A Danger to Herself and Others(49)

How is that different from what they’re doing to me here? Keeping me from school. Isolating me from the familiar. They even control the lights, just like Paula’s murderous husband.

How can I be crazy when I’m able to remember so many details about a movie made so long ago that they had to film it in black and white?

How can I be crazy if I got an A in that class for writing a paper comparing the movie Gaslight with the Charlotte Perkins Gilman short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” that was so good my teacher asked to keep a copy of it on file for when she next taught the class?

Lucy was here. Her hair brushed against my arm; I felt the warmth of another body in the room. Lucy sometimes mumbled to herself in Spanish; she told me she’d grown up in a bilingual home. I don’t even know Spanish.

Maybe Dr. Lightfoot stays in business by making her patients believe they’re crazy. Can’t make money if you can’t keep the beds full, that kind of thing. Gaslighting to pay the bills.

Lucy is the one who told me to go on the antipsychotics. She wouldn’t have done that if she’d known they’d make her disappear.

But then, how would Lucy have known, if she only existed inside my brain? I didn’t know.

I didn’t know Spanish either.

But…where did her bed go? It was here before the lights went out. It was nailed to the floor like my own. They couldn’t have moved it while I was sleeping. The noise would’ve woken me up. And anyway, I haven’t slept at all tonight.

Does that mean I didn’t just hallucinate a person, I hallucinated furniture?

But Lucy was a patient here. She went to therapy. She sat in the cafeteria.

And yet…I can’t remember if Dr. Lightfoot or Stephen ever actually talked to her or acknowledged her presence. When I helped her sneak out for her audition, how did Lucy get back in without being caught?

She said she paid off an orderly.

Okay, but why didn’t the attendant/orderly/nurse ask where Lucy was during that evening’s room check?

Well, she had privileges I didn’t. She might have been at group therapy, at dinner, weaving a stupid basket.

But why did she come back here at all that night?

She said it would have been too much trouble to stay away.

I close my eyes again, remember walking down the stairs. Lucy held my hand. I felt her palm against mine. She tugged me in the opposite direction when she saw how the orderly was scanning patients’ bracelets. I almost tripped and fell. We were nearly caught.

I was so happy when she made it outside, when she ran through the woods toward her boyfriend’s waiting car.

Her boyfriend. I texted Joaquin! Lucy told me his phone number.

Does that mean I texted some stranger? I invented all of it?

Impossible.

I shake my head, my eyes still closed.

Everyone hears voices sometimes. I mean, not voices necessarily, but memories of voices. My dad telling me to broaden my horizons, Agnes saying we’re too old for these games.

They’re just doing this to keep me here. My plan to get out by showing them what a good friend I could be was working, and they don’t want to let me win.

So, they’re saying that Lucy wasn’t real because no one would expect them to release me for being a good friend to a hallucination.

I’m trapped. I’m trapped, I’m trapped, I’m trapped. In this seven-by-eight room with disappearing furniture and a disappearing girl. I open my eyes, wide, like maybe I’ll see something I missed before—some giveaway, some proof that they’re lying.

“Doctor.” It’s Stephen’s too-high voice. “Are you sure you don’t want to give her a sedative?”

I’m still screaming. Or I’m screaming again. I’m running from one end of the room to the other (when did I get out of bed?) knocking into the walls, still searching for Lucy’s mattress, Lucy’s slippers, a stray strand of Lucy’s almost-black hair.

Dr. Lightfoot sighs heavily, standing up. “All right, let’s move her. I don’t want her to hurt herself.”





PART TWO


in between





thirty-five


They bring me to another room. A room on a different floor.

(What floor? I can’t keep track. I try to remember what I knew before:

First floor: admitting, offices, emergencies.

Second floor: cafeteria, classrooms (?).

Third floor: a long hallway of closed doors, the shower, the room Lucy and I shared.

But what does it matter, what I knew before? I knew I had a roommate then too. I knew nothing.)

This room doesn’t have walls. No, there are walls, but they’re padded. I’m in a padded room. They put me in an actual padded room. I can’t keep track of how many steps it is from one side of the room to the other because the floor curves up into the sides into the ceiling. There’s no sharp angle where floor becomes wall.

They’re still trying to take my sanity. This room without walls or windows would be enough to drive anyone over the edge.

That’s not true. Not the part about how this room could drive anyone insane, but the part about the window. There is a window. But not one to the outside. The window is in the door, which is every bit as padded as the rest of the place except for a small circle of glass, like a porthole on a boat. Through the glass, Dr. Lightfoot looks at me. Nurses look in on me—both the not-so-nice one and the nice one. I guess she didn’t get fired for not double-checking whether I took my sleeping pills. Stephen looks in on me, and I want to ask if he spells his name with a V or a PH, but I don’t think he can hear me and even if he could, the words I say don’t always sound like the words I’m thinking. They open the door to give me food and medicine. Dr. Lightfoot tries to continue our therapy, but I’m incoherent.