Straightjacket (26 page)

His knees cracked as he took each stair, his hand gripping the railing on the way down since he was dizzy. Anna sat next to Dr. Hillman on the couch. The sling was off and the doctor was moving her arm around in a huge circle.

“Caleb, good to see you,” the doctor said brightly, returning his attention quickly to the arm in his hands.

“I’m free!” Anna sung out. She was smiling with both her mouth and her eyes, and it made him feel warm.

“Finally,” Caleb answered. “Now you can start pulling your weight around here.”

She rolled her eyes.

“Everything’s looking good,” Dr. Hillman said, placing her arm down gently by her side. “Just don’t do anything silly. Your arm is weak and you’ll have to build up your strength slowly. Make sure you do the exercises I showed you.”

“Okay, I promise not to overdo it.”

“Do you have any questions before I go?”

Caleb wondered whether or not she’d mention her own medication to the doctor. Yesterday he had noticed the empty tan prescription bottle lying at the bottom of the bathroom trash can. He didn’t say anything to Anna about it, and she didn’t mention anything to him. In fact, she never talked about panic attacks anymore.

“Nope. I’m cured,” she said happily. He didn’t know what to do. It’s not like he had a right to talk to her about her medication after the choices he’d made. But he wanted her to be well, to be happy.

“Are you sure you don’t need anything else?” Caleb asked uneasily, searching her expression to see if she understood.

“I’m fine,” she said with annoyance.

“Then I’m off,” the doctor said as he walked toward the door. “Caleb, I’ll see you in the office on Wednesday, and we can reassess how everything’s going.”

“Yeah, I’ll be there,” Caleb answered blandly as he walked over to get the door for him.

The worst part of being on the pills was going to the appointments. Dr. Hillman would sit behind his big oak desk with Caleb on the other side, and the voice of Dr. Blackwell, muffled over the speakerphone, would fill the room. He’d listen with gritted teeth to the smugness of the bodiless voice, forced to answer the same inane questions over and over. Then the doctors would consult, using all kinds of medical jargon that Caleb couldn’t understand even if he wasn’t drugged almost to unconsciousness. It probably had something to do with dosages. With just a word Dr. Blackwell could make it so that Caleb felt more or less focused, more or less tired, more or less anything.

But one thing he couldn’t do was pry into his brain and try to pick apart everything that he knew was true. The memories of angels and heaven were safe and sacred inside of him. He would never have to listen to Dr. Blackwell rant on and on about rhythms and figments of his imagination again. He was free to miss Samuel, miss his studio, miss the peace, feel the loss.

“Have a good day,” Dr. Hillman shouted back once he passed through the doorway. Caleb shut the door softly and turned around to find Anna staring at him through narrowed eyes.

“I know what you were getting at, so don’t even pretend not to know what I’m talking about,” she said.

“I just want to make sure you’re ready to go off of it, that’s all.”

“Don’t think for a
second
that you have any kind of say in my medical treatment. I can make my own decisions, just like you, even if they affect you.” Her face had an
I’ll show him
expression. He smiled by accident.

“It’s not funny.”

“I can’t help it,” he said, unable to wipe the smile off of his face. “I’m sorry; you’re right. I made the decision about my meds, and so should you. I won’t mention it again.”

“You better not. So, I was thinking,” she said slowly, “that maybe we could try out the whole fooling around thing now that I have two functioning arms.”

“Uh—I…” What could he say? He hadn’t been with her in that way for such a long time. Those damn drugs. They’d drained him of everything. Soon after he began taking the pills, he stopped functioning in that way. He could hardly function period. He missed her desperately, but the anger and shame wouldn’t let him admit what was happening. It was just another weakness that he couldn’t overcome. “Not right now,” he said as gently as he could. But when her mischievous smile faded and her face hung, devastated, he hated himself for not having told her what had been happening to him.

“I’m sorry. It’s not you, Anna. God, I miss you so much,” he said, pulling her to him. “I just can’t, not with the pills, they make it so…” He’d always been so open with her, teaching her that sex was nothing to be ashamed of, but now he was the one who couldn’t be honest. “Side effects,” he mumbled, upset with himself for being such a coward. He couldn’t even look her in the eye.

“I didn’t know,” she said sadly. “Don’t worry about it.” But he could tell that
she
was worried about it, like it had something to do with her. He had no clue what to say, how to make her realize that it wasn’t her. So he said nothing.

She broke the silence. “So what do you want to do today?”

The sadness was still there, but she was trying her hardest to hide it. He wanted to make everything better, right away, and so he answered without even thinking it through.

“I think I’m going to go upstairs and draw.”

“I’m so glad,” she answered with genuine brightness. “I’ll come up with you. Maybe I’ll do some writing. I miss being up there with you while you’re working.” She stood up and pulled him behind her up the stairs.

While he followed her, the reality of what he had promised to do sunk in. Not only did he have no interest in drawing, the thought of it was repulsive. The ideas that used to pop into his head, the feelings that went along with them, even the way his hands would move, all of it was gone. No more creativity; it had vanished in a matter of days. He couldn’t stand to sit in front of the paper, confused and unable to work through any kind of idea. So he had given it up. Another casualty of trying to be normal.

But he couldn’t disappoint Anna, and so he dragged his feet up the stairs. It seemed like a lifetime ago that the pencils and pastels and paper had been stashed neatly away inside the desk. He pulled out a drawing pad and some charcoal. Maybe if he didn’t have to deal with color, if things were simplified, it might work.

Anna grabbed her notebook from the end table and lay down so that her body stretched across the length of the couch. Her neck sunk into the throw pillow that was propped against the arm of the couch, and she balanced the notebook on her legs, sighing contentedly. At least she was happy.

He turned his attention to the blank piece of paper staring menacingly back at him. His hand came into view from the right, gripping the charcoal so tightly that the flesh of his fingers turned white. He willed himself to think, think about what to do next, but that was never how it was before. His hand just used to start moving, obeying a vision that would introduce itself to him quietly and in its own time. Now there was nothing there, only his recognition of the nothingness.

The seconds passed.

The page was still blank.

He forced himself to make a mark.

As he did it, his hand shook and the line he drew was bumpy and uneven. The line meant nothing to him. It made him feel nothing. As he stared at it, the nothingness turned to irritation, then confusion, then to fear. He couldn’t look at the pathetic line anymore. His angry hand ripped the paper from its spiral spine and crushed it, shoving it into the trash can underneath the desk. He didn’t even want to touch it any longer than he had to.

Then there was another blank piece of paper staring back at him. He flipped through the drawing pad. There were hundreds of blank pieces ready to take the place of those he threw away. He couldn’t stand to look at the blankness, but he also couldn’t bear to draw another meaningless mark. And he was so tired.
Get up from the desk, leave the room, go anywhere just so long as I’m away from here.

“I’m kind of hungry,” he blurted out, shoving the chair out and away from the desk. “I’m going to get something.” He tried to avoid looking at Anna directly; he didn’t want to see her disappointment. He focused on the doorway and didn’t look back.

His foot missed the last step on the way down the stairs. He stumbled and fell. His hands slapped against the wooden floorboards as he caught himself. But the sound wasn’t that loud. Maybe Anna hadn’t heard. After waiting in silence for a few seconds, hearing nothing from the study, he pulled himself up with the help of the railing and made his way into the kitchen.

He took a seat at the table and let his head fall forward into his waiting hands. His fingers weaved through his hair, which had grown long over the weeks, and their pads gripped his scalp on either side. He thought about the space in between his hands. It was skin, bone, membranes, neurons. And it wasn’t working right, not anymore. Maybe the medication was making everything in between his hands slowly disappear. Maybe that’s how it was curing him, taking away everything that made him himself and replacing it with nothingness. He was too tired and terrified to think about it, and it was just confusing him. The idea of it lingered, though, and soon he was crying. The thought of there being nothing, of disappearing, was too much. He didn’t know how he could live like this any longer. He was doing it for Anna’s sake, ignoring the fact that she’d become close to miserable herself, but he couldn’t leave her alone. This was the way it had to be.

He wiped his face with the dish towel. Determined to prove that there had to be something of substance left in him, he dragged himself back upstairs with a vengeance.

Shapes. I can draw shapes.

So he drew a cube, a cube made of squiggly lines, but it was a cube. Then he drew another. Soon cubes covered the page. They were all supposed to look the same, but the tremors in his hand made that impossible. He thought hard about what they meant, why he was doing it, but when nothing came to him, he drew even more to fill the void.

A half hour passed. He took a sick satisfaction in the fact that he had tricked Anna into thinking everything might actually be all right.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Over the next couple of days it had rained almost constantly. The color of the sky hardly changed with the coming of morning, the black tweaking itself only slightly to form an intimidating gray. The darkness made Caleb sleep even more than usual during the day. As a result, Anna was left by herself.

She missed him desperately. Sometimes she would lie in bed with him while he slept, just to be close to him. But she could only lie there for so long. Then she’d write, sometimes for hours. She found some joy in reading, taking care of her basil, lots of other little things. Even though her heart was breaking for him, she wasn’t falling into the same old pattern. Instead of analyzing every thought that happened to float through her mind, obsessing over her shortcomings and hating herself for them, terrified of being consumed by a panic attack that would do its worst and leave her broken, she found she was able to just be. Be with herself. The change in her was all because of Caleb. He’d built her up into a woman, one who was at peace with what her mind and her body could do. She was grateful to him for that, and loved him even more for it.

Finally one day, the sun came out. Driven by a hankering for pancakes, she pulled the skillet out from the kitchen cabinet, a little less carefully than she could have done, and banged it against some neighboring pots. Maybe the noise would wake Caleb. She was anxious to get outside with him and didn’t want to wait until the late afternoon for him to wake up.

He shuffled into the kitchen just as the edges on the puddles of batter had begun to turn brown.

“Hi,” she said, trying to flip one of the half-cooked pancakes onto its raw side.

“Hey,” he mumbled as he sat down, wearing his uniform—no shirt and blue sweatpants. His face fell into his hands.

“Sorry. I hope I didn’t wake you up,” she lied.

“No, I want you to wake me up. I sleep too much. I need to stop sleeping so much.” He turned toward the stove. “Pancakes smell good.”

“Almost done. Want to grab some syrup?” His feet scuffed against the floor on the way over to the cabinet. Once he’d set the plastic bottle onto the table, he went over to the sink, which was a few feet away from her, and grabbed the pill bottles next to it. He popped open each one, shook the pills inside, and emptied them all out onto the counter.

“What are you doing?” she asked as he bent over the two piles, one white and one pink.

“Nothing,” he mumbled. “What’s today?”

“Thursday.” She added another small cube of butter to the skillet, which sizzled and smoked in protest when it hit the screaming-hot metal.

“Hmm,” he grunted as he arranged the pills in two straight lines, one above the other.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. I just want to make sure I didn’t skip any.” He counted each line from left to right. And then again. He swept all but two of the pills off the counter and into his cupped hand, dropping them back into their respective bottles. The two pills that he’d left out ended up in the back of his throat.

She piled two pancakes onto her own plate, and four onto Caleb’s, and set them on the table. He squeezed what looked like gallons of syrup onto his pancakes, saturating them so that they deflated and lay flat under the weight of the gooeyness. She watched confused as he shoveled the bites into his mouth, not seeming to notice or care. He ate so quickly that she wasn’t even halfway finished by the time he was done. As he waited for her to be done, he pulled his fork through the puddle of leftover syrup.

“Do we have any coffee that’s not decaf?” he asked suddenly.

“No. Why? I thought you didn’t drink regular.”

He wouldn’t make eye contact with her and took too long of a pause before he answered.

“I need regular coffee now. It’ll keep me awake more.”

“If you need to sleep, then let yourself.”

“Make sure we get regular coffee next time,” he answered, like she hadn’t responded in the first place.