“Sally, I still love you.”
“Good-bye, Carey.”
I went back to the dayroom. “Thanks,” I said to Mel, returning the pencil.
“Anytime. Hey, are you all right? You don’t look so good.”
“Ex-husband.”
“Rough.” He picked up a pack of Marlboros and offered me one. I shook my head and watched him light it, and then the way he smoked, snatching the cigarette away from his lips after each drag. I had never noticed before how sexy it was.
“What’re you reading?” I asked.
He picked up the book. “Yeats. Listen to this:
“It kind of reminds me of you,” he said.
I felt my face get hot. Not because of the poem but because of the way he was looking at me. It reminded me of someone—not Carey, or the movie-star MH, or Lillith, but someone from much longer ago, at that moment I couldn’t remember who.
6
Dream: I am in a rowboat on a river. I row under a bridge into a very dark glassy lake. Black water. In my hands I have a book, but the print on its pages is indecipherable. I get the idea it’s mirror writing, and hold the open book over the water, looking down to read.
What I see is too dreadful to take in.
I hadn’t seen my mother in three weeks. She refused to come to family therapy. “Too busy” was her excuse. Staff was working on her.
“Your mother loves you,” one of the MHs told me. “She’ll come when she realizes how important it is to your recovery.”
As a reward for talking in group, I was moved up to Status Three, which meant I could go anywhere on the grounds with staff or a Status Four person. Mel was taken off house arrest. The only one who got worse was Lillith.
It turned out she thought she was Joan of Arc. The scratching had become constant: palms, elbows, and finally the underside of her chin, leaving garish pink welts, I asked her if she had a rash, and she turned to me with a cynical expression.
“Can’t you see. Burned at the stake.”
“Who?”
“Who did it? Grindel Grundelwald. The dragon.”
“Dragon?”
Exasperated sigh. “Look, I’m going to take up arms. Despite what that fat-assed genitalic general says. And I don’t speak French! I’m not French, that was all a big lie!”
In group she stretched her stick arms out in front of her and pronounced: “The molecules are singing.”
“That’s not real,” the MH admonished.
“What are the molecules singing?” I asked. The MH gave me a warning look.
Lillith looked around gleefully. “Liar, liar, liar.”
They’d started her on a different drug, but it didn’t work. There was no choice but Status One and suicide watch. She sat kneeling on the carpet in her yellow flannel nightgown, so pale that every single amber freckle stood out in relief. The MH bent to look her in the face. “Do you understand why we’re doing this, Lillith? Do you see that this is not a punishment?”
Her eyes were as blank as marble.
“Lil, you’re going to be all right,” said Mel. At that her head snapped back, and I was afraid she was going to explode, but she didn’t.
At times she was still normaclass="underline" admiring Jane Pauley’s outfit, or we’d split a giant chocolate chip cookie I brought back from dinner. But I was afraid to look her in the eye. I understood that no matter how alone I had ever felt in my life, it would have been nothing compared to the isolation I would have seen there.
I knew so little about psychosis. I’d thought lunatics had fits, or outbursts, like Mel, and were confined to padded rooms until their minds wore themselves out. In the hospital I began to see that it wasn’t so simple. The brain could fasten itself on a character from history, some kind of metaphor for the soul’s illness. Jesus, who dies for everyone’s sins; Galileo, who wants to see heaven. Why had Lillith chosen Joan of Arc? If I’d been her I would have picked my own namesake, Lillith, the real first woman, pre-Eve. The one who was fashioned out of a lump of clay, like Adam, and thus Adam’s equal. Who escaped Paradise and had lots of interesting demon lovers.
Lillith’s uncle came and went one afternoon while we were at rec therapy. The word was that he was giving her one more week. One more week, and if she didn’t snap out of it, he was putting her into State.
I came back to the room just before lights out and Rachel was lying on her bed sobbing her head off. “What’s the matter?”
“I can’t find my teddy bear. Someone took him.”
“Who would have taken him? Come on, I’ll help you look.” Together we combed the room. I opened the closets and looked first in hers, then in mine. Nothing. At the back of the shelf in her closet there was a stuffed Peter Rabbit, complete with jacket and trousers, that her parents had given her for Easter. I took it out and handed it to her. She slammed it back at me as if it were a hot potato.
“What are you two doing?” It was the MH, coming around for bed checks.
“Rachel can’t find her bear.”
The MH put her arm around Rachel and said, “Honey, we’ll search for it in the morning, okay?”
“Someone stole him.”
“No one stole him. If we can’t find it, you can ask your parents to get you another, okay?”
When the MH left, I picked the rabbit up from the floor and took its clothes off, remembering that the teddy bear had been nude. I set the stuffed animal on the foot of Rachel’s bed and she ignored it, but at least she didn’t throw it back on the floor. In the night when she reached out at least she would find something to hold, something soft and familiar, that could soak up tears.
It had been two weeks since Douglas had tried to do away with himself in that spectacularly horrible way, and I still couldn’t bring myself to use the downstairs bathroom. People were leaving our group, new patients were coming in, people who had never met Douglas.
In dance therapy we did backbends. Mel and I were partners, spotting each other. He was much better than me. I watched him go over easy, with a slow twist of torso, his faded black T-shirt slipping to show faint ribs. His hair hung down over the gym mat like a drowned person’s and his face filled with blood—I could see it in the wall of mirrors behind us.
The therapist applauded. “It’s unusual for a man to be so limber.”
I did mine the sissy way, starting from a lying-down position.
“Good,” the therapist said. She went over to the other side of the room to help some older woman who was griping about her arthritis.
“Come on,” Mel said to me. “Stand up.”
He cupped his hand at the small of my back, as if we were going to dance. “Okay, fall.”
“I can’t.”
“Just trust me.”
“Why should I?” I said, but I closed my eyes and as slowly as possible let myself arch back over the still point that was Mel’s tensed palm. I could see the blood behind my shut eyelids as it reversed its flow. Crimson, violet, and finally chartreuse. My head was a boulder, my spine ready to snap. A million miles away, I felt my fingertips touch the cool dank plastic of the mat.
“See? You can do it.”
His blue-jeaned crotch rose above me. I closed my eyes. “Not by myself.”
“Stop putting yourself down, Sally,” he said, and his voice was sharp. I opened my eyes and there was that look again, that I couldn’t place.
“I’m dizzy,” I said truthfully.
“Now straighten up.”
I straightened up, which was a lot harder, and even when I was standing it took several minutes for the light-headedness to disperse.