Straightjacket (25 page)

They ate in relative silence, Anna trying to make conversation every few minutes. He felt badly for his one-word replies, but he couldn’t talk or even bring himself try. He just wanted to eat as fast as he could.

“I’m going to go now,” he said as his empty plate clanged against the bottom of the sink.

“Oh. I thought maybe I could come with you.”

“I’ll just be gone for a little while. Why don’t you relax and read outside or something?”

“Um, okay. If that’s what you want.” She rinsed off both of their plates and left them in the sink. “I’ll see you later,” she said sullenly, and walked out of the kitchen.

I can’t think about it, what just happened, right now
. Keys in hand, he headed outside to the car. The engine revved loudly, and some birds in a nearby tree took flight together. He drove a little too fast down the dirt road, but the car hugged every curve and made it too easy.

The woods thinned and houses popped up here and there until he was driving through the center of the small town. It looked like something out of the 1950s, with its tiny grocery store, bank, and old-time gas station. The red neon Open sign illuminated the pharmacy window. He parked right in front. The few people walking past him were staring at the car. He got out and made no eye contact, even though some had actually stopped on the sidewalk to get a closer look. His finger pressed the button on the keychain and the horn beeped, activating the car alarm.

The bells hanging from above jingled as he pushed the glass door to the pharmacy open. It was just after ten a.m., and the store had opened only minutes before. There were no other customers inside. He walked briskly down one of the aisles, past the cheap plastic toys that lined the shelves. When he reached the pharmacy counter, an older man with a head full of shaggy white hair greeted him.

“Can I help you?”

“Yeah, I need to pick up a couple prescriptions. The name is Stark.”

“Stark,” the pharmacist said thoughtfully. “Oh yes, something was called in early this morning. Let me just take a look and I’ll fill them right now.”

“Thanks,” Caleb mumbled. The man became only the top of a head as he moved behind the pharmacy counter. Caleb looked disinterestedly at diabetes test strips and pill containers labeled with the days of the week on the shelves in front of him. Finally the pharmacist returned to the counter, an uncomfortable look on his face.

“Here you go,” he said, forcing a smile. “It’s important to follow the directions on these exactly. Do you have any questions?”

“No.” Caleb threw some cash onto the counter. The old man fumbled as he picked up the bills and pushed the buttons on the cash register. Caleb grabbed his change from the pharmacist’s open hand and left without a word.

Back inside the car, he tore open the paper bag and fumbled with the safety cap of the first brown bottle, finally managing to twist it off. A few pills tumbled out into his hand, and he shoved all but one back into the bottle, then twisted it closed and chucked it onto the passenger seat. The second bottle received the same treatment.

The palm of his hand cupped the two tiny pills.
Here goes
. Soon they were resting on the back of his dry tongue. He closed his eyes and swallowed hard. The pills wouldn’t go down easily. They stuck, their scratchiness lingering in his throat. He swallowed hard again and rammed the key into the ignition. The car peeled out onto the street. The pills’ chalky coating wasn’t the only thing in the car tinged with bitterness.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Anna shivered from the coolness of the couch’s fabric on the backs of her thighs. She grabbed a blanket, wrapping herself up and then waiting for the heat from her body to warm her cocoon. Caleb’s head rested on the back of the overstuffed leather chair in the corner, his arms crossed against his chest and his legs stretched out straight in front of him. His eyelids hung lazily over his eyes, allowing only a sliver of his pupil to focus on the flat-screen television that hung above the fireplace.

Caleb had sat in the chair like that every night for the past few weeks. His transformation had been painful for both of them. He’d given up drawing. After the first few nights of sitting comatose in front of the television for three to four hours, she’d asked him why he stopped, even though she knew the answer. He said that he was too tired, letting it slip with a mumble that he couldn’t focus enough to draw even a line. During the daytime he’d do his best to take walks around the lake with her, keep her company while she cooked, all the things they’d done—except for the fishing—before the pills. But by nighttime, it was clear that he couldn’t hold himself together any longer. Although he wouldn’t admit it, she knew he felt more than just tired. He tried to hide the dizziness, the confusion, but she noticed and understood now why he’d been so resistant to taking the pills at the hospital.

The thing she couldn’t bear to watch most of all, the thing he hadn’t warned her about and she hadn’t expected, was how he was losing himself. The things she had loved about him were slowly slipping away. He didn’t joke around anymore and barely even smiled. A sadness was swallowing him up. It was like she was standing at the top of a hill, watching as he slid down backward with his eyes still focused up on her at the peak. Every day she would try to reach out her hand to him, urging him to grab it and help himself up before he slid down even further. Although his resigned look made her realize he’d given up and wouldn’t even bother to take her hand, she still wouldn’t stop trying.

“You wanna go up to the study and draw a little?”

No answer.

“Caleb?”

“Huh?” His eyes were still glazed over.

“Do you wanna go draw for a little bit?”

“No. I don’t feel like it.” His attention returned to the television screen, and the tiny fleck of hope she’d built up over the last few seconds was dashed. Over on the screen, a bearded man aimed his gun at a tiger. The dart shot out and hit the animal behind one of its front legs. It roared ferociously, its head darting in every direction, until its legs gave way and it collapsed onto its side. Three men approached cautiously, poking the tiger’s belly with the butt of the gun. Once the animal was fully unconscious, they dragged it into a cage and loaded it onto a pickup truck.

Caleb’s expression was empty. Could he actually be sleeping with his eyes open?

Back on the screen, two people in green scrubs with surgical masks that obscured everything except their eyes sliced the tiger’s side open. Their silver instruments dived in and out of the cavity, a voice-over explaining that this would be their only chance to reverse whatever damage had been done in the wild. The doctors’ white latex gloves were coated with bright red blood. Anna checked her watch to see if the hour was almost up and the program would end soon. Why would Caleb want to watch it in the first place? She didn’t have a chance to ask—his eyelids had become too heavy for him, and he’d given in to the sleep.

She tiptoed over to the television to shut it off. He hadn’t woken up, so she laid her blanket over him. He would fall asleep downstairs more often than not, and sometimes he wouldn’t wake up until the morning. Those nights she would sleep down there with him.

But this time, the weight of the blanket woke him. His eyelids opened back up very slowly and, when he realized what was happening, he pulled the blanket off of his chest.

“Why don’t you go up to bed?”

“No. I’m fine,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s too early to go to sleep. I want to be with you.”

“I’ll come up with you. We’ll just go to sleep early then.”

“No, no.” He shook his head again to break up the sleepiness. She grabbed the remote that was resting on the arm of his chair and was about to turn on the television again.

“No, I don’t want to watch anything,” he said, taking the remote out of her hand. “We’ve been doing enough of that.”

“So what do you want to do?”

“I don’t know. Maybe we could just talk. I would really like to talk.” He turned so that his body faced hers. She sat down on the arm of his chair and rested her feet on his lap.

“Okay. We can do that.” Now that the decision to talk had been made, what was there to be said? Before, their conversations had never been forced. Deciding to talk and setting aside a time to do it made it all so awkward.

“Um…So the basil I planted is beginning to sprout,” she said.

“That’s great.”

“Yeah, I knew it was late in the season to plant it, but I figured I’d try.”

“Uh-huh.”

“It probably won’t grow fast enough to eat before it gets cold, but maybe I can bring it inside in the fall.” Although he was paying attention, it wasn’t the way it used to be. Up until a few weeks ago, whenever she spoke to him, he would focus only on her, like she was the only thing that existed. But now he struggled just to make sense of her words, to grunt an affirmative answer when it was expected. She might crumble right there in front of him. The changes were just too much.

“So have you spoken to Samuel recently?” Her voice was forceful and unapologetic. His head jerked backward. They hadn’t spoken about heaven since he told her that he’d given it up. She didn’t know why she had asked and what made her think of it, but she felt a charge as the life came back to his face.

“What? What are you talking about?”

“I just wanted to know if you’ve talked to him. You said it would be easy to give it all up. I want to know if that’s true.”

“Anna, I really don’t want to talk about this.” He shifted his body away from her so that it faced the television again.

“I do. We haven’t talked about it—actually we’ve ignored it—for weeks. I want to know.” He cracked his knuckles. Clearly he was uncomfortable, but she reveled in the fact that the vacancy was gone. The nothingness was at least being replaced by some kind of emotion.

“That stuff is in my past. I don’t want to bring it up now.”

“Well, I do. Just answer me.”

He turned to face her, head-on. “Fine. No, I haven’t spoken to him in a long time.”

“So he didn’t care that you just gave it all up?”

“Please, I don’t want to do this.”

“Tell me. You said it would be easy to stay, and I want to know if it really has been.” She was relentless. He was clawing his way up the hill to her, no matter how reluctantly he was doing it.

“Just forget about all of it. The catatonia is under control; there’s no reason to dredge all this back up.”

Every part of her wanted to forget about it all, keep the doubts about his sanity from coming back, but instead, she started yelling. “We can’t just forget about it! It’s part of you; this is who you think you are. You can’t just pretend it doesn’t exist! And these drugs you’re on—” She stood up and swung her arm around wildly. “You were right about what they do. I hate them! It’s horrible. I’d rather—”

“You’d rather what? Live with practically a dead body for days at a time?”

“No,” she said, trying to control herself now. “I want to live with you, who you
really
are, without all the sadness and deadness that this stuff makes you feel.”

“Well, I’m not going off of it. I haven’t had a stupor in weeks. It’s working.”

“It’s not working. It’s killing you! I wouldn’t be able to live without you, Caleb. I’d—I’d just die.”

He slumped over, like she’d just shot him in the stomach. But then, to her surprise, he jumped up out of his chair. “Do you think I like feeling like this?” he bellowed, jerking his arms around. “I know what’s happening here. I feel like every day I’m slipping away more and more, I’m losing…” He stopped, but she knew what he was going to say, because she could see it happening up close minute by minute. Calmer and quieter, he continued. “But at least I’m here with you, and you don’t have to go through what you did on the boat.”

“I would rather lose you for a few days at a time than live with someone who isn’t you. Why can’t you trust me?”

“It’s not that I don’t trust you. I won’t make you take care of an invalid, bathing me, making sure I don’t starve to death, cleaning up after me. It’s disgusting. You don’t deserve it.”

“That’s not how I see it at all. You’re not even trying to see it from my point of view.”

He walked over to her and stood very close. “I told you I’d always take care of you. I can’t do that if I’m sitting in a chair, drooling and out of it. This is how I want to live. I know it’s not perfect, but I’m doing the best I can.”

She was so frustrated, so angry, that she wanted to scream at him, make him see that he was being completely unreasonable. He was trying to be noble and good, but why couldn’t he see how his attempt to drug himself into normalcy was killing himself and the life they’d built? She scoured her mind for the words that would miraculously make him come to his senses, but there was nothing left to say.

“I’m going upstairs to read,” she said coldly, and turned away.

For the first time since coming to the cabin, they spent the evening apart.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

The knocking on the door woke Caleb up. His arm ran up and down the sheets searching for Anna, but they were cool and empty. He slept much later than her almost every morning now. And all day he would drag the drowsiness around with him. It weighed on him like an extra twenty-five pounds.

The blue digits on the clock came into view.

“Damn,” his voice cracked once he understood what the numbers were telling him. It was almost noon. He’d wasted half the day. Again.

Lots of sounds filtered into the bedroom: the lock on the front door, the gentle whine as it was pulled open, Anna, and then a man. One memory began to fight its way through the fogginess that had become a fixture in his mind.

Dr. Hillman. It was Dr. Hillman downstairs
.

And then he thought about the why, and miraculously he remembered, which had become unusual. Anna was getting her sling off today. Her voice was definitely buoyant. Somehow his heavy limbs listened to him and pulled him out of bed. He slipped on a pair of jeans that was lying crumpled on the floor and then pulled a white T-shirt out of the dresser. He didn’t want to miss this. It wasn’t often anymore that Anna’s voice was so happy.