Chase chewed on his bear and stared at me.
“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s all right. You’ll be okay.”
His hair was still long and it fell in deep bangs over his eyes. His orange shirt was stained with cake. He was wearing his dirty black parachute pants. He stared at me and chewed on his stuffed bear and didn’t say anything at all.
I waited in the family waiting room. A woman behind a glass window pointed me to the chairs. I was alone at first but after a while a man came in and sat down in a chair near mine and stared at the wall in front of him. A brown wooden door at the rear of the waiting room opened and two women appeared, a young one and an older one; the young one moved slowly as if in a trance and the older one was telling her that her father had just gone to get the car and he would pick them up out front. The woman behind the glass called to them and waved. “Have a good break, Niki,” she yelled. “See you tomorrow.” When they were gone, I waited near the man who stared at the wall and tried to look at the ragged magazine in my lap. Field and Stream. 1997. I stood up and walked over to the magazine rack and examined the contents and then picked out a Good Housekeeping from 2001 and brought it back to my seat. It was a holiday issue and there were many articles explaining crafts the whole family could make or cookies by the dozen that you and your kids could bake together. There were photos of children smiling next to grinning parents. There was a long article about how to obtain a Christmas miracle and I tried to read that. The first paragraph was confusing so I tried again.
“She’s going to do better this time,” the man near me said and I looked up.
“She’s been out for almost a year but we were planning our wedding and it must have got to be a little too stressful for her so she’s back for a tune-up,” he said. He looked at me this time so I knew he was talking to me.
I nodded, once, and turned back to my magazine.
“It’s nothing shameful,” he said. “You got someone here?”
I nodded again.
“It’s all of us in this boat together, trying to take care of these people we love. Mine’s is okay most of the time. Mine’s just needs a little help now and then.” He spoke evenly, as if this were not a big deal. “She’s got to look after the house and maybe that’s too much for her. I don’t know. I might could do some more for her.”
He waited for me to tell my story. Finally he said, “Is it your husband?”
“No,” I said. I studied the magazine in my lap.
“Is it your mother?”
I stood up and crossed the room and sat in a chair where I could see the front door. No cars passed on the road out front. The man who’d been looking at the wall stood up and went outside and smoked a cigarette, leaning his weight on the foot he propped on a planter full of red geraniums. The woman behind the glass window answered the phone. I paged through my magazine. When I got to the last page, I closed it and left it lying in my lap for a moment and then flipped open to the first page and started again.
When I looked up, the man was gone. I looked around the empty room and tried to hear any sound that might be coming from the room I couldn’t see, where Chase was waiting with the doctor. I stood up and walked over to the front door and stepped outside and looked at the sky. The clouds were the color of dust. It was late afternoon by now and the breeze that blew through the ambulance bay had died down. I watched a red pickup truck make its way along the road between the hospital and the water treatment plant. It turned in behind the plant and disappeared from view. I pulled the door and walked back into the waiting room and sat down again. I stood up and tried to find another magazine. I looked for a clock but couldn’t find one. Then the wooden door at the rear of the room opened and women began to pass through the waiting room on their way to the front door, calling goodnight to the receptionist as they passed, so I knew it must be just about five o’clock. The receptionist came through a door in the wall next to her glassed-in booth and looked at me and said that someone would be with me soon and I should just continue to wait.
“These doors stay open until nine o’clock tonight,” she said. “You’ll see security come by from time to time to check on things.”
After she left, I listened to the telephone answering machine answer the phone but then the calls stopped coming. I tried to read the Good Housekeeping again but that was too difficult so I began to thumb through Field and Stream and look at pictures of fishing lures and guns. I walked up and down and looked for other magazines and finally settled on a Reader’s Digest, where I could read little anecdotes of things that were supposed to be funny.
When the doctor came through the brown wooden door at the rear of the waiting room, his wristwatch said six-twenty. He approached me gravely and softly and I stood up to meet him. He shook my hand and introduced himself and said, “We’re going to keep your boy.”
I nodded.
“Can you tell me—” he said. “How long has he been like this?”
“He’s been like this for the last seven-and-a-half months,” I said. “He was at UNC Memorial and he was transferred here today when my insurance company didn’t think he needed acute care anymore.”
“I see,” he said.
“His records were supposed to come in with him,” I said.
“So they tried various things at Memorial?” he said.
I nodded.
“And nothing worked?” He glanced at his clipboard. “I’ve got the list here.”
I nodded.
“How about the Clozaril?”
“The Clozaril seemed to have some small benefit,” I said.
He nodded gravely and looked at his papers and then looked at me.
“We’re admitting him to our adolescent acute-care unit,” he said. “That’s where he’ll go tonight. In the morning, the team will meet and decide how best to care for him.”
“Can I see him?”
The doctor shook his head. “Not tonight. It’ll be best for him if he just goes over and gets settled in. You’ll want to come back tomorrow and meet with the social worker. We’ve already set up an appointment for you. You can see him after that.”
“He can’t care for himself.”
The doctor nodded. “That’s why it’s a good thing we can take care of him here.”
When we were through, he shook my hand and wished me luck and smiled very gently and told me not to worry too much. Outside, the air was still and cool. My car was among the last three or four in the parking lot. I got in and sat behind the wheel and looked at the buildings and looked at the tall chain-link fence around the playground in front of the children’s unit and looked at the many windows without light or movement. There was a sign instructing visitors to lock all of their personal belongings in the trunks of their cars and not to bring anything inside and this sign was repeated throughout the parking lot. I looked at the broken gravel at the edge of the crumbling asphalt lot and the old concrete steps leading up to the old glass doors with big metal handles, and at the scrubby bushes that lined the foundation around the front doors of the different buildings and the flat, plain, mown grass, cut to within an inch of its life, and at the long, low field that lay between the hospital and the water treatment plant. Then I turned the car south and headed for home.
TWENTY
The next day I drove the same highway back to Butner and parked in the same desolate parking lot. I buzzed the doorbell by the front door and then signed in at the front desk, where an assistant sat behind a large sliding-glass window. Outside, a swarm of ladybugs seethed along the brick face of the building. “You can go sit in the waiting area,” the assistant said and handed me a tag that said Visitor. She looked down at my name. “You need to write the time, too,” she said. “Right here.”
I wrote the time and then looked blankly around. A hallway bisected the foyer and signs pointed to the Whitaker School to my left. To my right, the hallway disappeared into dimness. Right in front of me, a heavy wooden door with a small window; next to that, a sig
n: THIS DOOR MUST BE LOCKED AT ALL TIMES. Everywhere I looked, I saw linoleum floors that had been polished to a gleam and old walls with an old paint job.
The assistant glanced back at me. “Just go down that hallway and you’ll see some chairs. That’s the waiting area.”
The hallway was lined with shabby wooden doors, each with a nameplate, each one closed up tight. Staff offices. The space felt airless and dank and there was no sound of any sort. In the waiting area, the chairs were old and battered, with bald patches in the upholstery and greasy spots where heads had lain against the cushions. I heard a door close and the click of footsteps but no one appeared. Then the assistant walked past me on squeaky rubber-soled shoes and smiled and knocked on a door across from me. When no one answered, she returned to the foyer. I sat in the chair with my hands resting on the arms and looked around. The last time I’d been in a state psychiatric institution was in 1975, when I worked at Fountain House and went to visit the boy named Robert, who sat nearly naked in his room, his board-stiff legs drawn up before him.
The very fact of this boy had not occurred to me for almost thirty years. I remembered his catatonia and the unforced cheerfulness of the nurse who stuck our meager bouquet of daisies into a vase and the memory of that vase stopped me, for surely that could not have happened, surely no one could have permitted a glass vase in a room with a boy who had stopped eating, who stared at the wall, whose gown did not have ties or snaps. A vase in the hands of that boy was a weapon or a doorway, depending on your perspective, but either way, it offered a conclusion that surely could not, should not, be borne by the boy or by his parents. For a few minutes, I sat in the chair in the hallway and stared down at the covers of old copies of Martha Stewart Living magazine—“Have a Perfect Easter!” “Sixteen New Things to Do with Squash!”—and worried about that boy, who so many years ago may have been in danger, and may have seized an opportunity. I felt my heart race with fear for him and for his family, and even though I knew that decades had passed, that whatever was going to happen had happened long ago, and to another family, to another boy, I thought of that boy’s mother and what she must have endured, back in the days when psychiatrists glibly blamed mothers, as if psychiatric illness was a failure of maternal virtue, when nurses may have left glass vases in a patient’s room, as if safety was something that fell only within parameters that included snaps and ties.
I heard a door open and close loudly and a brown-haired woman in her fifties appeared in the hallway and said, “You must be Chase’s mom?” When I nodded, she strode over to me with her hand outstretched and introduced herself as May, Chase’s social worker, and told me we’d go upstairs to fill out the forms and I could see Chase after that.
Behind the heavy wooden door with the sign that said it must be locked at all times, we walked down a long hallway lit by long rows of windows on each side. Because Umstead had been a military facility in the beginning, when they converted it to a hospital they built long halls to connect the buildings and now there were miles of corridors.
“You have to have a staff person with you at all times,” May said. “Each door is locked and only a staff person will have keys.” She looked at me. “I know it seems shocking,” she said. “But it’s really in everyone’s best interest.”
I followed her up the stairs and then down another hallway, past empty areas furnished with the same kinds of chairs I’d seen downstairs. We passed a large room and I could hear shouts inside and the sound of a ball bouncing.
“That’s the gym,” she said. “We have recreation time there, with staff supervision.”
She pointed out the visitors’ room and explained that I would see Chase there. I would not be permitted to go onto the unit or to see his room. We turned down another hallway and then stopped at a battered wooden door. Inside, a worn wooden desk and desk chair stood under a single window. An old computer hummed to life when she touched the mouse. But she let the screen go dark again and opened a file on her desk.
“Please,” she said. “Sit down here.” She gestured at the only other chair in the room, a straight ladder-back chair with a tired cushiontied to its seat. “I’ll need you to answer some questions,” she said, “and this will take a while. We try to be as thorough as possible here and begin at the very beginning.” She reached for her pen. “By the way,” she said. “I believe I heard that Chase will be moved today. He’s on the adolescent unit but we know that that isn’t safe for him. I believe he’s going to be moved to the boys’ unit, where we keep the ten- to twelve-year-olds. There aren’t many kids on that unit now and he will be safe because he is so much bigger than they are.”
“He’s not safe?” I said. I felt my stomach sink.
“You know, the children we have here often have criminal histories,” she said. “This is really the end of the line for them. Often, they’ve come here in lieu of a jail sentence. They are very street smart, very savvy. Chase is not a member of that population so we believe there is some risk in keeping him with those boys and girls. There are more than twenty-five of them on that unit now and that’s too many for him to come into contact with. We saw it last night. We decided he needed to be moved and I believe that’s what they’re doing now.”
“And he’ll be safe?”
She looked at me. “The boys on his new unit are younger and smaller. We don’t think they’ll mess with Chase because he’s so much bigger. Plus, they aren’t quite as incorrigible as the kids on the adolescent unit. And there are only three of them. This should be a more secure environment for him.”
I shook my head. “If he’s not safe, he shouldn’t be here,” I said. “When will the folks from Murdoch be here?”
May said she didn’t know what I meant.
“I spoke to Raleigh the night before Chase was transferred here,” I said. “They said that Murdoch folks would consult with your staff, create a treatment plan for Chase while we wait on the bed over there.”
“I don’t know anything about that,” said May, “and I’ve never heard of anything like that happening before. It sounds highly irregular.”
“You’ve had no contact with Raleigh about this?”
“This is the first I’ve heard of it.”
I looked away from her and then looked at her again. “You should know that I want him out of here,” I said. “I never wanted him to come here in the first place. I’m appealing the insurance company’s decision and I want him transferred back to Memorial.”
“Give us a chance,” said May. “We do pretty well here.”
“I’d like to see where he lives,” I said. “I’d like to know how well he’s being cared for.”
May frowned.
“Look,” I said. “These are throwaway kids. You just said so yourself. The end of the line. Criminals. Chase is not a throwaway kid. He’s very much loved by his family. No one understands his illness. It’s a terrible illness. He hasn’t responded to treatment. No one knows what to do. But he is not like the other kids here and we are not like the other families and I will visit him and I will see that his needs are met.”
May watched me as I spoke. Her face softened a bit and she turned her pen in her fingers. “I’ll see what I can do,” she said. “Once he’s moved and settled in, maybe you can make a brief visit to his room.”
We began before the beginning, with the pregnancy and how much weight I’d gained, and what Chase’s father and I had done to make our livings, and only after May was satisfied with those answers did we move to the birth and Chase’s early years. She wrote steadily in spaces provided by the forms and I watched her write, her black ballpoint moving slowly across the page.
“All right,” she said. “Let’s talk about family history.” She finished what she was writing and turned the page over and didn’t look up while she asked me about my grandmothers and grandfathers, my mother and father, my sisters, the multiple histories of repeating illness that might run through my family, something that might account for Chase.
Then she asked me about Zip and I told her all I knew. She wrote and wrote and wrote as I spoke and I felt the unsteadiness of everything I said. After that, I felt the aching familiarity of everything I said, as if there were things that marked Zip and Chase as father and son, even more than the facts of their eye color or the shape of their heads.
“Did Chase’s father abuse Chase?” May asked. She watched me as she spoke.
I thought of Zip’s hands on Chase’s neck, his hard thumps on Chase’s back, that snowy morning in the Midwest. “In my opinion,” I said. “Yes.”
“And how often does he see Chase now?”
“Not at all,” I said. “Hasn’t for years.”
She paged through her forms until she found the space she was looking for and carefully wrote a few lines. She stopped and lifted the point of the pen from the page and looked out the window.
“So we have breast cancer and high blood pressure and diabetes,” she said, “but no one has neurological problems?”
I shook my head.
She turned the pages back until she found the family history space and wrote something next to a small box that she also checked.
Outside, the sun brightened suddenly, as if it had come out from behind a cloud, and then darkened again. Down the hall, a phone rang and rang and rang and then went still.
“Anything else?” said May.
I shook my head. “I can’t think of anything,” I said.
She wrote for a while, then turned her form over and continued writing. When she stopped, she paged past two more forms and pinched several pages between her thumb and her forefinger. “These are financial forms,” she said, and passed them to me. “They explain that you are responsible for paying for Chase if his Medicaid plan doesn’t pay. Sign at the bottom. There. And there.” She pointed to another line. “Date it.”
The Boy Who Loved Tornadoes Page 28