Strangers (33 page)

It was again pill time, not more than a half-hour ago. She did not feel sleepy, not now. She was marvelously alert, attuned to everything around her. She heard the sudden flare of the burner of the hot water tank in the utility room, the delicate—alive breathing of the girls
—Marcy exhaled when Kim inhaled and when Kim exhaled, Marcy inhaled, they were so opposite in every way—
even the hydraulic rush of blood through her own veins and arteries.

There was a wondrous precision to this moment of intense hearing and her muscles were taut with the effort of holding onto it.

She realized, then, that she was not breathing. Everyone else in the room was breathing—she could even hear Hot Lips and Colonel Potter on television—but she was not. She had to breathe! If you stopped breathing, you died.

She tried to pull in air and could not. Her head was pounding. Her blood rolled in angry, desperate demand.

I am dying!

No!
A moment of calm and pause and internal hush.
She had slipped out of the natural rhythm of respiration and once she regained it she would be all right. She focused on the pulsations of her wrists and temples, behind her ears, at the back of her knees, and she tuned in to the messages sent to these contact points by her racing heart. She had it then.

In
goes the good air,
out
goes the bad air,
in
goes the good air
out
goes the bad air…
She was fine, just fine, breathing so deeply that she could feel the oxygen saturating the cells of her lungs.
In and out and in and out…

“Beth,” Michael said, “are you okay?”

Okay can’t you see?
She said that, or thought it, she wasn’t sure which, to the tune of the first line of “The Star Spangled Banner.”

She knew that if her hearing was so sharp, her vision was probably no less acute. There was a trick, however, to seeing well,
to seeing
the everything
that is the all,
and that was instead of squinting the way most people did when they tried to focus on an object, you had to
open
your eyes as wide as possible.

I see Eye See…

The picture on a television screen was not a real picture. It was exploding dots of red and green and blue. She studied the dots, first the red, then the green, then the blue, and then let them merge into something more, a picture.

The camera zoomed in for a close-up on Alan Alda. He was drunk, slurring an anti-war monologue: “What it is, is it’s all crazy, you see…”

Yes, Hawkeye, I
do
see!

“…
like
a joke, but the thing is, the only way you can handle the joke is to come up with a few jokes of your own.”

Hawkeye was—
of course, of course
—talking to her. He had probably tried to speak to her before but she had ignored him. She hoped that she had not hurt his feelings. Now he was telling her what to do.

“Beth,” Hawkeye said, “believe me, if I could, I’d save you. I’d save everyone, Beth.”

I know that, Hawkeye.

“I can’t, so it’s all up to you, Beth. You’ve got to be the one to save yourself and those you love. Can you do that?”

Yes, I can.

“Beth…”

It was not Hawkeye who spoke; it was Michael. She turned her head, saw his lips shape her name after she’d heard it like a badly dubbed foreign movie. Then she heard the cold echo:

Beth

Beth

Beth

Beth…

“Are you all right?”

He
was the one who had played the jokes, all the vicious, heartless, monstrous tricks. But she could trick him! Whatever he said was certain to be a lie
—Liar, liar, pants on fire
!—
and so she would not let herself hear it.

“Look Beth…”

There! She’d turned him off. It was no more complicated than clicking the knob on a radio. Michael was talking to her, his mouth was moving, but she heard nothing. Beneath the aqueous surface of his eyes lurked the dark specter that was the
real
Michael—
Cruel Michael! Wicked Michael!
Stranger
Michael!

She could feel the evil radiating from him. It was draining her of strength. She would get away, but calmly, so he would suspect nothing, and then she would concoct a scheme of her own, a trick of salvation, of rescue.

She stood up and went to the stairs.

“Beth! What in the hell!”

Careful! She was not concentrating as intently as she had to and so his words broke through her barriers. She did not have to walk; effortlessly, she was carried up to the kitchen by the stairs that had become an escalator.

She knew then that Michael did not control the house; it was on her side. In the kitchen, she stood with her head cocked, listening to the house, to the hidden messages it wished to share with her. The chilly night pressed against the windows and she heard the glass panes whisper “Courage” as they refused to allow entry to the dark and the cold. The quiet hum of the refrigerator was the house wiring’s electrical energies. She tuned in to that power, and felt it indomitable within her. The plumbing vibrated with liquid secrets and confidences meant for only her.

She went to the sink, turned on the water Bluish-gray steam rolled out, a heavy fog filling the entire kitchen. She had a place to hide. She was invisible within this dense cloud. She was concealed from Michael.

She saw him
—I see
him
but he can’t see me
—as he came upstairs. The girls were right behind him. Beth held out her arms. “Come to me, children.”

Within this surrounding mist, they would all be safe. He could not find them, could not harm them.

 
“Mom,” Kim said, “you’re being real weird!”

Michael said, “Kids, your mom’s sick.”

“Liar!” Beth screamed.

“…
so
you get up to your room. Don’t worry, I’ll take care—of her.”

No!
The children were leaving, gazing back at her. They didn’t understand. If they did not come to her, she could not protect them!

“All right, Beth. Everything is all right now. You calm down. Get a hold of yourself.”

With his hands on his hips, he stood on the wispy perimeter of the fog. He was grinning—
the flesh of his face peeled away and his skeletal head was of itself a horrifying smile—
as he said. “Shit,
Beth,
looks like this is it. You’ve slipped your trolley, kiddo.” He laughed. “You’re freaked out. Your belfry is chockful of bats. Wifey dear, you are one hundred percent, stem-to-stem goofus. You are fucking
nuts!”

Hands balled into fists, she charged him.

He quickly grabbed her wrists, spun her around, and, keeping her arms pinioned, crushed her to him in bear hug. Her tears exploded and, with them, a string of profanity. Michael laughed. “That’s great. Nice and loud so the kids can hear you call their daddy twelve kinds of fucker. They’ll have an interesting story to tell at school tomorrow. ‘Hey, teacher, my mommy went crazy last night.’”

“I am not crazy!”

“Tell that to the men in white.”

The men in white arrived twenty minutes later. They stuck a hypodermic in her arm, strapped her to a stretcher, rolled her out of the house, and took her to Prairie Hills Sanitarium.

He was strikingly handsome, she thought. In his brown, three piece woolen suit, the stylishly thin tie knotted in a precise half-Windsor, his beard sharply sculpted, he had the rugged but intellectual appearance favored by advertising men’s apparel in the more conservative men’s fashion magazines.

She hated him. He was plotting against her, he and Michael…

“Beth,” he said, leaning his shoulders against the
door frame
, “when I ask a question, you are supposed to answer me.”

She glared at him. She was sitting up in bed, wearing a scratchy, white cotton hospital “Johnny.” She was numb—empty—from her hairline to her toes.

Beside her bed, there was a toilet bowl and a sink in the ten by ten isolation room. The floor tile was white and unpatterned. There was an observation window in the door. From time to time, eyes had suddenly appeared at it, always catching her unaware.

She remembered how when she was eight years old, her father took her to Chicago for a visit to the famous Shedd Aquarium. She peered at the sharks, those incredibly flexible torpedoes, behind the glass, and their glacial eyes looked back at her and she’d wondered who found
who
stranger. It was nearly inconceivable that both sharks and men shared a planet; they were so impossibly different. There in the aquarium, the sharks swam and she felt confusion, and fear, and even the hate prompted by the totally alien.

Dr. Jan Pretre, she thought, was a shark. He belonged on the other side of the glass.

“Beth, I want to help you. I can’t do that unless you cooperate.”

His help?
she
thought.
Perhaps he might help her choose her own casket!
She said nothing.

“Do you know where you are?”

She said, “In an insane asylum.”

“We don’t use that term nowadays,” Jan Pretre said. “This is a private institution, Prairie Hill Mental Hospital, and you’re my patient. How long have you been here, Beth?”

“Monday,” she said. “That’s when they brought me here.”

“Very good,” Jan Pretre nodded. He folded his arms across his chest. “You’re far more in touch with reality today than you have been, Beth. Now, can you tell me what day of the week this is?”

She thought about it. She wasn’t sure. Without a window in the room, no clock, the light, overhead that never went out, the constant dim illumination in the corridor, there were no ways to measure the passage of time. None of the people who unlocked the door to give her pills and shots answered her questions or even spoke to her. (And what were they drugging her with? Something that turned her blood to molasses and made it impossible to hold onto a single thought for more than an instant.)

“Don’t you know what today is?” Jan Pretre said.

“I know that you can’t keep me here. You have to let me out. I’m not a prisoner,” she said slowly and clumsily.

“No, you’re not,” agreed Jan Pretre. “You voluntarily committed yourself…”

“I did like hell!”

“That’s your signature on the admission forms, Beth.”

It was a memory or a dream or a fantasy
or an hallucination:
someone was telling her to sign something, that if she signed she would be safe and the girls would be safe and that everyone would be safe and she was signing, looking at her name and thinking
That is all there is left of me, there, on that line…

“I signed myself in so I can sign myself out!”

“You could indeed,” Jan Pretre said. He put his hand to his bearded chin. “I’ll bet a lawyer would have you released in an hour.” Then he glanced around the room. “What a shame, no telephone in here so you can seek legal counsel.”

Beth said nothing. She tried to think, but her mind was cluttered with bits of nonsense—a line from a nursery rhyme, the items on a shopping list, the remembrance of the way smooth stones glittered in sunlight as they lay in the shallow water of a stream.