The Unlikely Hero of Room 13B

by Teresa Toten

  This was new.

  “Hope you don’t mind—all the best shrinks have been recording since the Stone Age. I’m a little late to the party.” Chuck tapped the tiny black box. “I think it’s on, but I’m not sure, so I’m still going to take notes if you don’t mind.”

  Adam nodded and looked around the office as if he had never seen it before. Chuck’s office, like all psychiatric offices in the Queensway Hospital, was in the basement. The room was smothered in beige on beige on beige. Each shade fought to be more muted than the next. It was a fight to the death. Chuck stood against this in a riot of colour. Today he had on his favourite Jamaican Olympic bobsled team jersey plus red skinny jeans. It was hard for Adam to take his eyes off the therapist in all that super-subdued nothing.

  Probably what Chuck had in mind to begin with.

  “The last time …” Chuck riffled through his file. “Ah, found it—it was the impromptu appointment. It’s been a while, right?”

  Adam nodded. He actually had little to no memory of that session. He remembered being agitated. But then, he was always agitated. He needed some sleep. Adam had taken to swallowing Advil PMs each night, having convinced himself that this was way preferred to upping the Ativan dosage any more. Besides, he was out and he couldn’t ask Chuck for another prescription. The Advils didn’t work.

  “Adam?”

  “Sorry, I’m not sleeping much.” What were they talking about? “I’m kind of up and down and up and … And yeah, so my immediate response to all my fear and anxiety stuff is still to count and … well, I may not have been clear about this in Group, but the counting is escalating and becoming more involved with patterns, grouping and speeds.”

  “Including right now.”

  It wasn’t a question. Adam felt caught out. He was counting and he wasn’t even aware of it. “Including now,” he admitted. “In my head.”

  “In an effort to neutralize the anxiety of being here?”

  “Little bit.”

  “Okay, don’t concern yourself about that. It’s okay, Adam. I know you’re worried about the escalation, but you’ve also grown so much in the months since Group began.” The therapist smiled at him. “Literally and figuratively.”

  Five quick breaths. “Look, I know you’re all keen on starting the ERP thing …”

  Chuck nodded. “We will commence with the exposure response and prevention therapy. We’ll tackle and take down each one of your maladaptive coping strategies, one by one. Documenting, challenging and grading them. It’s the only way, Adam. Whether your condition is genetic or environmental, or some combination of the two, I believe that ERP with the right combination of meds is the gold standard for this thing.”

  Adam nodded but he didn’t buy it. He sucked at sticking to stuff like that. He couldn’t even remember to do the List. The List! Damn, he’d forgotten to do the List. Maybe Chuck had forgotten too.

  “You are ready, or I wouldn’t have suggested it.”

  “And I want to, sort of. Look, I do want to get better, actually. But I’m in a godawful hurry … I can’t right this—”

  “I don’t mean today. Relax. Today we talk, get caught up.” Chuck started writing.

  Okay, Adam knew how this went. This he could do, no sweat. He exhaled and stopped counting heartbeats.

  “Let’s begin at the beginning. How are things at home, er, homes?”

  “Uh, complex.”

  “It’s extremely stressful to be in a shared-custody situation, even in the most ideal circumstances, but you layer in OCD and your mother’s, uh, coping techniques, and that is a recipe for disaster.”

  “Welcome to my nightmare.”

  Adam caught Chuck up on Sweetie’s broken arm and the increasing hostility between the two houses. He glossed over his mom’s hoarding.

  Chuck asked about the letters.

  You are an abortion.

  “I can’t, sorry.” Warning shots rang out from the deepest part of him. “I promised her. I can’t talk about her letters. They’re supposed to be a secret and I blew it by blabbing in Group.”

  The therapist was quiet for a long time. How would that sound when he hit play on his fancy new machine? “But the letters are a serious factor, Adam, and they affect you directly. It may well be time for action. I want you to check in on that after every Group session. Let me know if there’s a new one.”

  “There hasn’t been a new one in a long time.” Adam tried to keep the fear—the lie—out of his voice. Would the machine hear it?

  “But if there is, it may be time to call in the proper authorities. We have to get to the bottom of this. I believe your recovery is tied to this.”

  And there you have it! His mother had warned him, pleaded with him, but he had to open his big fat freaky mouth, and now…

  “We need to talk about the letters and their effect on you next session. I can almost guarantee that it will help.” Chuck glanced back to his notes. “How about the threshold issues? You talked about the church door, I believe, and your own? Are the thresholds escalating?”

  Jesus, what a whack-job list. When they went through them—his things—that way, there was nowhere to hide. He was the opposite of fixed; he was broken and getting brokener.

  “Yeah.” Adam slumped lower in the chair. “Lots of them, actually. There’s the church and tons of classrooms at school, but especially the large biology lab. Three subway entrances. The side door to Brenda’s and, like, four random store-type places. Robyn’s front door, although she doesn’t know that yet. I just walked by a couple of times in the last week.”

  “And …”

  Adam wrapped his right foot behind his left and tapped. “And the worst is my house. Next thing you know, I’ll be wearing a tinfoil hat.” He shook his head. “My own house. It’s escalating.”

  Chuck didn’t seem to be impressed. “Front or side or back door?”

  “All of them, but the front is the real problem, and to tell you the truth, I don’t think you could get in through the side or back doors anymore.”

  “How involved?”

  “The quickest I can now do is twenty-seven minutes.”

  Chuck let out a long, slow exhale. “That’s a tough one, but again I want to assure you that it is entirely normal and within the scope of this disorder that a progressive deterioration might occur. You are not crazy and I need you to stop calling yourself that in your head. I know you do that. At the root, as you know, is fear, dread, anxiety. I personally believe that OCD has more of a neurobiological than a psychological basis, although one’s emotional environment is critical to the presentation. And bear in mind that most threshold issues present most prominently at the patient’s principal abode.”

  “Yeah, whatever.” Adam crossed and recrossed his legs. This was going nowhere. Chuck didn’t understand, wasn’t getting it. “But I have to get fixed, like totally this time, right? Like, counting actual things and the Internet scrolling went away, and now I’ve got all this crap and it’s worse. Look, I know cure isn’t in the cards, but control—that’s possible, isn’t it? You said so that one time. So I’ll do that exposure thing. I will. I’ll do it all, whatever it takes.” Adam couldn’t stop shivering. “You’ve seen my Lists, the old ones. I have to get better for Robyn. I have to protect her and … well, Robyn and me …”

  Chuck put down his notepad and his pen, and smiled. Nobody smiled like Chuck. “You have strong feelings for her.”

  “Well, yeah, that’s putting it mildly.” Adam stared at the blinking recording machine. “But it’s like she’s way ahead of me in this race. I can feel it. She seems … so much better.”

  Chuck pressed pause on the machine.

  “She is, Adam.”

  “She is.” He nodded solemnly. “I am not her attending therapist, so this is only a theory, only hypothetical, but I think Robyn is struggling to accept that. It’s for her attending to call the shots. But you see, sometimes participants have trouble letting go, even when it is in their best intere
sts.”

  “Huh?”

  “OCD symptoms can, as we know, fluctuate over time.” Chuck leaned forward, closing the distance between himself and Adam. “And in five to ten percent of all cases, patients experience a spontaneous and complete remission of all their OCD symptoms. Some believe it might have a hormonal link, but”—he removed his glasses—“we don’t know.”

  Remission. Adam did not hear a single word after “remission.” That was like cure, right? They never talked about cure with him. Never. Here he was, going to hang his guts out to dry for a chance at controlling his symptoms. And she was fixed!

  “In my experience, it can be an episodic remission, meaning it can return, months or years later, but every day would be—”

  “A day in heaven,” Adam whispered. What would that be like? To wake up one morning and be normal? To not bite down and parcel out each second of each day. To not wrestle and negotiate with your obsessions. To not have thoughts that ran you into the ground.

  To have a quiet mind.

  A quiet mind.

  Quiet.

  Shh.

  But he was keeping her in hell, with him, watching him, fretting over him.

  “The remission, uh, how long has it …?”

  Chuck didn’t answer directly. “Again, academically speaking, I believe that a person experiencing said remission should continue with her attending therapist, but that an OCD group may be more of a hindrance than a helping element, especially if a person like that were vulnerable to a co-morbidity, the most common of which is depression. I believe that is where the focus should be concentrated.”

  Adam’s stomach gnarled itself into ever-tighter knots. He said nothing.

  “Adam.” Chuck leaned closer to him. “You will reach that point too. I know it. You will do the work. You will no longer need us, me.” Blah, blah, blah, blah.

  One, three, five, seven, nine, eleven…

  They spent the last fifteen minutes reviewing and reality-checking. Chuck offered a couple of good suggestions about the doors, but later Adam couldn’t remember them because he hadn’t been paying attention. Still, whatever it was he said, Chuck’s soft, warm voice calmed his chattering heart.

  Temporarily.

  The dread came charging back as soon as the hour was up.

  “Adam? One more quick thing.” Chuck took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Do you ever cry? I mean lately. I know you haven’t in the past few years, but recently, with all the upheaval and turmoil. Do you ever cry?”

  The question surprised him. He had to think about it. “Uh, okay, I’m not much of a guy, I’ll grant you, but I am a guy, so, no, I don’t cry, and no, I haven’t been crying lately.”

  “Never?”

  “Never.”

  “It might be a good thing, a healthy thing, if you did, if you could. We’ll note it to talk about and explore in—”

  Adam was already heading for the doors.

  He rode up and down the hospital elevators. “Shit!” he yelled as he pressed all the odd numbers. He didn’t care if anyone heard; he was leaving the shrink floor. They’d all be used to twitchy psychos muttering to themselves. “Batman my ass. Some protector I am!”

  Robyn’s Batman had not come to save her. She was doing just fine until Batman came into her life.

  And now she was in danger.

  Because of him.

  He reached the ground floor and pressed all the odd numbers up to seventeen again and again and again. He disgusted himself. After thirty-seven minutes, Adam emerged from the elevator.

  He had to get better. He promised himself. He just had to.

  And then he got worse.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  When Adam finally emerged from the hospital elevator he headed straight for the cemetery. He had to jump the fence because it was already dark and the gates were closed. Once in, he made his way to the massive black granite headstone that he had first encountered just over six months ago. He stopped, genuflected in the muddy ground and made the sign of the cross. Adam apologized profusely to Jennifer Roehampton, May 7, 1971–October 14, 2008, and asked for her forgiveness for almost crippling her daughter.

  He swore that he would make it right, and that he would keep on coming no matter what, to pay his respects, to atone.

  Even in the dark Adam could see the black varicose veins of the willow’s trunk. The old tree had protected them, hidden them. He had propped Robyn against it on Monday, and for at least a while, time had stopped, they had so been lost in the taste and wonder of each other. Now he wanted to climb inside of it and stay there. Instead, he jumped the south fence and made his way out.

  And then he got home.

  And then he couldn’t get in.

  At all.

  Adam gave up after forty-one minutes of trying. The door to his very own home was impenetrable. He couldn’t clear it. At 9:07, Adam crossed the street and knocked on Mrs. Polanski’s door. She answered it instantly, having no doubt been a front-row spectator to this theatre of the absurd.

  “Hi, Mrs. Polanski, how are you?”

  “Adam, are you okay?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I mean, no, ma’am. I, uh, I can’t get into my house and my mom’s on night shifts this week.”

  “Oh, my dear.” She frowned but opened the door wide. “Well, our houses are practically the same.”

  And then he saw it.

  “And my boys knew how to jiggle both the back and side door locks in a certain way that would get them to open. Or they’d use credit cards. Do you want to try with my credit card, dear?” She started to turn.

  “No, no, ma’am. I can’t. Those doors, they, uh, they can’t be opened.” He was hypnotized by the house, his house, or at least a mirror image of it from a long ago time. There was the sheer expanse of the welcoming hallway, leading off to a spotless bright kitchen. Adam was pierced by a memory of his house being welcoming, breathable, clean. To his horror, tears sprang to the back of his eyes, but thank God they stayed there.

  “There, there, dear. Pay no attention to me, I’m just a prattling old thing. Come in, come in. What would you like to do, dear?”

  “I’d like to … uh, could I borrow your phone, please, and call my dad to pick me up?”

  “Of course! Come into the kitchen. That’s where I keep my phone and it’s actually attached to the wall, I’m afraid. The boys are always on me, but I would just lose something that’s not attached, don’t you think?”

  He hoped he was smiling at her.

  Mrs. Polanski’s kitchen had escaped any attempts at a reno or “freshening” over the years, but it was gleaming and ready for action. The cupboards were painted a snowy white and the blue counters were immaculate and free of anything, save a toaster and a bowl of green apples. Adam never wanted to leave. It was like the best memory of the best day in his own house … before.

  Before everything.

  Mrs. Polanski put on a teakettle and placed a mammoth piece of apple strudel in front of him as he reached for the phone.

  “Sweetie? Is Dad there?”

  “Batman! Are you coming home? Come home, okay?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I will, but put Dad on, okay?”

  “Now? Are you coming now? Come now!”

  “Yeah, I’m coming. I promise. Now go get Dad.”

  The phone was dropped and Adam heard Sweetie tearing around the house yelling for his dad. “Daaad, Batman’s coming home. Dad!”

  “Adam? Hi, son. What’s up?”

  “Dad?” His heart settled as soon as he heard his father’s voice. “Could you come and get me? I’m at Mrs. Polanski’s.”

  “Did something happen?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Are you okay? Is it your mother?”

  “No, not … um, I can’t get into the house. I cannot enter.” He glanced at Mrs. Polanski. “I had that appointment and then I went, uh …” She was busy making the tea at the far end of the kitchen and trying to look like she couldn’t hear. “Then I di
d an errand and came back and … was not able to get in.”

  “Does your mother—”

  “No, sir. Could you call her and tell her at work?”

  “Is she on late shift?”

  “Yes, sir. Tonight and tomorrow until midnight. And could you tell her that I’ll be staying for a few days?”

  “Adam, you know how she—”

  “I know it’s not your weekend.”

  Mrs. Polanski bustled over with teacups, a sugar bowl, milk and Godiva chocolates that had to be at least forty years old. Adam nodded and smiled a thank-you to her.

  “Tell her that I am the one that asked.”

  Now she was slicing some bologna and cheese. It was like a reverse dinner.

  “No, tell her”—he cupped the mouthpiece with his hand—“tell her that Chuck suggested it. She’ll buy that and he’ll back me up.”

  “Adam, are you really telling me that you can’t get through your own—”

  “No.” It had come to this. How? “I can’t, Dad. No.”

  “I’ll be right there. Tell Mrs. Polanski thanks from me.”

  “Yeah, okay.” The room seemed to sway in relief. “I will for sure. Bye.”

  He turned to Mrs. Polanski. “He says to thank you very much and we all apologize for the inconvenience and—”

  She caught Adam in her cushiony arms in two strides. Hugging him hard, surprising them both. Miraculously, he “fit” well into her short dumpling body.

  “We often hurt the ones we love, dear.”

  Adam exhaled. “It’s what I do best, Mrs. Polanski.”

  “I doubt that, dear. You’re a good boy. I’m old and I’ve seen a lot.” Mrs. Polanski sighed, returning to the bologna. “And remember what a busybody I am. Not much escapes me.” Now that she’d sliced enough meat for a squadron, she continued to fuss about with the dishes and silverware.

  “Sometimes it’s actually necessary to hurt the ones you love. You can check that out with your fancy-pants doctor, or whoever you go to every Monday.” She patted his hand. “Letting go, Adam. It’s the really hard part of growing up. You’re ready.”

  She was right.

  It was time.