But Inside I'm Screaming

by Elizabeth Flock

  “Connie! Where’s Keisha? Did she leave already?”

  “Nope. She’s still here. Ready to go. Her parents haven’t gotten here yet.” Connie exchanges a look with the other night nurse.

  “Where is she? In her room?”

  “Um, honey, no.” Connie sounds apologetic. “Keisha was supposed to leave earlier tonight before bedtime and so they gave away her room. We had a new arrival tonight and we needed Keisha’s bed.”

  “So where is she?” Isabel is still waking up but is alert enough to know that something is amiss.

  “The kitchen.”

  Isabel turns the corner into the tiny kitchen. There, with her nappy head resting on her crossed arms sits Keisha.

  “Keisha? I’m so glad I didn’t miss you. I fell asleep….” Isabel realizes that Keisha, too, has been sleeping. “Oh, sorry.”

  Keisha sits up and Isabel sees that she is back in her street wear: the Nike swoosh emblazoned on her hooded sweatshirt, the baggy Adidas sweatpants in a matching navy blue. Keisha’s packed suitcase sits alongside her, as if she is at a Greyhound bus terminal. “Izzy—” Keisha smiles groggily “—what time is it?”

  “It’s eleven. Your parents call? They running late or something?”

  Keisha looks upset and defensive and Isabel wonders if Keisha’s parents are going to turn up at all. She looks down.

  “Want to watch TV with me? We could just hang out for a while until they get here.”

  “Yeah, whatever.”

  She stumbles as she stands up from the table, rights herself and follows Isabel into the living room. Sukanya is, of course, planted in the armchair that faces the television so Keisha and Isabel take the couch. Keisha curls up and resumes sleeping.

  Isabel watches her and suppresses the urge to pet her, to pat her back, to reassure her that everything is going to be okay.

  Keisha’s mother looks just like her but fat. She is hunched over a clipboard at the nurses’ station when Keisha and Isabel walk into the unit from breakfast.

  “Mom? Mama?” Keisha runs up to her obese mother and gratefully throws her arms around her.

  “Hi, baby.” Her mother seems weary and wary of her daughter. Isabel thinks she does not seem as happy to see Keisha as Keisha is to see her. “You ‘bout ready to go?”

  Keisha is so elated her whole body looks like it is shaking. “Ready? I was born ready to leave this place. Lemme get my bag.” On her way past her sad mother, Keisha eyes the two men who appear to be accompanying her mom but she does not ask who they are. She runs back to Isabel’s room, where she had stowed her suitcase before leaving for breakfast.

  Isabel is standing off to the side of the nurses’ station and is taking in the scene. As soon as Keisha bounds off, Isabel approaches Keisha’s mother.

  “Mrs. Jackson? Hi, I’m Isabel Murphy. I’m a friend of Keisha’s.” She smiles, extending her hand.

  “Hi there, sugar, how’re you?”

  Why is she looking to these guys for permission to talk to me?

  “Fine. Keisha’s so excited to be going home. She’s been talking about it nonstop.”

  Who the hell are these guys and why are they looking me up and down…? Take a goddamn picture, it lasts longer.

  Isabel pretends she has not seen Keisha brush past the two men without a greeting. “Are you guys friends of Keisha’s or something?”

  No response.

  Mrs. Jackson looks miserable.

  The reporter in Isabel worries.

  Finally, Keisha returns, dragging her bag and heading straight for the nurse on duty. “I almost forgot the sharps closet! I need to get my stuff from in there.” Because Keisha had been brought to Three Breezes involuntarily she does not have much in the way of belongings.

  The two burly men move in to either side of Keisha. The nurse, on her way to check the sharps closet for Keisha, tries to whisper, “Can’t you wait until she’s in the parking lot?” but Isabel picks it up.

  “Keisha? What’s going on? Who are these guys?” Isabel asks Keisha, who is still smiling.

  “Them? Oh, I dunno. All I know is I’m goin’ home with my mama!”

  “Oh, baby.” Her mother looks like she is about to cry. “Oh, my baby.”

  “Why you cryin’, Mama? I’m comin’ home!”

  “Keisha Jackson?” One of the two men steps forward; his patience has run out. “You are under arrest. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law…”

  As he is reading Keisha her rights in front of the nurses’ station, Mrs. Jackson begins to wail loudly and wave her hands in the air around Keisha’s head. Keisha is frantic.

  “Mom? Mama, what’s happenin’?” she cries. “What’s goin’ on here? Why they arrestin’ me?”

  Chaos erupts on the unit. The nurse who had, moments earlier, urged the police to wait to arrest Keisha, rushes over to comfort her. The police are loudly, as if on a dare, reading Keisha her Miranda rights while handcuffing her wrists behind her back. Mrs. Jackson is wailing and chanting “my baby” over and over again and a bewildered Keisha is asking everyone who catches her eye why this is happening. Ben has joined the fray and is peppering the police with excited questions about their guns.

  “Is that a .45 or a .22? I always get them mixed up….45s and .22s. How much ammo you carry with you? You have some stored in your cruiser, right? Am I right?”

  Melanie, returning from breakfast, skips up to Keisha and tries to hug her goodbye.

  Doesn’t she see Keisha’s a little tied up for the moment?

  “I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye at breakfast!” she squeaks. I guess it’s just another day, Melanie, huh? Just another person arrested right in front of you?

  This place is unbelievable.

  “You guys always wear bulletproof vests, don’t you? Huh? You always have to wear ’em, right? Am I right?”

  When the police lead Keisha out of the unit toward the awaiting squad car Isabel falls into step alongside Mrs. Jackson.

  “Mrs. Jackson? Mrs. Jackson, please…please tell me what’s going on here. Maybe this is a misunderstanding.”

  “Ain’t no misunderstanding, child.” She stops crying long enough to look over her shoulder at Isabel, who stands at the edge of the parking lot. “My Keisha killed her nephew. Killed him dead.”

  Twenty-Seven

  “So that’s why I’m asking you what your reaction is to Keisha’s being taken away.” Isabel focuses just in time to catch Dr. Seidler’s question. She has been squinting, trying to read, from across the room, the names of the universities that had bestowed degrees upon her well-trained psychiatrist.

  “Isabel?”

  “Huh?” She tears her eyes from the framed diplomas. “Yeah?”

  “I was asking you what your thoughts were about your friend being arrested.”

  “I think it’s weird.” She shrugs.

  “Weird, in what way?”

  “Just weird, that’s all.” I don’t want to talk about it right now.

  “I realize you’re probably reticent to talk about it, but I think it’s a good idea to discuss it while it’s fresh.”

  “Keisha wasn’t here for that long, anyway…”

  Silence.

  “…so, I mean, we weren’t really that good friends…”

  Silence.

  “…it’s just that you get to know people, or you think you know them, so quickly here. From group therapy, I guess.”

  “You had warm feelings toward her, though, didn’t you? You expressed that in here once or twice.”

  “Yeah. I don’t really know why, though. There was just something about her that seemed so fragile. But she was tough, too. And that thing she said about someone wanting to control you when they knew what you were all about. She was kind of smarter than she seemed at first.”

  “What did that evoke in you?”

  What did that evoke in me? Evoke?

  “Isabel, why are you smiling?” />
  “It’s just…well…evoke…it’s kind of a word that we’re told is a print word. I remember my first year in television my news director got mad at me because I used it in a script. He said, ‘No one goes around saying evoke.’ He told us that and the word slain were verboten. Actually, then he added verboten to the list, too.”

  “Okay, well, sorry for using the improper word.” Dr. Seidler smiles and turns the conversation back to Keisha. “Why else did you find Keisha so appealing, do you think?”

  More silence.

  “Let me help you out here, and this is just a theory. Some people believe that we choose our friends, we choose the people we care about, because they remind us of ourselves. Do you think that’s the case with Keisha?”

  “Yeah, I’m a black girl from the ghetto.”

  “Look beyond the surface, Isabel. You’re quite fragile yourself, right? If you weren’t you might not be here. But you’re tough, too, when you have to be. Could that be why you felt strongly about Keisha?”

  That and the fact that she gets it. She knows what it’s like when someone takes away your soul. Alex took my soul.

  Silence.

  “I don’t know,” Isabel says. “I want to be by myself for a while today. I don’t really feel like talking anymore.”

  “Aren’t you going over for dinner, Isabel?” Connie is in early.

  “They’re already over there, so why don’t you sign yourself out and catch up with them before dinnertime is up.”

  Isabel dutifully writes dinner on the board and wordlessly leaves the unit.

  The smell of cooked beef assaults Isabel as she opens the cafeteria door. She picks up a wet plastic tray and slides it along the three steel rods that outline the salad bar.

  There he is!

  Isabel’s heart starts beating twice as fast. There, sitting off to himself at the end of a rectangular table in the corner of the dining hall is the little boy Peter.

  Anthill Peter.

  She throws some iceberg lettuce into her foam dish, adds a couple of cherry tomatoes and Thousand Island dressing and approaches him. He is concentrating on his mashed potatoes and does not hear her.

  “Hi,” she says, clearing her throat. “Can I sit down?”

  Peter looks up at her and then from side to side, to check to see that it is him she is addressing. She smiles.

  “I was wondering if I could join you.”

  Nothing. Back to the mashed potatoes he goes. He is not eating them, he is pushing them around on his plate.

  “I’m not scary or anything,” she tries to reassure him. “I promise I won’t bite.”

  Stupid comment! Maybe he’s here because he was abused. Oh, God, maybe he was bitten even, by a monstrous adult who looks like me and who lured him in with companionship…with dinner.

  Nothing.

  “Okay, well, see you around.”

  Good going, Isabel. Smooth move. Blown off by a mute nine-year-old.

  Isabel chokes down her wilted salad off by herself, away from Ben, Melanie, Kristen and the rest. In between bites she steals glances at Peter, who is still pushing his mashed potatoes around.

  She thinks about what Dr. Seidler said earlier, about what it might be about Peter that makes her want to befriend him. What he “evokes” in her.

  Peter is now at the trash can throwing his untouched plate of food away.

  Now. Do it now.

  Isabel gets up, waits a beat and throws away the remnants of her salad. As Peter’s group files out she falls into step alongside the mysterious boy.

  “Hi, again,” she says softly, trying to sound distracted, like she does not care if he answers her or not. “Told you I’d see you around and sure enough…I’m seeing you again!”

  The little boy is studying the pavement ahead of each step.

  “My name’s Isabel.”

  Nothing.

  “Okay, well, that’s strike two.” She fakes a baseball umpire’s cadence: stee-rike two.

  “Bye,” she calls out. When she looks up from the pavement she looks directly into the gardener’s kind face.

  “Sad boy,” he addresses her as he sprinkles fertilizer on a bed of hungry marigolds. “Umm-hmm, sad little boy.”

  Isabel considers his words.

  “Aren’t we all?”

  The gardener looks up from his work, cocks his head to one side and gives it thought. “I suppose we are, I suppose we are.” Sprinkle. “But you can’t let it crush you. No, ma’am. Can’t let it crush your spirit.” Sprinkle. “You’ve got to feed your spirit…fertilize it. Umm-hmm.”

  Isabel walks away.

  Twenty-Eight

  “Isabel!” Kristen calls her over to the smoking deck. “Come sit. We were just talking about boyfriends.”

  Isabel is confused. The only other person on the deck is Sukanya.

  Either it’s a freaking miracle or Kristen is crazier than I thought.

  “I was asking Sukanya here if she has a boyfriend,” Kristen purred, “and then we were scoping out the men.”

  Sukanya’s vacant stare indicates that the conversation has been entirely one-sided.

  Curious, Isabel lights a cigarette and pulls up a chair.

  “Do you have a boyfriend?” Isabel asks Kristen through her exhale, mindful of the trauma surrounding Kristen’s first sexual encounter.

  “Not exactly,” Kristen begins. “I’m bipolar, you know.”

  In the years that followed the Incident, Kristen’s mania that had begun with self-mutilation grew and soon she was craving outside stimulants to increase the buzzing sensation she would get when the roller coaster climbed to the peak of her bipolar illness.

  Kristen became an alcoholic.

  When she was happy she was so euphoric she would go on binges at a bar two blocks away from her apartment. Not only would she gulp down whatever she thought to order, she would order rounds and rounds of drinks she couldn’t afford for everyone around her. So pleased was she that others were happy to indulge her sick generosity that the mania would intensify and soon she would be so drunk she could barely remember her own name. The bartender knew her well, and while he knew it was probably irresponsible for him to allow her to carry on as she was, he also knew her father was extremely wealthy and paid all of Kristen’s bills.

  More than once Kristen left the bar, numb with drink, accompanied by men who were faceless to her. More than once Kristen found herself disheveled and lost, wondering whose semen was dripping down the insides of her thighs. That’s when the flip side of her bipolar disorder would introduce itself. Kristen attempted suicide four times.

  “Mom, I’m fine, I swear.”

  “Kristen, please don’t do this. Please.”

  “Mom, seriously. My doctor said that ultimately this is my choice. My choice, Mom. I feel great. I hate having that poison in my system. I hate it.”

  “It’s a lifelong illness, Kristen,” her agitated mother said. “Are you even paying attention to me?”

  “Yes, Mom.” Kristen was decidedly not paying attention to her mother. Her mind was made up. No more medication.

  “Kristen, please keep taking your pills. Honey, please. I’m begging you.”

  “Okay, Mom. Whatever you say,” Kristen said, parroting the only words she knew would appease her mother.

  Kristen reached for the bottle of medication her mother was holding for her. She pretended to gulp them down but instead let them rest in the twin wells under her tongue, to be spit out the minute her mother looked away.

  And so Kristen stopped taking the pills that were working overtime to try to save her from herself.

  “What about you?” Kristen is aware she has monopolized the conversation. “You’ve mentioned you’re separated in group. You’re still wearing your ring, though. It’s beautiful, by the way.”

  Isabel looks down at her left hand and twists her wedding band around on her ring finger.

  “Thanks.”

  “What’s he like?”

  “Y
ou know what you need?” Casey chomped on her hot pretzel.

  “Have you not been listening to me? I know what I need, I just don’t know how to get it,” Isabel answered.

  “Bells and whistles,” Casey said. “You need fireworks. A little garter-belt sex never killed anyone. Let’s go get you outfitted.”

  “What’s next? Light some candles and listen to Yanni? I’m a freaking cliché.”

  “Don’t you ever watch Lifetime? Connie Sellecca slips into a negligee and bam! She gets laid.”

  “Lifetime? Please tell me I did not hear you use Lifetime, Television for Women, as your reference guide to a good sex life.”

  “You’re missing the point. Let’s focus,” Casey said, squinting into the distance. “There’s a lingerie store up about three blocks. We’ll hit it first. Giddyup.”

  “Ugh.” Isabel sighed in frustration as she dragged behind her friend. “I hate this. I just don’t see why I have to parade around in some costume to get his attention. We’re in the honeymoon stage. Why do I feel like we’re a middle-aged couple trying to recapture the magic?”

  Casey walked fast and made no comment. Isabel scurried to catch up.

  She cleared her throat while they stood at the curb waiting for the light to change. “I’m sorry I haven’t called you back, Case.”

  Casey stayed silent.

  “It’s just, well, Alex takes up so much time, and then it’s late and I know you’re in bed and I don’t want to wake up Michael and…”

  “…and the dog ate your homework?” Casey interrupted. “Jesus, Iz, what’s with all the excuses? I know he doesn’t like me, you don’t have to dance around it. I’m not Forrest Gump, you know. I get it.”

  Isabel watched the electronic walking man turn into Don’t Walk as they missed another chance to cross the street.

  “Hey, that’s fine. I don’t need to be his best friend. I just miss you, kid. That’s all. I miss you.”

  “I miss you, too, Case.” Isabel’s tone was pleading. “Just give me some time. He just needs. He needs—oh, I don’t know—he needs me, I suppose. He needs to know he’s number one with me, you know? I kind of don’t mind it. I mean, it’s flattering in a way.”