Pretty (21 page)

I pass through
Westwood's tall corridor of doorman buildings to where it opens onto a stretch of wide, clear sky. The blue canopy hangs over a military cemetery—a bright green field with rows and rows of white tombstones and plenty of room for more. Flags flutter from the lampposts. Past the cemetery, a sign says
National Veterans Park
.

I drive through the gates. The VA looks like a huge college campus. I pass dormlike, Spanish-style buildings and a church with peeling white paint that appears to be abandoned. There's a wall painted with a mural of soldiers and helicopters and cryptic seals with acronyms on them: POW/ MIA, SAR, AWG.

CD, MDD, ADD, PTSD.

On the other side of the wall I see what must be the hospital. It looks like a white square pushed up against another white square stacked on top of another white square and a white square with a door in it shoved on the front. I park on a wide expanse of asphalt parking lot, put Milla's Kitty Hawk in my purse for luck, and mechanically walk toward the entrance, trusting that Buck stole the license number from Susan's office and everything will go smoothly.

Stenciled on the tinted glass of the tall doors in white letters it reads:

On the wall of the entry hallway is a framed picture of our bloodthirsty esteemed leader. The hall leads into a small lobby with an empty reception desk, some seventies sofas, and a bunch of blown-up vintage soldier pictures on the walls. There are military seals all over the place and it looks official except there's no one around. A sharply dressed old black couple follows me through the door. The man looks like Cab Calloway, in a tan linen sports jacket with an ascot and a fedora. His wife is twice his size and wears a snazzy patterned dress and shoes with purple suede flowers on them. We stand in the middle of the lobby together, looking around, before they finally walk over to the desk where no one's sitting.

An elaborately cornrowed woman wearing a starched white uniform shirt walks out from a door behind the desk and sits down. The couple ask after a patient and are directed to a floor and a room. They walk away slowly toward the elevator, holding hands as if they have been walking together forever.

As I take their place it hits me. My oatmeal comes up hot from my stomach and pushes at the back of my throat. My head swims so badly I want to lie down and put my skull to the cool floor. I summon all my will and stare the woman right in the computer while I ask for Jake. Something she sees on her screen makes her ask for my ID. She festers and looks at my license and talks on the fucking phone and I want to grab it out of her hand and split her face open with it. I really do.

When she finally points me in a direction I barely hear what she says and head instead toward the bathroom, where I only miss the bowl a little. I sit there on the tile floor wiping up the puke with wads and wads of thin toilet paper and hoping that the nausea will pass and I'll be able to stand again. My body betrays me, the bones in my legs dissolving, my brain shaking loose of its moorings.

It's a good fifteen minutes before I can stand up. I wash my mouth out in the sink, dab my forehead with some wet paper towel, and look at my bloodshot eyes and no-longer-neat hair in the mirror. I am really pregnant like you read about, like you hear about. This is the thing that happens to other people. Happens to real people, not to me. But here it is.

When I venture back into the hospital world, I've forgotten the directions. A few stray souls wander around, but it feels cavernous and empty and without logic. I find a map and discern that I have to find the third floor of the West Wing to reach In-Patient Psychiatric. I get lost a million times doubling back past oncology and radiology. I wonder where the other people walking by are going: the old Korean guy; the chubby highlighted blonde with the big, flat ass and the baby in a sling; the old codger with his age-spotted hands and his shirt tucked in and his blue VFW baseball cap on.

At the end of a hall, finally, I find a nurses' station behind thick, smudgy glass with one of those metal circle grates to talk through that never seem to work. A blue, metal cage surrounds the station on the inside. A sign above the door says
High-Risk Elopement Area
. I've found it. Paper butterflies and flowers decorate the walls. It's nearly Easter.

The Asian, pink-scrub-wearing nurse with plates of hair frozen in hair-sprayed layers seems annoyed with me before I even say a word.

“Hello, ma'am. How are you?”

She nods and looks at me.

“I'm here to visit my brother, Jake Hill. I believe his doctor called ahead of me.”

“What?”

I repeat myself.

“Who?”

I repeat myself.

I pass my ID through and there's a bunch of clucking and shuffling and conferencing with other nurses and yet more typing and typing and a phone call made while looking suspiciously over a shoulder at me. At any point on this chain someone could just say no and that would be it. The possibility that I won't be allowed to see him flutters right behind my heart. I clasp my hands together in front of me to steady them from shaking.

When she comes back, I put my ear to the grate to try to hear what she says. I think she instructs me to go through the door to my left. There's a loud buzz. I push and the door opens so that I am in a corral, with another locked door in front of me. When the first door clicks shut behind me, the next door buzzes open and I walk through. I know how it works. I have been on a lockdown ward myself. Me and Jake, together again behind locked doors.

A different nurse greets me on the other side and this one is friendlier. She's a blonde who looks like a grown-up Marcia Brady with adult acne.

“Hi,” she says, real cheery. “Your brother is with the doctor right now. You can wait in the group room for a minute if you'd like. Holler for the orderly if anyone bothers you.” She indicates a sturdy man hovering around the perimeter of the room. “But they won't.”

She holds her arm out, indicating a common area with a few chairs and couches, a TV as the centerpiece, and a couple of tables around the sides.

About six men are scattered around, not counting the guy in the corner, who is so immobile and pale that he's almost invisible. I don't even notice him at first; I think he's a piece of furniture. I find a chair as far from anyone as possible and sit down, crossing my legs and waiting with my hands in my lap. I look at the TV and try not to look back at the patients staring at me. I stare ahead at Dr. Phil. There's a married couple on the show. They're unhappy. Something about sex. The man thinks that paying his wife for sex seems like a good incentive. Dr. Phil will fix it in the allotted time, I'm sure. He'll fix it or it wouldn't be a show.

I can't help it; I look around and wonder about people's odds.

What are the odds for the guy who looks maybe Jewish, yeah, whatever, I know, but some people do look Jewish, and kind of handsome and who's wearing a tracksuit and has an older lady visiting with him who looks like she's recently been attacked by a vampire? He looks kind of like an accountant or something except the pockets of his jacket are overflowing with crap: pieces of wadded-up paper and eyeglasses and bandannas and cigarettes.

Watching TV with me is an older black man with nearly white hair. He wears a neat flannel shirt buttoned up to the top, a pair of khaki pants worn shiny at the knees, and those old-man, brown leather shuffle slippers. He's not in hospital jammies or anything and he looks normal, except he leans forward in his seat so far that I am sure he is going to get up any second, but he doesn't. The man hovers on the edge of movement, but doesn't move. He stares at the screen.

A sloppy, angry-looking, fat white guy with a few strands of greasy hair sits in a wheelchair, working with his hand on what looks like an endless puzzle. He bursts out in profanity uncontrollably every few minutes. When he shouts, “Niggerloving fuck cock,” I can't help but study the expression on the black guy's face, but there's nothing. No wince. He doesn't even notice; he's that far away. Or he's just used to it.

I stare at the faces on the screen, so self-satisfied and sincere, but I listen instead to the accountant and his mom. I don't want to make eye contact, but I steal a sideways glance at them. The puzzle assembler has a weird clucking in his throat that reminds me of Missy. Every few minutes or so he spits on the floor next to him.

I wait forever, like I could hear a clock ticking if clocks still ticked. Dr. Phil is wrapping it up, everything all better of course, by the time a young doctor with gold-rimmed glasses walks up to me. He has a big baby face, pudgy and red with all his features scrunched up in the middle. He carries some files under one arm and I can see he's already thinking about the next thing he is going to do. The embroidered name on his smock pocket is Dr. Walker. He wears the same smock I wear in beauty school. It seems unfair to him, with all that school.

I stand and shake his hand and then we sit down, each facing each other.

“Your brother Jacob is suffering a recurrence of his schizophrenic symptoms, which is disappointing but not unusual. In his case we assume that there were a number of acute stressors that precipitated this recurrence. We also suspect he stopped taking his medication a few weeks ago. Does this seem correct to you?”

I think back. When did it start getting really bad? It's hard to believe it's something as simple as a pill.

“It's hard to say. I don't know exactly when it started getting worse. It's hard to tell just what's his normal self. There's always a little bit of crazy.”

“Excuse me?”

“Like, he hears voices sometimes. Even when he's well.”

“Then I wouldn't say he's well. I'd say his symptoms are controlled to a degree that he's able to function in a limited way. I'm afraid that may be the best we can hope for in your brother's case. I think it's important to understand that you can't put too much pressure on him by carrying expectations that he'll live independently or hold a job that isn't extremely undemanding. I was able to locate his records. It's my understanding that he resides in a halfway house, is that right?”

“Serenity.”

“That's very good. I would say we could strive to stabilize him to the point that he can gain that degree of independence again.”

“How is he now?”

“Symptomatically, your brother is suffering from auditory hallucinations, inappropriate or magnified emotional responses, and paranoid delusions. Initially he was in seclusion because he was refusing meds but he's being more cooperative now and we have him on his former dose of risperidone.”

“He hates them. His meds.”

The accountant slaps his own thighs and jumps back from the table.

“That, unfortunately, is also quite common. It would be tremendously helpful if his community of support, most important his family, continued to encourage him to be consistent with his medication. Otherwise he has little hope of functioning in the world.”

“Is it genetic?”

“How do you mean?”

“The schizophrenia.”

“Ass-licker,” says the puzzle guy.

“Well, there's possibly a genetic component to it. It doesn't indicate on his chart that schizophrenia was evident in either of your parents.”

“I don't mean his parents. Our parents. I mean a baby. If Jake had a baby, would the baby be sick, too?”

The doctor seems a bit taken aback. As if this is not his favorite question. He says, “Some people say there is a thirteen to fifteen percent chance of the offspring developing schizophrenia, but that is by no means set in stone. Schizophrenia is a brain disease, but there's a lot about it we don't understand.”

This baby has a chance at being okay. It's all any of us has, really.

“I've started him on a course of his normal medication in conjunction with something to calm him down and something to help him sleep and we have him on constant watch for the next two days. At that point, and then again at two weeks, we reevaluate. It's hard for supportive families to hear this, but what matters is his response to the medication. Period. If he was one of the percentage of people who were going to recover completely from this disease, statistically, he would have done so already.”

Something smells too sweet, like rot, and I try not to breathe through my nose.

With this the doctor gets up. He's been conscientious and patient and now he's moving on. “I'll let you see your brother briefly now. Please keep your visit short. It'll be better if he doesn't get overexcited.”

“Thank you, Doctor,” I say to his square, white back as he strides off.

I turn in my chair, watch the entrance of the hallway where the doctor appeared, and wait for Jake. I feel like I'm going to puke again but it's not uncontrollable this time, just vague and hovering.

I know it's contrary to what the doctor says, but I can't stop thinking that if I can just reach the Jake that I know is always there, always whole, always sane—if I can speak to that part of him I can tell him to come back.

Jake rounds the corner and he looks wrong. He's not wearing any hat, which he normally always does, and his hair sticks up in little tufts. He wears a T-shirt and thin hospital pajama pants and he looks spotless white clean, like I've never seen him. There are usually smears of grease and paint and grass stains, the colors of his messy life, all over him.

He stands with bare feet and looks at me from across the room as if he isn't sure who I am. I get up and decisively go to hug him. He kind of hugs back, but the hug is limp and uncoordinated. The electricity I feel off his skin is strange and staticky, like it's discharging some internal lightning. I take him by the arm just above his wrist and lead him to the sage green sofa.