But Inside I'm Screaming

by Elizabeth Flock

  “Lark, what do you want to say to your daddy?”

  Lark’s breathing becomes forced and shallow, and from behind her hair, she starts to wheeze as she tries to take in air. “Please don’t hurt me, Daddy…I can’t breathe. Get off. It hurts.”

  “Do you need your inhaler?”

  “Yes,” she gasps as Larry reaches for the device tucked beside her in her chair. He holds it up to her mouth and gently calms her down enough to get her to take several inhalations. As Lark’s breathing returns to normal, Larry moves away.

  “Are you back with us?”

  Lark nods, still slumped.

  “I want you to know we all support you.”

  “Yeah, we do,” Melanie interrupts. “I know how you feel. I know you hate your dad—I hate my father-in-law. I thought about getting him a gift for Father’s Day this year but I blew it off. Screw him. He gets me the cheapest presents for my birthday, so screw him. I love the Sharper Image catalog. That’s where I usually got him something but I didn’t this year. Besides, I was here. I mean I am here,” she laughs, “so I said to Elwin, I said, ‘if your father—’”

  “Melanie? I’m sure Lark appreciates your support. Now, maybe someone else has something to say?”

  “Lark?” Kristen practically whispers. “I know we’re not close friends or anything, but if you want to talk you can come to my room. I’m not having visitors this weekend so I’ll be around.” Kristen begins to cry.

  “Why are you crying?” Larry moves toward Kristen.

  Boy does he have his hands full today.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

  “Are you sad that you’re not having visitors?”

  Isabel feels envious. Her parents are visiting for the first time, and while part of her is excited about it, the other part dreads it immensely.

  Kristen blows her nose. “It gets so lonely here on the weekends.”

  “Yeah, and the food’s not as good.” Ben nods in agreement.

  “I hear that,” Larry says. “Things are slow on weekends on purpose. We feel time off from group sessions and individual sessions can be useful for patients. Sometimes it can give you time to think, time to write in your journals, time to process everything.

  “Getting back to Lark, though. Isabel? It looked like you wanted to say something.”

  With Kristen sniffling, Melanie seething and Lark bandaged up in restraints, Isabel can think of only one thing to say.

  “Hey, Lark, if you want to inhale my secondhand smoke this weekend, I’m all yours.”

  She hopes that behind the wall of dirty hair Lark is smiling.

  “Isabel, Dr. Seidler and I spoke on the phone a few minutes ago and I wanted to talk to you about our conversation.”

  Isabel’s heart is speeding up as she searches Larry’s face for clues.

  “What’d she say? Do I have to go in again tomorrow? Because I’ve got to tell you, I’m just going to refuse it. I’ll get on the phone with my attorney and I’ll sue this place for malpractice if I have to—”

  Larry is holding up his hands as if to say “I surrender.” “Hold on, hold on. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. Calm down.”

  Isabel’s stare is unblinking.

  “Now. Dr. Seidler told me that you and she talked about this—that electroshock is one of the most effective forms of treatment—”

  “Blah, blah, blah,” Isabel interrupts. “I don’t fucking care how effective it is. I’m not doing it again.”

  Don’t cry. Do not cry.

  “What you’re experiencing here is a common side effect of the treatment—wait! Before you interrupt me again, let me tell you that many patients experience aggressive irritability following their first treatment. That’s precisely why Dr. Seidler is recommending a second round. To curb the irritability and to therefore receive the top benefits of the treatment.”

  “By irritability you mean belligerence,” Isabel shoots back. “You, this place, no one allows any of us to stick up for ourselves. The minute we do it’s off to the soft room.” Her arms sweep a large arc of frustration in one direction and then another. “Or it’s ‘Hey, have some more ECT. It’ll shock the irritability out of you.’”

  Suddenly Isabel is overcome with exhaustion. Larry is watching her carefully.

  “You know what? I give up,” Isabel says as she collapses into a nearby chair. “You and Seidler…you know I don’t have the energy to fight…so forget it. I give up.”

  Larry moves a chair close to hers and sits forward in it. “It’s fear you’re really feeling, isn’t it? Not irritability. Not anger. Fear. Am I right?”

  Silence. Isabel looks down at her lap.

  “I can imagine you’re scared.”

  “You can imagine? What? You can imagine what it’s like to go from having everything to having nothing? To being treated like an infant sometimes and an inmate others? I can’t even count how many times I’ve traveled, alone, mind you, to foreign countries to cover pretty dangerous stories—wars, even. And yet I can barely take two steps out of the unit without someone telling me to sign myself out.

  “I’ve interviewed heads of state, presidents, CEOs, you name it—all of whom treated me with dignity and respect—and now I can’t even shave my legs without some lesbian nurse ogling me.

  “I’ve had to become an expert on dozens of subjects, different cultures and a handful of medical breakthroughs, and yet I am not allowed to request that electrodes not be taped to my temples. Don’t tell me you can imagine what I’m feeling, Larry. You have no idea what this feels like.”

  It is Larry’s turn to look at his lap.

  “You’re right,” he says without looking up. “You’re absolutely right. I have no idea what it’s like to be in your shoes.”

  Then he looks up, straight into Isabel’s frightened eyes.

  “But I think, then, that it’s safe to say that you, Isabel, have no idea what it’s like to be in my shoes.”

  Isabel tilts her head ever so slightly. Touché.

  “You probably don’t realize how frustrating my job can be. How tough it can be to see patients suffer, to not be able to reach them, help them. And yes, it is equally difficult to see some patients make significant strides—” he gives Isabel a knowing look “—only to sabotage themselves by refusing the very treatment that is helping them.”

  Silence.

  “Just give it one more shot, Isabel. Then, if you don’t want to do it anymore you can take it up with Dr. Seidler. One more time.”

  Thirty-Nine

  The knock on the door is loud.

  “Time to go, Isabel!” A man’s voice. Isabel sits up in bed, alarmed.

  “What?” she scrambles out of bed and jumps to the door. “What is it?”

  She opens the door a crack and pokes her head out. An orderly is checking his watch.

  “I’m here to take you over to the medical facility,” he says briskly.

  Shit. “Um, I’ll be right there.” She closes the door and frantically scans the room. The window.

  I could fit through it…I could climb out the window and run away. Shit. They’d find me. Plus, where would I go? Goddammit.

  Reluctantly, she crosses over to the small chest of drawers and pulls on a pair of shorts, looking at the window as she buttons them up. She takes a deep breath to counterbalance the shallow ones.

  One more time. One more time.

  “Okay.” She closes the door behind her and follows the orderly down the hall and out of the unit. They walk in silence. Isabel concentrates on synchronizing her steps with the orderly’s.

  Left. Left. Left, right, left. Left. Left. Left, right, left.

  “The jelly’s cold, remember,” the nurse describes each step of the process. “I just…have…to…fix…the…suction…cups…to…each…side. There! We’re all set.” The nurse backs away and Dr. Edwards moves in to double-check that everything is in place.

  Isabel watches Dr. Edwards fiddle with the dial of the electros
hock machine.

  Who you gonna call? Ghostbusters!

  Forty

  “The investigation into the crash of TWA Flight 800 is becoming, as you might imagine, a massive operation. Later today the Coast Guard will be joined by the navy’s USS Grasp, up from Virginia. The rescue-and-salvage ship will do much of the heavy lifting of the fuselage and it will provide divers, whose top priority will be to hopefully locate the plane’s two black boxes. At this point it is highly unlikely there are any survivors.”

  Isabel Murphy, ANN News, East Moriches, Long Island.

  The helicopter blades beat so much sound into the air Isabel had to shout into her cell phone.

  “Sorry! Can you say that again?! I can barely hear you!” She yelled, hoping the helicopter would pass before John started to talk again.

  “This is…so be sure not to…okay?” Goodman’s voice was fading in and out.

  Isabel kept moving inland from the beach, trying to get better cellular service. “John? If you can hear me, I’m going to call you back from inside the car!”

  Another news helicopter was coming up the coast.

  It had been sixteen hours since Flight 800 went down off the coast of Long Island. As the day wore on, the number of reporters standing awkwardly in the sand, sweating in their blazers and good shoes, increased exponentially.

  It had been fourteen hours since a phone call woke Isabel out of a deep sleep.

  “Isabel?” The voice was thick with urgency.

  “Yes?” Isabel answered, trying to sound awake. It was one-thirty in the morning.

  “Ah, Isabel, this is John Goodman from ANN. Sorry to call at this hour.”

  John Goodman?

  Isabel had interviewed with him the week before, just days after moving from San Francisco to New York.

  “That’s fine. What’s up?”

  “Isabel, we have a situation here,” he began. She could hear a lot of noise in the background. “A 747 has gone down somewhere off the coast of Long Island.” He sounded exhausted. “It had just taken off from JFK.”

  Isabel was wide awake by this time and was scrambling for the TV remote control so she could see what the networks were already reporting.

  “Oh, my God” was all she could say when she finally switched on CNN and saw an animated graphic showing a plane nosediving into the water.

  “Yeah, it’s pretty bad,” Goodman agreed. “Isabel, we’re gonna need you to do some TV for us. I’m not gonna lie. We’re up the creek staffwise right now. We’ve got someone out on Long Island, but we’re gonna need someone to relieve her in the morning. I’d love to have the luxury of trying you out before something as big as this but I don’t, so I’m calling you to ask you, can you do it? Can you go live for us?”

  “Yes.” Isabel didn’t even pause to think about it.

  Fourteen hours later, Isabel knocked on the door of the van the network had rented and shyly asked if she could make a phone call from inside, though the hum of the generator was almost as loud as the helicopters.

  “John? It’s Isabel. Sorry about that. There’s such bad service out here on the beach.”

  “It’s like this—” he wasted no time “—you’re live at the top of the next hour. I want you to know that we’ve been pumping a source at the NTSB and we’ve got a good lead right now. They won’t go on record, but you can get away with sourcing it as someone high up in the investigation. They’re saying—you there?”

  “Yeah.” Isabel licked her dry lips and reminded herself to breathe. “I’m here.”

  “They’re saying it might have been linked to the center fuel tank. Apparently they’ve had problems with center fuel tanks on 747s but they haven’t drawn much attention to it. Got it? You can go with the info, just don’t source NTSB.”

  “Got it.”

  One hour later Isabel’s producer told her she was clear and congratulated her just as Isabel’s cell phone rang.

  “Mom?” she answered, knowing her parents were the only ones, besides work, who had the number to the cell phone the network had assigned her.

  A man’s voice chuckled. “Nope. It’s not your mommy. But after that live shot I wanna be!”

  It was John Goodman again. Isabel tried not to sound disappointed. “Why’s that?”

  “You were on fire! White-hot! They were only supposed to stay on you for about forty-five seconds and instead they kept you for double that. Wrightman never does that—if anything he dumps out sooner than he says. Welcome to the network, Murphy. Consider yourself hired.”

  Isabel felt the flush of the compliment for a moment, but then went back to the only thing that had been on her mind for the past hour.

  “Thanks, John. I appreciate it. Hey, by the way,” she said, trying for nonchalance, “you wouldn’t happen to know if there’s a network affiliate in Trenton, Vermont, would you?”

  “Let’s see. Hmm. I just got out my affiliate guide and it looks like the folks of Trenton, Vermont, will be getting their news from NBC and ABC. We don’t service that market. But who the hell cares about Trenton, Vermont? You got the biggest cities in the country scratching their heads asking ‘Who is this Isabel Murphy?’ and you want to know if they saw you in Trenton, Vermont?”

  “Not all of Trenton, really. Just one person.”

  Isabel’s heart felt like it was collapsing.

  Goodman was uncharacteristically curious. “Who’s in Trenton?”

  Isabel watched her foot draw circles in the sand. “My father.”

  Forty-One

  “Good morning!” Dr. Seidler scrutinizes Isabel on her way into the office. “How are you today?”

  Isabel knows this is not an empty question that can go without its inevitable reply just as Dr. Seidler is well aware of all that is riding on the electroshocks to which her patient is being subjected. Isabel ends the suspense with a single word.

  “Good,” she says.

  “Really?” Dr. Seidler is relieved. “Tell me more.”

  “I don’t know how and I don’t know why, exactly, but I feel good. Right this second I feel pretty normal. I don’t want to jinx it, though, so maybe we shouldn’t talk about it.”

  Her therapist nods.

  “Of course, now, you know why I’m asking you this, but I wonder what you were dreaming of last night?” Dr. Seidler asks. “Do you remember?”

  Not only does Isabel remember, her dreams were so vivid, so real, that she is sure that is part of the reason she feels better.

  “Work stuff, mostly,” Isabel answers. “I dreamed about stories I’ve covered and a couple of different places I’ve been. It’s weird, though. I thought dreams were supposed to be kaleidoscopic, maybe based on things from real life but then distorted in sleep.”

  “Sometimes. Were yours fairly reality-based?”

  “Yes!” Isabel is glad her doctor isn’t surprised by this observation. “Is that normal? These dreams I had last night, after ECT, were exactly as they were in real life.”

  “That’s to be expected. Electroshock therapy is meant to treat people who have retreated, for lack of a better word, too far into themselves. That can take on many different characteristics. In some it might be a retreat due to severe depression, in others it could be paranoia or paranoid schizophrenia, although that takes treatment to an entirely different level on the whole. Dreams immediately following the administration of ECT are attempts by the brain to begin functioning in reality again. Think of it as your brain reminding you who you are and where you’ve been. That’s why you’re having these dreams. Or, I should say, that’s probably why your dreams so mimic reality.”

  “So here’s the big question. Do I have to keep getting ECT?”

  Isabel braces herself for the reply.

  Forty-Two

  Calm down. Calm down.

  Isabel repeats the mantra in the shower. Calm down.

  Back in her room she towel-dries her hair and sifts through her clothes for something that does not smell, something that will cover her u
nshaven legs.

  Hi, Mom. Hi, Dad. Guess what? I’m undergoing electroshock therapy! Aren’t you proud of your baby girl?

  Isabel stands in front of her metal mirror. Glass mirrors are not provided at Three Breezes. Waves of acid gnaw at her stomach lining.

  Work’s tough these days, Dad? Aw. Poor thing. Sometimes? When the nurse applies the suction cups to the sides of my forehead? They don’t quite stick and she has to apply more cold jelly. I hate it when that happens, don’t you?

  Nearly two hours before her parents are supposed to arrive, Isabel has already washed and dried her hair and cleaned her neat room.

  I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is the doctors think my treatment is working beautifully. The bad news is the treatment is…drum roll, please…electroshock therapy. How ‘bout them apples?

  “Isabel?” Someone is knocking on her door.

  “Come in.”

  Lark appears in the doorway.

  For a moment, Isabel sees her as her parents will see her: a strung-out mental patient in tacky polyester clothes.

  “What’s up?”

  “Want to smoke?” Lark asks sheepishly.

  “Sure.” Isabel is relieved to have a distraction. She has been so anxious about her parents’ visit she had barely slept the night before. Now time seems to be dragging.

  It does not occur to Isabel until they are pulling their plastic deck chairs together that Lark is anxious, too.

  “How’s it going?” Isabel asks.

  “Fine,” Lark grunts, preoccupied with getting some secondhand smoke into her system.

  “You doing okay?”

  “Yeah, sure, whatever.” Lark leans in for Isabel’s exhale.

  Wouldn’t it be funny if Mom and Dad turned the corner right now and saw me practically making out with Lark?

  “My parents are coming in a couple of hours.”

  “You glad about that?”

  “I guess,” Isabel admits.

  “You can be happy about seeing your parents, you know,” Lark says, cracking what for her amounted to a smile. “You don’t have to hide it on my account.”