“Yes…” I say, fidgeting with the hem of my shirt.
“But I wonder about the people who never suffer from depression,” she says, leaning forward. “How calloused their souls are to feel less than us.” The us rings through my head. “Are they less actualized, less pessimistic, less able to taste the tang of reality on the tips of their tongues? Why are we the broken ones—those who feel things? Who are affected by the changing tides in society?” Her eyes are bright. She’s not doing the shrink thing with me, I realize; she’s speaking to me from her own heart. I let my guard down a little, and lean into her words.
“We are not the problem, Margo,” she says. I nod my head. “It’s the people who do not feel as strongly as we do who are…”
Her words surround me. At first they are suffocating. Everything about our society teaches us that what she is saying is wrong. But then I succumb to them. My need to be normal latches on to those words—sucking … sucking.
If what she is saying is true, then the rest of the world is numb, and we who suffer from ailments of the psyche are the ones who are more advanced in nature. We see the decaying of society, the neglect of morals and human decency: the school shootings, the crimes humans commit against one another, the crimes we commit against ourselves; and we react to them in a way that is more intense than everyone else. Yes, I think. Yes, this is the truth.
I leave her office altered. Perhaps feeling not as alone as I always have. I begin again, not to question who I am, but to embrace it.
It is later that night that I see Dr. Elgin in the hall. Her hair has fallen out of the low ponytail she wears, and is hanging in pieces around her face. She’s speaking in earnest to one of the orderlies, a dark man, who turns on his heel and runs toward the nurses’ station. When I draw closer, I see that she’s out of breath.
“Dr. Elgin?” I say.
She says my name; I can see it form on her red lips, but there is a screaming coming from the room to my left that drowns it out. I jar, my eyes wide. Screaming is as constant in a nut house as medication, but this screaming is different. Perhaps I am too familiar with the screams that emanate from the mouth of a tortured human. They are different from the screams of anger or injustice. The orderly returns with two others. They slip into the room as Dr. Elgin stands slump-shouldered next to me. I try to see into the room, but the only thing visible is their white backs as they struggle to subdue a thrashing body. The first time she says it—the woman in the room—I don’t register its meaning. She’s chanting it, over and over, the two words running into one another so that you have to break them apart to hear what she’s saying.
Pinkzippopinkzippopinkzippo
Pink Zippo
Pink Zippo
Pink
Zippo
I reach up and cover my mouth with my hand. Dr. Elgin, divided between the woman in the room, and the distress on my face, looks for the moment like a cat deciding between the fat mouse in the corner or the skinny mouse in front of her face. She recovers herself quickly and grabs me by the shoulders, ushering me away.
“Let’s get you to bed, Margo,” she says. “It’s verrry late.”
Exactly. So why is she here?
I crane my neck, trying to catch one last glimpse into the room…
It’s a coincidence, I tell myself. I hurt Leroy as much as he hurt me. He didn’t have the time to find someone new. He is methodical. He takes months to search out his prey—watching, stalking, planning. I’ve been here for a little more than a month. Not long enough. Or did I trigger something by disturbing his pattern? Did he lash out to get back at me? We are back in my room, the bare and dingy walls already wearing down at my hope.
“It’s a coincidence,” I say out loud.
Dr. Elgin looks at me, her sharp eyes not missing a thing.
“Or is it?” she says softly into my ear.
I am gently left in the center of my room, the door closing behind me. Her soft purr has left me immobilized.
“Or is it?” I say.
The next morning, when the doors open for the day, I dress quickly and scurry out, heading for the nurses’ station. Come morning, we are to take our showers in the communal, then we have breakfast, and after that, free time, which I usually spend thinking about Leroy. The one that got away!
Her door is on the way to the bathrooms. My bladder is swollen beyond what is comfortable, but I need to see the color of her hair. Her door is not open like the rest of ours. Sometimes this happens when a patient is too ill to come out for the day; they call it ‘rest time,’ but what it really means is you’re having an episode and are too doped up to get out of bed. Nurse Fenn sees me lingering in the hall. We are not allowed to linger, but to move with purpose throughout the day. Seize! Charge! Believe! Hope!
“Move along, Margo,” she says. “It’s your bathroom time.”
“Who is in this room?” I ask, pointing.
Fenn looks squirmy, like I’ve asked her to name ingredients to her grandmother’s famous cookies.
“I heard her screaming,” I rush. “Last night. I just wanted to see if she was okay.”
Fenn seems more comfortable with that, She looks up and down the hall, then lowers her voice. They like me, the nurses. They think I’m kind. “A writer,” she says. “Famous.”
I blink at her like it makes any difference to me. I need to know the color of her hair, but I realize how crazy I’ll sound if I ask.
“What happened to her?” I ask softly.
Fenn folds in her lips, shakes her head like it’s too sad to say.
“Assault,” she whispers.
I am skilled at containing my emotions. I wasn’t always, but killing people will change you a bit. I breathe through my nose—inhale exhale, inhale exhale.
“Nurse Fenn,” I say sweetly. “What color is her hair?”
This question does not come as a surprise to her. Crazy people ask crazy questions. What they haven’t figured out yet is that I’m not crazy.
Fenn is about to open her mouth to chide or answer me when Dr. Elgin comes striding down the hall. It’s a surprise to see her here. The other crazies part for her, giving her room to walk and looking at her with a certain adoration. Everyone likes her, and, by mutual consent, we all wish she were here more often than the stocky, curt Dr. Pengard. She acknowledges me with a nod, because I am her favorite, and slips inside the famous writer’s room. The screaming starts five minutes later. I run, not walk, to the bathroom. I might be responsible for her pain.
What color is her hair?
What color is her hair?
What color is her hair?
It’s on an endless loop in my brain. A carousel that goes round and round, making me dizzy. She’s been locked up in that room for days now, screaming for most of it. On one of those days a man came. Handsome, with a face that wasn’t made to smile. He was taken to her room, and then the screaming stopped for a little while.
I ask Dr. Elgin about her, but she presses her red lips together and tells me nothing. I overhear a nurse say her name, and I memorize it for later. It’s on the tenth day of her stay that I finally see her. Brown hair. She has a streak of gray at her temple, and I wonder if she had her stylist put it there on purpose. A nurse wheels her into the rec room, and sets her in front of a blank canvas and several tins of paint. She closes her eyes tightly and pushes them away, muttering something under her breath. Then she is gone, her room cleaned out and someone new assigned to it. But I know. Leroy hurt that woman. He took the rage that he felt for me, and he hurt her. And now I have to get out of here and stop him before he does it again. Once and for all. No mercy this time.
ON THE LAST DAY OF APRIL, after I’ve been at Westwick for just over four months, I tell Dr. Elgin everything. I tell her about Leroy, and what I did to him—the months of planning it took before I climbed through his kitchen window with the intent of killing him. I tell her how he overpowered me, and then deliver my suspicions that he drugged me and wrote the note himself.
When I confess that I am the reason the writer screamed ‘pink Zippo’ from behind the doors of her room, there is nothing on Dr. Elgin’s face to give away whether she believes me or not. She simply listens as she always does. When our session is almost over, she promises to look into Leroy Ashley, and I feel a burden lifted from my chest. It’s good to tell. To have someone know who you are. But the next time I see her, she does not speak about Leroy or the writer.
“Margo,” she says gently, once I am seated. “Why doesn’t Judah come here to visit you?”
He has … or no, he hasn’t. Why did I suddenly think he had? I’ve been here for how long? I’ve written him letters—five or six—after the returned e-mail-but I hadn’t heard back from him. He is in Los Angles with his girlfriend, Eryn … or is it Erin?
“I … I … He’s…”
I grasp my head, press my fingertips against my temples. I suddenly feel swarmy. Is that a word? But it’s what I feel. Swarmy. Everything melding and melting together. Emotions and thoughts kicking up like a windstorm.
“Look at me,” she says. “Tell me about the first time you saw him.”
“We were children,” I say. “We grew up a few houses away. He just went to a different school.”
“No,” she says. “The first time you spoke with him. Tell me about that day.”
“I was going to get cigarettes from the store. For my mother. I saw him outside of his house so I went to speak to him.”
“And that was the first time that you spoke to Judah since you were children?”
“Yes.”
“What was different about that day? What made you want to speak to him?”
I close my eyes. I can still feel the rusted gate beneath my fingertips, the moan as I pushed it open and walked down the path to where he was smoking his joint. The sickening sweet smell of pot.
“He looked so confident. He didn’t care that he was in a wheelchair. I felt like I needed to know how to do that. Be that.”
Dr. Elgin closes her eyes. It looks like she’s fallen asleep, except her eyes are roving back and forth behind her lids in a rapid eye awakeness.
“What happened the day before?” she says.
“The day before I spoke to Judah?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know. It was a long time ago.”
“You do know. Think.”
“I don’t. It was a long time ago,” I repeat. It’s the first time since our therapy sessions started that I would rather not be in the room with her. I feel as if she’s creeping in on me. She’s finished playing nice guy. A heat creeps around the back of my neck like an invisible hand. Even my eyelids feel hot. I pull at the scrubs, which are sticking to my skin.
“Judah has not contacted you since you have been here.”
“That’s not true,” I rush. But, even as I say it, I know it is. “We had a falling out. Before I was admitted to the hospital. We haven’t spoken in quite some time.” I sound like a formal, well-spoken liar.
“And what was your falling out about?” she asks, her pen poised above her yellow notepad.
I think. It’s so hard to remember shit in here, all the drugs pressing against your brain. “His girlfriend,” I lie. “There was an argument. She was rude to me.”
“How did the argument end?”
“He didn’t want anything to do with me. He … he said he didn’t even know who I was anymore.”
“But you write to him, yes?”
“Yes,” I say, remembering the judicious way I tried to explain myself in them. Please forgive me. I don’t know why I did it. She was hurting Mo. She killed her little girl. I won’t do it again. Please speak to me.
All met with silence. I hunker down in my seat, staring at the floor. I’d write him another letter—five. I’d do whatever it takes. I’d make him realize how sorry I am.
“But he came to the hospital,” I say. “Before they brought me here. He was in my room. The two people who transferred me here saw him. You can ask them…”
Dr. Elgin shakes her head. “There weren’t any visitors at the hospital, Margo.”
“How do you know?”
“You were on suicide watch and in critical condition. The hospital wouldn’t have let anyone in there beside family.”
“Call his mother,” I say. “Go on…”
“I have, Margo,” she says. “I went to see her.”
My tongue feels sluggish. I can’t make it form the words I need to say.
“Do you remember her asking you to buy her shirts, from your job … where was it…?”
“The Rag O Rama,” I answer. “And yes, I do.”
“You brought her men’s shirts.”
“That’s what she asked for. Shirts for Judah.”
Dr. Elgin reaches into a drawer in her desk and pulls out a stack of white envelopes. I watch as she lays them out—one by one in front of me. A fan of pure white accusation. And then I start to moan.
“No,” I say. “No, no, no, no, no.”
Scrawled on each of the envelopes, in what looks like red crayon, is Judah’s name. Judah on each envelope in a child’s handwriting: the jagged J, the crooked h. Judah, who I love. Judah, who loves me. Judah, who I wrote those letters for. I pick one up, pull out the lined paper inside. There is nothing written on the page.
“Margo,” Dr. Elgin says. “There is no Judah. He does not exist.” Her accent is thick and syrupy.
“You’re crazy,” I say. “I’ve known him my whole life. Where are my letters? The ones I wrote? Why didn’t the hospital mail them?”
“These are the letters you gave to the nurse,” she says. “There was never an address, and the papers are always blank.”
“No,” I say. “I wrote to him. I remember. He lives in California. He is going to move back to the Bone. Be a teacher.”
“There was a boy,” she purrs. “Who lived in the house on Wessex Street. I called his mother, Delaney Grant. She said you used to come by a lot … after he died.”
I can’t breathe. “What do you mean? What are you saying?”
“Tell me,” she says. “About the day before you became friends with Judah.”
I have to bend over, put my head between my knees. I feel her presence. She’s an absolute, and her absoluteness permeates the air I’m breathing.
“I’m not crazy.” I sob these words. They hurt so bad, like someone telling you you have cancer when you’ve been healthy your whole life.
“Crazy is a simpleton word. You are not crazy,” she says. “It’s much more complex than that.”
I tell her before she asks again. “I watched him his whole life. A boy in a wheelchair while the rest of us had legs.”
“But you never spoke to him,” Elgin says. “He died when he was nineteen years old. He committed suicide, and you tried to save him.”
“No,” I say.
She hands me a single sheet of paper, a print out from an internet search. Her nails are lacquered a deep, chocolate brown. I take the paper, not looking at it for several seconds, while I try to control the violent fray between my body and my mind. On it is a picture of a man in his late teens who looks nothing like my Judah. He is frail looking with deep hollows for cheekbones and hair that lays flat on his head as if plastered down by a heavy rain or days of unwash. Underneath what looks like his school photo is an article.
NINETEEN-YEAR-OLD MAN DIES AFTER ROLLING HIS WHEELCHAIR INTO THE BOUBATON RIVER
My eyes scan down the length of the article.
On Friday night, Judah Grant, a recent graduate from the Allen Guard School of Progress, who was scheduled to start college in the fall, was found drowning in the Boubaton River by eighteen-year-old Margo Moon. Margo, who lived down the same street as Judah, and attended Harbor Bone High School, was walking home from work when she saw him plunge from an abandoned dock into the water. Judah lost the use of his legs at eight years old after he was involved in a car accident where he sustained a spinal injury. Struggling with depression for o
ver a decade, his mother, Delaney Grant, said that her son often spoke of death and lost his will to live shortly after the accident. Margo, thinking that Judah’s chair had accidentally toppled into the water, dove in in an attempt to save him.
“I pulled him up from the bottom of the lake, but he struggled to get away from me. At one point, he hit me in the face, and my vision went completely black.”
The ink begins to thin here, like Dr. Elgin failed to load a new cartridge into the printer. I strain my eyes to make out the rest.
Margo, who says she is not a strong swimmer, swam to the shore to regain her breath, then dove back in for Judah. She was able to pull his already-unconscious body to the bank of the Boubaton River, where she reportedly preformed CPR for five minutes before running to get help.
The article cuts off here. Elgin didn’t bother printing out the rest of the story. She wanted to reassure me I was crazy—or complex, as she called it—without giving me too much information. I realize I am very, very hungry and start to think of dinner. Will it be beef stroganoff or enchilada pie?
I look at the blurred lines of the printout, the disjointed, jiggery ink job, and wonder why a fancy doctor like Queen Doctor doesn’t have fresh ink. She seems to be waiting for something. I avoid her eyes.
I can feel the cold water on my skin—cold, even though it’s summer. The weight of the cripple kid as I try to haul him to the surface … kicking, kicking … the burning of my lungs, the numbness of my fingers as they grip his shirt and can’t hold on. Desperation. Confusion. Who do I save? Myself? Him? Does he want to be saved? Eventually I had swallowed too much water, and, coughing, I pushed my aching limbs to the shore where I gasped for air, staring back at the spot where he sank … where he wanted to sink.
The reporter was nice. He gave me a twenty-five dollar gift certificate to Wal-Mart that he pulled out of his wallet and told me that I was a hero. “Not everyone can be saved,” he said to my tear-stained face. “Sometimes you just have to let nature take its course.”