Adrift in the Sound (7 page)

“What was that about?”

“Said she was fishing.”

Lizette pressed her lips together to keep from smiling. She hoisted her long legs over the side of the cot, leaned forward to tell the story.

“I looked at her and her eyes were like BBs, hard and black. Evil. I saw it. Teeth like a shark. Really bad chi, scary.”

“Did you tell the nurses?”

“No. I took ripped pages from the book I was reading and crumpled them up on the floor. I’d found matches hidden under the mattress when I first got there and got them out, set the paper on fire.”

“What?” Marian said wide-eyed.

“The girl started yelling and freaking out,” Lizette went on, rocking on the side of the cot, laughing in soft tinkles that started Marian giggling. “She called me a crazy bitch and said, ‘What the hell’re you doing?’ I told her I was building a fire. She goes, ‘What for?’

I said, “To cook the fish when you catch it.”

“My God, Lizzie. How did you think of that?” Marian crossed the small room to the cot and hugged Lizette. “What happened to the fisherman?”

“They told me later she always tries crazy stuff like that to freak-out roommates so she can get rid of them and get a private room. They knew all about her. She has had multiple involuntary admissions.”

“She stomped out the fire and called the nurses.” Lizette pulled the neck of her flannel shirt across her lips to contain her laughter. “She told them I was nuts and she wanted to be moved to a private room.”

“What’d the nurses do?”

“They took her out and put her in with a girl they kept in diapers because she rubs shit on herself. A couple of days later the black-haired one slashed the baby girl with broken glass. I think they finally took her to jail because she was too crazy to keep in the nuthouse.”

Marian burst into laughter. Lizette offered a sly grin because she knew Marian would misread her smile and be satisfied by her stories, wouldn’t probe any deeper.

“Well. It’s over now,” Marian said and sighed. “You’re safe here.”

Marian picked up a hair brush from the shelf and lifted Lizette’s wispy hair, made quick swipes at the ends to get the snarls out, then took long strokes down the length of her hair from the scalp to the middle of her back. Lizette pulled away from the strokes, her eyes watering from the pull. “When do you have to go back to see the doctor?”

“Never.”

Marian frowned, figured they could call later and find out.

“Let’s go stretch.” She headed for the door. “Get your sandals on. You need to get the kinks out.”

The sun spread across the damp skirt of the meadow below the cabin, soft wind breathed through the grasses. Lizette, towering above Marian’s petite, round shape, trudged to the platform, groggy and still sore from the beating in the alley. Sometimes her rib ached and her vaginal muscles went spastic at odd moments. She climbed the crude stairs at the platform’s side. Marian sat in Lotus position and began to breathe loudly through her nose.

“I’m doing Ocean Breath—Ujjayi Pranayama,” Marian said, hissing air through her sinuses. She sat on the platform facing the sea and Shaw Island in the distance, its outline gray-blue in the mist.

Lizette kicked off her sandals, sat down, put the soles of her feet together and bounced her knees. The waves roiled and spread water across the sand in front of them.

Open to the morning,” Marian said. “Let it dissolve your barriers, embrace the healing.”

She pushed forward and stretched her arms over her folded legs and missed Lizette’s scowl. Marian slipped back into
Child’s Pose
, her back lifting and falling with easy, noisy breath. Lizette followed, keeping an eye on her. They pushed into
Downward Facing Dog
together, pulled forward into
Plank
. Lizette collapsed into a rumpled pile when she tried
Crocodile
.

“Go to
Child’s Pose
,” Marian instructed like a fussy schoolmarm and Lizette was on the verge of telling her where to stick it. “It’s a recovery position. It’ll take you a while to regain your strength and be able to do
Crocodile
again.”

Lizette huffed as she pulled back, rested her hips on her heels, felt the rub of sit bones on heel bones, her pelvis aching. She heard panting and looked sideways. A black and white sheep dog, tongue flapping, bounded across the sand and up the steps to the platform, jumping up on Marian, who was standing one-legged in
Tree Pose
.

“Hey, Tucker dog,” Marian said, tipping sideways, bending to scratch behind the dog’s ears, playfully clamping his muzzle and letting him wiggle free. “What’re you doin’ here?”

She saw Greg waving to her from the edge of the trees and checked her watch and saw she was late for her rounds. That’s what she called her midwife visits to the pregnant women she helped prepare for home births. Marian pulled on her boots.

“This could take a while,” she said. “I’ve got a first-time mom. She’s young and scared, looks like she’s going to deliver early. I’ve got to hike up to her place. Hippies! They built a lopsided cabin up on the mountain.” She patted Tucker on the head. “She and the father are clueless.”

Lizette watched the two bounce across the meadow to Greg, who stood with his hands on his hips, whistling a command to Tucker and turning his back on Marian as she caught up with him. They disappeared into the trees and Lizette stretched out on the platform, relished the solitude.

NINE

EYES CLOSED
, lulled by the water’s rhythmic slosh, she awoke on the platform and heard a goose honk and, fading away, the sound of a ferry rumbling toward San Juan Island. In the distance, a truck’s engine growled, a gull mocked. Sounds pulsed up through her body and exploded out the top of her head. Her left eye throbbed, her arm ached, her pelvis burned. When she couldn’t take it anymore, she sat up and looked out on the vast, undulating sea, felt queasy.

At first it was just a black line cutting through the water. Then she noticed the slight bend at the tip. As the line got closer and changed direction, she realized it was a fin, attached to a broad back, an orca making for the beach, its dorsal like a knife blade aimed directly at her. She flapped her hands rapidly to release energy, put on her sandals, and hurried back to the cabin, looking over her shoulder at the orca’s humped back and the vapor puffs from its blowhole as it closed in on the beach.

Settling into her cot, out of breath, she pulled the sleeping bag over her and confronted her fear of the orca, as if watching it from underwater. Her ribs hurt when she moved on the narrow bed. Memories washed over her. She saw herself, stepped inside the memory, saw the flat, steely sky from the small window in her hospital room with one eye, the other swollen shut and bandaged. They said the vaginal tears would heal. Voices imparted these details with words that clacked like marbles, random sounds popping together in her head. She submerged, drifted from them to the place below, the place protected by “Watches Underwater.”

“Are you hearing voices?” In her half dream, the doctor sat beside Lizette’s bed, clipboard on his knees, tweedy and reeking of cigarette smoke. She clicked her tongue and turned to the wall. “We see you’ve been admitted to the mental health facility at Westside Hospital in the past. We have those records. Can you tell us something about that experience?”

He tried to gently draw out an explanation for her present condition, her past problems, but it felt like she was at the dentist, the doctor working without Novocain, fingers down her throat, indifferent to her pain. The toxicology report showed no drugs in her system when she was admitted, he told her. Her anger flared. She turned and showed it to him, showed him the flames behind her good left eye.

The cops tried to take a report, sent over a nice young officer in a crisp uniform and sparkly badge. He stood by her bedside and spoke slowly, in baby words, like she was a dimwit. He tried for a description of the suspect—height, weight, hair color—tried to establish a motive, figure out if she was somehow involved in the stabbing in front of the Twisted Owl that night, but she couldn’t give him anything concrete. After a half hour, he gave up.

“Miss Karlson?” Lizette did not respond. “You’ve got a visitor,” the nurse said sweetly, the fat one with the gaping buttons across her big tits. “Are you up to a visit, dear? It’s your father.”

Lizette turned and stared at the woman, focused on her chubby knees, the run in her white stocking, and leaned over to the bedside table. She picked up a small plastic water pitcher and hurled it, hit the door frame just as the nurse cleared the threshold, splattering water into the hallway. Lizette heard them paging her doctor over the loudspeaker and started screaming. The nurses sent her father away and threw out the flowers he’d brought.

She took a shot of sedative in the butt while they cleaned up the puddle, two orderlies standing by for safety, just in case. They said she was a danger to herself and others, called her “gravely disabled,” which she knew meant they thought she was crazy.

They took her by ambulance to Westside Hospital, a locked facility in Ballard, told her she’d be there seventy-two hours. She liked the ambulance ride. Colors flashed by like she was riding a carnival tilt-a-whirl, she remembered feeling exhilarated to be moving again, moving anywhere. The water on Lake Union reflected light like rumpled tinfoil, the leaf-barren trees twisted into wire sculptures in December. When she got to Westside, some of the staff recognized her, called her by name while she was being processed.

They laughed, she remembered, patted her on the arm like being there was no big thing. They medicated her, and put her in a private room. She slept a lot at first. She agreed to stay, stabilize, as they called it. She wanted to escape the grind of the streets—the cold, the hustle, didn’t care where she ended up.

After a couple of weeks, she dressed herself in a bathrobe and sketched on her bed. They tried to draw her out to mingle with the other women, join the group activities, but she refused. She met with Dr. Finch, a silly woman, Lizette thought, but harmless enough, as long as she didn’t ask too many personal questions. She didn’t feel like reliving her childhood or her mother’s death, or the assault in the alley for the benefit of a prying stranger.

Then one day a nurse popped her head in, said Finch was waiting, told her to dress, gather her belongings. Lizette pulled her things together, it wasn’t much. They tripped the door lock and she hurried down the stairs. Outside Dr. Finch’s office she knocked, tried the doorknob. She could see a dark shadow moving on the other side of the door’s wavy glass. As she took her hand away, the door opened and Dr. Finch stood there holding a blue plastic watering can, wisps of gray hair escaping from under the bifocals on her head. She waved with the can for Lizette to come in.

“Sit,” she said, nodding toward the center of the small room where a wooden chair was pushed against the big desk. Lizette had sat there many times, but today noticed the chair’s shining seat, polished over time by the rub of many twisting bottoms. She set her big canvas bag on the floor, propped it against the desk.

Seated, she braided her fingers and looked down to study the bare threads where the carpet pile was worn from the scuffle of troubled feet. The doctor finished watering the wilted plants along the window sill and settled into her coffee-colored leather chair. She lowered her glasses and peered at Lizette over the rims before scanning her file.

“You’re being released from this hospital for the third time in five years,” the doctor said flatly. “You’ve only been with us about six weeks, but in the future a court might not be so lenient about length of stay. Do you know that?”

Lizette lowered her head. A smile sneaked across her lips at the absurdity.

“This is no joke. You have to take your medication, consistently.” Dr. Finch leaned back in her chair, leveled her look at Lizette. “You can’t stroll around half naked in rough-neck bars twittering like a bird. The medication will help keep you stable, but you may experience tremors and tics, rhythmic contractions of the soft palate, slight nausea at times.”

Lizette hung her head as if in prayer.

“This isn’t hard, Elizabeth. Look at me,” she commanded. Lizette lifted her head, but hooded her eyes.

Bird-brained bitch
, Lizette thought.

“Take one pill a day and enjoy the rest of your life,” Finch said. “There’s no reason you need to come back here. You need outside support and counseling, that’s all.”

She rocked forward and pushed a pill bottle across the desk toward Lizette.

“Thousands of people suffer from destabilizing conditions and they’re able to hold jobs, lead relatively normal lives,” the doctor continued. “It says here you’ve been approved for public assistance, that the checks will be sent to your father’s house. Is that where you’ll be staying?”

“Yes,” Lizette said, looking out the window. She’d had a couple of months to think about what to do. She’d go out to Orcas Island, stay with Marian again. She’d watched gray clouds gathering above the treetops, winds rattling the branches, making way for rain.

“I get my county checks at my father’s house. That’s how we’ve done it since the first time.”

“Do you mean the time you broke out all the windows in your father’s home?” Finch waited, tapped the desk lightly with her fingertips.

Lizette nodded, but did not mean that time. She meant the time before that when she’d let her mother’s canaries out, freed them from the cages that hung from hooks in the kitchen. They had warbled pitifully, begging for freedom. She’d rolled over in her bed one morning, pulled her pillow around her head and still the canaries’ lamenting pierced her ears, twisted her heart and she couldn’t stand it.

That morning she’d released them, watched their bright yellow bodies fly into the welcoming green leaves of the apple tree in the backyard and disappear over the neighbor’s fence. Her mother had freaked out, said canaries were supposed be caged so they’d sing. Lizette called her a Nazi and began chirping, running around the kitchen, grabbing dishes, shattering them on the floor. That was when her mother ordered her out of the house. That was the first time they decided she was crazy, the first time they locked her up when they found her living on the street. After that they stopped chasing her.

Eventually, her father said he’d convinced his wife to allow Lizette to continue getting mail at their address, to stop by occasionally so they could see her. Her mother barely spoke to her, treated her like she had some disease that was catching. She hated the pitying, disappointed look on her mother’s face, the suffering on her father’s, couldn’t stand being around them, preferred the freedom of the streets to their suffocating, self-motivated concerns.

“Well, you’re going to need to check in somewhere,” the doctor said. “Your progress needs to be monitored or you’ll turn up here again. Frankly, you may not be free to go next time. Here’s a list of private counselors.”

“What am I supposed to do with it?”

“Don’t interrupt. I know you understand. I’ll expect to meet with you again in ninety days, before the pills run out, and we can confirm your private treatment plans. We’ve talked about all this before. All I can offer now is: Good luck. You’re free to go.”

Lizette saw herself pushing up from the chair, gathering the straps of her bag, dropping the pill bottle into it. She left the office, pulled the door firmly closed. In the hall, she looped the bag over her shoulder and headed toward the stairs. She remembered that she held back from running, tried not to draw attention from the staff, making for Westside’s main doors and the bright light beyond. On the way out she’d heard banging on the ward, someone whining loudly, growling between breaths. She nearly stumbled as she rushed outdoors, charging for the green lawn outside, running across the wet grass, her bag flapping against her side, laughing, laughing, choking, stopping to bend over and catch her breath, coughing, laughing some more, running.

She remembered she huddled in the bus shelter down the block from the hospital and watched a light rain fall, turned to study the leaves of the hedge that protected a garden and a neat white house beyond, where she guessed normal people lived. The leaves of the hedge reached toward each other, but did not touch, mist gathered in the leaf creases, collected into heavy drops and fell, splattering like mercury across the sidewalk. She’d dug in the bottom of her bag for change and got on, transferred to a trolley going downtown. She let the memories fade and slept.

Sweating, she got up now and peered through the cabin windows, moonlight glimmering the sea, guessing the time—about midnight, she thought, surprised that she’d slept again. She scanned the sea’s riffles, looked for the hunter. Embers glowed in the stove, cast an orange sheen over the room. She noticed neatly cut wood stacked beside the stove. She went and opened the stove door, fed the dampening coals a few sticks. Flames licked the edges of the neatly split wood.

Poland, she thought, comforted that he’d watched out for her, and went to her large canvas and turned it to face the room. Sitting on the rickety stool, resting her arms on her thighs, she studied the painting. After a while the gaps began calling to her, begging for color. She got up and gathered brushes, looked into tins, shook oil and thinner cans, fished her mother’s palette knife from the bottom of her canvas bag. On a square of thin plywood, she mixed a small amount of paint, working it to the right fluidity. Feeling the brush handle in her fingers, she twirled it slowly to balance the paint load. Leaning into the canvas, she stroked the color into the places it wanted to go, got up, stood back, went to the stove, added a couple more logs to the fire. Humming, she sat back down, considered, listened to the white spaces, waited for the call and mixed manganese violet on her palette, feeling the color’s richness like a weight on her fingertips.

Sometime during the musing and mixing, dawn arrived, flattening the sea to sheet-metal gray, deckling its edges with iridescent black. On the beach, black cormorants skittered along the sand. A seal’s sleek head broke the water’s surface and periscoped the cove. Lizette wiped her hands and went to the window, tried to make contact with the creature. He slipped below the metallic surface, popped up, twitched his whiskers, blinked. Further out, she saw the straight black line heading for the cove. The orca blew steam, glided, disappeared. Lizette watched, looking for the seal, scanning the water’s surface. Glancing down at the beach, she saw it had hauled out and waddled across the sand, plopped into its own puddle of fat, rolled over to accept the sun’s early warmth on its belly.