Patient: Crew
Hannah Kaplan
Kapcom Publishing
2015
Table of Contents
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
COPYRIGHT
Dedication
For the voices in my head:
David, Clif, Christine, Jennifer, Jacob & Farrest.
You are my heart, my love, my life.
1.
Momma died when I was three months old, leaving me to be raised by my grandparents. I was always told Momma and me could have been twins. Albee said we had the same wispy blonde hair and sad eyes. Pop would say we were both as skinny as rails. I was an unwanted addition to the people of Sunny, Texas, and this caused a sick feeling of rejection that has rooted itself in my memories. If God were kind to evil she would have died with her Momma, was the consensus of the women in town. She’s nothing more than an evil talisman sent to keep us in line, was the men’s. The children were warned to stay away, and never look me in the eyes. I was evil spawn and could curse them with a mere glance. Even the schoolteachers avoided me.
Sunny was the city to a hundred farms covering thousands of acres. It was a small community of hard working, God fearing people. Pop was the Mayor and the largest landowner in the county. The people of Sunny loved him despite his wanton daughter and her evil child. Blame for the rotten offspring was laid upon Pop’s first wife—Momma’s mother, she took her own life before Momma was a year old. Albee was Pop’s second wife. She was pleasant enough, but it always felt as though I was in the way. There was never a moment of bonding or small talk. She made sure my clothes were clean, tummy was full, and homework finished. I questioned Albee about Momma on one occasion when she seemed a bit more approachable.
“Why go about digging up rotted bones? Best to let sleeping dogs lie. What that child did to her father, your grandfather, is unspeakable,” she snarled. “The way she acted towards men was shameful.”
“Is she the reason kids don’t play with me? Why nobody likes me?”
“It don’t help matters none that’s for sure,” she said. “Your problem is that you’re too damn quiet. People don’t trust other people who don’t know how to communicate proper like. You need to learn how to talk to people.”
I couldn’t think of anything I hated more than talking to the other kids in school. The girls only wanted to talk about clothes or boys, neither of which interested me in the least. I considered both a waste of time. I didn’t care what I wore as long as it was comfortable and capable of keeping up with me. The boys were far worse. All they wanted to talk about—in-between the spitting and scratching—was cars. I liked reading fiction. I checked out every new book from the library, and lived the adventurous life of a different person every month. I had many friends, but none were real. The one time I questioned Pop about Momma, he clammed up and looked as if he were fixing to cry. Needless to say, I never asked again.
I spent my free time with Pop. Like most farmers we lived in town. Monday thru Saturday we were up at dawn filling our bellies before heading out to the farm. During the school year, Pop would pick me up at the end of the day, and I’d do my homework in the truck bed on our way back to the farm. On Sundays, we slept until seven, which was half the day according to Pop. Albee would make pancakes and poached eggs for breakfast. By eight-thirty we were dressed in our Sunday best and on our way to The Church of Christ, along with half of Sunny. The other half was Baptist. Pop leaned more to the Baptist belief, but Albee was born in the church and never intended to leave it. They spoon fed religion and faith to me from the beginning. I don’t have any thoughts on the subject.
I enjoyed the days spent with Pop. He taught me how to plow, and run the combine during harvest. When the sun went down we headed home to shower and present ourselves proper at the supper table. Albee was a good cook and there was always plenty to eat. All in all it was a good life. I behaved at school, made good grades, did my chores and did not argue with authority. I was content to follow a structured schedule until my eighth birthday, when I met Jim.
“My name is James Robert Long,” he said, and shook my hand. If I were skinny as a rail he was downright scrawny. Jim and his family were new in town and were living with his Aunts in the Parker house. Jim’s mother Pilly, and his Aunts Polly, and Picky were triplets. “Dad lost his job. We had to move back so him and me can farm the land, and put food on the table again. Momma says its family land, always has been always will be. I turned eight two months ago. That makes me older than you. I’m an only child because momma and daddy’s blood don’t mix.”
Albee pushed her finger into my back in an attempt to make me speak. The problem was that I couldn’t get a word in edgewise.
“Aunt Polly says your Momma put a curse on Uncle Peter with her wanton ways, and it killed him dead making her a widow fer life. She said they took your Momma and burnt.”
Albee grabbed his arm. Jim’s mother cupped her hand around his mouth as Jim struggled to complete the sentence. “Hush your mouth this second young man,” she admonished. “We will not talk about such things on Shanna’s birthday.” She took him by the hand and led him away.
“What’s he talking about?” I asked. Albee gave me a look of pity. I was too young to understand what he was saying and why it was a secret.
It was the best birthday ever. Jim and I talked and played while the grownups reminisced about the good old days. Albee and the sisters were best of friends and for that reason he was allowed to play with me, and look in my eyes. He had the most beautiful blue eyes. Pilly and Picky were there that day, but Polly had stayed home. “She’s not the forgiving type,” Jim would explain.
We became an inseparable duo. We shared everything. He told me secrets about the sisters that would force all three to confess during the invitation song six Sunday’s in a row. I told him about Albee’s chewing tobacco habit, and even went so far as to show him her spittoon. With Pop being the Mayor, and an elder in the church, I possessed an endless stream of gossip about the town folk. My days were no longer structured, and I no longer had time for Pop or the land. My world revolved around Jim.
We kissed for the first time on my tenth birthday, and when I turned eleven he told me the truth as he knew it. He said it had all started with my grandmother Zeffie. She was one of the hill people. We all knew people lived in the hills although most of us had never seen one. They lived well beyond the farmlands and deep in the brush inside dugouts created by digging into the hills. They stayed to themselves. You’d hardly ever see one of them except on the rare occasion, and only out of desperate need. I remembered seeing two of them at our front door when I was very young. It was a man carrying a woman. The man tipped his hat despite his full arms and asked for Pop to help the sick woman. Pop kissed Albee then told her to lock the door behind him. It’s funny how little moments of time will stick in your mind as if they have a purpose. What I remember most about seeing those people was how the woman stared at me. She must have known my grandmother was one of her people.
“Zeffie and your Pop met in town,” Jim said. “After they were married she got pregnant with your Momma. She was seventeen years old, and a few months away from giving birth when she starte
d talking to the air. Aunt Polly said she talked to evil spirits that no one else could hear or see, and that’s why she shot herself. It was that the evil told her to, is what Aunt Polly says.” He looked at me with concern. “Stay tough.”
“I’m tough. Tell me what happened to Momma,” I said, but I wasn’t tough. I was sweating with fear, wanting to know everything, and simultaneously wishing there was nothing to know.
“Aunt Polly said your Momma started acting the same way Zeffie did when she turned seventeen. She would wander around town talking to imaginary friends. They said she’d dance barefoot in the middle of the street without any music. Polly said it was the dance of Jezebel. Mom doesn’t talk about it much, and Aunt Picky don’t give a flip, but your Momma’s about all Aunt Polly can talk about most days.”
“Do you think it’ll happen to me?” I asked.
“What?”
“Nothing,” I said, not really wanting to know. “How’d Momma die?”
“Your Pop built her a house behind the farm, and it got burned down,” he said.
“They burned her?” I started to shiver though it was a hundred and six in the shade that day. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
“They didn’t burn her, they burned the house, and she died from the smoke,” he said.
“She didn’t die. She was murdered,” I said. “Why? What did she do that was so bad?”
“I don’t know,” Jim said.
He was lying—I pushed, “I want to know what she did!”
“It had something to do with her giving sex favors to men, and Uncle Peter’s heart attack,” he said.
“She gave him a heart attack?” I asked “Is that how he died?”
“He was coming home from her house, and made it as far as the Parker house front porch before his heart stopped. He was sprawled out, face up on the concrete and his pants were unzipped,” Jim said. “The sisters won’t talk about it around me, not even Aunt Polly’ll talk about such things. The three of them give each other looks. Freaks me out when they talk without words.”
“Have they ever talked about my father or who he was?” I asked.
“No,” he said, “they never say anything about him. I think that’s the part that scares them the most.” Jim was never comfortable with the subject of my family and he avoided it from that day forward. If I went near the subject, he’d stop talking all together.
Time went on, and memories faded. Jim matured into the town’s “Golden Boy”, and I was seen less as the evil spawn and more as Shanna—Jim’s girlfriend, and the granddaughter of Farrest and Albee Green. Aunt Polly adopted a four-year-old boy named Jason, after his mother died of cancer. Jason’s father had died in a farming accident before his birth. Aunt Picky, the only nurse in town, suggested the adoption, and the sisters agreed Polly would be his mother. Jason softened Polly’s heart. The sisters loved that boy like blood, and he soon became Jim’s Shadow. Wherever Jim was, Jason was.
We met Vicky at Jason’s winter school concert. He sang in the choir with her little sister Maria. Jim and I were a grade above Vicky in school, but in a small town age doesn’t matter as much as attitude. Vicky had attitude to the moon and back. She was a troublemaker. She would sneak into the nearest store during a school trip, buy a pack of cigarettes, and then we’d skip out on the trip, smoke, cuss out loud and dream about a future we had no control over. We became our own little clique.
Jim and I celebrated our sixteenth birthdays with Vicky and her boyfriend. Jason and Maria tagged along as usual. Aunt Picky let Jim borrow her car to drive us all to Sweetwater for burgers and a movie. We couldn’t get the little kids into an R rated feature so we settled for some Disney flick. We made the kids sit down front while us adults hung out on the back row. It wasn’t long after the movie that Jim had dropped off the others, and we were alone and naked. That night would be the first time for both of us. Six weeks later, Vicky and I were in the girl’s bathroom at school shocked by my positive pregnancy test. It felt as though my life was over before it had a chance to begin. We had committed the sin of fornication, and all too soon the proof would be in the swollen belly.
Jim bought rings and drove us to the courthouse in Abilene. To get married in Texas both parties must be over the age of 18, neither one of us could muster enough courage to tell anyone so we brought documents of consent, on which we had forged the names of our legal guardians. Both of us would rather go to jail than face any of them. We sat on the steps outside the courthouse contemplating the criminal act we were about to commit.
“What’s the worst thing that can happen?” I asked.
“Jail,” Jim said.
“Pop finding out is worse than death row.”
“The sisters are worse than that. There are three of them.”
Jim and I walked into the courthouse and down the long hallway to the Justice of the Peace. He went to the reception desk. I went to the restroom. Five minutes later I was sitting on a toilet full of blood—fully relieved. We left the courthouse without a marriage or license. Neither was necessary. That night we cuddled on a hay bed in Jim’s barn.
“We should’ve gone ahead and done it,” Jim said. “I want to go back to the courthouse get married and get out of this place. I don’t want to live here. We’re going to do nothing but rot and die, right here.”
“We’ll get out of here,” I said. “Someday.”
“When?” he asked.
“When the time is right.”
“Promise?”
“I Promise,” I said, as he pulled me close to his chest.
“Stay tough,” he said.
“I’m tough.”
Thirty days after my seventeenth birthday I left Sunny alone. Albee and Pop were at the breakfast table as I sped passed them and out the door. I revved the engine of my ’72 VW Bug and blasted the car radio but nothing would help me that morning. I could not let this happen to Pop—not again. The pain he’d felt was palpable when the good folks in town brought up Momma and what she had done. It would be better for them to think of me as dead and go forward with their lives, than to endure the chaos that was living inside me. I didn’t know where I’d go or what I’d do when I got there, but I did know that I had to leave. I’ve often wondered what Albee must have thought when I didn’t come home that night. How upset was Pop when he realized I was gone? What did she say to calm him down? The voices increased in volume as I drove east on I-20, and soon after that I began to understand them. Two weeks prior they had sounded like a fuzzy A.M. radio broadcast. That’s the point at which I blacked out. I didn’t know how I’d lost my car or how the truck driver found me.
2.
Being ambidextrous enabled me to pitch, write, eat, bowl, and golf using either hand. This little fact never sat well with my schoolteachers; it only served to increase their fear. They (at times not tactfully) would let me know that I should only use my right hand because the left side was evil. In my eyes, it was no big deal and simply something I could do. When it came to being a scribe for the voices that made a home inside my head; it was this little oddity that changed my life. I could write what two voices were saying simultaneously—one voice with each hand—on two separate pieces of paper and finish a session in record time. It was Marla’s idea. Doctor Marla Todd was the director and a part owner of a private, Dallas drug clinic. She said a truck driver saw me walking down the highway in a daze, put me in his truck and brought me to the clinic. She gave me a bed and never left my side.
For the first few days, she held me as the voices echoed through my head. I begged her for hours on end to do something that would make them stop. On the third day the voices calmed becoming a background mumble in my head. I woke up and Marla was still asleep in the chair next to my bed. When I touched her hand, she jolted up out of the chair.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I think they’re quiet now.”
“What does it sound like in your head?” Marla asked. “How many voices are there because I believe there are fou
r?” She steadied herself upright and grabbed her notes and pen. She wasn’t sure how much lucid time to expect. “When did it begin?”
“It started before my seventeenth birthday. Can you make them go away?”
“From what I can make out you are hearing four idiosyncratic voices. I would lay odds that not even one of these voices belongs to you.” She must have seen the utter confusion in my eyes because she stopped and took a deliberate deep breath. “I’m Marla Todd,” she extended her hand.
“Shanna Green, pleasure to meet you. I’m sorry for the last few days.”
“Don’t apologize for something you can’t control,” she said. “Promise me you’ll never do that again.” I nodded. “It’s me who should apologize,” Marla continued. “I should have taken you to a hospital instead of this den of drug addicts. I have been studying schizophrenia for the better part of my life. Most Psychiatrists, using the DSM, would diagnose you as schizophrenic. Hell most of them would think you were faking because of the way you can come in and out of it so smoothly.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“Be that as it may, I kept you because I can help you,” she said indifferent to my question. “Not necessarily as a diagnostician, diagnosis is by definition a categorization of symptoms and we all know that no two therapists could or would agree, but more as a behaviorist.” She reached into her bag, took out a couple of books and laid them out for me to see. “Here is a case study of a woman hearing voices. She is otherwise, healthy, mentally and physically, displays no paranoia, and has no desire to hurt herself, or others. She simply hears voices, and these voices do not in any way manipulate her.” She pointed to a book written by Betsy Holder. “This poor woman had seen multiple doctors before seeing Doctor Holder—who I might add is an extraordinary doctor, not to mention my college roommate. Every Doctor put her on medication; none of the medications stopped the voices, but Betsy did. I’m getting ahead of myself let me explain.”
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