The Road at My Door

by Lori Windsor Mohr

  A doctor coming out of the nurses’ station asked Derrick to move. Our silent confrontation ended. He stepped around me and proceeded down the hall.

  That was the extent of my bravado. The next day I refused to leave the locked unit. The next day and the day after that I did the same, refusing to talk to anyone, even Shirley, a monotone yes or no from the bed where I stayed curled up my sole response. Finally I got my wish. Dr. Granzow wrote orders restricting me to the locked unit and started a new medication.

  Tim’s visits had become awkward the further I sank into depression. He was flummoxed at the rapid change in our relationship. He showed up anyway. One evening I didn’t acknowledge him at all. After a while he kissed my cheek and left.

  Instead of the usual book of poetry opened to a favorite, Tim had left a folded note on the bedside table. The verse written in blue ink was done in Tim’s own hand.

  Lost

  Where do you go, hon, when you leave me?

  To faraway fields of Lupin and Lilac?

  You leave me here, alone, searching for you, calling out…

  But being neither father nor lover

  I cannot follow.

  Come back to me, sweet girl,

  Come back and let me make you safe.

  Better yet! Let me be lost with you, wandering

  Until we find respite from the storm—your storm.

  For I too am lost, until you bring me home.

  My blunted brain couldn’t make sense of it. I stuck his poem in the drawer.

  The final antidepressant was no more successful than the previous three. I forced myself to stay awake at night by sneaking coffee leftover from breakfast and lunch into my room and storing it in a water pitcher. There was no other way to combat the drowsy effect of medication.

  I was determined to keep up with assignments and graduate with my class, start college with my friends. Though I had missed most of spring semester I had completed the coursework and was halfway through requirements for next fall. By now my classmates must’ve assumed I was one of those girls, shipped off to have my baby before “returning from Europe.” There was nothing I could do about that. I felt bad anyway.

  By late May my mood hadn’t improved. Not only had God deserted me, medical science had been rendered ineffective. I could’ve saved Blue Cross the money and told them my illness was untreatable. Dr. Granzow had broached the subject of shock treatments to my parents. Dad drew the line at “zapping my brain.” He understood how much going to college meant to me.

  Dr. Granzow’s treatment plans had been exhausted with no significant improvement in mood status. He concluded I had remained “a danger to myself”, legal grounds for continued hospitalization, which is exactly what the doctor recommended.

  Mom supported the plan for long term treatment in a psychiatric facility, adding it would be impossible for her to provide “adequate supervision” to ensure my safety.

  My parents and Dr. Granzow had run out of options.

  So had I.

  *

  A streetlight reflected on the ceiling. I wondered if anyone had noticed an acoustic tile was loose. I ruminated on that tile all the next day into the evening. When the night shift came on at eleven, I said goodnight to Amelia and waited for her to complete first rounds. It would be two hours before she checked again.

  I folded four paper towels and placed one under each leg of the desk, then started moving it away from the wall. Progress was painstaking with only a few inches before stopping to listen for Amelia. The journey ended with the desk directly beneath the loose piece in the ceiling.

  I placed the chair on the desk and climbed up. The tile was two inches out of reach. Stretching on tiptoes I extended my arm as far as I could without losing balance. I locked the piece between my forefinger and thumb and slid it out of the grid.

  The metal pipe glistened in full view.

  I hopped down and tugged the top sheet off the bed. Once it was twisted tight on the diagonal I clipped a metal barrette on each end for added weight. I climbed back on the chair. The only sound was the whoosh of my heart. I was afraid of Amelia interrupting my plan, not about the decision itself. The same state of calm as the night of the overdose had come over me.

  I flung the weighted sheet into the air.

  CLANG! The barrette hit the pipe and bounced back, bringing the sheet rope tumbling over my head. I teetered. It was all I could do to keep from falling. There was no sound from the day room, though I was certain Amelia had heard the noise.

  I tossed the sheet a second time. The barrette brushed the pipe with a ding and stalled at the top. It plummeted down on my side again.

  I got down and retrieved two more barrettes. Once I’d knotted one end of the sheet into a bigger ball and clipped the extra weight to the tail, I returned to my gallows platform and made a third attempt.

  It hit the pipe. For a breathless second the ball hovered over the pipe. Ever so slowly, it rolled to the other side. I tied both ends of the sheet into a noose.

  I was ready.

  The door opened. Amelia appeared. “Scott!”

  She gaped in horror. I couldn’t move a muscle. A second shout brought a male psych tech bursting through the door. He lunged at me in full throttle. The force of momentum sent us both flying through the air. I landed on the bed. He bounced off and rolled to the floor.

  Amelia whipped to her desk and made an emergency call to the doctor. Scott was on the floor looking shaken. He leapt up and dragged me to a chair next to the desk. He shoved me into it, the power of his grasp crushing my still-bruised arm.

  Amelia hung up and unlocked the medication cabinet. Her hands trembled as she drew liquid into a syringe. The psych tech restrained me though I offered no resistance. Amelia swabbed my shoulder and jammed the needle in all the way.

  Sleep, at last.

  The next morning I woke in a fog. My head felt like lead, my mouth cotton. Leather restraints shackled my limbs to the bed. Shirley stood over me, her whole being drenched in sorrow. She pulled out the massive key ring and unlocked the cuffs. We avoided each other’s eyes while she helped me out of my dog-themed pajamas into a fresh gown. I was not to get out of bed or dress in my own clothes.

  Shirley sat next to the bed and worked on charts. Her face was slack with resignation. Thirty minutes later Mom and Dad walked in, both of them rigid with anxiety. I had never seen anything close to fear in Mom. It was unmistakable. Pancake make-up camouflaged dark circles. She comported herself with poise decked out in her customary cashmere sweater and scarf tucked into the canyon of cleavage below.

  After she’d determined I was fine the fear transformed into anger. Shirley loaded up the charts with shoulders tight from the collective tension in the room. She threw me a nervous glance. Apparently Mom and Dad had one more option.

  Dad stayed near the door with the whole room between us. Mom plunked into the chair vacated by Shirley. She glared at me with disgust.

  “You’ve really done it this time, Clarice. You’ve forced our hand. Go ahead, Walker, tell her what happens now.”

  Dad’s familiar expression was the same one facing me every day in the mirror—hopelessness. He spoke with raw anguish. “We just left Dr. Granzow’s office. He feels there’s nothing more he can do for you here. Liability concer—”

  “For God’s sake, Walker, just tell her.”

  Dad shot her a glance as close to anger as I’d seen since he’d stormed out of the room the day she told me I was going to boarding school. He scratched his neck like he did after taking off his tie.

  “Peanut, there’s no way you can come home now, not after last night. It’s not just that. This Recreation Therapist, Derrick, reported to the doctor this morning that on the night of the outing you made veiled threats about hurting yourself. He feels awful about not reporting it sooner. Maybe what happened last night could’ve been prevented.”

  A sneer threatened to curl my upper lip.

  “Dr. Granzow feels you need to be hosp
italized a while longer.”

  “I have to stay here?”

  “Even if Dr. Granzow wanted to keep you, our insurance coverage has about run out.”

  The feeling of déjà vu was so strong it would’ve knocked me over had I not been in bed. “If I’m not staying here, and I’m not going home—?”

  “Dr. Granzow is transferring you to Camarillo State Hospital.”

  At first I didn’t comprehend. The words bounced outside my brain, their meaning unable to penetrate. It slowly became clear. This was the end. I was to be locked away in the hellhole Derrick had described where patients were drugged and shocked and abandoned as prey for other patients. His lie would protect him forever. I would be out of the way. Out of everyone’s way. What did you think Mom would do? You’re too dangerous to have around. You could ruin everything for her.

  “The insurance requires transport to Camarillo by ambulance. I told the doctor I’d like to drive you myself and he agreed to that. I’ll take the day off work tomorrow.” Dad turned and left the room without looking at me.

  Mom stood up, shaking her head in revulsion. She was a stranger to me, both of us lost to each other. But I loved her. Even if she hated me I loved her. Deep down I knew she loved me too.

  I was eight years old again, my fate in her hands. I needed her now more than ever. She alone could save me. “Mommy, please—”

  For a moment heartbreak came through those stunning cobalt eyes. My beautiful mother looked at me, her little girl, pleading for help. She let out a shaky breath and fought the impulse. I knew my mother wanted to take me in her arms, protect me from my horrible fate, tell me I could come home so she and I could start over.

  Please, Mommy. Do it. Do it now.

  She took a step back and summoned the return of her usual cold demeanor, then swung around and walked out the door.

  Three injections kept me sedated the rest of the day. That night a special duty nurse supervised my restless sleep. Through the fog I envisioned the hellhole hospital, trying and failing to piece together how it had come to this. The cumulative power of medication finally caught up with me. I fell into a drugged sleep, suspending fear of my future until morning.

  Shirley helped me pack. We divvied up the unwieldy load of miscellaneous belongings—books and the box of poems from Tim, extra shoes refusing to fit in the suitcase, a paper Mache bust of myself from art therapy. Neither of us said much.

  Dad carried my suitcase to the car, which he’d parked in the staff lot, the same lot I had crossed dozens of times with Ian, the same lot where I had escaped Derrick after his assault.

  Shirley and I hugged without speaking, too much emotion between us for words. Dad started the engine. Shirley produced a slim volume from her pocket and handed it to me.

  “Promise me you’ll read it.”

  “It’s not Kahil Gibran, is it?” I asked, referring to our conversation of what I considered sappy poetry.

  “You’re hopeless. No, silly. This is a true story. This man survived unbelievable horrors in a concentration camp during World War II. He suffered in ways you and I can’t even imagine.”

  “And this will cheer me up?”

  “I believe he has something to tell you. Promise you’ll read it.”

  I looked at her in search of what, I didn’t know.

  “Find someone to confide in, Reese. It’s the only way you’ll get well.”

  I ached to tell her how much comfort she had given me, how much she meant to me. All I could manage was a weak smile through eyes sad with gratitude.

  We drove out of the parking lot. Through a blur of tears, I watched in the rearview mirror until Dad pulled in front of a truck and Shirley disappeared.

  At the next turn, I caught the book before it slid off my lap to the floor.

  Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning.

  Viktor Frankl would never know it. He was about to save my life.

  13 The Search for Meaning

  The late afternoon was picture perfect as Dad and I drove north on the Coast Highway past the Palisades, then Malibu, the glistening ocean a watercolor seascape. It had been three months since I’d last seen the ocean. I had almost forgotten the power of its beauty.

  After all that had happened, it had still been hard leaving St. John’s, harder facing the unknown. What good had it been getting ahead in my assignments now that I wasn’t going home? At least school would be out for summer in a few weeks. Surely I would be back for senior year and graduate with my class.

  Dad and I drove in silence. There was nothing left to discuss. In random moments I would forget our destination and enjoy riding again in the car with him, as if this were any morning on the way to school. In less pleasant moments I would remember this was the same road he and I had traveled the night we went looking for Mom in San Francisco.

  That thought was laced with bitterness. Today’s journey wasn’t the two of us bound by a common mission. It was Dad driving me out of his life the way Mom had driven us out of hers, which is what had put us on this road in the first place.

  An hour after leaving St. John’s the winding ribbon of highway along the coast straightened out. We crossed into Ventura County and veered into flatlands, salty sea air overpowered by the stink of fertilizer on miles of lush farm produce. Dad’s directions to the hospital led us away from the flatlands into the mountains. The road narrowed into zigzag switchbacks the higher we climbed in elevation.

  The mountain opened to a totally different landscape. We turned to each other in shock. Dad visibly relaxed at our first sight of Camarillo State Hospital. Lush sprawling grounds with tree-lined streets and manicured gardens looked more like the campus on the boarding school brochure than a mental hospital. Low rise buildings of Mediterranean architecture were arranged in clusters around a massive central courtyard like the California missions I’d studied in school.

  It wasn’t until Dad turned off the main road into the driveway lined with pepper trees that we got a closer look.

  Heavy metal grates over the windows transformed a welcoming campus into a macabre reformatory. My mouth went dry.

  Dad followed the signs to a building with a bell tower and parked in front of Admissions. A group of patients crossed the enormous lawn with an attendant. Boys wearing football helmets jerked forward in spastic motion. The girls shuffled single file dressed in donation-box clothing, their hair uncombed, faces without expression. A bony woman leaned lopsided under an oak tree. She looked drugged, or dead, her eyes blank, mouth agape.

  I clung to Dad’s side in terror. We entered the Bell Tower Building through French doors into a cavernous lobby. The room was drab and sparsely furnished with a long desk and metal chairs along one wall.

  Dad set my suitcase down, sending an echo through the hollow room. I stayed near the door and waited. Dad proceeded to the desk, as if he were registering at a hotel and might come back to tell me there was no vacancy.

  I sat down, dizzy with free floating dread. No plush leather sofa, no Sparklett’s water cooler, the piped-in music and soft lamplight in Dr. Granzow’s waiting room replaced by harsh fluorescence and the jarring sound of a heavy door blasting open and clanging shut in the distance.

  How insular my world had been, my middle class life in the Palisades. Even my suffering had taken place in a private hospital with peach coverlets on the beds.

  Dad instructed me to wait while he met with the doctor and disappeared into an office to the right of the lobby entrance. I drew the suitcase close, my sole contact with him. The woman at the desk eyed me with muted disapproval at the scraping noise.

  An hour later Dad emerged from the office, his shoulders hunched like an old man instead of a robust one of thirty-nine. He rubbed his forehead and kept his head down. “The doctor—it’s a she—seems sharp, real sharp. Gets right down to business. She’s worked with adolescents for twenty years and seems anxious to help you.”

  He looked at me for the first time since our initial view of the hospita
l, the view from above that looked like a campus. “I know this isn’t St. John’s. You just do what the doctor says. Then you can come home and we’ll get on with our lives, the three of us, just like we’d planned.”

  The words were delivered without conviction. I felt the heaviness in him, his body leaden with defeat at the failed effort to hold our family together. The dreams of his youth lay buried under secrets and compromise and tolerance of a life more lonely than the one he’d grown up with, the one he’d so desperately tried to erase with a family of his own.

  I couldn’t think of anything to say. Dad stood up and shook each leg of his slacks to loosen the wrinkled bunching. “That’s about it then.” I wouldn’t look at him. He took my face in his hands for a moment, the sadness of all we had been through filling his eyes. He kissed me on the forehead and left without looking back.

  I walked to the window in a stupor and watched the Ford drive away. “Goodbye, Daddy. I love you.”

  A severe looking woman of indeterminate age and diminutive stature stood facing me.

  “Hello, Reese. I’m Dr. Pallone. Let’s go in my office.”

  The room smelled old and musty, as if all the troubles revealed inside had taken up residence in the walls, under the rugs. There was not an inch of empty space on the desk. Metal charts in short messy stacks covered most of the surface, loose papers scattered the far reaches.

  Dr. Pallone motioned me to one of two well-worn corduroy chairs in front of the desk. She sat in the other. The woman moved with conviction, as if used to operating without a shred of doubt. Everything about her was all business as Dad said, from the tight bun at her nape and black-rimmed glasses to her neutral expression. She spoke with deliberation in a rich alto.

  “Do you know why you’re here, Reese?”

  “I’m crazy.”

  “Is that what you think? Or is that what you’ve been told?”

  I shrugged my shoulders.

  “I understand you made a pretty serious suicide attempt at home and were close to making another at St. John’s.”

  I studied the Persian rug under my feet. Sunlight had faded areas of rich red into a sickly pinkish white.