A Danger to Herself and Others(4)

Anyway, the sounds I hear make it clear that at least some of the other patients here (all girls, judging by their voices) aren’t left alone in their rooms like I am. I stand between the beds and do a few sun salutations. When I was little, Mom used to bring me to the yoga classes she frequented to help keep her belly flat.

Maybe being stuck indoors will be good for my skin. Maybe when all this is over, I’ll emerge with a preternaturally youthful complexion, like those kidnapping victims who are kept in underground bunkers for half their lives and emerge with non-sun-damaged skin after their rescue. Maybe my perfect skin will be a sign of my survival, a show of solidarity with those kidnapped girls, like a uniform—we were all held indoors against our will.

Not that I intend to be here that long. Like I said, this is all just a misunderstanding.

Eight steps. Turn. Seven Steps. Turn. I’d prefer to keep to the walls and circle the room like it’s a tiny little track, but the beds get in the way.

Dr. Lightfoot never uses the second bed. I don’t mean uses like sleeps in it or anything, but when she comes in here to talk, she brings a plastic folding chair with her and sits in the center of the room with her back to the vacant second bed while I sit on the first, the one in which I sleep. Maybe Lightfoot doesn’t sit on the bed because she doesn’t want to make our interactions feel too casual. After all, we’re not two friends catching up. We’re not roommates in a college dorm. She’s not my new Agnes.

Agnes never knew that I was hooking up with Jonah. Don’t let the biblical name fool you. Two biblical names: Hannah and Jonah. We were doing some pretty non-biblical things. Or actually, completely biblical things, when you think about it.

I gaze out the window. Dusk and dawn look the same here. The fog is rolling through. There are redwood trees as far as I can see, and when the fog gets thick, it condenses on the needlelike leaves and drips onto the roof. It sounds like rain, but it isn’t.

It’s not true that I can only see a few plants from here. We’re actually in the middle of a forest.

I was lying before.





three


Here’s what I remember about this place from when they brought me here (I haven’t left the room since, so I only know what I saw that day):

This building is three stories high, and I’m on the third floor. There’s no elevator, or anyway, they didn’t bring me up in one. I trudged up the stairs behind Clipboard-Man. The walls in the stairwell are the same vomit-green brick that they are in here.

When we reached the second-floor landing, I heard shouting. Almost the kind of sound you’d hear coming from a classroom of unruly kids or a group of teens hanging out in the cafeteria. (I assume this place has some sort of cafeteria.)

First floor: admitting, arrivals, emergencies, offices.

Second floor: cafeteria, classrooms (or something like that).

Third floor: a long hallway of closed doors, behind which I guess are all patients’ rooms. I wonder if any of the rooms are different inside. Like, depending on what you got sent here for.

There could be a basement, I suppose, but I don’t think they have basements in California because of earthquakes. Also, the building is kind of built into the side of a mountain, so in order to have a basement they’d have had to carve a hole into the hill. That seems like a lot of trouble to go to for a place like this.

I can tell this isn’t the sort of building that used to be something else. You know how hospitals become boarding schools become jails become high-end condos because they have good bones? Not this place. This building was designed to be exactly what it is. What other use could there possibly be for a long, rectangular, three-story stone box built into the side of a mountain?

My window faces the woods, but I’m pretty sure the windows on the other side of the building face the Pacific Ocean. I’m not positive, but I think I smell salt water sometimes.

I want to know whose idea it was to build this place here. The building may be ugly, but the location seems better suited to a high-end resort where rich people from the big city spend thousands of dollars to relax and unplug, seemingly oblivious to the fact that millions of people relax and unplug for free.

But then, putting this facility someplace beautiful probably makes it easier to convince parents like mine to allow their children to be sent here. I imagine mothers telling their daughters: It’s so lovely in the Santa Cruz Mountains. It’ll be like you’re on vacation.

Right.

There are certain allowances that have to be made if you don’t leave a room.

Allowance 1: Bedpans.

They offer me a chance to go to a bathroom down the hall a few times each day, but there’s also a bedpan in the room just in case. I actually prefer using it because at least that way I get to decide when I perform my bodily functions. I know a bedpan is supposed to be humiliating, but I have to disagree. There’s something oddly luxurious about not having to leave the bed to pee. And about the fact that someone else has to take your waste away. You don’t even have to flush it yourself.

Allowance 2: Food.

My meals are brought to me on a tray three times a day. I guess it’s the same food the others eat—whatever they serve in the cafeteria for the girls who aren’t a danger to themselves and others. It’s safe to assume that no one here gets to choose when they eat; mealtimes are probably strictly adhered to whether you’re in a room or in the cafeteria. This morning, they brought me Honey Nut Cheerios, or what was probably some generic off-label version of Honey Nut Cheerios. I wanted to tell them that I hate honey, but it’s not like there’s a menu to pick from. Jonah had Cheerios for breakfast nearly every morning this summer, though we always suspected that the dorm cafeteria stocked the generic off-label brand, which Jonah thought was ridiculous considering how much our parents paid to send us to that summer program. Maybe the food in this place is supplied by the same company that supplies food to the dorm I’d been living in before I came here. But having the same cereal we’d eaten on the outside doesn’t make this place seem any more normal.