Why They Run the Way They Do

by Susan Perabo

  “Someday,” she said.

  “When?” Chloe asked.

  “Sooner rather than later,” Carrie said.

  “Saturday?” Chloe asked.

  Dan smiled. “Not quite that soon,” he said.

  That night, after they put Chloe to bed, Dan sat down in the living room in front of a basketball game while Carrie went outside for her cigarette. He flipped through the paper, read all the bad news, waited for her to return. He wanted her to sit next to him on the couch, wanted to laugh at something on TV—some idiotic commercial, some know-it-all sportscaster, something that could draw them together, remind them that, in the little ways—and weren’t those the ways that mattered, anyway?—they were on the same page. He craned his neck to see out the front window, thinking he might spot the glow from her cigarette, breathing as she breathed, but the yard was dark. Sometimes she went for a short walk, if the weather was nice, but it was cold outside and he couldn’t imagine she would have gone far. At halftime he climbed the stairs and went into Chloe’s room. The giraffe lay stiffly beside her, filling a good two-thirds of the bed, its leather hooves overshooting the mattress by six inches. The armadillo was out of sight—under Chloe, he imagined—but when he rolled her warm torso over to peek, he found nothing. He surveyed her room then, still no Michael, went down to the kitchen, walked through the living room, checking all the usual spots, under the couch, behind the chair pillows, inside the DVD cabinet. No armadillo. He went back upstairs, put on his pajamas, and brushed his teeth. He slipped into Chloe’s room and looked out her window and down the street. His wife had been gone for almost an hour. A lot could happen in an hour.

  But then he heard the front door open and close. She ascended the stairs, quietly, then tiptoed past Chloe’s room and into their dark bedroom, the smell of cigarettes trailing in her wake. He followed her and stood in the doorway, a hand on either side of the doorframe, as if an earthquake were approaching. She was in the bathroom and he listened to the usual sounds of preparing for bed. When she opened the door she gasped to find him standing there, his shadow thrown into the dark room by the nightlight behind him in the hall.

  “What did you do with it?” he asked.

  “Jesus,” she said. “You scared me.” She walked over to the bed and set her alarm for morning. When he didn’t move from his spot, she looked up at him. “You’re very ominous, looming there in the doorway like that.”

  “What did you do with it?”

  “With what?”

  “You know with what.”

  “It’s gone,” she said, swinging her legs under the covers. “Just . . . it’s gone.”

  He shook his head. “She’s gonna cry.”

  “Maybe for a day. But then she’ll be fine.”

  “Where’d you put it?”

  She sighed. It was a sigh with a message. “Dan, he’s gone, okay?”

  “But where is he?”

  She turned onto her stomach, slid her arms under her pillow. “He’s nowhere,” she said.

  Nowhere? He gripped the doorframe tighter. Where was nowhere? Had she buried him at a construction site, tied a brick to his tail and thrown him in the river? Maybe she had cut him up into a million little pieces. He’d seen a movie once about a man escaping from jail, a prisoner who dug a tunnel from his cell with crude tools, and every morning the prisoner covered up the hole with a poster and put the rubble from the night’s work into his pants pockets and went out into the yard and gently shook the rubble, crumb by crumb, from the holes he’d cut in the tips of his pants pockets and out the bottom of his pants legs, leaving it scattered across the jail yard, pebbles among pebbles, dust among dust, so no one was the wiser.

  He looked at her lying there. She was pretending to sleep, but he knew she wasn’t really. He was no fool. She wanted to skip this conversation, wanted to wake up in the morning with the issue too many hours closed to continue. He would not let her win. He would just stand here, his shadow covering her. He would stand here in this doorway until she was forced to say something more.

  But as her breathing evened—could she really fake him out, after all these years?—the bed began to look more and more appealing. He was tired. And he liked the bed, liked this whole bedroom, really, which he and Carrie had painted together years before because they were too cheap to hire a painter and so there were paint smudges on the ceiling. He went and sat on the edge of the bed, his back to her. Tomorrow was Tuesday. Tuesdays were always crazy; he needed a good night’s sleep. He lay down and turned toward her, looked over her rising back and out the window. It was snowing. The snow was billowy; instead of falling it lifted and spun and sailed outward into the black sky. Watching the flakes whirl by the glass he imagined tiny, indistinguishable bits of Michael the armadillo, tiny puffs of fluff and pieces of brown fur, spinning from Carrie’s pockets as she went throughout her day, covering the house, the yard, the world, so that instead of being gone, instead of being nowhere, he was everywhere.

  STORY GOES

  It’s true that some things I did not witness first hand: the music therapist’s half nelson; the chair with the built-in straps; the suitcases packed for college; the field. But I am a reliable witness to most of what happened that day. Certainly I can be sure of my role, which officially consisted of a paint-by-number and a Styrofoam cup of cranapple juice. About other, earlier days I am equally certain. About the woman who believed we were angels. About the phones that didn’t ring. About the macramé noose. About the threads of drool that spooled from her lips after ECT. My memory is sharp. I keep it sharp. Ten smooth strokes a day on the sharpening stone, always in the same direction.

  Madeline was four years older than me. She had long dark hair that hung in violent tangles. She was so skinny that I could have bench pressed her, despite my own weakened condition. She had been everywhere. She could have written a travel guide to hospitals across Missouri and Illinois: what to bring, how to dress, what foods to avoid, currency, language, customs. She had seen it all, seen people raw. She told me stories about the places she’d been and the things she had seen people do to themselves and to each other. She was nineteen and her life was almost over. She was in the home stretch.

  About Simon & Garfunkel. About where we hid the screws. About the drinking fountain with the masking tape. About the bus. About the buffer boys. About morning stretch with the cripples. About the stuffed bunny in the clothes dryer. About croquet with foam mallets and rubber wickets.

  “I need you to do something for me,” she said. It was midmorning and we were supposed to be changing out of our scrubs but instead we were sitting on the heater in her room because it was the only really warm place in the whole unit and we were always cold. “I need your help.”

  She needed my help. My help. I couldn’t remember the last time I had helped someone. My blood was so thick with prescription drugs that I could hardly hold a conversation. My eyes were dirty windshields, the whole world covered in a milky gray film. A year before I’d played junior varsity softball, ripped line drives up the middle. What had it been like to see the ball, not just the ball but its twirling seams, as it connected with my sparkling bat? I could not begin to recall this image, this sensation, nor even the girl in the batter’s box who had felt it. I had only a vague sense that she had once existed, not a memory of her but a recollection of her presence, like the grandmother who dies when you are three.

  “When we go down for OT,” Madeline said, “I’m going to say I have to pee. The bathroom in OT’s getting fixed so they’ll have to let me go in the RT room. I saw somebody do it yesterday. Nobody’s in that room then. They just watch you from the OT door. I’m going.”

  (If you close your eyes and listen very hard you can actually hear, through years and miles, my fifteen-year-old brain creaking forward like a long dormant watermill while I process this massive amount of new and confusing information.)

  “To the bathroom?” I asked.

  She looked at me and rolled her eyes without rol
ling her eyes. That was something she could do. Then she lit a cigarette even though she had one burning in the ashtray. Sometimes between us we had four or five cigarettes going at once, sitting in ashtrays around her room. We just kept lighting them. Cigarettes were the only thing we had enough of. Our parents brought cartons and cartons of them to the hospital. It was all they could give us. It was all we wanted.

  “Going going?” I said. “Where?”

  “To get some pills,” she said. “There’s that Walgreens up the road.”

  “You should brush your hair,” I said. “So they think you’re a regular person.”

  “A lot of regular people don’t brush their hair,” she said.

  “I don’t think you know how fucked up your hair is,” I said.

  On this point I am absolutely clear: there was no need for her to explain what she was going to do with those pills. We had discussed ideal dosage, blend, timing, technique, at length. I had failed before; we had both failed before; but we were not going to fail again. She had learned from others’ successes. She had been schooled by the best teachers in the finest institutions. Here in the world of healing, pills were locked away in vaults, like treasure. Out in the world, in brightly lit stores, they lay across aisles in white boxes for the taking. You only had to know which boxes to choose.

  About the deaf man. About the Big Macs. About the vampires in white coats who sucked your blood while you ate breakfast with your free arm. About the mouth checks. About fielding grounders in the hall on New Year’s Eve. About the lighter on the wall. About the lady who thought every door was a door to outside.

  Madeline and I had made numerous precious keepsakes in OT in our several months together. We’d made moccasins from kits, molded clay into vases, hooked rugs, stitched pillows. We’d painted fruit and landscapes and each other. We’d made photo collages using old issues of Good Housekeeping and Better Homes and Gardens, snipping out the pictures with children’s scissors. It was like kindergarten, OT, except someone always frisked you before you returned to the unit because there were countless things in the OT room that you could kill yourself with given a little ingenuity and about three minutes alone.

  We took some hollowed-out watercolors and set up at a table by ourselves, as far removed from the other patients as we could get. This is what we normally did—we did not wish to be hassled by the RT staff to have positive interactions with others—but it was especially important on this day so that we could confirm and execute our plans discreetly.

  “How long will you need?”

  “As long as possible,” she said. “You’ve got to give me a good head start. Five minutes if you can.”

  “You’ll have to run like hell,” I said.

  “I can run like hell,” she said. “I was on the track team in middle school.”

  She had told me this before so I knew it was true, but looking at her now it was hard to believe she could make it up a single flight of stairs. She also once told me a story about when she was at another hospital and she had cramps and her roommate had tied pillows to her with bed sheets, in strategic places to combat the cramps, and then the roommate had gone to breakfast and Madeline had lain in her bed with pillows tied to her for nine hours until someone had come to get the roommate’s stuff because the roommate had swallowed seven Parcheesi pieces and had been transferred to a different ward. That was a different kind of hospital than this one. In this hospital they came into your room every thirty minutes overnight and shined a flashlight on you to make sure you were resting comfortably. In this hospital they kept you busy with moccasin kits and Ping-Pong and memory games. In this hospital they looked toward the future, including weekly “exit strategy” meetings during which you dutifully mapped out the rest of your life and talked about how you were going to pay your electric bill and keep your bathroom tidy. In that other hospital there was no pretending about the rest of your life or your tidy bathroom.

  “Good luck,” I said. And I meant it. In that moment there was no part of me I could reach that did not want her to succeed.

  “Good luck to you,” she said. And she meant it, too.

  About the man who went after his own face with a plastic fork. About the slices of light in the solarium. About the woman who always forgot how to play Go Fish. About sitting in the lockers. About where we carved our names. About the glazed doughnuts. About her sweater.

  (My god—her sweater! What but history held it together? It was as ratty as her hair, hanging in the same twisted mess. Did it survive? Was it in a drawer somewhere in Illinois? Could I use it as a lap blanket, sitting here now, today?)

  There were three staff in the OT room, two actual occupational therapists, smiley Nancy and anxious Linda, and a college girl who was busy discovering she didn’t want to pursue this as a career after all. Madeline went up to smiley Nancy. I couldn’t hear what she said but then she went through the door into the RT room and smiley Nancy hovered around the door, cheerfully delivering unreturned smiles from table to table. I slid off my stool and approached her.

  “I want to do a paint by number,” I said. “Can you help me find one?”

  “Why don’t you ask Sabrina?” she said. Apparently Sabrina was the college girl.

  “I don’t know her,” I said. “I just—” Nancy glanced toward the closed bathroom door in RT. And then I knew what I had to do. I had to smile. But how to organize my face into a smile? Lips up, I thought, but then I felt my lips purse instead of smile. At the ends, I thought. Lips up at the ends. But how to change the angle of your lips? Then I remembered: the cheeks. Yes, it was all in the cheeks. Just a little push with the cheeks. My lips were chapped and I felt the bottom one split just a bit in the center and that was how I knew I had succeeded. There it was. Nancy’s smile grew, reflecting mine.

  “Can you help me find it?” I asked again.

  “Oh, hon,” she said. “I can’t tell you how nice it is to see that smile on your face.”

  I held onto it, desperately. It was like trying to hold onto a terrified cat.

  “I know a lot of people in your life who have missed that pretty smile,” Nancy said. “I know your mother would give—”

  “Can you please help me find it?” I asked. “The paint by number?”

  “Sure I can.” She signaled to Sabrina. “Madeline’s in the bathroom. Keep an eye?”

  Sabrina did not exactly take up the post by the door. She just moved to that end of the room, glanced into RT, then started picking some polish off her thumbnail. I thought how Sabrina and Madeline were probably about the same age. Long before I met her Madeline had gotten into Grinnell and gone for a month but then she came home and went back in the hospital and that was that.

  Nancy opened the paint-by-number cabinet. Three towering stacks of cardboard boxes loomed. All those teeny-tiny eights and elevens and seventeens, woodlands and shores and windmills and sunsets, just waiting to be filled.

  “I want the horse one,” I said.

  “I don’t think there is a horse one,” she said. She peered at the boxes. I could tell she didn’t want to actually look through them. She slid one off the top of the box tower. “What about the dolphin?”

  “Linda told me there was a horse one,” I said.

  Anxious Linda was at a nearby table, helping a trembling old lady string together some moccasins she would never wear.

  “Linda, there’s a horse one, right?” I said. “You said there was a horse one, right? Right?”

  Anxious Linda drifted toward us.

  “Is there a horse one?” Nancy asked.

  “A horse what?”

  “Wait, it wasn’t Linda,” I said. “It was Sabrina.” I looked down the room. “Sabrina?”

  Sabrina took a few steps toward us, then a few more. Now there was no one watching the bathroom door. Now the coast was clear.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “The horse one,” I said. “There it is.”

  I yanked a box out of the middle of one
of the stacks and about fifteen boxes fell at our feet. We all looked at the one in my hand.

  “That’s a deer, hon,” smiley Nancy said.

  “Let me in there,” anxious Linda said.

  Then they were digging, all three of them. I had done it! If only she had been there to see it, to congratulate me. And then—amazing—smiley Nancy came up with a horse paint-by-number and I sat down by myself to work on it.

  About the doorbell. About the corn nuts. About that last stupid jigsaw puzzle.

  Three or four minutes later the door burst open and Nancy and Linda were called away. They went out into the hall. I smiled inside, my organs splitting just a tiny bit in the center, imagined she was halfway to the Walgreens by now, her middle-school track form returning with each stride. Maybe she was already standing at the counter. Maybe she had her money out. Maybe she had the pills in her hand. Maybe she.

  Nancy and Sabrina came back in, tight-lipped. They looked at me, then looked away, then looked again.

  “This is really hard,” I said, setting down my brush. I had filled in the horse’s left ear. “The boxes are too small. Can I go back up to the unit?”

  Once she told me about a friend of hers who OD’d and died flat on her back by choking on her own vomit. It was a nasty way to go, Madeline said. Instead of slipping away peacefully you basically drowned in your own spit and acid. She said when she did it she would remember to roll onto her side, so if she puked, she wouldn’t drown in it. She said you never knew for sure what you might need to remember, so you should remember everything.

  The door buzzed and we walked into the unit and there was Madeline, sitting at a table, a beefy orderly on one side and a nurse on the other. When she saw me she rolled her eyes without rolling her eyes.

  Story goes she was only halfway down the hall when she ran into Brenda, the music therapist, who karate chopped and tripped her and then put her in a half nelson and called on her little walkie-talkie for help.