Girl in Pieces (4 page)

Casper smells nice. She's always clean, her clothes rustle softly. She never raises her voice. She rubs Sasha's back when she sobs so hard she chokes. She positions her arms around Linda/Katie/Cuddles like a goalie or something when one of the bad people breaks free. I've seen her in Blue's room, even, on the days Blue gets an enormous box of books from her mother, pawing through the paperbacks and smiling at Blue. I've seen Blue melt a little, just a little, at this smile.

Casper should be someone's mother. She should be
my
mother.

We're never in darkness. Every room has lights in the walls that
ping
on at four p.m. and
ping
off at six a.m. They're small, but bright. Louisa doesn't like light. Scratchy curtains cover the windows and she makes sure to pull them shut, tightly, every night before bed, to block out the squares of yellow from the office building next door. Then she drapes the bedsheet over her head for good measure.

Tonight, as soon as she's asleep, I kick the sheets off and pull the curtains apart. Maybe I'm looking for the salt stars. I don't know.

I pee in the metal toilet, watching the silent lump of Louisa beneath her pile of covers. In the weird mirror, my hair looks like snakes. I squeeze the mats and dreads in my fingers. My hair still smells like dirt and concrete, attic and dust, and makes me feel sick.

How long have I been here? I am waking from something. From somewhere. A dark place.

The bulbs in the hallway ceiling are like bright, long rivers. I peek into the rooms as I walk. Only Blue is awake, holding her paperback all the way up to the
ping
-light to see.

No doors, no lamps, no glass, no razors, only soft, spoonable food, and barely warm coffee. There's no way to hurt yourself here.

I feel jangly and loose inside, waiting at the nurses' station, drumming my fingers on the countertop. I ding the little bell. It sounds horrible and loud in the quiet hall.

Barbero rounds the corner, his mouth full of something crunchy. He frowns when he sees me. Barbero is a thick-necked former wrestler from Menominee. He still has a whiff of ointment and adhesive. He only likes pretty girls. I can tell, because Jen S. is very pretty, with her long legs and freckled nose, and he's always smiling at her. She's the only one he ever smiles at.

He puts his feet up on the desk and pops some potato chips into his mouth. “You,” he says, salty bits fluttering from his lips to his blue scrubs. “What the fuck do you want at this time of night?”

I take the pad of sticky notes and a pen from the countertop and write quickly. I hold up the sticky note.
HOW LONG HAVE I BEEN HERE?

He looks at the sticky note. He shakes his head. “Uh-uh.
Ask.
”

I write,
NO. TELL ME.

“No can do, Silent Sue.” Barbero crumples the chip bag and stuffs it into the trash. “You're gonna have to open that fucked-up little mouth of yours and use your big-girl voice.”

Barbero thinks I'm afraid of him, but I'm not. There's only one person I'm afraid of, and he's far away, on the whole other side of the river, and he can't get to me here.

I don't
think
he can get to me, anyway.

Another sticky note.
JUST TELL ME, YOU OAF.
My hands are shaking a little, though, as I hold it up.

Barbero laughs. Chips clot the spaces between his teeth.

Sparks go off behind my eyes and my inside music gets very loud. My skin numbs as I walk away from the nurses' station. I'd like to breathe, like Casper says, but I can't, that won't work, not for me, not once I get angry and the music starts. Now my skin isn't numb but positively itches as I roam, roam, looking, looking, and when I find it and turn around, Barbero's not laughing anymore. He's
Oh, shit
-ing and ducking.

The plastic chair bounces off the nurses' station. The container holding the pens with plastic flowers taped to them falls to the floor, the pens fanning out across the endless beige carpet. The endless, everywhere beige carpet. I start to kick the station, which is bad, because I have no shoes, but the pain feels good, so I keep doing it. Barbero is up now, but I grab the chair again and he holds out his hands, all
Calm down, you crazy fucker.
But he says it really soft. Like, maybe he's a little afraid of me now. And I don't know why, but this makes me even angrier.

I'm raising the chair again when Doc Dooley shows up.

If Casper is disappointed in me, she doesn't show it. She just watches me watch the turtle, and the turtle does his thing. I'd like to be that turtle, underwater, quiet, no one around. What a fucking peaceful life that turtle has.

Casper says, “To answer the question that you asked Bruce last night: you have been at Creeley Center for six days. You were treated in the hospital and kept for observation for seven days before they transferred you here. Did you know you had walking pneumonia? Well, you still have it, but the antibiotics should help.”

She picks up something chunky from her desk and slides it to me. It's one of those desk calendars. I'm not sure what I'm looking for, but then I see it, at the top of the page.

April. It's the middle of April.

Casper says, “You just missed Easter at Creeley. You were a little out of it. You didn't miss much. We can't really have a giant bunny hopping around a psych ward, can we?” She smiles. “Sorry. That's a little therapist humor. We did have an egg hunt, though. Thanksgiving is a lot more fun around here: dry turkey, lumpy gravy. Good times.”

I know she's trying to cheer me up, get me to talk. I slide my face to her but as soon as I meet her eyes, I feel the fucking sting of tears and so I look back at the stupid turtle. I feel like I'm waking up and going back into my darkness, all at once.

Casper leans forward. “Do you remember being in Regions Hospital at all?”

I remember the security guard and the forest of hair inside his nose. I remember lights above me, bright as suns, the sound of beeping that never seemed to stop. I remember wanting to kick out when hands were on me, when they were cutting away my clothes and boots. I remember how heavy my lungs felt, as though they were filled with mud.

I remember being so scared that Fucking Frank was going to appear in the doorway and take me away, back to Seed House, to the room where the girls cried.

I remember crying. I remember the splatter of my vomit on a nurse's shoes, and the way her face never changed, not once, like it happened to her all the time, and I wished my eyes to tell her
sorry,
because I had no words, and how her face didn't change then, either.

Then nothing. Nothing. Until Louisa.

Casper says, “It's all right if you can't remember. Our subconscious is spectacularly agile. Sometimes it knows when to take us away, as a kind of protection. I hope that makes sense.”

I wish I knew how to tell her that my subconscious is broken, because it never took me away when Fucking Frank was threatening me, or when that man tried to hurt me in the underpass.

My broken big toe throbs beneath its splint and the weird foot-bootie Doc Dooley put me in. Now, when I walk, I really am a crazy freak, with my nesty hair and my clubby arms and trussed-up legs and limp.

What's going to happen to me?

Casper says, “I think you need a project.”

It isn't true that I want to be like the turtle and be alone. What's true is that I want Ellis back, but she can never come back, ever, ever. Not the way she was, anyway. And it's true that I miss Mikey and DannyBoy, and I even miss Evan and Dump, and sometimes I miss my mother, even though missing her feels more like anger than sadness, like I feel when I think about Ellis, and even that, really, isn't true, because while I say
sadness
what I really mean is
black hole inside me filled with nails and rocks and broken glass and the words I don't have anymore.

Ellis, Ellis.