“I think so,” Isabel replies softly.
“I see in you a strong, smart, lovely person. You need to see that in yourself. That is key. If you value yourself, no one will trample you again.”
Isabel felt the way she had years ago when she visited a psychic with her mother at a county fair. The astrologer had read her palm and Isabel had fallen into a trance, her hand tickled as the astrologer’s soothing voice washed over her. She rubs her arms and glances at the clock hanging over Dr. Seidler’s desk. Their session has ended.
“I know it’s time for you to go, but do you have any reaction to what I just said to you?”
“I have to absorb it,” Isabel says, not wanting to shake the trance. “It makes sense, I just have to absorb it.”
“Very well. Until next time, then.”
“Until next time.”
Sixty-Four
“Mrs. Jackson? This is Isabel Murphy, Keisha’s friend?”
“Oh, hello Isabel. How are you, honey?”
“I’m fine, thanks. I heard the great news about Keisha—is she home?”
“Isn’t it wonderful?” Mrs. Jackson sounds elated. “God answered my prayers—He answered my prayers, that’s for sure! Let me go get her—she was just getting ready to go on a job interview…Keisha? Telephone!”
Through the earpiece Isabel hears footsteps approach the phone.
“‘Lo?”
“Keisha?”
Isabel is surprised at how different the breathless voice on the other end of the line sounds.
“Yeah?”
“It’s Isabel. Um, from Three Breezes,” Isabel quickly adds, knowing that a last name will not make a difference. She knows Keisha’s mother was just being polite pretending to know who she is.
“Hey,” Keisha says in slow recognition. “Hey…how you doing? Wow, how’s it going?”
“Fine. I’m fine. I heard the news about you, though—you must be doing great. Congratulations!”
“Thanks. Blew my mind, I’ll tell you what.”
“I bet. I bet.”
What do we talk about now? I shouldn’t have called.
“What about you? Where you calling from?” Keisha asks.
“Huh? Oh. I’m still here—at the hospital.”
“Oh,” Keisha says awkwardly. “How’s it going there? Kristen still there?”
“No. No, she’s not here. I’m probably getting ready to leave soon, too.”
Now I sound defensive.
“Great!” Keisha sounds relieved to have something to congratulate Isabel for.
“Well,” Isabel says in a tone that signals the end of the conversation. “I just wanted to call and say congratulations. I’m really glad for you.” Say something more. “Now you can start your life again.”
Theirs had been a friendship forged in anguish, suspended in time. In real life it would be impossible to sustain.
“Thanks. And thanks for calling.”
Keisha hangs up immediately. Isabel knows they will never speak again.
“Isabel, before we start I have something I want to tell you,” Dr. Seidler says gingerly. “You talked to me about Kristen and what’s happened to her since she left Three Breezes.”
“Yes?”
“I want you to know that, as I told you I would, I have followed up with Dr. Flagg—her therapist here. He told me he had indeed been in contact with Kristen. In fact, he has arranged for her to be transferred back here from Bellevue. She told him to be sure to get that message to you so he asked that I speak with you.”
“Wow.” Isabel does not know what to make of this news.
“How does that make you feel, hearing she will be returning?”
“When? When is she coming back?”
“That I’m not sure about,” Dr. Seidler answers. “I doubt Dr. Flagg knows for sure. There is a lot of paperwork to be completed before she can come back, that and consultations. It could be as early as tomorrow. But the bottom line is she will be coming back. You have an odd look on your face.”
Isabel is hypnotized by the raindrops beading on the office window. She watches as one trickles down and melts into another—the two forming a miniature river winding its way down the pane of glass.
“I can’t believe she pulled it off,” she says, still watching nature draw pictures.
“Pulled what off?”
“Everything.” Isabel brings her doctor into focus. “First that whole concoction about her brother. Then getting transferred back here. I don’t know. I thought I knew her but I guess not.”
“Is that difficult for you? To find out someone isn’t who you thought they were?”
“Yeah. It’s some kind of weird pattern with me,” Isabel says. “Alex wasn’t who I thought he was. All that time we had all these problems: with anger, with communication. Maybe it’s like you said last time: I took in what I felt about myself at the time. I think that’s true.
“Kristen comes along and, at least in the beginning, I think we have so much in common. We’re from similar backgrounds, we both had bad luck with our first loves and with guys in general. But then she has this freaky thing happen to her with the limo driver—I still don’t know what went on there. It’s like her paranoia has totally taken over….”
She trails off and looks back out the window at the rain.
“What about you? You aren’t what you first thought you were, either.” “Huh?”
“You told me about the conversation with your mother—she thought you were this perfect daughter and you told her you weren’t. But maybe that was you telling yourself you weren’t perfect.”
Yes.
“Is it going to be difficult for you to be face-to-face with Kristen when she gets back here?”
“Kristen? No. I think I’ve put enough distance there. But Alex…coming face-to-face with him is going to be the toughest thing. I feel if I can just do that I will have conquered the biggest obstacle of all.”
“To come face-to-face with someone who betrayed your trust?”
“To come face-to-face with reality.”
Sixty-Five
The rain has left the air thick with humidity, and inside the unit it feels more like the middle of August than the end of September. The central air is working overtime and Isabel begins counting the seconds between its blasts in order to bring on sleep. She makes it to one hundred and loses interest.
Outside her room, over the hum of white noise artificially produced by her Hammacher Schlemmer, Isabel hears a series of doors opening and closing. She strains to understand the muffled urgency of a distant conversation that gets louder and then stops altogether.
They’re late for the one-thirty check.
Out of boredom and the certainty that sleep is futile, Isabel gets up and turns the noisemaker off. She opens her door and peeks down the empty hallway.
She follows the voices until she can vaguely make out a word or two. Isabel recognizes the raspy intonations of her favorite night nurse. Connie is involved in the dispute, evidently taking place in the soft room.
“No!” she hears a male voice say.
“Wait until the count of three,” Connie orders.
“If we…” Another voice trails off before Isabel can identify it.
Around the corner, light from inside the soft room falls in a triangle across the linoleum floor. Shadows slice into it from time to time as figures pass from one side of the room to another. The ebb and flow of agitated voices continues.
“You aren’t listening to me!”
“Okay, here’s what we’re going to do,” Connie is saying over the din. “On the count of three we’re going to lift the top part off simultaneously. The restraints are in place so this shouldn’t be a problem. Fred, you stand on the right and get ready to grab her if you need to.”
“She looks pretty sedated,” the male voice replies. “Maybe that shot’s finally kicking in.”
Isabel inches forward and looks over her shoulder. The hall is still empty. Whoeve
r is in the soft room is commanding the attention of all of the night staff.
“Okay, ready?” Connie asks. “One!”
Isabel inches forward.
“Two!”
Isabel takes two more steps toward the room.
“Three!”
As she moves to the edge of the doorway she hears the sounds of metal hitting the ground and the muffled sound of a woman groaning.
Isabel takes a deep breath for courage and forces herself to look into the room. Strapped into a stretcher with a square of duct tape angrily slapped across her mouth, is Kristen. Her eyes are wildly darting from side to side and sweat is beading on her forehead. She looks petrified, like a trapped animal moments before it tries to gnaw its own leg off in order to escape.
Connie and several orderlies have peeled another stretcher off the top of her. While the others are busy cleaning up a mess of medical equipment, Connie crouches at Kristen’s forehead and is whispering something to her, trying to calm her down. Isabel feels physically ill and turns away.
It is as if a flash of lightning has illuminated a photo negative of her nightmare and in that one moment, the difference between Isabel and Kristen has crystallized. In that instant Isabel knows they are traveling different roads. She stands there, outside the soft room, and hears Regina’s voice. You’re not like the others…you’re normal. She imagines Ben in camouflage marching down the halls of his school. She pictures Sukanya in the laundry room, reciting a Yiddish prayer. She sees Lark’s bloated body dangling, lifeless above the dryer.
She walks slowly, mechanically back to her room.
When Isabel closes the door to her room she knows, perhaps for the first time in years, that she is going to live. Before this night the prospect of returning to the “real world” had filled her with anxiety. Now she feels a quiet confidence.
Sixty-Six
“There’s nothing more for me to do here,” Isabel announces to Dr. Seidler within thirty seconds of the beginning of their appointment. “I’m ready to go home now.”
“Wow,” Dr. Seidler smiles. “Good. Okay, let’s get you home. Tell me about this resolve. What happened?”
“I’m ready to go,” Isabel says, completely sure of herself. “I know I’ve said this before, but this time I mean it. I am truly ready to go.”
“Excellent. I think you’ve done some good work here, Isabel,” Dr. Seidler says. “You’ve made incredible progress. It’s my hope that you’ve also learned some coping skills so when you feel overwhelmed in the future you can better deal with it. There are a lot of options out there.”
“I know. I do feel like I’ve gotten much better about talking things out rather than letting them build up inside. That’s been my problem all along. One of my problems. The rest I can continue with in New York, with Mona. That’s an ongoing project.”
Dr. Seidler has been nodding enthusiastically. “Absolutely,” she says.
“So. When can I blow this Popsicle joint?”
“Let me get your paperwork together and prepare you for your official discharge. You should know that I am required to put in a call to your therapist, Mona, just as a courtesy more than anything else. It’s just to notify her that you are leaving. You will need to call her to set up an appointment. As part of your discharge we need to be sure that you will have outpatient follow-up care. Just a formality since I know you will continue your work with her.”
“I’ll call her right after this,” Isabel says. “And I’ll call my mother to come pick me up. I need to tell her when, though.”
“When would feel right for you? I know you have your meetings in two days.”
“I can do it from there. Maybe it’s best that I get acclimated for a day back home before I go into the office. So…tomorrow? Can I leave tomorrow? That way I’ll have Larry’s group today and a chance to say goodbye to everyone.”
“You’re sure about this, Isabel?”
“Positive.”
“Then let’s make it tomorrow.” Dr. Seidler smiles warmly. “Why don’t you have your parents pick you up right after our morning appointment so we can say goodbye as well.”
“Great.” Isabel had forgotten she would also be saying goodbye to Dr. Seidler.
“Now that that’s settled, let’s talk about what you’re going home to,” Dr. Seidler says. “Let’s try to use every minute we’ve got left talking about what you’ll face when you leave here. That is, unless you have something else you’d like to address before you go?”
“No. That’s a good idea.”
“There are two pressing issues I feel you need to be especially careful about when you leave here, but I know you don’t need me to tell you that. Your meeting at ANN is likely to be stressful, and you’ll be facing Alex for the first time in quite a while. How do you think you can best cope with those situations?”
“See, that’s why it’s best if I go in from the outside, not from here. If I went into the city from here, got overwhelmed again—even if it’s only half as bad as it was on that other trip—then went in to meet with my boss, I’d be a basket case. I’d have absolutely no strength to say anything in my defense, even if it were just to save face. I’d be worried that my medication wouldn’t be powerful enough to prevent another panic attack and I’d freeze up again right there in Sargent’s office. It would be a nightmare.
“Whereas if I leave here tomorrow I can have a night to get used to my apartment and I’ll have a fighting chance of salvaging at least a shred of dignity at ANN.”
“True.” Dr. Seidler is nodding again. “It just occurred to me, what if they don’t fire you?”
“Huh?”
“Well, you’ve been assuming you’re going in to face the firing squad. But what if you come clean and tell them you’ve been getting the help you need in order to deal with the medical problem that had prevented you from doing your job and you feel ready to tackle it again. What if they said, ‘Okay, Isabel. Then come on back.’ What then?”
“I honestly don’t think that’ll happen.”
“Still…”
“I’m not one hundred percent sure right now. I feel like I can’t make that decision in here. Maybe that’s why I want to leave. The big decisions of my life right now need to be made at home. I need to be in a different context. Maybe I would go back to ANN. Maybe I could kid myself that I wouldn’t let myself get that stressed again or that I know how to deal with stress now so everything would be better. But maybe not. Let’s face it, the stress is always going to be there—this is the news business. I just need to figure out whether I want my life to be filled with that. And that’s something I can’t figure out from an Adirondack chair at Three Breezes.”
“Well said. So, what about Alex?”
Isabel pauses.
“In some ways that’s a dilemma that’s unsolvable. I mean, that train’s already left the station. I can’t help him. I know that now. I can’t be responsible for his happiness.”
“He made you feel responsible for his unhappiness before. How do you know you won’t get drawn back into feeling responsible again?”
“I feel like I’ve been through too much since then. I don’t know,” Isabel says, straightening herself in her chair. “I don’t know how to describe it better, but I just feel ready.”
“Then let’s get you out of here.”
Sixty-Seven
“Mom?”
“Honey, hi!”
“I’m leaving.”
“What?” Katherine sounds alarmed. “What do you mean? Where are you going?”
“I’m going home.”
“Honey—” she calls out to Isabel’s father “—pick up the phone! It’s Isabel! She’s checking herself out of the hospital! Isabel, did they say you were ready for that?”
“They said I could leave when I felt ready and I do.” Isabel feels like it is real now that she has told her mother. “Can you come pick me up?”
“Isabel? What’s wrong?” Her father sounds preoccupied to her.
She takes a deep breath, bathing her internal organs with oxygen, and releases it.
“Isabel?” Her father is calling out to her through the telephone line. Through years of missed opportunities. “What’s wrong?”
Though he cannot see her, she smiles into the phone.
“Oh, Dad—” there’ll be plenty of time to talk about that “—I’m ready to leave, that’s all.”
“Of course we can pick you up, honey,” Katherine says. “When?”
“Tomorrow. At ten. But if that’s not good for you it could be later, I suppose.”
“Tomorrow? So soon! It seems a little rushed,” Katherine says.
“Why are you leaving?” her father worriedly asks.
“It’s time, Dad.” Isabel has to sound sure of herself for her parents. She pictures Kristen’s wild-eyed return to Three Breezes, trapped between gurneys like a human burrito.
There is a slight pause while her parents struggle to decide whether to ask Isabel more questions or simply take their daughter’s word.
“We’ll be there,” her father says.
“Thanks,” Isabel says, hoping this time he means it.
Sixty-Eight
After calling her parents, Isabel’s outlook changes. Just as Clark Kent becomes superhuman inside a phone booth, Isabel begins to look at Three Breezes with a form of X-ray vision. With only twenty-four hours to go, she begins to say a mental goodbye.
Melanie is the first person Isabel encounters on her way back to the unit.
“Isabel, I was thinking,” she says with a look of intensity to which Isabel has become accustomed.
“Sure, Melanie. What’s up?” she says, slowing her pace but not stopping, which forces Melanie to walk alongside her.
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