Alice & Dorothy (7 page)

She stepped into her shoes. Then she walked to the curtain and took a quick peek into the hallway. It was filled with more of the same soft, yellow light that permeated her room. There were people milling about their workstations, but no sign of Nurse Howard. No sign of security.

Alice steadied her nerves. Took a deep breath, adjusted the bloodstained cloth on her hand. Then she stepped out into the yellow light of the hallway. It was familiar somehow, a yellow lit hallway filled with doors and curtains.

Familiar, yet different.

Dorothy sat in Dr. Weller’s chair, avoiding eye contact and pretending to be interested in the silk plants hanging in the window just to her left. She was still in her pajamas, officially against hospital protocol but Dr Weller never cared enough to enforce it. Under her arm was a small black dog, one of those stuffed animal toys won at the carnival for popping balloons with darts or being able to get golf balls into the red goblets without them bouncing out.

“Good morning, Dorothy,” Dr Weller said. He pretended to look busy; made a point of showing the girl that the long stretches of silence between them didn’t bother
him
either.

“
Good morning to you
,” Dorothy continued. “How is your mom?”

“Better, thanks,” Dr Weller sighed. “She thinks it might be the flu.” More paper shuffling.

Dorothy countered with a shirt adjustment, and then feigned a look of forgetfulness. She bit her lip, shook her head and then looked back at the silk plants.

“Something wrong?” Dr Weller said.

“
Umm
, no.” There was a pause while Dorothy chose her words. “I was just wondering,
umm
, when I can watch television again.”

“Well,” Dr Weller said, leaning back in his chair. It was a power position for him, giving him the air of importance. “I just don’t think that kind of stimulus would be good for you right now. I mean, you remember what happened last time, right?”

“Yes,” Dorothy sighed, defeated. “But it wasn’t
all
my fault. I mean, Tina was there first, yeah, but like, she was
sleeping
on the couch. I just switched the channel; she wouldn’t have even noticed if Roth hadn’t dumped his water on the floor and started crying.”

“Well, either way, you were pretty upset weren’t you?”

“Uhh, yeah. But still, not my fault—,”

“Alright,” Dr Weller said. “Well, for you, watching the weather network for tornado warnings shows me that you are still spending a lot of time thinking about your incident. And if that’s true, then you shouldn’t be exposed to the television because you will crave watching the weather channel some more, and feed an unhealthy cycle of thought and behavior that ultimately may lead to you attempting suicide again. Does that make sense to you at all?”

Dorothy’s shoulders sank. “I keep telling you guys I didn’t try to kill myself.”

“My apologies,” Dr Weller said. It was time to push her, just a little. He folded his hands behind his head.

‘So you ran away from your uncle’s house. And you stole a car. Sorry,
allegedly
stole a car. Then you drove the car seventy miles to the Kansas state line, where you turned it into a field and drove straight into an oncoming tornado.”

“He’s not my real uncle,” Dorothy said. “He’s my dad’s friend from the war. They only sent me there ‘cuz of that, plus he takes in foster kids for the money. He calls us
strays
.”

“You’re right,” Dr Weller said. “Sorry. But you can see how this looks, don’t you Dorothy?”

“Yeah,” she said. She bit her lower lip again. “I mean…
yeah
. It does sound a little
weird
. But that doesn’t mean it’s not true. I couldn’t make something like that up, I swear, doctor.”

“I know,” Dr Weller said. He took a sip of cold coffee from a silver mug. “Sometimes, especially with people who have suffered greatly, it is easier for them to sort of wipe out the existing bad memories and replace them with extremely vivid fantasy memories. I think we can both agree that you have suffered a great deal, Dorothy.”

“
But they’re not fantasies!
” Dorothy said. She waved her arms, exasperated. She caught herself immediately. Dr Weller saw the lights switch off, and Dorothy’s calm exterior shell once more took over. “I mean, I don’t see how I could be dreaming all of it up. The Witch?
Scarecrow?
”

“I know,” Dr Weller said. “That’s why we have our meetings though, right? So we can discuss this whole Oz business, try to make sense of it.”

“Em thought I meant Australia,” Dorothy said, and smiled. She looked down and hugged her stuffed dog. The ratty old thing glared at Dr Weller with one scratched plastic eye. “She kept thinking I had some dream about going down there to live or something.”

“Was she upset that you didn’t want to stay with them?”

“A little I think,” Dorothy said. “She was always talking about the boys around the area like I’d suddenly stop being into girls and run off to get married. Come home, do the family thing.”

“He didn’t say anything at all.” Dorothy cocked her head, looked out of the corner of her eye at the silk plants, and chewed her bottom lip. It was an incredibly cute gesture.

She does it to attract my sympathy,
Dr Weller thought.. He made a point of keeping his gaze neutral.

“Mostly it was Aunt Em and her sermons about how I was this lost little sheep, and how God knew I was confused but wouldn’t put up with me messin’ around with girls. Like once I got back on track it would all disappear.”

“Well, they’re
old
,” Dorothy said. “They’re not going to change on my account. Just like I’m not going to change for theirs.” She turned her head down and then lilted her eyes up toward Dr Weller. she dangled a smile at him, and then shot a brief pouty face when he didn’t respond.

“Would you like to talk about your parents today, Dorothy?” Dr Weller said. It had the effect of a punch in the stomach on the girl. Her shoulders sagged, and she dropped into a thoughtful, wounded look.

“There,
umm
,” Dorothy said, fighting to regain control of her emotions. She shook her head and dismissed the question with a wave of her hand. “There’s nothing really to talk about. They’re dead, right? People die all the time.”

“That’s true. But these are your parents. They only die once.”

“I know that,” Dorothy said, looking down into her hands. “It’s just that it can’t be helped, can it? It was an accident. I don’t know what to do about that.”

“Well, for starters, you can allow yourself to be angry, and sad. Those are perfectly normal emotions to feel.”

“Oh I do,” Dorothy said, nodding quickly. She had begun to pick at the skin on the sides of her fingernails. “I’m just kind of beyond it right now. But I feel all those things you said.”

“How?”

“
What?
”

“How have you been dealing with your grief?” Dr Weller said. He crossed his arms and looked down his nose at the girl. “How we deal with our grief is at least as important as the grief itself. Would you agree with that?”

“
Umm
, yes,” Dorothy said. “I mean no.
I mean
—.”

She sighed, and her shoulders sagged again. She looked up at Dr Weller and arched an eyebrow, flashing her playful, impish smile. “Can we maybe talk about this another time?”

“Absolutely,” Dr Weller said. “We’ll talk about it whenever you are ready. In the meantime I want you to try and think about the connections between their death and your life, if you can.”

“I will.” Dorothy said. “Promise.”

“Anything else? Still having issues with the medication?”

“
Umm, no
,” Dorothy said. “How much longer do I have to take it?”

“Tough to say. You have a small chemical issue that is causing you some problems, and we need to correct them before you see any real improvement.” Dr Weller shuffled some papers as he spoke, piled a small stack together and tapped them out on the desk. He glanced at the clock.

“They make me feel like crap,” Dorothy said. “Like I’m walking around in a mist kinda, I don’t know. Not myself.”

“It’s called disassociation,” Dr Weller said. “It’s a result of the anti depressants you’re taking. They’re like a chemical wall we build in your brain to keep out the bad thoughts.”

Dr Weller smiled. “You know you don’t have to be in here for the full half hour, right? I’m here to help you understand some of your feelings, kinda put things in perspective. If you feel like you’ve talked enough today, that’s fine.”

“I think I’m done for today, doctor,” Dorothy said quickly. “I can go?”

“Sure,” said Dr Weller. “Like I said, try to think about your connection to your parents, and how it’s affected you. Maybe next time we can talk about it a little, if you feel ready.”

“
Sure
,” Dorothy said, smiling. She got up off the couch and headed to the door. She paused at the threshold of Dr Weller’s office. “You know, Dr Weller, I never intended to kill myself.”

“I believe that
you
believe that,” Dr Weller said.

Dorothy’s face darkened for a moment. Then the look was gone, like the cloud passing by the sun on a summer day.

A moment later Dorothy herself was gone from the doorway, leaving Dr Weller to himself. “At least, that’s what you
want
me to believe,” he said, to nobody in particular.

Alice kept her head down. She felt sick and light headed, and several times she had to put her hand against the wall to steady herself. She’d never been this deep in a hospital before, and the soft emerald light made the distances deceiving. She tried to follow the stripes on the floor, but in her state she couldn’t understand how they worked. She passed a hallway where 2 green strips and two yellow strips intersected, came to a “T” intersection and opted to follow a thick red stripe. She had the sense of someone standing right behind her, and she looked back often to see only empty hallway. She felt as though she were shrinking inside her body one moment and growing the next. The sense of movement within herself was making her dizzy, and she stumbled more than once.

There were people in the hall, but they were phantoms to Alice; she barely made note of their passing. She kept her head down and her shoulder to the wall. As she walked, her mind began to separate the two sets of memories mixed up in her head.

At some point she had killed a man, she was fairly certain. The electric ball of static at the center of that black and white world had slowly receded until bits and pieces of another memory began showing through; one where she was stabbed in her ass again and again and blew some guys brains out. She was also sure, at some point, she had seen her friend Rabbit dressed in a checkered vest and running for his life. He’d stopped and shot her up. She’d washed blood off in a mud puddle and fallen through her reflection in the water at the same time...

...into an emerald-lit hall with many doors and wisps of people floating like phantoms about her. Just like now.
But that was impossible
. And there lay the paradox that was threatening to rip her skull apart. Things like that didn’t just
happen
. You didn’t just fall into a mud puddle and end up somewhere else. That wasn’t how life worked.

Had she fallen into the hospital?

Alice stopped and looked around. Had she been in the hospital looking for Rabbit before the tea party? The hallway she was in now
did
seem like it was the same hallway from memory, except this hallway had doors...and that other hallway had only one tiny door. Her only memory of arriving to this point had been falling into the water while she was washing blood from her face and hands. And that just didn’t make sense.

The nurse had been asking her about heroin. Was the answer so simple?

She couldn’t remember looking for Rabbit in the hospital because she’d been
high
the first time she tried to find him. So she’d stumbled around not realizing where she was, and somehow ended up having tea with The March Hare, the Dormouse, and The Mad Hater. And she let Rabbit fuck her.
Before or after…