Why They Run the Way They Do (7 page)

About the deaf man. About the Big Macs. About the vampires in white coats who sucked your blood while you ate breakfast with your free arm. About the mouth checks. About fielding grounders in the hall on New Year's Eve. About the lighter on the wall. About the lady who thought every door was a door to outside.

Madeline and I had made numerous precious keepsakes in OT in our several months together. We'd made moccasins from kits, molded clay into vases, hooked rugs, stitched pillows. We'd painted fruit and landscapes and each other. We'd made photo collages using old issues of
Good Housekeeping
and
Better Homes and Gardens,
snipping out the pictures with children's scissors. It was like kindergarten, OT, except someone always frisked you before you returned to the unit because there were countless things in the OT room that you could kill yourself with given a little ingenuity and about three minutes alone.

We took some hollowed-out watercolors and set up at a table by ourselves, as far removed from the other patients as we could get. This is what we normally did—we did not wish to be hassled by the RT staff to have positive interactions with others—but it was especially important on this day so that we could confirm and execute our plans discreetly.

“How long will you need?”

“As long as possible,” she said. “You've got to give me a good head start. Five minutes if you can.”

“You'll have to run like hell,” I said.

“I can run like hell,” she said. “I was on the track team in middle school.”

She had told me this before so I knew it was true, but looking at her now it was hard to believe she could make it up a single flight of stairs. She also once told me a story about when she was at another hospital and she had cramps and her roommate had tied pillows to her with bed sheets, in strategic places to combat the cramps, and then the roommate had gone to breakfast and Madeline had lain in her bed with pillows tied to her for nine hours until someone had come to get the roommate's stuff because the roommate had swallowed seven Parcheesi pieces and had been transferred to a different ward. That was a different kind of hospital than this one. In this hospital they came into your room every thirty minutes overnight and shined a flashlight on you to make sure you were resting comfortably. In this hospital they kept you busy with moccasin kits and Ping-Pong and memory games. In this hospital they looked toward the future, including weekly “exit strategy” meetings during which you dutifully mapped out the rest of your life and talked about how you were going to pay your electric bill and keep your bathroom tidy. In that other hospital there was no pretending about the rest of your life or your tidy bathroom.

“Good luck,” I said. And I meant it. In that moment there was no part of me I could reach that did not want her to succeed.

“Good luck to you,” she said. And she meant it, too.

About the man who went after his own face with a plastic fork. About the slices of light in the solarium. About the woman who always forgot how to play Go Fish. About sitting in the lockers. About where we carved our names. About the glazed doughnuts. About her sweater.

(My god—her sweater! What but history held it together? It was as ratty as her hair, hanging in the same twisted mess. Did it survive? Was it in a drawer somewhere in Illinois? Could I use it as a lap blanket, sitting here now, today?)

There were three staff in the OT room, two actual occupational therapists, smiley Nancy and anxious Linda, and a college girl who was busy discovering she didn't want to pursue this as a career after all. Madeline went up to smiley Nancy. I couldn't hear what she said but then she went through the door into the RT room and smiley Nancy hovered around the door, cheerfully delivering unreturned smiles from table to table. I slid off my stool and approached her.

“I want to do a paint by number,” I said. “Can you help me find one?”

“Why don't you ask Sabrina?” she said. Apparently Sabrina was the college girl.

“I don't know her,” I said. “I just—” Nancy glanced toward the closed bathroom door in RT. And then I knew what I had to do. I had to smile. But how to organize my face into a smile? Lips up, I thought, but then I felt my lips purse instead of smile. At the ends, I thought. Lips up at the ends. But how to change the angle of your lips? Then I remembered: the cheeks. Yes, it was all in the cheeks. Just a little push with the cheeks. My lips were chapped and I felt the bottom one split just a bit in the center and that was how I knew I had succeeded. There it was. Nancy's smile grew, reflecting mine.

“Can you help me find it?” I asked again.

“Oh, hon,” she said. “I can't tell you how nice it is to see that smile on your face.”

I held onto it, desperately. It was like trying to hold onto a terrified cat.

“I know a lot of people in your life who have missed that pretty smile,” Nancy said. “I know your mother would give—”

“Can you please help me find it?” I asked. “The paint by number?”

“Sure I can.” She signaled to Sabrina. “Madeline's in the bathroom. Keep an eye?”

Sabrina did not exactly take up the post by the door. She just moved to that end of the room, glanced into RT, then started picking some polish off her thumbnail. I thought how Sabrina and Madeline were probably about the same age. Long before I met her Madeline had gotten into Grinnell and gone for a month but then she came home and went back in the hospital and that was that.

Nancy opened the paint-by-number cabinet. Three towering stacks of cardboard boxes loomed. All those teeny-tiny eights and elevens and seventeens, woodlands and shores and windmills and sunsets, just waiting to be filled.

“I want the horse one,” I said.

“I don't think there is a horse one,” she said. She peered at the boxes. I could tell she didn't want to actually look through them. She slid one off the top of the box tower. “What about the dolphin?”

“Linda told me there was a horse one,” I said.

Anxious Linda was at a nearby table, helping a trembling old lady string together some moccasins she would never wear.

“Linda, there's a horse one, right?” I said. “You said there was a horse one, right? Right?”

Anxious Linda drifted toward us.

“Is there a horse one?” Nancy asked.

“A horse what?”

“Wait, it wasn't Linda,” I said. “It was Sabrina.” I looked down the room. “Sabrina?”

Sabrina took a few steps toward us, then a few more. Now there was no one watching the bathroom door. Now the coast was clear.

“What are you looking for?”

“The horse one,” I said. “There it is.”

I yanked a box out of the middle of one of the stacks and about fifteen boxes fell at our feet. We all looked at the one in my hand.

“That's a deer, hon,” smiley Nancy said.

“Let me in there,” anxious Linda said.

Then they were digging, all three of them. I had done it! If only she had been there to see it, to congratulate me. And then—amazing—smiley Nancy came up with a horse paint-by-number and I sat down by myself to work on it.

About the doorbell. About the corn nuts. About that last stupid jigsaw puzzle.

Three or four minutes later the door burst open and Nancy and Linda were called away. They went out into the hall. I smiled inside, my organs splitting just a tiny bit in the center, imagined she was halfway to the Walgreens by now, her middle-school track form returning with each stride. Maybe she was already standing at the counter. Maybe she had her money out. Maybe she had the pills in her hand. Maybe she.

Nancy and Sabrina came back in, tight-lipped. They looked at me, then looked away, then looked again.

“This is really hard,” I said, setting down my brush. I had filled in the horse's left ear. “The boxes are too small. Can I go back up to the unit?”

Once she told me about a friend of hers who OD'd and died flat on her back by choking on her own vomit. It was a nasty way to go, Madeline said. Instead of slipping away peacefully you basically drowned in your own spit and acid. She said when she did it she would remember to roll onto her side, so if she puked, she wouldn't drown in it. She said you never knew for sure what you might need to remember, so you should remember everything.

The door buzzed and we walked into the unit and there was Madeline, sitting at a table, a beefy orderly on one side and a nurse on the other. When she saw me she rolled her eyes without rolling her eyes.

Story goes she was only halfway down the hall when she ran into Brenda, the music therapist, who karate chopped and tripped her and then put her in a half nelson and called on her little walkie-talkie for help.

I went over to the table and sat down across from her.

“Hey,” she said. There was a cup of cranapple juice in front of her and she took a sip.

“Hey,” I said. “What's going on?”

“They're trying to take me over there,” she said.

(“Over there” = seclusion. Strapped in your special chair all day, then strapped in your bed all night. Straps to straps, for as long as they say. I had been strapped down once, only for one night, when I broke the thermostat off the wall and pulled out its insides just to see if it might explode like a hand grenade. You think it's just going to be one strap, but it's three, one like a belt around you, and then one on each side of the belt strapping you to the bedframe, so not only can you not get out of bed, but you can't lie any way but flat on your back. It was just one night, but in the morning only the top layer of me got up, peeled in a thin strip from the softball player, who stayed in the bed forever.)

“Why?” I asked. I turned to the nurse. “Why?”

“Doctor's orders,” the nurse said. The nurse's name was Cindy. She always looked tired. One time she saw a picture of my dog, the only picture I kept in my room, and she talked to me for like ten hours about her golden retriever.

“I'm not going,” Madeline said. “I want to stay here.”

“You should have thought of that before,” the nurse said. She didn't say it like a bitch, though. She said it like she was genuinely sorry Madeline hadn't thought of it before.

“I'm not going,” Madeline said. “You guys can't make me go.” (This would have been hilarious under any other circumstance. We might have laughed about it later if we'd had the chance.) “I'm staying here with my friend.”

“I killed it down there,” I said. “I gave you like ten minutes.”

“Good job,” she said.

“Let's go,” the beef said.

“I'm not going,” she said.

“You're going,” he said. He took hold of her arm and she looked at me wildly.

“Do something,” she said through clenched teeth.

I was frozen in my chair.
Do something?
Like what, exactly? Resistance was futile and would only result in straps to straps for us both. Another orderly came through the door and headed toward us. This one was scrawny.

“Take her other arm,” beefy told scrawny.

Scrawny took her other arm and Madeline started kicking frantically. Everybody in the solarium turned around and watched. It was good clean fun. Two more orderlies came running.

“Do something!” she screamed at me. It was an ugly, frantic sound and nothing like her.

“Don't hurt her,” I said. I said it quietly but firmly. “Please stop. You're hurting her.”

“Do something!”

Then they really had her, one on each limb. Like I said, she was tiny, rail thin, so even thrashing wildly it didn't take much for them to contain her. The nurse and I watched her go. They carried her off like an animal.

The cranapple juice was still sitting on the table. Somehow it hadn't spilled in all the commotion. I stood up and swiped it off the table with my hand and it splashed all over the floor. Cindy the nurse made a little sound, “ooh,” and I turned to her triumphantly. But she just looked sad.