The Moon Around Sarah (9 page)

‘Then she could….’

‘Hypothetically,’ Manzel said, returning Don’s word to him. The doctor rolled his head from side to side, ‘Such a recovery from hysterical trauma is not unheard of, but it is very rare and recovery usually has been the result of fairly unpleasant shock treatments which sometimes burden the patient with new trauma. After all, your sister has been mute since…’ he glanced again at Sarah’s file, ‘since the age of four. It is Dr Gerard’s opinion – and it would be mine as well – that she will never recover her speech. That, quite simply, she does not
wish
to.’

‘But why
wouldn’t
she?’ Don asked almost desperately, ‘What could have happened to her?’

Dr Manzel closed the folder deliberately. The suspicion had returned to his eyes.

‘As you must know, Mr Tucker,’ he said with slighting emphasis, ‘none of your family admits to having any idea what trauma or series of traumas might have precipitated Sarah’s hysteria – or none has been made available to us. Therefore Dr Gerard and I have no starting point to begin a therapeutic program. As to your hypothetical question: can you imagine how impossible it is to attempt to
psychoanalyze
or even frame therapeutics for a mute patient? It is my understanding that she cannot even write since this
episode – whatever it was – occurred before Sarah was even of school age.’

‘She can write her name,’ Don said heavily.

‘So you see, Mr Tucker,’ the doctor said, spreading his hands, ‘any discussion of treatment and future release is unfortunately moot at this point. I can tell you nothing else. Perhaps you wish to continue this conversation with Dr Gerard? He will be in the office tomorrow.’

Don rose. He looked down at the thin rust-colored carpet for a moment, shaking his head.

The doctor had also risen. ‘I’m sorry if I have
disappointed
you,’ Manzel said, not unkindly, ‘I’m sure your family must have been told all of this before.’

‘We don’t communicate real well,’ Don muttered.

‘I understand.’

Dr Manzel walked Don to the door.

‘I understand your feelings,’ Manzel said, ‘it’s terribly frustrating to have someone you love injured or ill and find there is nothing to be done about it.’ He opened the door and they paused there for a moment, ‘Perhaps you – someone in the family – can devise some plan for keeping Sarah at home? She’s such a pretty girl. And looking at her, watching her eyes, one cannot help but feel that she is very bright behind her eternal silence.’

‘Yes.’ Don took the doctor’s weak hand in parting. ‘Maybe we can figure out a way to keep her at home. I’ll talk it over again with the family.’

‘I wish you luck, Mr
Tucker
,’ Manzel said sadly, ‘I sincerely do. I don’t believe myself that Sarah is a good
candidate for our programs. I do believe you … you so seem to have her best interests at heart.’

Manzel retreated to his office, closing the door quietly behind him.

Don took a deep breath, swearing softly. A damned mess: was what this was. Then he went looking for Sarah.

He found her in a small recreation room where a group of elderly people stared at a banal television show flickering on the wall, or paced aimlessly, supported by canes or walkers. One man sat alone, staring out the window, into his past.

‘She’s right over there,’ Mrs Stanzione told Don. ‘Will you be able to find your way out all right?’

‘Yes, thank you.’

‘Then I’ll get back to my duties.’

‘Wait. Did you show her the psychiatric ward?’

The nurse hesitated. ‘Why, no. Dr Manzel didn’t ask me to … it’s not really wholesome always.’

‘I understand,’ Don said, and the nurse erased her briefly nervous apprehension, smiled and walked away down the corridor.

Don leaned his back against the wall and stood watching Sarah for a long while. She was crouched behind a woman in a wheelchair. The old lady’s face was pallid, hollowed and scoured by time. Sarah was gently stroking the woman’s straight, square-cropped, lifeless hair – dirty gray – a yellow-steel color. The old woman stared straight ahead with sunken eyes, apparently unaware of Sarah’s attention, her incredibly wrinkled hands, with prominent knuckles
and a network of deep blue veins, resting on the arm of the wheelchair.

Don walked slowly toward them. The room smelled of age and urine and only vaguely of some ineffective disinfectant.

‘It’s time to go, Sarah. Are you ready?’

She nodded and rose. Then, Sarah bent and kissed the stranger on the forehead and patted her arm. The old lady’s fingers lifted and then her hand raised and fastened itself briefly to Sarah’s and her cloudy eyes lifted to hers. The hand fell away again and her gaze dropped.

Sarah kissed her again and smiled as if they had
communicated
in some secret way only they knew. And perhaps they had.

Perhaps there was no secret to it at all. Sarah had touched the woman in the wheelchair and with those touches let the woman know that she was not just a last flickering glow of dying intelligence, but still a human being worthy of respect and love.

‘All right, Sarah. Let’s go now.’

In the corridor Don had another thought. He took Sarah to the central waiting room and left her sitting on one of a row of chrome-legged chairs.

‘I’ll be just a minute,’ he told her, ‘then we’ll go.’

He walked down the corridor, passing the nurses’ station where three white-clad women hovered around filing
cabinets
and a computer, and walked on, following the pointing sign reading: ‘Psychiatric Wing’.

Reaching the end of the carpeted hallway, he came to a set of green double doors. A sign read: ‘No unescorted
persons beyond this point’ and so he backtracked to a side corridor toward another nurses’ station. He could hear yelling beyond the walls somewhere, someone crying fitfully; a man’s voice screaming curses in cadence. Meaningless curses against a meaningless world.

No one paid any attention to Don as he entered a small waiting area much like the one in which he had left Sarah.

A black orderly was leading a man in a plaid bathrobe somewhere. The orderly called to a male nurse, ‘He’s at it again, Kelly.’

‘Painting on the walls?’

‘Yeah. A big old handful of shit smeared everywhere. I got to throw him in the shower. Have one of the janitors get up to the rec room to clean it up before someone eats it.’

The nurse laughed, ‘OK, Billy.’

Don March continued up the corridor, following the orderly and his charge, the muralist.

The moaning and shrieking continued behind the walls, emanating from unseen chambers. He watched as the orderly guided the hunched man in the plaid bathrobe into a room marked ‘showers’.

The ceilings seemed too low, thick and oppressive. The air circulating through the air-conditioning system did not smell fresher, only altered. Finding a small balcony where a female nurse sat smoking a cigarette, legs crossed, her puffy eyes lifeless and tired, he opened the sliding glass door and went out.

It was cool; the air smelled of the sea even this far inland. The remnant clouds left behind by the storm drifted
silently by. Below him, Don could see a small yard with a single tilting cypress tree, a few concrete benches scattered around in its shade. A tall chain-link fence topped with concertina wire enclosed the area where a dozen patients in bathrobes or ill-fitting clothes wandered around. One young woman was kneeling, looking skyward; she seemed to be praying. A man wearing a stocking cap sat on one of the benches, methodically slamming his fist against his own knee.

‘Exercise yard?’ Don asked the nurse. Startled from her private thoughts, she looked up. Ash from her cigarette fell onto the lap of her white dress. Don repeated the question.

‘Yeah,’ she answered tiredly, jabbing her fingers at her tinted hair, ‘for the “nons”.’

‘For the…?’

‘Non-violent patients. Not all of our patients get to come outside. Some of ’em like to fight. One of ’em tried to climb that fence. Got all snarled up in that razor wire. They had to cut him out of it. All the time he was up there dangling, he was calling, “Mommy, Mommy!”’

‘I see,’ was all Don could think to say.

‘Is there anything you need?’ she asked Don with a smile that might have been meant to be enticing but only looked deeply weary. Everything about her looked tired; everyone in this place, patients and doctors and nurses alike, looked tired.

‘No thanks. I was just taking a look around.’

Don smiled at her – his general-purpose smile – and he went back inside, sliding the glass door shut behind him.

He found Sarah sitting where he had left her, looking at the cover of a magazine on the table in front of her without opening it.

‘Come on,’ Don said, ‘we’re getting out of this place.’

Once in the car and on the road, Don’s distress subsided, but not his concern. How in the Lord’s name could those people, Sarah’s
family
, even consider putting her in such an institution? Surely they had visited it! They must have. Sarah was not mad. Forty or fifty years of life lay ahead of her. How many years spent in that environment would it take to drive someone mad?

Sarah touched Don’s arm. It was a rather urgent gesture, and unusual for her. She was pointing toward a side road, which lay ahead.

‘What is it, Sarah? What do you want?’

She continued to point. Her eyes were eager, pleading.

Don was vaguely familiar with the road. It was a winding, slow stretch of two-lane asphalt which snaked through the hills. It eventually intersected the coast highway again south of town a few miles.

‘You want to go that way?’ He glanced at the gas gauge. ‘OK.’

Why not, if it was important to her? She seemed to know the road, and it ended up where he was heading. He was in no hurry to get back anyway, because then – he had to face it – he would either have to find a member of Sarah’s family or turn her over to the authorities. As terrible as much of the day had been, it had been a long, long time since he had enjoyed anyone’s company as much as Sarah’s. When they
were alone, he felt a deep satisfaction, a calmness of mind. He looked at her from the corner of his eye. It was true: she did have a special and mysterious way of communicating. How could anyone not delight in her presence? How could they have determined to cast her aside like this!

‘Dear Sarah,’ Don March said, ‘why won’t you speak? If only a few words. To tell them that you don’t want to go to that place?’

But she remained mute, smiling at him as he swung onto the meandering back road, and they followed it down toward the coast through deep stands of cedar and old pine.

When they drove through cuts in the hills, the shadows were cool and deep. The occasional meadow was sprinkled with grazing white-faced cattle and the ripe scent of long grass mingled with the pungency of the cedar and pine trees. It was a clean, heady mixture. White clouds still floated past against a rain-cleansed blue sky.

‘I’m glad you brought us this way, Sarah. It’s nice. I wouldn’t mind living out here.’

Sarah felt her heart lift eagerly. Then, perhaps she wouldn’t have to move at all. Never leave Baby and Poppsy. If the young man bought the old house, the two of them could live there even if Mother and Aunt Trish went away. It was an encouraging thought. She leaned her head back and let the wind trifle with her hair as the miles drifted by.

The sea eventually came into view again, cobalt blue and glittering silver seen through a gap in the closely bunched hills, and Sarah leaned toward the dashboard, looking ahead expectantly.

‘What are you so interested in?’ Don asked. ‘It’s still a long way back to town.’

She shook her head, continuing to peer ahead through the rain-spotted windscreen.

Well, of course she knows where the town is, Don thought. If she knew enough to take this back road, she obviously knows where she is. He reflected on that
eagerly-made
choice. It seemed very unlikely that she had chosen it for the scenery. Then….

Sarah bounced in her seat excitedly and patted his knee. She looked at him and pointed toward a dark two-storey house standing alone on a low knoll.

‘Over there? Is that your home, Sarah?’

She nodded vigorously and Don slowed to turn off onto a rutted gravel driveway. He felt a sinking sensation in his stomach. He did not want to leave her, but maybe it was best to have done with it all. He had brought her home and after all, that was what he had started out to do in the first place, was it not?

The house was old weather-grayed wood, roofed with patchy and faded blue shingles. There were four gables, two in front, one at each end, above leaded windows. Some
whimsical
Victorian architect had placed an incongruous tower, cupola-crowned, with a surmounting weathercock at the back of the house. There was a tired garage surrounded by ancient oak trees, one of these with a huge limb broken off and left to dangle. As Don drove up the curving road to the house, the gravel crunched under the tires of the car. He noticed, here and there, old outbuildings, dilapidated and overgrown.

He pulled up at the side of the house in front of the sagging garage, and an old, half-blind, shaggy white dog came forward haltingly to meet them.

Sarah leaped from the car, leaving the door open, and went immediately to the dog, giving it the half cheeseburger and french fries she had smuggled from the restaurant. The dog wolfed the food down in three bites and settled in to lick at the napkin. Sarah sat beside the mangy white dog, petting it.

Don wandered that way and offered the dog the back of his hand to smell. A very old dog, there were cataracts on its eyes, sniffed at Don’s hand without interest and,
discovering
that he was offering no food, returned its complete attention to Sarah. It might have been a Samoyed, Don decided, mixed with something bulkier, maybe Old English Sheepdog. He crouched down beside Sarah and patted the dog’s shoulder.

‘And what’s your name, old girl?’

‘Her name’s Poppsy,’ a woman’s voice snapped from behind him, ‘and just who the hell are you and what are you doing with that girl?’