Pretty

by Jillian Lauren

  I went to the group room and there was Jake, awake and watching Jesus Christ Superstar.

  Every spare moment, he watched Jesus Christ Superstar. I thought it was so funny how he was completely obsessed with that movie, with its groovy, multiracial, seventies cast dancing against a background of white sand, their hair blowing wild in the desert wind. Unable to sleep, covered in the cold sweat of a nasty detox, I stayed up all night with him that night, watching the bare-chested and bell-bottomed apostles look on as a wide-faced Mary Magdalene anointed a movie star Jesus.

  Since he still claimed he was Jesus then, I asked him, “Doesn’t it bug you to watch that? Isn’t it like being a gangster and watching The Godfather or something? It must get on your nerves that they’re getting it wrong.”

  “No, no. They’re getting it right. There’s so much music and golden light. My hands hurt; they’re throbbing and cold and hot.”

  My hands. It was my hands that felt that way.

  “Somewhere not so far is an ocean you can’t hear yet,” he said. And then he held me as I wept and the sunrise shot the dingy room through with clean, rosy light.

  A few days later, he wavered about being God, and in a week more he said he had just been crazy. Anyway, it was the worst morning of my life and I lived through it with Jake and a bunch of bell-bottom-clad hippies singing in the desert. As we stumbled through the next few weeks, he tried to teach me to play chess in between group therapy and grief counseling. By the time we each graduated to Serenity, I wouldn’t allow that I loved him. It was far too soon for that. But I knew he’d saved me nonetheless.

  So maybe I can’t save him back, but I can’t just leave him, either.

  I go to the bathroom to give Buck and Violet a chance to say good night. I wash my face twice and mechanically brush my teeth. I open my toiletry bag, eye the amber bottles of my meds, and then zip it shut again without taking my evening dose. Because when you’re going to have a baby you stop taking truckloads of psychotropic medications designed to balance your tilted brain chemicals. Pills are bad for babies. Pills are bad for babies, but then what happens to moms?

  Eighteen

  I wake up and Violet is still sleeping, breathing softly with her covers pulled up nearly to her eyes. My breasts seem to be growing exponentially bigger by the day. I lie in bed and push my fingertips into the sides of them to test the soreness. Waves of ache shoot through me. I sit up slowly, expecting nausea, expecting something. But there’s nothing. I’m waiting for symptoms, becoming hyperaware of every subtle itch and twitch and shift in my body.

  I get out of bed with a renewed sense of purpose. At least Jake isn’t at Camp Pendleton like he wanted to be. Though I do feel sad for him when I think of him striding into that office expecting his life to change, expecting a dramatic splash of transformation, and what he got instead was slapped into another hospital. He must have felt so betrayed.

  I’m rolling the dice by missing another morning at school. I’ll have to attend two nights next week to make up the hours for missing yesterday afternoon and this morning, which means twelve-hour days. Miss any more than this and they may penalize me by pushing my graduation back a month. I can’t let that happen. I don’t think I have another month in me at that place. I am only living through it right now because the finish line is so close.

  Be a can-do guy. Eyes on the prize, Bebe. Eyes on the prize, sweetheart.

  Like Rick used to say. And maybe Rick was a scumbag, but he managed to be successful selling hot tubs in Toledo. You can learn a thing or two from scumbags about getting what you want.

  I get all brisk and directed. I take a shower, put on a somber sweater, and tie my hair back in a ponytail. I try to imagine that I’m someone a doctor might take seriously, someone to be trusted, someone who’ll be allowed to visit the patient. I’m a can-do guy. Eyes on the prize.

  I creep into the room Buck shares with Missy and wake her. She always sleeps with her boots by the side of the bed for an emergency or an earthquake or just out of habit in case she has to run. She reminds me of Jake this way, who takes it a step further and often doesn’t take his boots off at all. The house around us starts to stir. Someone showers on the other side of the wall. I shake Buck and drag her silently back to my room and we both wake Violet for a conference.

  “I need you to call the hospital and say you’re Susan Schmidt. Tell them that his sister is coming over and that he should be permitted to see me.”

  “There’s some kind of number,” Violet says sleepily.

  “What do you mean?”

  “There’s a number that she uses to identify herself. I’ve heard her call before. It’s, like, her license number or something. It’s on the pad by her computer. You need that.”

  “And this is why you want a felon as your friend. Who’s your daddy now? I’ll get into that office and Vi will make the phone call. How long do you think it’ll take you to get over there?”

  “VA hospital is, like, in Westwood. Crosstown rush hour. I don’t know. An hour? Six hours?”

  Buck makes a salute. “Done. We got your back here, soldier.”

  I pack my school uniform into the same bag Buck packed for me yesterday, then walk out of the house and down the three blocks to where my car is parked. I slide into the driver’s seat and throw my bag on the floor of the passenger side because I don’t want to smush Kitty Hawk Barbie, who is still in a seated position riding shotgun but has toppled so that one of her wings bends dangerously underneath her. I sit her up straight and point us west.

  I pass through Westwood’s tall corridor of doorman buildings to where it opens onto a stretch of wide, clear sky. The blue canopy hangs over a military cemetery—a bright green field with rows and rows of white tombstones and plenty of room for more. Flags flutter from the lampposts. Past the cemetery, a sign says National Veterans Park.

  I drive through the gates. The VA looks like a huge college campus. I pass dormlike, Spanish-style buildings and a church with peeling white paint that appears to be abandoned. There’s a wall painted with a mural of soldiers and helicopters and cryptic seals with acronyms on them: POW/ MIA, SAR, AWG.

  CD, MDD, ADD, PTSD.

  On the other side of the wall I see what must be the hospital. It looks like a white square pushed up against another white square stacked on top of another white square and a white square with a door in it shoved on the front. I park on a wide expanse of asphalt parking lot, put Milla’s Kitty Hawk in my purse for luck, and mechanically walk toward the entrance, trusting that Buck stole the license number from Susan’s office and everything will go smoothly.

  Stenciled on the tinted glass of the tall doors in white letters it reads:

  THE PRICE OF FREEDOM IS VISIBLE HERE.

  Jesus is in the letter V. Jesus is in the door hinge. Jesus is in the right foot, left foot.

  On the wall of the entry hallway is a framed picture of our bloodthirsty esteemed leader. The hall leads into a small lobby with an empty reception desk, some seventies sofas, and a bunch of blown-up vintage soldier pictures on the walls. There are military seals all over the place and it looks official except there’s no one around. A sharply dressed old black couple follows me through the door. The man looks like Cab Calloway, in a tan linen sports jacket with an ascot and a fedora. His wife is twice his size and wears a snazzy patterned dress and shoes with purple suede flowers on them. We stand in the middle of the lobby together, looking around, before they finally walk over to the desk where no one’s sitting.

  An elaborately cornrowed woman wearing a starched white uniform shirt walks out from a door behind the desk and sits down. The couple ask after a patient and are directed to a floor and a room. They walk away slowly toward the elevator, holding hands as if they have been walking together forever.

  As I take their place it hits me. My oatmeal comes up hot from my stomach and pushes at the back of my throat. My head swims so badly I want to lie down and put my skull to the cool floor. I summon all my will and st
are the woman right in the computer while I ask for Jake. Something she sees on her screen makes her ask for my ID. She festers and looks at my license and talks on the fucking phone and I want to grab it out of her hand and split her face open with it. I really do.

  When she finally points me in a direction I barely hear what she says and head instead toward the bathroom, where I only miss the bowl a little. I sit there on the tile floor wiping up the puke with wads and wads of thin toilet paper and hoping that the nausea will pass and I’ll be able to stand again. My body betrays me, the bones in my legs dissolving, my brain shaking loose of its moorings.

  It’s a good fifteen minutes before I can stand up. I wash my mouth out in the sink, dab my forehead with some wet paper towel, and look at my bloodshot eyes and no-longer-neat hair in the mirror. I am really pregnant like you read about, like you hear about. This is the thing that happens to other people. Happens to real people, not to me. But here it is.

  When I venture back into the hospital world, I’ve forgotten the directions. A few stray souls wander around, but it feels cavernous and empty and without logic. I find a map and discern that I have to find the third floor of the West Wing to reach In-Patient Psychiatric. I get lost a million times doubling back past oncology and radiology. I wonder where the other people walking by are going: the old Korean guy; the chubby highlighted blonde with the big, flat ass and the baby in a sling; the old codger with his age-spotted hands and his shirt tucked in and his blue VFW baseball cap on.

  At the end of a hall, finally, I find a nurses’ station behind thick, smudgy glass with one of those metal circle grates to talk through that never seem to work. A blue, metal cage surrounds the station on the inside. A sign above the door says High-Risk Elopement Area. I’ve found it. Paper butterflies and flowers decorate the walls. It’s nearly Easter.

  The Asian, pink-scrub-wearing nurse with plates of hair frozen in hair-sprayed layers seems annoyed with me before I even say a word.

  “Hello, ma’am. How are you?”

  She nods and looks at me.

  “I’m here to visit my brother, Jake Hill. I believe his doctor called ahead of me.”

  “What?”

  I repeat myself.

  “Who?”

  I repeat myself.

  “Who?”

  I pass my ID through and there’s a bunch of clucking and shuffling and conferencing with other nurses and yet more typing and typing and a phone call made while looking suspiciously over a shoulder at me. At any point on this chain someone could just say no and that would be it. The possibility that I won’t be allowed to see him flutters right behind my heart. I clasp my hands together in front of me to steady them from shaking.

  When she comes back, I put my ear to the grate to try to hear what she says. I think she instructs me to go through the door to my left. There’s a loud buzz. I push and the door opens so that I am in a corral, with another locked door in front of me. When the first door clicks shut behind me, the next door buzzes open and I walk through. I know how it works. I have been on a lockdown ward myself. Me and Jake, together again behind locked doors.

  A different nurse greets me on the other side and this one is friendlier. She’s a blonde who looks like a grown-up Marcia Brady with adult acne.

  “Hi,” she says, real cheery. “Your brother is with the doctor right now. You can wait in the group room for a minute if you’d like. Holler for the orderly if anyone bothers you.” She indicates a sturdy man hovering around the perimeter of the room. “But they won’t.”

  She holds her arm out, indicating a common area with a few chairs and couches, a TV as the centerpiece, and a couple of tables around the sides.

  About six men are scattered around, not counting the guy in the corner, who is so immobile and pale that he’s almost invisible. I don’t even notice him at first; I think he’s a piece of furniture. I find a chair as far from anyone as possible and sit down, crossing my legs and waiting with my hands in my lap. I look at the TV and try not to look back at the patients staring at me. I stare ahead at Dr. Phil. There’s a married couple on the show. They’re unhappy. Something about sex. The man thinks that paying his wife for sex seems like a good incentive. Dr. Phil will fix it in the allotted time, I’m sure. He’ll fix it or it wouldn’t be a show.

  I can’t help it; I look around and wonder about people’s odds.

  What are the odds for the guy who looks maybe Jewish, yeah, whatever, I know, but some people do look Jewish, and kind of handsome and who’s wearing a tracksuit and has an older lady visiting with him who looks like she’s recently been attacked by a vampire? He looks kind of like an accountant or something except the pockets of his jacket are overflowing with crap: pieces of wadded-up paper and eyeglasses and bandannas and cigarettes.

  Watching TV with me is an older black man with nearly white hair. He wears a neat flannel shirt buttoned up to the top, a pair of khaki pants worn shiny at the knees, and those old-man, brown leather shuffle slippers. He’s not in hospital jammies or anything and he looks normal, except he leans forward in his seat so far that I am sure he is going to get up any second, but he doesn’t. The man hovers on the edge of movement, but doesn’t move. He stares at the screen.

  A sloppy, angry-looking, fat white guy with a few strands of greasy hair sits in a wheelchair, working with his hand on what looks like an endless puzzle. He bursts out in profanity uncontrollably every few minutes. When he shouts, “Niggerloving fuck cock,” I can’t help but study the expression on the black guy’s face, but there’s nothing. No wince. He doesn’t even notice; he’s that far away. Or he’s just used to it.

  I stare at the faces on the screen, so self-satisfied and sincere, but I listen instead to the accountant and his mom. I don’t want to make eye contact, but I steal a sideways glance at them. The puzzle assembler has a weird clucking in his throat that reminds me of Missy. Every few minutes or so he spits on the floor next to him.

  I wait forever, like I could hear a clock ticking if clocks still ticked. Dr. Phil is wrapping it up, everything all better of course, by the time a young doctor with gold-rimmed glasses walks up to me. He has a big baby face, pudgy and red with all his features scrunched up in the middle. He carries some files under one arm and I can see he’s already thinking about the next thing he is going to do. The embroidered name on his smock pocket is Dr. Walker. He wears the same smock I wear in beauty school. It seems unfair to him, with all that school.

  I stand and shake his hand and then we sit down, each facing each other.

  “Your brother Jacob is suffering a recurrence of his schizophrenic symptoms, which is disappointing but not unusual. In his case we assume that there were a number of acute stressors that precipitated this recurrence. We also suspect he stopped taking his medication a few weeks ago. Does this seem correct to you?”

  I think back. When did it start getting really bad? It’s hard to believe it’s something as simple as a pill.

  “It’s hard to say. I don’t know exactly when it started getting worse. It’s hard to tell just what’s his normal self. There’s always a little bit of crazy.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Like, he hears voices sometimes. Even when he’s well.”

  “Then I wouldn’t say he’s well. I’d say his symptoms are controlled to a degree that he’s able to function in a limited way. I’m afraid that may be the best we can hope for in your brother’s case. I think it’s important to understand that you can’t put too much pressure on him by carrying expectations that he’ll live independently or hold a job that isn’t extremely undemanding. I was able to locate his records. It’s my understanding that he resides in a halfway house, is that right?”

  “Serenity.”

  “That’s very good. I would say we could strive to stabilize him to the point that he can gain that degree of independence again.”

  “How is he now?”

  “Symptomatically, your brother is suffering from auditory hallucinations, inappropriate
or magnified emotional responses, and paranoid delusions. Initially he was in seclusion because he was refusing meds but he’s being more cooperative now and we have him on his former dose of risperidone.”

  “He hates them. His meds.”

  The accountant slaps his own thighs and jumps back from the table.

  “That, unfortunately, is also quite common. It would be tremendously helpful if his community of support, most important his family, continued to encourage him to be consistent with his medication. Otherwise he has little hope of functioning in the world.”

  “Is it genetic?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “The schizophrenia.”

  “Ass-licker,” says the puzzle guy.

  “Well, there’s possibly a genetic component to it. It doesn’t indicate on his chart that schizophrenia was evident in either of your parents.”

  “I don’t mean his parents. Our parents. I mean a baby. If Jake had a baby, would the baby be sick, too?”

  The doctor seems a bit taken aback. As if this is not his favorite question. He says, “Some people say there is a thirteen to fifteen percent chance of the offspring developing schizophrenia, but that is by no means set in stone. Schizophrenia is a brain disease, but there’s a lot about it we don’t understand.”

  This baby has a chance at being okay. It’s all any of us has, really.

  “I’ve started him on a course of his normal medication in conjunction with something to calm him down and something to help him sleep and we have him on constant watch for the next two days. At that point, and then again at two weeks, we reevaluate. It’s hard for supportive families to hear this, but what matters is his response to the medication. Period. If he was one of the percentage of people who were going to recover completely from this disease, statistically, he would have done so already.”

  Something smells too sweet, like rot, and I try not to breathe through my nose.