She Wouldn't Change a Thing

by Sarah Adlakha

  “But how did you end up here in the hospital, in the psych unit of all places, if you weren’t here last time?”

  “I didn’t know what else to do,” Maria said. “Everything was happening so fast and I…” The events that had landed them together played over in her head—the drive to Bienville, the suicide attempt, the disastrous meeting with her psychiatrist—and Maria didn’t realize she’d stopped talking until Henry tried to finish her sentence.

  “You just wanted it all to end?”

  “No,” she said, feeling the weight of his stare burning into the side of her reddening cheek. “I thought this was what I was supposed to do to go back.”

  “To go back where?”

  “Home.”

  Henry leaned back in the couch with his arms crossed over his chest. He had the calloused and rough hands of a laborer, and though he couldn’t have been more than eighteen, he seemed like a man more than twice his age. “You can’t go home, Maria.”

  “Of course I can.” The parched and barren red dirt road wound its way through her memory and rose up to meet her, reminding her of the failed journey home that had landed her in the hospital. “I have to get back. My family is waiting for me.”

  “What about your purpose?”

  Purpose.

  Hadn’t Sylvia used that same word? God brought me back for a special purpose. It hadn’t occurred to Maria that she’d been sent back for any particular reason. She’d been so focused on returning home, she hadn’t considered there might be a purpose to her being there.

  “What do you—”

  “Lights out! Five minutes!”

  Before Maria could get the question out, the night nurse was walking through the halls, announcing the end of another day. Patients were scurrying around, trying to get crossword puzzles done and letters written and teeth brushed before their worlds were shut down. Henry was drawing himself up from the couch when Maria grabbed his wrist.

  “What do you mean by ‘purpose’?” she asked.

  Henry pulled his arm away, gently but firmly, and checked to make sure they weren’t being watched by any of the nurses. “You can’t do that,” he said. “I’ll find you before I’m discharged, but you need to be more careful, Maria. You’re never going to get out of this hospital if you can’t figure out how to play the part.”

  Maria was too shocked to respond. She was so accustomed to being in control that she didn’t know how to handle being scolded. She watched Henry disappear down the hallway and into his room before the nurse’s voice reverberated through the corridor again. It chased her into the sanctuary of the cold and steely gray room that had become her new home, and as she thought about Sylvia’s words and warnings, she knew she’d be hearing her dead patient’s voice ringing through her head over the course of another long and sleepless night.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “DON’T BE SCARED.” DR. ANDERSON MOTIONED Maria into the visitation room. “Come on in and take a seat next to your parents.”

  It wasn’t fear that Maria carried with her. It was caution. She hadn’t planned on an eight A.M. meeting with her parents and her doctor, and she’d been up half the night trying to make sense of Henry’s words from the conversation that had been so abruptly interrupted. She hadn’t had a chance to ask him about his purpose, and while she knew what Sylvia’s had been, she wasn’t convinced that she’d been sent back with one of her own.

  She slid onto the only chair available, the one between her parents, guardedly hopeful that another day pass was about to be handed out and discharge was in her near future. Henry would be off on his pass by the time she got back to the unit, but she was determined to catch him before he was discharged for good. He was her only lead, and she wasn’t about to let him slip away.

  “Thanks for joining us,” Dr. Anderson said, welcoming her as if she’d accepted an invitation instead of being pulled from a half-eaten breakfast. Maria tried to ignore the enthusiasm radiating from her parents as they nodded their heads and parroted their approval of whatever was to come. “I was just telling your parents about an interesting new development in your case,” she continued. “I spoke with a doctor from Iowa this morning, a specialist in schizophrenia who’s been reviewing your chart, and he’s very interested in being a part of your treatment team.”

  As Maria tried to find meaning in Dr. Anderson’s words—Iowa … specialist … schizophrenia—they churned through her mind like a thick stew.

  “I don’t understand,” she said. “What specialist?”

  “I know it’s a lot to take in,” Dr. Anderson replied. “But he’s a specialist in your particular type of schizophrenia.”

  Schizophrenia. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise, but there was a permanency to the word she’d never fully appreciated until that moment. It felt like a brand, a scar that had been carved into her psyche and was as much a part of her now as the wound on her arm.

  “I know this doesn’t make any sense to you, Maria.” Her mother’s voice, which had seemed a divine gift just days earlier, grated in her ears like the faulty brakes of a rusted-out steam engine. “But Dr. Anderson was telling us that schizophrenia is when people—”

  “I know what schizophrenia is.” If she’d been able to fake civility, she would have let her mother finish. She would have pretended she was grateful to have her there, grateful to be given this chance at recovery, grateful to have such an invested physician. “I’m just surprised it’s my diagnosis.” She turned her attention to Dr. Anderson. “What about the pills I told you about?”

  “There was no trace of anything in your system from your admission through the ER,” Dr. Anderson replied. “In your blood or urine. I’d be happy to go through everything with you.” She cleared her throat before opening the folder sitting on the table between them. It was Maria’s medical chart, weathered and worn, frayed at the edges, and thick with doctors’ notes, lab results, and imaging reports. It shouldn’t have belonged to a seventeen-year-old girl.

  “I’d rather not,” Maria mumbled. Dr. Anderson nodded before shuffling through the loose papers in the chart and pulling out a small stack that had been fastened together with a paper clip.

  “This is the résumé of the specialist I was telling you about.” She slid the papers across the table to Maria’s father, who thumbed through them with feigned interest before passing them on to his wife. “His name is Dr. Johnstone and he’s an expert in the field of prospective hallucinations.”

  Maria’s mother flipped through the papers, seemingly impressed with the doctor’s expertise in a field of psychiatry Maria was certain she’d never heard of before that moment.

  “What kind of hallucinations?” Maria reached for the papers that her mother was pretending to read, certain she’d misheard her doctor.

  “Prospective,” Dr. Anderson replied. “It’s a very rare type of hallucination where people have memories of events in the future that haven’t even taken place. It’s fascinating, really. I don’t know much about it, but Dr. Johnstone gives lectures all over the world, and I checked out a couple of his journal articles from the library.”

  The room swayed ever so slightly as Maria contemplated Dr. Anderson’s words, a new scenario taking shape in her mind. What if she was wrong? What if it was all a hallucination, a delusion created by an illness of her mind? The implications were unthinkable. Her family, her profession, every detail of a life that spanned more than twenty years into the future … it would all vanish.

  “Is it real?” she whispered.

  Dr. Anderson hesitated, casting a cursory glance toward each of Maria’s parents before responding. “Is what real?”

  “Prospective hallucinations,” Maria said. “Is that a real diagnosis?”

  Dr. Anderson nodded.

  “But I’ve never heard of it. Is it in the DSM?”

  “Well, no. Not yet.” Her doctor hadn’t quite learned to expect the unexpected from Maria, and she stumbled through an ill-prepared response. “I mean … it�
�s not actually a diagnosis, so it wouldn’t be in the DSM. It’s a symptom of a diagnosis.”

  “What’s the DSM?” her parents said, almost in unison.

  “It’s the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.” Dr. Anderson retrieved a handheld copy from the front pocket of her white coat. “It’s what we base all of our diagnostic criteria on in psychiatry. How we come up with specific diagnoses.” She slipped the book back into her pocket before she continued. “But I’m not sure how Maria knows what it is.”

  Maria shrugged and mumbled a nonresponse under her breath. Would she know about the DSM if she were a seventeen-year-old girl with schizophrenia? She couldn’t make sense of it in her mind. The timeline of her life was not only disjointed but also fluid and elusive, and she was having a difficult time grasping reality. “Who is this doctor?” she said. “And why is he so interested in me?”

  “He’s doing some research with imaging of the brain and psychiatric disorders,” Dr. Anderson replied. “And there was something he saw on the MRI of your brain that led him to this diagnosis.”

  “But you can’t diagnose schizophrenia with an MRI,” Maria said. “You can’t even do that…”

  Twenty years from now would have been the next words out of her mouth, if she hadn’t thought better of it. How could she know that if she wasn’t a psychiatrist?

  “Maria, please.” Her mother patted the fingers of Maria’s splinted hand, which rested on the circular table between them. “You don’t even know what an MRI is.”

  “But why me?” Maria said, pulling her hand away from her mother’s reach. “How did he even know I was here?”

  Dr. Anderson paused, the briefest of hesitations, which Maria was certain went unnoticed by her parents. “I received a fax yesterday,” she said, tucking the doctor’s résumé back into the folder. “A letter asking for patients with your particular diagnosis to participate in a study that’s being conducted at the University of Iowa. When I gave them a call, the doctor who’s spearheading it said he was interested in you.”

  “Well that seems a little coincidental,” Maria replied.

  “I’ve completely vetted him, if you’re worried about his legitimacy.” Dr. Anderson shifted her attention to Maria’s parents as she spoke. “I called the university where he works, talked to the dean of the department and several of his colleagues, and, like I said, even read a few of his journal articles.”

  Her parents didn’t have to be sold on the idea, though. With their wrinkled clothes and washed-out complexions, defeat already stitched into the creases of their brows, they would have agreed to just about anything her doctor recommended. Maria wasn’t quite so willing to concede defeat. She knew she’d already put her parents in a situation that would push them even closer to the edge they were about to fall over, but she was still considering another battle for her freedom. She was ready to argue that Dr. Anderson couldn’t keep her locked up on the psych unit without their permission or a court order, to beg them mercilessly for their pity, and to pull the threads of their sanity, which were already beginning to unravel.

  “He should be here in the next day or two,” Dr. Anderson said, cutting off the momentum of Maria’s thoughts and bringing her back to the reality of her life: she was a seventeen-year-old girl with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, she was locked up on a psychiatric ward, and she wasn’t going anywhere until she cooperated.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  jenny

  SHE HATED THE BAYOU. EVEN AFTER all these years, it was still foreign to her. It reeked of decay and its music crashed through the air in a cacophony of unblended notes. She stood at the edge of the pier and let her thoughts descend into the depths of darkness below her feet, almost believing she could see the outline of the gun.

  Hank was gone on an overnight fishing trip with some buddies, and Jenny had taken the opportunity to let Rachel into the house to take a shower and a nap in the guest bedroom before heading back out to the shed. Night was creeping in, and it was too dangerous for Jenny to keep a fugitive in the house when she couldn’t have one eye on the driveway. They both agreed they’d feel better not risking it.

  What they couldn’t agree on was their next step. Jenny thought Rachel should be planning her defense strategy for when she eventually turned herself in. She even offered to reach out to some high-profile defense attorneys who might take her case for free, but Rachel wouldn’t hear of it. She had no intention of returning to Mississippi. Ever.

  The silence of the empty house brought with it a comfort Jenny hadn’t anticipated. With a glass full of wine in one hand and the freshly washed quilt in the other, she found her way to the guest bedroom to remake the bed and search through some of her old clothes to find something that might fit Rachel. Bins that housed more half-finished projects than most people had even started were stacked on top of the closet shelves. Boxes of photos and birthday cards and school projects spilled across the wire shelves, all in line to be assembled into albums and scrapbooks. Jenny pulled down a few of the clothes bins before her eyes zeroed in on the red plastic bin in the far corner of the top shelf. The one she hadn’t touched in almost twenty years. The one she’d broken more than a few promises to herself to get rid of.

  It was heavier than she remembered, or perhaps age had weakened her, and when she dropped it onto the bed, dust fibers billowed into the air. A tinge of guilt pricked at her conscience before she pried off the top, inhaling the smell of stale smoke and musk that permeated the air around her. It was the scent of him invading her senses and filling her with a memory so real that she was once again sitting by his side in a smoke-filled lounge where he’d just performed, counting out dollar bills and phone numbers that had been left in his tip jar, listening to him hash out his plans to get signed by that highly coveted record label.

  The plastic lid fell to the floor as her eyes fixed on the man in the top photo, her breath catching in her throat. It could have been her son staring back at her from that bin, tall and thin, with roguish, dark eyes that matched his mischievous grin.

  “David.” She breathed out his name and blinked away the tears before she took the photo in her hands. She didn’t remember the photo, but David’s name was scrawled across the back in handwriting that had a marked resemblance to Hank’s. She’d often thought about how similar her life could have been to Rachel’s if Hank hadn’t spared her that fate, and though she sometimes lacked appreciation, there was no denying what her husband had done for both her and her son. David, Dean’s biological father and the man Jenny was set to spend her life with, disappeared ten months after they met, which happened to be the week she revealed her pregnancy to him. She’d been naive to think she could change David with that baby. It turned out that a family was too much to ask of a struggling musician who was in love with his wandering lifestyle. Within days of the announcement, what few belongings he had kept at her apartment disappeared, and then one day so did he. Three months later, when a handsome oil rig worker and his buddies sat in Jenny’s section for lunch at the Oyster Reef Restaurant, her fate was sealed.

  She placed the photo on the bed and dug deeper into a world that had been calling her back for years. A world where a young, beautiful girl smiled up at her in photo after photo. It was hard to believe that carefree girl was once her. Soft, brown eyes peered out from charcoal-lined eyelids, and pearly teeth gleamed between scarlet-painted lips. As she ran her fingers over the silken beauty of her youth, she wondered if David ever thought of her. What would she say to him if she could go back?

  She thought about him from time to time, about what her life would have been like if she hadn’t left New Orleans, but as she soaked up the memories of her youth, she realized it wasn’t him she had missed. It was what he represented to her: independence, freedom, dreams. He’d always lived by his own set of rules, and even though he did it selfishly, he was out there following his dreams while she was here, living someone else’s.

  The wineglass was dry by the time the bi
n was empty, and Jenny took a moment to survey the mess she’d created on the bed around her. She felt like she’d just cheated on her husband, and a renewed sense of guilt washed over her as she cursed herself for holding on to that bin. Dean had always been the feeble excuse to hold on to David and her past; it was to be a keepsake for him, a window into the truth about his biological father. The only problem, though, was that Hank and Jenny had never gotten around to telling him he was adopted, and after a certain number of years and too many missed opportunities, the moment was never right. It made no sense to tell him the truth. He already had a father who adored him; why tell him about the one who’d abandoned him?

  At the bottom of the bin, beneath the dust of Jenny’s life, lay an old business card with a black raven on the front and the Bourbon Street address of a voodoo priestess scrawled across the back. She shuddered as she thought about that day all those years ago. She’d been warned. She hadn’t stumbled into this life unaware of what was coming. The voodoo woman had given her plenty of notice when she’d stood Jenny up and faced her toward the door.

  This is west. Choose this direction, and you will see all the gifts you have to offer the world.

  Then she’d turned her to face the other direction, the one that would soon take her to Calebasse with her new husband and the baby she didn’t yet carry.

  But choose east, and you will see the woman in the bayou whose home was not meant for you.

  She’d ignored the warnings, of course. What else could she do when she found herself five months pregnant with no family, no money, nothing? Hank had offered to rescue her, and after hearing about the woman in the bayou one too many times, the jokes got old and his tolerance reached its limit. Jenny promised to stop talking about her, but she never forgot.