A Danger to Herself and Others(54)

Stephen is wearing black jeans a black T-shirt and the same heavy boots he always wears. They’re surprisingly quiet on the linoleum floors.

Not like Lightfoot’s shoes. She’s wearing high heels, what my mother would call pumps. She click-clack-clips with every step. Without her slippers, Lightfoot’s steps are anything but light.

She holds my arm as we descend the stairs, Stephen a few steps behind. The doctor’s grip is firm; not so tight that I feel like a prisoner, but tight enough that I know she’s not about to let go. I think she’s trying to be comforting, not restrictive.

I squint in the sunlight. I’m suddenly very aware that I’m not wearing a stitch of makeup, not even moisturizer or sunscreen. My hair is loose around my shoulders, and when the wind blows, it whips across my face.

“Warm out today,” Lightfoot says, and I nod in agreement despite the distinct chill I feel in the air.

Warmth in California is very different from warmth in New York. In California, because it’s a dry heat (as they say), the air feels thinner. It feels like the sunlight is the only source of heat such that every time a cloud rolls overhead or you step into a shady spot, the temperature drops. On a hot day in New York, the air feels warm. Shade offers next to no relief.

I’m sure this isn’t a scientific assessment of the differences between the climates of these two states. There are probably important factors a meteorologist would tell me I’m disregarding, like heat indexes and humidity levels and the like. Surely there are days in New York when the air feels thin and days in California when the air feels thick.

Lightfoot directs me to a car. I don’t know what I was expecting. Maybe a van with the name of the institute painted on the side, as if to say Caution: Contents Are Dangerous (To Themselves and Others).

But the car is a normal, brown sedan. I wonder if it’s Lightfoot’s personal car. She leads me to the back seat and puts my seatbelt on for me like I’m a child. She gets into the passenger seat directly in front of me, and Stephen gets into the driver’s seat. (Maybe it’s his car?) I try to roll down the window on my side, but when I press the button, nothing happens.

“Child safety locks,” Lightfoot explains, craning her neck so she’s almost facing me. She tries to say it casually, as if the person who really owns this car actually has kids, has the locks in place for their benefit. But it’s obvious the locks are for patients like me. If I tried to open the door, I wouldn’t be able to do that either. “I’ll turn the AC on to cool it off in here.”

I wasn’t treated this much like a child when I actually was a child.

I lean my forehead against the window and look outside. I thought the world might look different—because of the pills, because I’ve been in a cage for so long, because I’ve never really seen autumn in California—but everything looks the same as it did in August, just a little deader now that it’s October. (Lightfoot told me the date of the hearing.)

Stephen winds us down a long driveway, toward a big metal gate. He stops the car and leans his muscular arm out the window (his window opens without a problem), and punches some numbers into a keypad mounted on the side of the road. There was a time when I would’ve watched him, memorized the numbers he pressed. Just in case I needed them someday. But now I can’t imagine leaving this place unsupervised.

After punching in three numbers, Stephen looks back at Lightfoot helplessly.

“What’s the code again?” he asks.

Lightfoot glances back at me, then leans over to whisper the correct numbers in Stephen’s ear. She may have diagnosed me, and she may feel sorry for me, but she still doesn’t completely trust me.

The gate swings open and Stephen takes his foot off the brake. I wait to feel something like a surge of excitement at leaving the property after so much time.

But all I feel as Stephen accelerates out of the driveway and onto Highway 1 is a twinge of nausea from riding in the back seat. All I felt when Lightfoot led me out the front door was that my eyes hurt in the sunlight.

My itchy new skirt rubs against my hairy legs, and I’m sweating despite the AC. Cars whizz past us in the opposite direction. I wonder if those drivers catch of glimpse of me and assume I’m a kid going on an outing with my parents. If traffic slowed enough that they could look closely, they’d see that I don’t resemble Stephen or Lightfoot, and Lightfoot’s probably too young to have a daughter my age. I don’t even know how to spell Stephen’s name, though, of course, an outside observer wouldn’t know that. But the cars are going fast, and no one’s paying attention to us. You’d have to be pretty clever (and a little bit psychic) to put the pieces of the real story together.

The signs say we’re headed north, toward Silicon Valley and the peninsula. The Pacific Ocean is on the left, but I don’t turn to look at it. I’m on the right side of the car, still leaning my forehead against the window. All I see are the brown hills and mountains and cliffs. Cows graze on the hills above us. I can’t imagine what they’re eating. The ground beneath their feet looks dry and dead.

You’d never know the biggest ocean in the world is just a stone’s throw away.





thirty-eight


Stephen parks the car in a lot across the street from the courthouse. Dr. Lightfoot has to put her purse through an X-ray machine, and we all have to walk through a metal detector to get inside. Lightfoot goes through twice because first her jewelry and then her glasses set off the machine. Stephen has to take off his boots because they have steel toes. She and Stephen both show their photo IDs to the security guard. Meanwhile, I glide right through: no purse, no jewelry, insubstantial shoes that barely fit because I wasn’t there to try them on when my mother bought them.