A Danger to Herself and Others(52)
My troubles. Isn’t that what the Irish call their problems with the United Kingdom? The Troubles. How strange that the same word can be used to describe my brain as well as a conflict between two major European counties. The country of Shakespeare and the Beatles goes up against the country of Yeats and Joyce, and my brain goes up against itself, and we all call it trouble.
Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.
Did you know “Ring Around the Rosy” is about the plague? At least, that’s what I told my classmates in kindergarten because that’s what my mother told me. I found out later it was just an urban legend, but by then it didn’t make much difference. It had already been etched into my brain as a song about life and death.
Dr. Lightfoot mistakes my silence for concern. “I don’t want you to worry about the hearing. I’ve already sent an updated report to the judge, and I’m sure my findings will be taken into account.”
Her findings. My troubles. So many euphemisms. Call it what it is: the judge will have to consider my apparent insanity when he rules on the case.
Dr. Lightfoot will tell him that I hallucinated Agnes’s boyfriend.
She’ll say that I made up a new roommate when they brought me here. A new best friend. Maybe she’ll even tell him that we had an imaginary book club, an imaginary adventure, imaginary late-night heart-to-hearts that my addled brain thought were every bit as real as the heart-to-hearts Agnes and I shared.
Dr. Lightfoot won’t use the word imaginary, though. She’ll say hallucination and psychosis. After all, even people with normal (Lightfoot would say healthy, not normal) brains have imaginary friends.
Maybe the judge will think I made up Lucy to fill the void Agnes left behind after she fell. Maybe he’ll think: My goodness, Hannah must have really loved Agnes if her brain had to invent a person to make up for her loss.
(Dr. Lightfoot says hallucinations are rarely so straightforward, though they can be manifestations of our deepest anxieties and fears. She said she once had a patient whose Mom had left her with a relative for a year when she was three, and that girl’s hallucinations took the form of a voice telling her to kill her mother. But the truth was, she was terrified of losing her mother again.
“Well, that’s kind of backward,” I said. “Why wouldn’t the voices tell her to kidnap her mother, so she could have her all to herself and keep her from leaving again?”
Lightfoot nodded. “Why wasn’t Jonah the perfect boyfriend?”
Touché, Dr. Lightfoot.)
The judge will probably feel sorry for me. I’ll probably stand before the bench exactly as I’m sitting in front of my therapist right now, and the judge will stare at me with a similar pity-filled smile on his face. Except, unlike Lightfoot, the judge will be wearing a long black robe instead of blue scrubs. He’ll have gray hair and a white moustache that’s yellow at the edge of his lips because moustaches are impossible to keep clean, an extension of all the bacteria in your mouth. Unlike Lightfoot’s light-brown skin and dark-brown eyes, the judge will have pale skin dotted with age spots, and he’ll wear bifocals when he reads over my file.
I wonder: Does that count as a hallucination, my imagining a judge I’ve never met? I don’t think so because he is an actual person, and I am going to actually meet him.
It will take me some time to figure out the rules regarding what’s real, what’s imaginary, what’s hallucinatory.
If I ever figure them out at all.
I imagine the judge looking down at me, taking off his glasses, and slowly shaking his head. His voice will be scratchy, his decision dotted with words like:
Poor girl.
Didn’t know what she was doing.
Wouldn’t hurt a fly.
My brilliant plan to show them what I’m really like by being a good friend to Lucy might still work out in the end. They may still send me home because of her.
Even if I didn’t show them what I thought I was showing them: what a good friend I could be.
Even if it turns out they’re the ones who showed me: I was being a good friend to someone who didn’t exist.
That’s almost funny, isn’t it? I consider saying as much to Lightfoot, but she still has that sad, sympathetic look on her face. I don’t think she’ll see the humor in it. I look past Lightfoot to the empty space across the room where Lucy’s bed used to be.
If Lucy were still here, she’d make a silly face behind Lightfoot’s back.
They bring me two books before lights-out. One is a romance novel that’s missing its cover. I wonder whether it was ripped off by an angry patient or just fell off from having been read over and over again. The second book is so ironic I almost laugh out loud. It’s a real book, a good book, the sort I would have begged Lightfoot for weeks ago, even though I read it in eighth grade, so reading it now wouldn’t have gotten me any extra credit at school.
It’s Jane Eyre.
“I’m surprised they allow this in here,” I say, though (I know) there’s no one else in the room to hear me.
If Lucy were still here, this novel would give us so much to talk about.
“This must be a mistake,” I add, shaking my head. “A book where the villain is the crazy lady locked in the attic? Total contraband.”
I wonder if Lucy ever read Jane Eyre. If not, I just gave away the ending: Mr. Rochester was married before Jane, but he keeps his first wife locked in the attic of Thornfield because she’s insane.