The First Time She Drowned (2 page)

IT WAS FEBRUARY,
and I was fifteen when I woke to my mother, my father, and Matthew standing over my bed. They were backlit by the early morning sunlight, their shapes ringed by the glare. I blinked up at them, squinting through unadjusted eyes. It was so disconcerting to find them there and to realize that they had been staring at me as I slept that it took a moment to register their serious faces.

“What?” I said.

They watched me with cold detachment, the way one might examine a bug getting sucked down a drain.

Then I noticed the ropes in their hands.

I looked up at their faces.

Down at the ropes.

Faces, ropes, faces, ropes.

I sat up. “What the hell?”

“Get up and get dressed,” my mother said. “We’re taking you to a hospital.”

“A hospital? Why?” I said, and then, in my disoriented state, worried that something was actually wrong with me. I flashed back to the night before and then looked down at my body as if finding it covered in blood would explain things.

My mother glanced first at my father and then at Matthew, who
flanked her on either side like foot soldiers. They moved in closer. She took a breath. “It’s a psychiatric hospital,” she said. “You can come willingly or we’ll tie you up.”

I looked at my brother and laughed. “You have got to be kidding me.” There was no way this was happening. No way this was real. And yet.

I turned to my father.

He wouldn’t meet my eyes.

I looked back to my mother, at the curl of satisfaction on her lips. This was her doing.

I glanced at the door. No way to make a run for it.

Slowly, I removed my blanket and swung my legs over the side of the bed.

There was so much light in my bedroom. It seemed too early for such blinding sunlight, and when I looked down at myself, moving in this strange space between dreaming and not, my skin and clothes seemed bleached out by it, my whole body a fading stain.

I picked a sweatshirt off the chair and threw it on over the big T-shirt I had slept in. “Are you going to watch me put my pants on, too?” I said. All three of them continued to stare at me. I guessed that was a yes. I turned my back and slipped on my jeans as fast as I could. My body was shaking, yet my mind was completely still, completely stunned. I knew I had to figure out a way to save myself, but I could not form a thought beyond that.

They marched me out of my bedroom and down the stairs. Matthew was in front of me, his now six-foot frame blocking all chance of escape. I watched his back as he descended the steps—the one person I’d always believed could keep me from falling
through the Earth now leading the way down. I thought of the Matthew I had shared a childhood with, the one who had taught me how to skateboard, who sang “Jimmy Crack Corn” to me when I was scared or sad, the perfect older brother whom I followed and imitated as if I could fill my half-formed self up with him like plaster into a mold. I knew he had been under the spell of my mother for years now, had become in essence my mother’s surrogate husband once she’d decided that my father was useless. But I never imagined he could become this brainwashed. I wondered how, in his mind, he could justify this, what she must have told him.

We reached the kitchen. The reality of what was happening seized me all at once, shook me in its teeth like a small, helpless animal.

“You ASSHOLES!” I screamed. I swiped my arm across the countertop, bringing everything on it crashing to the floor. Then, in the chaos of that instant, I took off.

I was out the door and down the driveway, the houses and trees blurring in my panic. The sound of my own terror roared in my ears as I ran for my life. I was almost to the sidewalk when Matthew sacked me from behind. The asphalt rushed at me. A vivid memory dislodged with the impact, the image of Matthew and I running around on the boat, him playing the good captain and me the interloper, the doomed and hated buccaneer.

We are given our roles so young.

In an instant, all three of them were on top of me, tying my wrists and ankles while I screamed for help that I knew—in this
neighborhood where everyone minded their own business—would never come. Matthew and my father carried me to the car, stuffed me on the floor of the backseat like an old sack and slammed the door shut. I struggled uselessly to untie myself, screaming screams so bloodcurdling, I didn’t even recognize my own voice.

The door opened again and my mother helped my baby brother, Gavin, ten years my junior, into the car. She buckled him into the car seat right above me. His little face looked stricken when he saw me tied up and sobbing on the floor.

“Help me, Gav! Please! Untie me. Don’t let them do this to me!”

His forehead furrowed with conflict. He looked pleadingly to my mother. She gave a cold, authoritative shake of her head, closed the door and climbed into the front seat. “Let’s go,” she said.

My father started the engine.

“Please, kiddo,” I said to Gavin. “You know what’s right. You know I’m not crazy.”

“I know,” he whispered, his voice choked with apology. “I want to, but Mom said no.”

The sorrow in his face broke me. A single fragment of love in such a loveless place.

My father backed out of the driveway and down the street in silence. From my vantage point on the floor I could see nothing but Gavin’s anguished face reflecting my horror. We drove for hours and I pleaded with him the whole way there to help me. I shouldn’t have—he was too young. But then, so was I.

AS NURSE MARY
and I reach the ward, I pause and look back at the garden path we have just walked, this small patch of land and sky, the only landscape I have known for so long. I commit the scene to memory, imagining that just two days from now I’ll be able to look back and say, “I lived there once,” and I’ll marvel at the strangeness of that fact. Then Mary sticks her key in the heavy metal door and I am still a patient, back on the ward, the door banging shut behind us. I have become immune to the sound of keys and of doors slamming, but even after all this time, I still have the queer sensation when I walk through these halls that I am watching my body from above as if it belongs to someone else.

The ward is an L-shaped corridor, bookended by a television room and a “game room,” which consists only of a pool table that’s missing three balls. None of us know how to play pool anyway.

I remember my first day here, being half dragged onto the ward by two aides as I tried to resist, pleading with them to see that I did not belong here, that I was the one being victimized. The aides handed me off to a nurse with short, practical hair and a bland, cheerless face.

“I’m Kay,” she said. “Come with me.” We walked toward the TV room as she rattled off the facts of this place. “Breakfast is at seven. Lunch is at twelve. Dinner’s at five. Lights-out is ten o’clock.
School is five hours a day on-site. Group therapy is on Monday and Wednesday, and attendance is mandatory. One fifteen-minute phone call allowed each day. No cell phones. Pay phone is on your left. No razors, knives, scissors, glass or cords. No lighters or matches. No physical contact with other patients.” She paused in front of an empty, boxlike room. It had nothing but a bed with a bare rubber mattress and a small wooden desk. There was a narrow window with a thick steel mesh screen over it. “Yours,” she said.

I stepped inside. It smelled like cleaning fluid and salt: sanitized tears.
Not mine,
I thought.

“You can’t stay in here right now,” she said, ushering me out again. “You’re on supervised watch in the common area until tonight.”

I tried to imagine night in this place and felt ill. Back in the hall, a group of kids who looked around my age were gathered by the door, docile and obedient as they were herded two by two like kindergartners on a field trip. They eyed me suspiciously. I was afraid to even look at them. I wondered what they were in for, what brand of crazy. They waited patiently for the door to be unlocked and then filed out, chaperoned by nurses on either side.

Nurse Kay caught me watching them. “They’re going for ice cream,” she said. “We do an outing once a month here. You won’t be able to go this time, but as long as you’re on good behavior, next month for sure.”

“My parents will have me out long before then,” I said.

“Okay,” Kay said, as if she were too bored to refute it.

I went and sat down by the window where I could watch for my parents, and put my hand on the steel mesh screen.

“You can’t get out that way,” a voice said from behind me. “I’ve already tried.”

I turned to see a boy peer out from behind a high-backed chair. He had shaggy shoulder-length hair and pool-blue eyes that seemed to flicker between humor and sadness. The heavy metal T-shirt he was wearing had the sleeves cut off, revealing bruised and scrawny arms. He seemed like the kind of kid found cutting class and smoking Marlboros on the steps of any high school in America. In contrast, I had never touched a cigarette, and listened to cheesy pop ballads and old rock. He pulled out a cigarette and waited for Kay to light it.

“This place is locked up tighter than death row,” he said, blowing smoke out of the side of his mouth. “Only they don’t treat you half as nice.” He gave Kay a pointed look. “Isn’t that right, Kay?”

“Please don’t be like that in front of our new patient, James,” Kay said, retreating to the nurses’ station.

James jumped up from his chair, thrust his arms wide in the air and sang after her, “I gotta be meeeeeee!” Then he winked at me and shrugged as I stared at him wide-eyed. He sat back down and flipped on the TV.

Kay turned around and sighed. “Everybody’s a clown.”

Just then, a frail, sickly-looking boy with huge dark circles beneath his eyes shuffled slowly and silently past us.

“Not him,” James said dryly.

“Do you know when my parents are coming up?” I said to Kay as I watched the zombified kid shuffle down the hall. He couldn’t have been more than twelve.

“Did they say they would be?”

I nodded, and my voice got caught on the answer. “To say
good-bye.”

James jerked back around to look at me. The humor was gone from his eyes, replaced by wide, open compassion. He stood and came over. He was short, maybe five foot five, and walked with a bounce as if to acquire more height. “First day’s the hardest,” he said, sitting down beside me. “I’m on my second month.” Then he added, “Actually, the second month sucks too,” and handed me a stick of gum from a pack in his pocket.

I turned back to the window, swallowing the fresh onslaught of tears his kindness threatened to unleash, and waited for my parents to come up as they had promised. I was sure that as soon as they stepped foot on the actual ward, they would realize what they were doing, change their minds, take me home.

I waited there for hours. They never showed.

• • •

Later that afternoon of my first day in the hospital, the door swung open, and the ward, which had been quiet and inactive, was filled with the voices of the returning patients, loud with their achievement of temporary freedom and intimidating in their sheer numbers and togetherness. I was surprised that most of them looked like regular kids up close. I don’t know what I was expecting.

They said polite but not particularly friendly hellos to me and then split up into smaller clusters and whispered to each other and glanced over at me while I pretended not to notice. It was only when night descended and I’d been in the common area long enough to become a familiar object in the room that they began to approach me and to ask me what I was in for. I told them it was all a misunderstanding, that I’d be out by the weekend. They all
laughed. Every single one of them laughed when I said that.

It didn’t take much longer for them to tell me their own reasons for being there—stories that, in the mere hearing of them, made me older than I was ready to be. There was fifteen-year-old Eric, dark skinned with braces, whose father had walked into his bedroom one night, put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger. Eric was diagnosed with “behavior disorder,” as if there was a right way to behave after something like that. Fourteen-year-old Shelly was pale and fragile as a cloud with a neat row of razor-blade scars up both of her wrists. She was raped by her father’s best friend at a picnic, but no one in her family believed her, so she kept trying to die. Sweet, stuttering twelve-year-old Brian was born of heroin addicts and had never, to anyone’s knowledge, received a single phone call or letter or visit from anyone.

I sat and listened to these stories, all the while struggling against my own terror as if I were sitting on the steep ledge of myself and trying not to look down into the void. It wasn’t just the sadness of their lives that horrified me. It was the fact that most of these kids had been here for a long time, locked up in this place where no touch was allowed, where you couldn’t blow-dry your own hair without supervision, where every right was stolen, and yet, none of them seemed to mind all that much. This locked-down, lifeless hallway had become more comfortable to them than the outside world.

It was 10:00
P.M
. before I was allowed to go to my room, away from the watchful eyes of the staff. Nurse Kay escorted me there,
and I followed, dazed and disbelieving. Just that morning I had woken up in my own bed, and now I was going to sleep in an insane asylum. I reached my room and put on the hospital scrubs they had provided as pajamas. I climbed into bed, thinking it would be a relief to finally be by myself, but the darkness stared back at me, filled with strange shadows and the reality of abandonment.

From a window above mine, an old lady’s voice croaked, “Help me!” over and over into the pitiless night.

A few minutes later a flashlight shined in my face. “Fifteen-minute room check,” a nurse said. “Just making sure you’re still alive.”

Define alive,
I thought.

IN THOSE FIRST
few months of my hospital stay, I rarely left my self-appointed position at the window in the common room. I watched the sky change, the days newly bright and scented with spring, the nights softening after a brittle, cold winter. I’d close my eyes and imagine what my friends back in Pennsylvania were doing, what the second half of the school year was like, all the fun things I was missing. I pressed my face up to the steel screen, and I waited for my mother to come take me home.

I didn’t eat much, couldn’t bear to swallow over the perpetual lump in my throat. The nurses kept threatening me with an IV if I didn’t stop losing weight, but I did not know this body that was trapped here in a loony bin and I did not want to feed it. I wanted to shed it, to slip away from it, felt as imprisoned by my body as I was by the locked doors. I wanted out of the hospital and out of my gray, bottomless despair. I cried myself to sleep each night, torn between the relief of dreams and the fear of waking to discover that the nightmare was real. Each new day was like coming to in the middle of the ocean to find that the ship has left.

I wanted my mother. That powerful and primal longing for her bubbled up constantly against my will, leaving me with the paradox of wanting to be rescued by the very person who had imprisoned me. I did not want to wish for her. And yet, to not wish
for her—the one person who could reverse my situation—was to surrender all hope. She was my torturer and also my potential savior, and since it was impossible for her to be both at once, my thoughts became hopelessly ensnared, spinning and slamming into walls at every turn like a bug in a jar. To hope was to believe that my mother was good and that she loved me and that soon she would come take me home. But that would require me to accept that I was bad, that I deserved to be there, that it was all my fault. On the other hand, if I maintained my experience of her as tormenter, I could hold on to my sense of self and truth, but I had to give up all comfort, reconcile myself to the despair of nothingness and nobody there and nobody coming and no way out.

• • •

I celebrated my sixteenth birthday with a piece of cafeteria cake and a bunch of mental patients. I received a postcard saying that my uncle Billy had died of cancer. I started forgetting the names of streets in my neighborhood, and how it felt to ride in a car, or sit in a movie theater and wait for the lights to dim.

Eventually my parents did come to visit, if only for appearances. My father would sink deep and low in a chair, almost swallowed by it, his face tight and strained, while my mother blew in behind him as if the sun had followed her inside, blinding her to the darkness around her, acting as if this place, my being here, this horror, had nothing to do with her.

On one of their first visits, she told me they were moving. My father had just received a huge promotion at work, elevated to a level beyond his competency, she said, but they finally had enough money for a house on the right side of town, where my mother
had always felt she belonged. She seemed happy, untouched by my absence, talked at me about all the great things Matthew was experiencing in college as if the words wouldn’t cut. Sometimes Gavin came with them, bearing colorful drawings and eyes full of love and innocence that seemed to fill the depressing hallways with life. Matthew never came. He was embarrassed, my mother said, to have a sister in a mental hospital.

Each time, I cried and begged them to take me home, promised I would be the daughter they wanted. But when visiting hour was over, they walked out the door and watched it shut on me and went back to their lives. I wanted so badly to be driving off with them that my state of longing began to feel like perspective. Maybe it really had been me, maybe my mother really was just trying to help, maybe if I could fix myself, they would love me and take me back.

I posed this possibility to James one day when he sat beside me at the window as I watched my parents’ car pull out of the parking lot.

“Cass,” he said gently. There were tears in his eyes too. “I don’t know much, but I know you don’t belong here. Don’t believe the lie, okay?”

I looked one last time at the station wagon retreating out of the long driveway. “Okay,” I said, and in that moment my tears stopped instantly and finally because someone saw and understood and said out loud what I knew in the tiny, quiet temple of my soul to be true.

After that I stayed away from windows. I accepted the sentence I had been given and waited for the day that it would end.

James tried hard to resuscitate me with laughter. In the dining hall he sat beside me and stuck packets of ketchup into his breast pocket and then pretended to stab himself with his plastic knife, throwing the nurses into a panic. During visiting hours, he introduced himself to everyone’s guests and then casually mentioned that he was in for murder. “It only happened twice,” he said, and then winked at me as the visitors’ eyes bugged out.

When Dr. Meeks encouraged him to speak about his upbringing in group therapy, James was near tears as he relayed the time he was kidnapped by carrot-colored midgets from a chocolate factory after he turned into a blueberry. Another time, he raged with bitter indignation over the merciless teasing he got at flight school for having a nose that was too red and too bright. When Dr. Meeks suggested that James was afraid of letting us know who he really was, he jumped to his feet, thrust his arms into the air and sang, “I gotta be meeee!” Then he looked my way to see if I was laughing.

Eventually, I did begin to laugh again. It was all there was left to do.