Rise: How a House Built a Family(38)

I had enough pictures burned into my mind to last a lifetime. I didn’t want to see him. Not even if he couldn’t see me back. I had the feeling he would know I was there, sense me, and I didn’t want to be on his mind in any way. Another part of me worried more about the opposite, about my reaction to seeing him. Would I feel enough compassion to take him back? I couldn’t imagine that being a positive thing for me and the kids.

But Sophie put her hand behind my shoulder, lifting and pushing. “It will help. It will be good for you to understand. Dr. Christe wants to help. He knows what’s best.”

Sharp words wanted out but I held them behind my teeth and got to my feet. I refused to lead the way, waving for the good doctor to ignore Southern hospitality and precede me. He rocked forward and back, shaking his head until he was sure I wasn’t budging. If there were dangerous people in straitjackets lurking around the corners, I wasn’t going to step blindly out among them. Part of me knew that I was being unkind, I was stereotyping, but another part of me had already seen enough to know that this time the reality was even more frightening than stereotypes had ever suggested.

Sophie walked beside Dr. Christe through a maze of blue-green hospital hallways with me trailing behind, mentally jumping into a fighting stance every time we turned a corner. When he swiped his card beside a set of double doors and pushed the one on the right open, I held back, frozen with fear.

“You aren’t going to see anything worse than what you’ve already been through,” he said, soft and gentle. This time his lowered brow looked genuine.

I walked past him, to where Sophie was standing in front of a long window, silent and stone-faced. On the other side was what I thought of instantly as a dayroom, even though I wasn’t sure where the word came from or if it was actually correct.

Each corner was arranged with a round table, neatly lined with four chairs. To my right, a game of chess had put one of the players to sleep, a reaction I could sympathize with. A woman working a zillion-piece puzzle rocked sideways, performing a complex pat-a-cake with herself each time a piece fit in place. All in all, they looked more normal than I expected. A half dozen patients were sitting or standing in pairs and talking, as normal as if they were planning a barbecue or bragging over how the kids were doing in school. They all wore street clothes, though the quality ranged from teen-boy holey to designer chic. If it weren’t for the doctor and three nurses keeping an eye on them, I would have guessed they were family members rather than patients.

The idea unnerved me, that the dividing line between patient and visitor was so thin. But it also reassured me that I wasn’t the only one who might have missed the signs until it was almost too late, that insanity can be totally invisible unless you really want to see it. The door on the far side opened. It had a small security-glass window guarded by a bulky man who probably made more money moonlighting as a bouncer. A man wearing blue scrubs shuffled in, his slippered feet sliding forward in six-inch increments. His head angled down, chin to chest, and even though the hair was familiar, he was too small and round-shouldered to be Adam.

“Oh,” Sophie said, stepping back until the backs of her knees bumped a chair. She tipped down into it without looking to make sure her aim was straight.

I stood behind her with no intention of staying long enough to make myself comfortable.

Dr. Christe sat a seat away, long legs stretched forward and arms propped on the backs of the chairs on either side of him. “One of the first things we do to give the patient a break, a little rest from the voices, is to medicate them until the voices stay silent.”

He pointed at the shuffling man.

I forced my eyes to follow the line of his finger, and this time the man was Adam, looking old and lost. Vacant.

“Adam’s voices are stubborn things. Some people don’t need much at all to quiet things down. This is how far we had to go to silence Adam’s voices, though. Damn near as far as you can and stay conscious.”

Christe leaned forward, knees on his elbows, observing his specimen like Jada watching fireflies in a jar. “We won’t leave him this far under. Next step is to teach him to deal with the voices we can’t eradicate. Help him learn he doesn’t have to do everything they say, and he doesn’t have to answer them. We’ll try to help him tell the difference between what is real and what isn’t.”

“It’s all real to him,” I said, my voice stronger than I expected it to be.

Dr. Christe turned to look at me, but I was watching drool pool on Adam’s chest. The effort of keeping his mouth closed was too much and he’d given up trying.

“Yes. It’s real to him. But we’ll do our best to help him make good decisions,” he said.

A powerful wave of pity washed over me. Adam had lined my bed with knives while I slept. He had lied to me and tortured the neighbor’s cat. He had told me terrible things that I would never know for sure if he had done or only dreamed. But I could see that on some level it was out of his control. A disease had stolen his mind, taken his family, haunted him with horrors none of us could understand. I had vowed to stand by him in sickness and in health. My guilt surged as strong as my pity. I had abandoned this poor drooling man, kicked him out of his home and had him involuntarily committed after his mind fled through no fault of his own.

But how could I take care of three kids and still have time to nurse a gravely ill man? Sophie must have asked about supplies and care packages, because the doctor listed things Adam could and could not have. The priority was clothes. “Patients do better when they have their own clothes. They feel more like people than patients. But no belts. No shoestrings. No jewelry. And he’ll need toiletries, too. Skip the dental floss—it’s practically unbreakable, you know. And the toothpaste has to come in a pump, no tubes. Even plastic tube corners are sharp enough to slice a wrist.”