The Reach

by Nate Kenyon

  “I’d still like to see her file.”

  Wasserman blinked at her from behind his glasses. “You’re persistent, I’ll give you that. I’ve made my decision. If you need assistance there’s a button on the wall. Maria will let you out.” Wasserman fumbled the key into the lock as if he couldn’t get a handle on it. Then the key turned and the metal door swung open.

  —3—

  The girl crouched in the middle of a padded room. The restraint jacket that pinned her arms over her chest seemed to swallow her slender, boyish frame. Her black hair hung down far enough that Jess could not get a good look at her features.

  If Sarah heard the door open, she gave no sign. Her breathing came slow and deep. A thin line of spittle hung trembling from a strand of hair to the floor.

  Jess stopped just inside the door and listened as it swung shut behind her. The noise was enough to make her jump, but she caught hold of herself inside like the clenching of teeth.

  “Hello, Sarah,” she said firmly. “My name is Jess Chambers. I’d like to visit with you for a while, if that’s all right.”

  There were two ways to go about this: pretend to be occupied with something fascinating, and see if she became curious, or try to engage immediately. Either way it could take days, weeks, to break through. Both options assumed that Sarah was even reachable at all.

  The girl had not reacted to her presence, and Jess found herself staring. Were the restraints really necessary? How violent could a ten-year-old possibly be? Perhaps she had tried to harm herself; Shelley had mentioned that she was suicidal. Jess had heard of psychiatric patients tearing at their faces, pulling out their own eyes, digging out their throats. It was difficult to kill yourself with your bare hands, but that didn’t stop some of them from the attempt.

  She did not want to appear threatening and so she sat down on the floor against the wall, keeping a good distance, but getting into the girl’s line of sight. She had worn loose clothes specifically for this, a soft suit in neutral colors that covered her wrists and left only her hands and part of her neck bare. She wore contact lenses, her hair held up by a plain, white-cotton Scrunchie.

  Remember what you have learned. Finding the real world too much to bear, Sarah had formed her own. It was up to Jess to interpret it. She would be a translator of sorts. To do this she would have to form a bond, allow herself to let the girl in and hope that Sarah would trust her enough, be lucid enough, to let her in too.

  She opened her briefcase and removed a lined notebook and pencil. At the top of the first page, she wrote interpersonal contexts, and then, under it: Interaction with peers? Foster homes? Teachers? As she did this she spoke quietly, repeating her name, and why she was there.

  It was like talking to herself. When she was a small girl her grandmother Cheryl had a stroke, and the family visited her at the Maine Medical Center in Portland. It was a place she was already well familiar with from various visits with Michael. They had gathered around Grandma Cheryl’s bed, and everyone spoke as if she could hear them, as if at any moment she would sit up and answer their questions. Her grandmother died three days later, having never uttered another word.

  But this is different. Obviously Sarah was in a catatonic state, but that did not mean she had always been that way, or that she would not come out of it again. Studies indicated that catatonics were often aware of their surroundings and simply unable to respond. Jess had to believe the girl was listening, that whatever barrier she had erected in her mind did not entirely cut her off from the world.

  After a few minutes of note-taking on her observations of the surroundings and Sarah’s condition, she risked a glance, saw that the girl had not moved. The buckles must be hurting her. She thought about loosening the jacket, decided against it. She did not know exactly what Sarah was on. Tranquilizers, Wasserman had said. Neuroleptics.

  “I wonder if you could help me come up with some fun things to do,” she said, scribbling on the notepad. “We could try painting. I used to paint a lot when I was your age. I still do, like sometimes when I’m feeling sad or lonely. It’s like I’m putting those feelings down on paper where they can’t hurt me.”

  Had the girl moved her head? This was silly. Damn you, Wasserman, for leaving me in here alone. She continued, feeling like a fraud, forcing the anxiety from her voice. This was a familiar, unsettling discomfort. Sarah is not Michael. She was much older than her brother when he died. The two were nothing like each other. Just keep going.

  “There are other things I like to do when I’m lonely. I like to watch old movies and eat popcorn. I’m a sucker for a classic romance—Bogart, Grant, Bacall.” She talked some more about the world outside the walls, keeping her voice slow and steady. She held up the notepad to show off a few sketches. After a while she tried a different approach: “Dr. Wasserman told me you’ve been here a long time, Sarah. How do you feel about this place? Do you like it?”

  This time she was sure she saw movement, a slight trembling. It could be nothing more than muscle fatigue. Keeping her voice calm and smooth, she said, “I’ve seen places like this before. Most people don’t want to be here. Most people need a friend. I can be your friend. I’ll come visit you whenever you’d like. We can talk about anything you want.”

  She shifted, up onto the balls of her feet so that she was mirroring the girl’s crouch. “A place like this would make me upset. All those kids upstairs having fun while you’re stuck down here alone. I wonder if you’ve ever been to the zoo, or a ball game. We could go to those places, if Dr. Wasserman says it’s okay.”

  She was concentrating so hard that when the rattling came at the door she jumped. Gaining her feet, she went over and peered out the little window, but could see nothing except the opposite wall of the corridor. The noise did not come again. The button that would bring Maria was at eye level, housed in a small plastic casing, but she did not press it.

  When she turned around again, Sarah began to shake. The shaking started in her lower body and spread upward. The buckles on the straitjacket made a slight tinkling sound.

  The line of spittle attached to her hair danced and curved, but did not break.

  “I know you can hear me. I know you’re in there. I’m not going to hurt you.” Jess approached the girl and crouched, showed her open hands. “What are you afraid of, Sarah?”

  When the ringing began, she at first thought it was a distant noise of the clinic, or the lights humming over her head. But then the ringing grew louder, and with it came a buzzing as if the air itself were electrified. Jess felt a familiar disorientation, her mind growing heavy and sluggish, and thought of alcoholic haze, those dim nightclub dreams of her undergraduate days rushing back like a distant train coming at her through a tunnel. And something else, a memory so old and fragmented it was like a part of her she had forgotten was there.

  Dimly she felt herself falling, felt the impact from the floor run up her spine.

  Then Sarah raised her head. Instantly Jess knew that everything she had assumed about the girl was wrong. Her eyes were like flecks of white lightning surrounded by darkness, gathering themselves for a storm. Jess lay half on her back and could not move, watched as the girl stared back at her and continued to shake, as the ringing grew louder and Sarah’s lips moved in a silent, pleading prayer.

  Help me.

  Somehow Jess gained her feet and stumbled to the door, laying her hand against the button and her forehead against the glass of the window. She felt a cool looseness deep in her belly.

  In the distance she could hear the buzzer and the sound of running feet.

  —4—

  The student lounge (or “The Cave,” as it is somewhat affectionately called) is underneath the Thomas Ward main buildings, reached by a wide set of stairs from the street, which end at a triple set of glass doors. A converted basement, it holds a big-screen television and a small eatery with snacks and sandwiches available at outrageous prices, along with huge quantities of very bad coffee.

  T
he two women had chosen a booth out of the way of general traffic.

  “So you’ve seen her,” Professor Shelley said. “What do you think?”

  “She’s heavily sedated, restrained, isolated in a padded cell. And she’s immobile. I think she’s buried inside herself somewhere. I just don’t know how deep.”

  “Do you feel that you’re in over your head?”

  Jess glanced at her murky coffee. She was afraid of what she might see when she tipped the cup. A rumor continued to circulate about someone finding a dead roach once among the grinds. Right now the whole thing seemed quite possible. “I had a little run-in with Dr. Wasserman. He refused to show me Sarah’s file. And I disagreed with his methods and I think he took offense to it.”

  “What exactly did you say?”

  “I told him Sarah’s treatment was abusive and that I was going to report him.”

  “And how did he react to that?”

  “He basically said that I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about.”

  When Jess had burst into his office, Dr. Wasserman had looked up but did not seem surprised to see her. She did not slow down until she was at his desk, and a small juvenile part of her had wanted to go at him with her nails like a cat. Wasserman had seemed to regard the whole thing with amusement, sitting and watching her with an earpiece of his glasses tucked in one corner of his mouth, a half smile on his face.

  She’d wanted to hit him. Only now had she calmed down enough to talk about it. It was a stupid, childish move, threatening to report him. She would be working with him for the foreseeable future, and this wasn’t going to help their relationship.

  But if she were truthful to herself, the part that really burned her was that he was right. She knew nothing about Sarah’s violent side, or the kind of drug therapy the girl needed. There was only her intuition, and trusting in that was naive at best. And yet the image of that room stayed with her, and the look on the girl’s face.

  What more do you need to see!

  Shelley’s keen gray eyes seemed to appraise her carefully. “You don’t back down from anything, do you?”

  “I was angry. I felt I had been put into a situation without being properly prepared for it.”

  “What exactly bothered you the most?”

  “She’s just a little girl, and she’s scared. She’s all alone. There’s nothing in that room that’s remotely human.”

  “So you feel that Sarah would be better served in a more friendly environment.”

  “A child in this situation needs more intense therapy, interaction with peers. Schooling, if it’s at all practical.”

  “Yes,” Shelley said. “That’s true. But let me play devil’s advocate for a moment. You can’t know what she has available to her or how she’s been treated. She’s been Evan’s patient for eight years, most of her life. There’s no one else who knows her better.”

  “Which is exactly why I asked to see her file.”

  “Evan wanted to minimize any prejudices that might enter into your thinking.”

  “If that were true, he wouldn’t have told me anything about her condition.”

  “Did it ever cross your mind that he might be testing you?” Shelley sipped at her coffee. “You know that I chose you for a reason. There are plenty of talented students in my classes, but none of them have the gift that you do. I’ve read your essays, your case studies, and they’re all first-rate.”

  High praise indeed. Jess did not know how to respond. How could she talk about her secret doubts now, the strange disorientation, the helplessness she had felt when Sarah looked at her and mouthed those words? Had she mouthed them? Or was it just a figment of Jess’s imagination, something she had wanted to see and created from nothing more than random muscle spasms?

  “Quiet rooms are used in a lot of facilities like this,” Shelly said. “As for the sedatives, those are very carefully monitored. There’s nothing terribly unusual that you wouldn’t see in another violent case, especially when the patient’s violence is self-directed.” She reached out to touch Jess’s wrist. “I don’t mean to confuse you. I have to admit, Evan’s tendencies are a bit more extreme than my own, and you know how I feel about the diagnosis. I’ve been concerned lately with her treatment, which is another reason I decided to bring you into it. So I’m glad to have your thoughts. I’ll ask you again. Do you feel like you’re in over your head?”

  Jess tipped her coffee cup once more, saw something swirling like oil across the surface, and set it down. She examined her level of confidence and found it sound. She could continue, but not with the odds stacked against her the way they were. “I have to be honest with you. Without a proper understanding of her background I don’t see how I could do Sarah any good.”

  Shelley nodded. Wrinkles bunched around her mouth and eyes and she looked ten years older. “All right. Stop by my office tomorrow afternoon. I don’t care what Evan says. I’ll do what I can to get you that file.”

  —5—

  Jess could not get herself to slow down. Her mind raced at warp speed, pulling up bits of fact and memory, expressing theories and then discounting them. These were things she had filed and then put away in her mind, where they had been gathering dust for years.

  Always at the top of the class, even in elementary school, Jess had often been given special projects and work to complete on her own. The school was small, fifteen to twenty to a grade, a little brick building with a playground in back and temporary trailers to hold the overflow of younger students. Gradually she came to realize that the other children resented her special treatment, and it instilled in her a need to hide most of herself from the world.

  Then there was Michael. Her brother’s autism had been so severe he could not possibly relate to anyone. Cases like these tore people and families apart; she had seen it firsthand. Michael’s condition had put a terrible strain on them all. It had caused her parents’ divorce, her mother’s slow and painful free fall from their comfortable farmhouse to the trailer in the poor part of town. Then came Michael’s accident, and her mother’s drinking binges, taking her to a deeper and blacker place than Jess could reach.

  But that was ancient history. What she could not discount now was the feeling that the look in Sarah’s eyes was nothing like her brother’s disconnected gaze, that no matter how deeply sedated she was, Sarah’s eyes were alive.

  Back at the desk under the eaves in her cluttered little top-floor apartment, with the windows open to the breeze and her cat curled at her feet, she jotted down everything she remembered about the girl. The file was in her briefcase, but she did not touch it, not yet. She wanted to formulate her thoughts first. Traffic moved sluggishly on the street below, the train clacking by on its way downtown, filled with freshly scrubbed college students looking for some kind of nightlife. For a moment she wished she were with them. But she knew she would not be fit company for anyone. Once she had something in her teeth she had to worry at it until it was gone.

  She flipped through her developmental psychopathology book, looking for anything on schizophrenia. Most of what she could find dealt with the adolescent transition; there was a frustrating lack of information about younger schizophrenics. She got up and went around the narrow counter to the stove. The real estate agent had sold her on the charm of the place, a long, narrow studio added into the attic of a three-family home; after living in it for a week, she’d come to understand that “charm” meant hopelessly run-down and open to drafts. The best part of the apartment was the seat under the eaves near the west window. It overlooked a line of trees and grassy lawn, and it was where she kept her easel and paints. She painted to calm herself when life became too stressful. Bits and pieces of artwork, some freshly done, decorated the walls.

  The rest of the apartment was like everything else in Boston. The kitchen counter was scratched Formica, the floors dull and battered hardwood and linoleum. Wind moaned around the closed windows at night, and the radiators banged and rattled at all hours.
>
  But Otto loved it. There were mice.

  She put a pot of water on the stove for tea. Otto came clicking over and curled himself around her bare legs. “You’re the first male to do that since I can’t remember when,” Jess said. She sighed. Men had always found her attractive, but there was something about her that put them off, some sense of distance. Or maybe she pushed them away intentionally. More than one man had described her as chilly, stuck-up, or spoiled.

  But she was none of these things, far from it.

  Several times when she was younger she had had unnerving experiences with first dates who would not stop pawing at her as soon as they were alone. By the time she was in high school her mother was a full-blown drunk, in and out of AA meetings, unable to stay sober, going through boyfriend after boyfriend. One of these had taken a special interest in Jess, cornered her in an empty room, and tried to kiss and touch her. She never told anyone about it, not even her mother. Especially not her mother. She took a few self-defense classes after that, bought pepper spray for her purse. Loss of control was something she could not tolerate, in herself or in others.

  She studied herself briefly in the faux-antique pub mirror to the right of the door. Not so bad, old chum. Her body had always been slim and athletic, stomach flat and tight without much effort on her part. Her face looked a bit worn down and puffy from lack of sleep, and her hair could use a brushing. But overall, the effect softened her features and made her look as if she’d just rolled out of bed.