by Dilloway, PT
When she was thirteen, she came home from school and went upstairs to find Mother, but she wasn’t in the bedroom. Lindsey heard a splash and went into the bathroom expecting to find a trail of blood coming from Mother’s wrists. Instead, Mother sat on the edge of the tub, toweling off. In that moment when she saw Mother’s pale, thin, unharmed body she realized her disappointment and ran away.
Lindsey looked into a mirror above one of the sinks and saw tears had come to her eyes from the memory. As part of obtaining her license, she had discussed her mother’s depression and Dad’s accident with a colleague, but even understanding the psychological issues of Mother’s breakdown and her own anger and guilt about Dad’s death couldn’t erase the pain. She dabbed at her red cheeks and tried to smile. At least Max couldn’t see her like this. She squatted over the toilet to avoid getting germs on the seat and dried her hands on her pants, keeping her eyes away from the mirror.
She left the bathroom and from the stairwell looked down into the family room. Max felt his way through as he had in the living room. “Need any help?” she called to him.
“Could you describe this for me?”
“Of course. We’ve got the vaulted ceiling in the same beige as the living room with French doors opening to the patio and backyard.” As she described the furniture, she saw herself lying on the plush carpet, a tubby twelve-year-old with a bag of Oreos and game shows on the television. About this time every weeknight Dad used to come home from the city to watch TV with her. With him gone, she was alone. Outside, her brothers shouted, laughed, and grunted as they played football in the backyard. She wanted to join them, but she was too fat to keep up with them. Instead, she turned up the TV and shoved a handful of cookies into her mouth.
“Is something wrong?” Max asked.
“No, I’m fine. Over there to your left is the fireplace, which is more for show than anything else. For that romantic effect when you bring a date over.” She saw her sixteen-year-old brother Philip curled up with a girl by the fire. As fourteen-year-old Lindsey crouched at the top of the stairs, invisible as always, she watched Philip unzip the girl’s dress while her hands went to the fly of his pants. Lindsey waited until they finished before creeping back to her bedroom. In the mirror of her vanity she touched her sagging belly and flat breasts and turned away in disgust. No one would ever make love to her by the fireplace. “I’m sorry, where was I?” she asked.
“The fireplace.”
“Oh, right. Next to that we have a bookshelf loaded right now with cardboard cutouts. Not Harlequin romances, but just as one-dimensional.” She laughed, but inside she wanted to cry for the girl she’d been, haunting the house in Oak Park for eighteen years. “Hold on a minute and I’ll come back down.”
She wanted to leave so she could collect her thoughts and gain perspective on the painful memories this model house had dredged up from the subconscious soup of her mind, but she couldn’t. Max needed her and she’d taken an oath to do everything possible to help her patients. Her own pain could wait until later, when she could deal with it in a healthy way.
She showed him the library, dining room, kitchen, and even the laundry room. He wanted to touch everything and bombarded her with questions about the color of the furniture or how the appliances worked. Never had she seen him so animated. By the time they went upstairs to the bedrooms, she worried about him becoming too excited. “We should probably get you back to Midway House before Mrs. Garnett thinks I’ve kidnapped you.”
“A few more minutes,” he said. “Please?”
She heard such longing and desperation in his voice that she couldn’t say no. “All right, but let’s skip the other bedrooms and go straight to the master bedroom and bath.” She tried to shake away the ghost of Mother lying in the bed, so frail and small that she looked like a child on the king-size bed. While Max explored the walk-in closet, Lindsey sagged against the wall and pressed her hands to her face.
These memories were only the residual effects of her own feelings of guilt about Dad’s accident and repressed anger about Mother’s illness. Mother had been dead for eight years now. Lindsey, away at Stanford, had not gone to the funeral, only compounding her negative feelings. Nothing she saw now could hurt her. Like a dream, she told herself. A nightmare really.
When Max got to the bathroom, Lindsey stood in the doorway to describe it for him. “It’s beautiful,” he said. She said nothing; not even a joke to deflect the pain came to mind. “Are you still there?”
“I’m here,” she said. She had never left.
Chapter 10
Henrietta stopped Max before he could enter Sarah’s room. “What’s going on?” he asked, fearing the worst.
“The doctor is checking on her right now. Nothing to worry about,” Henrietta said. She took his arm and started to guide him towards the nurse’s station, but he refused to move.
“Did something happen? Is she dead?”
“No, nothing like that. The doctor is just checking her vital signs to make sure there’s no change in her condition.”
“Oh.” Now he let Henrietta guide him to a seat next to the nurse’s station. He twitched in the chair, wishing the doctor would finish his examination. He needed to see Sarah, so he could use all the information he’d learned with Lindsey’s help to make Sarah the kind of home she deserved.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you,” Henrietta said.
“It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have assumed.”
“Now, Max, don’t get discouraged. She’s going to come out of that coma sometime. And the second she does, I’m going to call you so you can be the first one she sees.”
“Thanks,” Max said, but he couldn’t muster any enthusiasm in his voice. He didn’t know if he wanted to be the first one Sarah saw when she woke up. In his fantasies she woke up like Sleeping Beauty or Snow White, kissing him, her rescuer, and then the two of them rode off to live happily ever after. In his nightmares, she woke up, saw his unfamiliar face, and began screaming. As much as he wanted the former, he couldn’t bear the thought of the latter coming true. Better if she never saw him at all.
“Are you all right, Max?” Henrietta asked.
“I’m fine.”
“I’m sorry too about the other day. I hope I didn’t make you feel too uncomfortable by asking you out like that.”
“No, of course not.”
“I’m a little out of practice. I’ve been out of circulation for a while.”
“Really?”
“My husband and I broke up about six months ago. We were married for fifteen years, ever since we graduated high school.”
“What happened?”
“I caught him in bed with this Asian girl who works over at the mental asylum. She’s an orderly there or something. I came home from a double shift one night and found the two of them passed out naked in the living room. I turned right around and never went back.”
“I’m sorry.” He tried to remember if he knew the woman Henrietta meant, but he’d never gotten too friendly with the orderlies. They were just as bad as the doctors in most respects and everyone knew the stories of what some of the orderlies did to patients after dark.
“You shouldn’t be. We weren’t very happy for the last fourteen years. We were too young to get married. Then too stupid or lazy to end it, I’m not sure which.”
“That’s awful.”
“It’s been kind of rough getting back into the whole dating thing after so long. Back then I had hair all the way down to my waist and not an ounce of fat on me.” She lowered her voice further, so that Max needed to lean forward to hear. “When Whitesnake came to town on my eighteenth birthday, some friends and I snuck backstage and got to meet the band, if you know what I mean. That drummer of theirs was amazing. We must have done it three times that night.”
“Done what?”
“Fuck, Max, what else?” She sighed and then he heard something scrape across the station. Her fingernail or a pen? “Now I couldn’t even
get someone in a washed-up hair band to screw me. My whole body is jiggling with cellulite and my breasts have already started going south. You’re lucky you can’t see me.”
“I’m sure it’s not that bad.”
“It’s no wonder he moved on to someone better. Someone younger and sexier. I mean, in another five years I’ll look like my mother. Big as a house and wearing a muumuu all day.”
Max didn’t know what to say. He couldn’t imagine someone so nice could be as repulsive as she made herself sound. “You’ll find someone,” he said.
“Maybe. Looks like Dr. Two-Face is about done in there.”
“Who?”
“Doctor Teague. I hate that man,” Henrietta said low enough so only Max could hear. “He used to treat all us nurses like dirt until he started nailing Lucinda in the ER.”
“Nailing?”
“You know: banging, screwing, fucking.”
“Oh. Is that bad?”
“It is when you’re married to someone else.” Max nodded, not a bit surprised. Doctors. Lying came as naturally to them as breathing air. They would say or do anything to get their way. Henrietta’s voice became higher and more cheerful as she said, “Good morning, Doctor Teague.”
“Morning Etta. Who’s this? Friend of yours?”
“This is Max. He came to visit Sarah Gladstone.”
“Ah yes, I was just checking on her. I think she’s making some real progress. I really think she’s improving. Any day now she’s going to pull out of it.” From the doctor’s over-cheerful tone, Max doubted Teague thought anything of the sort. Dr. Heathcoate always used that same tone of voice and at the time Max had been foolish enough to fall for the trick. Not anymore. “Well, I have other patients to visit. Nice to meet you, Max.”
“Likewise,” Max growled.
“Etta, make sure to keep an eye on Sarah. Let me know the second there’s any change.”
“Yes, doctor.” When the doctor’s footsteps faded away, Henrietta said, “Other patients my ass. He’s going to take Lucinda over to the Paradise Cove Motel in Fishtown for a quickie and then get in nine holes before lunch.”
Max didn’t know what she meant by “a quickie” but he didn’t want to ask. He had to see Sarah. “Can I see her now?”
“Sure. You can have a seat while I make sure that idiot didn’t screw anything up.” Max kept himself from running into the room so he didn’t appear too anxious. Henrietta hummed a tune Max didn’t recognize as he sat down next to Sarah’s bed and took her hand.
He knew something was wrong right away when he saw black smoke leaking from the shack he’d built for her. As soon as he opened the door to the house, he felt the heat from the fire that had already consumed the chair and records in one corner. Through the smoke, he saw Sarah’s foot dangling from the bed.
He hurried across the room, kicking aside discarded boxes of chocolates and bottles of liquor. He hadn’t given her chocolates or alcohol. Where had these come from? When he reached the foot of the bed, he understood.
The Sarah lying on the bed was not the one he’d left. This was the older version of her he’d brought here from the burning house. She wore the pink sweatpants and T-shirt with “Sassy Bitch” written in glitter. Only this time her stomach had swelled to the point where she looked about to give birth. By his estimates, she weighed two hundred fifty pounds. How could she have grown so heavy in such a short amount of time?
He didn’t have time to figure that out now. The fire was following the trail of spilled alcohol to the bed, where it would engulf her. Max touched Sarah’s chubby face, but she didn’t move. He scooped her up and then created a door behind the bed to take her outside.
After setting her on the ground, Max watched the little house he’d created burn, wondering what to do now. He remembered the loneliness and despair of her earlier dreams. He’d thought creating this place would solve the problem, but her loneliness had followed her here. Even if he made her a palace, it too would be destroyed.
Max could create someone for her, but his attempts at manufacturing human beings always ended in failure. When he was eleven, Barney Pike had spent the night at his house. In Barney’s dream, the girls from school became fifty-foot Medusas chasing him through the halls. Everyone in Max’s class knew Barney had a crush on Miranda Cruz, so to comfort Barney, Max eliminated the Medusas and replaced them with Miranda. But Max’s version of her shambled towards Barney like a zombie, spouting romantic clichés in a hollow voice. Barney woke up screaming, leaving a wet stain in his sleeping bag. Since then, Max’s few other attempts at creating real people always resulted in shuffling automatons that spoke in monotones.
Still, for Sarah’s sake he had to find some way of solving the problem. Until then, he needed to put Sarah in a place where she would be absolutely safe. He shivered at the thought of what might have happened if he had arrived a few minutes later. The fire would have killed her and then she never would wake up from the coma. But if this world with its cheerful blue sky and green grass wasn’t safe, where could he put her?
He closed his eyes to conjure the safest place he knew, his cell at Gull Island Psych. He laid Sarah on his bunk, again changing her back into the young woman he’d first seen. He replaced the pink sweatpants and T-shirt with the white jumpsuit everyone at the institution wore. Even in the jumpsuit she looked beautiful. She began to stir as he pulled a thin wool blanket over her trimmer body.
He still wasn’t ready for her to see him, remembering the last time he had appeared in someone’s dream in this very room and the horrible consequences that had ensued. No, she wouldn’t see the real him, at least not yet. Instead, he made himself small and bald with a white lab coat over an expensive silk shirt and tie. “Miss Gladstone, are you awake?” he said in Dr. Lee’s voice.
“Where am I?” she asked.
“You’re in Gull Island Psychiatric Hospital, but you’re going to be all right.”
“The mental hospital? How did I get here? I’m not crazy.” She threw the covers away and ran to the door; when it didn’t open she began pounding and shouting for someone to let her go. Max felt sick watching her, remembering his first night here. How could he do this to her?
“Miss Gladstone, please, sit down. You’re going to be just fine. I’m here to help you.”
She gave up trying to open the door, collapsing to a sobbing heap on the floor. Max knelt down beside her and touched her shoulder in a way the real Dr. Lee never would have. “Sarah, I’m sorry about all of this. Don’t worry, it’s just temporary.” She continued to cry, not looking at him or saying anything. From his lab coat, he produced a syringe. “I’m going to give you something that will make you fall asleep. You’re going to feel a little sting.”
She still didn’t look up at him as he jabbed her in the arm with the syringe. Only then did she look into his eyes with a look of surprise. “Why?” she said before her eyes closed.
“I’m sorry,” he said again, though she couldn’t hear him. As he set her back on the bunk, he promised she wouldn’t stay here as long as he had.
Chapter 11
Max managed only a few hours of fitful sleep that night. He kept waking to the sound of a woman screaming. Then the uniform darkness reminded him that he was not inside Sarah’s mind and the noise he heard was nothing more than a dream. His own dream, where he could do nothing to help her.
By five o’clock he stopped trying to sleep. He searched through his record collection until he found Beethoven’s “Moonlight” and put it on. Tears came to his face as he listened to the music, imagining her lying in his bunk at Gull Island Pscyh, mired in a drug-induced haze. It was his fault.
But he couldn’t turn back now. If he did, she was guaranteed to suffer further. He had to keep trying for the sake of that beautiful young woman he’d first seen standing on the beach. He would find some way of creating a world where she would be happy and content for as long as it took for her to emerge from the coma.
This thought stuck with
him all the way to Holy Redeemer Church. As he listened to a tape of hymns and tried to play them back on the piano, he kept thinking of how to make her happy. She felt alone and helpless in her dreams. If he eliminated those feelings, the nightmares would end.
His fingers slipped off the piano keys and he heard the tape stop. “Is something wrong?” Pastor Robbins asked.
“I forgot where I was in the piece.”
“Do you want to try again from the top or just keep going?”
“From the top, I guess.” While the tape rewound, Max worked up the courage to ask, “Pastor Robbins, when God created Adam and Eve, he gave them free will, right?”
“Yes and that’s what led to Original Sin.” The pastor’s voice climbed to its sermon level, “You see, free will is both a blessing and a curse—”
“How did God create free will?”
Max heard the pastor sit on the bench next to him and felt a hand on his shoulder. “I’ll admit that what I’m going to say is borrowed more from Dr. Perry than the Good Book. Don’t tell anyone or they’ll take my collar.”
“I won’t.”
“Good. When we’re born, we aren’t completely blank slates. There are instincts we’re equipped with that have been passed from one generation to the next. Everything else we learn as we grow up. Sometimes it’s by the teachings of an authority figure, but a lot of it is trial and error. We touch a hot pan on the stove, burn our hand, and know not to touch a pan on the stove again with our bare hand. We make choices for good and bad, and if we’re smart, we learn from the consequences. So, to answer your question, I suppose you could say free will is something that was not created at all. It’s more like a lack of creation. In the Garden of Eden, God let Adam and Eve make their decision to eat from the tree and the consequences of that have been with us for thousands of years.”
Max took in the answer and began to understand why his own attempts to create people had failed. He couldn’t program them like robots to imitate a person. He needed to provide them with the background information and let them develop personalities and behaviors on their own.