My Lost Daughter (23 page)

He stood in front of the door and blocked her. “I didn't get married because I hoped we could get back together someday. Why haven't you called me?”

“It's over, Richard. Move out of my way. I'm supposed to be on the bench right now. You cheated on me, in case you've forgotten. Or I guess it was just a fuck, right?”

“Just once, Lily, and I was drunk. The girl came on to me. You know how I get when I'm drinking. I haven't had a drink in five years. I'm older now, too. I've given up my womanizing ways. Can't we at least have lunch together or maybe go for coffee after work?”

Richard knew everything. If he wanted, he could blackmail her. She knew he would never stoop that low. If he did report what he knew to the authorities, he could be charged with being an accessory to murder. The fact that Lily had placed him in such a position was one of the reasons their relationship had failed.

Even though she tried to deny it, a part of her was still drawn to him. Richard had taught her what it was like to genuinely love someone. And the sex had been great. John had stopped having sex with her as soon as Shana was born. “I can't see you on the side, Richard,” she said, gently shoving him away. “I'm with Chris now and even if I wasn't, I would never let myself become involved
with you again. Just see what Greg can find out about Shana. Oh, and thanks for listening.”

 

On the third day, they released Shana from isolation and placed her in the general population. The main room was as spacious as the lobby of a first-class hotel. Various seating areas and large round tables were positioned throughout the room. One section reminded her of a reading circle in an elementary school, with plastic chairs arranged in a semicircle facing a television set.

What excited her most were the people. She no longer cared who they were as long as they were alive. Peggy was behind the counter with Lee. Shana scanned the room. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a flash of green. A man passed her walking fast. Fascinated, she watched as he circled the large room as if he were on a jogging track. Another reason he drew her attention was the fact that he was the only person beside herself dressed in green pajamas. With nothing better to do, she fell in step beside him. Although he failed to make eye contact, he immediately struck up a conversation.

“I find that walking calms me,” he said. “It's like I have too much energy and I get aggravated and when I get aggravated people get mad at me. I find that walking calms me, you know. When I'm calm, I . . .”

Live and learn, Shana thought, stopping and letting the man continue on without her. Walking might calm this guy but it certainly didn't calm her. Because he was the only other person decked out in green pajamas, she decided they must be the hallmark of the most seriously deranged. Great, she thought facetiously. Spotting a small group of people at one of the circular tables who appeared fairly sane, she headed in their direction.

Then she saw him.

Unless she was hallucinating, a drop-dead gorgeous guy was standing in the middle of the group of patients. To say he looked as if he'd stepped out of a Calvin Klein commercial was an understatement. His dark hair fell just the right way and his skin was luscious
without so much as a hint of a blemish. His dynamite body wasn't overbuilt like so many guys. He was muscular but lean, and his mischievous grin let her know that he knew he had caught her eye and that she liked what she saw.

He was rocking back and forth on his heels. Although it was hard to tell the way he was moving, he had to be an inch or two over six feet, which made a tall girl drool. His white T-shirt was stretched over his toned abdomen and his jeans hung perfectly on his hip bones, low and sexy. His hair was dark and shiny, styled in a conservative cut, which she found refreshing. His nose was nicely slanted and his lips thin but well suited to his face. He looked fit but he didn't possess the type of body she saw on jocks and bodybuilders. It might mean he was genetically gifted, and would look the same even if he never walked through the door of a gym. She imagined other men and even a few women could be fiercely jealous of him.

Shana took a sharp intake of oxygen, her overall assessment of the man changing as she moved closer. Old movie stars came to mind such as Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson. Although he looked young, maybe mid to early twenties, he exuded maturity and masculinity.

“That's Milton,” he said, tilting his head toward the man who had been circling the room in the green pajamas. “We call him the ‘Walking Man.' I guess it wouldn't take a genius to figure out why we decided to call him that.”

“Excuse me,” Shana said. “Have we met each other?”

“I don't know,” he said, giving her a coy smile. “You tell me.”

The man seemed so lucid and normal. Shana was almost positive he was flirting with her. She glanced down at her pajamas in renewed humiliation. How could a person make a bad fashion statement in a nuthouse? “I'm sorry,” she told him, blinking nervously. “I guess I was mistaken.”

At the table behind him, a black woman with luminous eyes and a pretty face was painting her fingernails. They were like claws, at least two inches long, and curled at the end. Each nail was painted
a different color. “This is May,” he said. “Tell me your name and I'll introduce you to some of my friends.”

“Shana,” she stated, almost blurting out her last name before she reminded herself where she was. It was her understanding that Whitehall was a rehab hospital, but she didn't see anyone who resembled a drug addict or a stone-cold alcoholic. Except for the few people gathered around the table, the patients appeared to be mental cases.

She couldn't take her eyes off May's fingernails. The woman looked up at her and smiled, blowing on a green nail and waving it in the air to dry.

“May's a psychic,” the man said, only a glint of sarcasm in his voice. “She'll give you a reading if she likes you.”

Shana wondered if he meant psycho instead of psychic. She was about to ask the man his name when the person seated next to May turned around, and Shana gasped in horror. Every inch of his skin was burned and melded together. In his hand was a portable fan about the size of a flashlight.

“Norman, this is Shana,” he said. “In case you're wondering, Norman set himself on fire.” He paused and took a deep drag on a cigarette. “The fan eases the pain.”

Norman gave her a pathetic look of acknowledgment, his eyes hidden inside the Halloween mask that had become his face. She turned and walked to the far side of the room, her stomach churning.

“I'm Alex,” he said, walking up behind her and startling her.

“Why are you here?”

“Why are you here?”

“I asked first,” Shana said, managing a weak smile.

“Because my family put me here,” Alex told her. “They thought I was going to kill myself.”

“Were you?”

“Maybe,” he said. “And you?”

“I'm supposed to be a drug addict.” Shana was surprised she had rattled off such an embarrassing statement to a complete stranger.
But no matter how desperate she was to escape this hotel hell, her new friend seemed to take the sting out of her situation, making it seem almost comical. She hadn't been standing on a street corner preaching doomsday with a megaphone or eating out of trash cans, but nonetheless, a psychiatrist had looked her straight in the eye and told her she was psychotic. “I don't want to be rude,” she continued, “but do you have a clue as to how I can get out of this place?”

Alex shrugged.

Shana glanced back over her shoulder at Norman. Her natural curiosity made her want to ask questions about all the patients, but she knew this wasn't the time or place.

“Are you the one who was singing ‘Amazing Grace' in the emergency room?”

“No, why do you ask?”

Alex smiled at her. “I've heard about her but I haven't seen her yet. Maybe she's still in isolation.”

“I just got out of there and I didn't see anyone.”

Shana suddenly recalled who he reminded her of—a guy she'd fallen in love with her sophomore year in college. Mark Summerfield had the same dark eyes, the same facial structure, the same thick hair, the identical Irish nose. The way Alex held his cigarette, the way he exhaled the smoke, letting it exit one side of his mouth. Mark had been a smoker as well, and during the time she had dated him, she'd picked up the habit. She quit a few months after they had split up, but even to this day, she occasionally yearned for a cigarette. Nicotine had to be the most addictive substance in the world. “It's odd that they let you smoke in here. Smoking is banned almost everywhere today. They won't even let the guys in prison smoke anymore.”

“Maybe that's what makes Whitehall so successful.”

Shana didn't answer, deciding the most marked resemblance to Mark was the look in Alex's eyes. Wasn't it the eyes that set one person apart from another? Facial features weren't that unique when you thought about it. When she was a kid, her grandmother used to tell her that God only had so many models. Alex's eyes held a
sharp, crisp intelligence that shot you down cold, extremely reminiscent of her first love.

Mark majored in English and wanted to be a journalist. He was also an aspiring novelist. It was strange how people who seemed to be so unique sometimes turned out to be so ordinary, which is what eventually occurred with Mark. He was always working on his novel and between that and his work on the college paper, he never had enough time to spend with her.

“Want to play Ping-Pong?” Alex stubbed his cigarette out in an ashtray.

Shana glanced around the room until she spotted the table. She could barely walk, let alone play Ping-Pong. What she wanted to do was beat the shit out of that lying bastard Morrow. That is, when she could remember what he looked like, where she was, her name, little insignificant details. “I can't,” she said, staring at the floor. “The medication . . .”

“Sure you can,” Alex told her. “Come on, you have to do something.”

On the back wall was a black pay phone. Next to it, Shana spotted a blackboard with chalk and erasers resting in the grooved track. Was it really a phone? It wouldn't surprise her if it turned out to be a prop. Everything seemed so surreal. She could imagine Morrow placing a phony phone on the wall to get the patients' hopes up. Then when they picked up the receiver, a message would say, “Got you, sucker.”

Not hearing a symphony of cell phones ringing all the time was nice, though. She felt as if she had spun back in time.

She took off in the direction of the phone, her heart pumping against the drugs. She wanted to call Brett but she didn't want him to know she was in a mental hospital. Thinking she'd call her former roommate, Julie, she picked up the phone. It appeared to be real, but she needed money. She turned back to Alex, who'd followed her, thinking she would ask him to loan her a quarter. Not now, she decided. She'd just met the guy. A quarter must be a real prize.

“I'd play,” Shana told him, “but my pants are too long. I might
trip and fall.” She was five-ten so it seemed odd that her pants were so long. Even if they'd given her men's pajamas, they wouldn't drag on the floor. They must have one size of pajamas for both men and women and because she was thin, there was an abundance of extra material. In that respect, she too was genetically gifted, as she'd inherited her height from her mother and could eat a horse and never gain a pound. It was one of the things that made other girls envy her.

Glancing down at her feet, she discovered she was wearing flip-flops, the cheap kind that nail salons gave her when she had a pedicure. For three days, she'd never once looked at her feet. “My shoes . . . I can't play Ping-Pong in these. I'll fall on my ass.”

“Here,” Alex said, reaching out and unabashedly placing a cool hand under the edge of her pajama bottoms, quickly rolling over the elastic waistband. “That takes care of one problem. As far as the shoes, just play barefoot.”

Shana's eyes narrowed. She wanted the quarter. Surely someone could get her out. At the very least, Julie could bring her some clothes. Her thinking was elemental. The drugs had returned her to a state of childlike simplicity.

Everyone else except the “Walking Man” was wearing regular clothing. Several of the women were even wearing makeup. In a way, the hospital resembled a run-of-the-mill health spa. Some of the people were strange, no doubt, such as May with her long multicolored fingernails that curled like talons on a condor, and the tragically disfigured Norman, but others seemed completely normal, almost as if they were on some type of holiday. “Okay, I'll play.”

Alex smiled boyishly and set out in the direction of the table. She shuffled along behind him, and they took up positions on opposite sides of the Ping-Pong table. A small crowd of onlookers gathered around. After only an hour or so in the great room, as she'd heard one of the other patients refer to it, she had seemingly been thrust into the role of an entertainer. Here she was playing Ping-Pong in a mental institution with a guy who was a dead ringer for one of her boyfriends, all while she was wearing oversized green pajamas, no shoes, and no underwear.

Through the haze of nameless faces, Shana focused on Norman, knowing her original assessment had to be accurate. She saw herself in Dante's gondola navigating the fiery rivers of the inferno, poor Norman at her side.

“Are we playing?” Alex asked, picking up a paddle off the table. “Or are you going to let the natives gawk at you all morning?”

Shana tossed her hands in the air. “Why me?”

“Why not?” He waved the paddle back and forth over the table. “If you keep asking silly questions, I'll find another partner.”

Alex served. Shana managed to return the ball, clear the net, and miss the table. He paused and lit a fresh cigarette, then held it between his teeth as he retrieved the ball and promptly sent it flying over the net again.