“Huh? Come on, Dad, two more stairs.” Isabel looked down the long dark hallway to her parents’ bedroom and then focused again on the remaining stairs.
“Why do you even bother.” This time it wasn’t a question. “You know you have no family.”
A sharp pain radiated down her back. “What did you just say?”
“You have no family,” her father said, his tone mean and cold, his words no longer slurred.
“You don’t know what you’re saying,” she said, hoping she was right and that her drunk father was babbling about nothing again.
“You have no family.”
Isabel stood on the top stair and flinched.
“You have no family.”
Isabel would never know that her father was speaking to himself and not to her.
“Dinner’s in ten minutes,” Lark mumbles. “Want me to sign you out?”
Isabel shakes the memory away like a wet dog coming in from the rain. She looks at Lark.
“Yeah, thanks. We can walk over to the cafeteria together if you want.”
A friendship forged over carcinogens. Lark walks back into the nurses’ station where the dry erase board hangs.
Kristen calls out to Lark: “Lark? Will you sign me out, too?” Then to Isabel she says, “Do you guys mind if I walk with you?”
We’re back in elementary school and we’re forming a clique.
“Sure, whatever,” Isabel replies as she steps on her cigarette.
“Where’re you from, anyway?” Kristen asks as she puts out her unfinished cigarette. “It just occurred to me that I don’t know where you live.”
“Yeah,” Isabel said. “I don’t know anyone’s last name. I grew up in Connecticut but I live in Manhattan now.”
“I grew up in Connecticut, too! Where in Connecticut?” Kristen asks excitedly.
“Greenfield.”
“I grew up in Winsford.” Kristen is beaming. Winsford is only minutes away from Greenfield.
Please let’s not play the name game.
Isabel takes a couple of steps back and looks toward the unit to see if they are to start lining up for their meal march. She hopes her body language will quiet Kristen.
“Where’s the dinner nurse, anyway?” Kristen asks, picking up on Isabel’s signal. “I’m starving. I hate it when they’re late taking us over.”
“Want another cigarette?” Isabel asks her. Kristen nods gratefully.
Isabel smiles as she pulls out her pack of Marlboro Lights. “We are one sick group,” she says, heading over to the wall-mounted lighter. “One sick group.”
Behind her Lark’s mouth turns upward, forming a slight smile.
“You got that right,” Lark says.
Nineteen
“Okay, guys, grab a magic marker!”
Larry the group leader is sick today and his substitute is a therapist who looks like she is fresh out of graduate school and hasn’t yet had her spirits trampled by life. Her name is Rita.
No one moves. They all stare at Rita.
“Come on, people.” Rita is now batting her eyelashes in what Isabel thinks is a pathetic schoolgirl attempt to get everyone to do what she wants.
She has no experience. She’d never waste the eyelash-bat for a group of nuts if she had half a brain. Besides, this is shaping up to be an artistic venture, and if so, I am outta here.
“What we’re going to do tonight…” Rita is now trying to reason with the group. “What we’re going to try to do is make a mural on this piece of poster board. I want everyone to take a magic marker and go and draw a picture of how you see yourself.”
Still no action from the group.
This is embarrassing. Like watching someone on stage struggle to remember her lines.
“Seriously, you guys.” Rita is plugging away. It’s as if there’s a competition among the mental health care workers to come up with the breakthrough group activity. Rita seems convinced that her activity will beat them all. “Just try it out. If you don’t want to continue that’s fine.”
“That’s fine?” Lark croaks. “If we don’t like it, then what? We get to leave the session for the night?” She challenges Rita. Everyone turns to Lark. Even Sukanya.
“Um, well, no, Lark. But we can try something else if everyone decides they don’t want to do this. But I really think you ought to give it a chance.”
“Yeah, well, what do you know?” Isabel is staring at Lark, who, for some reason is taking Rita to the mat. “You just don’t want to hear about the hard stuff. The shit. The things in our lives that’ve fucked us up. Right? Am I right? You just want us to draw pretty pictures.” Lark’s voice goes high to mimic Rita’s.
Rita is literally cringing. Lark has the entire group transfixed.
“My father raped Lark when she was eight, Rita. My mother watched him do it. Want me to draw a picture of that? She never said a thing. Not a word.”
What the hell is going on? She never says a word at these things. Now she’s spewing all this stuff in the third person?
“You know what dear ole dad did when Lark got her period? Stuck a hot curling iron up her, that’s what. Said he’d burn it outta her. Said she wasn’t pure anymore. Little fucking Lark is such a fuckin’ crybaby,” Lark continues, Rita staring along with everyone else. “She asked her daddy to stop. You believe that shit? She actually asked her father to stop…like that would work or something. She’s unbelievable.”
Lark has now pulled a pack of cigarettes from her shirt pocket. Isabel is surprised to see that they are her cigarettes—Lark must have taken them from the bureau in her room. She lights one up—verboten inside the unit—using matches she must have stolen from the nurses’ station when no one was looking. Rita has absolutely no control over the group.
“Lark, I don’t think you’re supposed to do that,” Ben says nervously, looking at Rita for approval.
Melanie starts to laugh. Keisha tilts her chair back and looks as if she’s enjoying the conflict. Sukanya maintains her catatonic stance.
Lark inhales and drapes one arm over the back of her chair while crossing her legs…a difficult undertaking since her thighs are extremely fat. She has to force her right leg to stay poised across her left.
Rita looks panicked. She stands up, and instead of directly approaching Lark, she announces to the group that she’s forgotten something outside the room and will return momentarily. She bolts out of the living room.
Lark turns to address Isabel and Kristen. “Scared little Rita,” she laughs. Then she inhales again. “I think I scared her off!”
The person talking bears no resemblance to the quiet woman who inhales secondhand smoke out on the deck.
Seconds later the evening nurse and two orderlies burst into the room followed by Rita, who at least had the intelligence to realize she was in over her head. Lark looks at them expectantly, like she knows the routine, and she slowly drops her cigarette in to her half-empty can of Diet Coke and stands to greet them as if she is at a cocktail party.
“Boys, good evening.” Lark stands jauntily with one hand on her hip.
Isabel watches as the orderlies pin Lark’s arms behind her back and escort her out of the room. As they do, Lark spits on Rita’s astonished face. “Fuckin’ baby!” she yells at Rita. “Asking Daddy to stop…”
As she leaves the room, Lark breaks into uncontrollable laughter.
Once the double doors are closed behind her, a visibly shaken Rita, who has wiped her face clean with a balled-up Kleenex fetched from her pocket, looks at the group and says, “Okay. Now. Where were we? Magic markers for everyone. Come on, guys.” This time Rita makes it an order.
After a minute or so Melanie rises and goes to the bin and picks a violet marker. Ben watches her, heaves himself up and chooses yellow. Kristen exhales and follows suit. Isabel looks at Keisha, who rolls her eyes, shrugs, stands up and stretches.
Who are these people?
Isabel stands up and quietly walks out of the living room.
Without anyone stopping her, Isabel returns to her room and climbs up onto her uncomfortable bed.
Twenty
“A nationwide manhunt is intensifying for this man: twenty-seven-year-old Andrew Cunanan. Police believe Cunanan could be the serial killer responsible for four killings that stretch from Minneapolis to Chicago. They are requesting that anyone with information about the man you see here on your television screen contact your local police station. He is considered armed and dangerous.”
Isabel Murphy, ANN News, Chicago.
“But why?”
“They haven’t found this guy yet. I’ve got a great lead that he might be heading south. I’ve got to go, Mom. I’m sorry.”
“It’s your father’s birthday, though. Can’t you just take one night off?”
“I’m sorry, Mom. I just can’t. Tell Dad I said happy birthday. I’m really sorry. Really.”
“Just come for coffee.”
“I don’t drink coffee, Mom.”
“Since when?”
“I never have. Nice of you to notice.”
“Who doesn’t drink coffee?”
“Some people don’t. Anyway, they’re boarding my flight now. I’ve got to go.”
“Where are you going again?”
Isabel sighed. “Miami.”
“Nice work if you can get it. I bet it’s eighty degrees and sunny there.”
“I’m not going on vacation, Mom. I’m going to work.”
“I know, I know. You’re always going to work. Don’t you ever take any time off?”
“Not really.”
“What am I going to tell your father? It’s his birthday, after all.”
“I don’t know,” she said, and then paused. “Wait. Tell Dad his boy turned out just like him. Like in the song.”
“You’re talking gibberish now, Isabel.” Her mother sounded annoyed.
“The Harry Chapin song. You know the one. ‘My boy was just like me. He turned out just like me.’”
Twenty-One
“This is about the last sorry-ass-excuse-for-a-meal I’m gonna have, suckers!” Keisha is smiling so hard her face resembles the center of an overgrown farmer’s market sunflower.
“What’re you talking about?” Isabel asks, her mouth full of salad.
“I am leavin’ this hellhole!” Keisha surprises everyone at the lunch table, including, it appears, Sukanya, whose fork pauses for a moment before piercing the next bite of her special-order kosher meal. “I got my walkin’ papers today and I am outta here.”
Isabel feels a knot in her stomach.
How come she gets to leave? She’s barely opened up in group.
“I gotta hand it to my insurance company. It’s like they read my mind or somethin’. Just as I’m getting sick and tired of this place, they send my doctor a letter sayin’ they ain’t coverin’ me anymore. So I get to go home, baby. Home sweet home.” Keisha says this so loudly that a group at the next table stops eating. It is very disturbing for patients to hear about someone going home from Three Breezes. Many are patients for extended periods of time, so to see that someone in their midst is leaving is like restless soldiers hearing of someone going AWOL.
“Keisha, okay, I know what you’re going to say but just hear me out.” Isabel isn’t quite sure what she’s going to say. “Group’s just now getting good and maybe your insurance company will go eighty-twenty with you on coverage. I’m sure your doctor can talk to them about it.”
Keisha gives Isabel a mournful look, but Isabel knows immediately that Keisha is too young to know that even a horrific thing like a mental institution can turn out to be the best thing for you. She knows Keisha is homesick, tired of her fits of rage and her subsequent restraint. She wants her mother and her own bed.
“No way, baby, I’m outta here. No more salad bar that’s been sittin’ here since I was in diapers. No more sharps closet. No more padded cell. Freedom, baby!”
Isabel slumps in her chair. Her bitterness at being left behind is palpable. “How’re you getting home? When are your parents coming?”
“To-morrow night.” Keisha split the word in two. “I just left a message with my sister, Mo, and she’s going to tell my mama to come up right after she gets out of work.”
“What time’s that?”
“‘Bout nine. What’re you, the human dry erase board or somethin’? That reminds me, after tomorrow I ain’t got to sign out no more.”
“Okay, okay. Give us a break for God’s sake.” Lark speaks for the first time since she was released from the soft room following her psychotic break.
“I got to go to the art studio to pick up the vase I made my mama.” Keisha turns to Isabel. “Wanna come?”
“No, thanks.” Isabel avoided the art studio. Her first day at Three Breezes she had been appalled to learn that there really was a place you could weave baskets. She would never sink that low, she told herself. She wanted no souvenir of this place.
“See ya back at the ranch,” Keisha called over her shoulder.
“I know how you’re feeling,” Kristen comforts. “It’s tough when people you like leave. Feels like I’ve been here forever, I’ve seen so many people go.”
You don’t know a thing about me. I don’t give a shit about any of you, that’s how much you know how I feel. You think we’re friends.
Isabel walks on in silence.
“It gets easier, if that’s any consolation.” Kristen pats Isabel’s shoulder. “It gets easier.”
The following day Kristen approaches Isabel, who is reading and smoking on the deck.
“Hi,” she says.
Isabel looks up. “Oh. Hi.”
“What’re you reading?” Kristen is twisting her head to the side in order to see the cover of Isabel’s book.
“Anna Karenina,” Isabel answers.
Kristen looks like she wants to talk, but the Russian novel is a dead end to her, conversationally. Sensing this, Isabel closes her book and asks about Kristen’s bandaged arm.
Kristen does not know why she likes to bleed, she tells Isabel. She loves to pick at her cuticles until they are ragged and bloody. She loves to let her hair get dirty so she can scratch her scalp until it bleeds in different places. She has one area at the very top of her head that she has kept from healing for two years. Every time she makes up her mind to stop, the scab will itch and she will pick it off, usually pulling several hairs out at the same time. It hurts so much that it feels good.
Even at a young age, Kristen says she knew this was not normal. Then, her first boyfriend in high school confirmed it. Billy was more than six feet tall, almost a foot taller than Kristen, so he could literally see over the top of her head. He spotted the bloody sore along the part in her hair.
“What happened to your head?” asked the fifteen-year-old, sounding disgusted.
Kristen quickly ran her hand through her thick hair and repositioned her part so the sore was covered up. She had just picked at it so the blood was vivid red.
“I told him it was a mosquito bite,” Kristen tells Isabel. “I was embarrassed when he saw it so I told him I’d scratched it because it itched.”
“Ew” was all he said and the conversation was dropped. Kristen was careful to move her part from then on so Billy would not notice that it was not healing.
“Did your parents like him?” Isabel asks.
“Yeah. At first they loved him,” she answers with a weary smile that fades too quickly. “Until they found out we’d been having sex.”
Twenty-Two
“I think we have a lot to talk about tonight so let’s get started.” Larry starts talking as he shuts the door to the living room. “I’d like to begin with what happened at last night’s session. Lark? Can we start with you?”
As Larry turns the empty chair in the center of the circle to face Lark, she shifts in her seat.
“What was on your mind yesterday afternoon, before the session began?”
Lark looks at Larry.
>
“Lark? Could you talk to us? Tell us what you were going through yesterday…”
“I’d like to talk about it, Larry.” It is Ben.
“All right, if Lark doesn’t mind yielding the floor then Ben, why don’t you start us off.”
“I was very upset, Larry, that Lark smoked in here. I mean, smoking’s not allowed inside. I think you should know that Lark smoked in here, Larry.”
Silence.
“Hmm. You’re right, Ben. Smoking is not allowed inside the building. Matches aren’t allowed, either. Lark? Can you hear that Ben had some concerns about your smoking inside?”
More silence.
“What did that call up for you, Ben?”
“Huh?” Ben looks confused by the question.
“Why did that upset you?”
“There are rules, Larry. There are rules about that and I don’t like that she broke that rule.”
Can we please get to the point, folks?
“You’re right again, Ben. Lark? Care to jump in? Why did you feel compelled to smoke inside this room?”
Lark looks drugged. She probably is.
“What do you want me to say, Larry?” She slurs her words, but her tone is unmistakably confrontational. “You want me to apologize or something? Is that what you want?”
“What I want, Lark, is for you to talk to us about what was going through your mind yesterday. Were you feeling upset or anxious about anything in particular?”
Lark looks out the window and appears to be mulling over the question.
“What interests me is what led up to your break last night. Because that is exactly what happened here. Who was talking to Rita last night, Lark? Who was that?”
Lark turns back to face the empty chair.
“I don’t remember.”
“Oh, I think you do remember. But just in case, let me help you out. You talked about your father touching you when you were a little girl. Remember? You talked about the curling iron. Who was that talking about young Lark?”