by Jw Schnarr
“Long—uhh, no, not really,” Alice said. “I do it once in a while, that’s all.”
“Uhh huh,” Nurse Howard said, making a note on her chart. “And did you smoke the stuff last night?”
“I’m not sure, exactly,” Alice said. “I think I might have used a needle.”
“Pretty dangerous behavior,” the nurse said. There was a hint of condescension in her tone. Alice didn’t like it, but it wasn’t anything new. Everyone was better than a heroin user. Some of them were just better at hiding their disgust than others.
“Hey, can you get me off this thing?” Alice said. She flexed the muscles in her arms. Made fists.
“Oh of course,” Nurse Howard said. “I imagine that’s not very comfortable for you after ten hours.”
Alice nodded at her. She even managed to fake a smile.
Condescending bitch, she thought.
Nurse Howard put down her clipboard and undid the straps on Alice’s arms first. Then she did her legs. Alice moved her hands, shook them out. The blood began to return to her fingers and toes.
“I have to ask, Alice,” Nurse Howard said, picking up her clipboard again. “Do you have health insurance?”
“I do,” Alice lied.
“Oh good! And what is it, state funded? Blue Cross maybe?”
“Yeah,” said Alice. “Uhh, Blue Cross.”
“You didn’t come in with any identification,” Nurse Howard said. “Is there any way you could round up your number for us?”
“Yeah,” Alice said. “I can, uhh, call my folks.”
Another lie. Alice’s father had been dead since Alice was little. It had driven her mother insane with grief, and she’d concentrated her feelings into a little green heat ray and pointed it straight towards Alice. Now they didn’t speak at all. The last thing Alice had heard her mother say was go on, you little bitch! You killed him! You just couldn’t get your shit together and you killed him! I hope you die too!
“Oh. Good,” Nurse Howard said again. “Well maybe we can sneak the phone call in before the doctor sees you this morning. That way we can get you all squared away in a proper room. Get you out of this area.”
“Sounds good,” Alice said. She’d already made up her mind. Getting out of the hospital would be first on her list of things to do.
She was deeply disturbed that there seemed to be two sets of memories in her mind regarding the last little while. She remembered vividly all the time she had spent down the rabbit hole, but underneath that was another, less soluble version of her life; one where she had been getting high and having sex with Rabbit. She’d been really upset about something in the foggiest part of her memories. She’d gone to Rabbit. They’d gotten high, and then…had she followed him down into a cave or something?
One set of memories filled with smoking cats and bizarre tea parties. Technicolor and fragmented, like an acid trip. The second memories made more sense, but they were dull and mottled copper-gray and seemed to just begin and end with no real beginning or ending. But worse, there was something black in that set of memories, like a dead patch of night between street lamps. A place where monsters might lurk; where she could step in and be dragged away screaming in eternal darkness if she wasn’t very careful. But that was just the thing; her mind was being dramatic about it because it was simply a black hole with sepia and silver memories in orbit around it.
“Where are my clothes?” Alice said.
“Oh, they’re in a bag at the foot of the bed here,” Nurse Howard said. “No need to get back into those dirty things. We thought you had some kind of injury, there is quite a bit of blood on them.”
She stopped for a moment, looking over charts and monitors again. Alice looked at the woman. Nurse Howard shook her head.
“No trace of injury though,” she said. A quick glance into Alice’s eyes, then darting away again. Trying to be flippant about the whole thing. Trying to act like it didn’t matter where the blood came from, even though the nurses face had WHAT THE FUCK HAVE YOU BEEN UP TO pasted across it like a billboard sign.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Alice said.
“Well, we’ll get it all squared away,” Nurse Howard said. She double-checked the heart monitor. “Everything looks good here, why don’t you relax and I’ll get you some water.”
“Oh good,” Alice said. Beside her, the heart monitor blipped as her heart rate started to speed up.
Nurse Howard gave it a look, and then glanced at Alice. Looked away. She seemed on the verge of saying something, but then turned on her heel and walked out. The dividing curtain swished shut behind her.
Alice watched her shoes under the curtain. Nurse Howard was standing just outside, like a curious parent on the wrong side of a child’s door, listening for any sign of wrongdoing. What was Nurse Howard up to out there? Writing on her clip board? Waiting for Alice to get off the bed and try to escape? Signaling security to be ready for anything? Whatever it was, the moment passed and Nurse Howard’s feet disappeared from under the curtain. They turned and walked briskly down the hall.
Alice sat up in bed. If she was going to do this, she had to get up and moving. Her legs groaned in protest when she swung them off the side of the bed. Vertigo came, swished around behind her eyes, and drained away. Alice slid off the bed. Standing was an act of will.
She flicked off the finger sensor. The heart machine whined at her for a moment, and Alice hit the on/off button. She looked down at the IV needle in her hand. She was still being fed saline from a half filled bag on a post at the head of her bead. There was a touch of pink in the hose where the needle met her hand. The needle itself was deep inside her, in a vein. In spite of her recreational heroin use, Alice cringed at the thought of it. She didn’t like needles at all; that’s why she always made Rabbit fix her arms for her.
The needle was going to have to go.
There was a box of paper towels by her bed, and Alice grabbed a handful of them. Then she undid the tape around the IV needle and pinched the hose in her fingers.
Pulled it.
There was blood.
A line of dull purple-red shot from the hole in Alice’s hand across the bed. She clamped her hand over the wound. Then she grabbed the bag at the end of her bed, pulling out her jeans. The nurse was right; there was a lot of blood on her clothes. Alice slid her pants on, the blood making them waxy. They smelled like iron; like when her period came early and got into her pants; like an unseasoned chunk of meat that had been sitting on the counter all day. She quickly did them up and grabbed her shirt. Yanked off her hospital gown. Pulled the shirt over her head. Blood was running down her fingers by the time she finished dressing, and she grabbed a folded washcloth from a pile of linens on a little shelf under her bed. She folded it in half and wrapped it around her hand, making a padded fist.
She stepped into her shoes. Then she walked to the curtain and took a quick peek into the hallway. It was filled with more of the same soft, yellow light that permeated her room. There were people milling about their workstations, but no sign of Nurse Howard. No sign of security.
Alice steadied her nerves. Took a deep breath, adjusted the bloodstained cloth on her hand. Then she stepped out into the yellow light of the hallway. It was familiar somehow, a yellow lit hallway filled with doors and curtains.
Familiar, yet different.
Chapter 5
Dorothy sat in Dr. Weller’s chair, avoiding eye contact and pretending to be interested in the silk plants hanging in the window just to her left. She was still in her pajamas, officially against hospital protocol but Dr Weller never cared enough to enforce it. Under her arm was a small black dog, one of those stuffed animal toys won at the carnival for popping balloons with darts or being able to get golf balls into the red goblets without them bouncing out.
“Good morning, Dorothy,” Dr Weller said. He pretended to look busy; made a point of showing the girl that the long stretches of silence between them didn’t bother him either.
; “Good morning to you,” Dorothy continued. “How is your mom?”
“Better, thanks,” Dr Weller sighed. “She thinks it might be the flu.” More paper shuffling.
Dorothy countered with a shirt adjustment, and then feigned a look of forgetfulness. She bit her lip, shook her head and then looked back at the silk plants.
“Something wrong?” Dr Weller said.
“Umm, no.” There was a pause while Dorothy chose her words. “I was just wondering, umm, when I can watch television again.”
“Well,” Dr Weller said, leaning back in his chair. It was a power position for him, giving him the air of importance. “I just don’t think that kind of stimulus would be good for you right now. I mean, you remember what happened last time, right?”
“Yes,” Dorothy sighed, defeated. “But it wasn’t all my fault. I mean, Tina was there first, yeah, but like, she was sleeping on the couch. I just switched the channel; she wouldn’t have even noticed if Roth hadn’t dumped his water on the floor and started crying.”
“Well, either way, you were pretty upset weren’t you?”
“Uhh, yeah. But still, not my fault—,”
“Alright,” Dr Weller said. “Well, for you, watching the weather network for tornado warnings shows me that you are still spending a lot of time thinking about your incident. And if that’s true, then you shouldn’t be exposed to the television because you will crave watching the weather channel some more, and feed an unhealthy cycle of thought and behavior that ultimately may lead to you attempting suicide again. Does that make sense to you at all?”
Dorothy’s shoulders sank. “I keep telling you guys I didn’t try to kill myself.”
“My apologies,” Dr Weller said. It was time to push her, just a little. He folded his hands behind his head.
‘So you ran away from your uncle’s house. And you stole a car. Sorry, allegedly stole a car. Then you drove the car seventy miles to the Kansas state line, where you turned it into a field and drove straight into an oncoming tornado.”
“He’s not my real uncle,” Dorothy said. “He’s my dad’s friend from the war. They only sent me there ‘cuz of that, plus he takes in foster kids for the money. He calls us strays.”
“You’re right,” Dr Weller said. “Sorry. But you can see how this looks, don’t you Dorothy?”
“Yeah,” she said. She bit her lower lip again. “I mean…yeah. It does sound a little weird. But that doesn’t mean it’s not true. I couldn’t make something like that up, I swear, doctor.”
“I know,” Dr Weller said. He took a sip of cold coffee from a silver mug. “Sometimes, especially with people who have suffered greatly, it is easier for them to sort of wipe out the existing bad memories and replace them with extremely vivid fantasy memories. I think we can both agree that you have suffered a great deal, Dorothy.”
“But they’re not fantasies!” Dorothy said. She waved her arms, exasperated. She caught herself immediately. Dr Weller saw the lights switch off, and Dorothy’s calm exterior shell once more took over. “I mean, I don’t see how I could be dreaming all of it up. The Witch? Scarecrow?”
“I know,” Dr Weller said. “That’s why we have our meetings though, right? So we can discuss this whole Oz business, try to make sense of it.”
“Em thought I meant Australia,” Dorothy said, and smiled. She looked down and hugged her stuffed dog. The ratty old thing glared at Dr Weller with one scratched plastic eye. “She kept thinking I had some dream about going down there to live or something.”
“Was she upset that you didn’t want to stay with them?”
“A little I think,” Dorothy said. “She was always talking about the boys around the area like I’d suddenly stop being into girls and run off to get married. Come home, do the family thing.”
“But that’s not for you,” Dr Weller said.
“Nope,” Dorothy said. “No thanks.”
“How did Henry react to you being openly gay?”
“He didn’t say anything at all.” Dorothy cocked her head, looked out of the corner of her eye at the silk plants, and chewed her bottom lip. It was an incredibly cute gesture.
She does it to attract my sympathy, Dr Weller thought.. He made a point of keeping his gaze neutral.
“Mostly it was Aunt Em and her sermons about how I was this lost little sheep, and how God knew I was confused but wouldn’t put up with me messin’ around with girls. Like once I got back on track it would all disappear.”
“Some people are like that,” Dr Weller said. “Especially ones from the old way of thinking. How do you feel about that?”
“I don’t really feel anything. It is what it is, right?”
“Sounds like avoidance,” Dr Weller said.
“Well, they’re old,” Dorothy said. “They’re not going to change on my account. Just like I’m not going to change for theirs.” She turned her head down and then lilted her eyes up toward Dr Weller. she dangled a smile at him, and then shot a brief pouty face when he didn’t respond.
“Would you like to talk about your parents today, Dorothy?” Dr Weller said. It had the effect of a punch in the stomach on the girl. Her shoulders sagged, and she dropped into a thoughtful, wounded look.
“There, umm,” Dorothy said, fighting to regain control of her emotions. She shook her head and dismissed the question with a wave of her hand. “There’s nothing really to talk about. They’re dead, right? People die all the time.”
“That’s true. But these are your parents. They only die once.”
“I know that,” Dorothy said, looking down into her hands. “It’s just that it can’t be helped, can it? It was an accident. I don’t know what to do about that.”
“Well, for starters, you can allow yourself to be angry, and sad. Those are perfectly normal emotions to feel.”
“Oh I do,” Dorothy said, nodding quickly. She had begun to pick at the skin on the sides of her fingernails. “I’m just kind of beyond it right now. But I feel all those things you said.”
“How?”
“What?”
“How have you been dealing with your grief?” Dr Weller said. He crossed his arms and looked down his nose at the girl. “How we deal with our grief is at least as important as the grief itself. Would you agree with that?”
“Umm, yes,” Dorothy said. “I mean no. I mean—.”
She sighed, and her shoulders sagged again. She looked up at Dr Weller and arched an eyebrow, flashing her playful, impish smile. “Can we maybe talk about this another time?”
“Absolutely,” Dr Weller said. “We’ll talk about it whenever you are ready. In the meantime I want you to try and think about the connections between their death and your life, if you can.”
“I will.” Dorothy said. “Promise.”
“Anything else? Still having issues with the medication?”
“Umm, no,” Dorothy said. “How much longer do I have to take it?”
“Tough to say. You have a small chemical issue that is causing you some problems, and we need to correct them before you see any real improvement.” Dr Weller shuffled some papers as he spoke, piled a small stack together and tapped them out on the desk. He glanced at the clock.
“They make me feel like crap,” Dorothy said. “Like I’m walking around in a mist kinda, I don’t know. Not myself.”
“It’s called disassociation,” Dr Weller said. “It’s a result of the anti depressants you’re taking. They’re like a chemical wall we build in your brain to keep out the bad thoughts.”
“Like driving into a tornado?” Dorothy said.
“Among other things, yes.”
Dorothy stared into her hands.
Dr Weller smiled. “You know you don’t have to be in here for the full half hour, right? I’m here to help you understand some of your feelings, kinda put things in perspective. If you feel like you’ve talked enough today, that’s fine.”
“I think I’m done for today, doctor,” Dorothy said quickly. “I can go?”
“Sure,” said Dr Weller. “Like I said, try to think about your connection to your parents, and how it’s affected you. Maybe next time we can talk about it a little, if you feel ready.”
“Sure,” Dorothy said, smiling. She got up off the couch and headed to the door. She paused at the threshold of Dr Weller’s office. “You know, Dr Weller, I never intended to kill myself.”