Crazy Dead (A Cordi O'Callaghan Mystery)

by Suzanne F. Kingsmill

  I waited, but it was no good. Lucy may have known, but she wasn’t saying. Jacques said impatiently, “Oh, for Christ’s sakes. She’s schizophrenic.” He looked at me, his green eyes lucid and clear, making me feel flustered in a way that wasn’t all bad. Not all bad at all.

  But then he spoiled it by asking, “Is that what you are?” As if my diagnosis, whatever it was, defined who I was.

  I wasn’t up to this. I looked away and said nothing.

  “Still in the denial phase, eh?” He was so persistent! I wondered if he was always like this.

  Lucy came to my rescue. “Just because you’re still denying that you’re ill doesn’t mean she is.”

  “I didn’t say that, did I? And I’m not in denial. Never have been,” and he lifted his little orange juice container as if to say “Cheers.”

  “You’re definitely in denial if you’re denying you have a problem with alcohol,” said Lucy impatiently.

  “Said like a true manic-depressive.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Lucy pushed back her chair and stood, her face flushed.

  “Don’t get your knickers in a knot. It’s just a saying.”

  “Well, don’t say it anymore.” Lucy picked up her tray. “And besides, don’t you know anything? It’s bipolar disorder, not manic depression anymore.” She left without looking at Jacques, who shrugged and winked at me.

  “One week she’s manic as hell and the next she’s depressed,” said Jacques. He wasn’t expecting me to answer, but even I knew they had changed the name, partly because of the stigma associated with it.

  “Hence manic depression,” he added, emphasizing both words by drawing them out. “Does bipolar say as much?”

  Breakfast had exhausted me. I left Kit counting tiles in the hall and went back to bed.

  I lay there, prisoner of the fog and the anxiety, or whatever the hell it was, washing over me, and the awful sense of foreboding that something was going to go wrong. It haunted me, because what more than my broken mind could go wrong with me here?

  I was lying there, looking at the speckled ceiling tiles, when there was a gentle knock on the door and Ella walked in.

  “Dr. Osborn is free to see you now,” she said.

  She looked at my quizzical face and said, “We don’t make set appointments here. We just come and get you when the doctor’s ready.”

  I realized what a different culture it was in here from that outside in the real world, one where the patient didn’t have to wait, one where all the respons-ibilities of the world were checked at the front door, and one where demons were wrestled into checkmate by patients and doctors alike. It was a comfortable feeling, a cocooning feeling.

  Ella led me down the hall to the cafeteria and the door that said NO ADMITTANCE. On the other side it was somehow anticlimactic — just an ordinary hallway with office entrances on one side, the other side being the mutual wall with the cafeteria. But they weren’t all just offices, as I discovered when we passed an open door and I looked in. I saw one bed and a lot of medical equipment that took up most of the room.

  When I looked more closely I could see a pair of purple-and-yellow running shoes tucked under the bed. So this was where Mavis had come. Something about the room seemed familiar to me, but I couldn’t place it. Had I been there before? I felt a queer sensation, almost as if my mind was sliding on ice and couldn’t get a grip. What was that all about? I wondered.

  I followed Ella down the hall, turned a corner, and watched as she knocked on a door. I heard a muffled “Come in,” and she opened the door and gestured for me to go inside.

  I did so and immediately got lost. The grass-green rug on the floor, speckled with darker green swirls, was at least two inches thick, and I sank into it like a thick carpet of moss. All four walls and the ceiling were covered in photos of what appeared to be a West Coast forest, the towering trees of another era transplanted into an office the size of half a tennis court. As I closed the door behind me all the outside noises disappeared, cut off with the finality of a guillotine, almost as if the room was sound proofed. Dr. Osborn was sitting at a large wooden desk, talking softly on the phone. He looked up as I walked in and smiled.

  I stood uncertainly for a moment, the odd silence unnerving me, when he motioned me to the sofa in the middle of the room. By the soft mellow light of a floor lamp I could see that there were no windows or, if there had been, they’d been blocked out. The sofa was forest-green leather and matched an armchair pulled up close to it. Beyond the sofa was his desk with computers and filing cabinets and a stereo system. As I sat down on one end of the sofa, close to an arm and as far away from the chair as I could get, the room suddenly filled with the soft sounds of rain falling through a forest to the needled ground below.

  “Do you mind the music?” he asked as he hung up and came and sat down in the chair, seemingly oblivious to how I had distanced myself from him, out of some need to hold myself together and not let him see how vulnerable I was. Stupid really, but I don’t talk about myself easily.

  “It’s nice,” I said.

  He smiled. “When I was a boy and had nightmares and couldn’t sleep, my mother would play this for me.”

  “It doesn’t put you to sleep anymore?” I asked, wondering how he could deal with patients without dozing off.

  He laughed, but didn’t say anything. Instead he looked at me for a moment and then said, “How are you, Cordi?”

  I took a deep breath. “I’ve been better,” I said lightly.

  “You’ve been through a horrible depression. No one should have to go through what you have gone through. But you did. What do you remember of it?”

  I sat there, feeling myself clamming up.

  “You don’t have to tell me anything, Cordi. You know that, don’t you?”

  I nodded.

  “It helps sometimes, though. To talk. If only to know that someone else knows and sympathizes. I can help you, Cordi.”

  I looked at him sitting there, the concern in his face genuine. We sat in silence for some moments, listening to the rain, until I finally said, “I remember sleeping. I couldn’t get up. I remember my brother cajoling me to eat, pleading with me, and I felt like I was outside of my own body, watching all this and wanting to respond. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t even hug my brother when he started to cry.” I couldn’t believe I’d just revealed that, but Osborn somehow made it easy to talk. Or maybe it was the rain and the trees and the feeling of being in a womb.

  “And how did that make you feel?”

  “It made me feel like nobody, that I didn’t exist anymore.”

  “Were you aware you were ill?” he said.

  “I knew something wasn’t right.”

  “Then you knew you were in a clinical depression.”

  “It doesn’t work like that,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The emptiness destroys all your feelings. It takes over everything, the will to live, the will to eat, the will to love, the will to help yourself. It leaves nothing behind, so there’s no understanding, no knowledge that I was in a clinical depression. Even if I’d had that knowledge, it wouldn’t have mattered. The depression or emptiness itself makes sure of that. It comes unbidden and for no reason. You must know that.”

  He looked at me and sighed. “I just wanted to hear it in your words.” There was silence then, but I had nothing further to say. After a while he finally spoke. “Do you remember your brother bringing you here?”

  I nodded. “Some of it is a blur, though.”

  “How much do you remember from the time you entered hospital until today?” he asked.

  He was being awfully insistent. Hadn’t we covered this already? “Bits and pieces,” I finally said.

  “Does anything stand out?”

  “Not really. I guess I must have slept most of th
e time?”

  Osborn nodded. “Yes. You did a lot of that. And the medications would have made you sleepy, but you seem to have forgotten a lot. Do you remember me? ” He certainly was interested in my memory.

  “Vaguely.”

  “I was the doctor who admitted you.” He paused. “Perhaps we need to adjust your medication.” He said it more to himself than to me, as I watched his mind turning over the problem of me and my meds. It felt encouraging to see someone taking it all so seriously. Serious in my context surely meant getting better.

  We talked a bit more and he said he was “guardedly encouraged” about my progress, that the depression was dissipating, but he wanted to keep an eye on me for a while longer, and then he showed me to the door, the glaring lights of the hall making me recoil and want to go back into his office, where it felt safe and warm and separate from the outside world.

  I was exhausted and went back to my empty room and curled up on my bed and fell asleep. I was woken by a cluster of people crowding into our room. Mavis had come back from her ECT and was looking a little dozy. Kit and Ella were hovering around her like bees around the queen. I sat up in bed, feeling really really groggy and watched as Mavis spied her clean white T-shirt on her bed. She held it up in shaky hands so I could see the outline of the brain and read the slogan, and she said, “The red cranberry juice came out,” to no one in particular.

  Lucy, who had come into the room on Mavis’s heels, looked at her in some confusion, opened her mouth to say something, and then apparently thought better of it. Even in my wiped-out state I knew that something was going on. I just didn’t know what.

  Chapter Four

  When I awoke the next morning Kit and Lucy had already left, presumably to take showers. Only 8:05. Ten minutes before breakfast. I rolled over and saw Mavis’s arm hanging over the edge of her bed, my mind taking a while to process the weird way her arm was hanging. I sat up and took a better look. Her arm was flopped over the bed so that her hand was dragging on the floor, and when I looked more closely I could see the outline of her head, hidden under the covers, angled in a way that sent shivers down my spine. I got out of bed and padded over to her, softly calling her name. There was no response. Gingerly I crept closer and tapped her on the arm with one finger. She didn’t move and her arm seemed cold to the touch. I reached over and pulled back the covers. And gasped.

  Her face was grey, lifeless, erased in a tableau of death, a long crimson scarf wound around her neck. I stood there, frozen, scared, my heart racing. I knew the face of death and she was wearing it. I shuddered, one long convulsive shiver. She had died inches away from me, her life ebbing out as I lay sleeping. Had my meds made me sleep that soundly? I hastily covered her face. I suddenly wanted to get the hell out of there. And so I ran out into the hall to look for help.

  I could see Jacques lounging against the wall near the one pay phone we were allowed to use. He had what looked like a pencil hanging out of his mouth — a surrogate cigarette maybe? He was addicted to alcohol, so why not cigarettes? Farther down, near the room where the nurses usually dispensed our meds, was a row of chairs where we waited each night for the pills that kept us sane, at least more or less. Austin was sitting in the closest chair, head down and talking to himself. Kit and Leo were there, too, Kit sitting primly in the second chair, her hands in her lap. Leo sat apart from them, balanced once again on the edge of his chair. Lucy was pacing the hall like a caged tiger. It was too early for meds. Were they all waiting for breakfast? I could smell the tantalizing aroma of bacon even from where I stood. Question answered.

  And then I caught sight of Ella as she entered the corridor from one of the bedrooms and started walking away from us all. I called out and watched as Jacques, Lucy and Austin, Kit and Leo all swivelled to look from her to me. Ella turned and hesitated, and then called out that she’d be back in a while. It was a pretty public place to be having a conversation, but I didn’t want to wait a while, so I said in a loud voice, “This can’t wait.”

  Ella hesitated and then, not bothering to hide her annoyance, came down the corridor toward me. Even in my distress I could not help but notice the seductive way she walked, seemingly oblivious to the way she carried herself, her hips swinging rhythmically to and fro.

  “Mavis’s dead,” I said without preamble.

  Anywhere else such a statement would have raised an alarm, but Ella stared at me and said, “Now, dear, did you take your meds last night?” She knew I had, of course. The nurses were under orders to watch you swallow them.

  When I didn’t answer, she said, “I’m sure you just had a bad dream,” and she turned to go. I watched her walking back down the corridor toward Lucy and the others and I let it rip in the loudest voice I could manage.

  “MAVIS IS DEAD.” The words sounded as stark and cold as Mavis herself.

  Ella stopped in her tracks. There was a long period of silence and then, inexplicably, Austin said, “Of course she’s dead. She was murdered.”

  I felt this cold creepy little thing crawl up my spine. What the hell did he mean by that? And then it occurred to me that maybe he was psychotic or something and was acting up, which immediately made me realize I was no better than Ella, who assumed my illness was making me see things. Leo stood up and yelled that we were all unsafe, and the fear plastered across his face belied his name. Ella came back down the corridor. She tried to calm Leo down before dealing with me, but he seemed to be in an awful panic and she had to talk him down as I waited. As we all waited. After some minutes another nurse arrived and took Leo under her care. Ella was struggling with controlling her temper, as she came and took me by the arm and propelled me into my room.

  “Cordi, you must learn to control what you say. You’ll just rile everybody up and scare people. Leo doesn’t need this.”

  “In the meantime,” I said, “would you try to wake up Mavis for me please? She’s late for breakfast.” Mean, but effective, and it was not an unreasonable request.

  Ella turned and walked over to Mavis’s bed and called out her name, the same way I had.

  “She’s not going to hear you,” I said helpfully.

  Ella glanced at me, but her attention was now squarely on Mavis. She shook her by the shoulder and when nothing happened she pulled off the sheets and jumped back.

  “Mavis is dead!” she said, her voice pockmarked with surprise. But then she gathered herself together and reached over to feel for a pulse. There was a long silence and then she surprised the hell out of me. “She’s still alive,” said Ella as our eyes met in that no man’s land of confusion, suspicion, and subterfuge.

  Ella hustled me out of my room faster than I normally run and told me that under no circumstances was I to go back in. Then she ran down the corridor to the nursing station, stumbling at the door before disappearing inside and immediately returning with some reinforcements. The group rushed into my room, while I stood there, in the middle of the corridor, under the glaring lights, with five pairs of eyes glued on me. I could see them there, just down the hall, but I felt removed from them, on the outside of my mind, looking in. I could see their mouths moving, but no sound reached my ears. I was like a person in the fog, all senses dulled, all thoughts distorted and fractured. Nothing was sharp. Nothing was clear. Everything was foggy and I felt an enormous wave of hopelessness rush through me.

  I started to turn away, but Jacques called out, “Not on your life, girl. Spill it.”

  I looked at them all looking at me and thought that the world sometimes seemed like a very small place. These people were my world right now. I had to live with them. I started walking down the corridor toward them.

  “I thought she was dead,” I said.

  “Is she? So how did she die, Cordi?” Lucy asked. “Did she die in bed?”

  “What did she look like?” This from Austin.

  “Did she suffer?” Now Lucy.

  “Did she hang
herself?” Jacques.

  “Was it contagious?” Leo.

  Ghoulish, yes, but all questions that death brings out in people as they try to grasp the loss of a life, especially of one so young. But none of them seemed to have heard what I said. They were all stuck on what I had first said, that Mavis was dead. I realized they were all looking for different answers. Jacques, for instance, I imagined wanted to hear that she hung herself inexpertly and her face was contorted in death. Lucy might want to hear that she died peacefully in her sleep, Austin that some sinister force had carried her away. And Leo? I didn’t know what to think about Leo. At least he seemed to have calmed down.

  So all I told them again was that she actually hadn’t died. At least that was what Ella had said. But I was uneasy. When our eyes had met, hers had said something altogether different.

  They peppered me with more questions after that, but I just shrugged and walked away as several more medical personnel moved quickly down the corridor. I turned and watched them go into my room and wondered if I’d have the same room come nightfall. Would they put me and Lucy and Kit in a dead woman’s room? But then I had to remind myself that she wasn’t dead. And it was a hospital, after all. Beds went empty all the time and had to be filled with the next in line. No time for sensitivities.

  And that was when I heard an unholy moan welling up like some monstrous ululation. I turned and saw Leo, his raccoon eyes wild in a panic that consumed his whole body. He was gasping for air, like a fish out of water, and his face was the colour of chalk, but glistened like a snake. He seemed to be battling a fear all his own, as though something had caught him by the throat and was hanging on until death. I watched as his skinny legs slid out from under him and he crumpled to the floor like a skeleton, his breaths coming jerky and jagged.

  “I’m going to die,” he croaked, the words sounding like a sword had been thrust into his heart.

  I was the closest to him and by the time I had loosened his shirt, the same nurse who had helped him before knelt down beside him and took his pulse. He had further unnerved me and I was feeling a little ill.