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Adriana sat in the stall and let her bladder relax. She was mortified, but somehow her eyes were dry. What was she doing here, in the mental hospital, with people like Marlene in the red parka? Bizarre people, people who were stragglers on the edges of humanity. She was afraid of them, and most of all, she didn't want to be one of them.

Someone came into the washroom, weeping. Adriana could see fluctuations in the light on the bathroom floor, indicating the woman outside was moving around. Adriana waited for a few moments, wondering whether she could stay in the bathroom stall unnoticed. But the woman began to sing, in a tearful voice, “We Shall Overcome” and Adriana felt she couldn't just sit there. She opened the door of the stall and walked to the sink beside the weeping woman, who was combing her wispy brown hair as she sang. The woman took no notice of her. Adriana looked at her own face in the mirror—it was pale with dark rings under her eyes, like a drowned woman.

She opened the bathroom door to the hallway, not sure what she'd find. In the common room, the television was blaring an ad for some medication or other. Redgie was sitting in a rocker, rocking away. He was wearing a Russian fur hat, a johnny shirt, faded track pants and army boots. Adriana stood in the middle of the hall, unsure of what to do. The man pointed at the TV without looking at her. “You see that? That's the drug the CIA gave me when they were trying to get me to talk about what I knew about 9/11.” He shook his fist in the air and began to rock with fierce purpose.

The man glanced over at her during the next commercial. “Hey you're the Chinese girl,” he said, smiling. “I like the Chinese. You're going to take over the world.” He continued rocking and nodded toward the television, as though to acknowledge he was still listening. Suddenly, he stood up, his face expressionless and walked out of the common room. Adriana heard him tell Joanne, the middle aged nurse with the blonde perm who had first greeted her in short stay, “I need a dose.”

Joanne clucked her tongue sympathetically, and unlocked the door to the med room. “TV getting to you, Redgie?” she asked. He nodded, his face pale and sweating. “Why don't you go lie down for awhile and let this Ativan get to work? In the meantime,” she said winking an exaggerated wink in the direction of the nursing station, “We'll change the channel.” Redgie swallowed the small white pill and with the strange slow motion gait of a drugged man he walked toward his room.

Adriana felt suddenly, drastically alone. The TV blared on, but the common room was empty except for her. She got up, clutching her johnny shirt around her. Her stomach was empty but the thought of eating made her feel sick. She went back to her room to lie down, under the white blanket that made her think of a shroud.

Adriana was asleep when her father came to visit that evening. It was her first full day on Short Stay, he noted. Thankfully, he'd had his own doctor's appointment and had been able to take the time off work, which seemed to him, at this particular time in his life, an irrelevance. He'd told his GP of 20 years that Adriana was in hospital and that he felt a kind of vertigo, as though he stood on the edge of a cliff. The doctor nodded his head and asked him about his sleep. Mr. Song realized he'd spent half the night awake, thinking, but the last thing he wanted was a prescription for sleeping pills. He didn't want them anywhere in his house.

Mr. Song sat quietly in a chair at the end of her bed, reading the paper. He always folded the paper up to show only the article he was reading, never spread out the pages like Jazz liked to do, which is part of what drove them crazy about each other.

When Adriana awoke, her father was immersed in the news of the world. He shook his head, squinted, and whistled under his breath. Adriana blinked at him and shifted to a sitting position. She felt angular, every bone aching.

Her father looked up, and his face was strange to Adriana. She noticed the wrinkles around his mouth, the pain in his eyes. She turned her face away. Mr. Song tried to erase his sad expression. “Hi, honey,” he said. Adriana raised her fingers and let them fall back on the bed. Mr. Song took her hand, noticing how cold it was.

“Last night I brought you some clothes and things from the bathroom at home,” he said helplessly. Adriana looked away from her father at the locker in the corner of the room, as there was no where else to put her eyes. The locker was brown, with a fake wood grain pattern, and a latch for a lock. It was, she noted, for a very thin person, big enough for a coffin.

Mr. Song looked at his hands and cleared his throat. “Have you talked to the doctor today?” he asked.

Adriana responded hoarsely, “Yes.” She let her chin fall to her chest and closed her eyes. She hadn't called him to let him know, Mr. Song thought, a small hurt, but a significant one. She didn't want to talk to him about what was happening to her.

Mr. Song stood up, saying, in a trembling voice, “I just have to go to the bathroom.” Adriana did not acknowledge him. As he left the room she lay down again, hugging one of the pillows to her chest.

When he returned to her room, after splashing water in his face in an attempt to dissolve his worry, there was no one around, only the television blaring in the common room. He opened Adriana's door slightly, saw she was asleep and stood looking at her. Her lips relaxed and slightly parted, her face finally smoothed of the ravages of her depression. She looked much like she had as a child, on an early summer evening, when his wife made her go to bed, despite the fact that neighbourhood children were still playing outdoors in the sunshine. He would check on her 15 minutes later and find her with her eyes closed, breathing quietly and rhythmically, her face golden in the setting sun. His wife had been right that she was tired, right that is was time for bed. It always reassured him that she knew what was best, that there was safety in this world after all.

As Mr. Song turned to leave, Fiona stopped by with her clipboard. She cocked her head to one side. “Still sleeping?” she asked in a low voice. Mr. Song nodded. “Would you have time to talk to the doctor?” He eagerly agreed.

Fiona led him to an interview room, and Mr. Song was surprised to see an Asian-looking woman sitting in one of chairs. She smiled primly and nodded, out of a sense of kinship, Mr. Song thought. “Sit down please,” she said.

The chat with the doctor lasted 20 minutes, at the end of which Mr. Song exited the interview room, looking anguished. The doctor had quizzed him on Adriana's early life, her relationship to both her parents and her sister, her school years and his own role in her upbringing. It was painful to remember his wife's death, her sometimes stormy relationship with Adriana and harsh approach to raising her. Many a time he had stood between them, shielding Adriana from the wooden spoon that her mother brandished over her for some perceived misdeed. She never mocked his gentleness, but she also never paid attention to his soft remonstrations, though he stood in front of his daughter and received the blows meant for her.

He had never thought his wife abusive—merely volatile and overly passionate—but it seemed that was not the conclusion the doctor had drawn from talking to him. “Does Adriana have any scars?” Dr. Chen asked. Mr. Song was taken aback. He didn't know. It hadn't occurred to him that she might. The thought that his wife would have damaged Adriana in a physical way horrified him. Somehow it seemed more real than the depression, easier to point to as evidence that something really was wrong with his wife's behaviour.

“Adriana needs medication,” the doctor said, “but she also needs psychotherapy. We don't do much of that here but I will refer her to a psychiatrist with a private practice before discharge.”

Mr. Song nodded, miserably. “That could be in a couple weeks, depending on how she does.” Mr. Song wondered what that meant, but the doctor had already put away the file and was standing up to leave. She shook Mr. Song's hand and held the door open for him. Mr. Song had the distinct feeling that he was peripheral to all that happened to Adriana in this place, that he wasn't needed or wanted except for the information he could provide.

Mr. Song walked out to his car, out of the depressing dimness of the hospital. He wondered if mental illness was contagious after all, because he felt shaken, oppressed, and weary. It could just be the barometric pressure, he thought. He drove past the gates where Redgie and the woman in the red parka stood smoking. Both of them waved at him, with the friendliness of those with nothing more to lose. These were Adriana's compatriots, he realized, with a strange mingling of hope and hopelessness. Mr. Song raised his hand to acknowledge them and Redgie, standing tall, saluted him.

Chapter 13

The next day, Adriana got out of bed long after lunch hour to go to the washroom. The sound of regular, muffled banging came through the wall. But when she stepped into the hallway, she no longer heard it. There was no one around, either at the nursing station or the common room. She could see the backs of a couple nurses as they worked on their computers, oblivious to the absence of people on the unit. The TV blared as usual, like a mad person talking to itself, Adriana thought anxiously, her hands curled in tight fists. She escaped into the washroom which was empty, splashed water on her face and felt some semblance of normalcy,

On her way back to her room, she swayed slightly, her stomach drawn and empty. When she reached her door, she heard an urgent tapping coming from the door next to hers. She hadn't noticed before but there was a window in the door, covered with a small curtain, and the door was bolted on the outside.

Adriana hesitated for a moment, knowing she was about to break some kind of rule. She opened the curtain and, startled, jerked away from the face pressed against the Plexiglass.

“Hey,” he said through the door “Don't worry, I won't tell. Can you just open the door for me?”

Adriana stood still. “Please,” he said. “I need to get out of TQ.”

So this was TQ. Adriana froze. The man's face contorted. “I need a cigarette. I need to pee.” He started to cry. “Get me outta here.” He said to no one in particular, turning away from the door. Adriana heard him unzip his pants and she turned away from his sobbing as he emptied his bladder into the corner of the room.

A surge of anxiety engulfed Adriana. She went to knock on the door of the nursing station. Joanne was talking on the phone and seeing it was Adriana said, “Just a minute.” She turned her back to Adriana and continued speaking in a low voice, doodling on a message pad.

Fiona was walking down the hall toward her. “What can I do for you, love?” she asked Adriana. It was hard to get the words out, for some reason.

“The guy in TQ,” she said. “He needs to get out. He…he peed himself,” Adriana said, bitterly. The whole world was narrow and dark.

Fiona looked concerned. “Adriana, it's kind of you to worry about Jeff, but he can take care of himself. He needs to be in Therapeutic Quiet right now, but don't you worry about him. You just concentrate on what you can do for yourself.” Adriana covered her face with her hands. She had the urge to collapse on the floor and just let whatever happened, happen, but instead she walked back to her room. There was no sound from TQ and Adriana didn't look through the Plexiglass window to make sure Jeff was still there. She lay down on the bed and thought about Jeff lying face down on the mattress, with the stench of piss rising from the corner. An image flitted through her mind of her bed at home, and how she'd left it unmade. She knew what her mother would think, but for some reason her mother was silent on the issue, glowering at her from the shadows of her mind.

Adriana was woken at supper time by the call, “Trays are up.” She noticed the door to TQ was ajar. She didn't look to see whether Jeff was still there, but she doubted it

In the kitchen people were eating supper from grey plastic trays. The clock said it was a quarter to five, too early to eat, she thought. But she sat down at a table where Marlene was carefully pushing mashed turnip onto her fork with a plastic knife.

“Hello, dearie,” she said, “Do you want your dessert or can I have it?” Adriana took the lid off her tray. There was a couple slices of grey roast beef, mashed potatoes and turnip, and a small dish of apple crumble, which she passed to Marlene. “Thanks love,” Marlene said, patting her shoulder. “You're alright, dearie.”

Adriana looked around. Redgie, the man with the Russian hat, now wore only his sunglasses and street clothes. He must be doing better, Adriana thought. At the same table was a thin young man with dishevelled hair and the shakes, shovelling mashed potatoes into his mouth. It was the guy from TQ, she was pretty sure. He was focussed on his food, as though he were tunnelling though a mountain.

Redgie pushed himself away from the table abruptly and stood up. “Can I buy a smoke off you, Jeff?” he asked the young man, who looked up briefly and shook his head.

“I don't have enough for myself,” he said. “Sorry.” Redgie mumbled something and went to the door of the unit. He pushed the buzzer.

“Hey can somebody let me out?” Adriana realized that she was now locked in, and it made her feel panicky.

She made her way back from the kitchen to her room. It felt like the dead end of something, a place from which there was no escape. She realized that hiding there away from the other patients was a bit like a self-imposed TQ. Only sleep gave her some respite, but even that was beginning to lose its sweetness. Her body was weary of it, she realized.

Chapter 14

“I want to bring Beth home.”

In Adriana's other life—before hospital—she sometimes thought about Beth, wondered how she managed. Wondered whether, at the age of 11, when their mother was dying, she could have taken care of her younger sister. Beth had their mother's brown curls and blue eyes, and stood out from her adopted family like a peach in a basket of plums. She was only ten years old and spoke Chinese fluently, whereas Adriana knew not a word. When Adriana and her father went to visit, her sister had crying spells and shrank behind Aunt Penny, as though from a poisonous snake. Adriana thought she must be afraid that they would try to whisk her off to Nova Scotia.