by Amanda Davis
I took a deep breath and tilted my head towards him. I tapped my cigarette and watched the ash tumble to the ground.
“What about you?”
I felt the fat girl’s knife in my pocket, its weight solid and warm. I thought about my most frequent dream, where stars peppered the sky and I stood on a patch of grass, swelling, and rose above everything until I was immense and powerful and threw fear into the hearts of those below. I was an enormous hungry moon, able to swallow the world. I hovered there, swaying back and forth, but I always woke falling.
Tony Giobambera’s hands were on his knees. His fingers were long and thin. On his right hand was a silver ring. I focused on it, on the pattern of it, but didn’t answer.
I kept it all to myself, as though the power of words could make things come true. In the distance the fat girl spun and fell, spun and fell, a violent scratch of blue in the clear green day. She knew everything that mattered, everything there was.
I inhaled and blew smoke up into the sky where it dissolved and disappeared. “Nothing dangerous,” I told him. “Nothing to be alarmed about.”
There was a gentle breeze and the knife was warm in my fingers, warm against my leg. In the distance the fat girl fell. Tony finished his cigarette and ground it into the bleachers with the heel of a scuffed black boot. “I oughtta go,” he said, looking straight ahead. “You need a ride?”
I felt the knife’s smooth shell and tried to think, but my answer came quickly. “Sure,” I said.
I followed him up the hill and was careful not to look over my shoulder, though I felt the bleachers behind me like a living, breathing thing. I knew the fat girl was back there too. I knew she would catch up.
TWO
AFTER I swallowed all those pills, I woke in Gleryton Hospital. Later I learned I’d been in a coma for almost two days and only barely survived. My room was a creepy pale green. Sometimes I blinked and it was dark outside, blinked again and the day nurse was taking blood. Sometimes I lay alert for what felt like hours but were only minutes dripping slowly by.
My mother stood by my bed. She had her arms crossed, holding herself and swaying back and forth. It was dark outside and I tried to say something. She leaned towards me and became my dead father looking nervous and worried.
Daddy—I managed before I fell asleep again. Sleep was dark and dense, a syrupy underwater place without dreams.
I don’t know how long I was there but one night we left. My mom had help from an orderly loading me into her car and then we drove out of town. I drifted in and out. She talked the whole time, her voice like a black fly, buzzing, buzzing, trying to find the window that would set it free.
I woke to another wheelchair and a big dark house. Everything was dim then. I was dim, the world was dim. And the next thing I knew it was morning in a pale room with a sour smell and a small, red-haired girl, dressed in blue, staring out the window.
I was woozy and thick. I tried to sit up but my body was made of rubber and wouldn’t cooperate. I rolled over on my side, grabbed the metal bar rimming the bed, and tried to pull myself up, but my arm was an elastic band: it just stretched and stretched, growing as long as it wanted but doing nothing to hoist me.
“Meds.”
I couldn’t see her face—her back was to me—but I knew the voice hadn’t been mine. “What?” My voice came out as tissue paper, thin and light.
“Meds,” she said again. “They have you doped out of your mind.” Her words were pinballs flying around my head, repeating and repeating before they made any sense, and then it was one at a time, as though they’d each struck a flipper to be flung back into the room. “Might as well enjoy them,” she said. “It just gets worse.”
It. Just. Gets. Worse.
She never turned around. I wondered if she had no face, if her bright ratty hair hung all around her head. In my addled state this made sense. My eyelids were heavy and I drifted back into blackness. The last thing I thought about was the sour smell. Urine. Then sleep.
When I woke, the room was empty. The other side of the room was a mess: the area around the girl’s bed and bookcase was plastered in ragged pages from magazines that looked as though they’d been ripped out and taped to the wall in haste. Her bed was unmade but partially covered by an enormous pink blanket that was bunched up where she’d kicked it aside. The edge of the blanket nearest me said STARLING in a shaky markered uppercase. On top of her pillow were three stuffed chickens: a pink, a pale green, and a light blue, all in a row.
My head faced the doorway. A bookcase crouched at the foot of my bed and beyond that was an institutional blue vinyl chair under the other window. Our ceiling was low and hung with spotted white acoustical tile. An oval rag rug in shades of green and blue covered the center of the dark, scuffed, hardwood floor. The sheets smelled like bleach and the building had a deep hum. All my observations exhausted me.
There was a knock at the door and then my mother pushed it open. “I brought you something from home,” she said. “To brighten the room.”
I nodded and tried to smile, tried to sit up. She had brought me her quilt, folded and clutched close like she was chilly. It had repeating squares of wonderful fabric: jewel-colored satins, bright ginghams, dark velvets.
I wanted to thank her but my mouth was rubbery. I knew the story of the quilt. When she was eighteen, my mother decided to leave home and move to the city rather than attend the local junior college and work in my grandparents’ pharmacy. My grandmother was furious at my mother’s impending departure and felt very strongly that she should stay. Two weeks before she was supposed to leave, at my grandmother’s insistence, my mother went to help out an older cousin who’d just had a baby. While she was away, my grandmother cut all of my mother’s good clothes into small squares and sewed them into an angry quilt. I don’t know what happened when she returned and found the quilt. I only knew that she left anyway, taking it with her, and that I never met my grandparents.
The room was very quiet. My mother took a step forward and spread the quilt over me, my grandmother’s blanket of shame, my mother’s blanket of defiance. There was the occasional sound of faraway footsteps, a tiny gentle patter, then nothing. There was the low, distant hum. I drifted back to sleep.
For a while day and night bled into one another. Then one day a nurse came to get me and I was brought into the fold.
I remember that first walk down the hall. My legs were weak and the floor prickled beneath my feet. The edges of everything wavered. I felt that if I reached out to touch a hard surface it might very well not be there at all, but I kept such thoughts to myself. There were seven or eight people watching TV, none of whom seemed to have any interest in me. One guy had a burned face. Another twitched and tapped nervously. A girl in the corner hid behind her tangled hair. I found their inattention comforting. I tried to smile at the introductions but I really didn’t care who any of these people were, and I could tell they didn’t care about me either. I stood on gray linoleum in a sterile room. We had all been brought there by fate and fortune, but as far as I knew, no one had chosen to be there and I figured I didn’t have to befriend anyone. As if I even knew how.
Then each morning I woke to the blinding Berrybrook sunlight and thought I was a little girl in my bed at home again, that my father would come and wake me at any minute. And then, slowly, I blinked awake to the ceiling tiles and the scuffed wood floor, the chrome-rimmed bed and the hum of the room, and realized that I’d grown up.
My days had plenty of structure: meals and group therapy, recreation time and nap time, individual therapy and exercise. I was fed pills in little paper cups at regular intervals and I gave myself over to them. I let my mind float free and numbly pushed through the soup of each day, hopeless and confused and alive.
But it was just one more thing. One more way the days would form and even at the bottom of everything I was, I just didn’t care that much right then. It was all about one more day and just for now and every other cliché in the worl
d. It was all about waking and eating and running and sleeping. And it was about getting through to the next day, all of it even, nobody hurt. Me alive, though I still wasn’t sure I wanted to be.
I had all sorts of assumptions about Berrybrook. I thought life would be orderly and controlled. I believed there was no future and no past, no identity, only the present. I thought I was among the broken, waiting to be fixed—that hope was something we would earn.
I had private therapy sessions four days a week. “Tell me how you feel, Faith,” he said. Dr. Barry Ronnynole. Very Runnynose, we called him. “How I feel,” I always repeated. How I felt was none of his fucking business. No one’s fucking goddamned business but my own. I felt the way I felt and that was mine, belonged only to me.
“I’m okay,” I said, blandly. Or: “I’m tired today.”
I didn’t say what burned inside me: that sometimes I bubbled with something dark. That I was angry and angry and angry.
Because the more I didn’t say it, the more I wasn’t. The calmer I sounded, the calmer I was. And the more I felt it all fade away, all of it: Homecoming, my empty echoing house. All of it.
“I’m a little restless,” I might say. Or, “I’m thinking a lot about home.”
In Group some people talked about the stuff that had happened to them, the stuff they’d done. I felt disconnected from all of them. If anything, ending up at Berrybrook further convinced me of what I’d long believed to be true: that if I spoke of even the most innocent thing, the rest would come tumbling out of me, endlessly replenishing itself. That my need was as voracious as it was hideous, and the only sensible thing to do was choke it all back. So I sat on my folding chair, the world a strange sequence of hazy images, the room filled with strangers as sad and demented as I must have been to end up there, and I kept some things to myself.
But then my roommate, Starling, became the first friend I’d made in years. It had been so long since I’d felt that suck, that energy of drawing out that comes from another person’s attentions. After a week or two of quiet indifference, she began to warm to me. It started with small kindnesses—she’d smile at me, or leave the light on if she went to sleep before I came back from the common room—and evolved from there until she’d developed an interest in me that I found suspect until I realized it was sincere. Starling Yates was many things, but she was extremely sincere.
“Tell me what your favorite foods are,” she said. Or: “What’s the first memory you have and how old were you?” Or: “Have you ever been in love?” And I told her: Artichokes. Waking to a bad dream in the middle of the night and calling out so that my father came and held me until I fell back asleep when I was three. No.
And she told me things too. That she had a gay older brother named Charlie who was her best friend. That her father had a gambling problem and wasn’t around much. That her mother had run away with his brother when Starling was four. That she could barely remember her, but what she did remember was a certain sweet perfume, shiny red heels, stockings hanging in the bathroom, being spanked for wetting the bed.
In the daytime Starling was effusive but never talked about herself. In the comfort of darkness she told me long complicated stories and I listened with every pore, afraid somewhere in the back of my mind that if my attention wavered, even for a moment, her interest in me might fade, casting me back into the depths of solitude.
“I started to hear things when I was seven,” Starling whispered late one night. “I would wake up and feel myself listening. Sometimes I remembered what had been said, sometimes I didn’t. At first I told Charlie about it because I told him everything, but he didn’t believe me so I stopped. By the time I was eight I heard this voice all the time. A girl I played with, who lived down the street, invited me to come to church with her family and I went for the first time ever. After that I believed it was Satan talking to me, which meant I was evil.” She arranged her chickens on her lap.
“I was very scared. I asked the voice to go away. I begged, but it didn’t. It told me things I shouldn’t know, told me to do things I shouldn’t do. So one night I jumped out of my bedroom window to shut it up. I broke my ankle and my wrist, but the voice didn’t leave. My dad and Charlie took me to the hospital and I told them why I did it, that Satan was talking in my head. That was my first psychiatric admission.” She gave a short laugh. “The first of many. On and off, I’ve pretty much been in the system since then.”
I couldn’t see her face in the moonlight. She didn’t sound upset, just matter-of-fact about the whole thing. “Did it ever stop?” I asked. “The voice, I mean.”
“No.” She was quiet for a few moments. When she turned her face towards the moonlight, she looked pale and small and calm.
“I’ve tried everything you can imagine,” she said. “Taken pills, jumped from moving cars, hung myself…Charlie always saved me is the thing. And it never worked. By the time I was eleven I’d even had electroshock therapy—which fucking hurts!—but it never left. And I know now.” She paused. “I know now that it’s not Satan talking to me.”
“So who is it?” I asked, but she just shook her head.
The days were endless, and they sped by. Starling’s life unfurled before me in the wee hours and everyone else’s problems were public during the day. She told me that her brother Charlie worked in a restaurant but had a boyfriend in the circus and that he and their father didn’t speak, though they shared the same house. I learned that she was eighteen, lactose intolerant, anemic, manic-depressive, and allergic to wheat, dust, mold, and chocolate. She could barely eat anything and what she did eat she often got rid of—evidenced by her raw gums and bad breath.
But the whole ward loved her. People gravitated towards her. There was a radiance she had, a way that her presence made you feel better. I felt chosen by her. I’d never been chosen for anything in my life.
“You watch everyone,” Starling said one day when we were sitting in the common room. “I’ve seen it. You watch everyone and everything that goes on around here, don’t you?”
I swallowed and nodded. It wasn’t something I’d ever thought about before, but I supposed I did. I had always watched other people, noted their habits and manners. Ever since I was a little kid.
“I like that.” She made this declaration as if it meant so much more. And it did.
So Starling Yates became my friend. She called me Annabelle, after her favorite Poe poem, and everyone else did too. As much as it violated everything I had told myself, and even as it terrified me, I was grateful for her friendship. But I should have known better than to let myself believe in someone. I should have learned how devastating that could be.
Starling inventoried her suicide attempts. She was very frank about trying to kill herself. She spoke openly in Group, and I assumed to her doctors. She didn’t seem to think there was anything wrong with wanting to die. But I started to. Slowly, simply, I began to want to live. I don’t know what the transformation was, what made the light inside me begin to burn again, but something did. Some infinitesimal grain of hope was born in me in that terrible place. I guarded it fiercely, and kept it tucked away.
I liked to imagine Starling’s rescues. Charlie binding her wrists in strips of his shirt and carrying them above his head with one arm, the other lifting and dragging his sister’s naked body to the bed to the phone, to the safety of Berrybrook. Charlie stepped in at the last moments. Charlie had found her with a gun, had come home to the garage door shut and a motor running. Charlie had discovered her drifting in a sea of pink. In my mind Charlie was a superhero.
“I tried pulling my boombox in the bath with me,” she whispered one night. “What a fucking idiot. It was battery operated. I ruined it.” She took a deep breath. “I didn’t know it had to be plugged into the wall. I don’t think Charlie even knows about that time.”
I liked to hear anything Starling had to say, but especially stories about her brother’s rescues, the near misses, about this amazing elliptical closeness they
shared. I liked to think of people so connected that one could sense when the other was about to self-destruct. And I liked when she talked about him, because her voice became giddy. I knew she trusted him more than herself, and I doubted she trusted anyone else.
“Don’t you know how lucky you are?” I asked her once.
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“No, I’m serious.” I was. It was another evening, the anonymous darkness that gave me the courage to say it. “You have someone who cares about you that much. It must mean that deep down you’re never lonely.”
She was quiet for a long time and I thought about how different my life would be if I’d had a brother or a sister, someone to take my side, someone to emulate.
“It’s not that easy,” she said, and her voice was flat. “It doesn’t mean the things you think.”
She was sitting up; I could see her outlined against the pale wall. “You’re going to bust out of there someday,” she said, pointing at me. “I wish I’d be around to see it.”
“Oh, give me a break,” I said. “You’re not going anywhere. Why don’t you just accept the fact that you’re going to live?” Silence. I tried to make light of it. I smiled, but she didn’t smile back. “I don’t want you to go,” I said. “I’d be all alone again.”
But she didn’t answer, and lay back down, a signal that the conversation was over.
I liked to hear Starling talk because she had a way of telling stories that made you want to hold your breath. It was something in the way she stacked her words, and it was the stories themselves, but most of all it was Starling’s eyes and the way they squinted and got darker when she needed you to believe her.
“Do you think you’re really crazy?” I asked her. I knew that what I really meant was, Am I? She pushed the chickens off her lap and scooted over and stretched across her bed so her hair dragged on the floor.
