Someplace to Be Flying (36 page)

They weren’t mean to me in there and it wasn’t like I was a vegetable or anything, but I learned after awhile that I was never getting out—not so long as my parents were alive and were willing to pay off my doctor. Whenever I started to push at getting released, my dosage would be upped and I’d truly zone out for awhile.

Of course I wasn’t aware of any of that for a long time. I just thought I really must be crazy. I mean, I felt okay and everything, but these were doctors and I wouldn’t be in here if I were normal, would I? And if you think about it, no one knows what “normal” really is. Not inside themselves. Everybody has crazy thoughts from time to time, or feels weird or depressed or panicky. But for most of them it passes and they carry on. But you can’t do that inside a place like that. As soon as you start to display any signs of anxiety or stress, out comes the medication.

My record said that I was a danger to myself and others and prone to violence when I was off my medication, so it’s not like anyone was going to listen to me when I tried to explain that I was really all right, it was just a passing mood, not some huge trauma. They’d just up my medication and put me into a zone state. I’d spend a couple of days in seclusion, then when I’d get back out on the ward, I’d go from half-hour checks to five-minute checks—you know, when they open your door and check up on you.

Doctor’s orders. Paid for by my loving parents.

I’d been in there for three years before I finally found out what was going on. My doctor had taken her annual two-week vacation and I got to see someone else while she was gone. I was used to the procedure by now. But this time the replacement therapist I got for the two weeks she was away was different from the ones I’d had before. He was a young guy and not quite the good soldier the others had been since he didn’t believe in following orders when they seemed wrong.

During the first week, he decided to lower my dosage and it was like someone had unwrapped a half-dozen layers of gauze from around my brain. Not the first day, or even the third, but by the middle of the second week I was thinking and feeling things more clearly than I had in years.

And then Katy came back.

I had grounds privileges at the time, so I was outside, sitting on a bench by myself in the garden. There were other patients around and of? course the ever-present nurses making sure that one of us didn’t suddenly take it into our heads to run screaming for the walls or attack each other or something. It happened at times.

Katy seemed to come out of nowhere. One moment, the grounds were the same as always, patients shuffling about or staring at their feet, the nurses looking bored, the next, there she was, sauntering down the path heading right for me.

I’ll admit that the first thing I felt was pure panic. I’d been in here long enough that I’d pretty much started to accept that she really was only something I’d made up. The fact that no one else noticed her didn’t help. No surprise with the other patients, but the nurses were oblivious to her as well, which didn’t help my peace of mind. What I wanted to do was go back inside and ask for more medication. What I did was sit there, pulse too quick, feeling a little dizzy, and wait to see what would happen next.

“Oh, Kerry,” she said.

It was a voice filled with heartbreak and despair. I looked around to see if anyone was watching me before I dared speak.

“What … what are you doing here?” I asked.

She looked at me so sadly. “I come here all the time. You just can’t see me because they fill you up with drugs.”

“They say you’re not real.”

She sat down beside me and put her arm around my shoulders, leaned her head against mine. I couldn’t move. I sat there stiffly, staring straight ahead. She felt real.

“What do you think?” she asked.

“I … I don’t know.”

She took my chin in her hand and turned my face so that I was looking at her.

“Don’t let them win,” she said. “If you truly don’t believe I exist, I think it’ll come true.”

She dropped her hand and I looked straight ahead again. Megan, one of the gjrls on my floor, was sitting cross-legged beside the flower bed in front of us. Not close, not so she could hear. She was here because she’d tried to kill her father. She was so sweet, it was hard to believe. But then people probably said the same things about me.

“I wouldn’t be here if there weren’t something wrong with me,” I said.

“That is such bullshit. You’re here because our loving parents are paying off one of the doctors to make sure you stay locked up and out of the way.”

I turned to look at her. “That’s not true. I’m here because I … because they think I imagine things.”

“Like me?”

I had to look away again. Katy took my hand, like she had in the hospital, all that long time ago. She held my fingers between her own.

“Kerry,” she said softly. “Just because something seems impossible that doesn’t mean it’s not real.”

“I don’t know … it’s all too confusing. …”

“It wouldn’t be if you were out of this place. If
they
let you out.”

“You just hate our parents,” I told her. “That’s why you’re saying they’re having me kept here.”

“I’ve heard them talking. I’ve seen the checks our dear daddy writes—one to the institution and one to Dr. Elizabeth Stiles. Even? month, regular as clockwork.”

“But why?”

“Money.”

I shook my head, not understanding. “But Daddy’s rich.” That wasn’t entirely true. He wasn’t rich by California standards. But compared to the people back home in Hazard, he was rolling in dough. “He sells all those houses, works all those deals.”

“Oh, yeah. But the thing about some people is that no matter how much they have, it’s never enough.”

“I don’t see how keeping me in here makes him any money.”

Katy sighed. “They were expecting to get the farm when Granny died. That’s a serious piece of real estate. The logging rights alone are worth a small fortune. But she screwed them out of it and had it deeded to one of those environmental groups she belonged to on the condition it be kept as a nature preserve. Everything else she left to you.”

“Everything else of what?”

“The royalties from her books. Her paintings. Everything.”

I hadn’t known anything about that. “I didn’t know.”

“And you’re never supposed to because the money goes into a trust fund managed by our dear daddy. He’s sold everything else. All of it. The paintings, the sketchbooks, everything. And that’s why he’s rich.”

“But that doesn’t explain why they’d want to keep me in here.”

Katy shook her head sadly. “Because everything’s supposed to go to you when you turn twenty-one, except there’s nothing left except for what’s in the trust fund and that’s what’s keeping you in here. There’d have to be a reckoning when you turned twenty-one and took over your own affairs and then there’d be all hell to pay, wouldn’t there? Except if you’re in here, that reckoning is never going to come.

“But I won’t be twenty-one for years. Why would they do this to me now?” “So that you don’t have to be around. They don’t love you, Kerry, any more than they’d love me, if they thought I was real. Any more than they loved our granny.”

I knew that was true. They’d always hated Grandma. But when we still lived in Hazard, they’d let me see her. Sometimes I even got to stay overnight. But then we had to move here and she died… .

But I couldn’t accept that they didn’t love me.

“They do love me,” I said.

“Then why don’t they ever come see you here?”

I didn’t have to answer. She already knew. And now I did, too.

I kind of fell apart after that. Started crying. Katy tried to comfort me, but then a nurse approached and took me back inside, called the doctor. I tried to explain to him that I was okay, that I was just sad, but I couldn’t mention Katy, so I couldn’t explain why I was sad, and in the end he upped my dosage again and put me back in the zone where Katy was lost to me. I lost my grounds privileges and went back on group, but I kept my half-hour checks and didn’t have to go into seclusion like I would if Dr. Stiles had been there.

I guess it was a few weeks later that the books came. Two of them, both illustrated with the author’s own pen and ink and watercolor sketches. One was a collection of nature essays called
Writing the Hills,
the other a journal of one summer’s rambling through the wooded hills outside of Hazard. It was called
Fieldsong.
The author’s name was Annette Bean. They were from Katy. She’d inscribed each of them, “for Kerry, love Katy,” and included a letter with the package that made it sound as though she’d been one of my friends in school and that she’d found these in a secondhand bookstore and thought I might like them because they were set in and around my old hometown of Hazard. I’d never had any friends in school, but I suppose that, for all their expertise, no one in the institution knew that.

Dr. Stiles decided they were harmless and let me have them, which was both a blessing and a curse. I loved having these reminders of my grandma, of getting this peek into her mind. But they also reminded me that Katy wasn’t something I’d made up—which was probably half the reason she sent them to me.

I guess I could go on about the time I spent there but I think you get the picture. I did get to see Katy a few times when I managed to not take my medication for awhile, but I always got caught and put back on, dropped back into the zone. One time Katy had us write letters to myself and we hid them in one of Grandma’s books so that I could find them when I was zoned and they’d remind me that being zoned wasn’t normal—that wasn’t who I am. I was the girl who wrote the letters. But they found those letters one time.

This was a real setback, Dr. Stiles told me. She made me tear them up in front of her in the office, though luckily she let me keep the books. They were all I had from who I was before I got trapped in here. Those and two plush toys I’ve had since I was a kid that I also got from my grandma—Dog and Cowslip. When things’d get really bad, I’d bundle them all up together and lie on my bed, hugging them. I’d do that for hours—at night, when I was less likely to get caught.

They were so strict with my medication after the business with the letters that I never saw Katy again. And finally I came to believe them about her, though not entirely. I believed that she’d existed once, that she
had
been real. But that she was gone now. I guess that’s because the last time I saw her, she told me she was going away. They’d given me an extra dosage of my medication after Dr. Stiles made me tear up the letters and then put me back in my room.

Katy was waiting for me there.

“I’m going away,” she told me, “because all I do is cause you trouble.”

I didn’t say anything because it was true. I didn’t want her to go, but I was tired. So very tired. Of being here. Of everything. I tell myself now it was the drugs, but I’m not entirely positive about that.

“I’ll miss you,” she said. “But I guess it’s better this way.”

I think she was hoping that I’d ask her to stay, but she was already fading away on me. I hardly looked at her. Just gathered up my talismans—two books, two toys—and crawled into bed with them.

“Better this way,” I mumbled.

I was in the institution for another three years and then my parents died in a car crash. I didn’t feel anything when I found out, but then the medication kept me on such an even keel I hardly ever felt anything. No real downs, but no real ups either. I just was. Day to day, I was.

But when I was told that they were dead I remembered what Katy had told me. I started hoarding my pills again, taking them, but coughing them up again as soon as I could get away from the nurse’s station. I’d walk real casually into the TV room and then bring them up. The TV audience was the worst of us, the catatonics and depressives, so it wasn’t like they were going to tell on me.

I didn’t get completely clear of the gauze, but I managed to unwrap enough of it to be able to work out a deal with Dr. Stiles. See, my trust fund would continue to pay my hospital bills for awhile—how short a while I didn’t realize then—but there’d be no more extra monthly checks coming Dr. Stiles’s way because my father wasn’t there to write them anymore.

I remember being so scared when I went into Dr. Stiles’s office that day. I thought she’d put me on megadoses, or maybe shock therapy like Megan had undergone. But Dr. Stiles just looked at me from across her desk for a long time before she finally spoke.

“Not that I’m admitting anything,” she said, “but what exactly is it that you’re proposing?”

By that I knew she’d already been thinking about it. The deal was, I got out and I’d sign over the trust fund to her, but the joke was on her because once I got out and saw the family lawyer, my father’s debts had pretty well swallowed up all his assets and the trust fund. For all the cars and real estate and stuff they’d had, my parents had died broke. All that was left when all the bills were paid was about four thousand dollars and I kept that for myself.

Only maybe Dr. Stiles knew that as well, that there’d be no more money. She was never a stupid woman. Maybe she just wanted to be rid of the situation.

Of course, once I was out, all I wanted was to be back inside again.

The world’s a funny place. When I used to look at it from inside, sometimes it was this huge, overwhelming presence, vaguely menacing and all sort of quivery. Other times it was this perfect jewel, tiny and hand-sized, and all I wanted to do was cup my hands around it and experience it. It was the same when I was out in it, except I couldn’t ignore it anymore and there was just too much of it, with no respite. Inside, in my old world, you could turn it off, but you can’t do that in this world, in the real world.

I stayed for a couple of weeks with Mindy, this girl who’d been in Baumert with me a few years ago. She tried to help me fit in, look for a job and stuff, but it didn’t take me long to know I couldn’t stay on the coast. She’d ask me what I wanted to do and I’d say, I want to be like my grandma. I want to write and paint. It was like a kid’s fantasy because I didn’t know much about either. But she suggested I take some courses, or even go back to school, and then I realized that if I was going to do that, I wanted to do it at home. I was still thinking of Hazard as my home, even though I’d been away from it for half my life.