A Danger to Herself and Others(55)

Everyone in this building is fully clothed: The security guards wear uniforms and most everyone else is in a suit. There’s not a pair of paper scrubs or a set of pajamas in sight.

Stephen leads the way down a hall toward a set of double doors. I brace myself for what I’m going to see on the other side: a courtroom with a judge in a black robe perched on his bench above the rest of us. One table on either side of the room: one for the defendant and one for the plaintiff. Rows of seats full of spectators as though this is a sporting event.

But instead of a courtroom, we walk into a conference room with linoleum floors (beige, not gray) and stucco walls.

I see Agnes’s parents first. They’re standing at one end of the long table which sits in the center of the room. Agnes’s mother looks paler than she did when I met her in the hospital, as if she’s been trapped indoors just like I have. (I suppose spending all this time at her daughter’s bedside is a kind of imprisonment.) Agnes’s father is taller than I remembered, well over six feet. He has Agnes’s blond hair and blue eyes. I remember Agnes calling her parents Mama and Daddy when they spoke on the phone.

My own parents are sitting on the other end of the table, their backs to the door. For as long as I can remember, I’ve called them Mom and Dad. Surely there must’ve been some Mommy-ing and Daddy-ing when I first learned to talk, but I don’t remember it. Lightfoot walks ahead of me, and my parents swivel in their chairs. The doctor shakes their hands, says something about how nice it is to see them again after months of talking on the phone.

I realize that my parents have already heard my diagnosis. That probably everyone in this room—both sets of parents, Stephen and Lightfoot, my parents’ lawyer, another man I assume is Agnes’s parents’ attorney, and someone else who’s maybe Agnes’s doctor—thinks I’m crazy. Knows I’m crazy. They know my brain works differently from however their brains work. They know I hear disembodied voices and see people who don’t actually exist.

Unlike Agnes’s parents, my parents aren’t pale. They still have a touch of a tan left from their summer vacation. My mother stands and hugs me, but the hug feels formal, the kind of hug you’d give to a cousin whom you only see every few years at occasions like weddings and funerals, someone you’re related to but who’s essentially a stranger. I can feel Mom stiffen at the scent of the generic shampoo I was given to wash my hair. She avoids looking directly at my makeup-free face. When she steps away, I can still smell her perfume, the same scent she’s worn my whole life. It’s always been too heavy and floral for my taste. I used to beg her to try something new, something a little more subtle, but she refused. Scent is the sense most related to memory, she’d say. If I changed scents after all these years, I wouldn’t be the same person I used to be.

Maybe she sprayed a little extra perfume on her wrists today, to make sure she’d smell like the mother I remembered, just in case I was so crazy I might have forgotten her.

My father doesn’t hug me at all. He rests his hand on my shoulder and gives it a squeeze. He makes a big show of clearing his throat, and I wonder if he’s trying not to cry or if he simply doesn’t want to talk to me.

I don’t know what I was expecting: a tearful embrace, a loving reunion? I’ve never gone this long without seeing them.

Maybe my parents have concluded that I’m not the same girl I used to be. Maybe this isn’t a loving reunion because I’ve become a stranger to them: a problematic daughter, a crazy girl. A girl they’ve heard stories about—courtesy of Dr. Lightfoot—but don’t really know.

“Why don’t we sit down?” Lightfoot suggests brightly. She’s an expert at this. She probably goes to a half dozen of these hearings each month. She pulls out a chair and gestures for me to sit. My parents don’t sit next to me. There are at least three chairs between us. Lightfoot sits on one side of me and gestures for Stephen to sit on the other. Agnes’s parents are across from us, and I wonder if they’re relieved that there’s a doctor on one side of me and a security guard on the other.

The door opens and closes. Around me, everyone stands, so I stand too. (At least I’m still able to read social cues.)

The judge isn’t wearing a black robe. She’s wearing a Hillary Clinton–esque pantsuit and has a no-nonsense look about her. (My mother would say I was a bad feminist because until this moment, it never occurred to me that the judge might be a woman. All this time I’d been picturing an old man.) If the judge were a teacher, she’d be the type most students were frightened of. I always liked those teachers. I was always their favorite. Now, I keep my eyes trained on the table in front of me when she speaks.

“We’re here to determine whether Hannah Elizabeth Gold did unlawfully and with harmful intent contribute to Agnes Smith’s severe injuries.”

I look up, expecting the judge to make eye contact, to ask me to enter a plea, for anything that resembles what I’ve seen in movies and TV shows. Instead, she sits, and then everyone else sits, and the judge directs her gaze at the other side of the table, waiting for someone else to speak.

The Smiths’ attorney opens his mouth.

“Agnes Smith’s life will never be the same,” he begins.





thirty-nine


My attention span isn’t what it used to be. I’ve spent most of the past two months rereading the same books over and over, books that weren’t all that challenging to begin with. Lightfoot’s visits were never more than an hour, and when she talked, it was never for more than a few minutes at a time. I haven’t watched a TV show or a movie or attended a class since August. I haven’t had to actually pay attention in a long time.