Later, after Study Hall, I escort myself to your office. The lights in the waiting area are off and the UFOs outside all the shrink offices are quiet. I sit down in my usual chair outside your door and wait. I check my watch. If this were a dentist’s office, there’d be old National Geographics to look at; here, there are only tissue boxes and more tissue boxes.
I check my watch again.
You’re late. Fifteen minutes late.
I count the tissue boxes and the UFOs. I do the math; there are 1.5 tissue boxes per UFO. I check my watch again and know that you’re not coming. That something’s wrong.
I must have made a mistake. The chalkboard probably says my appointment was changed. That happens sometimes. I decide to wait until you’re twenty minutes late; then I’ll check the chalkboard.
Then it dawns on me: Wednesday is your day off. I remember you saying See you Thursday, last time. You didn’t say See you tomorrow. You said See you Thursday. I feel annoyed for some reason, then scared. Thursday is a long time away. What will I do till then?
I decide to go to Study Hall and figure out how many hours till tomorrow. How many hours, then how many minutes, then how many seconds. That will at least help pass the time.
Study Hall’s closed, too. My only other choice is the dayroom. When I walk in, the TV’s on, but no one’s watching it; then I see Amanda lying down on the couch. She notices me before I can sneak out.
“So,” she says, “you were onto Becca’s scam?”
I don’t know how to answer. Her voice is cajoling, full of encouragement; I think I’m supposed to say yes, but somehow I don’t. I shrug.
“Cool,” she says, sitting up. “Very cool.”
I sit down on a chair far from her and act very interested in the show on TV, a rerun of Family Ties. Alex is trying to keep his mom from opening the closet.
“So, S.T.,” Amanda says. “What do you use?”
I don’t understand.
She pulls up her sleeve and points to a line of purplish bumps on the inside of her arm; she twists her hand so I can see that the bumps go all the way around her wrist, like a bracelet. “You know, scissors? Glass? Wire?”
I try to concentrate on the TV. The Family Ties mom turns her back and the person hiding in the closet opens the door; Alex slams it shut, looking innocent. I can’t exactly follow it with Amanda bugging me.
“I knew a girl who used her father’s credit card. Nice touch. Little hidden psychological message in that, don’t you think?”
I don’t say anything.
“My personal favorite?” Amanda maneuvers herself so she’s blocking my view of the TV. “A safety pin and hairspray Rubbing alcohol’s good, too. But hairspray’s the best. It makes your scars puff up.”
She lies down again. “By the way,” she says, “I found this staple. Underneath one of the chairs in the study lounge. It works really well.”
I remember the look on her face in Study Hall the day I saw her rubbing her arm on the seat of the chair while she pretended to be asleep.
“Third row, last chair,” she says. “Just thought you might want to know. In case they find your metal thing.”
On Thursday I don’t wait for you to ask me where I want to start. While you’re still closing your door, I ask if you want to see my scars.
Your face is neutral. “Do you want to show me?” you say.
I nod. I pinch my sleeve between my thumb and index finger, but instead of pulling it up, I pull it down. Until it covers my wrist. Until it covers my hand. Until my whole arm is hidden inside my sleeve.
“I use my mom’s Exacto knife.” I stare at my shirtsleeve. “Or her embroidery scissors. Once I used the paper towel dispenser in the guest bathroom here.” I feel the corners of my mouth turn up; I’m not happy but somehow I have to fight the urge to smile.
I check for your reaction. You’re expecting something, I can tell. Your normal, calm face shows a hint of waiting. Waiting, and something else, something like hope.
I roll my sleeve between my thumb and index finger, then deliberately, with a kind of reverence, I pull my sleeve back, all the way up to the elbow, and extend my arm to you.
You’re not disgusted or frightened or any of the hundred wrong things you could be; you look like yourself, serious, curious, and maybe, maybe, just a little bit proud of me.
I look at my arm. It’s crisscrossed with pink lines, lines that strike me as delicate and faint, lines I remember making.
I gently pull my sleeve back down and decide it would be good to make some kind of joke right about now.
“Guess I’ll never wear a strapless ball gown,” I say.
You look perplexed.
“Debbie, you know Debbie from my group, she’s always drawing fancy ball gowns. I’ll have to ask her to design one for me—one that has long sleeves.” I laugh. You don’t.
“What makes you think you’ll never wear a strapless ball gown?”
I shrug. I never planned on wearing fancy clothes, but for some dumb reason, now I really want to. In fact I want to so badly, I feel like crying. “I don’t know.”
“You might wear a ball gown someday.” You say this quite surely.
“I might?”
You nod. “I have every reason to believe you’ll do all the things every other girl does, all the things you want to do.”
I’m still stuck on the stupid ball gown that I never cared about until now. “With these arms?” I thrust my arms out, keeping my sleeves wrapped around my thumbs.
“Those scars will fade. It looks like some have already faded.”
I consider this.
“There are treatments, too, medical treatments that can help get rid of scars.”
I must look dubious because you go on.
“I knew a little girl who was in a terrible car accident. A beautiful little girl whose face was absolutely covered with cuts; she had nearly a hundred stitches in her face.”
I wince. I feel so sad, so sorry for this little girl, I want you to stop. But I need to hear more.
“She’s a model now,” you say. “She’s a very successful, very beautiful model. She had plastic surgery to get rid of her scars. You would never know what happened to her when she was younger.”
I like and don’t like this story, but I don’t know why.
A bird outside your window trills. Another bird, far off, answers.
“I may not want to get rid of my scars,” I say finally.
You nod.
“They tell a story,” I say.
“Yes,”you say, “they do.”
It must be the end of our time because you’re standing up. I wait for you to say Good work, see you tomorrow. But you just stand there with your hand on the doorknob. I get to my feet and look at the clock. Our time was up a few minutes ago. I tug at the hem of my shirt.
“Callie,” you say. “Is there something else you want to say?”
I shake my head. But I don’t move.
“You seem to be waiting. Can you tell me what you’re waiting for?”
I shake my head again. Then I nod.
You let go of the doorknob.
I reach into my pocket and pull out the metal strip. “It’s from the cafeteria,” I say.
You don’t seem to understand. I hold it out toward you.
“You’re giving this to me?”
I keep my eyes on the stain on the carpet and nod.
“Can you tell me why?”
“Not really.” I roll my feet onto the sides of my sneakers. “So I don’t …you know …” I know I have to say more. “So I don’t use it.”
I look up from the carpet to check your reaction. You’re tapping your lip with your finger.
“I’m glad,” you say finally. “I’m very happy that you don’t want to use this to hurt yourself.”
My arm is getting tired; the metal strip feels very, very heavy. Finally, when you reach out and take it, it slips from my fingers, weightless. You place it on the corner of your de
sk.
“I’ll keep it here until you’re ready to decide what you want to do with it.”
I don’t understand. “I get it back?” I look over at the small, dull square of metal sitting on the edge of your desk, so close I could just reach out and slip it back in my pocket.
“Callie.” Your voice is a little sad. “There are all kinds of things in the world you could use to hurt yourself. All kinds of things you could turn into weapons. Even if you wanted to give them all to me, it wouldn’t be possible. You know that, don’t you?”
I do know that, I guess. I nod.
“I can’t keep you safe,”you say. “Only you can.”
That night we see Becca in the dining room with her new group from Humdinger. Maybe I’ve been here too long— they don’t look that bad to me.
Becca walks past our table carrying a glass of water; behind her, another girl, who looks normal except for the twitchy smile on her face, is carrying two trays. They get to their table and the girl sets one of the trays down in front of Becca, pulls out a chair for her, then hands her a napkin.
Debbie is staring; then she shades her eyes, still watching Becca and her new friend. Finally she turns to Amanda “Guess Becca’s found somebody new to be codependent.”
We go back to our dinners, trying not to look at Becca anymore. The pasta tonight is especially bland. I consider going to the salad bar. I check first to see if the Ghost is there, waltzing. She’s not.
“Where’s the Ghost?” I ask Sydney.
“Home,” she says. “She went home.”
Tara and Sydney complain about the food, but I don’t really pay attention. I’m thinking about how people leave here: Ruth, Tiffany the Ghost. Some leave on schedule, some leave without warning. But everyone leaves eventually
Tara’s asked me a question. I can tell because everyone is looking at me.
“Huh?”
“Is it OK with you if we let Debbie have the remote tonight?”
“Sure,” I say. “Absolutely.” It’s a simple question, the kind of thing the group used to vote on all the time, but this time, I’m included.
Debbie flips through the channels so fast it’s hard to tell which shows she’s rejecting. She stops briefly at the Food Channel, where a woman in an apron is making apple brown betty in what looks like a real kitchen.
“No,” Debbie says, pushing the button on the remote. “Watching someone make dessert is not a good idea.”
She flips through a few more stations, then stops at a show where all you can see is the front door of a house. A scratchy voice comes on: “What is the nature of your emergency?” A subtitle repeating these words scrolls by at the bottom of the screen. A child’s voice, barely audible, comes next: “My mommy’s on the floor.” The child starts crying. The subtitle says: “(Child crying.)”
“Rescue 911!” Sydney shouts. “I love this show.”
Debbie is transfixed, watching the screen. “Me too.” She doesn’t even look over at Sydney.
“Oh, wow,” says Tara. “I used to watch this all the time.”
“Me too,” I say, aware that I sound surprised.
Sydney glances at me. “S.T.,” she says in the weary old voice Sam used when he was trying to get me to understand lateral thinking. “Everyone loves this show.”
“I don’t think I have anything to talk about today,” I say to you.
You nod.
“I mean, things are going really well,” I say.
You smile.
“I talk in Group, at dinner, I’m getting along with the other girls.”
“Good,”you say.
“We all watched TV together last night.”
You seem to be waiting for more.
“Oh,” I say. “We watched that show I told you about. Rescue 911.”
Your expression doesn’t change. I wonder if you’ve ever watched Rescue 911, I wonder, again, what your life is like outside Sick Minds, if you watch TV like other people.
“Everyone loves that show,” I tell you.
You don’t agree or disagree. I wonder if you think it’s stupid to talk about a TV show in therapy.
“It’s really good. But it’s also like a home video. You know, the camera is shaky sometimes, like when they show the paramedics carrying the person to the ambulance.”
You don’t seem especially interested; I want you to understand about this show.
“They make the ambulance sound really loud on the show. Sam says you can’t hear the siren in real life.”
“Sam rode in an ambulance?”
“Yeah.” Now you seem to be paying attention; I decide to tell you more. “Actually I gave him CPR before they got there.”
“Before the paramedics got there?”
“Before my parents got there.” I stop a second, confused. We’ve entered new territory here, talking about Sam and the ambulance and the paramedics and my parents; I can’t quite remember what I’ve told you before. I need to change the subject, quickly.
“You may have saved his life,”you say plainly.
“Huh?” The idea crosses my mind idly that saying Huh is bad manners; I should have said Pardon me.
“You may have saved Sam’s life.” You say this so simply, it almost seems sensible.
“No, I didn’t.”
You lean forward. “Why do you say that?”
“I don’t know. That only happens to kids on TV.”
“Like the kids on Rescue 911?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“You gave your little brother CPR. You got help. Why isn’t that like the kids on Rescue 911?”
“I don’t know. It just isn’t.”
“Well,” you say. I see a distinct glimmer of impatience in your eyes. “I disagree.”
I’m having trouble taking all this in: this new, sort of annoyed look in your eyes and this odd new idea.
It makes sense, then it doesn’t. It seems right—here in a shrink’s office in a loony bin called Sea Pines where there’s no sea and no pines—but it can’t be right in the real world.
“Callie?”
I try to focus on you. You seem very far away.
“What are you thinking about right now? Will you tell me?”
I’m thinking about the other day when you told me how people get asthma, how you said they can get it from having an infection.
“Sam had an infection,” I hear myself say.
You wait.
“He wasn’t feeling good that day. The day he got so sick.” I can picture him, wiping his nose and rubbing his eyes. “A cold or something. When my mom called about it, the doctor said to keep an eye on him.”
“The day Sam had his first asthma attack, he was already sick?”
I nod.
“And the doctor said to keep an eye on him?”
I wonder why you care about this so much. I nod once, slowly this time.
“But your parents went out.”
“My mom had to go see Gram at the nursing home.”
“And your father?”
I shrug.
“He was out?”
“Yes,” then quickly, “No. Well, I guess. He had to. It’s OK.”
“Where did he go?”
I bite my lip. “Out.”
“Callie, we’re out of time for today, but I want you to think about something.”
I glance at you, then away.
“Please,” you say. “Please try to see that day from a slightly different perspective. Try to imagine it as if you were on the outside looking in. Try to think of yourself in that situation as someone else, just a girl, a thirteen-yearold girl on her own, alone, with a sick little boy.”
I don’t see what good this will do, and I don’t plan to do it, I plan to forget about everything and go watch TV with the other girls, but I agree.
“Good,”you say. “Good work, Callie. Excellent.”
No one’s in the dayroom; the TV’s broken. I wander around and end up in Study Hall. No one’s in there eit
her, except Cynthia, the attendant with the large multiplechoice workbook. She smiles, goes back to her work.
I take my old seat by the window and watch the dog behind the maintenance shed. He barks, trots to the end of his chain, barks, trots back down the dirt path to his doghouse. I wonder if he’s the dog I always hear barking during Group.
It’s cold in here studying. I wrap my arms around myself and wish Debbie were here with her sweater. I wish Debbie were here, and Sydney and Tara, even Amanda I pull my shirt close to me and think about going back to my room for a sweatshirt. I can do that now that I’m a Level Two; I could just get up and leave. I think about it, think about walking past the chair where Debbie draws her ball gowns, past the chair where Tara was sleeping when I slipped her the note from Sydney, past Amanda’s chair. Amanda’s chair: the one with the staple underneath.
I breathe out with a little shuddery sound. Cynthia looks up.
“You cold?”
I nod.
“Look at you, you’re shivering,” she says. “Why don’t you go get yourself a sweater.”
I don’t move.
“You’re a Two now, right? It’s OK for you to be on your own.”
I rise to my feet, but I don’t go anywhere. I’m thinking about you, about what you said about me being a girl on my own, alone, with a sick boy.
“Go on,” she says.
I wonder suddenly if you’ll tell my mom what I said about my dad being out when Sam was sick. My mom’ll get upset, then Sam’ll get upset, they’ll get sick. Sam could even die. He could be having an attack right now and I’m not there. What if Sam is having an attack right now and I’m not there?
“Go on,” Cynthia says again, insistent. “You’re always in here. It’ll do you good to get out of this place.”
I know what to do then. I know exactly what to do.
III
I get up and go down the hall. Past the attendants’ desk, past Rochelle on her orange plastic chair. She puts her finger on the page of her magazine to mark the spot, looks up, goes back to her reading. I pass the dayroom, which is still empty, and our Group room, which is also empty. I go by Amanda’s room, the phone booth, my room. Down the stairs to the laundry room, past the fire exit with the YOU ARE HERE sign. I stand in front of a door marked EXIT.
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