Zoe Letting Go (3 page)

“You are prohibited from entering the bedroom of another patient unless given explicit verbal permission.”

Patient?

“Meals are mandatory, as is adherence to the program. Free time will be allotted according to a schedule, which will be consistent from one day to the next.”

I said nothing, but the feeling of panic continued to grow inside of me.

“Aside from today, you won’t often see me. I handle the administrative and research aspects of Twin Birch. Your main points of contact will be Alexandra, our in-house psychiatrist, and Devon, our program coordinator.”

I barely heard her speech; my mind was still stuck on the
word “patient.” I didn’t feel like a patient; I felt like an inmate or a victim. “Patient” implied that there was something wrong with me. “Patient” implied that I was sick.

Finished with her briefing, Angela stood and slipped out from behind her desk, plucking the phone from my stunned, open hand along the way.

“We’ll keep it safe until you check out,” she said with a smile. “Please follow me.”

My suitcase squeaked as I pulled it down the hallway behind Angela, keeping my eyes focused on the hem of her suit in order to avoid becoming dizzy. When I chanced a wider survey, I saw that her black hair was gathered into a French twist and secured with a single, glossy chopstick. A pair of pumps rapped against the floor sharply, their assault amplified by the acoustics of the hallway. As we moved away from the periphery of the building, I saw that the house wasn’t as bare as it first seemed. Bit by bit, pieces of furniture accumulated: antique mirrors, end tables, settees, statuettes, and ottomans that, by their looks, hadn’t supported a pair of feet in decades. Just as I considered complaining about my suitcase, Angela came to a stop before a plain chair and table arranged at the tail end of the hallway.

On top of the table sat a red box, shiny and new-looking among the surrounding relics. But Angela hadn’t led me here to show me a box. Next to the collection of items was a door—a closed door.

“Sound-proofed,” Angela said, rapping against the door to illustrate her point. “You’ll be here every day.”

I swallowed hard, determined not to reveal an iota of
bewilderment. Angela scrutinized my face in response, no doubt searching for signs of weakness.

“You’re nervous,” she said.

I narrowed my eyes.

“That won’t last long,” she continued, confirming the diagnosis despite my silence. “I’ll take you to meet the rest of the girls now. This way, please.”

With one hand I grasped the suitcase; the other I jammed tightly into my jacket pocket, where my fingers traced the deckled edges of the paper I’d snatched from Angela’s chair. When would I have a moment of privacy to read it? I wanted badly to examine it—
needed
to examine it. The state of semi-paralysis that had enveloped me early in the morning was disintegrating fast. I needed answers soon.

I followed Angela as we headed up a staircase, around a bend, and down a second hallway roughly perpendicular to the one downstairs. As with the ground floor of the building, the rooms upstairs were arranged chaotically, with no apparent logic guiding their placement. Navigating the crooked passages, I realized that I’d need to draw some sort of map in order to keep my compass oriented amid the bamboozling array of corners and half-staircases. After what seemed like a mile inside the maze of the second floor, we arrived at a straight-ahead hallway lined with bedrooms.

“Here we are,” Angela said.

I let go of my suitcase handle, and it fell to the ground with a violent thump.

“Well, not quite,” Angela amended. “Come this way.”

Three bedrooms abutted the corridor, their doors wide open
to show scattered clothes, books, and personal objects. Evidence of inhabitation.

“The bathroom,” Angela said, directing my attention through an opposite doorway as we continued. I paused and surveyed the large, white-tiled room. A counter was already clotted with a drugstore’s worth of shampoos, conditioners, moisturizers, toners, cleansers, soaps, lotions, contact lens solutions, shaving creams, glosses, serums, sprays, toothpastes, tweezers, and sticks of deodorant. Staring at the bottles and tubes on display, I was reminded unpleasantly of how much effort it takes to be a female. And how much money, too—there must have been three hundred dollars worth of shaving products alone.

My own room was the last of the bunch.

“This is you,” Angela said. “If you have any questions about accommodations, I’m sure Caroline or Devon would be glad to help you.”

“Caroline?”

“Your roommate.”

“Oh,” I said uncertainly.
A roommate?
Was I supposed to know this information already? If so, how? I pinched my thumb and forefinger together tightly, which is something I do when my composure is failing me. The presence of minor pain keeps me on my toes.

“Devon,” Angela continued, misreading my confusion, “is the coordinator of our program.”

I reviewed this information once more. Had I been told about Caroline? I had not. My processing devices were cluttered with new data: the layout of the house, the names of the people, the rules and regulations and schedules. It was a lot for one afternoon.
Especially for a summer afternoon, when my brain wasn’t primed for anything.

I wheeled my suitcase into my new room, which was arranged as if for a pair of twins: two beds, two desks, two dressers, all identical. A clean, scrubbed room. The kind of room where you could swipe a finger along any surface, no matter how obscure, and find it free of dust and cobwebs. Nearly everything my eyes swept over was painted or woven of the same color, and the predominant feeling of the room was, therefore, an overwhelming sensation of yellowness. Yellow walls, yellow curtains, yellow lampshade, yellow bedding: Nothing was the same shade of yellow as anything else, but it all belonged to a very specific category of yellowness. The shades were rich and saturate, like shortbread and banana cream pie, or the golden tips of a crisp meringue cookie. I wondered if this was supposed to add up to a subliminal message, and if so, how I would resist it.

One half of the room was a blank slate. Presumably, this was my half. The other half was populated with a dozen items, each organized neatly across the top of Caroline’s dresser. I had only a few seconds to eye my roommate’s possessions, but a few seconds was long enough for an uneasy feeling to creep up my neck.

“All right?” Angela asked. “Ready to meet the girls?”

I nodded to Angela, signaling that I was ready for whatever came next.

First came the smell. Then came the heat.

I sniffed the air as Angela led me toward the kitchen. Christmas. It smelled like cinnamon, spice, and everything nice. Like
wood-burning stoves and ribboned gifts beneath a tree. But it was June, not December, and instead of good cheer, the smell cast a disorienting spell. With each step toward the source, the air grew hotter.

The kitchen was a hybrid of different purposes and shapes, like the rest of the house—a former home kitchen remodeled, with baffling additions and corrections, into an industrial cooking space. Three ovens blasted at 350 degrees each. The room contained three tables, six stools, and six people. Five of the people sat hunched at the stools. The sixth strolled among them, passing out nickel-sized objects. At my entrance the entire group looked up. I pinched my thumb and forefinger together again, praying for the knot of pain to distract me from my nerves.

“This must be Zoe,” said the sixth person, strolling over to where I stood. She was solidly built, maybe in her late twenties, with a blond ponytail spouting from the base of her head like a garden hose. Her posture was uncommonly erect, and I could tell she was the kind of person who is genetically engineered to be a camp counselor, soccer coach, or some other middling authority figure. Not a stitch of makeup adorned her confident features, and a light sheen of oil cast a glare from her forehead.

“I’m Devon,” she said.

“What’s on the menu?” Angela asked.

Devon turned to address the five girls sitting on stools behind her. “Ladies? Want to tell Angela what we whipped up today?”

Five frail girls stared at their hands in silence. I was struck by the hollowness of their features, though perhaps it was an effect of the kitchen’s harsh fluorescent lights.

“Tiger milk cookies,” Devon filled in. “Smells good, doesn’t it, Zoe?”

I nodded automatically—what else could I do? One of the girls at the table glanced up at me with a murderous look.
Traitor
, her expression said, as though by agreeing with Devon I’d already erred. The girl bowed her head back down, letting a wreath of dark curls conceal her face. My stomach heaved. I clearly didn’t know the rules here yet. I didn’t know who was a friend and who was an enemy. Certainly the gaunt figures in front of me did not look eager to welcome me into their fold.

“We’re about to perform the Mindfulness exercise,” Devon said, holding up a bag of dried apricots.

Angela nodded. “I’ll leave you to it. Have fun, girls.” She left without pausing for a reply. I didn’t have one, anyway.

I took the only free stool in the room. My table partner was a twiglike creature with blond wisps of hair, a ski-jump nose, and marble-like eyes. Her hands were as dainty as bird claws, save for the thin blue veins visible just beneath the surface. My own hands, by comparison, were as ruddy and robust as a farmer’s. I hid them in my lap self-consciously.

Devon placed an object in front of me, then returned to her place at the front of the class.

“Ready?” she addressed the group.

Silence again.

“Put the apricot in the palm of your hand.”

I put the apricot in the palm of my hand.

“Imagine you’re visiting our planet from outer space,” Devon intoned soothingly. “Imagine you dropped in from the moon five
minutes ago, and you have never seen anything like this object before.”

I looked up sharply. Was this a joke? The girls perched around me stared hypnotized at their pieces of fruit. None would meet my eye.

“Turn it over between your fingers,” Devon said. “Explore the texture of the apricot. Let your eyes explore every part of it, as though you’ve never seen such a thing before.”

The reverse side of the apricot looked exactly the same to me: like a piece of scrap rubber. Like something you’d see in the gutter.

“Notice where the light shines on the apricot,” Devon said. “Notice where the fruit is dark in shadow.”

There was no shadow, only wetness. My palms had grown clammy, and when I tried to pinch my fingers together they slid off each other like peeled grapes.

“Smell the object,” Devon said. “While you are doing this, notice any thoughts that come to mind.”

The girl next to me held her apricot between two fingers, like an insect. She dangled it one inch from her nose and inhaled. The girl who glared at me was hinged over so that her face was several inches away from the apricot, which lay on the table before her.

I wondered if we were being hypnotized.

“Bring your full awareness to the fruit,” Devon continued. “Do you like apricots? What do you like about them? Notice the smell of your apricot.”

Play-Doh
, I thought. It smelled like Play-Doh.

“Gently place the object in your mouth without chewing it.”

I looked around. Five girls held the apricot aloft, watching it with the intensity of a chemist mixing formulas. The apricots levitated, but nobody ate. “On three, girls,” Devon said, a bit more firmly this time.

What the hell was going on? I raised my hand.

“Yes, Zoe?”

“I’d prefer not to eat this,” I said. Five pairs of eyes whipped toward the source of the comment.

“Are you allergic to apricots?” Devon asked.

“No.”

Her look was quizzical.

“I don’t like apricots,” I explained.

“That’s fine. But you need to taste it for the purpose of this exercise.” Her tone was stringent. Glancing about me in search of understanding, I saw that each of the stares directed at me was an accusation. Had I said the wrong thing again? It wasn’t fair—the others had gotten here before me. They knew the rules and they also knew that I
didn’t
know the rules. It wasn’t fair of them to punish me.

Devon counted up to three. When she got to the final digit, each of the five girls robotically inserted the apricot into her mouth. I put mine down on the table instead. Nobody, I decided, was going to tell me what to do.

“When you feel ready, consciously bite into the apricot,” Devon said. “Notice the tastes that it releases.”

Five bony jaws sank their teeth into five dried apricots. My apricot remained intact on the table in front of me. I crossed my
arms and stared at it. The smell of cookies baking spilled forth, meanwhile, from behind closed oven doors.

One of the girls raised her hand.

“Yes, Brooke?” Devon said.

The girl pointed at me and said, with a mouth full of apricot, “Zoe isn’t participating.”

My stomach shriveled into a raisin.

“Focus on yourself, Brooke,” Devon said. “Everybody with me? Slowly chew the apricot. Notice how it changes consistency. Notice how the tastes change. When you feel ready to swallow, follow the sensations of swallowing down to your stomach.”

When the ovens beeped, I glanced up and found Devon eyeing the untouched apricot sitting in front of me. Everyone else, it appeared, had successfully ingested hers. Only one apricot—mine—remained uneaten.

“Good work, girls,” Devon said. “You can all test your cookies to see if they’re done. Remember to use the mitts; pans are hot.”

A scuffle of chairs and murmurs accompanied the other five girls as they rose to fetch their cookie trays. I sat alone, like a child waiting to be punished, as Devon took the empty seat next to me.

“Today is your first day,” she said.

“Yes.”

“I allowed you to skip the Mindfulness exercise only because I don’t like to single girls out right off the bat. The exercises, however, are non-optional. You’ll be expected to comply with every step, starting now.”