17 & Gone (34 page)

slumped and her red-dyed hair hangs in

her eyes. She wears the clothes she

always wears, the last outfit I remember

seeing her in and the outfit she wore

through the ashy rooms of the dream: the

too-short shirt and the too-tight jeans.

Her bare stomach is exposed to the

biting cold. She makes no movement,

doesn’t even shiver.

They’re saying it’s only a fire drill,

but I know better. We wait outside

longer than any drill should last, wait

until someone inside gives the all clear.

Then we can go back in. We pile up, one

behind the other, pushing into the

oversize elevator, enough of us inside

you’d think we’d make it sink instead of

rise.

Fiona is between me and the paneled

wall, and as the elevator doors fold

closed I feel how hot her skin is up

close, how it roasts against mine. I don’t

move away, because I want the mark on

me after. I want the proof we’ve both

been here.

The adult ward has also been

evacuated—in a time of emergency, no

one would be left behind—and some of

their patients are on the elevator with

ours. One of the women has suddenly

taken a liking to me. She’s sandwiched

beside Fiona, but she ignores Fiona

entirely and focuses her attention on me.

Her blue hair is cotton-candy soft, and

hollow punctures in her earlobes show

where thick piercings used to be.

When she speaks, her voice is fainter

than I expect. Gentle.

“They’re wrong about us,”
she

whispers, her heated words in my face.

The elevator, so fully loaded, takes its

time lifting us between floors.

“Who is?” I say back.

“In another place, in another time,

we’d be shamans,”
the woman whispers

with shining, truth-telling eyes as blue as

her head.
“We’d be gods.”

I turn to Fiona to see what she thinks

of this nonsense. There is a muscle in

her cheek that jitters—if she lets it go, it

would allow her mouth to smile.

A nurse takes the blue woman by the

arm and says to me, “Don’t you listen to

Kathy. She knows that’s all in her head.

And she
knows
she’s not to talk about

such things with the other patients.”

The blue woman knows no such thing

—her blue eyes tell me so—and then

when the elevator doors open and she

leaves, she takes everything she knows

with her.

I can tell Fiona thinks she’s insane.

We’ve returned to our side of the

floor, to our vinyl chairs and to the hour

before it’s time for dinner, which we

look forward to and dread all the same.

My gray notebook is where I left it, open

to the page I’d given Fiona to write me a

message, though the pencil has vanished

from the room.

She’s left me a drawing that’s been

scratched into the paper, like with a

fingernail. I can see it if I turn the page

this way and that, let it catch the light.

It’s a hard, jagged line that rises high to

attack the edge of the paper, like a burst

of flames.

This is when the understanding leaks

into me, faster and so much more

welcome than a sedative. Fiona is trying

to communicate. She drew me this

symbol, and she pulled that alarm. In

doing so, she showed me the way out.

Because there it is in the paper

carving she did for me:

Fire.

She wants one.

But she hasn’t said why yet.

—
54
—

MY
mom’s wardrobe choices for me

make me question
her
mental state. Once

the nurses let me have everything she’s

brought for me, I discover that she’s

packed me more socks and also the

ugliest sweaters and sweatshirts I own,

ones she would have had to go digging

through my drawers to find, and more

than I’d need for staying only through the

weekend. For my therapy appointment,

I’m encased in a bright orange

sweatshirt, the cautionary color of traffic

cones, and if there’s anything that says

I’m not myself, it’s this. Only a very sick

person would wear this shirt.

The one thing my mom didn’t send

was the necklace. It wasn’t anywhere in

the bags she packed for me, not even in

the pockets. It’s all I can think about

now, how I’ve lost it, how without it

I’ve broken my connection to the other

girls. Fiona is here with me, but the

others—I can’t hear them, and I haven’t

dreamed them, and it’s Abby I keep

wondering about, Abby I miss most of

all.

“How are you feeling today, Lauren?”

the doctor is asking me. Or she may have

asked this minutes ago, and I still

haven’t formed my answer.

Some days I see one doctor in a group

with the other patients, and other days

this doctor, alone. The last time I was in

here alone with this doctor I was asked

all about wanting to harm myself, which

I denied, and I’ll say the same today.

This time, though, when I say I’m

feeling better, the doctor asks about the

voices. “The girls,” she calls them, as if

she was pleasantly introduced to each of

them before I came in the room and

they’ve stepped out for a moment,

perhaps for tea.

How long have they been talking to

me? she wants to know. Do they ever

ask me to do things, things that scare me

or upset me? Things I’d rather not do?

“Like what kinds of things?” I ask.

“Violent things,” she says carefully.

Her hair is layered and cropped short,

and her pantsuit is wrinkled in only one

spot as if she ironed everywhere else but

the left knee. This mistake in her pants

seems violent to me.

“No,” I say.

“Such as trying to hurt your mother?”

she says, and waits.

“That’s not what happened,” I start,

getting upset. “I’d never hurt my mom.

Who do you guys think I am?”

“Of course you wouldn’t,” she says,

then switches gears. “Tell me about this

party where you lost your keys. That was

a bad night, wasn’t it? What happened?”

“I lost my keys.” She stays silent, so I

keep talking. “I guess I dropped them. I

don’t remember. I kind of blacked out.”

“Do you have blackouts like this

often? When you wake up and don’t

remember what you’ve done? Or maybe

when people tell you that you’ve done

things and you have no memory of doing

them?”

I’m not sure what someone told her I

did beyond losing the keys; my mom

wasn’t even there that night. Has she

been talking to Jamie? Did Jamie say

something?

“That’s like something I saw on TV

once,” I say. “Multiple personalities, I

think. Is that what you mean? Like I

black out and someone other than me

takes over and makes people call me by

a different name?”

“I’m not saying that at all. Is that what

you’re saying?”

She leans forward and the large button

earrings she has fastened into her lobes

droop low, skimming her shoulders. The

earrings themselves are bigger than her

ears and must weigh a ton. It’s like she’s

decorated herself with two plates from

her kitchen.

I think of the blue woman from the

elevator, how the giant empty holes in

her ears might have once held earrings

as large as this.

“No,” I say. “I’m not saying I have

multiple personalities. Of course not.”

If she knew more about the girls, she

wouldn’t have even asked that. The girls

may tell me things, and let me walk

through their memories, but I don’t

become
them. They’re them, and I’m

always only me.

I fold my arms over my chest and play

with the caution-orange cuffs on my

floppy sleeves. The sweatshirt smells

musty, like my mom wanted to dress me

as a whole other person and had to

search for the costume in the back of my

closet. Or like she’s some other woman,

come to impersonate my mother, wanting

to dress a girl who’s impersonating me.

“Do you ever see things you think

might not be real?” the doctor asks.

“What do you mean by ‘not real’?”

“Hallucinations. Things or people no

one else can see.”

I’m silent for a long time.

She’s not asking any more questions,

so after a while I speak up. “Can you be

a psychiatrist and believe in stuff?”

“How so?”

“If you had a patient,” I start, “and if

she said she saw a ghost, if she said she

could talk to the ghost and the ghost

talked back, would you automatically

give her medication and call her crazy?

Or would you consider that maybe some

kind of supernatural explanation is

possible? What I mean is, do you

believe in things like that? Are you even

allowed to?”

She skirts the question. “We never use

the word
crazy
here.”

“But would you? Would you say that

seeing something like that is only a

chemical imbalance in her brain?”

“Seeing hallucinations can be a

symptom of mental illness, yes. Seeing a

‘ghost.’ Talking to the ‘ghost.’ Having

the ‘ghost’ talk back . . . Yes.”

“Like what?” I say. “Like which

illness? Tell me one.”

“We don’t insert labels so soon in the

process, we never—”

“Schizophrenia,” I insert for her.

“Like my dad.”

She pauses and absently touches her

wrinkled knee. “So you
did
hear what

your mother and I were talking about.

That was not about you. You understand

that, right?”

I shrug.

“Schizophrenia isn’t something that

can be diagnosed after just one episode.

A diagnosis can take years. And I want

you to know that one person’s

experience

isn’t

necessarily

like

another’s. Experiences can vary, and

nothing in psychology fits neatly into a

box and gives us such easy answers.”

She’s being vague. I don’t respond, so

she keeps on.

“There are many things what you’re

going through could be. You say you’re

not depressed, but that’s something we

need to explore. There has to be time for

therapy, time to adjust to different

medications, to—”

More things, she says more things.

She keeps talking. She could be talking

about shamans and gods, for all I know

—I suspect she talks simply to hear

herself talk. What I’m waiting for is

another voice, an answer in my head. A

voice of a lost girl to tell me all of this

is what’s crazy. My being here. My

having to listen to this. While outside

they’re being taken and I’m the only one

who knows. The meds aren’t making me

as slow and sleepy as they were in the

beginning, but they do something far

worse than that. They make it so I

haven’t heard a voice in days.

At some point I realize the doctor has

gone silent.

“Who are you listening to?” she asks.

I’m confused. “I’m listening to you.

You were talking.”

“You turned and looked over there”—

she points at the potted plant in the

corner—“is someone there, talking to

you? One of the ‘girls’?”

The plant is a plant, a fern in a pot of

dirt. If I insist that the plant is only a

plant, will she wipe my slate clean and

send me home? If I say the plant speaks

in the voice of a girl, will I stay locked

away here forever? Or maybe I have it

in reverse. Will she think I’m lying if I

deny the plant can talk? Will she think I

can’t ever be “cured”?

I turn back to her and there she is. Not

the doctor—she hasn’t moved from her

plush chair, where she sits with her leg

folded up, daring me to notice the

wrinkled knee—but Fiona, no longer

faking catatonic and instead faking a

trigger with her finger and pointing her

imaginary gun to the back of the doctor’s

actual head.

—
55
—