“OK,
Amy,” I said. I hung my phone up firmly, as if from now on, I’d really
never answer it again. Then, I put on shoes and picked up my keys. I
passed my roommate Sarah, a modern dance instructor with perfect
posture. She sliced uncooked tofu in our kitchen.

“That was Amy,” I said.

“Oh!
Is that the girl I met? That gorgeous young thing? She and Bill came
over here looking for you last week. I guess you were out that night.”

“Yeah, but Amy wasn’t exactly with Bill,” I clarified. “And Bill fixed it up so I’m the one who gets to go see her tonight.”

“Oh? Well, excuse me,” Sarah said, raising an eyebrow.

“Of course!” I called over my shoulder as I left.

A nurse and two aids
catching up on paperwork at the front desk greeted me with smiles.
During visiting hours, responsibility for inpatients’ care informally
fell back to the people who had brought or sent them here in the first
place. But I wasn’t family. For all anybody here knew, I was neither
victim nor perpetrator—a bona fide innocent.

I approached Amy in
the unit’s model kitchenette. She drank grape juice from a paper cup.
“Hi,” she said, as tears welled in her eyes. I grasped her hand and led
her to the TV room.

Amy smeared her tears across her cheek,
wetting a sensuous lock of dark hair by the soft lobe of her ear. “What
is it, Amy? The food? The service? The lighting?” I teased. She giggled
and looked away.

“I’m sorry I called you…” Her lips quivered and
turned down. “I shouldn’t have had to come here,” she insisted, her
palms open as if in appeal. The scar on her slender left wrist had
closed up days ago. “My mom’s boyfriend hates me. He went off on her,
and I said something about it, and…” Her voice rose to a pained squeak.
She inhaled sharply. I hugged her. She slumped against me with weary
relief.

A young doctor carrying a clipboard eyeballed me sternly
as he passed us. With a smile of encouragement for Amy, he kept walking.

“That’s
Dr. Gunther!” Amy murmured. Her face softened. “He was here the first
night, when I couldn’t sleep. He’s the best doctor. They wouldn’t
assign him to me, though.”

“Why not?”

“He already has too
many patients. They have to give a certain number of patients to the
other doctors. You know what? Dr. Gunther used to manage a band for a
while in college, before he worked with the mentally ill. Can you
believe it?”

“Well, yes,” I said. I looked around the ward. “Do you have a roommate here?”

“Yeah,”
said Amy. “She’s pretty nice. She’s just reads a lot of mystery novels
and waits to use the phone, to call her family. She doesn’t say much to
anyone. Her name’s Evelyn. She’s over there.”

Amy nodded toward
Evelyn, a petite woman with curly auburn hair who blissfully cradled
her toddler in her lap. The baby reached toward a wall covered with
pieces of construction paper that heralded unit activities: “Monday
3:30, Exercise,” “Monday 4:00, Group,” “Monday 4:45, Meds.” Meds?
Administering medications apparently counted as an activity. Perhaps
the patients had made the schedule for the staff.

“So, Amy. You mainly wanna get out of here, right?”

“Yeah.”
She tucked one foot under her leg. “They assigned me to Dr. Neel. He
put me on Wellbutrin. He goes, ‘We’ll try this, Amy, and see if there’s
a shift.’ I said, ‘Ohh, yeah. There’s gonna be a shift.’ But I don’t
have any of my records, and he doesn’t even think I’m bipolar. I
haven’t seen a real doctor in years.”

A group of people at a
nearby table applauded loudly. The table held a large, square chocolate
cake. The party’s honoree wore a baseball cap backwards. “That’s Fred,”
Amy explained. Fred sat next to his mother, a rotund woman with short,
curly blond hair, and a sister. “Hey, everyone, get some cake!” Fred
called out. “You too, Vince.”

Vince swaggered toward the group.
He was a youth in his mid-twenties with shoulder-length dark hair and a
strong chin. Vince wore only a bathrobe knotted neatly around his
waist, but he wore it with a certain distinction. “Thank you, Fred.
We’ll miss this guy, you know,” Vince told Fred’s mother and sister,
patting Fred’s shoulder.

“Here, Vince,” Fred thrust a slice of cake toward him.

Vince
set the cake on a dusty, unused grand piano and took a seat. He folded
his hands in his lap. “Fred’s a good guy,” he pronounced, indicating
Fred with a slight nod.

“He’s a great guy,” Fred’s mother agreed
with forced enthusiasm. She wiped a cake crumb from her small puckered
lips with a survivor’s poise. “Oh! Here, you’ll need this.” She offered
Vince a plastic fork.

“Mom, Vince doesn’t use plastic forks,”
said Fred casually to his mother, as if he expected her to know that by
now. He kept one eye on the news broadcast playing in the background.
“Oh,
he doesn’t’ use plastic forks! Because of the environment, or
something…?” Fred’s mother inferred, nodding politely. She set the fork
down.

“Not at all, Mrs. Morgan,” Vince replied. “I’m not one of
those nature freaks, you know. I appreciate your thoughtfulness. I
simply take umbrage to eating with breakable utensils.”

Vince’s
eyebrows puckered in a stormy frown. “We all face our demons here, Mrs.
Morgan. But, your son Fred is really quite well-adjusted, in my
opinion.”

“Absolutely,” Dr. Gunther added cordially. He had
stopped at the table long enough to enjoy a slice of cake with the rest
of the group.

“You’re different from some of us, Fred. You can be normal,” Vince said, dropping his gaze. There was silence for a beat.

Fred
looked up. “Thanks, Vince. You could be normal too, you know. Just wear
some damn clothes!” Everyone laughed. Fred folded his napkin and wiped
his mouth. “Hey, Amy? Get some cake.”

Amy stood and went over to
Fred’s table. Even from six yards away, her copious dark eyelashes
jumped off her alabaster face in sensuous detail. “Congratulations on
going home,” Amy said. She kissed Fred on the forehead. Anxiety flashed
across his face and his body tensed. Vince watched them.

Fred
gestured toward the cake, as if yielding a prize to a competitor. “Take
a piece for your visitor, Amy,” he said, looking at me. Amy took two
slices, and came back over to where I sat.

“Amy, can you still leave this ward voluntarily?” I asked.

“Technically.
But, if Dr. Neel doesn’t approve the release, then I’d be leaving
against medical advice. My mom would flip out. It’d be worse for me
than staying here.” Amy shook her head slowly.

I considered that as chocolate icing melted on my tongue. “Why would she flip out?”

“It
would mean they wouldn’t admit me into this ward again, for one thing.
That’s bad. This place is a lot better than most of the others. Plus,
my mom might not help me get a good doctor if I don’t follow Neel’s
advice. I can still get coverage under her insurance plan. I do need a
good doctor.” Amy leaned her head on the back of the sofa and looked
around. An orderly had cleared away the cake. An LVN was stocking a
cart with juice and medications. “But, I have to get out of here first.”

“Yeah. Then, of course, there’s the hard part,” I said. “Like, not getting high with people like Bill.”

Amy’s
eyes came sharply into focus. She looked uncomfortable, as if I’d
threatened to search her room for drugs. “What do you…mean?”

“What
do I mean? Bill knows me from the machine shop where he used to work,
Amy. We don’t hang out together. He came over to my place with you to
try and borrow money from me again. He didn’t tell you that?” I was
asking a rhetorical question, but I looked straight at her anyway.

Vince
came over and sat next to Amy on the sofa with a sketchbook under his
arm and a paper cup of herbal tea in one hand. “Good evening,” he
addressed us both, lifting the cover of his sketchbook. Vince had
filled the first page with multidimensional trees sprouting skeletons,
gaping wounds and contorted faces. The thick black ink seeped into the
backs of pages like dried blood.

“I had an argument with Dr. Gunther about my artwork,” said Vince.

“It is pretty grotesque,” Amy pointed out, eager to change the subject.

“Dr.
Gunther didn’t object to it,” Vince scoffed, adding, “He’s a man of
aesthetic as well as scientific discernment. He just thought I couldn’t
draw realistically. But, see? I proved him wrong.”

Vince turned
to a charcoal pencil sketch of clear, strong proportions. Amy peered at
it. “Oh, wow, cool! That’s Evelyn and her family!” She looked at me.
“Look.”

Vince fidgeted with his robe, clearly pleased. I leaned
over far enough to see the drawing. It showed Evelyn, her husband and
her baby, rendered almost perfectly, except that they were smiling and
sitting in a living room. “Where are they supposed to be?” I asked.

“They’re
supposed to be at home together. I can also draw from description. Not
just memory,” Vince emphasized. “I drew another portrait like this. Dr.
Gunther thought it was so good that he posted it on the bulletin board.
Then Evelyn asked for it. So, I gave it to her.”

“That’s great, Vince,” Amy said.

“It’s good,” I conceded.

Vince
noticed the silence and moved off to display his artwork elsewhere. Amy
nervously pushed her cuticles down with a thumbnail. “I haven’t really
known Bill that long. Actually, we’re just…we’re not dating. We’re
friends, I guess…”

“Whatever. Bill’s high on coke all the time. It’s not worth cutting your wrists and landing here. Right?”
“Of
course not. I wanted…” Amy stopped. I waited. “I wouldn’t hang out with
Bill, but at least…See, my last boyfriend wanted a steady relationship.
But, what he really meant was he wanted me to wait on him? And, like,
be with him every spare moment of time. I just want…to be a separate
person,” she said. “Because, most guys think they’re different. Like my
mom’s boyfriend. They think, ‘This woman would be happy if she just
devoted her life to me.’ And Bill…at least he doesn’t think that way.”

“Because he doesn’t think at all,” I said. She laughed.

“Do you see what I mean?” Amy asked.

I sighed. “Bill’s not really any different from any other guy, Amy.”

“But do you understand why I want that?” she insisted.

“Yeah. So, Bill’s not Ward Cleaver. So what? How does that make you independent?” I was scowling.

Amy
said nothing. Dr. Gunther passed by again and announced that the
visiting hour was over. I looked toward the door, where Evelyn was
seeing off her husband and baby daughter.

“I have to go,” I said, standing up.

“Thanks
for coming here. Thanks for everything,” Amy said. She walked with me
as far as the exit. “Is it…” she hesitated by the door, clasping one of
my hands. “Do you…think you could come here again? Do you think I could
see you later, when I get out?”

“If you need help, you can call, Amy,” I told her.

“But
I guess I meant…?” She was moving in on me now. The hospital entrance
felt claustrophobic. I took one last, long look at her beautiful face.

“I’m a separate person, Amy,” I replied. Amy laughed again. I gave her a big hug.

Then, I went out through the thick glass doors, turned around and waved at Amy. I walked down the long corridor and went home.

©2001 Leslie R.