by John Neufeld
“I hope you’re not so well read as Mary Nell is,” he said still smiling. “I’ve a feeling I need a refresher course in psychological terminology.”
I laughed a little—a husky, sexy little chuckle à la Paula Prentiss. “No,” I said, “we’ve left the dictionary and research to M.N. exclusively. Elizabeth and I felt that one expert was enough in this crowd.”
I suddenly wished I’d had a cigarette. I don’t smoke, of course, but it would have given me something to do with my hands. I could have relaxed with it, crossed my legs, and looked older blowing smoke through my nose.
“Where would you like to start?” Dr. Donovan asked.
“Well, I’m not sure. I imagine M.N. told you everything pretty clearly. She’s nothing if not objective.”
“Well then,” he went on, “is there something that especially bothers you?”
“The whole thing bothers me!” I said sharply. “I mean, well, what happens next? Suppose walking through glass didn’t hit her family? What does she have to do, for Pete’s sake?”
“You think she’ll be forced to do something else? To think of something more?”
“Wouldn’t you think so?” I said. “You’re the expert here, not me.”
Dr. Donovan stopped to think. So did I.
I was furious at myself. Here was this absolutely socko guy, and I was being as rude as I could possibly be. Not rude, really, just touchy. I guess it was because I knew my Woodward Special had failed, and that it would have failed no matter what its voltage. I would just have to take Dr. Neil Donovan at face value (gasp!) and accept him as I would anyone else, a guy who happened to be a doctor. Nothing more. (Paul! Paul! I’m back, I’m back! I’ll always love you, Paul Newman! Always!)
“Suicide,” Dr. Donovan said quietly. “Is that what you think?”
“Yes, I guess so,” I said. “And what we have to do is get over there and stop it.”
“Unfortunately, it’s not quite as easy as that,” Donovan said. “We can’t walk in, unasked, and cart Lisa away from her family.”
“It’s either that,” I said strongly, surprising myself, “or watch as someone in white walks in, called for, and does exactly the same thing.”
21
But there wasn’t much any of us could do honestly. Lisa was at home, beyond our reach and, no doubt, beyond the reach of anything else. M.N., Elizabeth, and I worried but it was wasted energy, really, since all we were left with was sitting on our hands.
Dr. Donovan, though, went around quickly and quietly researching. He spent one full day at school talking with Lisa’s teachers and with Mr. Bernstein. I would like to have heard this particular conversation because, as far as I could tell, while I liked Mr. Bernstein and sympathized with him, it seemed to me that he should go up to Donovan’s hospital along with Lisa and iron out his problems. I think what Mr. Bernstein should have been was some kind of administrator, or a computer technician, so he wouldn’t have to meet people and deal with them directly.
That same evening Dr. Donovan came to our house to talk with Daddy who really couldn’t tell him anything we hadn’t already. Except, of course, Daddy’s point of view being more mature it probably carried more weight than our own.
The next morning, at breakfast with Elizabeth, Neil Donovan came across something in the newspaper that interested him. “Elizabeth,” he said, “how does this sound to you? Could it be your friend? The teenage daughter of a nearby Sikhanout family was treated last night in Mount Cedar Hospital for an overdose of barbiturates. The youngster, whose name was not released, will recover.’”
“I don’t know,” said Elizabeth. “It could be Lisa. But it’s indefinite. Is there some way you could find out through the hospital?”
“I can telephone,” said Donovan getting up to do so. He was gone only a few minutes and came directly back to the table. “It turns out,” he said, “that that was Lisa.”
“Oh, no!” said Elizabeth.
“I’ll try to find out who the consulting analyst is, because this time there will be one. By the time you get back from school we’ll have some idea of what really happened.”
“Why must it take that long?” Elizabeth asked. “It’s just another phone call.”
“Never mind. I’ll tell you what,” he said, “come home at lunch if you like.”
“Well, at least that’s better,” Elizabeth had told him.
“Can I go with you?” I asked Elizabeth later that morning during a break.
“Me, too,” M.N. said. “I don’t see what good two of us will do without the third.”
“The thing is,” Elizabeth said thoughtfully, “I don’t know what good any of us is able to do. The question is, do the Shillings finally understand?”
“I can find out,” I offered.
“How?” asked M.N.
“I’ll have my father call. After all, Mrs. Shilling doesn’t want anything to do with us, but Father is different. I’ll call right away.”
So I did. And I waited in the phone booth for Daddy to call me back—the longest four minutes thirty-seven seconds ever! Finally the phone rang. I had it in less than a second. “Hello? Daddy?”
“Yes, Betsy. I don’t want to get your hopes up,” he said, “but I would say that the Shillings are going to be more receptive now. Mrs. Shilling wasn’t able to talk but her husband wants to meet me for coffee in forty-five minutes. He wants to know exactly what happened at our house that night, and what I think he can do.”
“Oh, Daddy!” I nearly cried. “Tell him we already have found help for Lisa! Tell him about Dr. Donovan!”
“I will, Bets, don’t worry. I will. See you later, O.K.?”
“O.K., Daddy, and thank you.”
“It’s O.K., Bets. Bye.”
“Bye.”
I was late getting back into Miss Strane’s class but I managed a thumbs-up sign as I came in to Elizabeth and M.N., and when we broke for the next class I told them what Father had said.
“Well,” said M.N., “at last! Hallelujah!”
“But we still have to reach Mrs. Shilling,” I mentioned.
“No, we don’t,” Elizabeth said. “Mr. Shilling has to do that. If he’s this close now, after he talks with your father he’ll be in it all the way. She won’t have a chance.”
“You know what?” M.N. said. “I feel sort of sorry for her. Not that she deserves it, mind you. But it must be hell realizing one of your kids is crazy.”
Elizabeth looked at M.N., strong and straight and with no smile. “Would you say it was as hard as realizing that people are human, Mary Nell? That they are single things with their own problems that won’t be solved by someone else’s determination?”
Mary Nell’s face drained. Her eyes began to water. Elizabeth waited, unyielding. “That’s not unfair,” Mary Nell said slowly. “Ignore the tears.” She drew in a big breath and faced Elizabeth squarely. “Yes, I would say that,” she said. And then she smiled tentatively.
Elizabeth smiled back, stepped forward, and kissed M.N. very quickly on the cheek.
We all rushed to Elizabeth’s house at lunch and nearly raped Dr. Donovan for news. (I looked that up. It means “to seize,” which is perfectly O.K. in this sense.)
“It’s not as bad as it sounded,” he told us. “Lisa got hold of her mother’s sleeping pills, took a handful, and walked downstairs. She lay on the couch in the living room so that when her parents came home they would find her. Which is exactly what they did. Dr. Brody, who admitted her, said he thought the parents were pretty shaken. So, between that and the talk he had with Mr. Goodman this morning, Mr. Shilling may finally be ready for us.”
“The question is, how do we do it, gently?” Elizabeth asked.
“Dr. Brody said he thought if we wanted to visit Lisa later this afternoon it wouldn’t do any harm.”
“All of us?” I asked.
“I don’t see why not,” Neil said. “After all, someone will have to introduce me to my new patient.”
; “But what about her mother?” M.N. objected. “She was dead serious about keeping us away from Lisa.”
“I don’t think she’ll be so firm about that now,” Dr. Donovan said. “But I’ll talk to Mr. Shilling before we go.”
M.N. slapped her forehead. “If anything goes wrong now,” she said, “you may as well forget Lisa and take me back with you!”
“I’ll pick you all up after school, after your last class,” said Donovan.
So we went back to school for the slowest afternoon in the history of man. We were terrifically excited. I realized that we had begun to assume that not only would Lisa be glad to see us, but she would also have miraculously recovered her mind. We expected to walk in and have her leap out of bed running open-armed for us all, laughing and chattering and free as she used to be.
But Elizabeth tried to quiet us. “We haven’t seen her in days and days,” she said. “Who knows what else has happened to her, inside? It could be we’ve lost her totally without knowing it.”
We thought about that for a moment, hut dismissed it almost as fast. We simply didn’t want to believe there was even a chance that we were too late, that keeping Lisa afloat until help came had been futile after all.
So, although we had been warned, we couldn’t help ourselves. We tried to keep our expectations low, but it was no use. When Dr. Donovan picked us up, we were all three nearly hysterical with happiness and anticipation.
This ended as soon as we got into the hospital. No hospital in the world smells different from the hospital you learned to hate as a kid, and this one was no exception. Our eagerness shrank to nothing as we remembered all the things we’d seen Lisa do and say and go through. By the time the elevator stopped on her floor, no one wanted to get out.
“Well, come on, girls,” Dr. Donovan said. “This is it. This is what you’ve worked so hard for. You’re not going to let me go in alone, are you?”
Elizabeth was the first to follow him, and then M.N. and I stepped out and walked down the hall after them.
We stood for a minute outside Lisa’s room listening. There was absolutely nothing to hear. I began to hope she wasn’t even there. But then a nurse came out, nodded, and motioned for us to go in. It was M.N. who got up enough nerve to push through the door. We could see Lisa was there, after all.
She was lying in bed looking up at the ceiling. She hardly moved and if you had asked me, she could have been dead for all the motion in her body. M.N. walked closer. Elizabeth and I followed. Lisa didn’t move.
“Lisa?” M.N. whispered. “Lisa? It’s us. M.N. and Betsy and Elizabeth.”
Lisa let her head fall to one side and looked at M.N. without seeming to recognize her.
“Hi,” M.N. said.
Lisa didn’t even blink!
I looked at Elizabeth. We’re too late! I thought. We are too late!
Elizabeth was silent. Then she stepped up to the bedside. “Lisa,” she said, “I’ve brought you a friend.”
Lisa shifted her look from M.N. to Elizabeth.
“He’s a friend of mine,” Elizabeth emphasized. “I think perhaps he can help you, if you want him to,” she said. “I think he’s what we’ve been looking for all this time.”
Elizabeth motioned from behind her back for Dr. Donovan to come in, which he did very quietly. He walked forward and stopped at Elizabeth’s side, looking down over her shoulder at Lisa.
“Lisa,” Elizabeth said, “this is Dr. Donovan. Dr. Donovan, this is Lisa Shilling.”
Dr. Donovan gave Lisa one of his unbelievably gorgeous smiles and reached out for her hand. He took it very gently and held it a minute. “I’m very glad,” he said quietly, “finally to meet you, Lisa.”
Lisa looked up at Dr. Donovan for a long moment, and then back at Elizabeth. Elizabeth nodded yes to her, “it’s all right,” and Lisa looked back up into Dr. Donovan’s face. And then a tear fell, just one. And then another, and then, without moving still, a whole torrent started.
M.N. and I started to cry, too, then, with relief and joy and who knows what else. We reached out and touched Lisa’s shoulder, and each kissed her on the cheek. And then we left. We just had to. We couldn’t stand around there getting hysterical.
Elizabeth came out and found us, arms around each other, in front of the elevator. She punched a button and, after a minute, we all got into the car and rode down to the street.
We ran through the lobby like three idiot children and burst through the doors. There is a little park on the side of the hospital, and we scrambled to reach it, all three of us holding hands and laughing, and crying, and giggling, and acting like three-year-olds together. And we didn’t stop. We fell about in the grass, and rolled over each other, and shrieked and hooted and hollered and hit each other and then started all over again. And to think, I remembered, that the patient was still inside.
22
School ended then soon afterward, and Lisa stayed at the hospital for another week beyond even that. Not that she needed to be watched so much as it was to give her a chance to rest before going up to the hospital where Dr. Donovan worked. And this was the Shillings’ idea!
For Mr. and Mrs. Shilling had, at last, been beaten down. Their resistance, their objections, their fears had all given way finally to concern that they might lose their daughter to a kind of living death far worse than any sudden cutting off naturally might have been.
Mrs. Shilling, especially, reacted. She hid at home twenty-four hours a day, never venturing outside to go to the store or the bank or even with the garbage. She felt, and you could sympathize a little, that every time she showed her face her neighbors were criticizing her. After all, we’re told illnesses like this don’t just happen. There must be reasons and background and incidents that build up to a point of tautness until a personality finds a way of releasing its tension. And Lisa’s release had been in madness, plain and simple. Which, of course, if you wanted to, could be traced in part at least to her family and the way in which she had been raised.
That wasn’t important to us, though. It mattered less what the causes were than whether Lisa would recover. “I think,” Dr. Donovan had said before he left, “that Lisa may be back with you by Christmas.”
I counted very fast: seven months. It was hard to believe.
“I don’t mean,” he said then, “that she’ll be back with you full time, as good as new, ready for action as before. I mean that if we work very hard, from the minute Lisa gets settled up north, right through summer and next fall, she may be home for a visit then.”
The following weekend, as the Shillings drove Lisa to the hospital and just before he left, Neil Donovan talked with us again. “This is going to sound impossible, girls, but the worst is yet to come.”
M.N. slapped her forehead. “Make three more reservations, quick!” she shouted.
“You were lucky this time,” Donovan said. “Lucky your other friends treated Lisa so fairly when she was alone. That isn’t usual, you know.”
“What would you expect?” Mary Nell asked. “After all, Lisa was sick. They could see it, too.”
“I know,” the doctor said. “And, believe me, it’s remarkable that cruelty and easy fun didn’t occur to anyone. It will.”
“Why?” I asked. “When Lisa comes back full time, she’ll be just like the rest of us. Won’t she?”
“Yes, but she’ll be more sensitive, too. It’s not easy not to make fun of someone who’s just come out of a … a nuthouse.”
Elizabeth started to object but Donovan cut her off. “I know that sounds harsh, Elizabeth, but it’s true. We all know how easy a target someone who’s been ill is. Your job, all of your jobs, is going to be very tough indeed. Not to insulate Lisa but to educate the others.”
This, of course, was right up M.N.’s alley. “Well, then,” she said, “maybe you could write to us every so often. Keep us up-to-date so we can educate everybody here.”
“Poor M.N.,” Elizabeth laughed. “You’ve had a chance to study everythi
ng but the patient’s mind. I hate to think of all that reading and no primary source available to you. Maybe Neil could send bulletins.”
“If there is time,” Neil Donovan said seriously, “I will.”
“As long as it doesn’t take time away from Lisa,” M.N. said quickly. “Or your other patients.”
“Right,” he said, and smiled.
“I have learned so much,” M.N. said. Elizabeth smiled.
“So have I,” I offered. “What I’ll do with it all, though, I don’t know.”
“There’s no rush to put all your information and all your good intent to work,” Donovan said. “You’ll have years and years yet to do that. But maybe you’d like to come up and visit our hospital during the summer.”
“I can’t,” M.N. said sadly. “I’ll be in Ohio.”
“I can!” I volunteered fast. After all, I thought, what’s a few years’ difference when you’re in love? (Of course, Paul, I’ll always be true to you. Sort of.)
“Good,” he said, “I’ll look forward to it. Elizabeth, write, yes?”
“Yes, I will,” she said.
The beautiful man drove away, and we all sighed.
“Know what?” M.N. asked.
“What?” said Elizabeth.
“This whole thing could have been a disaster,” M.N. said. “I mean, suppose Lisa had gone round the bend anyway? Suppose she had reached a point beyond help.”
“She didn’t, though,” Elizabeth said.
“I know,” M.N. answered, “But just suppose.”
It was the one thought none of us needed to think. “Now what?” I asked.
“Who knows?” Elizabeth said. “It’s Maine for me.”
“You are so lucky,” I said. And then I remembered that with Lisa gone for a while, and Elizabeth away and M.N. beyond the reach of anything but the telephone, I would be alone. I started to cry, and I put my arms around both girls. “What am I going to do all summer? I’ll be alone!”
“You’re behaving like a ten-year-old when camp breaks up,” Elizabeth said sharply.
“Exactly,” M.N. agreed. “Remember, you’ve got Brian all to yourself, at last.”
