One September Morning (35 page)

Lakeside Hospital
Abby

T
hree days after the dosage of sedative is reduced, Emjay Brown once again manages to speak. “What day is it?”

“Wednesday.”

He motions for water, and Abby brings the cup’s straw to his lips. But now, for the first time, he takes it from her and drinks.

Abby watches him attentively, resisting the urge to jump up and do a happy dance in the middle of the Day Room. She has been by his side for many hours during the past three days. At times he asked for a drink, and once he even had her change the channel on the television until she hit on a basketball game. But this is the first time he’s strung words together.

He braces his arms in the chair to take in the surroundings, the plant hanging from the ceiling in the corner, the mural of flowers on the far wall. “I really fucked up this time. I made it to the Cuckoo’s Nest.”

“You’re in Lakeside Hospital, in the psych ward. Do you know why you’re here, Emjay?”

He takes another sip, thinking. “I was under attack.” He closes his eyes. “A convoy. A whole mess of armored vehicles. And my gun…it wasn’t my gun. I looked down and all I had for firepower was some lame hunting rifle.”

“Is that what you remember?”

“I think so. Or maybe that part’s a dream. I don’t know.” His chin lolls to his chest. “Do you know what happened?”

“You were found on Mason Boulevard with a rifle in the middle of the night,” Abby says.

“Jesus Christ.” He rubs his knuckles over the growth on his cheek. “Did I hurt anyone?”

“A shot was fired from the rifle, but it jammed after that. The police found a slug lodged in a tree by the road.” Abby knows this because she has researched that night, checked news accounts and police reports. She thought Emjay would want to know.

“A small mercy.” He sighs and scratches his upper arms.

“How do you feel now?”

“Like somebody turned the world on slow motion. Like I’m trying to run underwater with lead shoes. Everything is slow.”

“You’re on medication to stabilize you. Dr. Jump has you on Ativan to relax you, and Wellbutrin for depression.”

“Well, that explains it.” He scratches his arms vigorously, then falls back in the chair as if the itching has exhausted him. “That explains why I feel so dead.”

“You feel dead,” she says. “That feeling probably isn’t completely caused by the medications. Have you ever heard of post-traumatic stress disorder?”

He closes his eyes and nods.

“Very often, episodes like the one you just had occur months after a stressful incident, a stressor, like an accident, an attack, a violent war experience.”

He nods again, but this time his dark brown cheeks are streaked with tears. “What’s going to happen to me?” he asks in a whisper.

“You can work toward recovery.”

He shakes his head. “Yeah. Sure.”

“Emjay, your episode is a reaction to horrific memories, things you have endured that are difficult for any of us to understand or explain. If you take positive action, one day your reaction to those memories will be less intense. You can improve your ability to cope.”

“Can you make it all stop?” he asks.

She’s not sure if he’s talking about life or his memories. “Do certain images replay in your head?” she asks.

“Over and over. I close my eyes but they’re still there. I just want them to stop.”

“You know, Emjay, you’ll never forget your war experiences. We can’t erase them, and we can’t completely remove the emotional pain you feel when you remember them.”

“Then what’s the point?” He leans back in the chair and presses his eyes closed. “What’s the point?”

“The point is that we’re here to help you if you want to make an attempt at feeling better. And I’m not talking about the fuzzy world of medications. We can come up with a recovery plan together. But you have to be ready to make that commitment.” She closes his chart and stands, noticing that his eyes are still closed. He must be exhausted. “You think about what we discussed, okay?”

She returns to the nurses’ station and grabs the chart for her new patient, a military wife with a history of alcoholism. Bernadette asked to be admitted after she went on a drinking spree and left her six-month-old with a sitter for three days. Her husband, now deployed in Iraq, is not here to offer emotional support and probably doesn’t even know of his wife’s meltdown yet.

Abby is reading through Bernadette’s chart, composing “therapeutic” questions in her mind, when she hears someone buzz through the door to the ward. Although she’s become so accustomed to the buzzer she barely notices, this time something is different. The air seems to chill twenty degrees, and without looking up, she knows it’s him.

Dr. Charles Jump.

She has managed to avoid him in her three days on duty, and she was hoping for a fourth until now. A little research, and she learned he was on the evening shift this week. She suspected that he was covering for another doctor at the moment.

Don’t let him smell your fear. Don’t back down. Just act normal
.

He doesn’t acknowledge her as he enters the nurses’ station and brushes past her, edging her out of the space where the charts are stored.

“Who’s been messing with my patients’ charts?” He rifles through the open file then turns to her. “Do you have the charts for Dryer and Brown?”

She shakes her head, tying to remain void of expression. “I have Bernadette Conseco.”
Not your patient, thank God.

“Where the hell are my patient charts? Nurse Hobart? Where’s Rhonda Hobart?” he calls, swiping past her again. The metal part of his clipboard scrapes her elbow, stinging. Deliberate? Probably, the bastard.

But she refuses to look up and acknowledge the pain.

So much for worrying about any sexual harassment at work. Jump is acting as if he’s never met her, which is chilling in a different way.

What kind of person swings to such radical extremes? First, he insists on being a part of her life, helping her in any way he can—his promise to John. Then, he refuses to let their relationship end. “You can’t abandon me, I won’t let you,” he said, first pathetic, then angry. And now, he’s cold, slightly hostile, estranged.

Those mood swings, the fear of abandonment…Could it be that he suffers from borderline personality disorder? Fluctuating emotions, inappropriate anger…

My first week as an intern, and I’m diagnosing the director of psych services.

If that isn’t typical of an overenthusiastic student. For now, she will apply her knowledge of the field to the patients she’s assigned to work with.

Once she hears his barking voice fade down the hall, she runs her index finger over the tabs of the files until she comes to “E.” There in the front of the file is the chart for Emjay Brown. Jump didn’t think to look there, and when he asked her if she had it, she was honest when she said no.

Abby glances out at the Day Room where Emjay seems to have drifted off to sleep between a handful of patients involved in an animated card game and Oprah chatting with some author about near-death experiences.

It’s been a day of landmarks.

Emjay Brown returned to the land of the living.

She survived a face-to-face with Dr. Jump.

And it looks like she’s got Brown’s chart concealed from Jump for at least one more day. Of course, all this information will have to go into the hospital databases eventually, but electronic charts are only updated once a week.

She’s still got time to help Emjay. Time to solicit another doctor to look at the case. Time to figure out why Charles Jump is determined to either seduce her or hurt her.

Canada
Noah

N
oah Stanton breaks open a fresh bale of hay and loosens it with a pitchfork. Lipsy and Pearl need fresh hay in their stalls. He stabs the pitchfork in and begins tossing the fresh hay into Lipsy’s stall. Stab, toss. Stab, toss. The rhythmic motion that once made the muscles in his shoulders and back ache now feels like a soothing song. Work on the Delacroixs’ small mixed farm is physical and very tiring, but at the end of the day, sleep is welcome and peaceful.

Lipsy’s round, sleepy eye watches him as he corrals her into the cleaned stall. Edna and Collette have had her for many years and she’s proven to be an excellent milking cow. He’d been impressed and surprised to meet these women who milked the cows themselves; he didn’t think anyone did that anymore.

When he asked where the milking machines were, the old woman clapped her hands to her cheeks dramatically and exclaimed,
“Mon Dieu! Vous êtes ridicule!”
He later figured out she thought he was speaking nonsense, but her disapproval was obvious in that moment.

“We do the milking,” Collette explained. A solid young woman with hair the color of caramel cascading from a high ponytail and a mouth that curved in a permanent smile, she had the patience to explain so many things to him. “My mother will continue to milk the cows, but she is growing old and needs help lifting buckets and bales of hay and whatnot.”

Heavy lifting he could do.

In exchange for his work, they provided him with meals and the use of a small cottage behind the farm. The one-room cottage with its fireplace, simple kitchen, and shower stall suit him well. This is a place where a man can live and be safe.

Finished with Lipsy’s stall, he hangs the pitchfork and gloves on the wall and heads back to the cottage for a cup of tea. Nestled amid tall pines, the cottage is a tiny gem, its new windows glittering in the receding afternoon light.

When he first arrived, the windows of the cottage needed replacing, and he has begun that task. He accompanied Collette into the city when she made the drive back in December to purchase double-paned replacements from a wholesaler, then did the job himself, hammering and caulking, pressing insulation into the walls. After the first window was installed, he stood there for a good ten minutes, soaking it all up: the shock of golden light on a pasture, long purple shadows dwarfing towering evergreens.

By installing the window, he feels that he has opened up this beauty, somehow gained access to it.

So many windows here in the north.

Windows to look outside. Windows to gaze within.

He lights the fire under the kettle and opens his laptop, realizing that it’s time. There’s an outside chance that his story might reach someone who’s trapped in the same place, someone else searching for a window. He’s been told by the webmaster that his bio will be posted whenever he’s ready. He’s been putting this off, mostly waiting for the words to form, but now that his path is clear, his fingers fairly fly over the keyboard.

He takes his hands from the keyboard, wondering if he should be more specific. The images of daily life at Baghdad Hospital come to mind. The bodies brought in by soldiers desperate to save their buddies. The amputations, pulverized limbs dropped into red plastic bags with the casualness of a housewife cleaning a roaster.

Is that necessary to reach people?

His mission is not to shock but to help the reader become more aware.

To the brewed tea he adds a touch of milk, marveling at the richness of fresh milk. Taking one of Edna’s fresh-baked lemon cookies from a tin, he decides to give more of his personal past and writes:

That will put him back on the radar, although he suspects the U.S. government could have found him if they really wanted to track him down. So be it. The other war resisters on the Web site had been left to live in peace. Granted, the Canadian government had yet to grant them political asylum, but the war resisters movement was still in its infancy. He clicks on the Web site to see their faces—Jeremy, Brandon and Patrick, Darrell and Robin. He’s never met any of them, but he enjoys seeing their faces, men living their lives. Living.

He sends the e-mail, then grabs his jacket to clean the horses’ stalls before he brings them in for the night.

Down in the paddock, Collette is adjusting the saddle on Midnight, “Minuit” she calls him.

“Getting some exercise?” he calls through the cool evening air.

“I am always getting exercise.” Her tone is matter-of-fact as she lifts herself easily onto the tall horse.

“I meant the horse,” he says.

She shakes her head. “No, you meant to tease me.” Collette has a solid grip on reality that’s harsh and reassuring.

They have spent many evenings sitting by the fire in the big house, after a fine meal cooked by Edna, who doesn’t even try to understand Noah when he speaks English. Collette is tutoring him in French, and somewhere in the process they have exchanged stories of their childhoods.

Collette has helped him remember the good times he had with John. The day Noah lost his boots in a snowdrift and John carried him all the way home—three blocks—on his back. The way John supported him when he played football with the older boys, picking Noah first for his team and letting him be quarterback. And John’s generous manner when they were teenagers. That night when he lent Noah his car and gave him three condoms to take out Courtney Swanson. Noah, a virgin at the time, looked at the three packets and asked if you needed to wear all three at once.

Embarrassing, yes, but good memories. Noah is proud to have been John Stanton’s brother. He is still angry at John for dying, but he is no longer angry at him for living.