The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin'

by Lamb, Wally

  I didn’t know what the hell she was talking about.

  “It’s not all bad news, though,” she said. “His new psychiatrist is Dr. Chase—it could be worse—and his psychologist is Dr. Patel, which is very cool. I have a lot of respect for—”

  “His doctor is Dr. Ehlers,” I said. “Ehlers has been treating my brother for the past four years—successfully, for the most part.”

  “Successfully?” she said. “He cut off his hand, Domenico.”

  “Because he stopped taking his medication, that’s why,” I snapped. I wasn’t taking any crap from this scrawny little—. “Okay, maybe Ehlers should have been on top of it. But I should have been, too. We all missed it. We were all asleep at the wheel.”

  “This is none of my business,” she said. “But I can see already that you take an awful lot of this on yourself. Compared to most patients’ siblings, I mean. What is that, a twin thing?”

  “Never mind about me,” I said. “All I’m saying is that Ehlers has been better than most of them—has been consistent, anyway. Thomas feels safe with him. Comfortable. So I don’t care what anyone in Hartford wants. Just have this Dr. Chase or this Dr. . . . ?”

  “Dr. Patel.”

  “Have this Dr. Patel guy call up Ehlers so that I can get him out of here.”

  “Dr. Patel’s a woman,” she said.

  I closed my eyes. “Okay, fine, whatever,” I said. “That’s irrelevant.”

  “I’m just telling you. She’s Indian. Indian Indian, not American Indian.”

  I slapped my hand down on her desk. “Hey, what is it with this place?” I said. “Why doesn’t anyone listen? It’s a mistake. I don’t give a rat’s ass if Dr. Patel is from Mars or if she’s a man or a woman or a friggin’ three-headed extraterrestrial, okay? My brother’s getting stuck down at this sinkhole is someone’s stupid bureaucratic mistake.”

  She cocked her head just like that wooden bird on her desk. “Mistake how, Domenico?” she said. “Go ahead. I’m listening.”

  “Because he always goes to Settle after an episode. He’s practically a fixture over there. He has a part-time job there.”

  She sat there, mute. Waiting.

  “And because . . .”

  “Yeah? Because what?”

  “Because right about now he must be scared out of his mind, okay? Look, the guy has no defenses. Zip. Zero. And it’s not a ‘twin thing.’ It’s . . . I’ve just always had to run interference for Thomas, okay? Putting him in this place is like throwing a rabbit in with the wolves.”

  She took a deep breath—let it out slowly, audibly. “Coffee and newspapers, right?”

  “What?”

  “His job? He was telling me about it. We talked for over an hour last night.”

  “Listen to me,” I said.

  “Oh, I’m listening. It sounds like I’m listening to myself talk, actually. My old self.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Oh, nothing. Personal observation, that’s all. It’s irrelevant.” I just sat there, trying to figure out what the fuck she was talking about. “I was in a nine-year relationship with a substance abuser, that’s all. So I know all about running interference. Being someone else’s main line of defense. I call it the Don Quixote complex. Makes you feel noble to defend the defenseless. Plus, it’s a great avoidance tactic. You don’t have to deal with your own stuff, right? But, listen, I’m way over the line here. I just thought I recognized a fellow Quixote, that’s all. I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah, well, thanks for the free psychoanalysis,” I said. “But this is about my brother, not me. Or you.”

  “Ouch,” she said. “Fair enough. Really—I’m sorry. Let me give it to you straight, paisano. They’ve placed your brother in a forensic hospital because he’s seriously mentally ill and because he’s committed a serious crime.”

  “What crime? What’d he do? Interrupt a couple of old ladies during their afternoon reading? Get a little blood on the library rug? Look, I know what he did was bizarre. He gets totally fucked up when he’s not taking his medication. I’m not saying otherwise. But what ‘serious crime’ did he commit?”

  “Carrying a dangerous weapon.”

  “He wasn’t . . . he used it on himself ! “

  “Well,” she shrugged. “He counts. Right?”

  We sat there, staring at each other—two gunslingers, each waiting for the other to make a move. “He gets . . . he gets these religious delusions,” I said. “Thinks God’s handpicked him to save the world. . . . Hey, he’s got your politics. Feels the same way you do about this Persian Gulf thing. . . . He wanted to do something—make some sort of big sacrifice that would wake up Saddam Hussein and Bush. He says God directed him through the Bible. . . . He’s nuts, okay? He’s not a criminal.”

  “And here’s another way of looking at it,” she said. “He was brandishing a knife in a public building. He needs to be locked up so that decent people can walk the streets.”

  “Brandishing? What do you mean, brandishing?”

  Her hands flew into the air, palms outward. “Don’t get defensive, paisano. I’m just playing devil’s advocate here. I’m Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Public, reading about what happened in the paper. You see what I’m saying?”

  “But he wasn’t brandishing it. He wasn’t threatening anybody. He was sitting in a study carrel, minding his own business. Look, I know the guy. I know him better than anyone. I’m probably more dangerous than he is.”

  She smiled. “Look. You know what your problem is? Can you calm down a minute and listen to something? You’re making the assumption that this is the worst place in the world for him to be and that’s not necessarily the case. And at any rate, there’s nothing you can do about it, anyway. You’re just going to have to take a leap of faith.”

  I sucked in a couple of deep breaths. Took a ten-second time-out. “You’re a real company gal, aren’t you?” I said.

  She laughed so hard, she snorted. “I’ve been called a lot of things down here, Domenico, but never—”

  “You are, though. You don’t look the part, but you’re walking the walk, talking the talk. You spout the party line just like the rest of them.”

  She shook her head. Kept smiling. “Now there’s a low blow,” she said.

  “Hey, look—”

  “No, you hey look. Let me have the floor for half a second. In the first place, paisano, I’m a woman, not a gal. Okay? If we’re going to be working together on this, you’re going to have to remember that distinction. ‘Gal’ sounds like someone’s horse, which I’m not. All right? And in the second place—”

  “Who’s your supervisor?” I said.

  She smiled, skimmed her hand across the top of her crewcut. “Why do you want to talk to my supervisor?”

  “Because if I have to get someone with a little authority to pick up the phone and call his goddamned doctor, then that’s what I have to do. I want him out of here today.”

  Her face remained unperturbed. “My supervisor is Dr. Barry Farber.”

  “And where’s he at?”

  “Dr. Farber’s at a conference in Florida. She’s delivering a speech there.” She smiled at the surprise on my face. “Gotcha again. Didn’t I, Domenico? Funny thing about professional women these days, isn’t it? The world is crawling with them.”

  “Who’s her supervisor?” I said.

  “That would be Dr. Leonard Lessard. One of yours.”

  “Hey, look,” I said. “I’d appreciate it if you just cooled it on the sarcasm, okay? I’ve got one or two things I’m trying to deal with here without you—”

  She tapped her finger again on the signature in front of me. “Dr. Lessard’s the Deputy Commissioner for Clinical Services. He’s the guy who ordered the transfer.”

  I stood up. Opened my mouth. Shut it again and sat back down.

  “I tell you one thing,” I said. “If my brother gets so much as a scratch while he’s in this place—”

  “He won’t,” she
said. “I promise you. And you’re right, he is scared. And I can see you’re scared, too, which is probably why you’re being so obnoxious. But I want to tell you something. Are you listening, now? Can you really listen to me here, Domenico?”

  “Dominick,” I told her again. “My name’s Dominick.”

  “Dominick,” she said. She sat there waiting.

  “All right. I’m listening.”

  “You might be right,” she said. “Your brother might very well do better over at Settle than here at Hatch. Security’s tight here, by necessity; paranoiacs tend to have a hard time with all the watching and monitoring and security checks. But there’s a misconception about this place—that it’s the house of horror or the torture chamber or something. It’s not. Are there problems on the wards? Sure there are. Every day. Does anyone really want to be here? Uh-uh. Club Med it isn’t. But overall, the care is really pretty decent. Pretty humane.”

  I let go a laugh. “I don’t want to burst your bubble or anything, but this place is so decent and humane that last night I got my gonads pushed back up into my gut by one of your hired goons. I got real humane treatment down here. You want to know why I’m wearing these stupid pants you were laughing at before? Because I’m black and blue and swollen. I can hardly walk because of one of the compassionate guards you got down at this place. And I didn’t even get beyond the locked steel doors.”

  “I know, I know,” she said. “I saw the tail end of that. I’m sorry. That shouldn’t have happened, no matter how much of an asshole you were being. But just because one guard on the night shift thinks he’s Rambo, that doesn’t condemn this whole hospital. In the first place, the guards pretty much stay in the security areas unless there’s a problem. They don’t hang out in the wards; they have pretty limited contact with the patients, actually. And second, I know this place—especially Unit Two where your brother is. He’s in the best unit here. I may sound like a ‘company gal’ when I say this, but the people in Unit Two really do care. I mean it. And, like I told you before, Dr. Patel’s a real sweetheart. He’s lucky to have—”

  “Fine,” I said. “Great. But it’s a mistake.”

  “Hey, paisano,” she said. “It’s not a mistake. Let me walk you through it. Are you listening?”

  “Yeah, I’m listening,” I said. “Just don’t talk in initials. And don’t say stuff like, ‘He was a political appointee,’ or, ‘Oh, it’s Jimmy Lane fallout,’ when I don’t even know what you’re goddamned talking about.”

  She reached over and grabbed the candy bar I’d bought. Peeled off the wrapper at one end. Broke me a piece and took one for herself. “Okay, let me spell it all out,” she said. She glanced quickly at the intercom box on the wall. “Don’t quote me on any of this,” she said. “All right?”

  She explained her theory first: that the order to transfer Thomas to Hatch had probably come down from Hartford as a result of all the publicity his self-mutilation had caused. “I knew he was in trouble the minute I saw he’d landed on the front page of the Courant,” she said. “And then, when it went national—when it started showing up in papers like USA Today . . .”

  I told her about the Enquirer, Inside Edition, Connie Chung.

  “Shit,” she said. “The state hates that kind of negative publicity. You remember Jimmy Lane, don’t you? The psych patient who strangled that college kid up on Avon Mountain?”

  “In front of her girlfriends, right?”

  She nodded. “God, what a horror show that was. I don’t know if you remember this part of it, but Jimmy Lane was on a day pass from Westwood—on a hike with a supervised group—and he just wandered away from the rest of them. Just grabbed that poor kid. The guy had no history of violent behavior—nothing at all in his record to indicate that he might be anything but passive. He just snapped that day up there. That case set the department back years. Reinforced all the old stereotypes about the mentally ill—that they’re all psychotic killers, lurking in the shadows. That no one’s safe around them. It was a public relations nightmare. Remember all those letters to the editor? And the newspaper and TV editorials? I saw one bumper sticker: ‘Electric Fry Jimmy Lane.’ Good God, everyone in the state wanted blood. And when the insanity defense prevented a lynching, everyone wanted to lynch the system instead. And the system got pretty touchy about it. Pretty media-weary. See what I’m saying?”

  “He’s here, isn’t he? Lane? Didn’t he get sentenced to this place?”

  She ignored the question. “NGRI—not guilty by reason of insanity—became a real political hot potato because of that case,” she said. “So, to save face, the governor made some heads roll. He fired the commissioner. They retooled the entire department. And then, voilà, the PSRB was born.”

  “What’s that? The PSRB? You mentioned them before.”

  “The Psychiatric Security Review Board,” she said. “Very conservative and very media-conscious. They’re powerful, too. They wield what amounts to sentencing power.”

  Since the Review Board came into power, Sheffer said, lawyers had begun backing away from the insanity plea, even when it was legitimate. Psychiatric patients with charges against them were being advised to go through the criminal justice system instead: bite the bullet, go to a state prison, do one-half or one-third of their sentence, and then get out because of overcrowding, or on good behavior. “If the PSRB gets ahold of someone on the insanity plea,” Sheffer said, “they can keep him at Hatch indefinitely. Which they’ve tended to do. That’s been the pattern so far.”

  “So what are you saying?” I asked her. “That they should arrest Thomas and send him to prison for what he did? That’s ridiculous.”

  “I’m not saying that. Not at all. If he did prison time, the psychological treatment would be minimal—a Band-Aid approach, and that’s only if he was lucky. And he needs treatment, Dominick. No doubt about it, your brother is a very sick man. But if it’s not a criminal matter, then the Review Board are the ones who are going to decide when he gets out of here. And like I said, they tend to be conservative. And jittery about the media. It reads better, you know? Freddy Kruger’s locked up and all’s well. Come out, come out, wherever you are. Have you seen today’s paper yet?”

  Had I? I couldn’t remember.

  Her phone rang again. While she spoke to the person on the other end, she unfolded a copy of the Daily Record, thumbed to an inside page, and pointed:

  COMMIT 3 RIVERS SELF-AMPUTEE TO FORENSIC HOSPITAL.

  My stomach muscles clenched. Jesus Christ, I thought. Here we go again. At least he wasn’t front-page news anymore. He was front-page second-section news. Maybe Thomas’s fifteen minutes were almost up.

  The article implied that if my brother hadn’t gone into shock when he amputated his hand, he might have started hacking away at other people. It made him sound like the kind of psychopath who did belong at Hatch. It made a case for it. The reporter quoted some talking head from Hartford about public safety—about how patients’ rights “coexisted” with the rights of the community to a safe environment, but that the latter was priority number one.

  It was bullshit: Thomas as a public menace. I knew it and so did any doctor who’d ever worked with him. But I was beginning to get what the deal was. With Sheffer’s help, the situation was beginning to clarify itself like one of those Polaroids that develops in the palm of your hand: my brother’s being locked up at Hatch was about public relations. Order restored. They’d slammed the door on him, and now this Psychiatric Review Board was going to throw away the key. Okay, I sat there thinking. Now I’ve got it. Now, at least, I have a hand to play.

  “I’m sorry, Dominick,” Sheffer said, after she’d hung up the phone. “I know I’m throwing a lot at you here—a lot more than the state of Connecticut wants me to, actually.”

  “Who cares what the state of Connecticut wants?” I said.

  “Well, for starters, I have to,” she said. “Unless you’re interested in supporting me and my daughter. Look, let me back up a lit
tle—tell you a little bit about the legality of what’s already happened and what you can expect now. Okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Okay.”

  Thomas had been admitted to Hatch on something called a Physician’s Emergency Certificate, which the surgeon at Shanley Memorial had put into motion.

  “That’s the fifteen-day paper, right?”

  “Right,” she said. The hospital now had fifteen days to observe the patient—to determine over a two-week period if he was dangerous to himself or others. “The fifteen-day paper’s airtight, Dominick,” she said. “There’s no way in hell you’re getting your brother out of here today. It’s out of your hands. Thomas is going to be here for fifteen court-ordered days, minimum.”

  “This sucks,” I said. “This just sucks.” I got up, walked back over to the window. The patients in the rec area had gone inside. “There’s no way to fight this fifteen-day thing?”

  “There is, actually, but it’s a long shot. A waste of time, probably. Your brother or you could request a ‘probable cause’ hearing. Then the hospital would have to prove that Thomas is dangerous to himself. But think about it: all a judge has to do is look down at his stump. There’s the proof of probable cause, right? You want my advice?”

  I was still looking out the window. “Go ahead,” I said.

  “Just ride out the fifteen days. Let us take care of him, observe him, see how well he starts coming around now that he’s gotten back on his meds. This is probably going to be the safest place for him.”

  “Oh, yeah, right,” I said. “In with a bunch of psychotics with violent histories.”

  “That’s not fair, Dominick, and it’s not accurate, either. There are all kinds of psychiatric patients here—not all of them violent by a long shot. Sooner or later you’re going to have to face the fact that the person who’s most dangerous to Thomas is Thomas. But he’s on close watch. For the next forty-eight to seventy-two hours, there’s going to be an aide within ten feet of him, twenty-four hours a day. If he’s suicidal, someone’s going to be there.”

  “He’s not suicidal,” I said.