Me for You

by Lolly Winston

  “Comrade!” she said cheerfully. They weren’t fellow employees; they were comrades. “I would have come sooner, but I worried to intrude.” She blushed a little, nodding at the bags at her feet.

  Rudy hoped Sasha hadn’t noticed the dumbfounded amount of time he’d spent admiring how pretty she was. He quickly stood and held out his arms to help her with everything she’d brought, to take her jacket.

  He returned her greeting, “Comrade!” And delight tingled all the way up his neck and across his scalp.

  17

  Sasha felt a little guilty as Rudy leapt toward his hospital room door to unburden her of all the bags and packages she’d brought. He was the patient! But Rudy quickly arranged everything atop the long, narrow counter that covered the radiator under the room’s big window.

  He peeked down his front, brushing and picking at his clothes, seemingly checking for smudges of food and brushing away imaginary crumbs.

  “The other day I had oatmeal on my sweater!” he said brightly, clearly trying to compensate for embarrassment.

  Sasha shrugged. “You look nice.” The truth was, she liked seeing Rudy in casual attire—he looked like a regular guy, home with the flu or cleaning out the garage.

  “Please, sit.” Rudy gestured to the one chair for guests. He had positioned it at an angle in the corner between the bed and the radiator, so his visitors could look both around the room and down at the busy emergency room. Sasha was impressed that he’d even put a stack of magazines on the radiator top, next to a bouquet of daffodils that he said CeCe had brought, with space for a cup of tea or juice that Rudy could apparently fetch from the little kitchen by the nurse’s station anytime. She had the feeling Rudy could make any place homey.

  “Okay: Here’s the question I’ve been mulling over since the first day I got here,” Rudy told Sasha, as he seemed to be pulling taut a minor wrinkle in his shirt. “Can you see crazy? Can you see unresolved grief? I feel like they must have been eyesores I was carrying around for a long time, like stuffing bulging out of a tattered old sofa.”

  “No. I would tell you. I promise.” Sasha laughed. She didn’t add that, either way, it didn’t matter when she was with Rudy. She felt comfortable with him in a rental tuxedo or hospital clothes, if he were grieving for his wife or playing a bawdy Broadway show tune.

  “I just need an ottoman,” Rudy lamented, gesturing at the area before Sasha’s chair. “I wish there were a way you could put up your feet after your long hours at two jobs. Feet above the heart! my wife always said.” Rudy smacked his forehead. “God, talking about my dead wife.”

  He wrung his hands as he perched on the edge of his bed. Then he got up and slid his small, hard suitcase out from under the bed, placed it at the foot of Sasha’s chair, lifted her feet, and rested them atop it.

  “Thank you,” Sasha told him. “And I do want to hear more about Bee, you know.”

  Silence. The ticking of the big plastic clock on the wall.

  “Did you eat dinner yet?” Sasha clapped her hands on her thighs.

  Rudy said, “Nope! I’d actually be relieved by escaping the five-thirty booby hatch dinner for a night.”

  Rudy pulled the rolling hospital tray table between him and Sasha, and lowered it a bit as a sort of dining room table. “Voilà,” he said.

  The supper she’d brought him smelled great. Sasha set the table with plastic cutlery and napkins from the bags. She unpacked and opened Styrofoam cartons onto their shared place settings: hot latkes with sour cream and applesauce.

  “Wow, terrific.” Rudy rubbed his palms together. “Telepathic, actually. Among my favorite suppers. How’d you know?”

  Sasha shrugged. “Comfort food. I love, too.”

  Rudy looked apprehensively around the room, rubbing his palms together nervously. “It’s a bit like my college dorm room.”

  “But what a nice view,” Sasha replied, pointing to the window. “What is this tree?” She nodded at magenta flowers on a tree against the darkening sky.

  “Er, crape myrtle.” Rudy sat back down on the bed. “The only other seat in the joint,” he said nervously. “What could be more intimate, yet creepy, than sitting on a bed for a chat?” He added, laughing, “Even when the doctor comes in, I feel weird sitting on a bed.

  “And the weirdest part about the beds on the unit is that they’re air mattresses that move with you, even if you sit gingerly. It’s a feature to alleviate bedsores. Granted, no one in the psych ward is faced with this risk, but the beds are out-of-commission toss-offs from the ICU. It’s sadly clear the psych ward doesn’t get the best amenities. Look,” Rudy showed Sasha how the bedsheets were imprinted with a San Francisco Hospital insignia—cast-offs. The unit, with many patients on Medicare, simply wasn’t competing for business, like the flowery maternity ward, which was even advertised on local TV.

  As they ate, Sasha pointed to the playing cards and books she’d brought. “I thought we could play gin rummy and I could read to you. You said you loved audiobooks. I can be your stereo.”

  “Sasha.” For a moment she thought she’d done something wrong, as Rudy took her hand. “I’m so grateful. You’ve thought of everything.”

  “The nurses up front went through everything,” Sasha added, laughing about her bags.

  Sasha recalled entering the unit. Through the double doors of the psychiatric ward, the first thing she’d reached was a high-countered, imposing nurse’s station, where she had to sign in as a guest. After that, the staff behind the desk looked through her packages for Rudy, making sure there was nothing off-limits or dangerous. Sasha wasn’t sure why, but she felt a little embarrassed by this procedure, perhaps because of the quantity of things she’d brought Rudy: dinner, drinks and snacks for later, games, magazines, books. It was a little like airport security, where suddenly you brimmed with anxiety, fearing maybe someone had snuck a knife into your belongings. They asked her to show them what foods were for Rudy to have later, and they took them away, saying they’d mark them and put them in the refrigerator. The nurses and administrators—Sasha wasn’t sure which, frankly—were kind, so she decided that they really would give Rudy his drinks and snacks later. Then she’d proceeded on down the long corridor, the floors as shiny as ice on a skating rink, the pale blue walls hung with fine art prints, and knocked lightly on Rudy’s door.

  Now, Rudy’s face dropped, as though he wished Sasha hadn’t had to go through the front-desk search.

  Sasha reached over and patted his arm. “The staff was very nice. They wrote your name on the perishables and stored them in the refrigerator for you. You can have anytime you like.”

  Rudy asked Sasha if he could get her a tea, coffee, cocoa, or juice.

  “Oh!” She jumped up and grabbed a thermos out of a canvas tote bag, from which she also produced a pack of playing cards, books, a backgammon set, and New Yorker magazines. She thoughtfully arranged them on the radiator, nightstand, and hospital tray table. “I brought thermos of tea. Silly?”

  “I’m so touched,” Rudy told her. “Not just by your thoughtfulness but also by your uncanny intuition that these very activities are great. The truth is, it’s been hard for me to read. For some other patients, too! It’s like: Word, word, word, punctuation, proper noun, page turn . . . I have to read even simple newspaper paragraphs over and over. It’s like nothing permeates my brain. And reading was always a great escape for me, since I was a child.” Rudy’s eyes closed, seeming to remember the books he’d enjoyed most.

  “The admitting doctor said that depression could do this. He said that his younger brother had died in a car accident while he was in medical school, and for months he could barely study. So it’s common.” Rudy spoke quickly and breathlessly, as though he wanted to tell Sasha everything at once.

  “Common,” Sasha nodded in agreement. She wanted to reassure and comfort Rudy, without frightening him with the knowledge that she knew the blinding blare that grief gave you. That feeling like you were choking on dirt.

/>   They continued to eat in silence, the food a comfort. During their meal a nurse came in and encouraged them to eat in the conference room next time. Family members who brought patients food often gathered there to dine.

  Sasha’s heart soared at the words family members. As special as an agate found and pocketed from the beach. A treasure to be saved and polished.

  Rudy’s night nurse was Jessie, who, he whispered to Sasha, was among his favorites. As she clamped the clothespin-like monitor on his finger to take his pulse, he introduced her.

  “All your vitals are great. Your pulse is way down,” Jessie reported, her wide, smooth face beaming at Sasha.

  “I’m officially relaxing,” Rudy replied. “I guess sleeping around the clock before I got here was hardly taxing. Although, more like a paralysis, rather than a peaceful rest.”

  “That level of depression is stressful,” Jessie told him. “The cognitive behavioral therapy taught in group is meant to help—to be applied to both our outer and inner worlds.” As she bumped her cart toward the door, Jessie told them, “But don’t let the CBT handouts feel like too much homework. My motto is think, but not until it hurts!”

  “I love that,” Sasha told Jessie. “I’m going to try to remember when I can’t sleep.” She stood to clear away their Styrofoam boxes and napkins, but Rudy wouldn’t let her. He bussed the table and wiped it off.

  “I may feel hopeless, but I am not helpless,” Rudy proclaimed. “That’s my motto.” After the nurse left, he confided quietly that he’d shared this motto with the physicians, too; having no idea until later that hopeless was a red-flag word for deep depression and perhaps even suicidal ideation or tendencies.

  “Yes,” Sasha agreed. “Let’s ditch . . . ditch?”

  Rudy nodded.

  Sasha continued, “Let’s ditch hopeless.”

  “And let’s read this.” Rudy chose The Idiot.

  “Have you ever read?” Sasha asked.

  Rudy shook his head. “I’m a little light on the Russian literature.”

  “It’s actually funny,” Sasha said. “And look,” she opened the book and smoothed her lovely long white fingers over the pages—“the chapters are short.” As Sasha told Rudy about this favorite book of hers, her voice sped up and her cheeks flushed, her gray eyes brightening. “The funny thing is. Well, this isn’t a spoiler. The protagonist, the idiot, is merely an epileptic. He’s been away from Russia during his formative years to a sanatorium in Switzerland. He’s a prince, but not high up on the prince scale, or whatever you call it. But the sad and sadly funny thing is that they put epileptics in among the mentally ill then, seriously mentally deranged, perhaps people with brain tumors. It’s awful! They had no real treatment for epileptic fits. And when he returns to Russia, he still carries this nickname ‘the idiot’! Sometimes when people refer to him as such, he tries to explain, ‘You know, I’m not really an idiot, I have epilepsy. And it’s much improved now.’ But no one listens to him.”

  Sasha covered her mouth, laughing, her eyes welling up with tears. “It is painful humor. Am I terrible for thinking this? I love Dostoevsky for his ironic touch. Some irony is funny, no?”

  “Yes!” Rudy agreed. “I can already relate to this idiot, this prince without a family, without a kingdom.” And so this would be their shared book for now.

  The next night, Rudy awoke, already sitting up, his room lit by the dim night-light and a wide pie shape of hall light shining in on the glossy bare floor. He had to tell someone he was choking to death. Two long, black shadows loomed in the doorway. Then blue figures moved toward his bed. When he recognized that these were the night nurses—the lovely reassuring one with the short curly hair, and a male nurse from the other side of the ward whom Rudy hadn’t seen before—he sighed and fell back against the pillows. His heart thumped in his chest, wanting to get out. The thickening of his pulse in his neck made it feel as though his throat were closing up.

  “Breathe,” he said. As in CANNOT.

  Brenda, that was her name, the woman with the short brown curly hair. How welcoming her familiar face was now—the spray of light brown freckles across her olive complexion. She encouraged him to sit up and sip water. She turned on the low light beside his bed. “We were worried because you screamed. Nightmare?”

  The young, burly night nurse ducked out of the room. It looked as though his specialty was restraining especially troubled patients. Rudy had noticed a few large, particularly buff staff members on the lockdown side—like bouncers.

  Rudy nodded. Yes, nightmare. The water tasted extraordinarily sweet and good. In his dream, the faceless serial murderers who had abducted him would not allow him water. He was in a cement closet, like a warehouse room or janitor’s closet. His arms and legs were duct-taped together. There was a board with exposed nails, and they were going to hurt him with that next. Something dripped somewhere. They were serial murderers because well, his dream logic told him so. There was no motive. Just arbitrary psychopaths.

  Until Jensen showed up in his life, Rudy’s bad dreams had been that Bethany was still alive, but dying. Rudy would be pounding her chest, then he’d be sitting up in bed awake, discovering that reality was worse than his nightmare. Bethany wasn’t dying, she was dead. And his heart felt as heavy as a suitcase. Now, thanks to Jensen, he dreamed that he was going to be murdered. In a bad TV creepy killer kind of murder. He and Bee used to marvel at how people could watch these “trouble shows,” as Bethany called them. Shows where there is “always such big awful grim, terrifying trouble, and violence.” And so many of them—nearly all of them—with violence against women. “Special Victims,” Bee would say and shudder. Always such violence against women.

  Rudy described the dream. How, between Jensen visiting and a few patients watching Special Victims that evening before bed, he had gone to bed haunted about his wife’s potential murder, even though he had just learned that this hadn’t even been the case.

  “You know, I try to turn off that show,” Brenda told him, “try and encourage another show or activity. Cooking and sports. I swear those are the best for most people. And the singing and dancing competition shows. Everybody loves those.” She sat in the chair beside Rudy’s bed, turning on the low light behind him. “I’m going to put in a request that we not allow that show to be on.”

  “There are victims of violent crime here with PTSD.” The victims of violent crime counselor had visited him briefly a few days prior to Jensen’s appearance, saying that when Rudy was released they would be there for him if he needed support. The volunteer did not give him any of her pamphlets, thankfully. She just wanted him to know about the resource. Good GOD was he weighed down with literature—for widowers, depressives, PTSD sufferers, partners of those with heart disease, cognitive behavioral therapy, living in the present, yoga . . .

  “Plan in place!” the social worker had chirped to the group therapy session one morning. “We want resources lined up for you upon your release. You don’t have to read up on services immediately, but you’ll meet with a social worker before your discharge to sketch out a plan.”

  Rudy sat on the side of the bed now, his feet dangling over, awake, and nearing anger. “There’s Monk!” He felt his voice rising in pitch and volume. “A perfectly fine murder mystery!” Who cared if liking that show made him a fuddy-duddy?

  Brenda nodded. “Exactly.” She patted his shoulder. “Can I bring you some cereal?”

  Steadying himself, Rudy declined.

  “Okay, then, here’s what I recommend. Get up and use the bathroom, splash warm water on your face, and look at a magazine for ten minutes max, then turn off your light. I’m pretty sure you’ll go right back to sleep. I’ll be back in twenty minutes to check on you.”

  Rudy’s heart felt less like a rapidly descending plane about to crash, and his breathing gradually slowed. The sensation of choking was now just a small lump in his throat. Every day in the hospital made him more grateful for psychiatric nurses. Unsung heroes, for su
re. He would send them flowers when he got home.

  He flipped through The Idiot, having already loved what Sasha had read to him earlier. This would be their shared book. Rudy had selfishly chosen it because it was the longest of the tomes Sasha had brought. Certainly, even after his release from the hospital, she would not leave him until they finished the story. For, since Bethany’s death, people leaving him—people whom he loved—had become his biggest fear.

  Once a week dogs visited the unit—the world’s most subdued German shepherds, wide-eyed and blinking and calm. They were brought by animal therapy specialists—and politely sat or stood in the sitting area of the dayroom, allowing patients in the surrounding chairs to pet and scratch and coo to them. Rudy found it uncanny that not one of the dogs ever barked or so much as drooled or even shed. While the unit may not have had the fanciest beds, sheets, or showers, where else could you borrow a German shepherd like a library book?

  “Isn’t this something?” he asked the animal therapist, scratching a gentle pup behind his enormous ears.

  “I misssssssss my daaaaaaaawwwwg,” a newly admitted twenty-something boy moaned, rolling on the floor in his makeshift outfit of sweats and hospital pajamas, hugging a pup.

  Sasha visited Rudy every evening now, something he looked forward to all day. Rudy couldn’t remember looking forward to anything since before Bee died. Twice a week there was art therapy. Hell, he looked forward to art therapy. Gathering materials, gathering ideas, becoming engrossed as they delved in. Once a week a lovely gentleman who was a painter himself, and who visited the women on bed rest in the maternity ward, and the really laid-up kids in pediatrics, brought a rolling a cart of his own supplies. He unobtrusively helped people with their projects, many of which included the use of his fine colored pencils. Frustrated by trying to sketch out a piano, Rudy asked the teacher how Monet’s The Duck Pond achieved such depth—how it looked like the ducks were really swimming away from the foreground and deeper between the trees, growing smaller. Ah, perspective! The artist sketched it out in simple circles and shapes, magically making three dimensions appear on the paper—a demonstration that soothed Rudy’s nerves.