Nick and June Were Here

by Shalanda Stanley

  “To help you sleep,” the nurse had said.

  Now I was in a tiny room with white furniture and white walls. The chair I sat in was made of vinyl and was cold, making me cold. I was waiting to see the specialist, and I was right. She was a psychiatrist. She worked at Little Rock Psychiatric Hospital. It turned out the fourth floor was the mental health ward. The secret elevator was so not just anyone could waltz in. “To protect confidentiality,” a nurse had said. My parents were joining us later. They thought it would be a good idea to meet with her by myself first.

  My dad had told me the psychiatrist’s name was Dr. Keels and she was the best he knew about, the best around. It’d probably made the resident psychiatrist mad that he brought her in, but my dad didn’t care who he hurt when it came to helping me. We were lucky to have the resources that we had in a town as small as Creed. Other towns our size might have hospitals but most of them didn’t have psychiatric wards. It was because we were so far from anything that resembled a city. We were more than a hundred miles from the next hospital. People from all around used Creed’s hospital, not just the people who lived here, so it came with a few bells and whistles that other small-town hospitals didn’t have.

  I wasn’t left alone to wait. I’d learned in the short time I’d been there that privacy wasn’t a luxury you got to keep on this floor. The nurse with me was named Janet and she’d grown up in Creed. She had just graduated and this was her first real job. We’d gotten to know each other in the past twenty-four hours. It felt right that I should ask her questions about herself. I needed to know something about her since I had to pee in front of her.

  The door pushed open and a woman swept into the room like a wave. She wore red from head to toe. She had red hair and red lipstick and a red pantsuit that she had to have sewed herself, because there couldn’t be much demand for red pantsuits. Her earrings were strawberries and I worried she might not be real, so I looked to Nurse Janet for confirmation and she nodded, like Yes, this is who you’ve been waiting for. Then I remembered that she was a child psychiatrist. Maybe this was her “relatable” outfit. She reminded me of a character from a picture book. I couldn’t remember the name, but I was pretty sure I liked it.

  She shut the door and sat in the seat across from me, the smell of her perfume wafting toward me. She smelled like honeysuckle and I was disappointed, because it should’ve been strawberry.

  “Hi, June,” she said.

  I waved. It was a weird thing to do, but I felt pretty weird.

  “Janet, would you mind giving us some privacy?”

  Janet nodded and walked out of the room, but before she shut the door she met my eyes and smiled. I’d miss her.

  Dr. Keels looked down at the notepad in her hands. “I like your name. I’ve not met many Junes.”

  She said it like she’d met a lot of Aprils and Mays.

  “It was my grandmother’s name,” I explained.

  “That’s nice. I’ve always liked the tradition of handing down names.”

  I had, too.

  “Your dad gave me an idea of what’s been going on, but I’d like to hear it from you.”

  I didn’t know what she wanted me to say, how I should start. If this was a TV show, I’d be lying down on a couch or staring out a window into the middle distance, but this was real life and this room didn’t have a couch or a window. I didn’t know what to say and I didn’t know where to look.

  “It’s okay, June,” she said, like she could read my mind. “This can go however you want it to.” She tilted her head to the side, like she was thinking of something for the first time. “Do you have an idea of how you’d like it to go?”

  “Not any good ones,” I said. “I’d just like to be honest.”

  “I’d appreciate your honesty.”

  I slid my hands underneath my legs to keep them still. I was nervous. “If it’s okay with you, I’d like to pretend that I’m just a person and you’re just a person and we’re having a conversation and nothing is weird and we didn’t just meet and there’s no high stakes. We’re just talking.”

  She leaned in and I tried not to be distracted by the sound of the red fabric rubbing against her legs. It sounded like polyester.

  “We are just people and we’re just talking,” she said. “There are no high stakes and nothing is weird.” She put down her notebook. “My name is Brooke. I’ve known your parents for a long time. Your dad has been trying to get me to come down from Little Rock for a while now.”

  “He said you met in med school.”

  She nodded. “We were partners in anatomy class.”

  “Was he a good partner?”

  “The best. He was always very organized. He took excellent notes. People offered to pay him for them.”

  That didn’t surprise me. He was meticulous, like me. It was another reason he couldn’t forgive himself for not seeing what was in front of him.

  “Your dad says you’re good at taking notes, too.” She pointed at my notebook on the coffee table between us. When I’d told my dad that I’d written everything down, he’d brought it to me and encouraged me to share it with Dr. Keels.

  “I write down everything,” I admitted.

  “Like a diary?”

  I shrugged. “Sort of.”

  “What types of things do you write in it?”

  “There are different sections for different things. I’ve been keeping one for a while now. This is my second one this year.”

  “Your dad mentioned that you had more than one.”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  They all looked the same, though. Blue five-subject notebooks with college-ruled paper that I kept on a shelf in my room.

  “Why do you think you keep them?” she asked.

  I thought about it. “I’m an observer. I notice things, things maybe other people don’t, or just things I need to remember, so I write it all down so there’s a record. I like having a record.”

  “Did you write about the things you’ve been experiencing?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you tell me about some of them?”

  It was weird to go from admitting something was wrong to my parents to saying it to a stranger. It was too personal. I didn’t know her.

  “What’s your favorite color?” I asked.

  She looked confused at first but then said, “Today it’s red.”

  “Today?”

  She nodded. “My favorite color depends on the day. When I woke up today, I was feeling red.” She waved her arm across her body.

  I smiled. “I want to imagine that your closet is full of monochromatic pantsuits. Please don’t tell me I’m wrong.”

  “You’re not far off the mark,” she said.

  “Did you always want to be a psychiatrist?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ve always wanted to help people.”

  “You had to go to school for a long time for that. Longer than my dad did. Are your parents proud?”

  “I think if they were still alive, they would be,” she said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. It happened a long time ago. A car accident,” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” I said again. It didn’t matter that she’d said it was okay.

  “Can we play a game?” she asked.

  “Do you get to make the rules?”

  “Yes,” she said without apology.

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “With me, you always have a choice.”

  “Okay, then. Let’s play.”

  “Pretend that I’m not here.”

  “You’re kind of hard to ignore. What with all that red.”

  I was deflecting. She knew it.

  She smiled. “Close your eyes.”

&
nbsp; I closed them.

  “Take a deep breath and pretend you’re in the room alone.”

  But that was impossible.

  “I’m never alone,” I said.

  “Why are you never alone?”

  Because the things I couldn’t control were living in my head with me, like parasites.

  “There’s a lot of noise in my head.”

  “Can you tell me about the noise?”

  It was hard to describe. It wasn’t always voices or distinct sounds. Sometimes it was a low hum, this constant background noise. I didn’t know how long it’d been there. With my eyes still closed, I tried to hear it so I could describe it to her, but it never happened on command.

  “I don’t know how,” I said.

  “Could you try?” she asked. “Or maybe it would be easier if you read something to me from your notebook.”

  I opened my eyes. Would that be easier?

  “Or I could read something from it,” she said. “If you’d prefer.”

  The idea scared and excited me at the same time. I opened the notebook to the right section and handed it to her. She’d be the first person to read it besides me. She began reading, and a few seconds later she frowned, her brows furrowing.

  “This is in third person,” she said.

  I nodded. I never wrote it like it was happening to me, always she or her, never me.

  “ ‘There is something inside of her trying to get out,’ ” Dr. Keels read. “ ‘Like an animal clawing. The pain is so real that she checks her body, looking for marks. She keeps her mouth closed most of the time, because she’s scared if she doesn’t, it will escape.’ ”

  My days were spent with muscles coiled tight, mouth pressed tight. I couldn’t afford to relax. I didn’t know what would happen if it got out.

  “What do you think is trying to get out?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “How does that make you feel?” she asked.

  Like I was choking on all the things I couldn’t say. I shrugged.

  She kept reading. “ ‘She never sleeps.’ ” She looked up at me. “When did you start having trouble sleeping?”

  “A couple of months ago.”

  “How long did you go without sleep?”

  Days and days and days.

  “A while.”

  I knew that I had slept some, because I’d wake up occasionally, so I must’ve gone to sleep at some point.

  “There’s too much to think about, worry about,” I said. “During the day, I worry less, because there are so many distractions, but at night there’s nothing else to do but lie there and I can’t turn off my mind and it just runs and runs.”

  My thoughts chased each other until they merged into one constant stream.

  “Did something occur during that time that could trigger not being able to sleep? Anything stressful or traumatic?”

  That was when Bethany and I had started hearing back from colleges, nothing most people would think was traumatic. Letters came every day, telling us, “Congratulations!” or “We regret to inform you…” We didn’t always get into the same places. I’d stay up late, reading everything about the ones that had said yes to both of us, where they were and what their cities had to offer us. I’d take notes, cataloging everything. I was so worried about choosing the right one, about not being able to bring Nick along. The future terrified me. Bethany seemed to take it all in stride. “Don’t stress, June,” she’d say. But it wasn’t a choice for me.

  “We started getting acceptance and rejection letters from different universities,” I said.

  “We?”

  “My best friend, Bethany, and me. We’d get mail every day. I started worrying over them. I like to have a plan. I want to know what’s coming, you know, what to expect. There was too much to think about and not enough day to do it, so I made myself stay awake until I knew everything about whatever school we’d heard from that day, and not just the school but the place.”

  I had an entire notebook full of facts about each university.

  “Not sleeping was a choice,” I said. “At first.”

  “But over time you developed insomnia,” she said.

  “I guess.”

  She flipped through my notebook. I felt a little queasy. I didn’t just write down observations. Some of my most private thoughts were in there.

  “You’ve time-stamped some things,” she said.

  “I wanted to see if I could establish a pattern.”

  “You’re very smart, June. I think you’d make a good scientist.”

  “My science teacher would disagree.”

  “I think your science teacher knows you’re smart, too. What’s this?” she asked. She turned the notebook so I could see. “Why the quotation marks?”

  “They’re things I heard,” I said. My voice was squeaky and I hated it.

  “Who said them?”

  “I never named them.”

  “Are you hearing voices?” she asked.

  She asked it like it was any other question. What do you like on your pizza? I wanted to go back to talking about favorite colors and dead parents.

  I nodded. I didn’t want to admit it out loud to her yet.

  “When did you start hearing them?” she asked.

  “I think it was a couple of months ago.”

  It was hard to know exactly when it had started. For a long time, I didn’t know that what I heard was something other people couldn’t hear.

  “About the same time you started having trouble sleeping?” she asked.

  “I think so. It wasn’t voices at first,” I admitted.

  “Can you tell me about it?”

  I liked that she kept using the word can, like she understood that what she was asking might be something I wasn’t able to do.

  “At first it was sounds I could explain away, something I could rationalize. Like the doorbell ringing when I blow-dried my hair, or soft music playing in the other room, or phones ringing, things like that. I didn’t know other people couldn’t hear it, too. But one day my mom was home and the doorbell kept ringing over and over and I kept answering the door and no one was ever there. I thought there was a malfunction or something, like maybe there was something wrong with the wiring. She’d been asleep, because she works the night shift here at the hospital. She woke up, angry, and I thought it was because of the doorbell. But it turned out she hadn’t heard the doorbell, just me opening and closing the door over and over.”

  I shifted in my seat.

  “The first time it was a voice, I didn’t take it so well.”

  “What did the voice say?” Dr. Keels asked.

  “She sang to me.”

  “What did she sing?”

  It was a song my mom had sung to me when I was a baby. “A lullaby called ‘All Through the Night.’ Do you know that one?”

  “I don’t,” she said.

  “It’s really beautiful. It’s about guardian angels watching over the baby as she sleeps. They stay with her through the night, protecting her.”

  “And the voice sang this to you?”

  “Yes, she tried to sing me to sleep.”

  “Where did the voice come from? Did it sound like it was someone speaking in the room with you, like how I’m speaking to you now?”

  I shook my head. “It came from inside me.”

  “What did you do when it happened?”

  I’d been alone in my room. It was the middle of the night.

  “I tried to get away from her. I ran to my bathroom, but she was in there, too.”

  I’d gone into every room of my house, but she was everywhere. I’d stood right outside my parents’ bedroom door, my hand reaching for the doorknob, but then she stopped.

  “I
thought it was exhaustion, or my imagination, or some combination of the two, because what else could it be?”

  “How often did you hear her after that?”

  “Just from time to time. Whenever I was really tired, or stressed about something. And then there were more. Different voices, some older, some younger, always female.”

  “Did they sing, too?”

  I shook my head. “They say all kinds of things.”

  “What kinds of things?”

  “They say all the things I think about myself, my worries, my fears.”

  All of my insecurities, spoken to me by voices with no bodies.

  “I try to ignore it. I’d gotten pretty good at ignoring them. Writing down what they said made me feel better.”

  It was harder to know when they were talking when I was in a room with a lot of people. I’d gotten in the habit of watching people’s mouths to see if I could match the voices I heard to anyone in the room. That was another reason I liked to spend most of my time with just Nick and Bethany. It was easier to know when I was hearing voices that didn’t belong to them.

  “Are they ever commanding?” Dr. Keels asked.

  “They don’t tell me to do things, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  She scribbled on her pad.

  “Are you having other symptoms besides not sleeping and the voices?” she asked.

  “Like what?” I asked.

  “Are you experiencing anything else unusual? Things you think other people aren’t experiencing?”

  “I saw my mom’s shadow detach from her body and walk into the kitchen. Does that count?”

  “Yes,” she said, back to scribbling.

  “And one day I thought I saw my friend Becky. She was standing on Walton Street where we used to meet to walk to school together.”

  “That’s not unusual, is it?”

  “She’s been missing for more than a year. I yelled out for her but she didn’t hear me, because she turned and went the wrong way, back toward her house. I started running, to catch up to her.”

  My hands were red from wringing.