But Inside I'm Screaming

by Elizabeth Flock

  She moves silently toward the sound, her body pressed up against the painted concrete wall like a cat burglar. Again she swallows hard. Her heartbeat is now pulsing in her ears. She jumps when she hears something crash to the floor several feet away from her around the corner.

  Maybe I should go back to my room. This is stupid. I’m going back to my room.

  After several seconds of silence, Isabel peeks around the corner and in through the doorway of the adjacent room.

  Inside, the dark-haired sport-spout woman is a blur of activity ripping apart her room. Drawers are pulled out, sheets untucked, closet emptied. Every twenty seconds or so the woman kicks the wall.

  Just as Isabel is about to turn and creep back to her room the woman whips around and sees her.

  “Are you spying on me?” she asks, her eyes darting from side to side. “What do you want?”

  “Huh?” Caught off guard, Isabel panics. “Um, want help or something?”

  Goddammit, why did I just offer to help? I don’t want to help her…she’s crazy.

  The woman has already turned away and is dumping the contents of her purse onto the floor in the middle of her bright room. “My name’s Melanie,” she says breathlessly.

  Isabel backs up and looks up and down the hallway.

  Shouldn’t an orderly be in here calming her down? Doesn’t anyone else hear all this noise she’s making? Hel-lo? Nurse Ratched? Anyone?

  “Hey?” Melanie shouts. “You helping me or what?”

  “Uh, okay.” Isabel cautiously kneels down just inside the doorway and, not knowing where else to begin, delicately picks up Melanie’s lipstick.

  Get me out of here….

  “What’re you looking for, anyway?”

  Melanie breaks into a sob. Her hair is angrily pulled away from her face with a simple barrette. Her pajamas are splashed with primary colors, exaggerating the sense of chaos. Melanie must have been told she’s arty and eccentric and then capitalized on the compliment.

  “My beaded bracelet,” Melanie answers in an annoyed tone that suggests Isabel should have known the object of the search. “I made it in art the other day and now I can’t find it.” More sobbing.

  Isabel looks up to see someone else joining in the hunt.

  “Hi. I’m Kristen.” The woman cheerfully introduces herself to Isabel as though she’s in a sorority meeting. “What’s up, Mel? Want help?”

  Isabel is still holding the lipstick. “Okay, well…I’m going to go now,” she says to no one in particular.

  The night nurse comes barreling through the door with her flashlight even though the lights in the room are on. Her nameplate reads “Connie.”

  She is the nurse who just hours before talked Isabel into staying at Three Breezes for at least one day. Isabel takes a closer look at her. Connie’s face is wizened from years of sunbathing. Her voice is raspy from years of smoking.

  Finally! Somebody cart this woman off to solitary confinement.

  Instead, Connie casually plops down on the floor and helps look for the bracelet. Melanie starts shaking. Her whole head vibrates and she starts hyperventilating. No one can calm her down. She’s talking so fast even she is tripping over the words and thoughts pouring out of her mouth.

  “She’s only two months old. Elwin is never gonna deal with me,” Melanie chokes in between breaths, “he’s put up with so much. I have the baby. I get the postpartum thing and stop taking my meds and now he’s taking care of her all by himself. Of course he’s got his parents. They love this. They love the fact that they were right about me. I’m not good enough for their son. I hope he remembered to get the lamb-and-rice dog food. Coco hates the beef flavor. When I was little I used to love running through sprinklers. Wasn’t that fun?”

  This is unreal. If I saw this in a movie I’d think it was heavy-handed.

  Connie pulls Melanie up and takes her over to the nurses’ station to give her a sedative. Kristen and Isabel remain on the floor, Kristen still searching for Melanie’s bracelet, Isabel listening to Melanie’s disturbing chatter echo from down the hall.

  Isabel steals a glance at Kristen’s right arm, bandaged because, as Isabel will later find out, her obsessive-compulsive disorder leaves her clawing at her skin until it starts to bleed. Perhaps sensing Isabel’s stare her hand flutters to this spot and quickly withdraws. There is an awkward silence between them.

  Isabel looks back down at the floor.

  How do I extricate myself from this one?

  Melanie returns just as Kristen spots a cigar box and opens it. Voila! Among some pictures and letters is the bracelet. Melanie grabs it and shrieks with happiness.

  “Good night, everyone,” she says as she crawls into bed, the shot Connie gave her a few minutes ago taking hold of her tiny, troubled frame. “Thanks for helping.”

  When no one moves she adds, “That’s all I have to say.”

  Kristen and Isabel file out and head back to their respective rooms. The bed crinkles as Isabel climbs up into it: instead of soft mattress covers there are thick sheets of plastic under the paper-thin sheets in the unlikely event someone becomes incontinent on top of everything else.

  Every fifteen minutes the door opens and a flashlight shines in Isabel’s face. Directly into her face. So even if she manages to fall into a light sleep the beam wakes her up just enough to toss and turn all night. Isabel is on suicide watch. The flashlight checks are a status symbol. Everybody seems to know who’s got checks every fifteen minutes and who has the more desirable thirty-minute variety. Isabel wouldn’t have known this except that Kristen asked her point-blank about her checks while they were on Melanie’s bizarre scavenger hunt. When Isabel told Kristen that the nurse checked on her every fifteen minutes Kristen looked relieved. Kristen had been at Three Breezes for some time now, but she was still, apparently, a “fifteener.”

  Four

  The ant is neatly marching along the mortar line on the cement block wall alongside her bed. To Isabel, it appears he is as frantic as she is to leave the hospital. She tugs once more at the lower lip of the window but it will not budge. Windows are nailed shut at Three Breezes. So instead of freeing the insect, Isabel, with miserable resignation, watches it make its way down the wall.

  Isabel avoided anthills. In the spring-and summertime, when nature was busy reinventing itself, those telltale signs of ant industry—miniscule pyramids of dirt—multiplied in cracks of buckled pavement, between bricks and along fence posts, and Isabel always stepped around them. She had ever since she was a small girl growing up in Connecticut.

  Her brothers, on the other hand, went out of their way to step directly on them.

  “Don’t!” she yelled at Owen, who was twisting his foot on top of the fourth of twelve anthills along their short front walk. Isabel ran over and pushed her seven-year-old brother away. Too late. Isabel imagined hundreds of suffocating ants under the cement gasping for air.

  “I’m telling Mom if you do it again.” She was on her hands and knees frantically trying to clear a passageway so that the ants could find their way out of the rubble. Her nine-year-old mind realized this was futile so she grabbed a tiny stick to drill a hole into the ground so the ants could get some oxygen.

  “I’m telling Mom if you do it again,” mimicked her brother. “You’re such a tattletale.”

  He was right.

  But Isabel didn’t think of it as telling on her brothers, she just couldn’t stand to see anything or anyone hurt. Even ants.

  “What’s going on out here?” Isabel’s mother called through the top screen of the porch door.

  “Nothing,” her brothers called out, disappearing into their fort in the backyard.

  “Isabel? What’re you doing?” Katherine asked as she approached her hunched-over daughter.

  Isabel was furiously drilling, pausing only to wipe her tears out of her eyes so that she could continue her rescue mission.

  “Is it the anthills again?”

  “I don’t understan
d why they do this,” Isabel cried as she squatted over the fifth flattened mound. “There’re families under here. Whole families. And they’re dying!”

  “Oh, for God’s sake. This is ridiculous. Look at me for a second.”

  Isabel obeyed as she wiped her nose on her sleeve.

  “They’re going to be okay, the ants. We’ve been over this. They like to burrow out. They’ll be okay.”

  Isabel looked back down. No ants were crawling out of her manmade holes. She looked back up at her mother.

  “You’ve got to let it go. You think this is sad? Wait’ll life kicks you in the rear a few times. No one’s out there drilling holes for all of us, you know. Now, come on inside. Help me sort the Girl Scout cookie orders.”

  As she stood up to go, Isabel looked back at her doomed friends. But she swallowed her tears and forged ahead.

  As her childhood advanced, Isabel’s empathy for creatures of all shapes and sizes morphed into a sadness that was difficult to shake. Sadness gave way to isolation. Isabel constantly felt as if she were on the outside looking in. As if she wasn’t quite a participant in everyday life, but a sleepwalker. While she maintained the polished front of an oldest, overachieving child, her true personality had yet to emerge, and that only added to the disconnected feeling she wore like a bulky shroud.

  As Isabel floated numbly through elementary school, her physical appearance was taking a very definite shape. She began to hear over and over again that she was pretty, and soon, perhaps because she felt so empty, the compliments at least temporarily filled her up. Isabel began to crave the attention that was paid to her looks. No one wanted to hear about her sorrow, no one wanted to see her sad.

  She was becoming an expert at reading people. She soon learned that humor got more results than anger or tears, that attention was paid to the attractive, and that people were inherently egotistical. Everybody likes to talk about themselves. So she honed her listening skills. Isabel was learning to survive by playing roles: the curvaceous beauty, the class clown, the intense listener. She was excellent at being whatever someone else wanted her to be.

  “Isabel. What can I do for you?”

  Isabel cleared her throat.

  “Um. Mr. Clulow? Um, I was wondering if I could have another chance.”

  The high school drama teacher slightly cocked his head to the side. “Another chance.” It was a statement, not a question.

  “Yeah. I mean, yes. I know I froze up there last week. I totally froze. I blew it. I just wasn’t prepared. For improv. But I’m ready now. I can do it. I’ll act out anything you want me to act out. If you’d just give me one more chance.”

  Mr. Clulow looked down at the papers on his desk. Then he looked back up at Isabel.

  “Why do you want to join the drama club, Isabel? What is it that’s drawing you to drama?”

  “Drawing me?”

  “Yes. You see, some people feel it’s the perfect way to tap into their creative side. Others find it’s the perfect form of self-expression. I’m just wondering what’s driving you.”

  Isabel looked down. Without looking back up she answered.

  “I guess it’s that…well, I suppose I just like the idea of being someone else,” she mumbled.

  Mr. Clulow raised his eyebrows as if he’d caught her in a trap.

  “So you don’t like to be yourself?”

  “No!” she said, too loudly. “I mean, I do. What I really mean is that…” She stammered, aware that he was prepared to pick apart her next sentence. “It’s…um…”

  “Miss Murphy,” the teacher scolded, “I have a class to teach in five minutes. I suggest you get to the bottom of what it is you would like to say.”

  “Please. Just give me another chance to try out. Please?”

  He tapped his pencil impatiently and looked out the window.

  “Hmm.”

  “Please?”

  “All right. One more chance. But this is hardly fair. I don’t do this for other students who buckle under pressure. If you get embarrassed in an audition, how on earth will you be able to act on stage in front of hundreds of people? Don’t…answer. It’s a rhetorical question, Miss Murphy. Tomorrow after school meet me in the gym and we will try it one more time.”

  “Thank you! Oh, thank you so much, Mr. Clulow,” she said, backing out of his tiny office.

  It was eight o’clock on a school night and Isabel’s mother was furious.

  “I thought rehearsals were never more than two hours after school.”

  “Mom, we’ve got a play coming up and no one knows their lines yet. We had to stay late. Mr. Clulow said—”

  “Mr. Clulow said. Mr. Clulow said. That’s all I ever hear—Mr. Clulow said this, Mr. Clulow said that. Well, Mr. Clulow said rehearsals wouldn’t take time away from homework assignments on school nights!”

  “I don’t have that much work tonight. I have history and English and that’s it.”

  “No math? No science?”

  “No. And for English all I have to do is read one chapter and I can do that in fifteen minutes.”

  “Your father’s home and he hasn’t seen you in a week. You missed dinner and he’s got a conference call at nine, so I don’t know when you two will have a chance to visit.”

  “He’s coming to the play, right? Please tell me he’s not going to miss the play.”

  “Of course he’s coming to the play.”

  “It’s just…” she trailed off.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. It’s nothing.”

  “What were you going to say? I hate it when you do that.”

  “Nothing! Seriously. I forgot what I was going to say. He’s just…like…he’s just never here.”

  “Don’t be silly, Isabel,” her mother said sharply. “Your father has to work, you know. He loves you, but his job—”

  “I know, I know. His job calls for a lot of travel. I’ve been hearing that since I was born. I get it.”

  “But he tries.”

  “But he tries,” said Isabel.

  Five

  “Fuck! Fuck, fuck, fuck!”

  Isabel slowly follows the sounds of the shrieks, unsure whether she wants to find out who or what is behind them.

  “Get your hands offa me, you motherfucker!”

  Through the front window of the unit, Isabel watches as two aides try to pin down a young, wiry newcomer. Just as they seem to get her under control enough to slip her lanky frame into restraints, she lets out a piercing scream.

  “I’m gonna fuckin’ kill you! You hear me? I’m gonna kill you.”

  Because she is young-looking and breakably thin, it startles Isabel to hear this come from the girl’s mouth.

  The restraints are finally in place. The new girl is sapped of all her angry energy and is sobbing on the ground, her head twisted to the side, her face shiny with sweat.

  Isabel looks down the winding driveway and, as the black girl is hauled past by two hospital aides, stares at her only way out.

  I’ll walk down the driveway, wait for a truck and step in front of it.

  The thought calms Isabel. It soothes her to plan her fatal escape.

  First I’ve got to get privileges.

  Kristen, the girl Isabel had met the night before, chirps “good morning” and walks past Isabel out the door of the unit. Isabel watches Kristen’s hand shake as she attempts to light her cigarette from a box on the wall that contains what appears to be something resembling a car lighter. Matches and lighters are confiscated on arrival.

  The blubbery man she sat next to the day before lumbers past and joins Kristen just outside the door to the unit. Isabel turns her head and hopes her ear can bionically pick up their conversation through the pane of glass. It’s so riddled with greasy fingerprints that Isabel is careful to keep at least one inch of space between herself and the disgusting barrier.

  “What’s up with that new girl?” Kristen asks him. “Did you see her yesterday?”

  It’s disco
ncerting for everyone on the unit to see someone in restraints. In the jacket. To hear someone resist. The new girl will provide conversation material for the entire day: Did you hear the new girl this morning? Did you see how long it took the orderlies to get the jacket on her?

  “Her name’s Keisha,” the giant tells Kristen in a conspiratorial voice. “She was gang-raped.”

  “She was gang-raped?” Kristen repeats it slowly, as if it’s a spelling bee and she has to use the vocabulary word in a sentence.

  “Yeah,” he answers, pleased to have Kristen’s undivided attention. Isabel, inside the unit but off to the side where they can’t see her, feels her head butt up against the slimy window. “She was raped for four hours or something. And she was baby-sitting her nephew or something, and the guys? They killed the kid. They killed her nephew she was sitting for. Then they took off. She lost it. Completely fucking lost it. They found her wandering in the middle of the street.”

  Isabel jumps when the quiet is broken by a voice coming from behind her: “Asshole don’t know what he’s talkin’ about.”

  “Oh, my God.” Isabel steps back. “You scared me!”

  Keisha calmly turns her eyes from Kristen and Ben through the window to Isabel right in front of her.

  Keisha could be the poster child for the inner city. She looks about fourteen, with long, skinny limbs and a head full of short nappy dreadlocks. Her entire outfit consists of sportswear: Air Jordans, five years old but pristine, nylon Adidas sweatpants that would make a swish sound if her lanky legs ever rubbed together, which they don’t, and a hooded sweatshirt about four sizes too big. It’s her uniform. She takes a long time to look as if she hasn’t taken any time at all.