AND THEN
— 49 —
IT takes some time before I realize the words they’re saying aloud are meant for me.
“We’re going to take care of you here, Laura, hon. Just rest.”
“I think her name is Lauren.”
“Sorry. Lauren. Your mom brought you in to us. Do you remember? Do you remember what happened? What you did?”
“Have you ever tried to hurt yourself before, Lauren? Lauren?”
“All right then, I see you want to sleep. Just sit up and swallow this.”
“She won’t sit up.”
“Just help her. There. Let her lean on your arm. There, Lauren. Here you go. This will make you comfortable. Good. Swallow.”
“Who was that you were talking to just now, Lauren?”
“Did she say something? I didn’t hear.”
“She’s talking to those girls again . . . What girls, Lauren? I don’t see any girls.”
“Let’s leave her be. Don’t encourage her. Let’s just let her sleep.”
The two nurses shuffle out the door. They leave it open—it’s a door that doesn’t seem to ever be able to close—and they wander back, every so often, checking on me as I pretend to sleep. Soon the pill they had me swallow makes it impossible to keep pretending. The pill makes the sleeping turn real.
My head thickens with the quiet. The lost girls who’ve come out to visit with me slip under the bed to hide. Or they’ve gone somewhere else, behind the curtains maybe, where the shadows gather—all I know is I can’t see or hear them anymore.
The next time my eyes close, I can’t get the lids to lift open.
This is the psych ward of the hospital and I don’t know how many days I’ve been inside.
— 50 —
I don’t dream. I don’t wake up coughing, and I can’t smell smoke.
I’ve been across the river, in the hospital’s adolescent psychiatric ward, for what feels like a week’s worth of nights, though it could be fewer and it could be more, I’m not sure. The sun streaming through the window feels like afternoon sun long left over from morning, or the dreary start to a new day. I’m in a long, narrow room, in a long, narrow bed against a wall. The bed on the opposite wall is empty. So is my head.
There isn’t a voice rattling around in my mind that doesn’t belong to me—which, after all that’s happened, is a foreign and noticeable thing. Whatever they give me here at night knocks me out and steals the dreams away, also the voices. I’m wiped clean and returned to who I was before I ever spied Abby Sinclair on the side of the road.
Except for the bandage wrapped around my left arm.
I don’t want to unpeel the bandage to see what I did. I lie still on the bed and wait. My limbs are heavy, and I can’t seem to do much else. Surely, if I wait long enough, one of the girls will visit me.
Someone has to.
But no lost girl enters the room, and no lost girl finds her way through the quiet caverns of my head to lift her lips to my ear.
I need to get out of bed and go out there, see if someone can get my mom on the phone. She’ll believe me if I could only get a chance to talk to her. She’ll come right away and she’ll take me home.
On the ride back, we’ll laugh over this. We’ll be sure I’m far more careful in the future with mirrors and fingernail clippers. If I missed too much school, she’ll cover for me as she has before. Maybe we’ll say I came down with the flu.
No one will ever have to know this even happened.
— 51 —
MY mom seems afraid to look at me and yet all she can do is look at me, so there’s the constant swish-swishing of her head as it turns toward me, then away, toward me, away. Not to mention her hands, which keep smoothing the hair from my face, or grabbing my fingers and squeezing, or rubbing circles upon circles on my back between my shoulder blades even though I’d rather she didn’t keep touching me right now.
She clears her throat. “They’re going to keep you here through the weekend, Lauren,” she says. “Then we’ll . . . we’ll decide more on Monday.”
When I speak it’s my voice that comes out, but it’s slower than normal, which makes me think my ears have gone bad. The meds they keep giving me whisper through my system the way the voices used to, but in dumb, dull sounds I can’t translate. “Monday?” I say. “I think I have a big exam on Monday. I can’t stay through Monday.”
“I’ll bring your schoolbooks and whatever you need from home, if that’s really what you want. But are you sure? I don’t want you worrying about school after, after . . .”
She can’t say it.
“I didn’t try to kill myself, Mom. It was an accident. I told you.”
“Do you remember what you said?” she asks tentatively. “About Fiona Burke?”
I sharpen. “No. What did I say about Fiona?”
“You were . . . It sounded to me like you thought you were talking to Fiona.”
I shake my head. “I don’t remember that at all.”
She changes the subject. “How do you feel?”
“Fuzzy.”
“Does it . . .” She points at the arm.
“Hurt?” I finish for her.
She nods.
“Not really. It’s barely even a scratch. Can’t I go home with you? I have shifts at work all this week.”
“No, you don’t. I called in for you already. And it wasn’t a scratch, Lauren.”
Now she’s not meeting my eyes at all. She looks like she’s about to burst into tears. She turns from me in the chair to survey the common room we’re sitting in, this sad space meant for sad people. Blinds block out as much sunlight as possible, and puke-and-blood-proof couches and chairs covered in scratches aim away from one another, making it possible for a dozen people to sit in this room at once and not have to talk to one other person, which is a miracle in furniture arrangement. A large woman guards the common area from inside an adjoining office. The window between her desk and the rest of the room has a shutter over it that can be closed, so if the place falls to chaos, she can abandon ship and blockade herself in.
A boy shuffles past the common room just in time for my mom to see him—how both of his arms are covered in the kind of bandages that cover just my left forearm—and how slowly his legs move, barely lifting off the floor as he inches down the tiled corridor. He walks like he’s been filled with cement. Maybe that’s what’s in the pills they make us swallow here. Carefully I lift my arm to see how heavy it is, and then with a thunk I watch it drop back down onto my lap, the way a sack of cement might drop.
When my mom turns back in my direction, a perfectly positioned beam of sunlight from between the blinds catches her in the face. It lights her up as if someone in the clouds has aimed a spotlight down to reveal something of significance to me.
Pay attention, it says.
My mom’s beauty mark again. Just like the other night, it’s on the wrong side of her face and I’m left wondering. Am I looking at her in a mirror? Has my memory gotten dislodged and confused? Or is this woman—this beautiful woman with the mark on the wrong cheek, the one who keeps nervously touching me, the one who locked me away supposedly for my own good—is this woman even my mother?
I want her to speak. I need to hear her voice. Then I’ll know.
She sighs. She says, “I’m so sorry I made you feel like you couldn’t come to me, Lauren.”
For a second I think she called me Laura, like I swore I heard the nurse call me the other night. But no. No, she knows my name, and she’d never make such a simple mistake as that. It won’t be so easy.
I’m second-guessing myself again. I’m not sure who she is now: the one I know and have always known, or someone pretending to be that person, trying to trick me. I decide to take careful stock of her tattoos, but she’s wearing a sweater, and the sweater strategically covers them up with overlong sleeves and a bulky turtleneck that doesn’t allow even a peek of vine to be seen. Of the birds on her neck, only two can be made
out, the last two closest to her ear.
Should I ask her to take off her sweater? To undress and prove herself to me?
Then I remember how I tore off her shirt in the bathroom the other night and how frightened she seemed of me after, like I’d attacked her with claws out and teeth bared, ready to rip into her skin. I remember the sight of her chest. Her breasts. Her ribs. Her stomach. And I hang my head, ashamed.
“What?” she says. “Tell me what you’re thinking, honey.”
“You should probably go,” I say. “I’m having weird thoughts right now.”
“Like what weird thoughts?”
“I shouldn’t tell you.”
“Are they telling you what to think?” She’s leaned forward and whispered this, like someone might overhear. “Did they tell you not to tell me?”
I think at first by “they” she means the doctors, but then I get it. She’s regurgitating rote from those case studies in her books again. She used to make me read them aloud to her so she could guess the right answer and prep for her exams. Because that’s the kind of question you’d ask a patient you’re trying to categorize, ticking off all her symptoms until the winning diagnosis dings and lights up the game board. If I tell her that the alien-vampires who’ve come down from the galactic heavens are telling me what to think and what to do and what to say, she’ll win the prize refrigerator.
I give a tiny shake of my head. That’s the only answer I can offer right now.
“Oh, Lauren,” she says, a hint of pity in her voice. Her mouth crumples, showing me how defeated this makes her feel. She asks if I need anything from home and I describe what she can bring me: my textbook, for the test Monday; some books to read, anything really; my gray notebook with the doodles on the front and I think I left it on my desk; my eyeliner and the rest of my makeup; more socks.
Then I make myself ask, “Did they call you yet? The police? About Abby?”
What I know from my last night at home—and my last visit to the house before Trina left me her knife—is that Abby might still be out there somewhere. It’s possible. I can’t give up hope on that.
She’s hesitating, so I really do begin to think it’s about to happen, the truth, the end of the story, the end. And will I be allowed to be sad about my friend while in here, will they let me have that emotion? Will they even let me call her my friend?
But my mom shakes her head. “No news,” is all she says.
“Do you want to call them and ask, maybe? For me?”
I think she might agree to it. Then she veers around and completely changes the subject. “So I called Jamie. I thought he should know.”
“About Abby?” I ask, confused.
“About you,” she says. “I called and told him you were here.”
My real mom would have called Jamie. That’s something she actually would do. This is her, isn’t it? This is my mother, and this crazy girl is me.
“He picked up your van from that party for you. He said he found your keys.”
“Please tell him thanks for me,” I say.
“He might visit. I hope that’s okay.”
I don’t want Jamie to see me like this; it’s bad enough he knows, and I don’t know how much my mom told him, so I can’t be sure how much he knows. It could be all; it could be every awful thing. He’s probably so relieved right now that we broke up; he’s probably eternally grateful to be able to stay out of this. Away from me.
— — —
Soon it’s time for good-byes. There’s the hug, never-ending so I feel like I can’t breathe, and there’s the remembered scent of my mother’s hair, which brings me back to childhood, and I’m thinking randomly about the wasp sting and the frozen peas, and I feel worse again for doubting her. I don’t know what’s happened to me. To my head.
I let her go without standing up, as my legs weigh twice as much as they did just minutes before and my left arm feels too weak to lift. Only my right arm can be made to move, and I wave that at her until she disappears down the hall.
It isn’t until she’s gone that I think to raise my right hand to my throat. I feel the exposed skin at my collarbone, tracing my fingers around the base of my neck like I’m aiming a guillotine. I let my hand go lower, feeling for it. The pendant isn’t there.
I don’t remember seeing it here, in the hospital. I don’t remember feeling it, against my skin, all those days I spent in bed. Was it on me when they brought me in? It should have been around my neck, but what if something happened when they carried me out on the stretcher? What if it fell off? What if it got caught on something and it broke? I have to go after my mom and get her to look for it at home.
I stand up.
I try to remember which direction my mom went down the hall.
It takes me a moment and then I see the exit—of course, that’s the only direction she could have gone; that’s the one exit. There isn’t another one on this whole ward.
I walk toward it, but the walking is a difficult thing to manage. I feel sure I’m being faster than I am, except the tiles under my feet are changing too slowly and the window in the wall is the same window that was there before.
It takes me a long time to make it even a quarter of the way down, and it’s here that I come upon the sounds of them talking. There’s an open, unguarded door and two voices thrown out into the hallway. The first voice, the one I recognize, belongs to my mom, and the other voice, the voice that sounds only barely familiar, must be one of the doctors. They’re talking about something that confounds me at first: They’re talking about my dad. The last time I saw the guy, I was three years old, which for all intents and purposes means I have no memory of ever seeing him at all. And yet here’s my mom telling some random doctor all about him.
“And he wouldn’t come to the phone,” she says. “And I’ve called around, but I haven’t been able to find where he’s staying since. I mean, I have no idea. He could be out on the streets again. He could be sleeping under a bridge. He probably is. I don’t know. It’s not like anyone would tell me.”
“So was there ever any diagnosis? Did he tell you?”
“He didn’t.” She sighs and stays silent for a long while.
I’m hovering just outside the door and I wonder if she can sense I’m here. Then she starts talking again, starts saying these things she never bothered to tell me. Her own daughter. About my own dad.
“He never said anything to me about it. But there was the medication he was taking when I knew him. He left an old prescription bottle in the house when he took off, and I found it after. I remember seeing the label. Thinking, What are these for? So I looked them up. Antipsychotics. I mean, schizophrenia, could that have been it? How could he not tell me? I know it can be hereditary. Doctor, with Lauren, I mean she’s too young yet, but do you think—”
I lose track of the rest of it when an orderly takes my elbow and says, “Are you confused? Do you need to go sit down?”
The orderly spoke loudly enough to bring my mom to the door, and the doctor, and there’s a nurse, and there’s a shuffling patient coming this way, and some other hospital person in hospital clothes, and they all see me and they all know I heard.
My mom looks stricken.
“Lauren, do you need something?” the doctor says. I don’t know her name, but she knows mine.
“Mom, I was going to ask . . .” I settle my eyes on my mom. Apparently she thinks my absent, supposedly homeless dad is a certified lunatic and she’s been keeping this little detail from me for my whole life. “My necklace. My gray one. Could you bring that for me from home, too?”
She glances at the doctor. The doctor nods. So she turns back to me and she says sure, she’ll look for it at home and bring it with everything else tomorrow.
“Lauren, did you—” my mom starts to say, but the doctor there beside her is shaking her head. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Lauren, honey,” my mom says instead.
I nod and make my way slowly back down the hallway to stare at th
e wall while sitting in an uncomfortable, antisocial vinyl chair.
— 52 —
A new day, but I haven’t been staring at the wall. I’ve been staring at the girl. She hasn’t noticed because she notices nothing. She hasn’t moved since the nurse led her in and sat her down, not just not moving from this chair to another chair, but at all. Not even to fidget or scratch an itch. Not to blink her eyes or adjust the piece of fire-red hair that’s fallen in front of her nose.
Maybe she is sitting very, very still in the hopes that I notice her. There are other patients who are louder, and flail more, and in the midst of all that she stands out. Or there could be another reason. She must think we’re being watched here—she must know for sure if she’s keeping herself that still.
Her voice won’t reach me through the drugged confines of my head, so she’s come here in the flesh. It’s the only way.
“Fiona?” I prompt her.
She doesn’t stir.
I try her name again, louder. “Fiona. I see you, okay? I see you there.”
Her body betrays no movement. She’s catatonic, if you can be in that state with your eyes still open. There she sits, as if formed into the vinyl chair by a mold of wax.
I move chairs so I’m right beside her. Then I reach out and shake her knee, but it’s like playing with the CPR dummy in health class. Deadweight.
“Can’t you talk?” I whisper. “It’s me.”
Her eyes are still open, and I wedge my face in front of them, so she has to look at me. Even then, the brown irises seem to cast straight through me, as if my body has lost all its skin and bones and bloody, bubbling organs so the blank wall behind me holds more space in this world than I do.
“Blink if you can hear me,” I say.
She blinks.
Then I get an idea.
“Write it down if you can’t talk,” I tell her. I pass her my gray notebook, which is the only thing besides the socks that made it through to me on the inside. The nurses’ station acts like the TSA at an airport. Everything must be checked, and since they have no scanners, that means by hand. They’ve only given me two things from the bags my mom brought me for now, and say they have to go through checking the toiletries and all the rest.