Faerie (9 page)

18
. Art's Masterstroke

Dr Bélanger suggested to Dr Messer that Alyssa and I be allowed to try art therapy. So, after two o'clock tea, Alyssa and I walked down the long east-wing corridor, past the salty waft of soup from the cafeteria, until we reached a scene that could have almost emerged from memories of kindergarten. Circular tables and wooden chairs were painted in Lego colours. Bookshelves held dripping paint cans and lumpy mounds of clay. And the patients' collages, sculptures, and drawings were scattered about the room and on the walls—they were expressions of wounded psyches and broken lives, revealing a raw, sad beauty.

Alyssa and I spent an hour and a half in the art therapy room most days with other patients, moulding clay, beading bracelets, sketching flowers, painting portraits, and distracting our minds from the craving to cut, the compulsion to starve. On the first day, Alyssa threw her paint brush against the table and stormed out after ten minutes, grumbling and tired. I knew her urges had possessed her when the soft hairs of the brush pressed hard into the paper and produced a grotesque green blotch. I caught her scanning the metal objects other patients were using, assessing, I assumed, their bluntness and sharpness and the depth of imprint they might leave on the underside of an arm.

I could see that Alyssa didn't care much for art therapy; for her it was an obligation, as exhausting as ripping newspapers. I was able to see the silver lining in the dreary tasks of preparing paints, producing a cohesive image on canvas, or extracting a carving from soapstone because what I produced, I believed, had some artistic merit. Dr Bélanger had already planted the idea in my mind that I was an artist, and her words had power over me, more than I would admit.

By the second week, it seemed that Alyssa had begun to find some benefit from kneading her knuckles into folds of clay and cupping it to shape vases and bowls and lumpy heads. But as she told me, her art never measured up to the images she had in her mind. Her fruitless attempts to create something from nothing only served to expose her life as empty and hollow, without shape, beauty, or promise. A life of failure is how she saw it.

It was in art therapy that I began to wonder what would become of us. Once the suitcase was packed, discharge papers signed, and doors held open for us to walk through, what lay ahead? Our bodies would be recovered, the weight gained, the sutures healed. And our psyches? Would they have been mended? How would we hold up against the storm of reality, the demands of family and friends, careers and life challenges? How would we navigate all of the constricted passages through which girls must squeeze to become women?

Although there was nothing physically wrong with me and my weight stayed at ninety-nine pounds, I began to have headaches, lapses of memory, and numbness. I went to Dr Bélanger's
office, but sat there unable to speak or even cry. I had checked out, pinched myself off from all feeling. She didn't pressure me to say anything or answer her questions, but it was obvious that I was more agitated the longer we sat there in silence. My leg shook, my fists clenched.

“Lila, no one is forcing you to be here. You can go if you want.”

I wanted her to force me to stay, to impose some harsh rule on me like Dr Messer would.

“One of the pleasures of being a grownup is that you're free to choose,” she said. “Choice is power.”

I sat there, paralyzed, unable to make up my mind. I complained all the time of being controlled and manipulated by others and by life circumstances, and yet when I was offered a choice, I couldn't make one. Finally, I got up and left. As I walked back to my room, I wondered if I'd done the right thing. I was on a precipice, not moving forward, not going back.

“They're letting me go,” Alyssa told me in her room one day.

“You're joking!” I said as a golf-ball-sized lump rose in my throat. Alyssa, who had jumped from Phase Two to Four had, according to Dr Messer, complied with the program and not expressed an urge to harm herself. Therefore she was ready for discharge. What “urge,” I thought, could she have when the most dangerous object accessible to her was a toothbrush?

I swallowed the lump in my throat. “So, when?” I asked.

Casually and half yawning, she replied, “Oh, um, day after tomorrow.” She tugged at her bedcovers, smoothing out the wrinkles. I stood waiting for her to say more, but she went on fussing with mindless tasks while I became more annoyed by how cool she was. I threw myself on her newly made bed.

“Hey, what's your problem?” she said.

“
You're
cured? You?” I laughed. “You know as well as I do, you're not ready.”

“You're jealous!”

“You don't even wanna get out!”

“'Course I do, stupid.”

She shoved me off her bed and smoothed the bedcovers again. With her sleeves hiked up, her scars were exposed. Since the bandages had come off, her arms had been hidden under long-sleeved shirts that stretched over her wrists. I knew never to ask to see her scars, never to mention them to her. When she saw me staring, she pulled down her sleeves, strode straight into the bathroom, and slammed the door.

I walked over and tapped on the door. “Alyssa? Alyssa, I didn't mean it,” I said, stepping back and waiting for her to answer me or come out. Moments later, as I turned to leave, dragging my pole with me, the door opened. She walked out and brushed past me.

“You don't get it.” Alyssa threw herself in the chair and curled into a ball. “I'm just a fucking revolving door.”

I stood there puzzled, not knowing what to do or say.

“Just leave me alone,” she said. So I did.

At lunch time, she ate at the far end of the cafeteria from where I sat, and when she left, she glanced my way but wouldn't look
directly at me. Alyssa didn't show up to art therapy. Forty-eight hours away from discharge, she was no longer obliged to. I stared at her newest shapeless clay figurine. It was wrapped in wet cloth, ready to be moulded into a form, any form. I took it into my hands and resuscitated it, made it my own. As I did, her absence forged deeper crevices of loneliness inside me. I missed her voice, the sound of her laughter, the warmth of her understanding—how wrong it felt that she wasn't there. I was incomplete.

For the rest of the afternoon, she either kept to her room or huddled on the phone having voluble conversations, making plans, marking off her agenda with dates, parties. And when she saw me coming, her body twisted away and into the receiver. As I walked past, I held up her clay sculpture. Her eyes stuck to it for two seconds, as though I were carrying her baby, then rose up to meet mine. She looked away, brushed her hand over her face, and curled into the phone again. After dinner, I couldn't imagine how I'd endure another day without her company. I didn't want the night to end, for in little over a day, she'd be gone. I dimmed the lights and lay on my bed and wondered if this was the end of our friendship. Neither of us had the courage to talk about it, it seemed. Would we be like travellers who met in some foreign land and, once our journeys ended, parted ways forever? Was this how Alyssa saw our friendship—as transient and disposable? Maybe I was just someone to keep her entertained while she laboured through the dull days in hospital, and she didn't feel about me as I did about her. Had I merely conjured up a fantasy of who we were to one another out of some pathetic, abject loneliness?

An hour before lights out, I opened my eyes to see Alyssa standing in my doorway. She shuffled toward me as I sat up, her eyes swollen like mine. She sniffled and wiped her nose with her soiled sleeve. We looked at each other and began to laugh.

Alyssa picked up her sculpture and said, “Damn, that thing is ugly.”

“Sure is … What should we call it?”

She stood before it, scratching her chin. “How 'bout Alila? A mashup of our names.”

“Cool.” After a moment of silence, I asked, “So what did you mean earlier, about a revolving door?”

She scratched nervously at her wounds. Bulging salmon-pink lines turned white when she scraped her nails into them, and small scabs still clung to her flesh. I wanted to pull her hand away, worried she might bleed.

“I've been in and out of this place so many times. But this time it feels different.” She turned and looked at me. “I'm not coming back.”

“Well, that's good news,” I said brightly. She looked down, and then I understood her perfectly. “Don't say that.” I reached out for her hand, but she jerked it away and continued to pick and scratch, dig and peel at her scars.

“And you? How about you?” Her eyebrows twitched when she looked at me. “How do you feel about getting out?”

“I'd rather die than gain weight.”

We stared at one another but didn't say a word. She got up and went to her room. Lights out.

“Lila, wake up.” Breath smelling of mint toothpaste woke me from the underbelly of a dream. “I have a plan!” Alyssa said as I sat up.

It was early, barely seven, and the nurses were still preparing for the day's shift. Alyssa announced that she'd had an incredible vision during the night. It was as though pieces of a puzzle had fallen into place.

“Our lives,” she explained, “have been lived out to their fullest extent. That's why neither of us can see a future for ourselves, right? Lila, our time here, and I don't just mean the hospital, is over. I'm sure that we met here because we're both being called forth into … the great infinite realm.” She met my astounded gaze. “It's time, Lila. It's time to end it.”

“You mean,” I ventured, “we should …”

She frowned at me as though I'd completely missed the crucial meaning of her point. “It's not just that! It's much
more
than that.” She explained that time had no more use for the bodies we were born in. We had come to time's end. I sat back and let her words sink in.

Of course, had I not been the faerie creature whose earthly passage had led her into this insane asylum, this would've sounded like complete insanity. But it not only made sense, it seemed as though my destiny had finally been revealed. Within twenty-four hours Alyssa was to be discharged. Her parents would be arriving to take her home in the morning.

“I'm not going to be here to see them tomorrow,” she said. Her last conversation with them would happen later that day over the phone and then she and I would carry out our plan. I nearly fell to the floor. She wanted to do this today.

This had to be a calculated operation. The method: poison. The poison: shellac. The place: art therapy room. The time: 14:30 hrs. The result: death. The destination: paradise.

We would steal into the art therapy supply room, each take a container of shellac, and drink the poison.

“It'll be done in minutes.” She spoke like a plumber faced with the job of unblocking the kitchen sink. My throat dried out, as though her words had already set in motion the effects of the poison.

“Tic Tac?” she offered.

I took the candy.

“What does shellac taste like?” I asked, sucking the mint.

She shrugged. “Dunno. Probably a lot like Pledge.”

It was remarkable. While planning her death, her essential nature had risen to the surface and the fog of bewilderment and gloom had been blown away with a bolt of practicality. I'd never seen her so alive and serene. For once, she stopped picking at her scars.

After breakfast we sat like Siamese twins on the lounge sofa that stank of coffee and tobacco, watching
Sesame Street
. Electric shivers ran up and down my limbs when my eye caught the great hand of the clock pulling time closer to the moment when we'd take our final breath. We flipped cards, playing Crazy Eights as Big Bird led a train of singing schoolchildren through the neighbourhood.
My thoughts swirled back and forth in time, leaping television and game, space and memory, calculating numbers and calories and siphoning each moment that arose. Today's number was nine. Nine kittens, nine dolls, nine lives. She deals nine of spades. No more weight to gain from now on; I would become a ninety-nine-pound corpse. Nine cartoon children lined up in a row counting down to one. Backward. The hand moved closer to noon.
All my cards have been discarded. I win
.