“No, smarty pants, next week. So there.”
“I probably bought it.” CeCe slathered half a muffin with jam.
“You’ve got me there,” Rudy agreed. The sun was setting and they were eating breakfast and then they were going to the hospital. To the nuthouse, booby hatch, medical-psych whatever.
Afterward they loaded the dishwasher, Rudy hugged his daughter and kissed the top of her head. Then he wordlessly climbed the stairs back up to his bedroom. She followed along, to help pack his bag. He planned on wearing a dress shirt and V-neck sweater. He wasn’t sure what lay in store for him, but he was certainly going to dress properly today (no freaking tuxedo!). Even if he was going to the psych ward.
II
14
“Why don’t you take the place by the window, Dad?” CeCe suggested.
Just hours into his stay at Stanford, Rudy had to admit, the hospital’s psych floor, though not fancy, was . . . nice enough. Not the bleak snake pit he’d imagined. His fairly large room had two neatly made beds separated by a curtain. The signature light blue waffled blankets matched the pale blue walls. The psych ward seemed like any other hospital setting. Except there wasn’t any life-or-death paraphernalia hanging from the ceiling or walls, no needles or crash carts or even the smell of rubbing alcohol, unless you counted the hand sanitizer on the wall beside the door to the room.
“Gel in gel out!” a cheerful sign by the door reminded entrants. Rudy and CeCe obeyed on their way in.
“Sure.” Rudy agreed to the space by the window, wanting to seem agreeable—compliant. The window was expansive, the entire length of the wall at the far end of the room, so that the person in that bed had a view of trees, sky, clouds, and the busy parking lot below. Ambulances and cars dashed up to the ER.
The nurse stood between the two beds, biting the corner of her lip with a hesitation that perplexed Rudy.
“Do you feel safe by the window, Rudy?” The nurse was young, with a long black braid and purple scrubs dotted with daisies. She was serious, but kind. Rudy realized that the staff must know from his admittance papers that he was a fairly recent widower, with “unspecified” depression, according to his family doctor. (A year was recent, how dare the platitudes imply otherwise!) Okay, he had been having difficulty with self-care lately. Apparently sleeping all day on Sunday and eating toast for dinner every night indicated this. In recent days his desire to cook had been downgraded to toast. Yet, honestly, was there a more perfect food than toast?
When they’d gotten to the hospital, they met with an admitting psychiatrist in the ER. CeCe added details to Rudy’s answers to the doctor’s questions, stating that her dad couldn’t get out of bed sometimes.
“Well, I can get up,” Rudy argued. He didn’t want the doctor to think he was physically incapacitated, even though the long Sunday sleeps were more restful than his nighttime tossing and turning, when he couldn’t stop picturing Bee, dead, in her nightgown. About how she hadn’t looked peaceful. Peaceful was falling asleep with a good book spread across your chest. Closing your eyes and tilting your face up to the sun for a warming moment. Dead, gone forever, was different.
When CeCe stepped out to go to the restroom, Rudy had tried to explain to the admitting psychiatrist what he’d experienced with the PA system where he worked, and that it wasn’t a hallucination. The paging system—always calling out people’s names—now wanted him to do something about his wife’s shoes.
“I sound certifiably insane.” He shook his head, rubbing the fine cuffs of his old wool pullover sweater. At home, ashamed, he’d dressed as though he were going to a neighborhood cocktail party—a crease-free dress shirt and sweater straight from the dry-cleaning bags. As soon as he’d stepped onto the ward, he imagined the crisply attired Men’s Department headless mannequin quipping at his outfit: For the nuthouse? Honestly!
“Your wife’s shoes?” the psychiatrist asked, not at all judgmentally.
Rudy nodded. “I thought perhaps she had to special order some at the store and now they needed picking up. But I checked the Shoe Department, and the woman at the HR office upstairs said that no one had really paged me. But those monotonous pagers, you know? Please tell me you’ve noticed them.”
The kind doctor said that he himself couldn’t recall hearing the store’s pages, but they must have been disconcerting. “Department stores and the whole dang mall are simply overwhelming,” the doc added. “And grief does weird things to us.”
Rudy liked the unclinical word weird, and the inclusive us. The doctor didn’t hide his clipboard from Rudy—they both could see all the notes made. With his clean-smelling hands, under “DIAGNOSIS:” the shrink wrote major depressive disorder—complicated by grief. He showed this to Rudy and explained that it was common, as well as natural, let alone just plain understandable after such a traumatic, life-altering event. The words common and natural were heartening.
Now, upstairs on the unit, Rudy set his bag on the chair next to the window-side bed.
“You feel safe . . . by the window?” the nurse repeated, sliding a tray with a sandwich and a little carton of cranberry juice onto the revolving hospital tray table. Later, Rudy would discover that this was the best feature of the room. It was like a good airplane seat, with its extensions and compartments and ability to go up and down.
Oh, safe. Right. It dawned on him that this window worry meant suicide risk. He peered out the metal-framed window, which he couldn’t even imagine how to open. Plus, they were only on the second floor.
“Yes,” he smiled. “Safe. Thank you. Even if I were to muster opening that window and jumping out, I’d probably only break an arm and then have to crawl right back into the hospital via the emergency room.” He nodded out to the ambulances.
It was clear CeCe did not find this one bit funny. In fact, Rudy could see his daughter’s eyes well with tears. She sniffled, looked away.
The nurse’s lips turned up at the corners just a little. “That’s about the long and short of it, but we don’t like to take any chances. We want you to be safe.”
“The window is nice,” he replied. “Thank you.” He followed this with an apology to CeCe.
“It’s okay,” she said, as the nurse hustled out of the room again. “I’m just scared, Dad.”
Rudy couldn’t recall ever hearing these words from his daughter. Not even during childhood. Not while watching The Wizard of Oz, or when their house back east shook with the crackling boom of giant thunderstorms in the summer. During these storms she would bring her sleepover cotton sleeping bag and place it on the floor beside her parents’ bed, but it was always with that dignified, balletic posture and lower lip protruding slightly, not in a pout, but in a show of brave defiance.
He hugged his daughter to his chest now, and she let him. Really let him. Her faint perfume smelled of coriander and dryer sheets; suddenly Rudy wanted to weep. But for once—you dumb sod, he thought—he needed to hold it together, for his daughter.
“Your old man’s going to be just fine,” he insisted, feeling a bit helpless. CeCe’s eyes welled with tears again. What if all the crying she hadn’t done in her entire lifetime came right now? Of course she’d cried at her mother’s funeral. Cried with more abandon when the last guest had left after the gathering that followed at the house. Spencer had held her tightly, the smell of the medical disinfectant soap on his hands always apparent even to Rudy. He was slim, but sturdy. A rock. An inflexible rock—not the medical student who had given CeCe piggybacks through the quad, the two of them tumbling into the leaves, laughing and kissing. Back then, he’d loosened her up. Now he seemed uptight around her.
Rudy wanted to make a joke to lighten the mood, but his first attempt at humor over being admitted to the psych ward had bombed. He wished Bee were there.
Bethany’s shoes. Bethany’s shoes. The words shot into Rudy’s head as intrusively as a smoke alarm. He felt the overwhelming urge to shout them out. It was a sort of humor hysteria that had come over him i
n the past forty-eight hours.
“I’m fine.” He shook CeCe gently as he hugged her. “What about you, hunh? Hospital not the easiest place in the world to hang out, is it?”
“Spencer should be here,” she said bitterly. Then she wiped her cheeks with the backs of her hands, forced a smile. “You’re in good hands,” she confirmed, digging into her immaculate green leather bag—it was as big as a briefcase almost, but surprisingly empty. She pulled out a packet of tissues and blew her nose and wiped her eyes. “I’m silly,” she snuffled.
“You need to be more silly.” Rudy kissed her on the forehead.
“This I know,” she said. “From Spencer.” She raised her eyebrows, her freckled forehead bearing weary wrinkles. “And my daughter. How can a four-year-old know that you have no sense of humor?”
“Oh, honey.” Rudy had always hated himself for worrying that Spencer would tire of his daughter’s hyperefficient, control-freak ways. But she did such a good job at work, at home, with Keira. Rudy was so proud of CeCe. Had he not conveyed how proud he was of her? BEE! he wanted to shout. Family meeting! They’d never had a family meeting, but it seemed time for one now. With his wife, who was the best of both Rudy and CeCe—she would straighten them both out.
CeCe looked around the room, giving the not-half-bad nod of approval.
“Honey, you are the best mother.”
To Rudy’s surprise, CeCe kicked off her shoes, plopped on the bed, and took a big bite of his sandwich. He nestled beside her, scooping up the other half of the turkey-on-wheat lunch. The small bag of potato chips cracked with a loud pop as he opened it, making CeCe jump.
“Yeah, not really,” she mumbled. “I’m not fun. It’s true. You should see what some of these other mothers come up with. Ha,” she laughed through a mouthful of sandwich. “Maybe I should check in and be your roommate.”
“For the record,” Rudy said, pointing the open chip bag to her, “that was a joke. Sense of humor confirmed.” Bee, no doubt, would have giggled with them.
“Would you like another juice?” the nurse asked, bustling back in with a contraption on wheels that had a computer atop it, and a tray that stretched beyond a small keyboard to include room for little medication cups and a pink plastic pitcher. Alongside this traveling station were a blood pressure cuff and some other nonthreatening-looking gear on one side, with a little basket on the other.
CeCe pointed to a bottle of water in her efficient bag. “No thanks. And I’ve got to go.” She leaned back on the pillows.
“Since you’re eating,” the nurse said, “I’m going to take your bags and go through them just to make sure you don’t have any scissors or clippers or razors. It’s fine to have them; we just keep them at the nurse’s station for you. You may sign them out any time after your first twenty-four hours.” Rudy imagined clipping himself to death with nail clippers. Where would one begin? Oddly enough, he’d felt better in these first surreal two hours at the nuthouse than he had since Bee died. Humor. He saw humor in things for the first time in a year. Granted, it was a hysterical, nervous humor, and it was killing him that he couldn’t share every bit of this experience with Sasha over dinner, but he wanted to laugh. Yet he wasn’t sure that this was a good thing. It might not only upset his daughter, but also alarm the doctors, and frighten the other patients. What if he burst into hysterical, maniacal laughter once he ventured out of his room—like those lunatic characters you see in the movies?
“Your computer bag and phone and books you are welcome to keep. We want you to come to all the groups, but you’re welcome to use your computer. We prefer that you minimize work emails, however. It’s better if patients watch something on it at night or listen to an audiobook on your phone. We want you to socialize a bit, too. Eat meals in the dayroom with everyone else, and don’t isolate yourself. Okay?”
“He’s a professional concert pianist,” CeCe said.
“Hardly concert,” he told the nurse. “Department store.”
“Okay, Dad, I’m going.” CeCe stood and resumed her typical briskness, brushing crumbs from her slacks, pulling her top taut. She slipped her shoes back on, grabbed her designer bag, and kissed her father’s forehead and both cheeks. For once, he was relieved to see his daughter’s signature businesslike nature return. She patted his leg before disappearing out the door, chirping “Gel out!” as she went.
“I love you!” he called after her green bag. He wished she didn’t have to leave.
When the nurse returned, she had even more information—so that Rudy would be prepared for the next day. Rounds were made by the doctors in the mornings, before, during, and after breakfast, which was from seven-thirty to eight-thirty. The first group didn’t start until ten, giving patients plenty of time to take their meds, have their vitals taken, meet briefly with their docs, eat, and wash up. Although, she pointed out, it was perfectly fine to attend meetings in sweats, even pajamas the first day.
No stiff rented tuxedo. “Thank you. Thank you for all the information, it’s helpful.”
“I always say the scariest thing is the unknown,” the nurse said matter-of-factly. “I hate to inundate people with too much information, but you can always ask me anything again tomorrow. We want you to feel reassured and focus on getting well.”
“My wife died,” he told her. Rearranging the crumpled napkins on his meal tray. The sound of his own voice saying this startled him. The fact of Bethany’s death was still surreal.
The nurse nodded. “Sometimes we’re just crushed by our own grief,” she said, returning his bag and Dopp kit and rolling up the computerized gadget tray for taking his vitals. As she squeezed the blood pressure cuff, she continued, “It isn’t something that ever really goes away necessarily. It changes, gets better and worse, but it might always be with you.”
“Well, it was almost a year ago already,” Rudy said, a little chagrined, as though he should have manned up by now.
The nurse wagged her finger. “I’m telling you. The first anniversary is the worst. You’re in shock, you want a refund, and you walk around like a zombie. It feels like your loved one might be on a trip, Bali, business—who knows. Then bam that first anniversary descends and some of us just fall apart.”
“You understand,” Rudy said.
“Lost a brother,” she replied. “And I’m a psych nurse.” With this, she tapped her temple and smiled.
15
Bee was upstairs still sleeping and Rudy was downstairs playing the radio quietly, a bit irritated by the morning guy and his sanctimonious announcing—as though only he knew a nocturne from a mazurka. Rudy smelled oatmeal, but he wasn’t making oatmeal.
Weekdays he cooked the breakfast she liked most, but rarely had time to finish before setting off to work. Two soft-boiled eggs with buttered whole-wheat toast. First he put the eggs on, and then popped down the toast. He buttered and cut one slice into strips, then squares, placing them beneath the eggs (that way you got a bite of toast with each bite of egg); the other he cut in half and arranged on the edges of the plate. His mother had always done this for him and he considered it an act of love. Rudy’s menu varied on weekends. Blueberry or apple pancakes. Real bacon. Heart attack.
He’d tried fixing made-to-order eggs for CeCe starting in junior high, but that girl was a picky eater—the opposite of low-maintenance Bee. Sometimes Rudy even wished his wife were a tougher customer, but boy, did she always appreciate the detail that went into preparing a meal, or even a snack!
Look at this! she’d exclaim when Rudy laid a plate before her. It’s lovely. Yum, she’d muster as she ate, and ohhh.
CeCe viewed food as utilitarian. Meals were calculations of protein and calories that would keep her going through field hockey or a calculus exam without putting on weight. They were not to be enjoyed. Bee and Rudy’s friends dealt with teens who would not buckle down and get serious about their studies or curfews or chores, and so the couple shied away from worrying aloud over their frighteningly diligent daughter. How
unkind it would be to share with friends that they didn’t think their daughter was a fun babysitter, or lighthearted party guest. (Those kids would not do their homework; CeCe would come home complaining about her babysitting charges: They’d wanted to make sundaes!) At this particular description of a Saturday night with the Wilson kids, Bee had had to hide behind the hall closet door, stuffing the corner of a mitten in her mouth to stop from laughing.
“I’m so sorry,” Bee confessed, lamenting her parenting skills. “I think I gave birth to a forty-year-old and I’m terrible at this.” Rudy hugged his wife until she promised that she believed she was a good, kind mother.
“It’s not enough to get a 4.0,” CeCe said, scoffing at her father’s praise of her report card. Apparently you needed to get better than that these days, because so many kids were acing their AP classes—with A pluses.
“Darling, I promise you, you will be happy wherever you go to school, and you are going to have some great schools to choose from,” Rudy insisted encouragingly, trying not to show his blooming concern that CeCe might collapse into a breakdown before she even got to write her first college application essay. What with her field hockey, ski club, French club, organized beach cleanups. (Could a child with a clipboard and whistle make friends?) Then their daughter met with her first failure: She did not make the swim team. Rudy had started swimming with her weekends to practice. By work on Monday his eyes were rimmed red and his nose stung from the chlorine. But she didn’t make the team, and it was clear that as soon as this news had been delivered to her parents, it was not to be discussed further.
Rudy listened for the creak of the stairs as his wife started down, the pause she always took on the landing. The quiet clearing of her throat, something she did often in the spring when allergy season hit. That’s how Rudy could always find her in a store. The syncopated clearing of her throat. “You’ve been coughing for two years,” he told her once, slightly annoyed. Annoyed! Now he wished she were hacking in his ear.
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