ONE
(IS GRAY)
The darkness behind my eyelids was thick and stank of chemicals, as though someone had poured black oil inside my head. My tongue lay like a dead slug in my mouth, and my limbs felt too heavy to lift.
Had I been sick? Was I injured? Or . . .
My stomach sloshed, rebelling against the thought. I couldn’t be dying. I was only sixteen years old. Yet my skin itched with the coarseness of unfamiliar sheets, and the mattress beneath me felt rubbery. The air was stale and lukewarm. Where else could I be but in a hospital?
As the oily slick across my senses thinned, colors and shapes crept into my awareness. Faint blue splashes of footsteps on tile, the dry buzz of air-conditioning, a silken ribbon of murmurs outside my door. Muffled thumps from the end of the corridor felt like cotton puffs dropping onto my forehead, until they ended in a sandpaper rasp of
“Nurse!”
I winced, and opened my eyes.
I was lying alone in a room so stark that its blankness hit me like an assault. There were no IV stands or heart monitors, no bedside table covered in flowers and get-well cards. No windows, no cabinets, no shelves, not even a clipboard hanging on the wall. Nothing but the bed, and me in it.
My arms lay limp by my sides, skinny and white as ever. They looked whole enough, but the forearms were a mess of half-healed scratches and bite marks, as though I’d tried to shake hands with a wolverine. My wrists were chafed red, my fingernails were ragged stubs, and my grandmother’s ring, a square-cut topaz I’d worn every day for the past five years, was missing.
I was staring at my empty ring finger when the door opened, and a woman in petal-pink scrubs came in. “Good morning, Alison,” she said brightly. “How are you feeling? Ready for some fresh air and a change of scenery?”
She talked like someone used to not getting an answer, the way people talk to babies or coma patients. Clipped to her pocket was a laminated tag that said
Rachael
—a shimmery purple-violet name with flecks of silver, one I’d always liked. But I couldn’t recall ever seeing her before.
“What happened to my ring?” I tried to ask, but my whisper was so faint even I could barely taste it.
“Nurse! Help me, nurse!”
screeched the voice in the distance, punctuated by more thumping. But the aide didn’t seem to hear it any more than she’d heard me.
“We’re just bringing a wheelchair around for you,” she said. “Can I help you sit up, Alison?”
“Where am I?” I asked, forcing out the words. “Where are you taking me?”
The aide looked surprised, but it took her only an instant to recover. “You’re at St. Luke’s Hospital,” she said. “But not for much longer. Your mom put in a transfer request for you, so we’re going to take you to a place where you’ll be with other patients your age, and where you can get the treatment you need.”
“What kind of treatment?” I didn’t mean to sound hostile, but I was starting to get scared. “What kind of place?”
“A good place,” she said soothingly. “It’s called Pine Hills. You’ll like it there.”
I’d heard that name before, but right now I couldn’t place it. My memories were all in a tangle. “How long have I been here?”
Rachael’s eyes flicked away from mine. “Only a little while,” she said, but the words rang so sour in my ears, so unexpectedly foul, that bile rose in my throat. “You were agitated, so we brought you here to calm down—”
“Not the room,” I gasped. “The hospital. How long?”
“You were admitted on June seventh,” she said. “It’s the twenty-second now.”
I sank back against the pillow, stunned. I’d been here for more than two weeks. Why couldn’t I remember any of it?
“Let me help you get dressed,” Rachael coaxed. “Then we’ll talk.”
I struggled upright, a yellow-gray stink of sweat wafting around me. The clothes she held were my own, so clean and fragrant that I felt ashamed putting my filthy body into them. I wanted to ask for a shower, but Rachael had already tugged up my jeans and pulled the T-shirt over my head. Another aide appeared in the doorway with a wheelchair; she helped me over to it.
“It’s been a hard couple of weeks for you,” Rachael said as she wheeled me down the corridor to a locked door, buzzed it open, and steered me through. “So things will probably seem a little hazy for a while. But now your medication’s really starting to work, you’ll be feeling a lot better soon. . . .”
She chattered on, but I wasn’t listening anymore. I was staring at the sign above the nurses’ station. It said, in my hometown’s two official languages:
PSYCHIATRIC UNIT / UNITÉ DE PSYCHIATRIE
My worst nightmare had become reality. I’d gone crazy, and my mother had locked me away.
. . .
I was six years old, watching my pregnant mother wash the dishes. Cutlery clinked, filling the air with sparkling bursts of color.
“Do it again!” I begged her, bouncing in my seat.
My mother glanced back at me. “Do what?”
“Make the stars.”
“Stars?”
It never occurred to me that she couldn’t see what I was seeing. “The gold ones,” I said.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she replied, and with a child’s impatience, I hopped down from my stool to show her.
“Like this,” I said, taking two spoons and clanging them together. Each clink produced another starburst, expanding luminous through the air between us.
“You mean,” said my mother slowly, “the sound makes you think of stars?”
“No, it makes the stars. Why aren’t you looking? You have to look,” I told her, and clashed the spoons again. “See?”
My mother stood rigid, the bewilderment in her face shading slowly into horror. Then she snatched the spoons from my hands and flung them into the sink. “There. Are. No. Stars,” she hissed, her voice full of icy peaks and seething valleys. “Do you hear me?”
“Yes, there are, they’re right—”
My mother slapped me across the face. “Don’t argue with me!”
She’d smacked me once or twice in the past, but never like this. Tears sprang to my eyes. “But . . .”
“No buts!” She backed away, one arm wrapped protectively around her belly. “Just stop it. Stop pretending, or—whatever you’re doing.”
“So you don’t . . . see the stars?” I could hardly get the words out.
“No!” she shouted at me, her face a blotchy mask. “Normal people do not see things like that!”
I felt like my insides were climbing up my throat. I wanted to burst into tears. But I could also see how scared my mother was—and worse, I knew she was scared of me.
So I swallowed. I forced my misery back, pushed it deep down inside myself, and I said in a small voice, “I’m sorry.”
“Go to your room, Alison,” said my mother, breathing hard. “Go and think about what I’ve told you. And I never, ever want to hear you talk about seeing stars or—or anything else like that—again.”
I slunk out of the kitchen and was halfway up the stairs when a wavering moan floated up behind me, followed by another sound I had never before heard my mother make. It was a deep gray bubble, and it followed me all the way to my bedroom, where I flung myself down on the bed and sobbed until the air was full of them.
That day I’d learned that my mind didn’t work the same as other people’s—that perceptions I took for granted could seem incredible or even frightening to them. So I couldn’t talk about the color of three, or whether triangles tasted better than circles, or how playing Bach on my keyboard made fireworks go off in my head, because people would think I was crazy. And then they’d be scared of me, and wouldn’t want to be around me anymore.
So I hid those alien sensations inside myself, a secret I swore I’d never betray again. I made a few mistakes at first, because it wasn’t always easy to know what was “normal” and what wasn’t, but by the time I was nine years old my transformation was complete. As far as the rest of the world was concerned, there was nothing extraordinary about me, nothing unpredictable, and certainly nothing anyone needed to be afraid of.
Until now.
. . .
“Alison, can I get you something to eat? Are you hungry?”
I shook my head distractedly, too shell-shocked to speak. Rachael had parked my wheelchair in a little glass-walled office opposite the nurses’ station, then excused herself to help another patient. The woman stooping over me was thickset and graying, a grandmotherly stranger.
“How are you feeling?” asked the older nurse as she pulled up a chair and sat down, pen and clipboard in hand. “Any dizziness? Nausea? Headache?”
Ever since I saw that sign reading PSYCHIATRIC UNIT, I’d had all three. But I was afraid to admit it, because it would give these people another reason to believe that I was sick. I needed to convince them that I was better now, that I didn’t need any more treatment, before they could find out about my colors and try to take them away.
“No,” I lied, and the gorge surged into my mouth so fast I nearly choked. I had to swallow three times to get it down again, and then fake a coughing fit before I could gasp, “Could I—have some—water?”
The nurse filled a paper cup from the water cooler and handed it to me. “How would you describe your mood right now?”
I suspected that
terrified
wouldn’t be the best answer. “I’m okay,” I said, and took another hasty sip as my stomach convulsed again.
The interview went on, the nurse asking questions and ticking off boxes on her clipboard while I gulped water and answered as briefly as I could. All the while my nausea came and went—I felt fine when I told the nurse that I couldn’t hear any voices talking to me except for hers, but when she asked if I sometimes saw things that were invisible to other people and I said no, it came back again.
I had an uncomfortable sense that I wasn’t fooling her, either. Her expression stayed bland, but her eyes seemed to pierce right into my head. Still, I must have done something right, because in the end the nurse thanked me, called Rachael back into the room, and went on her way.
“Your ride will be here in about twenty minutes,” said Rachael as she wheeled me out of the office. “Would you like to call your mom and let her know you’re going over to Pine Hills, so she can meet you there?”
Her words were peach with sincerity, and I could tell she really believed it was a good idea. Which showed how little she knew. I still couldn’t remember much, but I was sure of one thing at least: my mother was the one who had sent me here. I’d worked so hard to convince her I wasn’t dangerous . . . but in the end, it had meant nothing.
“No,” I said. “I’ll be fine.”
. . .
The sky above St. Luke’s was a rhapsody in blue, the northern Ontario sunlight so crystal-sharp that I could feel it even through the tinted glass of the lobby windows. And when Rachael wheeled me outside, the fresh air tasted so sweet it brought tears to my eyes.
“You’re doing really well,” said Rachael, patting my shoulder. “How are you feeling? Things getting any clearer?”
She didn’t seem to think it unusual that I’d lost some of my memory. Maybe it would be safe to ask her a few questions. “My arms,” I said. “They’re all messed up, and my ring’s missing. But I don’t remember how it happened.”
“I never saw you wearing a ring,” said Rachael. “Maybe your mom has it. But your arms . . . well, Alison, you were in a very bad way. Sometimes, when people are in a lot of mental pain, they turn to physical pain as a distraction.”
My stomach turned to cold jelly. So all those bites and scratches . . . I’d done that to myself?
“You screamed and cried a lot, when you first came in,” said Rachael. “You kept clawing at your arms and face, and banging your head against the wall. We did everything we could to calm you down, but it took a while to find a medication that would help you.”
Was that why my mother had applied to have me transferred? Because the nurses at St. Luke’s hadn’t been doing a good enough job of keeping me under control? “This place,” I said, struggling to push the words past the tightness in my throat. “Pine Hills. What kind of—”
Then the police van pulled up in front of the curb, and the words died on my tongue.
Rachael had told me in the elevator that a police officer would be escorting me to my destination. She’d assured me that this was routine, nothing to worry about. But as the officer stepped out to meet me, my pulse started to beat in 6/8 time.
His voice was gritty and rumbling, like boulders rolling down a slope. He was talking to my mother, asking her questions, but all I heard was a garbled roar. . . .
“I’m Constable Deckard,” said the officer in a soft tenor, and the memory vanished as quickly as it had come. In his dark blue uniform and red-banded cap he looked serious but not hostile, and I tried to tell myself there was no reason to fear.
To Serve and Protect
—wasn’t that the motto? Even if a policeman had come to my house two weeks ago, he was probably just helping my mother get me to the hospital.
“Alison, the officer needs to put some handcuffs on you,” said Rachael. “Would you hold your hands out for him, please?”
Instinctively I pulled my hands to my chest. “But I . . . I haven’t done anything wrong. I’m not—”
I didn’t know how to finish the sentence. Not dangerous? Not a criminal? Could I be sure of either of those things anymore?
“It’s for your safety and protection,” said Constable Deckard. “Standard procedure.” He jingled the cuffs at me. “Hands, please.”
What would happen if I resisted? Would he grab me and force the cuffs on me anyway? I was afraid to find out. Especially since we were right by the front doors of the hospital, in full view of the lobby windows, and I could already feel people staring. I held out my hands to the policeman, and he locked the cuffs around them.
Rachael helped me up the step into the van. “Good luck, Alison,” she said, and shut the door. Head down, eyes on my fettered wrists, I sat rigid while the van made its way out of the hospital grounds and onto the main road. Then I slumped against the window, gazing out listlessly as we passed the space-station architecture of Science North and the cerulean blue waters of Ramsey Lake. Rocky hillsides crowned with birch and poplar rose around us as we headed toward New Sudbury. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have thought I was going home.
