Breaking the Silence (24 page)

Once she had Joe’s escape mapped out in her mind, Sarah relaxed a bit. Dr. P. ordered her to give Joe another injection that evening, an order she had no intention of following. She kept a careful eye on Joe the entire day, and when he seemed to be growing rational once again, told him her plan.

“I’ve called Mrs. Gale,” she said, putting the syringe filled with LSD on his bedside table. “She’ll watch Janie until seven. So once the day shift has left, you and I can go down the back stairs and get you out of here.”

“I’m not leaving,” Joe said. “Now I know what that drug—what was it?”

“LSD.” That he had already forgotten the name of the drug worried her.

“Now I know what it does to people. And it ain’t fun. I was…” He shuddered. “Everything was purple.
Everything
. Purple and soft. I was truly afraid I was stuck there, in that purple, soft world. But now I’m back and I’m all right, and it’s
time to try out the tape room. Or the slumber room. Or whatever it’s—”

“No, Joe.” Sarah tried to keep her voice low, but was unable to control her fear and mounting anger. “You can’t stay here. Look what happened when I was away last night? It’s too dangerous.”

“I survived, didn’t I?”

“Joe, please. No story is this important.”

“I think this one is,” he said. “You were right, Sarah. Something’s going on here and someone’s got to find out what it is.”

One of the other nurses called to Sarah from the hallway outside Joe’s door. Standing up, she looked at her husband.

“I’ll be back around six,” she said. “And you’re going with me, Joe. This has gone far enough.”

Joe grabbed the syringe from the bedside table, yanked off the cap, and rammed the needle into his thigh, straight through the hospital-issued pajamas. “I’m staying,” he said, and she knew she was not dealing with her ordinarily rational husband. She was dealing with a man on LSD.

At six, he was far too loud and wild for her to take him down the back stairs without attracting attention. She would have to wait one more day. As she left Joe’s room, she nearly collided with Gilbert, who looked at her with what she could only label suspicion. Had he heard her trying to talk to her husband? She forced a smile.

“Do you think he’s ready for the tapes?” Gilbert asked her.

“Yes!” she said, with far too much enthusiasm. She never wanted anyone to be subjected to those helmets and their repetitive messages. But maybe the tapes would finally satisfy Joe’s investigative hunger and he would get out of there. And at least in the slumber room, she would know where he was at all times.

“I’m not so sure,” Gilbert said, and she knew by the tone of his voice that he’d been testing her with his question.

The next morning, Sarah awakened with the stomach virus that was devastating ward three. She dressed for work and had managed to take Janie next door to Mrs. Gale’s when the nausea struck with full force. She just made it back to her own home before the vomiting began.

She had to get to Joe, she thought, filled with terror. The LSD would have worn off by this morning, and she had to prevent him from receiving any more drugs.

But it was ten in the morning before she was able to drag herself out of the bathroom and into the living room to call the hospital. She reached Colleen on ward three.

“Listen, Colleen,” she said. “Listen carefully. I’m sorry to put you in this position, but—”

“What’s wrong?” There was immediate concern in Colleen’s voice.

“Joe is there,” Sarah said. “He checked himself in as a patient because he wants to do a story on what’s going on at the hospital.”

“Are you kidding?” Colleen’s voice was soft, and Sarah knew she was not alone.

“He’s the patient in room eleven. He’s under a fictitious name, Frederick Hamilton. I’ve been pretending to medicate him, but Dr. P. got some LSD into him. And I caught that stomach bug and can’t get over there.” The bile rose in her throat again and she swallowed hard. “Maybe I can get in by this afternoon, but I need you to check on him. Make sure he’s all right.”

Colleen was quiet.

“Colleen? Do you understand?”

“Um…” Colleen was probably watching her words, not wanting to give anything away to whomever was listening to
her part of the conversation. “Uh, I helped Dr. P. with that patient this morning,” she said. “In the electroshock room.”

It took Sarah a moment to understand. “What are you saying? Colleen, you can’t mean—did Joe get ECT?”

“Mr. Hamilton did, yes.”

“Oh, my God.” Sarah leaned back against the wall, battling nausea. “Why couldn’t they just put him in the slumber room?” Remembering the suspicion in Gilbert’s face when she’d bumped into him in the hall the day before, she feared she knew the answer. ECT would be the quickest, surest way to scramble Joe’s memory of anything he’d learned as a patient in ward three. “I have to get off,” she said, hanging up the phone without waiting for a response from Colleen.

She was sick three more times, impatiently retching in the bathroom when she needed to be back on the phone. She called the hospital and asked to be put through to Dr. Palmiento’s office, her mind racing as she tried to formulate what she would say. She was desperate enough to resort to the truth. At least, some of the truth.

“Yes, Mrs. Tolley?” Palmiento’s voice was expectant.

“Dr. Palmiento, a terrible mistake has happened,” she said. “The patient on ward three, Frederick Hamilton, is actually my husband, Joseph Tolley. He’s a reporter and he wanted to do a story on…what it’s like to be a psychiatric patient. I tried to talk him out of it, but I wasn’t able to. I’m sorry I deceived you. But he’s really a very sane man, and I want to check him out of there. Right away.”

There was no response on Dr. P.’s end of the line, and she had the feeling he was trying to prolong her suffering.

“I know this means the end of my job,” she said. “I understand that. But right now, I just want to get my husband home.”
Her voice cracked on the last word, and she drew in a long breath.

“Do you really think a ‘very sane man’ would check himself into a mental institution?” Dr. P. asked her.

“A reporter would. Someone who really wanted to find out—”

“And what exactly did your husband find out?”

“Well, just a little of what it’s like to be a patient. I mean, he experienced LSD. And now I guess ECT.” She pinched the phone wire with her fingers, fighting her tears. “So I think that’s enough. I’d like to come get him now.”

Palmiento made her endure another moment of silence. “I know this is hard to hear, Mrs. Tolley,” he said finally, in that fatherly tone that now grated on her, “but I believe your husband, out of his love for you, has been trying to protect you. He didn’t want you to know how unhappy he was in his current life. He suffers from a true, clinical and quite severe depression, dear. His signing into the hospital was indeed a ruse, but you were the victim, not us. He didn’t know how to tell you that he really wanted to be here. That he really needed treatment.”

“That just isn’t true!” Sarah said. “I know my husband. He’s one of the happiest, most contented people I’ve ever—”

“He kept it all inside, Sarah,” Dr. P. said kindly. “You’ve known patients like that, haven’t you? It takes the medication and other treatment to help them open up.”

“I’m coming to get him.”

“He doesn’t want to go,” Palmiento said. “He signed himself in, and he signed the form allowing us to provide whatever treatment we deem best in his case. You know those forms, don’t you, Sarah?”

She did. The form gave blanket approval for any and all
treatment deemed appropriate by the staff. “But he…but this was…he’s not really a
patient!
”

“Perhaps you could use a few sessions with a therapist yourself, Sarah. You need to accept—”

“You’re mad!” she said.

There was another pause on his end of the line. Then he spoke in a clipped tone. “And you, of course, are fired.” He hung up, and Sarah clutched the phone in her hand, shivering from nausea and fear. As she tried to stand, dizziness washed over her and she leaned against the arm of the sofa. She had to get to Joe. They knew who he was. They would want to know if he’d learned anything more momentous than what it felt like to be on LSD. They might torture him to get him to talk. She thought of the isolation box. She would not put anything past them.

Her stomach would not let her leave the house until late that afternoon. She drove to the hospital, feeling as though she’d been hollowed out, left with barely enough strength to sit upright. She took the stairs up to ward three and walked as quickly as she was able to Joe’s room. There was another patient in Joe’s bed, and she turned from the doorway in a panic.

“Where’s Mr. Hamilton?” she asked the nearest nurse.

“He left this morning,” the woman said.

“Left to go where?”

“I don’t know.”

“The slumber room?” Sarah asked. “The isolation room?”

“No,” the woman said. “He left the hospital.”

They discharged him! Her call to Palmiento had some impact after all. But if he’d gotten out that morning, why hadn’t he come home? He could be at his office, she thought. It would be just like him to rush immediately into work.
Although…Colleen said he’d had shock treatment. He wouldn’t have been able to go anywhere on his own after that. Her heart began to race again; her head felt light. Would they have put him out on the street in that condition? She walked down the hall to Dr. Palmiento’s office, running her hands against the wall for support.

“Come in,” Palmiento said after she knocked. He stood up and reached for her shoulder, but she shrugged his hand away. “Please sit, Mrs. Tolley. We need to have a talk.”

“Where is my husband?” She made no move to sit.

Dr. P. remained standing but leaned back against his desk, his arms folded across his chest. “I reevaluated him after our talk this morning,” he said. “His depression was so deep and intractable. I knew there was only one thing we could do.”

Sarah froze. “Where is he?” she asked, praying that her suspicion was not correct.

“The lobotomy went well,” Dr. P. said.

Sarah laughed, the sound tinny and unnatural. “Is this some sort of joke?”

He pursed his lips and looked at her with his false sympathy. “I know this must be very hard to understand,” he said. “Why, just a few days ago you thought you had a hale and hearty husband. He’d kept his distress so very well hidden. But believe me, he’s much better off now. No more of that terrible psychic pain.”

“I don’t believe you at all,” she stood up. “Where is my
husband?
”

He handed her Frederick Hamilton’s chart, and she opened it slowly, studying Dr. Palmiento’s notes.
Severe and intractable depression. Suicidal ideation
. And the final note.
Lobotomy performed 1:00 p.m., May 7, ’59. Patient tolerated procedure well
.

Closing the folder slowly, she lowered herself into the chair. “Where is he?” she asked, her voice quieter now, less insistent.

“We transferred him for custodial care. Surely you know you can’t care for him at home now.”

“Where to? To an asylum? A home?”

“Right now, it’s best for you not to know,” Dr. P. said. “You’re far too distraught. You—”

She was up from the chair and across the room in an instant, her arms raised for battle, and Dr. P. held up his hands to thwart her attack. Speaking to her in the gentle, patronizing voice she loathed, he grasped her wrists. Wrenching free, she spit at him, then turned on her heel and ran out of his office as fast as her weakened legs could carry her.

Once in her car, she sat behind the wheel, struggling to catch her breath. She would find Joe. She had to. Yet she knew she had lost her husband to his foolhardy scheme. Even if she found him, Joe probably would not know who she was.

“Where was he?” Laura asked. She had moved next to Sarah on the sofa, taking the older woman’s hand when she began to cry near the end of her story.

“I don’t know.” Sarah blotted her eyes with the tissue Laura had handed her. “I never found him, although I looked and looked. And I never saw him again.”

“My God.” It seemed impossible, and once again, Laura wondered if the story might be an elaborate figment of Sarah’s imagination. It had been too rich with detail, though. The events hung together too well to be so easily discounted.

“What did you do?” Laura asked. “Did you call the police or—”

Sarah suddenly stood up, putting an end to Laura’s questions with a wave of her hand.

“No more.” She shook her hands as if trying to rid them of a sticky substance. “Don’t you have a movie? Let’s watch it now.”

Laura looked at her watch. “I’m sorry, Sarah, but I have to get home. I can leave the movie with you,” she said, even though leaving the movie would make it woefully overdue. But Sarah seemed in desperate need of something to take her mind off the past.

Sarah looked uncertain for a moment. “All right,” she said finally. “Will you put it in the…thing for me?”

“The VCR? Sure.” Laura readied the movie in the VCR, then gave Sarah a hug. “I’ll see you next week,” she said.