Halfway House

by Katharine Noel

  “Hooray for Nicole.”

  Luke dropped the letter. He made his voice deep: “The Voorsters had another exceptional year.”

  “Right. Exceptional.”

  “No divorces and only one near-death, so keep your fingers crossed! We’re sure Pieter will turn up, though he’s temporarily AWOL—”

  “Luke, he’s not.”

  “Angela seems to be recovering nicely on Thorazine after her psychotic break.” His voice, beneath its false cheer, sounded forced. “Our son, Luke—yes, we have a son!—left UW with only a semester and a half left. Go, Luke, go!”

  “But you’re going back.” As Jordana said it, she knew he wasn’t.

  Luke looked startled, as though he hadn’t known either, until this moment. Jordana wanted to grab his shoulders and shake him. He was sabotaging himself, as if it were his fault Angie wasn’t in college. Trying to sound neutral, she said, “You have a life out there.”

  “It’s just for now I’m not going back. For now.”

  “God!” Springing to her feet, she rushed from the room, then jerked to a stop in the hallway, unsure where to go. She was trembling.

  Such a pointless waste. “Stop,” she said, not loud enough for Luke to hear, not even sure who the words were meant for. She put shaking hands over her eyes. “Stop. Stop.”

  Twenty-five

  Luke taught his 7 and 8 A.M. classes the same things he’d been taught as a child: to put their faces down in the water and blow bubbles, to do the dead man’s float, to dive for small objects. These were adults who had never learned to swim, and in the water they were nervous and hopeful, sometimes almost fierce when he’d set a difficult task. He had ten women and three men. One woman worked as a printer at The White Mountain Times: when she dove into the water, faint vapor trails of ink streamed from her hands and arms. Afterward, his students used the Y’s shabby locker room to change into work clothes, blow dry their hair, put on makeup and jewelry. Transformed into their day selves, they got into noisy old Celicas and Marauders and drove off in different directions: the bank, the hospital, the Igga. A man who came to class gray-faced from the night shift at UPS went home to bed.

  Once Luke had said to him, “If you’re ever too wiped out, you don’t have to come. We have makeup classes.”

  “Oh, no.” He seemed upset at the idea. “I look forward to this all night. This is the best part of my life right now.”

  It seemed impossible that Luke could be responsible for the best part of someone’s life. He’d taught classes like these for the last three summers: he felt like he could do it in his sleep, and sometimes like he was doing it in his sleep.

  This life back in New Hampshire—staying in his old room, working at the Y again—seemed unhinged from time. Even his sexual fantasies had reverted back to those he’d had as an adolescent. He came upon a beautiful woman on the beach, standing with her back to him. From behind, he slid his hands into her bikini top. Just the weight of her breasts falling into his hands, the press of her nipples, was all he needed.

  In his Intermediate class he taught backstroke, flip turns, the frog kick. A few mastered those and learned butterfly, Angie’s old stroke. On beginners it looked desperate, like drowning: arms smacking the water, head rearing to suck in air. At ten, he taught a private lesson to a guy who’d lost his legs in a car accident; then he taught a Guppy class.

  He finished work around one. He told himself he would go visit Angie at the hospital, but as usual, as soon as he got into his car, he was overtaken by such deep tiredness that he almost couldn’t lift his hands to the wheel. He drove home and stumbled up to his room, where he slept for the rest of the afternoon.

  When he woke, it was dark inside and outside the house. The clock said five, and he had to search his memory before deciding afternoon. He’d slept in his clothes, and his skin felt clammy. Turning onto his side, he drew his knees up against his stomach. He felt so emptied that it was hard even to breathe. What was he doing here? If he were waking from a nap in Madison, Wendy would be beside him. She would have a textbook open on her knees, hair pulled back, the lamp throwing a yellow circle of light on the page. It was stupid to be here—he wasn’t doing Angie any good—but he couldn’t see himself anywhere else. Madison, that life of drinking beer in the afternoon with his housemates, doing laundry with Wendy, sitting in lecture halls, felt closed off to him now, no longer available.

  Putting his hand beneath the waistband of his jeans, he cradled himself. It comforted him, a little.

  Twenty-six

  Angie woke with a dry mouth and a pounding headache. There was a piece of gauze on her arm over the IV mark, and a place on her temple that felt tight. She touched it: adhesive that hadn’t all been swabbed off. She couldn’t remember being awakened or coming down here for the ECT. She felt like a pot whose insides had been scoured with steel wool: that empty, that dry.

  A nurse, wearing a cardigan that obscured all but the first letter of her name tag, K, brought Angie water. Angie tried to say something about aspirin. She must have said something because K nodded and left, returning with a fluted paper cup of water and another paper cup holding two red pills. Angie swallowed them and lay back on the gurney. Closing her eyes, she felt herself floating, the way she used to feel after swim practice, when she lay back in the water, exhausted, muscles aching. Except that then she’d felt relieved and happy. Now her head burned; immediately, she threw up the water and the melted white nubs of aspirin.

  While she was still leaning over the edge of the gurney, pawing her face, a doctor stopped next to her. He put his hand on her shoulder. “You had a very good seizure.”

  She felt a dim flash of accomplishment. A nurse used a cotton pad to swab adhesive from her temples, and Angie remembered a day a couple of years ago when Jess had taken her to a salon. Brow waxing was a very girly thing to do, not really Jess’s style—or Angie’s. She’d been in very bad shape, though, and Jess must not have known what else to do to cheer her. Angie lay on a vinyl exam table while a woman used a tongue depressor to swab hot brown wax between her eyebrows. She pressed a small piece of muslin against the wax, then yanked it off. Angie had cried out. Cheerfully, the woman showed her the cloth; the wax had stuck to it, pulling out dozens of small hairs. “That’s much better,” the woman said. It should have been funny—someone trying to make her beautiful when for two weeks she’d been so depressed she could barely lift a toothbrush—but the strip of cloth, yellow sebum clinging to the hairs’ root bulbs, had filled Angie with dread. After that day, she and Jess had drifted even farther apart.

  K got her back into the wheelchair. Angie didn’t have the energy to grab at the back of her hospital gown, so doubtless her fat white ass flashed the room. She didn’t care; she cared horribly.

  On the ward, she staggered to the social room. Two of the catatonics sat in the blue vinyl chairs; they weren’t officially excused from groups, but no one expected them to go. Angie sank into a chair as far from them as possible and passed out.

  She woke to find she’d slid half off the chair. She watched the light change on the ceiling, sharpening toward noon. She felt like she had a horrible flu, one that made her bones ache with fatigue, one that made the world flat, an unsteady platter whose edge she could slide off.

  To herself, Angie whispered, “What’s your name?”

  She whispered back, “Angela Hedde Voorster.”

  “Where were you born?”

  “Presbyterian General, New York, New York.”

  “What is your favorite movie?”

  “Chinatown for good movies, Valley Girl for bad movies.”

  “What did you do yesterday?”

  She tried to think. She knew she must have spent time in this room and in the breakfast room. One of her parents had probably visited, and Trevor called every day. She hadn’t seen or heard from Luke. She’d surely watched television, but she couldn’t remember a single image. She couldn’t remember what she’d eaten. Something, there must be somet
hing. She tried to imagine her plastic-wrapped tray; Natalie saying, “Did I just go somewhere?”; the Cheers theme song: a place where everybody knows your name. … But they belonged to every day.

  In a just world, she’d have ECT on Drama Therapy day and be allowed to skip it. From the cacophony down the hall, though, this was Music Therapy day. A young guy from the community college—he wore lots of rope jewelry—brought drums and let the patients whale on them. It was the only therapy group that didn’t make her feel worse.

  Angie got up and limped to the bathroom. There the ward’s similarity to a hotel ended. The stalls had curtains, and the mirror was made not of glass but of polished metal: unbreakable, slightly dented in one place, so that if Angie stood at the second sink her forehead bulged, then shrank, bulged, shrank, as she moved. The Formica counter held a mermaid-shaped stain the color of milky coffee.

  Back to the social room. Elsie had come in to sit on one of the couches, her head tipped forward so that her long graying hair covered her face. Rapidly, she raked her fingers through, not a combing motion—in fact, she was tangling it—but as though searching for something.

  When Angie came into the room, Elsie looked up and froze. “Are you an angel?”

  “Yeah.”

  Elsie continued to stare at her; then, quite suddenly, she ducked her head again and resumed her anxious sifting. The catatonics were still as the chairs they sat in, barely breathing. The television played a news program above their heads. It had closed captioning, black bars with white letters across the bottom of the screen. In movies the captions were edited down to the bare essentials, but the news was broadcast live, with no time for editing; the words came in fits and gushes. A woman wearing a turquoise power suit adjusted her face from sad to cheerful, while beneath her lagged

  >>perished in the blaze.

  Angie had checked the hall clock on her way back from the bathroom, but she realized she had no recollection of what time it was. No one knew why ECT worked, but the fact that she could speak, sleep a few hours a night, want a cigarette—want anything—meant that it was working. On the other hand, her short-term memory was shredded. The past was clearer than five minutes ago. She might lose a whole afternoon remembering something like the summer she was ten and had been tapped to swim with the thirteen-and-ups. That whole summer tasted of watermelon Now-and-Laters. Olivia Newton-John on the radio in the lifeguard office, a rabbit’s foot of aluminum foil crumpled around the antenna for better reception. The older girls’ coconut oil leaving a rainbowed sheen on the water’s surface when they dove in. Angie and Abe—the two younger kids singled out to swim big kids’ practices—ran around fetching things for the lifeguards, showing off.

  The social room had six wobbly ashtray stands, a plastic coffee table with no sharp edges, copies of Family Circle and Newsweek and People. Some of the magazines were semi-new, ones the nurses brought from home, first cutting off the small white subscriber labels that would have shown their addresses. The Globe wasn’t left in the social room anymore, because Harriet had pica; she ripped pages out and ate them. If you wanted the paper, you had to get it from a nurse. Angie lit a cigarette. The smoke steadied her, as did the familiar movements, bringing the cigarette to her lips, pulling the harsh smoke into her lungs. She wandered to the window, surrounded by blinking green Christmas lights. Semis ground by on the highway. Old snow covered the cars in the lot, smudging their outlines. On the concrete apron of the emergency entrance, someone else—it was so overcast that they were smeared, indistinct—also smoked. Angie took a long drag and, six floors down, the other cigarette’s tip flared orange, then faded.

  Nighttime. The TV showed Whoopi Goldberg dressed as a nun. “There she goes! She’s taking the stairs!” shouted the gangster, and underneath, shortened to keep up:

  >>She’s gone!

  Whoopi ran between pinball machines, and then another nun and another, the hit men turning each nun around, and it was never her, never the right one. Down the bright hall, a nurse said, “Girl—” in a laughing voice that meant she was talking to another nurse, not the exasperated voice that would have meant a patient—and from the ward upstairs you could make out faintly someone screaming and screaming and screaming, and then the sudden silence of Isolation.

  “Did I just go somewhere?” Natalie whispered, looking stricken. “Did I just leave?”

  “You’ve been right here.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Natalie had steel-rimmed glasses and a narrow uncertain face. In real life, she worked for a florist. Angie used to sometimes say Nope, haven’t seen you for hours, but she’d learned not to joke. Something terrible—Angie didn’t know what—happened to Natalie in the fantasies she fell into. “Yeah, I’m totally positive. You’ve definitely been right here.”

  On the screen the nuns turned, a row of black bells, innocence and false innocence knocking against each other in their faces.

  “Did I just disappear somewhere?” Natalie asked.

  Angie shook her head. “Did I?”

  Natalie smiled a little. “You know you didn’t.”

  The movie ended with a gospel song. Later a nurse came in to switch off the static. “Night meds, ladies.”

  It was weirdly calming, how the days were barely differentiated. Lights out at ten, movie at eight, ice cream at dinner Friday, Group every morning: the week turned slowly, a seven-toothed gear, Sunday night rising again and then falling slowly as Monday rose behind it. In her room’s window, her face was less distorted than in the bathroom’s tin mirror but fainter, as though she was fading. It was snowing outside. The flakes looked black as they whirled beneath the streetlamps.

  A knock on the door. A nurse stuck in her head, swept a flashlight across the room; someone would check every fifteen minutes, all night. The door clicked shut behind her and Angie, alone again, turned back to the window. Through her reflection, she could see a thin moon hanging crooked over the empty softball field. She worked two fingers though the grating to touch the cold glass.

  Twenty-seven

  It was more than a month after he found her that Luke finally forced himself to drive up to see Angie at Hay slip-Balsbrough after work. He knew from his parents that Angie was on the “unlocked” floor. The “unlocked” unit was actually locked, but some patients were allowed out for fifteen minuts or more, accompanied or unaccompanied, depending on doctors’ orders.

  Today, if he were in Madison, he’d be turning in his term paper for physical anthropology.

  At the nursing station, he signed the register, surprised to see his hands shaking. He took his wallet and keys from his pockets. The nurse was young, about Angie’s age. She checked for sharps, then handed back his things. “Your sister’s in the TV room.”

  His heart began to beat faster. On a gurney beside the nursing counter slept a young woman. She must be sui-1, on constant watch. The first time he’d heard sui had been about his sister, after her overdose. The word had hung in his brain, hard and without meaning—suu-eee—before dissolving into the first syllables of suicide. Thinking of how much he’d had to learn since then, a wave of pride and self-pity moved through him, quickly followed by disgust. How could he congratulate himself about anything connected to Angie’s illness?

  Coming into the TV room, he said her name. His heart was beating painfully fast; he felt a little faint. “Angie,” he said again, and she turned.

  Her face was bloated, and her short hair stood up all over her head, like the hair of a child just woken from a nap. She wore a limp cardigan over her hospital gown.

  She said, “You have a beard.”

  “It’s not really a beard,” he said, stupidly. “I just haven’t shaved in a while.”

  “Come closer.” She reached to touch it. “It’s red.”

  “Yeah. It itches.”

  She patted his beard. She usually wore silver rings on every finger; without them, her hand looked soft and vulnerable. Pat. Pat. Pat. “I like it.”

  “Wendy h
ates when I let it grow out,” he said. “She thinks I look like an outlaw.”

  “Very … original.”

  Without thinking he reached up and drew her hand down to his lips, kissing the back as he might have done with a girlfriend. Her knuckles still had a few scabs from where he’d ground his knees into them. He winced.

  A commercial came on and Angie turned away from him, toward the television. The ad was for laundry soap, a woman grabbing her son as he ran past, stripping off his stained shirt and throwing it into the washing machine. “I would’ve gotten dressed, if I knew you were coming.” She rubbed at her eye with the heel of her splayed hand. He watched until he couldn’t stand it and had to pull her hand away. Her eyelid was chafed pink.

  When he let go of her hand, she started grinding her palm against her eye again.

  “Goddamn it, Angie.” He pulled her hand away from her face. More gently, he said, “You’re making your eye all—it’s all red.” He ducked his head to make sure she was listening. After a moment, she nodded meekly. His mother had warned him that the ECT made Angie dopey, but he still hadn’t been prepared. He wished that she were angry at him after all.

  The TV wasn’t caged; apparently this hospital wasn’t worried that people would go to that particular bizarre length to kill themselves. Luke watched dogs bound toward a little boy, tlck, a woman scrubbing her counter, beaming, tlck, a man on a talk show saying, I just want a normal life, tlck, a soap-opera heroine in a bikini of leaves, kneeling on a desert-island beach, tlck, a fifties-era Clark Kent following a man, tlck—

  “No, go back,” he said. “That’s the old Superman.” He knelt beside his sister. “Remember this? Remember watching this?”

  “When Mom was at work.”

  He felt like cheering. “Mom was at work and we used to get so bored. We’d watch TV standing up, right up against the screen, so we could turn it off as soon as she got home.” Clark Kent sat at the restaurant counter next to the suspect, drinking water. Then he got up and pretended to make a phone call. Luke asked, “Do you remember this one?”