7
The plump nurse from the previous day woke me at eight in the morning. She turned off the machines next to me and disconnected the wires attached to me. The beeps and whirring stopped. She pulled off the red light device on my pointer finger. She was careful as she took out my IV and managed to do it without hurting me. She threw the gauze in the garbage and brought a wheelchair from the hallway over to my bed.
She shrugged her shoulders at me when I looked at her skeptically, and said, “Standard hospital procedure. You’ve been in bed for a week.”
I pushed the covers off and stood. My knees wobbled and I felt lightheaded. I took a seat in the wheelchair and felt a flash of gratitude. The nurse attempted small talk as we began winding our way through a series of hallways, but quickly abandoned her efforts because of my nonresponsiveness. It was like a maze as we twisted and turned until finally reaching an elevator. I watched the numbers light up until they arrived at five. With a ding, the door opened, and she pushed me through. As we walked down the hallway, she unlocked each door we came to and I held my breath each time as if something bad was behind it.
“This is it,” she said, sliding her key into another door.
The sign next to it read: Adult Psychiatric Unit. I wasn’t being moved to some other room in the hospital to finish healing but was being tossed into the nut ward. Every scene from movies I’d watched about psych wards flashed through my mind in snippets and my chest tightened. It was hard to breathe. We moved through another series of locked doors and with each click the sense of impending doom heightened. My panic escalated.
We arrived at a see-through door with a small sign that read: Secure door. Flight risk.
I was rolled through a short, wide hallway to an open area with hallways branching off each side. There was a square nurses’ station bustling with activity in the center, where all of the hallways met. Most of the nurses were dressed in ordinary, everyday clothing rather than scrubs as they answered phones, scribbled ferociously on papers, and carried around big, thick black binders. It seemed out of place and character to me, but I’d never been in a nut ward before, so I had nothing to compare it to. My nurse walked up to a petite redheaded woman at the station. They exchanged words, nodded, and looked over in my direction. My nurse returned with the redhead.
“Hi, Elizabeth, I’m Polly. I work here on the unit.” She stuck out her hand as if we were acquaintances meeting at a party or something. I declined the gesture. It seemed pointless. “I’m going to show you around and help you get settled.”
“I’m going to go now. You’re in good hands,” my nurse said. It took a moment for me to realize she wasn’t waiting for me to say something, but to get up from the wheelchair. I stood up and felt as dizzy as I had getting out of bed.
“This is the nurses’ station.” Polly pointed to the activity in the center of the room. “There is staff here twenty-four hours a day. If you need anything, you just ask.”
She motioned to the hallway directly behind the station.
“Those are the rooms where group sessions are held and where you’ll meet with your doctor. Everybody sees their doctor at least once a day. There’s a big conference room at the end of the hallway where you’ll meet with the team. The team is everyone who is responsible for patient care. Doctors, nurses, social workers, OT people, and such. You’ll meet all of them in time. Don’t worry about it now. The team is responsible for making the decisions about your care, but they rely heavily on the recommendations from your primary doctor. I think you should have met your primary doctor yesterday, did you? Dr. Larson?”
I nodded. So, he wasn’t really a doctor but some kind of a shrink. No wonder he’d looked at me so intensely.
She pointed to the hallway on the left side of the station.
“Down there are the men’s rooms. Men and women are at separate sides of the unit. They mingle during the day, but at night we keep you guys separate.”
She laughed. I didn’t. The idea of crazy people having sex wasn’t amusing.
“Everyone is expected to be in their rooms at nine thirty. Lights out is at ten. C’mon.”
I followed her around the desk and into a huge room that opened up in front of the nurses’ station.
“This is the family room,” she announced as if it was something to be proud of.
I stood in the doorway.
“Come on inside.”
I scanned the room. Magazines thrown around everywhere. Cards spread out on a round table as if someone had left during the middle of a game. There were mismatched padded chairs on wheels strewn about. A big TV stood against the far wall. It was housed in an old-fashioned wooden entertainment center that nobody used anymore. Windows lined an entire wall. Two couches were haphazardly tossed together.
“When you aren’t in scheduled activities during the day, this is where you’ll spend your time. You won’t be allowed in your room outside of sleeping and illness. At least for now. Patients can earn room time once we’re assured of safety, but for right now you’ll just be one-on-one. That means that you must always have a staff member present. The team will determine when this restriction can be lifted.”
The sound of footsteps and laughter broke into her detailed instructions. I watched as bodies filed into the room. The voices hurt my ears, forming a joint throbbing verse in my head.
“It’s time for morning checkin. Just have a seat and I’ll explain more when it’s through,” she instructed.
I sat in the nearest chair. The aluminum was cold and made me shiver.
Another woman walked into the room. She was dressed in a sweater and jeans. Her body was completely disproportionate. Her upper body was small and slender, but from her waist she ballooned into a wide bottom and huge hips. As if on cue, the other bodies in the room stepped into action, moving chairs and taking seats as they created a lopsided circle. They made me a part of the circle. I stared at the floor. Dingy gray institutional flooring, like in an elementary school cafeteria. Voices carried on around me, but I didn’t let them register. I drowned them out with a humming in my ears and by focusing intently on counting the specs of brown within each tile. I was on my third tile when someone tapped on my knee. I looked up. A woman was peering at me from across the circle. I could feel other eyes on me as well, but I stayed focused on hers.
“Can you tell us your name so we can welcome you?” she asked cheerfully.
She didn’t fit on the chair. Her fat folded over the chair like rolls of dough spilling out of the pan. What were they welcoming me to and who cared what my name was? I said nothing. Just returned her stare.
She waited for a few moments and then spoke for me. “Everyone, this is Elizabeth.”
The focus shifted from me to the person sitting in the chair next to me. I didn’t pay any attention to what was happening around me. I wanted to die. I recalled reading somewhere that the body shut down after three days without water. Would my body quit working if I refused to eat or drink? It would be a relief to waste away in my chair, but there was no way it was going to happen. There were too many nurses around to allow it. I was sure they’d stick an IV in my arm and pump me with fluids to keep me alive. I glanced at the windows lining the wall on the other side of the room and considered jumping, but I was sure they were locked since we were on the fifth floor and every crazy person here would jump out the window if given a chance.
It was foreign to be trying to figure out a way to die. I’d never wanted to kill myself before. Giving up had never been an option for me and I’d always tried to prevent Emily from doing it too. When she was a teenager and experienced her first bout of depression, I’d encouraged her by promising her that her hopeless feelings were due to her hormones and eventually, they’d level out and she’d start to feel normal again. But as her depression grew worse and she became more self-destructive, I worked hard at being her cheerleader.
“C’mon, Em. You’ve got to fight this. I know you can do it. We didn’t go through ever
ything we went through just to quit.” I must’ve said it to her hundreds of times over the years.
If my cheerleading didn’t work, I switched my tactics to pointing out all of the good things about her and what she had to live for.
“Think how much Dalila and Bob love you. It would devastate them to lose you. Everybody loves you. They always have. You’ve got that special thing that people are naturally drawn to. You can use that. You could use it to do all kinds of other things. Maybe even help other people. You’d probably be good at it because you’d be able to understand exactly what they were going through.”
And then, when there weren’t any more words left, I held her until the despair passed. I’d always refused to give up and to let her quit. Until now, until I failed to keep her alive.
Emily and I were each other’s life support. My purpose in life was to take care of her and keep her safe. It always had been. I went first with the special friends and if Emily was too afraid to play one of their games, I played them for her. When Mother came at us with the wire hanger, I stepped in front of Emily and took the brunt of the beatings whenever I could. The times when I couldn’t were torturous. I kept Emily going when she didn’t have the strength to keep going on her own, but she kept me going too because she gave me a purpose for living. She defined me, gave me the role I had to play.
Mother’s neglect and abuse started it, but by the end, it was more than that. I took care of Emily like we’d pretended to when we were little, trapped in our room and inventing ways to mother each other. But even though she ended up being the sick one, the one who needed help, she gave my life meaning. In high school, she’d kept on cutting herself, and I’d help her clean the wounds. Whenever any of the mean girls in high school would tease her for not getting good grades or making out with a boy she barely knew, I stood up for her. I was a master at pointing out the mean girls’ flaws and making them feel bad for things they’d done to shift the attention away from Emily. We were a formidable unit. I didn’t know how to exist without her. She’d taken her life and with it, she’d taken away my reason for living.
She’d tried to kill herself so many times I’d lost count, but I’d never considered her suicide attempts as being real death threats. I saw them as a desperate cry for help because she strategically timed her attempts so I would find her before it was too late, or she’d do something crazy in front of me because she knew I’d stop her. I was sure she’d expected me to interrupt her again.
How long had I been asleep? What if I’d woken up five minutes earlier? Would she still be alive? Would it have ended like every other time? What if I’d gone to her instead of staying on the couch? My questions tortured me. All I wanted to do was die, and I wondered if anyone had successfully killed themselves in a nut ward. I almost laughed out loud at the absurdity of it. I had to find a way to get released. There was no way I could stay. Dr. Larson had said yesterday that I needed to be in a safe place until I worked through my situation. If working through my situation meant getting over losing Emily, it was going to be impossible for me to get out.
People around me began moving their chairs out of the circle and putting an end to the strange gathering that had taken place. The bodies scattered throughout the room. The other bodies belonged to actual people. The voices had faces and stories like mine. What brought them into this locked world?
A few sat in chairs by the window, staring intensely out of it as if something really exciting was happening outside that they didn’t want to miss. There was a man over in the corner all by himself staring out the window as he sat in an old wooden rocking chair. His eyes were glazed over and he didn’t even seem to be blinking. There were three women playing cards in the middle of the room. They all had their hair done and makeup on. One of them was dressed in a low-cut shirt with her cleavage spilling out. They were animated and laughed obnoxiously as they played a card game like they were in someone’s living room on a Friday night. They looked like they were having fun.
There was an elderly woman in the opposite corner, rocking back and forth even though she wasn’t in a rocking chair. She was pulling hair out of her head, strand by strand, and putting each strand in a neat pile on her pants. She didn’t even flinch when she tugged it out.
There were a black man and a white man facing each other on one of the brown couches. At first glance, it looked like they were having a heated conversation with each other as they gestured and pointed wildly. It took me a moment to realize they weren’t looking at each other when they talked—they were actually talking to themselves.
“Pretty scary, huh?”
A girl was sitting next to me. She looked ill. Not mentally, like I’m sure I did, but physically, like she should be in the cancer ward instead of a psychiatric unit. Her cheekbones were protruding through thin, pale skin so translucent I could see the blue veins below. Her hair was thin and there was weird brown fuzz growing on her face. She was dressed in a baggy hooded sweatshirt and jeans, but the clothes lay flat, unfilled, as if her head was simply a clothes hanger.
“Yeah, kinda strange,” I said.
“I’m Rose. I hate my name. Doesn’t really go well. Roses are supposed to be beautiful. Elegant.” She snorted. “And then look at me.”
“I’m Elizabeth.”
She looked me up and down. “You don’t look like an Elizabeth.”
I didn’t respond, but I didn’t think she expected me to.
“Is this your first time here?” she asked.
People came here more than once?
“Yeah.”
“My fourth,” she replied.
“Oh. Really. So, have you been here long?”
She rolled her eyes. “Four weeks and two days.”
“They keep you here that long?”
“If you’re me,” she laughed. “Gotta gain more weight. Five more pounds. Can you believe it? I have to look like a big fat pig before I can get out of here.”
I looked at her body again. She couldn’t have weighed more than ninety pounds. She had the body of a little girl with the face of a very old woman.
“What are you in for?” she asked.
“I tried to kill myself.”
It sounded weird coming out of my mouth, but I’d better get used to saying it. It was true.
“Oh.” She smiled and waved her hand as if it was nothing. “Then they can only keep you for seventy-two hours. It’s an automatic seventy-two-hour hold when you try to kill yourself.”
I could last seventy-two hours.
“Who’s the team?” I asked.
“A whole bunch of doctors and stuff. You, like, sit at the head of this great big table and they all ask you questions. And stare at you. I hate it. Everyone does. It’s so uncomfortable. It’s one thing you never get used to no matter how many times you’ve been here.”
I trusted her because she had to know what she was talking about if she’d been here four times. Polly was sitting in one of the aluminum chairs behind us but appeared to be engrossed in a book.
“I really want to get out of here. How do I get them to let me out?” I whispered, just in case Polly had good hearing.
“It’s easy for you,” she explained. “All you gotta do is tell them you aren’t gonna kill yourself. You just gotta be like—hey, I felt really bad at the time and I did something stupid. I won’t do it again.”
I listened to her stories about all her other hospitalizations and the forced feedings she had to endure. I knew how hard it was to eat, but I didn’t tell her that.
“You’ve got it easy. The suicidals usually make it in and out of here pretty quickly. It will probably be the longest three days of your life, but there’s stuff you can do to pass the time.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“Like reading all the trashy magazines you want.” She tossed an Us Weekly onto my lap and giggled. “And believe me, there will be plenty of drama to keep you entertained. Some of the people here really are crazy. See that dude over there?�
� She motioned to the guy staring into nothingness by the window. I nodded. “He doesn’t talk. Like at all. Ever. You could go up behind him and yell in his ear. He wouldn’t even flinch.”
Rose and I were interrupted by Dr. Larson, who motioned for me to follow him down the hallway and into one of the offices. It was small and cramped. Completely bare. Not even a picture on any of the muted blue walls. There was only a single table with a chair on each side. I sat on one while he took the one across from me. It reminded me of the interrogation rooms I’d seen on TV, and it wasn’t anything like Lisa’s therapy room. He wasted no time.
“How are you feeling today?”
I took a deep breath. I could do this.
“I feel much better than I did yesterday. Yesterday was tough, trying to figure out what was going on.”
He nodded attentively. “Do you remember more about what happened the night before you came to the hospital?”
“I felt like everything was my fault, maybe I was too overwhelmed? You have to understand how close me and Emily are—were—I didn’t want to live without her. So, I just did it. I didn’t think about it. I wanted to die with her.”
“I understand how you could feel that way,” he said.
He still hadn’t taken his eyes off me and I still hadn’t looked at him. I kept my gaze focused on the desk in front of me. We sat in silence that seemed to go on for hours. I wanted him to ask me questions. Something. Anything to give me a clue as to what to say. I didn’t want to start talking without some sort of idea about what I was supposed to say, because what if I said something wrong and he kept me longer? Finally, he broke the silence.
“What’s the last thing you remember about Emily?”
“Her body. Like I told you yesterday. I found her in the bathroom. I can’t get the picture of it out of my head. I keep seeing it.”
“What happened before that? Do you remember?”
“Yes, we had a fight about my boyfriend.”
Phantom Limb: A Gripping Psychological Thriller Page 7
