Heart Berries: A Memoir(5)

Keep in mind you were once desperate for me. I need help, and I cannot stop thinking that every transgression has brought me closer to a light, a striking beacon that tells me death is absolution. I have never chosen light.

If transgressions were all bad, people wouldn’t do them. Do you consider me a transgression?

I’m tired of the constant stories and the truth I don’t acknowledge. They’re not medicine anymore. I’m not medicine anymore. The words are flaccid, and the things I used to find sacred are torment. I’m stepping into my own undertow. My own valley is closing in on me. I curl into walls, ashamed at my cowardice. I am sick or possessed.

The spirits used to possess the people. We called it “Indian sick,” and it was the first illness to be accounted for. It begins with want, with taking, and ends with a silence that hurts and makes us beg. There were stories about the cures and causes. Women tried to eat soapberries, or nothing, and talked about how we all had it coming. When the first children died it was too late to stop talking. When the beings took the women they bound them in blood. They were buried in wombs of sad memory. The only thing, the right thing—the thing that brought about our immunity—was the knowledge that something instinctual would carry us back. The awareness that our ancestors were watching was vital. I don’t feel the eyes of my grandmother anymore.

What I feel struck with is something smaller, in a less impressive world. I woke up today, confused, inside of something feminine and ancestral in its misery. I woke up as the bones of my ancestors locked in government storage. My illness has carried me into white buildings, into the doctor’s office and the therapist’s—with nothing to say, other than I need my grandmother’s eyes on me, smiling at my misguided heart. Imagine their faces when I say that?

At the behavioral health service building, I felt something: a young woman staring at me. She was soft-looking and crazy-eyed, sitting with an old, gray, wool blanket in her lap. Avoiding her stare was the first task I failed at in the institution.

“You’re pretty,” she said.

“Thank you,” I said.

“No,” she said. “Thank you.”

Scared, I smiled and nodded. We both looked out of place, and, when I considered what kind of woman would look like she belonged here, I drew a blank.

“I got these moles,” she said, and pointed to the five surrounding her mouth. “They’re spitballs from Jesus.”

It was a mistake to check myself in. So many people said something wasn’t right. I told them you were my savior, and this is what neglect can do. They didn’t believe me—it’s important to be loved back. No matter, I’m a mother. My son will stay with a friend. Do this, they said. Something is wrong, I know.

We passed the hours in the waiting room watching the Weather Channel. We watched tornadoes and the fury of water wash around. Slowly, women were called in for assessment with psychiatrists and then more women came in to wait.

I was eventually alone on the couch. Regular to crazy-looking—I was somewhere in the middle, wearing an oversize black petticoat and a too-red lipstick. There was a glass where workers observed us, and I recognized a man on the other side, Josue. Years before, we worked at a call center together. We had lunch a few times, and he told me about his night shifts at a hospital. He came outside and observed me in a quiet and careful way. Observation is a skill. Observation isn’t easy, and the right eyes can make me feel like a deer, while the wrong ones make me feel like a monster.

He stood in front of me with a binder in his hands.

“Terese,” he said.

“No. Don’t do this,” I said.

He smiled. “It’s good you’re here.”

I said a lot of things to fill a silence. He didn’t want to know why I was there. I told him every reason except the truth. He was kind of a dick, in that it didn’t matter what I said. He just smiled and sat with me for a moment and then went back to work.

A nurse came in with a girl who couldn’t have been older than eighteen.

“Sit,” the nurse said.

“Calm your tits,” the young girl said, turning to me. “Wild night?”

The fuzz of the couch came off in my hand. The orange fur of it was familiar. A nurse came out of a gray door and motioned for me. I followed her into a room. She left me there with the door cracked. There was an urge to leap and run. The doctor walked in. She was petite and wore a blush hijab, with wine-colored lipstick.

“On a scale of one to ten, how bad is your depression?”

“Seven,” I said.

“Seven’s not a ten.” She smiled. “Why are you here?”

“This is the last thing I can do.”

“Do you have a plan to hurt yourself?”

“It’s dramatic. I don’t think it’s a real plan,” I said.

She sat up straighter.

“I think things would be better if I was dead.”

She told me there was a better solution to pain, and that she’s seen it herself. She asked me to stay for five days. I’d be out two days before Christmas. I had already bought my son’s gifts. I asked her if I could write. She said yes. I asked her if I would be out before Christmas for sure. She said yes.

“Do this program for you,” she said.

The forms made me feel big. My signature mattered. I was signing a new treaty. The gamut of questions and searches through my bag lasted for hours, and, during that time, several nurses pointed out that things do, in fact, get better.