Phantom Limb: A Gripping Psychological Thriller

by Lucinda Berry

  Mark nodded.

  “I think you’re right, Rick. It probably wasn’t the ladies. Doesn’t Archeus usually say bad things about you and tell you to hurt yourself?”

  Rick bobbed his head up and down. He sat back in his seat.

  “Shut up. Done.”

  “All right, then. I’d like to go around the room again, and this time, I’d like everyone to talk a little bit about their treatment goals and the progress they’re making towards them,” Mark directed. “This time we’ll start with Doris. Doris?”

  Doris looked around the room, eying the door, and returning to Mark’s face.

  “I kill me mudda,” she mumbled under her breath.

  I couldn’t make out her words, but it sounded like she said she killed her mother. I didn’t think it was what Mark had in mind when he said we were supposed to talk about our treatment goals.

  “Can you speak up so we can all hear you?”

  “I kill me mudder!” she yelled. This time, there was no mistaking her words.

  Mark remained calm and spoke in an even tone. “Doris, do you know it’s not okay to kill your mother?”

  Doris was wearing a pink floral-print muumuu and you could almost feel the sting as she pounded her fist against her leg. It made a sharp slapping sound against her skin.

  I looked around the room. Everyone was calm. Some of them weren’t even paying attention. Shelly was busy whispering to Tobi while Rick and Darin had gone back to talking to people only they could see. They were uninterested in this woman freaking out because she wanted to kill her mother, or maybe she already had. Now she was rocking back and forth in her chair, still punching her leg and chanting “kill my mother” in her weird, thick accent.

  “Doris, I need to ask you to calm down. I need to ask you to take some deep breaths. Practice the breathing exercises we worked on in session.”

  His words had no effect on her. It was as if she hadn’t heard them. Suddenly, she jumped up, picked up her chair, and launched it in Mark’s direction. It landed at his feet. She lunged towards him. He reacted quickly, jumping up and pushing a round metal button on the wall. She reached him and flailed her arms at him wildly, trying to grab his face. He tried to grab her arms and restrain her, but she was too quick.

  Now everyone was paying attention. Everyone moved their chairs back. Shelly was sobbing, holding her face in her hands. Tobi and Denise wrapped their arms around her as they watched wide-eyed. Rick and Darin stood up and paced the room, mumbling and swearing softly.

  “Christ, here we go again,” Rose whispered beside me.

  Suddenly, the door burst open. Three huge men rushed in and tackled Doris. She was kicking and screaming. They looked like they spent hours at the gym, but they struggled to contain her, even though she couldn’t have weighed much more than a hundred pounds. She kicked, bit, clawed, and scratched at them. They pinned her down to the ground. She spat in their faces, screaming that she would kill them.

  Mark was still telling her to breathe, but she was beyond breathing. A nurse ran into the room, rolled up Doris’s sleeve, and quickly stabbed her in the forearm with a needle. I expected this to calm her down. It always did in the movies and I felt as if that’s what I’d stepped into. A modern-day One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. But whatever drug they gave her didn’t have any effect on her. She struggled even harder. They stabbed her again with another stick. She continued to fight. It took every staff member in the room to pick her up even though she was rolled up in some weird-looking yoga mat. They carried her kicking and screaming out into the hallway. Her screams echoed down the corridor until fading away.

  Other nurses rushed into the room. Two of them began talking to Darin and Rick. They paced back and forth alongside them. One of the others put a soothing arm around Shelly and rubbed her back along with her friends. Arlene went back to pulling her hair out of her head while Sally sat as still as a statue next to the boy who still hadn’t even blinked, despite the chaos erupting around him.

  I looked at Rose, my eyes filled with questions.

  She burst out laughing. “Welcome to another exciting day of group therapy.”

  9

  Dinner was as strange as group. This time, it was Rose who freaked out for no reason. One minute she was sitting next to me at the cafeteria table, pushing her food around her plate and gushing about how much she loved Taylor Swift’s new song, and the next minute, without any provocation, she threw her tray of food against the wall.

  “I’m not eating this!”

  Polly appeared unfazed by her outburst and pushed the intercom button on the side of the door without looking at Rose. “She won’t eat.”

  “All right,” a voice cackled back.

  Before I had a chance to say anything to Rose to try to calm her down, the door flung open and the same bouncer-looking men who’d pinned down Doris earlier in the day arrived.

  “C’mon, Rose. Let’s go,” the shortest one said. “You know the rules.”

  Rose sat in her chair, arms folded tightly across her chest, and glared at them.

  “Let’s not make this any harder than it needs to be.”

  Rose still didn’t move.

  They stepped towards her and in one quick movement swooped down at her, grabbing both of her arms. Rose fought like a cat that’d been thrown into a tub of water, scratching and clawing at them as they tried to lift her from her chair. Her chair fell backward and she kicked at it wildly with her stick legs. They carried her out wailing and screaming in the same way they’d carried Doris. I was shocked by her explosive outburst because she seemed like such a meek and timid girl.

  “What a freak,” Tobi piped up from across the table as soon as the door clicked shut behind Rose.

  “Right? I mean, can’t we ever eat in peace? Some of us actually like to eat,” Shelly said. They burst out laughing along with the other girl, Denise, sitting next to them.

  “Maybe she doesn’t want to,” I said. I wanted to tell them it might do them some good not to eat since none of them could be mistaken as skinny, but it was mean and I didn’t like to be mean. Instead, I said, “You don’t know what she’s going through.”

  Shelly raised her eyebrows at me and sneered. “And you do?”

  I shrugged. She had a point. I’d known Rose less than twenty-four hours.

  After dinner, I was surprised to find her back on the couch in the family room, absorbed in her magazines as if nothing had happened. I took a seat next to her.

  “Damn, girl. You put up a fight.”

  I was amazed that it had taken three huge men to restrain such a small girl.

  She looked up, her eyes red and puffy. They were still watery. Her pupils were the size of pinpricks. “So much for eating with you guys. Back to forced feedings alone.”

  “That sucks.”

  I knew what it was like to be forced to eat. In the first few months at the Rooths, Bob used to hold my mouth open while Dalila shoved food into it as fast as she could. Then, Bob would tilt my head back and grip my mouth closed for me, forcing me to swallow. But whatever food went down came right back up, and they ended up wearing the food they’d worked so hard to get in me.

  “How do they force you to eat?”

  She sniffled. “It’s awful. They give me these huge protein drinks that look and taste like chalk. But that’s not even the worse part. The drinks have over a thousand calories. Can you believe that? I have to drink one of those plus whatever else they put on my plate. They’re not going to be satisfied until I’m a fat slob.”

  “What happens if you don’t eat it? Do they force the food down your throat?” My throat reflexively closed in response.

  “They’d love to. Assholes.” Rose snorted. “Nope. If I don’t eat, then they put the tube back in.”

  “A tube? Oh my God, how do they do that?”

  “They used to put it in my nose, but I kept pulling it out and making it get infected. So now they do it through my stomach.” She pulled up her shirt a
nd pointed to her side. “Look.”

  I leaned closer. Her right side had three big puncture wounds as if she might’ve been bitten by a vampire in the last week.

  “Whoa.” I’d never seen anything like it. “Why don’t you just eat? Wouldn’t it be easier that way?”

  She glared at me like I’d suggested she commit a felony. She pulled her shirt down and folded her arms across her chest. “Do you have visitors coming?”

  “Yeah. I do,” I said.

  She leaned in closer, speaking in a hushed tone. “You should know the team talks to your family, too. They ask them how they think you’re doing. So, you might wanna, you know …”

  I nodded knowingly. I turned behind to look at Polly, to see if she heard, but she wasn’t there anymore. She’d been replaced with a heavyset hippy-looking guy wearing Birkenstocks. He was too busy staring at Shelly, Tobi, and Denise playing cards in the middle of the family room to notice us. Every few minutes one of them would laugh loudly and turn to flash a smile in his direction. He returned their smiles, welcoming their attention with a goofy grin.

  I didn’t want to see Bob, Dalila, and Thomas. It was going to be weird and uncomfortable seeing them together, but I didn’t have a choice because I needed to talk to Dalila about the funeral. I wanted to know where it was going to be held and what Emily was going to wear in the casket. I wanted to be buried next to her, and if I killed myself as soon as I got released, then they’d be able to do a funeral for us both at the same time. It was the only thing that mattered to me right now. My plan had to be efficient and foolproof.

  Shooting myself would be fast and easy, but I didn’t know how to get a gun. Even if I did, it would take weeks to get one and I didn’t have that much time. Taking pills was another option, but pills were never a sure thing. I’d watched Emily swallow enough to know that most of the time they didn’t kill you. You just got really sick, puked them up, and woke up feeling hungover. Waking up wasn’t an option. I’d woken up last time. I wasn’t doing it again.

  Slitting my wrists was a possibility, too. I knew the right way to cut them—vertical, not horizontal like so many people thought. But what if I didn’t hit the vein you were supposed to or didn’t cut deep enough? The thought of cutting open my flesh made me cringe like it always did. How had Emily done it this last time?

  I hadn’t allowed myself to think back to the night it happened. It was too painful, but I wanted to know how she’d done it because I might be successful if I copied her. I swallowed my emotions and braced myself to try to remember that night like I was a scientist, replaying the scene as if it were a video I was watching of someone else.

  There were pills everywhere and she’d puked, which meant she must’ve taken a lot of them. Whenever she’d taken a lot of pills in the past, they’d always made her puke. What had she taken this time that made her puke, but was still enough to kill her? There was also blood, but was it because she was cutting herself like she regularly did, or was she trying to cut deep enough to kill herself? Could she have done anything else that I didn’t know about? Maybe she did both things together. Maybe that was the key and I could do it the same way.

  Suddenly, it dawned on me that I had tried it before. I was in the hospital for trying to kill myself but had no memory of what I’d done that night. I searched my brain for one, but there was nothing. I kept trying to bring something into my consciousness, but it was futile. All I saw were images of Emily. I could trace my memory all the way back to opening up the bathroom door and discovering her crumpled body, but that was it. Her body and then darkness.

  Who had found us and how had I gotten to the hospital? Had I called someone? How was I going to make sure I didn’t fail again? I couldn’t bear the thought of waking up in the hospital another time, finding out I was still alive and she was still dead. My plan had to work this time. It had to be a good one. Much better than last time.

  I decided to find someone to buy me liquor on the way home from the hospital even though I hated drinking and shuddered at the thought of the burn it made in my throat. I’d stop at Walgreens and load up on Extra Strength Tylenol. Most people didn’t know it, but Tylenol was a good killer. Emily had explained to me once that it shut down everything in your system. Taking handfuls of Tylenol while chugging the booze would make it easier to slit my wrists, but I would have to make sure I didn’t drink too much because I couldn’t pass out or puke. It’d ruin everything if I did. Drinking might be a risk, but I needed it because I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to cut myself without it. I’d lie in the tub just like Emily used to so I didn’t get the blood everywhere.

  The more I thought about my plan, the less feasible it seemed. If I killed myself in the apartment, how would anyone know I was dead? I couldn’t call anyone before I did it because they might stop me before it was over. The only person I saw regularly was Thomas and he was used to not seeing me for days. A week could go by before he started to get worried and by then it would be too late, and Emily’s funeral would be over. Killing myself at home wasn’t going to work. Not if I wanted to be buried with Emily at the same time and I did, more than anything else. The only thing keeping me moving was knowing if I made it through the seventy-two-hour hold, I could ceremoniously die with her. I had two more days to come up with a good plan.

  My name being called over the intercom broke into my thoughts. My visitors were here.

  “Good luck,” Rose said, without looking up from her magazine.

  “Thanks,” I replied, hurrying up to the nurses’ station.

  Dalila, Bob, and Thomas stood at the nurses’ station beaming at me. Both Thomas and Dalila looked much better than yesterday. They were showered and scrubbed. Dalila had done her makeup to skillfully hide the worst of her breakouts and her hair was tightly curled in the same way she’d been doing it for the last twenty years. Thomas’s dark circles underneath his eyes had lessened, although he still looked a bit ghastly. Bob had his shirt tucked into his jeans, something he reserved for special occasions, and I couldn’t help but feel love towards him for the gesture. He carried a handful of dripping-wet flowers.

  “They took the vase,” he explained apologetically when he saw me eyeing the wet flowers. “The nurses said you can’t have glass. One of them is looking for a Styrofoam cup.”

  Each of them had a smile spread wide across their face. They each took a turn hugging me and today I allowed it.

  “You can visit in your room with your guests,” one of the nurses instructed. “Let me take those flowers. I’ll find a better place to put them.”

  Bob handed them to her, and a different nurse came out from behind the desk and led us down the women’s hallway. She arrived at a door on the right, unlocked it, and pushed it open. “You do have to leave the door open, though. Sorry.”

  I walked into my room for the first time since being wheeled onto the unit. Everything was bolted to the ground. There was a hospital bed against the wall with a nurse’s call button next to it and a small metal dresser across from it with three drawers. A tiny desk was on the other wall with a chair. The chair was the only thing not bolted to the ground. The walls were painted white and it had the same institutional flooring as the rest of the place. We all eyed the room warily.

  Dalila was the first to break the silence. “It’s a nice room. Needs a little color, though. Maybe I could bring some pictures.”

  “That’s okay. I’m not going to be here long.”

  We were all standing, which made the space feel even smaller.

  “How was your day, honey?” Bob asked.

  “Today was a strange day. The people here really do have a lot of problems. Most of them aren’t doing very well. It’s made me glad for my problems. My own stuff seems pretty mellow in comparison.”

  “Do you think so?” Bob asked.

  He looked over at Dalila with raised eyebrows. She shrugged.

  “I really do. I’m pretty sure most of these people hear voices and they freak out all the time. I
guess I can be grateful I’m not as sick as they are.” My words landed on dead air and hung there expectantly.

  “Lisa said some of the best psychologists in the state work here, so you’re in good hands. Oh, she also said that wants to visit you once you’re settled in,” Bob said.

  It would be nice to see Lisa, but she had an uncanny ability to get me to talk about things I didn’t want to talk about and I couldn’t take the chance of accidentally letting on I was planning to kill myself when I got out.

  “I don’t think I’m going to be here long enough for her to visit. I’m pretty sure I’ll be getting out soon,” I said.

  “It seems like a nice place,” Dalila commented for the second time.

  It was silent again. I sat in the desk chair. The three of them sat on the edge of bed together. Bob had his arm around Dalila for support. Thomas was to the right of them at the end of the bed. His posture was more relaxed now that he was on the bed. They sat together as if they were old friends.

  Thomas interrupted the silence this time. “I’ve been praying for you all the time. I put your name on our prayer list. Don’t worry. I completely respected your privacy. I didn’t give any details about what was going on with you or anything else. I only said you needed help.”

  He irritated me. It wasn’t because being on his church list bothered me, it was that he’d made his way into very private spheres of my life and I wasn’t the one who’d invited him there.

  “The food’s not bad,” I said.

  “That’s good.” Bob patted his big belly that protruded over his waist. It was especially pronounced with his tucked-in shirt. They all laughed and I smiled again. Bob could always find a way to make me smile.

  The awkwardness in the room surrounded us. We had no idea how to be together in normal circumstances and certainly not in circumstances as weird as these. I hadn’t been in a room with Bob and Dalila since last Christmas. Even then, I’d only made a brief appearance. I’d pretended to have a major school project to get done over the holidays and stopped by just long enough to drop off presents. I rarely talked to Bob on the phone because he hated talking on the phone and since the last time Dalila had offended me about Emily, I only talked to her every few weeks.