CHAPTER SIX
“Thank god I’m nothing like Marie,” Sarah mumbled under her breath as she entered the common area of Flanders Mental Hospital.
The great room was large and well illuminated by skylights and windows with a northern exposure. Architecturally interesting nooks and crannies gave the illusion of privacy without obscuring the vision of staff nurses. Gaming tables and benches made of cast concrete offered the opportunity for cards, chess, and checkers, but couldn’t be converted to battering rams and blunt instruments. Identical overstuffed couches, bolted to the floor around the perimeter, created semi-private micro-environments.
Three televisions mounted at strategic locations allowed patients the viewing choices of sports, drama, or music video. Cable news and religious channels had been blocked. Prozac couldn’t overcome the stimulatory effects of current events and Jesus.
Over the years, Sarah had visited her mother in places like this many times, often enough to know that in spite of initial impressions, there was nothing common about the common area of a mental hospital. Even the most cunning interior design could not hide the simple truth about Flanders for more than a few seconds. The place was a crazy house.
Clients were permitted to use the commons only if their disorders were manageable. Sarah was impressed with euphemisms used by the mental health establishment.
The clients of Flanders were patients, forcibly confined and given unwanted medications to alter mental states they didn’t want to change. A disorder was considered manageable if its decibel level didn’t consistently exceed hospital background noise. That could be pretty loud.
The collection of behaviors in the common area was both predictable and bizarre. Some clients engaged invisible companions in animated conversations. Others rocked obsessively, sang tuneless songs in private
languages, paced the room like participants in a zombie parade, or wavered between uncontrollable tremors and catatonia.
“We are being watched,” Marie Ferarro told her daughter.
Sarah knew her mother’s suspicions weren’t a symptom of her disease. The staff in the common area was discretely absent, but could appear as suddenly and mysteriously as a magician’s illusion if a client disrupted the questionable serenity of the room.
“They have hidden cameras,” Marie said. “And microphones and spies.”
Sarah didn’t believe professional spies were imbedded in the client population, but there were snitches aplenty. The difference would be lost on Marie in her current mental state. The doctors had settled on Thorazine as the most appropriate means of managing her manic behavior. The drug turned Marie’s complexion red. It dried up her saliva, made her hands tremble, and transformed her confidence into confusion. Sarah hoped to persuade someone in authority to reduce the dosage, but doctors were scarce in mental hospitals, and they avoided the relatives of clients the way celebrities avoided paparazzi.
Marie lowered her voice to a slurred whisper. “Archie’s reaching out to me.” The tip of her tongue explored the vermillion border of her lips as if it had an alien purpose of its own. Marie covered her eyes with her hands, but peered through the spaces between her fingers to be prepared for the evil things that were sure to come her way. Her breathing was deep and noisy. Sarah watched the second hand of her Timex while she counted respirations.
Twenty times a minute—was that hyperventilation?
“Yesterday, I held a cup of coffee in my hands.” Marie’s whisper was barely audible, but carried as much emotion as a scream.
“Archie’s vibrations buzzed my fingers like a captured hornet.” According to Marie, he spoke into his own cup of coffee in a prison cafeteria fifty miles away, broadcasting expressions of love on the emotional wavelengths of the cosmos. Marie thought Nicholas Sparks should incorporate the concept in his next novel. She planned to send him the idea eventually, but would use a traditional means of communication like the postal service or email.
“Fifty miles is no distance at all for a man like Archie.” The persistence and intensity of the vibrations were as reliable as his signature. Archie’s love for Marie shook the walls, the windows, even the floor of Flanders Mental Hospital.
“It’s like Message in a Bottle.” Marie drew a deep breath between each word. “But the bottle cap is stuck so tight, I can’t get it open.” She gripped an invisible bottle in her left hand and struggled to unscrew its imaginary cap with her right. The act transformed her simile into a full-blown hallucination. Marie’s emotions and her invisible bottle were at the breaking point.
Sarah looked around the room for help, but Marie’s current mental state would be acceptable to the Flanders Angels of Mercy. Marie was quiet. She was not a physical threat to herself or to anyone else. The only pain she suffered was mental, and in a hospital like Flanders, mental turmoil was a matter of course.
Marie’s breathing increased in frequency. Way too fast for anxiety. Her fingers curled into spastic claws. Sarah knew that was brought on by too much oxygen too fast. The spasms would intensify and spread into the large muscles of Marie’s arms and legs.
“Slow down, Mom.” Sarah knew from past experience she couldn’t talk Marie down, but she didn’t know what else to do.
“Breath slower. You’ll make the spasms worse.”
Marie began a series of rhythmic screams as silent and as relentless as a shark attack. Sarah would have run for help if she could have done so without leaving her mother’s side. She was afraid to call out; afraid overzealous staff members might interpret her vocalizations as a threat to peace and stability. Even for Marie, she would not risk being mistaken for a disruptive Flanders client. Psych nurses were quick on the draw with hypodermic syringes, and they weren’t particular whose butt was loaded full of sedatives. For some reason they always went for the butt—probably Sigmund Freud’s idea.
A series of pokes with a stiff index finger ended Sarah’s period of indecision.
“Not good.” The finger’s owner was a tall, balding, male client as thin and fragile as an Auschwitz survivor. He continued poking Sarah well after he had her full attention.
“Seen this before.” He counted ten pokes then withdrew his hand, blew on it, and licked his fingertips. “Sweet.” He trained his gaze on a spot two inches above Sarah’s head. “Not good at all. Ben will get Dr. Collins.” The man’s walk reminded Sarah of Charley Chaplin. A lot of people walked like that at Flanders.
After several minutes, Ben returned, accompanied by a handsome young man with lustrous black hair and deep blue eyes. He introduced himself as Robert.
It was rare to find a doctor who didn’t use his title to put distance between himself and lesser humans. A doctor whose humanity hadn’t been erased by higher education—amazing.
Even more amazing, an absolutely charming man. A first for Sarah. Her attitude toward members of the opposite sex was tainted by Marie’s romantic escapades. Sarah usually found men about as desirable as exotic venomous reptiles, but she decided she might make an exception for Dr. Robert Collins. Robert seated himself beside Marie. Her silent frantic screaming had intensified, but he brought it to a sudden stop with a gentle kiss on her forehead. A kiss always got Marie’s attention. She smiled at Robert Collins through her Thorazine haze.
“Tell me what you need,” Robert said. “We’ll look for it together.”
Marie’s breathing approached a normal rate. “Archie’s calling me,” she told him. “But I can’t hear him inside this place.”
“I understand.” Neither Sarah nor Marie doubted the truth of his statement.
“Work with me. We can bring him closer.”
Sarah had never seen a doctor do what Robert did. It was something like hypnosis and something like meditation and something like two crazy people talking to each other. Robert Collins had perfect rapport with Marie Ferraro. Sarah watched as he guided her mother through several seemingly pointless mental exercises to an incomprehensible conclusion that Marie understood completely. As Marie sorted thro
ugh her thoughts and emotions, her facial expressions changed as clearly and concisely as a lesson in method acting.
“I’ll hear him better when I’m outside,” Marie said. “Until then, feeling his vibrations will be good enough.”
Robert nodded in agreement. He kissed Marie on the forehead once again, ending the session as it began.
“Screwing someone’s head on straight requires some delicacy,” he told Sarah. “The threads are easily stripped.”
Without stopping to consider the consequences, she reached out and took the doctor’s hand. Robert Collins was quite a man, good looking but not arrogant, smart but not superior, a doctor of the mind who preferred happiness over sanity. He could definitely change Sarah’s attitude about the effectiveness of psychotherapy. Maybe about men in general.
There was no wedding band on Robert Collins’s finger, but that didn’t rule out a significant other. She wondered how he would react if she kissed him on the lips. That’s what her mother would do if she met a man who caught her fancy. Move boldly and make corrections as conditions demanded, like a juggler on a tightrope. Sarah wished for a moment she could be just a little more like Marie, but she was accustomed to stifling such impulses.
Maybe later, she thought. Maybe she could arrange to run into him outside of Flanders Hospital. A mental institution didn’t seem the most appropriate environment for exploring relationship possibilities. Not even Nicholas Sparks could twist that idea into a believable story.
Sarah didn’t think to ask Robert Collins if he would take charge of her mother’s therapy until she reached the security doors at the entrance of the hospital. Her thought processes had been put on hold by the strength of the doctor’s personality, but she knew she should take immediate action before one of the other doctors did Marie irreparable harm. If something developed between Sarah and Robert while Marie was being treated, so much the better.
She made her way to hospital administration and eventually found a secretary sympathetic to her cause.
“It’s nice when one of our psychiatrists gains the confidence of a family member,” The secretary ran her fingers over her computer keyboard, brought up the appropriate application, and asked Sarah for the doctor’s name.
“Robert Collins.” Sarah watched the cooperative smile slide off of the helpful woman’s face.
“Did he say he was a doctor?”
Sarah mentally reviewed her encounter with Robert Collins. She was surprised at the detail.
“I guess not.” She was ashamed to admit feeling a little disappointed at Robert’s loss of professional status.
“Is he an intern, a psychiatric nurse, an orderly?” Surely a man with Robert’s expertise wasn’t a mere visitor.
“He’s a client,” the secretary said. “Brought in by the police after he disrupted a funeral. They say he talks with the wind.”
Perfect, Sarah thought. Maybe I am my mother’s daughter after all.
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