by Cara McKenna
* * *
Things got busy after the morning lull. Lunch meant more meds to organize and distribute, then Jenny took me through the exhaustive inventory rigmarole in the various nurses’ stations. There weren’t any more incidents after the UNO debacle, and by late afternoon I’d gotten most of the patients and their diagnoses and treatment plans copied onto a mental crib sheet, having spent a couple of hours studying their files.
Rattling off their histories and dosages couldn’t hold a candle to actually having relationships with them, though, and when dinner was getting underway, Jenny suggested I join her, eating with the residents in the dining room. I’d scarfed a banana for lunch, feeling pokey with my paperwork, so the promise of a sit-down meal was enough to steel my resolve.
Since breakfast I’d been hearing mutterings of “pizza day,” and now I could smell it. Ambrosia. I followed Jenny and we got in line alongside patients and staff at the S3 cafeteria counter. I grabbed two cheese slices and a root beer, and tailed Jenny to one of several large, round tables. I caught sight of Kelly not far away, eating with a group of residents, a circle of gray. He’d taken a seat with a view of the entire room, and I bet it wasn’t an accident.
“Has everyone met our new LPN, Erin?” Jenny asked brightly, glancing around our table.
There were three patients, and I tested myself on their names and conditions. Lonnie and Carl, both schizophrenic, and Les, a deceptively cheerful sociopathic type who’d served three separate prison sentences for arson. I remembered him easiest, as I’d employed the thoroughly un-PC mnemonic device of “Les be sure to not give that one any matches!” while quizzing myself earlier.
The three men murmured greetings, and Jenny nodded to a seat between Lonnie and Les, taking her tray to the other side of the table.
Conversations resumed, which meant Lonnie and Carl went back to arguing. Paranoid schizophrenics can be prone to that, and both of the men were clearly feeling a touch self-righteous. As best I could gather, Lonnie was insisting that the military had planted him here on the ward, and that they’d be coming any day to collect his findings. Jenny had told me he was what the Starling staff called a popper, meaning his illness was particularly potent and frequently “popped through” the bubble of civility created by his meds. Carl seemed simultaneously unnerved by the notion of a government operative in his midst and annoyed by Lonnie’s self-importance. He’d been distractedly cutting his pizza slice with a plastic knife for some time, so long he now seemed to be trying to saw through the tray. I stole a glance in Kelly’s direction, suddenly wishing he were at my table.
Jenny attempted to shift the topic. “I wonder what movie they’ll show in the rec room tonight.”
Carl dropped his knife, shooting her a patronizing look. “It’s Monday. On Mondays we watch the singing show. We always watch the singing show on Mondays.”
Lonnie wasn’t listening. He was studying me as I stripped the wrapper from my straw, hazel eyes squinting magnified skepticism through his thick lenses at my hands and face and the shiny new picture-ID badge clipped to my scrubs.
“Do you like the singing show?” Carl asked me earnestly.
“I don’t think I’ve seen it. Maybe I’ll check it out, later.” There was a TV in my apartment. I could watch whatever program it was, and have something to talk to him about tomorrow.
“I know what she likes,” Lonnie said, in a slow, snide, creepy murmur, loud enough for most of the table to hear.
I took a bite of my pizza, ignoring his attempt to affect me. He was only testing the new girl. Don’t take the bait. “Do you like the singing show, too?” I asked him politely.
Lonnie stood, fast enough to topple his chair. He grabbed a pizza crust, and jabbed it toward my face and shouted, “You’ll like this when I jam it up your cunt!”
The room went flat, panic reducing everything to soundless slow motion. Like being underwater. I lunged to the side, a second’s scrambling that felt like an hour’s swim. Smooth, cold tile found my palms, and legs rustled past from above—orderlies rushing to restrain Lonnie.
Sound returned. Someone was helping me to my feet. Lonnie was on the ground, face pressed in my direction, wild eyes locked on mine. One orderly held his ankles while Kelly Robak knelt straddling his waist, pinning his arms.
“She’s an agent!” Lonnie was shouting. “Don’t trust her!”
Jenny must have dashed for the nearest nurses’ station and prepped a syringe. She reappeared, offering Lonnie a seeming eternity to settle before deciding to give him a jab in the deltoid. “That’ll calm you down, Lon.”
“Agent!” he shrieked, eyes blazing hatred up at me through his skewed glasses. “Bitch agent! Sent by the council!”
The shot took effect in a matter of moments, and Lonnie’s fiery eyes went dim under heavy lids. I watched him blinking groggily, everything seeming to me as if it were happening on a TV screen, two-dimensional and glassy and unreal.
A tech was rubbing my back, saying something soothing. She may as well have been speaking to a coatrack.
The numbness slowly lifted, uncovering a crisis in my body. My heart had never beat this hard—my head pulsed, my eyes, my bones. I knew my chest was heaving so violently it must’ve looked as if someone were thumping me with invisible defibrillator paddles, but it was theoretical. The entire room was a theory, as all I could do was stare at the floor, blood and breath crashing through me in waves.
Jenny’s hand on my arm. She was saying something. I was being led to the nurses’ station and steered to sit, my hand wrapped around a white paper bag and coaxed to my mouth. I huffed into it. Soon I could control my eyes enough to blink and scan the room. I felt my fingers and toes, my prickling cheeks, the padded chair under my butt.
“There we go,” Jenny said. “Keep that up.”
After another minute my wheezing quieted and my head cleared, the fog lifting to reveal a massive headache. “Sorry,” I gasped. It came out thin and high.
“Hyperventilation’s a joy to treat, compared to what I’m used to.” She stood and gave me a soft, casual clap on the back. “Sit tight for a few. Actually . . .” She consulted her watch. “Your shift’s done in twenty minutes. Why don’t you take your paperwork down to the sign-in room, have a Coke, take your time with the forms? Don’t worry about evening hand-off. I think you’ve had enough excitement for your first day.”
As much of a relief as the offer was, I felt like a failure and a coward as I gathered my clipboard. I thought I could feel everyone’s eyes on my back as I headed for the stairs, hear them thinking, Well, she’s done. Another one bites the dust. Tears stung my eyes and I could feel my face going pink . . . if it wasn’t already from the anxiety attack.
I bought a pop from the vending machine and sat at the table, pressing the cold aluminum to my burning cheeks before I cracked it open.
I hadn’t felt this defeated and useless in ages, not since the early challenges of caring for my grandma. Not even physically touched by a patient and I’d fallen to pieces. I shook my head and a lone tear made a break for it. I wiped it away with my wrist and sighed.
My whole life, I’d been the one who kept it together. Grace under fire. I felt more lost than I could remember, naked with my veneer of capability stripped away.
Paperwork helped. It required me to recount what had happened in clinical detail, to label Lonnie’s outburst in impersonal terms and remove myself from it. Though it seemed callous to draw the analogy, I told myself it was no more personal than an angry dog snapping at me. I’d been nothing more than the least trusted face in the room. Or maybe he’d smelled my fear.
I’d do best to quit thinking of the patients like they were some other species. I never, ever would have let myself think about my grandma that way, and those men were all somebody’s family—somebody’s son or father or brother or lover. The thought lef
t me more exhausted than ever.
Though I’d stopped shaking, my handwriting was barely legible and stringing coherent words together was a struggle. A sob of frustration rose in me. I tamped it down, knowing other staffers could appear at any time to sign in or out. I sat up straight and tried to look studious. Well, she had a scare, but she bounced right back. Worth a shot.
I finished my incident forms, three pages that left me as spent as a triathlon. I stood to toss my can in the recycling bin, then yelped when I turned around, finding a huge body materialized in the threshold. But it wasn’t the shiv-wielding maniac my brain expected, only Kelly Robak. Just as scary in his size and general ominousness, but unarmed, and placid as always.
My hand had flown to my chest, like an old lady set upon by ne’er-do-wells. I dropped it hastily. So much for looking cool and collected.
“Hey,” Kelly said. He wiped his name from the whiteboard with his improbably big thumb.
It was useless to pretend I wasn’t upset, so I let him see as I combed my hair with shaky fingers. “Hey.”
He leaned against the door frame. “Lonnie gave you a scare, huh?”
“Yeah. I’m okay. Just, you know. My first day.” I rubbed at my sternum, trying to soothe my panicky heart. “It’s my first clinical job. My first real psych job.”
One of his brows rose a fraction. “You picked a real deep end to jump into.”
I nodded. True, it would’ve been nice to start at an end with steps, not a high dive. “It was the only end with a job opening.”
“Get changed and I’ll take you out for a drink.”
“Oh jeez. I better not. I’m really tired, and I have to be up at six again tomorrow.” I hadn’t even unloaded my car or set foot in my new apartment. I wanted to change into my familiar pajamas and reread a few nursing textbooks’ chapters on paranoid schizophrenia, try to figure out how I could have handled myself better with Lonnie.
Kelly shook his head. “Get changed and meet me in the lot. You can follow me in. You living in town now?”
“I’m staying here. In the transitional housing.”
He gave me skeptical look, the most judgment I’d seen from him.
“Just temporarily,” I added.
“I’ll drive you, then. You can leave your car.” And then he disappeared, giving me the distinct impression that his invitation was as negotiable as a hostage taking.
I was pooped. I obliterated my name from the duties board, dropped off my paperwork, and changed, tossing my scrubs in the hamper. The day had done the same to me—wiped me clean out and wadded me into a rumpled heap.
Though Kelly was surely only trying to be helpful in his bossy way, I resented being ordered around, especially by a man. Like I needed rescuing. I didn’t want to be rescued—in my family, I did the rescuing.
If I suddenly needed assistance, who in the hell was I?
But it was good, I decided as I buttoned my sweater—an invitation to grab a quick drink with Kelly. I was in over my head, and he’d have advice to help me stay afloat. He’d had a first day once, too. We’d talk and it’d push the incident a bit further back in my head, so it wouldn’t be the only thing running through my mind as I tried to fall asleep in a strange room. That voice, those words; that accusing pizza crust pointed like a switchblade at my face.
As I left the locker room and headed down the hall, I felt that corset sensation again. Only it wasn’t from the scare. Every step I took toward the exit, closer to Kelly, tighter, tighter. Funny how my body reacted to him the same way it did to the thought of getting assaulted by a patient.
Punching the keycode to the foyer, I wondered idly what Kelly’s wife looked like. And what she’d make of some underfed, round-faced urchin of a hapless trainee LPN going out for a drink with her oversized husband.
She probably wouldn’t think anything of it, I reminded myself, since it doesn’t mean shit. It’s a pity drink with your married coworker.
Still, as my fingers punched the final code, those laces yanked tight, tight, tight. At least if I passed out, Kelly was strong enough to carry my sorry ass home.
Chapter Two
He was waiting outside under the darkening sky, dressed in his civilian clothes—jeans and a black zip-up sweatshirt. It made him look like even more of a thug, but I followed him nonetheless. A thug who was on my side felt like a precious commodity.
Kelly led me to the far corner of the employee lot, to a late model GM pickup, probably the same vintage as my car but far-better maintained. He came close to unlock my side, seeming taller than ever, seeming huge and looming but strangely reassuring. A breakwater to keep the storm of stress from washing me out to sea, never to be found. Maybe I could steal some of his bricks and fortify myself, so the next run-in with someone’s psychosis wouldn’t shake me so badly.
He started up the truck, wipers knocking droplets from an afternoon shower off the windshield, headlights illuminating the sign posted at the head of each space that read, NEVER LEAVE YOUR KEYS IN YOUR VEHICLE!
“Everyone in that ward’s had their own first day,” Kelly told me, driving up to the first of two security boxes that would let us exit the campus. He punched in a code, drove through, waited for the first automatic gate to shut before jabbing at the second keypad.
“I know.”
He turned us onto a narrow service road I hadn’t taken in.
“I don’t want to make you feel worse, but that wasn’t such a terrible day to start.”
“I know that, too. And I don’t want to be as upset as I am, by what Lonnie said. It’s not like he stabbed me or anything. It was a frigging pizza crust.”
“But what he said slapped you across the face,” Kelly said. “So it’s fine to let it sting. Next time it won’t sting so hard, and soon enough the words won’t even hit you.”
“I hope so.”
“Just know that whatever anyone in there says to you when they’re having an episode, it’s not personal. You’re the just the face that was closest to theirs when the impulse hit. Like you happened to be walking by when they whipped a door open, and got clocked in the head.”
I nodded, finding some comfort in that.
“They didn’t know who was behind the door. They just needed to shove. But letting them see you flinch is like handing them a weapon—they’ll use it if they know it’s there.”
I knew he was right. But skins didn’t thicken overnight, and realizing the only way to get my armor built up was to be verbally assaulted over and over was a defeating thought. Defeating and dehumanizing. Probably felt an awful lot like being locked in a psych ward. I sighed, and the exhalation made room for a measure of calm. I gulped it down like a quenching drink, thirsty for more.
“How long have you worked on the ward?” I asked, just as Kelly pulled us onto a rural route, trees giving way to a vast stretch of fallow fields.
“Four years. Four and a half.”
“Is there a lot of turnover with the patients? Have any of them been there as long as you?”
“Sure, two or three. Don and I came to the ward the same week, actually. Probably part of whatever bond we got going.”
“How long do most patients wind up staying?”
“’Til they’re better.”
“On average?”
“Couple weeks, maybe a month. Tough to say. Lots get on the right antipsychotic regimen, get better, get cleared, think they’re cured and go off their meds. Or they go home and get triggered by the same shit that landed them with us to begin with. So maybe a month, but then another month, and another . . . Some patients in Larkhaven have been institutionalized on and off for twenty years or more, but most don’t stay in the locked ward for longer than it takes for their drugs to kick in or their addictions to be treated.”
“That’s good.”
“Most patients don’t want to stay in a unit like ours long-term. They want their own clothes back. They want to be trusted with metal cutlery and get more visiting hours with their families, stand a chance at meeting a woman or seeing their loved ones with a bit more dignity. There are a few types like Don, though. Guys who thrive on the routine and the restrictions, real institutional cases. Or ones like Lonnie, who’ve been in and out so much, the ward has become their own little world. A place where they feel they understand their spot in the pecking order, unlike on the outside. But it’s not ideal. After years of the same gray pajamas, same meals, same views out the same windows . . . Sounds like prison. To me, anyhow, to lots of those guys. But it keeps the ones like Don safe, I guess.”
“I hope that’s not how it feels, working there—like it’s a prison.”
“Not when you get to clock out every night, get paid and have the freedom to drive to a bar once the working day’s done, order whatever you want to eat. Leave the job behind the second you wipe your name off that board.”
“I guess.” But I worried it’d feel like a sentence to me. I’d chosen this job, but out of duty and under duress. I’d be going home to just another ward, practically, as long as I stayed in the transitional residence, and playing nurse on the weekends for free, trying to enact order to combat my sister’s chaos. Would I ever feel like I was off duty? Would I ever leave the day behind when the door to Starling clicked shut at my back? Right now, I couldn’t imagine it.
The outskirts of a small city appeared beyond the fields. Buildings drew closer, revealing their wear. The sun was just meeting the horizon, ripening the clouds to a warm mauve.
Kelly drove us past a huge factory, windows shuttered in plywood, its vast parking lot eerily absent of cars. Corroded wisps of razor wire coiled along the top of the chain-link fence.
“You been to Darren before?” Kelly asked.
“No. Do you live here?”
“Yeah.”
“You like it?” I asked, as another block of urban decay slid past.