined.
The woman turns, snaps her teeth at me, and hisses.
Real, then.
“Cassie,” a voice says. “Is that any way to welcome a new guest?”
I turn to find a petite girl standing beside me. She has long black Goth hair and eyes that are even darker. Her skin is milky, with a smattering of pimples over the bridge of her nose. “I’m Vera,” she says. “Welcome to the nuthouse.”
“I’m . . . Georgia.”
“You don’t sound too sure.”
I chew on my bottom lip. “I don’t remember getting here.”
She shrugs. “Here’s all you missed at intake: someone strip--searches you and takes away your stuff.
Pro tip? Get in line for meds early, because some of these fuckers can’t remember how to swallow and you’ll wind up standing around for two hours.
Dr. Gruner is aces, but Dr. Dillmark will try to cop a feel.
Stay away from Cassie, she bites. But you know that already. ”
The girl smiles at me. She has a gap between her front teeth.
“Thank you,” I say. Compared to the others in this room, Vera seems like someone I might have known at RISD.
She looks at me with her strange, rimless irises, reading my mind. “It’s nice to finally have someone normal to talk to.”
I lift my wrists. There is dried blood on one of the bandages. “I don’t know if I qualify.”
“So you tried to off yourself. I mean, who hasn’t?”
“Is that why you’re in here?”
“Nah,” Vera says. “I’m waiting on an NGRI hearing.”
“NGRI?”
“Not guilty by reason of insanity,” Vera explains. “They say I killed my mother and put her through a wood chipper.”
My lips part, but no words come out. Fortunately, just then, a woman in a white coat starts walking toward us. “Georgia?” she asks.
Vera bumps my shoulder. “Nice, George! You pulled Dr. Gruner.” She winks at me. “I’ll save you a seat at dinner.”
The doctor has straight blond hair and horse teeth and gentle eyes. She leads me into her office and leaves the door to the common room ajar. “Is it all right if I call you Georgia?”
I nod, as my hands twist in my lap.
“I’m sure you were surprised to find yourself here,” Dr. Gruner says. “Do you remember anything about your time at the hospital?”
I glance at my wrists, hidden by the sleeves of the sweatshirt. “Chains,” I say.
“Yes, you were in restraints at first. According to the doctor there, you refused to take your meds. You were given Ativan, which is what made you sleep. And Haldol, an antipsychotic.”
I probe the corners of my mind, but there are only cobwebs. Haldol. Is that why the voice has gone? Will it return?
I shake my head to clear it. I can’t trust myself. I can’t be trusted with Molly. It’s why I left. I need a new plan: Get out of this place. Try to die again. Succeed.
“I think there’s been a mistake,” I say. “I don’t need to be in a mental hospital.”
“I’d like to get to know you a little better today, Georgia, so we can continue to help you heal. Where do you live?”
My brain revs in overdrive. If I say I’m from Atlanta, the doctor will expect a paper trail of my life—-a job, a family, an address. “I took a bus here,” I say. “From . . . Boston.”
She makes a note on a pad. “What did you do in Boston?”
I remember reading once that the best lies are the ones based on truth. “I taught art.”
“Do you have any family in Massachusetts?” the doctor asks. “I know you didn’t have any identification when you got to the hospital.”
“No family.”
“No partner?”
I shake my head.
“Children?”
“I don’t have children,” I say, although it feels wrong.
“Do you know if there are any mental health conditions in your family?”
I think about the little bottle of pills my mother kept in the bathroom.
How once, in the middle of the night, I heard noises and went downstairs to find that she had written in red paint on the wall: exodus 20:14.
matthew 5:27. hebrews 13:4. I remember watching the letters and numbers drip like blood.
“No,” I reply. The more I talk, the more likely I am to trip up. “Is it okay if we stop for now? I’m tired and—-”
“Georgia,” the psychiatrist interrupts, “you told the doctor in the hospital that the Devil was speaking to you. Do you still hear that voice?”
“No,” I admit.
“Do you know what psychosis is?” When I don’t respond, she answers her own question.
“It’s when someone loses contact with reality.
They may hear or see things that aren’t there or believe things that aren’t true.
It could be caused by a mental illness like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.
It can also come from a neurological condition, or drug use, or trauma.
Someone who is having a psychotic break might also suffer from suicidal thoughts.
” Her eyes flicker to my wrists. “Do you remember trying to hurt yourself?”
I shake my head no.
“Do you remember why you tried to hurt yourself?”
“I didn’t want to be here anymore,” I confess.
“Here as in Atlanta?”
“Here,” I say, “as in alive.” I add, “Everyone would be better without me.”
“Who’s everyone?”
Molly is too little to grieve me. Evie will tell her the good parts: How I told Adam we were pregnant by making a pizza and spelling out baby in pepperoni.
How I sang to her when she was growing inside me, so that she would know my voice before she arrived.
How I agonized over choosing bassinet sheets with little lions or with mermaids. How much I wanted her.
Molly will never know that I sometimes couldn’t pull myself together to shower, or nurse her, or change her diaper. She won’t know that I tried to drown her.
As if I have conjured my daughter, I hear her cry.
The cry turns into music. I realize that the sound is coming from an ad on the television in the common room . . . and that it has caused my milk to let down. Two perfect wet circles have spread on the front of my sweatshirt.
I cross my arms, but not before Dr. Gruner says, “I see you’re lactating. That used to happen to me when I was nursing and heard a baby cry. Why do you think that’s happening?”
“I don’t know. Maybe there’s something wrong with me.”