The First Time She Drowned (3 page)

BACK ON THE
ward, Nurse Mary and I part ways, and I go seek out my friend Trish as I always do after my sessions with Meeks because it’s the hour when our favorite soap opera,
Malibu Dreams
, is on. Today is the last time we will ever watch it together. I find her in the room next to mine, poised in front of her warped plastic mirror, applying foundation to her cheeks with one hand and smoking a cigarette with the other. Impressively large smoke rings float above her head before they break up and disappear. I pause in the doorway, taking in this scene so familiar, soon to be a memory.

“What’s up?” Trish says without looking at me. She has been avoiding eye contact for the last couple of days, and I know it’s because she wants to make me matter less now that I’m leaving.

I shrug, a sudden lump in my throat. I always imagined that leaving here would be the best feeling in the world, but these friends are like war buddies, all of us deeply bonded because we have survived the worst of our lives together. Once I walk out that door, I won’t be allowed back to visit.

I notice the small hole above her bed and laugh. “Remember that?”

Years back, when I first discovered that pea-sized opening in our shared wall, I would occupy myself at night by sticking raisins
through it and waiting for Trish to notice. For weeks, I amused the hell out of myself by imagining the small pile of fruit accumulating on her bed. Then one night, I had my face up to the wall, preparing to squeeze another raisin through it, when a sudden blast of lotion squirted through from the other side and nailed me in the eye. “Gotcha!” Trish had said, and the two of us laughed until we were sobbing and the nurses came running to see what was wrong.

“I taught you early on not to mess with me,” she says now, allowing a small smile as she takes a drag off of her cigarette. I pull one out of my own pack and light it off of hers so I don’t have to track down a nurse to do it for me. On occasion, I have seen a nurse let Trish light her own cigarettes even though it’s against the rules. They won’t let me anywhere near fire.

I sit down on her bed and ash into a small plastic cup on the windowsill. Technically we aren’t allowed to smoke in our rooms either, but I think the staff is secretly afraid of Trish. Actually, we are all a little afraid of Trish, who is tall and blond and strikingly beautiful but carries herself with a streetwalker’s edge. She has been here longer than any of us, but I have no idea what she’s in for, what label of crazy they have tagged her with. I suspect there was some pretty major shit in her past, because despite her toughness she jumps about six feet if you surprise her from behind, and she doesn’t like anyone to touch her. Even if you just accidentally brush her arm as you’re passing by, she freaks out.

Trish is the one who taught me how to properly smoke a cigarette, as well as how to score an extra ice cream cup at dinner and which nurses will let you stay up past curfew to watch the late-night talk shows. She has a boyfriend named Van who hops the
fence to visit beneath her window. So many nights I have spent listening to their whispers, my ear pressed up to the screen, trying to make a study of the way they flirt with each other in case I ever get the opportunity to flirt with a guy myself. They tell each other about their day, and Van pretends to climb the hospital wall and jokes that he’s going so crazy without her that soon he’ll be locked up too.

I have tried to make sense of the fact that he’s still around after all this time, that he stays with Trish even when she is at the bottom of her life and the whole world thinks she’s crazy. Trish says it’s love and maybe it is, I’ve just never seen love that looks like that—so entirely unselfish and without judgment.

I’ve daydreamed about having a boyfriend of my own someday, and now that I’m getting out of here, it’s weird to think the opportunity might actually present itself. The thing is, I wouldn’t even begin to know how to act, and the fact that I have no experience at all makes the whole idea seem daunting. I’ve never even kissed anyone, which is humiliating considering that I’m eighteen, but it’s not like there are a lot of prospects on a psych ward.

I watch Trish apply a heavy line of electric-blue eyeliner, her brows creased in concentration as if she is preparing for battle. I remember the first time she showed me how to wear makeup, how amazed I was afterward to find that I didn’t look anything like myself. Since then I have never left my room without it, even though there’s exactly no one here to impress. There’s a sense of security in the mask, in the daily burial of myself beneath layer and color, concealing the girl who walked in here two and a half years ago, so exposed and rejected and easy to wound. The act of putting on
makeup is like covering up a secret I don’t want anyone to know. Now when I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror, I don’t see ugly and unlovable anymore, I see mascara, cherry lip gloss, bright pink blush. I see an illusion I’m hoping to pass off as truth, as the real me.

We are about to head over to the TV room when Shelly of the sliced-up wrists passes by, sobbing. I rush over to find out what’s wrong, but Trish stays put. She can’t tolerate tears, doesn’t let herself have them either. I find Shelly in her room stuffing an overnight bag with clothes. She tells me that her nana, the only real mother figure she’s ever had, the only one who comes to visit, who bakes her cookies and strokes her hair, has been hospitalized nearby and is not expected to live through the night. I start to cry too because it’s just so freaking sad and because this is what happens when twenty-two heartbroken kids get locked up together on a small hallway—everybody’s emotions get all mixed up with each other.

Then Nurse Kay, who has mastered the art of being disaffected, struts in and informs Shelly that Dr. Meeks has denied her a pass to see her grandmother, having deemed her too much of a suicide risk. Considering the razor-blade scars up her wrists, he’s probably right, but all Shelly knows is that she won’t have the chance to say good-bye to the only person who ever loved her. She sits down on her bed and cries quietly, her pale face turning red and puffy. Soon, the crying moves, becomes something more guttural and desperate.

“Please,” she sobs. “I just want to say good-bye!”

“I’m sorry,” Kay says matter-of-factly.

Shelly stares up at her, dazed, blinking through tears. Then
she jumps up suddenly and runs past us down the hall toward the door. “You have to let me out of here!” she cries, pounding her fists and yanking the knob. “You have to let me out!”

I run after her and put my hand on her shoulder, but Kay steps in front of me.

“No physical contact,” she says. Then, instead of providing Shelly comfort, Kay turns and marches into the nurses’ station and flips the emergency alarm. The piercing sound shatters the air, a high-pitched scream that runs laps around my head. Everyone stops, hands to their ears, fixed by the blaring sound we know too well. Only Shelly seems mobilized, thrashing harder to get out.

Within seconds, six huge male aides from other wards are running down our hallway. Shelly turns and sees them and screams louder than the alarm at the sight of all those men coming at her.

“I just want to see my nana!” she pleads.

They are upon her in a flash, manhandling her to the ground. She cries out for us, for someone to help her. I think of her rape as the men trap her arms and legs.

“Get off of her!” I scream. I know they’ll try to take away my privileges like they always do when I stand up to them, but I’ve never given a shit before and I’m not about to start now.

“Please don’t do this!” Shelly pleads with the aides, and her screams are so penetrating and desperate, they sound like they’re coming from my own head.

Nurse Kay gives her a shot that silences her, and the aides drag her by the arms to the Quiet Room to “get herself together.” Even
after she is drugged and muted, I can hear her screams reverberating: the sounds of helplessness and grief, the horror of indifference.

The alarm stops. All is immediately and terribly quiet.

“You didn’t have to do that,” I say. “You could have just talked to her.”

Kay ignores me, turns to the gathered crowd. “Okay, everybody, show’s over.”

“Some show,” I say with disgust. And just like so many times before, I glance around at the other kids, hoping to see shared outrage in their faces. But the system that punishes feelings and rewards obedience has robbed them of their fight. Me, I don’t know any other way to survive.

Finally, I spot James, just back from Meeks’s office. He walks over and stands beside me, allying himself with my fury—me and James against the world.

LATE THAT NIGHT,
my second to last here, James and I are sitting just inside the doorway of our respective rooms, James slouched against the doorjamb. The hallway is near black and quiet as sleep.

“So,” he whispers into the watchful silence. “How’s it feel?”

“What? Being a super-genius?”

Even in the dark I can see him roll his eyes. “Flying the coop.”

I look down at my hands, which seem larger in the darkness. For the first time in my life, my entire future feels wholly dependent on me, and I can’t think of anyone I trust less not to screw things up. I can’t even think about it. It’s too scary.

“You realize how hard it’s gonna be, running this place all by myself?” he says.

I look up and smile. “All those damsels in distress and no one but you to rescue them.”

He smiles back, but the air between us grows heavy with unspoken sadness. I look away.

“Anyway . . .” I say.

He watches me.

“What?”

He pauses. His face grows serious. “Who’s gonna have your back when I’m not around?”

“Come on. I’ll be fine.”

He looks away, chews his lip. “I hope so.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing. I just think your mother’s gonna try to make you think you owe her now and suck you back into her control.”

“Owe her for what?”

“Gee, I don’t know . . . Twenty grand tuition for starters. Strings pulled to get you in.”

I shrug. My mother’s surprise offer to pay for college was made after I mentioned to one of the nurses that I wanted to go. At first, my mother was completely against me leaving this place, but then out of nowhere she came up with the idea that I should apply to her alma mater, and all of a sudden my going to college was a brilliant decision. She even got me an application and arranged for me to take the SAT. As soon as my dream became a possible reality, I was sure they wouldn’t accept me, a mental patient. But then I learned that the hospital’s on-site school would discreetly show up as a satellite to the local high school. I didn’t meet all of the math and foreign language requirements, but my mother somehow worked her strange magic and
voilà
, I was headed to Dunton College, the place I had heard a million stories about, where my mother had gone to study art.

Since my acceptance, I have felt my anger at my mother not exactly dissipating but receding, slipping back below the swampy surface like an alligator head. I have seen this happen before, how one act of parental kindness across a history of cruelty can make a kid in here forgive everything that came before simply because they have been deprived of kindness for so long. But I tell myself I’m tougher than that.

“Just because she’s paying for college doesn’t mean I have to . . .
like . . . talk to her or have a relationship with her.”

“But why would she go to all that trouble? To get you into
her
school? There’s gotta be an agenda there, right?”

“I don’t know,” I say with a sigh.

He’s right, of course. I know how dangerous it is to let go of memory, to forget for even a minute who my mother is, but I don’t want to think about that right now. The constant vigilance is exhausting and with less than forty-eight hours left, I just want to focus on hope.

“I need you to give me your word,” James says.

“Okay. What for?”

“That you won’t fall for the lie.”

“This again?” I laugh. “You’re so dramatic.”

“Your word.”

“Stop worrying. She doesn’t have any power over me anymore.”

He gives me a look.

“Good night,” I say, and turn away.

“Wait! Cass,” he whispers. “I’ve been thinking.”

I return to the door. “Well, that’s new.”

He glances down the hallway and back to me. His face is serious. “I’m breaking out of here tomorrow. First thing. I’m gonna meet up with you in Rhode Island.”

I laugh, lean my head against the door. “I’d love that,” I say, touched by his fantasy. “But you know it’ll never happen. Tighter than death row, remember?”

Kay’s flashlight hits the far wall of the hallway, and James and
I exchange looks. We have only seconds to hit our beds before Kay catches us.

“See ya in the morning,” I whisper.

“Love you, Cass,” he says.

I pause, trying to soak in the words, to hold them and keep them with me for when I go.

“Love you too, James,” I say finally, but he’s already in bed with his headphones on.

IN THE MORNING,
James is nowhere to be found. The nurses look everywhere. They tear our rooms apart. They check behind sofas, behind desks, in the Quiet Room. He is flat-out gone.

For the first few hours I don’t even let myself get my hopes up, certain that he’ll be caught and dragged back here. Instead I just sit back and enjoy his antics along with the other patients as we watch the nurses scramble around in a panic, everyone trying to figure out how the hell he managed to get out. But as the hours pass and a quiet unease descends upon the nurses on the ward, the air heavy with anxiety like the waiting room of an ER, I start to believe that maybe, just maybe, James has pulled it off. He has gone to Rhode Island. He is waiting for me there. Soon I am making plans for the two of us on the outside, how I’ll hide him in my dorm room and sneak home food from the cafeteria. Then James can get a job at a beachside café or nearby coffee shop where I can go after classes and find him, where I can sit with someone who knows me and knows where I’ve been and cares about me anyway.

For the first time, the future doesn’t seem quite so scary. For the first time, everything seems like it might just be okay after all.

• • •

The hours tick into nighttime. The cafeteria is quiet at dinner, the
reality of James’s absence settling over the other patients, who, caught up in the excitement this morning, now realize they have lost something. I alone am happy, a quiet but deep relief expanding in my chest, making it easier to breathe.

At 9:00
P
.
M
. the doorbell rings. The fantasy shatters. James has been captured by the police, I am sure of it. But when Nurse Kay unlocks the door and opens it, it is James, alone, standing in the doorway, no officers or hospital aides accompanying him. He saunters in smelling like late summer air and cigarettes lit by his own hand, acting with his usual cocky bravado, as if he had just been out for a stroll.

But something is different. Something is wrong. He won’t look at me.

We all rush around him to hear the details of his escape, and he boasts to the others about how he slipped out with the laundry, stealing through bushes and jumping on a bus—to where he does not say. Everyone else laughs too loudly and listens too eagerly and speaks over each other with their endless questions. I stand at the back of the group and wait for him to give me some sign, some sense of explanation, something, anything. But he will not meet my eye.

I get frantic, chasing reasons in my head for why he came back, for what might have happened, for what he found out there that made him turn around and choose death row instead. Because if James couldn’t make it, if James with all his fearlessness and charm went out into the world only to rush right back, then what hope is there for the rest of us? What hope is there for me?

I want to ask him, but he’s not looking at me and there are too
many people around, and then a nurse is leading him to the office, where they will check him for contraband: razors, knives, pills—anything you can off yourself with.

I head toward my room; my body, which was just this morning light with hope, is heavy now, waterlogged with dread and fear. In the hallway, James and the nurse pass by me on his way to being frisked. Once again I try to make eye contact, but instead James slips a small brown bag from under his shirt into my hand.

“Sorry, Cass,” he mumbles to the floor, and disappears down the hall.

I go to my room and tear open the bag. Inside is a candle shaped like a Smurf and a small blue lighter to match. I think I’m supposed to laugh, but all I can do is cry.

• • •

In the morning, I go through the motions of packing, moving slowly as if through a thick fog. I wish James was with me, teasing me and making me laugh, but he is still unable to face me after coming back. I dump all of my accumulated belongings into one small suitcase: makeup purchased from the gift shop, a bunch of letters from when I first got here sent from old friends who slowly trickled away, the bedsheets and towel and clothes my mother packed for me the day she put me in here. Most of the clothes were already baggy when I bought them to hide all the weight I had gained in my early teens. Now, after years of inedible hospital food, they pretty much hang off of me.

I try to figure out what to wear for my first day of both freedom and college, but it’s not like I have a lot of good options. Finally I choose a T-shirt, an oversized sweater and a pair of ripped-up
jeans. Just the act of putting them on feels like a restoration of personhood after not bothering to wear anything but hospital scrubs and pajamas for so long. And yet to see myself in these old clothes invites the intrusion of my mother’s voice back into my head: “All my life, I dreamed about having a daughter . . . how I would dress up her up like a pretty little doll. I just don’t know why you won’t be the daughter I wanted.”

I sit on the suitcase and zip it shut.

In front of the distorted plastic mirror I do one last check of my makeup and wonder what the kids at college will think of me, if they will be able to look in my eyes and know where I’ve been. Just to be on the safe side, I add more eyeliner and mascara.

I’m about to head out into the hallway when Nurse Kay pops her head into my room.

“The time has come, eh?” she says, smiling for once.

“Yep.”

“Who’s picking you up?”

“No one,” I say. “I’m taking the bus.”

“Oh,” she says. Her eyes go sad. Just for a moment. Just long enough to let me know I was wrong in thinking she doesn’t care about us kids or that she doesn’t see the reality of our situations. “Don’t miss your stop,” she says then, and disappears down the hall.

I take a deep breath, grab my suitcase, and allow myself one last look at this room that has seen so many of my tears. It appears now exactly as it did the day I first saw it: the bare mattress, the small desk, the window with the steel mesh screen. There is no trace of me left here. Even my memories feel somehow packed up and
put away. Already it’s just a strange room I passed through in the wider panorama of my life. I think of the kid who will move in here next, and I wonder if they will be afraid like I was, if they will cry themselves to sleep like I did, if they will make friends here who will help them get through. I go over to the desk and write a note, let them know that they’ll be okay, let them see that there was a girl here before them who survived this place just as they someday will. I leave it in the drawer and walk out.

At the end of the hallway, the other patients have gathered in a semicircle by the door to see me off. When I see them there, whatever composure I have managed to assemble collapses. One by one I hug each of them, defying the “no physical contact” rule. James stands back from the rest, watching. He wears a blazer over his hospital scrubs and dark sunglasses as if it’s a funeral. The sight of him dressed like that makes me laugh and cry harder at the same time.

With each good-bye, the idea of this last, most painful good-bye to James gets more difficult. My throat tightens around the thought of it. I go to hug Trish, a quick hug, but it means something that she lets me. I slip a good-bye letter into her hand because I know she’ll never let me say to her face all the corny things I want to tell her.

“Don’t let me catch you here again,” she says, and I can swear there are tears in her eyes too.

I go to Shelly next. I grab her wrists and glance down at all those pink scars on white skin. “I’ll see you again soon. On the outside, okay?”

She looks at her hands as if surprised to see them there. When she raises her head to meet my eyes, her nod is small and unconvincing. I feel a pang of foreboding.

By the time I get to James, I am ready to call the whole thing off. I stand in front of him. His eyes are hidden by the sunglasses. I need so badly to see his eyes. All of my fear accumulates in the space between us, in the space of his absence from me before I have even left.

“I don’t think I can do this without you,” I say quietly.

He is silent for a moment, and then he takes his sunglasses off, revealing the James I know, the friend I love, my safe place. His eyes are tired and sad and far away. “I’m a call away,” he says, handing me a folded-up piece of paper with the ward’s pay-phone number on it. “You’ll always know where to find me.”

“I don’t want to find you here. I want to find you out there!” I say, tears threatening.

“Listen to me, soldier,” he says, grabbing my shoulders and looking into my eyes with mock seriousness to make me laugh. “Run! Save yourself!”

I manage to smile back and put my hands up in surrender. Then Dr. Meeks unlocks the door, looks at me with his well-cultivated expression of concern and hands me his card. “Just in case,” he says.

I walk out the door and turn to watch it shut on James.

He moves to the window—all the kids do—for one last wave. I stand just below them and pull out the lighter James smuggled in for me. Then I hold up Meeks’s card and set it on fire. I watch as everyone, James especially, cheers.

“You’re going to do great!” he calls after me through the steel mesh screen.

He sounds so sure.