“There are other things I like to do when I’m lonely. I like to watch old movies and eat popcorn. I’m a sucker for a classic romance—Bogart, Grant, Bacall.” She talked some more about the world outside the walls, keeping her voice slow and steady. She held up the notepad to show off a few sketches. After a while she tried a different approach: “Dr. Wasserman told me you’ve been here a long time, Sarah. How do you feel about this place? Do you like it?”
This time she was sure she saw movement, a slight trembling. It could be nothing more than muscle fatigue. Keeping her voice calm and smooth, she said, “I’ve seen places like this before. Most people don’t want to be here. Most people need a friend. I can be your friend. I’ll come visit you whenever you’d like. We can talk about anything you want.”
She shifted, up onto the balls of her feet so that she was mirroring the girl’s crouch. “A place like this would make me upset. All those kids upstairs having fun while you’re stuck down here alone. I wonder if you’ve ever been to the zoo, or a ball game. We could go to those places, if Dr. Wasserman says it’s okay.”
She was concentrating so hard that when the rattling came at the door she jumped. Gaining her feet, she went over and peered out the little window, but could see nothing except the opposite wall of the corridor. The noise did not come again. The button that would bring Maria was at eye level, housed in a small plastic casing, but she did not press it.
When she turned around again, Sarah began to shake. The shaking started in her lower body and spread upward. The buckles on the straitjacket made a slight tinkling sound.
The line of spittle attached to her hair danced and curved, but did not break.
“I know you can hear me. I know you’re in there. I’m not going to hurt you.” Jess approached the girl and crouched, showed her open hands. “What are you afraid of, Sarah?”
When the ringing began, she at first thought it was a distant noise of the clinic, or the lights humming over her head. But then the ringing grew louder, and with it came a buzzing as if the air itself were electrified. Jess felt a familiar disorientation, her mind growing heavy and sluggish, and thought of alcoholic haze, those dim nightclub dreams of her undergraduate days rushing back like a distant train coming at her through a tunnel. And something else, a memory so old and fragmented it was like a part of her she had forgotten was there.
Dimly she felt herself falling, felt the impact from the floor run up her spine.
Then Sarah raised her head. Instantly Jess knew that everything she had assumed about the girl was wrong. Her eyes were like flecks of white lightning surrounded by darkness, gathering themselves for a storm. Jess lay half on her back and could not move, watched as the girl stared back at her and continued to shake, as the ringing grew louder and Sarah’s lips moved in a silent, pleading prayer.
Help me.
Somehow Jess gained her feet and stumbled to the door, laying her hand against the button and her forehead against the glass of the window. She felt a cool looseness deep in her belly.
In the distance she could hear the buzzer and the sound of running feet.
—4—
The student lounge (or “The Cave,” as it is somewhat affectionately called) is underneath the Thomas Ward main buildings, reached by a wide set of stairs from the street, which end at a triple set of glass doors. A converted basement, it holds a big-screen television and a small eatery with snacks and sandwiches available at outrageous prices, along with huge quantities of very bad coffee.
The two women had chosen a booth out of the way of general traffic.
“So you’ve seen her,” Professor Shelley said. “What do you think?”
“She’s heavily sedated, restrained, isolated in a padded cell. And she’s immobile. I think she’s buried inside herself somewhere. I just don’t know how deep.”
“Do you feel that you’re in over your head?”
Jess glanced at her murky coffee. She was afraid of what she might see when she tipped the cup. A rumor continued to circulate about someone finding a dead roach once among the grinds. Right now the whole thing seemed quite possible. “I had a little run-in with Dr. Wasserman. He refused to show me Sarah’s file. And I disagreed with his methods and I think he took offense to it.”
“What exactly did you say?”
“I told him Sarah’s treatment was abusive and that I was going to report him.”
“And how did he react to that?”
“He basically said that I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about.”
When Jess had burst into his office, Dr. Wasserman had looked up but did not seem surprised to see her. She did not slow down until she was at his desk, and a small juvenile part of her had wanted to go at him with her nails like a cat. Wasserman had seemed to regard the whole thing with amusement, sitting and watching her with an earpiece of his glasses tucked in one corner of his mouth, a half smile on his face.
She’d wanted to hit him. Only now had she calmed down enough to talk about it. It was a stupid, childish move, threatening to report him. She would be working with him for the foreseeable future, and this wasn’t going to help their relationship.
But if she were truthful to herself, the part that really burned her was that he was right. She knew nothing about Sarah’s violent side, or the kind of drug therapy the girl needed. There was only her intuition, and trusting in that was naive at best. And yet the image of that room stayed with her, and the look on the girl’s face.
What more do you need to see?
Shelley’s keen gray eyes seemed to appraise her carefully. “You don’t back down from anything, do you?”
“I was angry. I felt I had been put into a situation without being properly prepared for it.”
“What exactly bothered you the most?”
“She’s just a little girl, and she’s scared. She’s all alone. There’s nothing in that room that’s remotely human.”
“So you feel that Sarah would be better served in a more friendly environment.”
“A child in this situation needs more intense therapy, interaction with peers. Schooling, if it’s at all practical.”
“Yes,” Shelley said. “That’s true. But let me play devil’s advocate for a moment. You can’t know what she has available to her or how she’s been treated. She’s been Evan’s patient for eight years, most of her life. There’s no one else who knows her better.”
“Which is exactly why I asked to see her file.”
“Evan wanted to minimize any prejudices that might enter into your thinking.”
“If that were true, he wouldn’t have told me anything about her condition.”
“Did it ever cross your mind that he might be testing you?” Shelley sipped at her coffee. “You know that I chose you for a reason. There are plenty of talented students in my classes, but none of them have the gift that you do. I’ve read your essays, your case studies, and they’re all first-rate.”
High praise indeed. Jess did not know how to respond. How could she talk about her secret doubts now, the strange disorientation, the helplessness she had felt when Sarah looked at her and mouthed those words? Had she mouthed them? Or was it just a figment of Jess’s imagination, something she had wanted to see and created from nothing more than random muscle spasms?
“Quiet rooms are used in a lot of facilities like this,” Shelly said. “As for the sedatives, those are very carefully monitored. There’s nothing terribly unusual that you wouldn’t see in another violent case, especially when the patient’s violence is self-directed.” She reached out to touch Jess’s wrist. “I don’t mean to confuse you. I have to admit, Evan’s tendencies are a bit more extreme than my own, and you know how I feel about the diagnosis. I’ve been concerned lately with her treatment, which is another reason I decided to bring you into it. So I’m glad to have your thoughts. I’ll ask you again. Do you feel like you’re in over your head?”