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But Inside I'm Screaming
Elizabeth Flock
From the New York Times bestselling author of Me & Emmacomes one woman’s unforgettable story about what it is to lose controlas the world watches, and to figure out what went so very wrong.While breaking the hottest news story of the year, broadcast journalist Isabel Murphy falls apart on live television in front of an audience of millions. She lands at Three Breezes, a four-star psychiatric hospital nicknamed the “nut hut,” where she begins the painful process of recovering the life everyone thought she had.But accepting her place among her fellow patients proves difficult, and Isabel struggles to reconcile the fact that she is, indeed, one of them. As she faces the reality that in order to mend her painfully fractured life she must rely solely on herself, she must also accept an imperfect life in a world that demands perfection.


From the New York Times bestselling author of Me & Emma comes one woman’s unforgettable story about what it is to lose control as the world watches, and to figure out what went so very wrong.
While breaking the hottest news story of the year, broadcast journalist Isabel Murphy falls apart on live television in front of an audience of millions. She lands at Three Breezes, a four-star psychiatric hospital nicknamed the “nut hut,” where she begins the painful process of recovering the life everyone thought she had.
But accepting her place among her fellow patients proves difficult, and Isabel struggles to reconcile the fact that she is, indeed, one of them. As she faces the reality that in order to mend her painfully fractured life she must rely solely on herself, she must also accept an imperfect life in a world that demands perfection.
Selected Praise for


“An absorbing novel…this former reporter writes a story that’s hard to put down.”
—Oakland Tribune
“An insightful, touching and, yes, even funny account of what it’s like to lose control as the world watches.”
—New York Times bestselling author Mary Jane Clark
“From the first page, Elizabeth Flock takes you inside the mind and heart of a young woman of promise, about to be destroyed by her own past. A riveting, fast-paced tale by a first-time novelist with a gift for breathing life into her characters.”
—Judy Woodruff, Anchor, CNN’s Inside Politics
“[A] gripping story.”
—OK! magazine
“Riveting, raw, painfully honest…Elizabeth Flock’s well-written, insightful, deeply emotional debut novel is a stunning portrayal…an intense look at mental illness from the inside.”
—Romance Reviews Today
“An insightful character study…[a] bleak, yet at times amusing, well-written story…readers will agree that Elizabeth Flock provides a powerhouse.”
—Midwest Book Review

But Inside I’m Screaming
Elizabeth Flock

www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
It is almost impossible for me to properly convey my gratitude to the following people for their tremendous support—both professional and personal—throughout the years it took to complete this novel:
Laura Dail, Mary Jane Clark, Stuart Horwitz, Susan Swinwood, Amy Moore-Benson, Jodie Chase, Jill Brack, Tres Mills, Liz Flock…I could not have done it without all of you.
And to my parents, whom I love deeply—thank you.
Contents
Chapter One (#u1cedc98c-d104-50c8-ae58-da7fd442a3bf)
Chapter Two (#u82bf1af4-542f-5ca7-9063-4adab26b286c)
Chapter Three (#uc879b52b-6618-5763-90b3-58c51f8900ed)
Chapter Four (#u9834250a-8fea-5ca2-9e2e-5076028f4a66)
Chapter Five (#ubf4bfeb0-6cb9-5e87-a86b-d2c1db90a6dd)
Chapter Six (#u0ade63b5-afc8-5a97-b01b-8b39f345cd02)
Chapter Seven (#uef26a4d4-4bbc-5834-b95c-b633a88d376d)
Chapter Eight (#u4b23635e-b4d4-5e0b-a56c-302fc7b59917)
Chapter Nine (#uc333d96a-05c9-5479-afd6-27d7befd9a36)
Chapter Ten (#u756c6ab1-fbac-52a0-a0e6-998747a16c7a)
Chapter Eleven (#u5f1ee805-ed12-5781-9926-77eabe452ca1)
Chapter Twelve (#u9ad3c4df-8538-58ff-829b-d3765165eb4b)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventy (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
Questions for Discussion (#litres_trial_promo)
“Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe
upon these slain, that they may live…
and the breath came into them and they lived…
and they stood up upon their feet…”
—Ezekiel 37:9-10
One
Isabel picked at the ragged threads that once hugged a shiny button on the front of her blazer. Hunched over her keyboard and sallow-skinned from too much fluorescent lighting, she had won computer solitaire three times before she bored of it entirely and listlessly reached for the mouse to click over to the wires to see what was not happening on this slow Labor Day weekend.
Staring at her flickering screen, either at words floating in front of her or at playing cards triumphantly dancing off a full deck, was a relief from the noise in her brain: angry shouts shifting into one another like a Rubick’s Cube. “You disgust me,” her husband called out as her father’s voice interrupted with “You have no family” and “Why do you even bother?” Alex again: “You’re nothing, you don’t even register.”
She shook her head to put the invisible squares back into place.
“Hey, Jack, check out AP wires. Princess Diana’s been in a car accident,” she called out across the newsroom to the assignment editor, her ring finger finding its way to her front teeth.
“Yeah, her Mercedes probably got a scratch and they’re calling it a wreck,” the overnight editor answered.
Isabel was filling in for the weekend anchor who wanted the holiday weekend off to spend with his family in the Hamptons.
“You think you can actually get away from this?” an unidentified voice snarled in Isabel’s head.
She bit the skin around her fingernail.
“I don’t know, Jack. Look how many ‘urgents’ they’ve entered. Why don’t we call the London bureau and see what they know.”
“Okay, let’s,” Jack replied bitterly, knowing that “why don’t we call…” was a direct order for whoever was on the desk to carry out the task.
You disgust me. Did you hear me? You disgust me.
Isabel shook her head again. To an observer it might have appeared she was dodging persistent mosquitoes.
As Jack hit the direct-dial button to London, the phones started ringing. Isabel picked up the first line.
“Isabel, it’s John. I’m on my way in. Who’ve you talked to?”
“Huh?”
“London just beeped me. You talked to Ted yet? I think he’s making his way across town, too.”
Jesus.
“What did London tell you? Jack’s on the phone with them right now—I haven’t heard.” Isabel felt a knot tighten in her stomach.
“It’s bad. They said they’re going to coordinate with Jack to feed video as soon as the freelancer in Paris gets to the bureau. The car’s all mangled, though. Should be good pictures.”
“What about injuries?”
“London said they don’t know yet. Listen, kid, we may need you to do a special report. You okay with that?”
No. Jesus Christ, no.
“Sure,” she replied. She had tried to sound convincing but was sure she’d failed.
“You sure? Ted’s made the call that it’s you and he’s on his way in to make it happen. But say the word and we’ll get someone else in. You don’t have to do it.”
“I’m fine, John.” Isabel corrected her posture and took a deep breath in. “Seriously. Don’t give it another thought.”
I can’t do this. Not right now. Not tonight. Please.
But John was dubious. “Who else is in the newsroom?”
“No one. Just me and Jack and a couple of editors in the back—I don’t know who.”
“For chrissakes! Why hasn’t Jack gotten backup in there? You’re gonna need at least a couple of producers for now, until we can get our shit together and we know how bad this thing is. Lemme talk to Jack.”
“Stand by.” Isabel felt the thump of a headache gnawing its way to the front of her forehead. Her computer was beeping every two to three seconds with the same “urgent” wire report that Diana had been in a car accident. She signaled to Jack to pick up the phone. He already had a phone on each ear and was no longer sitting back in his chair but was pacing behind the assignment desk.
Calm down. This is my last chance. Last chance. Last chance. So let’s dance…the last dance…to-oo-night. Yes it’s my last chance….
* * *
“Buckingham Palace confirms that Diana, the Princess of Wales, was in a serious car accident earlier this evening in Paris. There is no confirmation yet on the extent of her injuries.”
Isabel stared at the AP report on her computer. She squeezed her eyes shut, opened them again, and tried to pretend her peripheral vision was not narrowing.
“You think you can actually get away from this?” the voice asked again, its sinister laughter bouncing off the interior walls of Isabel’s skull.
Not now. Please. Calm down.
Two seconds later the makeup artist backed away from her and then dabbed an extra bit of powder on her forehead.
“Okay.” Ted Sargent was nervously arranging the two sheets of copy on the anchor desk in front of Isabel. “You got everything you need?”
“Yes, Ted,” Isabel answered, her voice an octave higher than normal. “They’re talking to me in my ear so, if you’ll excuse me…” She was unaccustomed to having the president of the network news division looking over her shoulder.
“Stand by, Isabel,” the voice came into her earpiece. “We don’t know when we’re cutting in. Stand by.”
Isabel had never done a Special Report. She turned in her seat and scanned the newsroom. Within minutes it had come alive, desk assistants, producers, writers—many of whom she’d never seen before—were scurrying around, diving for phones, typing on their keypads, combing through hours of Diana footage for the best shots. She felt as if she were on a plane, taking off, the cabin pressure adjusting and popping her eardrums.
We are interrupting this broadcast to bring you an ANN Special Report. Just moments ago, Buckingham Palace confirmed that Diana, Princess of Wales, has been involved in what they are calling a, quote, serious car accident in Paris. The extent of her injuries and the nature of the accident are not yet known. Once again, Princess Diana was in a car accident roughly one hour ago in Paris, France. Buckingham Palace is characterizing it as serious. We will, of course, bring you more information as soon as it becomes available. Please stay tuned to your local ANN affiliate for further details. I’m Isabel Murphy reporting from ANN headquarters in New York.
Isabel’s lips moved as she read the copy again to herself. Her heart was racing almost as fast as her thought process.
I’m anchoring a Special Report for the American News Network. Focus. I’ve got to focus.
“Chip?” Isabel spoke into her microphone at a whisper and barely moved her lips, which were now magenta, the blue fear freezing out the slash of her red lipstick. “Do I have five seconds to make a quick call? It’s important.”
“We’re in standby mode so technically no, but since we’re waiting for the break to drop out of programming…if you do it quickly…you’ve got about seventeen seconds until we’re on alert. Go.”
Isabel had already dialed the first nine numbers into the phone behind the anchor desk. She pushed the tenth on Chip’s go-ahead.
“Hi, it’s me,” she said softly. “Just wanted to tell you two to watch ANN right now.”
Her face fell as she listened into the phone. “But where is he? Oh. Okay. Well, bye.”
Maybe he’ll be home in the next few minutes. Then he’ll catch it. Mom’ll already have it on.
“Okay, Isabel.” The voice in her ear was steady and commanding. “We’re going live in one minute. Stand by.”
You disgust me. You disgust me.
Isabel sat up straight in her chair and nervously touched her sprayed hair.
Calm down. Calm down.
“Isabel, you all set?” Ted was just behind the TelePrompTer facing the anchor desk.
Last chance. Last chance. For romance…to-oo-night.
“Yes,” Isabel replied, looking down at her copy (a backup in case the TelePrompTer were to break down). There was already an imprint of her sweating hand on the printout.
Maybe he’s walking into the house right now.
Isabel’s heart pounded even harder when the voice of her producer came back into her ear: “Thirty seconds, Isabel. Stand by.”
Oh, God. Please, God.
Isabel watched Ted hurry in to the control booth from behind the camera.
Last chance…
“In ten, nine, eight, seven—cue music—five, four, three, two.” Good producers never say “one.”
Last chance…
Isabel looked into the camera and, for the first time in her career, froze.
Chip’s voice was urgent in her ear: “Isabel! You’re on!”
Nothing.
Last chance…last chance…
Isabel was no longer at the anchor desk, she was in a parallel universe, one in which Donna Summers sang the same song over and over and Isabel was able to watch herself spiral down a dirty tunnel and yet was powerless to stop her descent, her arms frantically grabbing at the sides of the darkening cone, trying to catch hold of a slippery side. Viewers, alerted to the emergency cut-in by a fancy graphic and urgent music involving trumpets and French horns, were now turning to other stations.
Ted Sargent ran out of the control booth toward the anchor desk, just off camera. “Isabel!” he hissed angrily.
Nothing.
You disgust me. The voices had broken through—Isabel no longer heard them as others but as herself. Did you hear me? You disgust me!
He ran back into the booth and yelled to the producer. “Throw up a graphic! Something! Cut to black! Jesus fucking Christ!” Ted looked up at the monitors running the other network broadcasts and saw that all were on the air with Special Reports about Diana. CBS was running video of her on an amusement park ride with her two sons. NBC had somehow gotten Tom Brokaw into the anchor chair in time. As precious minutes ticked by, ANN was missing the story. And with the evening news anchor out of town, all the network had was Isabel Murphy, who was spontaneously combusting on national television.
“Isabel, what the hell is going on?” Ted was one step away from reaching across the anchor desk and strangling his only hope. “Isabel! Jesus Christ, Isabel! Snap out of it!”
Isabel watched Ted’s small calamari lips moving. His voice tangled up with others talking at her and confused her.
Chip, the man behind the voice in her ear, was in front of her. “Isabel? Do you need a doctor? What’s going on?” Normally unflappable, Chip was nearly as frantic as Ted. This was the kind of thing that lost people jobs. Possibly the biggest news story of the year and Isabel was single-handedly wrecking the network’s reputation.
“Isabel, you have got to listen to me.” John Goodman, the senior producer on duty, was towering over her. His words were measured but powerful. “You have got to go live right now, do you understand? Whatever is going on, we can fix it when this is over. But right now, you have got to go live.”
Isabel brought John’s stern face into focus.
This is the man who hired me. The man who took a leap of faith in me when no one else would.
“Okay,” she whispered through ventriloquist’s lips. No one heard her but John.
“Okay? You’ll do it? Okay?” he double-checked while nodding to Ted and Chip.
“Okay,” Isabel said meekly.
I’ve got to do this.
Chip ran back into the booth.
He had left her earpiece on so she heard the voices thundering at one another in the control room. “This is a mistake, Ted. I told you I didn’t want her in the chair tonight.” Chip’s voice.
“What, she’s not used to live television? Give me a fucking break.”
“Okay, Isabel, let’s try this again.” Chip had regained his composure. “In thirty seconds.”
Please. Please.
“Nice and easy.” Chip was trying to soothe her.
Please. Calm down. Please. Please.
“I have to protect my reporters, Sargent,” Isabel heard John challenge Ted. “And I’m telling you, this is not a good call to make with Murphy right now! Where’s Roberts? Get him in here.”
“Fifteen seconds.” The knot, ever-tightening in Isabel’s stomach, threatened to erupt in vomit. “Ten, nine, eight, seven—cue music—five, four, three, two…”
Last chance.
With the camera trained on her, Isabel opened her mouth to speak but closed it when no words came out.
Please. Please no.
“No fucking way!” Ted shouted in the booth. “Go to a graphic.” As Ted barked orders, Chip tried to coax Isabel one last time.
“Get her off the air!” Ted yelled. Isabel flinched at the volume of the words still piped through her ear. “Get her off the fucking air! She’ll never make air again, if I have anything to say about it. Not on this network. She wants to go down, fine. But she’s not taking this network with her, goddammit!”
So, let’s dance the last dance…let’s dance…the last dance…
“If you threaten her, I swear to God I’ll make your life miserable,” John warned Ted.
To-oo-night…
“She’s over. She’s finished,” Ted ranted.
“If she is it’ll be her choice, not yours,” John volleyed back. “You hear me?”
“Do I need to remind you who you’re talking to, Goodman?” Ted’s voice a decibel lower.
“Just give her some room right now. Agreed?”
Look at you. You disgust me.
Ted looked through the glass door into the newsroom. His assistant was running across the room to him.
He opened the door. “What? You reach him?”
“He’s five minutes away,” she panted.
He turned back to John. “She’s lucky Roberts is in town or I’d wipe the floor with her. Okay, Chip, let’s get the desk ready for him. The computer’s all booted up, right? Melissa, go down to the lobby and hold an elevator open for him. We got some water by the desk in case he’s thirsty? Good.”
Move. You have to get up now. It’s over. Move.
Two
It’s so thin and small it seems impossible that it can end a human life.
Do it.
Two long, quick slices and the pain bleeds away.
So why am I hesitating? Do it.
Isabel knows that she is scared to slit her wrists. She’d rather find a painless solution. To her it sounds like something Yogi Berra might have said: I’d kill myself but it’d hurt too much.
The white porcelain feels cold to her as she climbs, fully clothed, into the tub.
This is it. This makes the most sense. Do it.
Isabel looks from the metal blade balancing on the edge of the bathtub to the sink counter where her sleeping pills are neatly arranged. Plan B. The last time she tried swallowing pills she did not take enough and woke up with a stiff tube snaking down her throat, pumping charcoal into her belly. For hours she vomited up the black coal as unsympathetic interns scowled and mixed up more of the pitch-black concoction that’s meant to absorb the poison.
Maybe I’ll try the pills again. That’s much easier. And this time I’ll take the entire bottle and throw in some Tylenol PM for good measure. That’ll work.
She pulls herself up and out of the bathtub. After pushing down and twisting the prescription bottle open, she turns on the faucet. Then she finally gives in to the magnetic pull of the mirror facing her. She had resisted it until now, knowing her face, however exhausted, haggard or gaunt, would betray her fear.
Look at me. Jesus. Who is this looking back at me?
She looks back down to the running water.
Thirty-five years of living, thirty-five years packed with classes she excelled in, jobs she succeeded at…Isabel’s thirty-five years all boiled down to one moment, an image she pulled out and focused her inner eye on whenever she despaired.
In the image is five-year-old Isabel, pretty and shy, quietly curled up on the floor alongside the family dog, a huge Saint Bernard named Violet. The two slept together almost every night, the enormously fat Violet providing enough body heat to warm the tiny child nestled against her. Isabel’s parents took many photographs of this scene, but it is Isabel’s own recollection she relies on in times of confusion. When she needs to feel comforted, to feel safe. Lately the image was becoming mentally frayed with overuse.
Thinking of the warmth of Violet’s belly, the steadiness of her breathing, the softness of her thick coat, Isabel is once again momentarily transported away from her pain.
How did that little girl end up alone and desperate in a cold New York City bathroom trying to decide whether to slash her wrists or swallow a fistful of pills?
What else is there? What else can I do?
Three
Isabel gingerly touches her upper chest and winces at the pain. Her throat feels sore from the plastic tubing, her stomach raw from being angrily pumped the day before.
“Hi.” Isabel’s mother, Katherine, is waiting on the sidewalk in front of the freshly washed SUV.
She holds out her arms for a hug that Isabel returns perfunctorily. Isabel studiously avoids meeting her mother’s eyes.
“Let’s go” is all she says as she climbs up into the black Range Rover.
“I’ve got the directions, so we’re all set,” Katherine says, trying to fill the awkward silence that descends once both are buckled inside. “You don’t have to worry about a thing.” She pulls into busy Manhattan traffic.
Isabel stares out the window, watching her apartment building disappear into the distance.
“Do you want to listen to the radio?”
“Huh?”
“The radio. Do you want it on or off?”
“I don’t care.” Isabel never breaks her numb stare. She is fighting to keep her eyes open.
“What’s that station you always used to listen to?” her mother asks. “You know the one. You and your brother used to call in all the time.”
“Mom.” Isabel turns her weary head. “I just got released from the emergency room. I’m exhausted. I don’t care if the radio is on. Put it on if you want to. I don’t care.”
“Watch your tone, Isabel,” her mother warns. “I’m your mother and I’m just trying to make conversation.”
“Do we have to have a conversation right now?”
“Your father and I don’t know why you didn’t call us last night. We could have talked to you, cheered you up. You’re always giving up so easily.”
“So even in this I didn’t do the right thing? The thing you and Dad would have wanted? Sorry to disappoint you once again, Mother.”
“Well, I don’t understand why you always give up. Like ballet, for instance. Whatever happened with that? I’ll tell you what happened with that—you weren’t any good so you dropped it. Instead of sticking it out you dropped it.”
“Thanks, Mom. This is making me feel so much better.”
“And then there was volleyball…you couldn’t get that ball over the net no matter what you tried…so what’d you do?”
“Mom.”
“You dropped it. I’m sorry, Isabel, but someone has to help you see the truth here. Maybe it’s tough love….”
Isabel closed her eyes, her mother’s familiar lecture a sad lullaby for the rest of the ride up the interstate.
* * *
There is no sign for Three Breezes, just a discreet number expensively etched into the low stone pillars flanking the wooded driveway. Katherine slows as she makes the turn, anticipating the speed bump just inside the entrance. While they ease over it, Isabel catches sight of a groundskeeper raking a few errant leaves underneath a magnolia tree. As their car passes, he glances up and ever so slightly tips his head to Isabel. She looks away.
Everything is in slow motion.
Within forty-five minutes her belongings are spread out on the floor of the nurses’ station. Everything she has brought with her to Three Breezes is out of her suitcase and on display for all to see. Her underwear, her raincoat, her nail clippers, needlepoint, tweezers. Everything.
What the hell is going on?
“You don’t have to stay here while we do this, Isabel.” The nurse is sitting cross-legged on the floor among Isabel’s things, Isabel’s own hairdryer in the nurse’s lap. “We explained to you when you checked in that everyone’s suitcase has to be inspected. It’s nothing personal. Some people find it easier to let us do this and then we bring them the things they’re allowed.”
“What do you mean allowed?”
“It’s for your own protection,” the nurse answers. “We just go through here and take anything that might be dangerous and we set it aside. After the inspection, we take all the things we set aside and we put them into a bin marked with your very own name on it….”
Why the hell is she talking down to me as if I’m in kindergarten? Can’t she see I’m nothing like the people here?
“…that bin then goes into the sharps closet,” the nurse continues, “and any time you need to use something from your bin you just need to come find one of us and we’ll help you out. You might find it easier, though, to let us do this by ourselves.”
The hell I’m leaving when she’s going through my stuff. Why is my hairdryer going into that pile with my pack of Lady Bic razors? I understand the razors—I’m not a complete idiot—but what’m I going to do…blow-dry myself to death? My needlepoint, too?
“Why are you taking my needlepoint?” Isabel asks through gritted teeth. “I’m making a pillow for my niece.” She doesn’t care what the needlepoint is for…why did I say that?
“It has a needle?” the nurse answers in up-speak. “You can work on it only if you’re supervised.”
Even the Oil of Olay moisturizer is confiscated. “It’s in a glass jar?” Up-speak again. Before Katherine can regain her own composure, Isabel catches her mother’s mouth gaping open—mirroring the horror Isabel feels closing in on her, suffocating her.
Her Hammacher Schlemmer sound machine is set in the “no” pile.
“Okay, that’s it. This is ridiculous.” Isabel feels the fury beginning to unleash. “Give me back my sound machine. It’s not sharp. It’s not dangerous.”
“Um, well, we need to run a test on it.”
“My ass you’re going to run a test on it.” Isabel’s voice is an octave higher than usual. Katherine puts a hand on her shoulder.
“Get your hand off my shoulder, Mom.” Isabel whips around to face her mother. “I know what that’s code for. That’s code for Shut up, Isabel. Mind your manners, Isabel.”
Katherine withdraws her hand quickly and takes a step back.
Astonished, Isabel asks, “What, Mom? You think I’m going to hurt you?”
Katherine, with eyebrows stretched across her forehead in mock fear, addresses her reply more to the nurse than to her daughter. “I just don’t know you anymore, Isabel. How do I know what you’re going to do next?”
Oh, this is rich. This is just perfect. Now she’s making them think I’m dangerous.
“What I’m trying to say, Isabel—” the nurse goes from friendly to firm “—is that we simply run a quick electrical test on it and we’ll return it to you by tonight. Tomorrow at the latest.”
I can’t take this. I can’t take this…
Isabel steadies herself in the doorway.
“We’ll get it right back to you.”
It’s not just the sound machine, you idiot. It’s everything. It’s this whole place. It’s this whole snake pit.
Isabel slides down the door frame, collapsing into a heap at the base of the doorway.
“All right, that’s enough, young lady.” Katherine is standing over her crumpled daughter. “Let’s go outside for a minute.”
“Ma’am?” It’s the inspection nurse again. “Um, she can’t go outside the unit anymore? She doesn’t have her privileges? She has to stay inside at all times.”
Isabel is stunned. The tears that had just begun to flow stop immediately.
“What?” She stares directly at the nurse, the fog that had enveloped her briefly dissipating.
“Um, you have checked in so you cannot go outside. Your caseworker will be here any minute to explain all this to you,” the nurse says as she returns to her inspection.
“Mom?” Isabel’s breathing becomes shallow as she reaches for her mother and tries to stand up at the same time.
“Yes?”
“Let’s go,” Isabel says simply. “Let’s get out of here. Do you have the car keys?” Katherine looks from her daughter to the nurse, unsure of what to do.
Another nurse, who until then had been sorting through files, turns to Isabel.
“All right, hon.” Her voice is craggy but gentle. Her tone betrays a hint of resignation, as if she has seen a thousand Isabels come and go. “Let’s go sit down for a second.” She tries to lead Isabel into the single room she has been assigned. Isabel pulls her arm away and focuses on her mother.
“Mom? The car keys?” Her stare is intense. Her lips are pursed and her throat is trying to choke back vomit. She sees, for the first time, that she is here to stay. Her mother is not even reaching into her cavernous bag to hunt for the keys.
Oh, my God. Why isn’t Mom doing anything? Why is she looking at me like that?
“Mom? Mom? Please, Mom. Please take me home.” Isabel is crying again as the nurse helps Katherine lead Isabel to her stark room with an ominous stain on the industrial wall-to-wall carpeting. “No. No, Mom. I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want to come here, Mom. Seriously, I’ve changed my mind. Mom, do you hear me? Mom?”
When she sees that yelling is not advancing her case, Isabel begins to beg.
“Mom! Please, Mom…”
Isabel sees the same mix of dread, shock and disgust on her mother’s face she had seen two nights before in Manhattan. On that night Isabel had announced to her parents that she had decided to follow her doctor’s advice and was checking into a psychiatric facility in upstate New York, “before they check me in involuntarily.”
“Just give it twenty-four hours, Isabel,” the nurse is saying as she guides Isabel to the bed by the elbow. “Just twenty-four hours.”
* * *
As she tries to unscrew the cap of her water bottle, she frantically scans the room and sees she is surrounded by the dregs of society. Losers, both literally and figuratively. Literally because they lost the battle to end their lives. Figuratively because, collectively, they look like the rejects from a One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest casting call.
Isabel’s hands are shaking so badly she gives up the thought of hydration. Her pupils are so dilated by fear her green eyes appear black.
Across the room a woman with short, thick jet-black hair is staring at her. Slowly, still staring at Isabel, the woman brings her own bottle of water to her lips and sucks, like an infant, through the sport spout.
Jesus. Where am I? What is this place?
Isabel shrinks into herself when, moments later, a large man stumbles into the room. The only free seat is next to her. He lumbers toward it and loudly exhales as he squeezes into one of the mismatched Naugahyde armchairs. His fat pasty-white thighs begin to melt uncomfortably into the chair. The hot weather has intensified his body odor and the only thing separating Isabel from the man’s stinky armpits is a useless polyester mesh jersey that adds a gamey scent to the sweaty giant.
“I know exactly what I’m gonna talk about today,” he gleefully declares to his miserable neighbor. He resembles a puppy with huge paws and baby fat that he hasn’t yet grown into. He appears to have the mentality of a six-year-old.
Isabel continues to stare straight ahead, knowing that looking at him will only encourage his conversation. She is willing the day to be over, willing the clock to tick faster.
This is a nightmare.
“Barbecued chicken wings!” shouts the smelly man-child. She thinks he meant to whisper to her, but he is too excited to regale the group with this topic that he forgets to adjust the volume and instead loudly blurts it out. It doesn’t seem to bother him that Isabel is pointedly ignoring him.
These people are freaks and this is a nightmare.
“Shhh,” everyone in the bedraggled group hisses. Everyone but the black-haired sport-spout girl, who is laughing disproportionately hard at the outburst. And another, younger woman with long, stringy hair, who is staring off into space. Two people over on Isabel’s left sits an older woman in restraints because, the smelly man loudly whispers to Isabel, “Yesterday she tried to hit the group leader when he asked her what she was thinking.”
Isabel takes it all in, frozen in her sleek black gabardine slacks and Barney’s New York black T-shirt, her arms tightly wrapped across her chest in an invisible strait-jacket, her legs tensely crossed, her thick blond hair dried out and brittle.
How the hell did I end up here?
* * *
Hours later, Isabel has not changed out of her clothes and is lying on her back, wide awake, her purse still on her shoulder so that if tipped upright, she could walk straight out. Through the cinder-block walls, Isabel hears something slamming into the wall and strains to identify the sound.
Slam!
After five more minutes trying to block it out, Isabel sits up. With her heart beating rapidly, she inches off the bed, which is several inches higher than a normal one, so, upon sliding off, she is startled when it takes her feet longer to find the floor. After waiting a few seconds she swallows hard and takes a few steps to the doorway, following the crack of light beaming from its edges. The hallway is deserted. She waits while her eyes adjust to the bright overhead lights. The sharp sounds next door echo her panic and amplify her fear.
She moves silently toward the sound, her body pressed up against the painted concrete wall like a cat burglar. Again she swallows hard. Her heartbeat is now pulsing in her ears. She jumps when she hears something crash to the floor several feet away from her around the corner.
Maybe I should go back to my room. This is stupid. I’m going back to my room.
After several seconds of silence, Isabel peeks around the corner and in through the doorway of the adjacent room.
Inside, the dark-haired sport-spout woman is a blur of activity ripping apart her room. Drawers are pulled out, sheets untucked, closet emptied. Every twenty seconds or so the woman kicks the wall.
Just as Isabel is about to turn and creep back to her room the woman whips around and sees her.
“Are you spying on me?” she asks, her eyes darting from side to side. “What do you want?”
“Huh?” Caught off guard, Isabel panics. “Um, want help or something?”
Goddammit, why did I just offer to help? I don’t want to help her…she’s crazy.
The woman has already turned away and is dumping the contents of her purse onto the floor in the middle of her bright room. “My name’s Melanie,” she says breathlessly.
Isabel backs up and looks up and down the hallway.
Shouldn’t an orderly be in here calming her down? Doesn’t anyone else hear all this noise she’s making? Hel-lo? Nurse Ratched? Anyone?
“Hey?” Melanie shouts. “You helping me or what?”
“Uh, okay.” Isabel cautiously kneels down just inside the doorway and, not knowing where else to begin, delicately picks up Melanie’s lipstick.
Get me out of here….
“What’re you looking for, anyway?”
Melanie breaks into a sob. Her hair is angrily pulled away from her face with a simple barrette. Her pajamas are splashed with primary colors, exaggerating the sense of chaos. Melanie must have been told she’s arty and eccentric and then capitalized on the compliment.
“My beaded bracelet,” Melanie answers in an annoyed tone that suggests Isabel should have known the object of the search. “I made it in art the other day and now I can’t find it.” More sobbing.
Isabel looks up to see someone else joining in the hunt.
“Hi. I’m Kristen.” The woman cheerfully introduces herself to Isabel as though she’s in a sorority meeting. “What’s up, Mel? Want help?”
Isabel is still holding the lipstick. “Okay, well…I’m going to go now,” she says to no one in particular.
The night nurse comes barreling through the door with her flashlight even though the lights in the room are on. Her nameplate reads “Connie.”
She is the nurse who just hours before talked Isabel into staying at Three Breezes for at least one day. Isabel takes a closer look at her. Connie’s face is wizened from years of sunbathing. Her voice is raspy from years of smoking.
Finally! Somebody cart this woman off to solitary confinement.
Instead, Connie casually plops down on the floor and helps look for the bracelet. Melanie starts shaking. Her whole head vibrates and she starts hyperventilating. No one can calm her down. She’s talking so fast even she is tripping over the words and thoughts pouring out of her mouth.
“She’s only two months old. Elwin is never gonna deal with me,” Melanie chokes in between breaths, “he’s put up with so much. I have the baby. I get the postpartum thing and stop taking my meds and now he’s taking care of her all by himself. Of course he’s got his parents. They love this. They love the fact that they were right about me. I’m not good enough for their son. I hope he remembered to get the lamb-and-rice dog food. Coco hates the beef flavor. When I was little I used to love running through sprinklers. Wasn’t that fun?”
This is unreal. If I saw this in a movie I’d think it was heavy-handed.
Connie pulls Melanie up and takes her over to the nurses’ station to give her a sedative. Kristen and Isabel remain on the floor, Kristen still searching for Melanie’s bracelet, Isabel listening to Melanie’s disturbing chatter echo from down the hall.
Isabel steals a glance at Kristen’s right arm, bandaged because, as Isabel will later find out, her obsessive-compulsive disorder leaves her clawing at her skin until it starts to bleed. Perhaps sensing Isabel’s stare her hand flutters to this spot and quickly withdraws. There is an awkward silence between them.
Isabel looks back down at the floor.
How do I extricate myself from this one?
Melanie returns just as Kristen spots a cigar box and opens it. Voila! Among some pictures and letters is the bracelet. Melanie grabs it and shrieks with happiness.
“Good night, everyone,” she says as she crawls into bed, the shot Connie gave her a few minutes ago taking hold of her tiny, troubled frame. “Thanks for helping.”
When no one moves she adds, “That’s all I have to say.”
Kristen and Isabel file out and head back to their respective rooms. The bed crinkles as Isabel climbs up into it: instead of soft mattress covers there are thick sheets of plastic under the paper-thin sheets in the unlikely event someone becomes incontinent on top of everything else.
Every fifteen minutes the door opens and a flashlight shines in Isabel’s face. Directly into her face. So even if she manages to fall into a light sleep the beam wakes her up just enough to toss and turn all night. Isabel is on suicide watch. The flashlight checks are a status symbol. Everybody seems to know who’s got checks every fifteen minutes and who has the more desirable thirty-minute variety. Isabel wouldn’t have known this except that Kristen asked her point-blank about her checks while they were on Melanie’s bizarre scavenger hunt. When Isabel told Kristen that the nurse checked on her every fifteen minutes Kristen looked relieved. Kristen had been at Three Breezes for some time now, but she was still, apparently, a “fifteener.”
Four
The ant is neatly marching along the mortar line on the cement block wall alongside her bed. To Isabel, it appears he is as frantic as she is to leave the hospital. She tugs once more at the lower lip of the window but it will not budge. Windows are nailed shut at Three Breezes. So instead of freeing the insect, Isabel, with miserable resignation, watches it make its way down the wall.
* * *
Isabel avoided anthills. In the spring- and summertime, when nature was busy reinventing itself, those telltale signs of ant industry—miniscule pyramids of dirt—multiplied in cracks of buckled pavement, between bricks and along fence posts, and Isabel always stepped around them. She had ever since she was a small girl growing up in Connecticut.
Her brothers, on the other hand, went out of their way to step directly on them.
“Don’t!” she yelled at Owen, who was twisting his foot on top of the fourth of twelve anthills along their short front walk. Isabel ran over and pushed her seven-year-old brother away. Too late. Isabel imagined hundreds of suffocating ants under the cement gasping for air.
“I’m telling Mom if you do it again.” She was on her hands and knees frantically trying to clear a passageway so that the ants could find their way out of the rubble. Her nine-year-old mind realized this was futile so she grabbed a tiny stick to drill a hole into the ground so the ants could get some oxygen.
“I’m telling Mom if you do it again,” mimicked her brother. “You’re such a tattletale.”
He was right.
But Isabel didn’t think of it as telling on her brothers, she just couldn’t stand to see anything or anyone hurt. Even ants.
“What’s going on out here?” Isabel’s mother called through the top screen of the porch door.
“Nothing,” her brothers called out, disappearing into their fort in the backyard.
“Isabel? What’re you doing?” Katherine asked as she approached her hunched-over daughter.
Isabel was furiously drilling, pausing only to wipe her tears out of her eyes so that she could continue her rescue mission.
“Is it the anthills again?”
“I don’t understand why they do this,” Isabel cried as she squatted over the fifth flattened mound. “There’re families under here. Whole families. And they’re dying!”
“Oh, for God’s sake. This is ridiculous. Look at me for a second.”
Isabel obeyed as she wiped her nose on her sleeve.
“They’re going to be okay, the ants. We’ve been over this. They like to burrow out. They’ll be okay.”
Isabel looked back down. No ants were crawling out of her manmade holes. She looked back up at her mother.
“You’ve got to let it go. You think this is sad? Wait’ll life kicks you in the rear a few times. No one’s out there drilling holes for all of us, you know. Now, come on inside. Help me sort the Girl Scout cookie orders.”
As she stood up to go, Isabel looked back at her doomed friends. But she swallowed her tears and forged ahead.
* * *
As her childhood advanced, Isabel’s empathy for creatures of all shapes and sizes morphed into a sadness that was difficult to shake. Sadness gave way to isolation. Isabel constantly felt as if she were on the outside looking in. As if she wasn’t quite a participant in everyday life, but a sleepwalker. While she maintained the polished front of an oldest, overachieving child, her true personality had yet to emerge, and that only added to the disconnected feeling she wore like a bulky shroud.
As Isabel floated numbly through elementary school, her physical appearance was taking a very definite shape. She began to hear over and over again that she was pretty, and soon, perhaps because she felt so empty, the compliments at least temporarily filled her up. Isabel began to crave the attention that was paid to her looks. No one wanted to hear about her sorrow, no one wanted to see her sad.
She was becoming an expert at reading people. She soon learned that humor got more results than anger or tears, that attention was paid to the attractive, and that people were inherently egotistical. Everybody likes to talk about themselves. So she honed her listening skills. Isabel was learning to survive by playing roles: the curvaceous beauty, the class clown, the intense listener. She was excellent at being whatever someone else wanted her to be.
* * *
“Isabel. What can I do for you?”
Isabel cleared her throat.
“Um. Mr. Clulow? Um, I was wondering if I could have another chance.”
The high school drama teacher slightly cocked his head to the side. “Another chance.” It was a statement, not a question.
“Yeah. I mean, yes. I know I froze up there last week. I totally froze. I blew it. I just wasn’t prepared. For improv. But I’m ready now. I can do it. I’ll act out anything you want me to act out. If you’d just give me one more chance.”
Mr. Clulow looked down at the papers on his desk. Then he looked back up at Isabel.
“Why do you want to join the drama club, Isabel? What is it that’s drawing you to drama?”
“Drawing me?”
“Yes. You see, some people feel it’s the perfect way to tap into their creative side. Others find it’s the perfect form of self-expression. I’m just wondering what’s driving you.”
Isabel looked down. Without looking back up she answered.
“I guess it’s that…well, I suppose I just like the idea of being someone else,” she mumbled.
Mr. Clulow raised his eyebrows as if he’d caught her in a trap.
“So you don’t like to be yourself?”
“No!” she said, too loudly. “I mean, I do. What I really mean is that…” She stammered, aware that he was prepared to pick apart her next sentence. “It’s…um…”
“Miss Murphy,” the teacher scolded, “I have a class to teach in five minutes. I suggest you get to the bottom of what it is you would like to say.”
“Please. Just give me another chance to try out. Please?”
He tapped his pencil impatiently and looked out the window.
“Hmm.”
“Please?”
“All right. One more chance. But this is hardly fair. I don’t do this for other students who buckle under pressure. If you get embarrassed in an audition, how on earth will you be able to act on stage in front of hundreds of people? Don’t…answer. It’s a rhetorical question, Miss Murphy. Tomorrow after school meet me in the gym and we will try it one more time.”
“Thank you! Oh, thank you so much, Mr. Clulow,” she said, backing out of his tiny office.
* * *
It was eight o’clock on a school night and Isabel’s mother was furious.
“I thought rehearsals were never more than two hours after school.”
“Mom, we’ve got a play coming up and no one knows their lines yet. We had to stay late. Mr. Clulow said—”
“Mr. Clulow said. Mr. Clulow said. That’s all I ever hear—Mr. Clulow said this, Mr. Clulow said that. Well, Mr. Clulow said rehearsals wouldn’t take time away from homework assignments on school nights!”
“I don’t have that much work tonight. I have history and English and that’s it.”
“No math? No science?”
“No. And for English all I have to do is read one chapter and I can do that in fifteen minutes.”
“Your father’s home and he hasn’t seen you in a week. You missed dinner and he’s got a conference call at nine, so I don’t know when you two will have a chance to visit.”
“He’s coming to the play, right? Please tell me he’s not going to miss the play.”
“Of course he’s coming to the play.”
“It’s just…” she trailed off.
“What?”
“Nothing. It’s nothing.”
“What were you going to say? I hate it when you do that.”
“Nothing! Seriously. I forgot what I was going to say. He’s just…like…he’s just never here.”
“Don’t be silly, Isabel,” her mother said sharply. “Your father has to work, you know. He loves you, but his job—”
“I know, I know. His job calls for a lot of travel. I’ve been hearing that since I was born. I get it.”
“But he tries.”
“But he tries,” said Isabel.
Five
“Fuck! Fuck, fuck, fuck!”
Isabel slowly follows the sounds of the shrieks, unsure whether she wants to find out who or what is behind them.
“Get your hands offa me, you motherfucker!”
Through the front window of the unit, Isabel watches as two aides try to pin down a young, wiry newcomer. Just as they seem to get her under control enough to slip her lanky frame into restraints, she lets out a piercing scream.
“I’m gonna fuckin’ kill you! You hear me? I’m gonna kill you.”
Because she is young-looking and breakably thin, it startles Isabel to hear this come from the girl’s mouth.
The restraints are finally in place. The new girl is sapped of all her angry energy and is sobbing on the ground, her head twisted to the side, her face shiny with sweat.
Isabel looks down the winding driveway and, as the black girl is hauled past by two hospital aides, stares at her only way out.
I’ll walk down the driveway, wait for a truck and step in front of it.
The thought calms Isabel. It soothes her to plan her fatal escape.
First I’ve got to get privileges.
* * *
Kristen, the girl Isabel had met the night before, chirps “good morning” and walks past Isabel out the door of the unit. Isabel watches Kristen’s hand shake as she attempts to light her cigarette from a box on the wall that contains what appears to be something resembling a car lighter. Matches and lighters are confiscated on arrival.
The blubbery man she sat next to the day before lumbers past and joins Kristen just outside the door to the unit. Isabel turns her head and hopes her ear can bionically pick up their conversation through the pane of glass. It’s so riddled with greasy fingerprints that Isabel is careful to keep at least one inch of space between herself and the disgusting barrier.
“What’s up with that new girl?” Kristen asks him. “Did you see her yesterday?”
It’s disconcerting for everyone on the unit to see someone in restraints. In the jacket. To hear someone resist. The new girl will provide conversation material for the entire day: Did you hear the new girl this morning? Did you see how long it took the orderlies to get the jacket on her?
“Her name’s Keisha,” the giant tells Kristen in a conspiratorial voice. “She was gang-raped.”
“She was gang-raped?” Kristen repeats it slowly, as if it’s a spelling bee and she has to use the vocabulary word in a sentence.
“Yeah,” he answers, pleased to have Kristen’s undivided attention. Isabel, inside the unit but off to the side where they can’t see her, feels her head butt up against the slimy window. “She was raped for four hours or something. And she was baby-sitting her nephew or something, and the guys? They killed the kid. They killed her nephew she was sitting for. Then they took off. She lost it. Completely fucking lost it. They found her wandering in the middle of the street.”
Isabel jumps when the quiet is broken by a voice coming from behind her: “Asshole don’t know what he’s talkin’ about.”
“Oh, my God.” Isabel steps back. “You scared me!”
Keisha calmly turns her eyes from Kristen and Ben through the window to Isabel right in front of her.
Keisha could be the poster child for the inner city. She looks about fourteen, with long, skinny limbs and a head full of short nappy dreadlocks. Her entire outfit consists of sportswear: Air Jordans, five years old but pristine, nylon Adidas sweatpants that would make a swish sound if her lanky legs ever rubbed together, which they don’t, and a hooded sweatshirt about four sizes too big. It’s her uniform. She takes a long time to look as if she hasn’t taken any time at all.
“Listen to them goin’ on and on like they know.” Keisha juts her chin in the direction of the smoker’s deck, Kristen and Ben.
Isabel knows Keisha wants to be asked about herself but cannot summon the energy it would take to enter into any conversation, much less this one. She turns and looks out the window and hopes nothing will be required of her in what is threatening to be a social interaction.
“That ain’t it!” Keisha says to the window, after hearing another fragment of Ben’s prattle. “Okay, you want to know what happened?” She is addressing Isabel.
Did I say I wanted to know what happened?
But Isabel is finding herself begrudgingly drawn to the edgy teenager.
“I wasn’t walkin’ in the street, first of all,” Keisha begins without encouragement. “The police came and got me from my sister’s place when neighbors called 911. Hours, my ass. It wasn’t no hours passed. A few minutes, sure. Maybe, and this I’m not sure about, but maybe half an hour. But no hours, Lord. They talkin’ shit out there,” she says, again motioning with her chin to the gossiping patients outdoors.
“Wow,” Kristen says, exhaling smoke and looking down. “Hey, Ben? How do you know all this?”
“You think I’m a freak, Kristen.” Ben pouts. “You think you’re the only one who’s got a clue. You’re not, you know. I know stuff, too.”
Isabel looks over her shoulder and past Keisha toward the nurses’ station to see if anyone cares that they are eavesdropping.
“Ben,” Kristen says, trying to soothe him. “We’re buddies, right? It’s just…well…I’m a little surprised that you know all about this girl. I just want to know what you know, sweetie.”
Isabel marvels at the fact that both Ben and Kristen are missing the point. She looks longingly at the driveway.
“You teasin’ me now, Kristen? Huh? You a fuckin’ tease now?” Ben is getting red in the face. He stomps toward the door to the unit and Isabel busies herself with the old National Geographics stacked on a corner table next to the window in case he is headed her way.
Kristen throws what little is left of her cigarette to the ground and steps on it just as a nurse with a clipboard brushes past Isabel and opens the door to the outside.
“Hi, Kristen,” she says, making a mark on her notepaper. “Just doing the check.”
Kristen smiles and shakes out another cigarette. “Hi.”
The nurse lets the door close and sees Isabel and Keisha. More marks on the clipboard.
“Hi, ladies. I’m just making the rounds.”
Isabel and Keisha turn their attention back out to Kristen, who is now talking towards Melanie.
“He said her name’s Keisha,” she is telling Melanie, “and she was raped for hours and hours and hours. They found her naked in the street. The police. That’s how she ended up here. I guess she was on some kind of suicide watch….”
“See you later,” Isabel says as she slips past Keisha, who is emphatically shaking her head. As Isabel crosses the room Keisha mutters, “Bitch don’t know what she talkin’ about.”
A few minutes later Isabel is willing sleep to visit her in the little airtight room at the end of the hall.
Six
“Erin Hayes has exhausted all her appeals and now waits for a last-minute reprieve from the Texas governor. Her legal team is not optimistic, given the state’s well-known record on stays of execution. Crowds have already begun to gather here outside the state penitentiary in Huntsville. Some will hold candlelight vigils, others say they’ll cheer if and when Hayes goes to the electric chair.”
—Isabel Murphy, ANN News, Huntsville, Texas.
An overripe banana was the only health food in the Huntsville 7-Eleven. Isabel picked it up, felt the oblong bruise running along its backside and wondered if she could make herself eat around it.
“Is that it?” the cashier asked.
“Yes,” Isabel replied while putting the brown banana back into the basket by the register. “That’s it.”
“Three seventy-eight.”
Isabel picked through her change purse for quarters but remembered she’d used all of them for laundry. “Cigarettes sure are cheap here.”
“Where you from?” the cashier asked politely, though Isabel thought she saw a bit of a sneer.
“New York.”
The cashier smiled as if she’d won a bet and made change from the five-dollar bill. “Have a nice day.”
“Thanks,” said Isabel, shaking her Snapple. “By the way, could you tell me how far to the Motel 6?”
“It’s about four miles from the prison gates. Two stop lights.” She was already ringing up the next customer.
Before getting back into the rental car Isabel popped the safety seal on the Snapple and took a long swig. She balanced the glass bottle on the roof of the car while she opened her Marlboro Lights, turning her back to the highway to block the wind from passing trucks. After several failed attempts, she finally managed to light her first cigarette of the day.
Breakfast.
“This is one remote outpost,” Tom said, barreling out of the 7-Eleven, his camera equipment rattling against his back. “How does a 7-Eleven not have a Slurpee machine?”
“I think the better question is, Who wants a Slurpee at 6:00 a.m.?”
“Says the girl with the Snapple and cigarettes.”
“At least I’ve gotten my fruit in.”
“Ex-squeeze me?”
“It’s raspberry iced tea Snapple. And raspberries are a super food. High in vitamin C. Or maybe it’s A. Vitamin A. I’m pretty sure it’s A.”
“Guess you should be a personal trainer instead of a reporter. You’re one healthy chick.”
“Says the guy choking down a ninety-nine-cent heart attack. I’m guessing there’s some sort of sausage ingredient in it, judging by the hieroglyphic grease markings on that waxed paper.”
“That’s affirmative. Sausage-cheese biscuit,” Tom said with a full mouth. “Want a bite?”
Tom lowered himself into the car and Isabel stepped on her cigarette and got back behind the wheel.
“Tom?” Her tone serious.
“Isabel?” His tone joking.
“Seriously. About last night.” She shifted uncomfortably.
“Forget it.”
“No, I want to say this.” Isabel cleared her throat. “I drank way too much. I know that. I just…I mean…I just really…oh, God.”
“Hey. Colonel. It’s me.”
“I know, I know. It’s just that my life is going way too fast. And then I feel this pressure thing up here at my temples and I see spots and I go blank. It’s like I’m spiraling or something. Do you ever feel that way? Don’t you ever want to slow it all down so you can think, really think for a minute? I never mean to get out of control like that. I don’t plan it. God, listen to me. I just want you to know that I’m really grateful to you for taking such good care of me. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
“There’d be no one for the bartender to call to carry your ass home, that’s what you’d do without me.”
Isabel winced with the memory.
“I’ve been there, believe me,” Tom said. “I’m no one to talk. But you gotta be more careful, Iz. A woman passing out in a bar isn’t exactly cool, you know?”
“I know, I know.” Isabel knew she was sounding defensive. “I’m just going through a phase.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. You say that every time.”
I do?
“This phase of yours is gettin’ old and dangerous, know what I’m saying?”
Isabel looked as if she’d been slapped.
“Hey, listen.” Tom softened. “What goes on in the field stays in the field. Copy that? You read me? I’ll always cover you.”
Several minutes later Isabel looked at Tom.
“Hey, Tommy, the nineties called. They want all Wayne’s World references back.”
“Huh?”
“I haven’t heard ‘ex-squeeze me’ in years.”
“Very funny. Let’s go, huh? I want some fries to go with my biscuit. Get it? Fries? Execution? Get it?”
Five minutes later reporter and photographer were inching their car back into the prison parking lot jammed with news vans and satellite dishes smiling up at the sun. Overworked generators crowded parking spaces alongside the trucks. Worried producers scurried into and out of their makeshift offices while reporters scribbled on notepads and talked to whomever was speaking in their ears.
“How long till the magic hour?” Tom asked.
“Six hours. Long enough. Why? You in a hurry to get to the hotel?”
“Motel 6? That’s a negative.”
Seven hours later she collapsed on the top of the natty motel bedspread, too exhausted to undress.
* * *
Beep, beep.
“Mom, wait up!” Isabel called out from across the congested street. “Dad? Wait for me!”
Beep, beep. The cars demanded attention. Beep, beep.
Isabel’s parents glanced over their shoulders at their daughter, who was waving frantically from nearly a block away. Unfazed, they kept walking.
Why aren’t they listening to me?
Beep, beep.
“Mom!” Isabel was now shouting to them. “Dad!”
Beep, beep.
The honking was so close her head snapped from the parental dots in the distance to the car speeding directly toward her. Isabel’s eyes widened in fear but her body was immobilized. Swerving, the car was feet away and showing no signs of stopping.
Ten feet. Beep, beep. Eight feet. Beep, beep. Two feet.
She shrieked and bolted upright in bed. It took Isabel a few moments to realize it had all been a nightmare. She put her hand over her heart as if she could stroke the beat back down.
Beep, beep.
Startled again she looked over at the hotel night table and saw that the insistent car horn of her dream was the deceivingly harmless-looking tiny black pager.
She reached for it and instantly recognized the number screaming at her through the neon green glow of the LCD display. She picked up the phone and dialed.
“Hi, it’s Isabel returning my page.” She tried not to sound as panicked as she felt.
“We’ve been calling you but your ringer must be off,” Rob, the assignment editor, said.
“Oh, God.” Isabel remembered turning it off when she came in hours earlier. “I haven’t slept in three days and I wanted to get a—”
“We do need to be able to get a hold of you as quickly as possible,” Rob scolded. “We need you to get to Atlanta as quickly as possible. Can you call the airlines and call me back to let me know what flight you’re on? You don’t have a fax, right, so I’ll fax wire copy to the Avis counter at the airport in Atlanta. That’s the only way I can think to get you this stuff without holding you up.”
Rob paused as though he were trying to come up with a better solution.
“What’s the story?” Though she was fairly new at the network, Isabel was almost certain it wasn’t asking too much to inquire after the subject of the trip.
“Oh, geez,” Rob sighed. “I’ve been burning it on both ends tonight. Sorry. Um, we’ve gotten a heads-up that we could get a verdict in that police brutality case first thing in the morning. We want you in place so we’re covered if it comes down.”
“Okay. I’ll call the airlines and let you know.”
It would be only a matter of months until the excitement and intrigue Isabel felt upon hanging up the phone this night shifted into a howling bitterness, an exhausted dread that slowly ate away at her until she was nothing but a hollow shell mechanically moving through her formerly full life.
* * *
“Isabel! Time to meet!” The rapping on the door, coupled with the shrill announcement, cause her stomach to twist with dread.
Seven
“I love chicken wings,” says Ben, looking quite earnest. “Any kind, but in particular I love the barbecued ones at Bobby D’s near where I live.” Ben does not seem to care that there is a huge smudge of a chocolate-like substance in the middle of the right side of his thick glasses. He is wearing baggy camouflage pants and another tank top that barely covers his wiry chest hair. “If I could take you to Bobby D’s you’d see what I mean.” Ben is staring so intently at Isabel she cannot make eye contact with him without feeling uncomfortable. Her eyes dart alternately from his wide face to her lap.
This is hell. I’m in hell.
“Thirty seconds are up,” the nameless nurse excitedly announces. “Everyone on the B team get up and move to the right and sit with a new A partner. Remember, the A group stays put and lets the B group shift partners around the room so by the end of the exercise we’ll all have had the chance to visit with one another.”
Isabel seethes.
They explained the concept of this asinine group exercise four minutes ago. Is everybody so zoned out on tranquilizers they’ll forget what we’re doing here in four fucking minutes?
“The new topic is pets. Remember, no interruptions from your partner. Go!” The group leader seems orgasmic.
Ben lumbers away and a sad-looking woman named Lark lowers herself into his place. Lark is a forty-something woman who, because she always looks as if she’s one sentence away from bursting into tears, seems much older. She is too young for osteoporosis but she seems to know its calling cards: she hunches over and looks brittle, like if you hugged her too hard she’d break.
Pets. Hmm. Buck. And my little kittens.
Isabel’s mind is a slide show of the pets she shared with Alex.
You disgust me.
Stop it. Just stop.
Isabel is concentrating so hard on quieting the voices she is not able to explain that she has lost custody of her two cats and dog to her soon-to-be ex-husband. The group leader tells them to shift partners again.
Great. I now know that Ben loves Southern barbecue and that I never miss the chance to cry in public.
Lark looks straight at Isabel before she gets up to continue on. As Isabel blows her nose she realizes Lark is looking straight through her and as she stares, a single tear falls down her bloated face. After a moment and with considerable effort, Lark silently hoists herself out of the chair, making room for Isabel’s next partner.
“We haven’t met yet.” The woman who on Isabel’s first day had been in the jacket is smiling at her—extending her hand to be shaken. “I’m Regina.”
Isabel looks from Regina’s face to her hand and back to her face. Unfazed, Regina withdraws her hand and sits down across from Isabel.
“Fish.”
“Huh?”
“Fish.” Regina repeats the word and waits for it to make sense to Isabel.
“I don’t follow.”
“I have pet fish,” she says in a tone of exasperation. “They like to ride with me on my bike. Well, in the basket on my bike, actually. I keep a leash around their bowl just in case…”
Two weeks ago I was covering the Middle East peace summit at the White House. Two weeks ago.
“…people don’t stop at stop signs anymore so I say—you can’t be too careful. That leash gives me peace of mind, let me tell you.”
“Excuse me. Regina, is it?” Isabel asks. Regina nods her head, eager to hear her partner’s comments.
“Regina, I want to tell you something.”
Regina shimmies up to the edge of her seat.
“I don’t care about your fish,” Isabel says.
Not only do I not give a shit about your goldfish but I think you’re a freak. Everyone here is a freak—come to think of it. I don’t want to hear about everyone else’s pets or whether the barbecue sauce here can compare to some shithole in some godforsaken town in Minnesota or whether someone’s mother neglected them in early childhood—which, I’m sure, is a topic we’ll be covering in great depth in group therapy.
“I really don’t care about your fish,” she says again.
Regina stiffens in her seat.
Isabel continues. “I just want to get out of here, okay? I’m only here because I screwed up and didn’t take enough Tylenol PM—not because I want to talk about my childhood or my pets.”
Exhausted, Isabel sinks back into her chair and looks out the window.
Unfazed, Regina shuffles over to a free chair across the room.
“Sukanya, I notice you haven’t taken part in this exercise.” The nameless nurse is looking at a young woman with long, dirty hair who has remained silent in the corner of the room. “Can you tell us why you have decided not to participate?”
Isabel looks at Sukanya, who has been catatonic since she arrived at Three Breezes.
The only thing she has uttered, to Isabel’s morbid fascination, is “I’d prefer not to say.” And, right on cue, Sukanya fixes her stare on the overenthusiastic nurse and quietly repeats her mantra: “I’d prefer not to say.”
The nurse pauses for a second, clearly trying to decide whether to pursue Sukanya’s cryptic reply or cut her losses and proceed on with the group.
“Well, it looks like time is up for this session.” She directs her attention to the rest of the room. “You’ll gather here again in two hours for another group. That’s two hours, people.”
She definitely dots her i’s with smiley faces. And does that annoying sideways smiley face on her e-mails.
Everyone files out of the makeshift living room on the unit. Everyone except Sukanya. She stays in the same chair all day long. Group therapy sessions may come and go around her but she just sits there.
I wonder if there are such things as bed sores for people who sit. Chair sores.
Isabel, who has just learned that she can indeed go outside the unit for fifteen minutes at a time during breaks pushes the door open and lines up at the box lighter to smoke.
Kristen is already out there, sucking the air out of her cigarette as if her life depended on it.
Lark is there, too, even though she has been warned by her doctors not to smoke because she has extreme asthma.
“So what’s the deal with Sukanya,” Isabel asks Kristen as she inhales. Isabel and Kristen seem to recognize in each other an unspoken similarity, perhaps in background or in mentality. They look alike—both are thirty-something, career-types, and their social skills mirror each other’s. To Isabel, Kristen seems like someone she might have been friends with outside of Three Breezes, had the circumstances been different.
“I don’t know,” Kristen answers. “I can’t even imagine what must’ve happened to her. Or what’s wrong with her.”
“Does she ever have visitors?”
“I saw her parents once—at least I assume they’re her parents. They brought her Beanie Babies. Like twenty of them. They were all wrapped up in tissue—each one individually wrapped—in this beautiful gift bag, and it just sat on Sukanya’s lap until they opened each one for her. Like a baby or something. Then they oohed and aahed over each one like they’d never seen them before, like she would like them if she saw they liked them. I don’t know, it was weird. Sad.”
“What’d they look like—the parents?”
“Normal. Like you and me—or like our parents, I mean. You know,” Kristen replies in an insider tone.
Isabel knows exactly what Kristen means. She knows that clubby tone.
“I guess you could look at any of our parents and think they looked normal, though, right?” Kristen says. “My parents look totally cool. My mother’s a whack job but she looks normal.”
Kristen laughs nervously, afraid that she has crossed the line and has shared too much too soon.
I’m supposed to jump in here and save Kristen from feeling embarrassed. I know the drill. I can’t do it.
Isabel feels a wave of exhaustion that brings the social interaction to a screeching halt. She musters a smile and walks away, knowing Kristen is offended.
On her way past the living room, Isabel sees Keisha nodding her head to the beat of the music funneling into her ears from headphones the size of fluffy earmuffs.
With those headphones on she looks like a black Princess Leia.
Eight
Isabel and Kristen are sitting next to each other for the evening session. All the patients on the unit are seated in a circle and in the middle is an empty chair.
“What’s the deal with the chair?” Isabel whispers to Kristen, who is still wounded by Isabel’s snub earlier in the day.
“You’ll see,” she answers curtly. “He does this every once in a while.”
Isabel is smart enough to know that someone is going to have to sit in that chair in the middle and, whatever it entails, she does not want it to be her.
“My name is Larry,” a large man says after quietly closing the living room door. If Larry were a state he would be Vermont: earthy, self-sufficient, nonthreatening, easy to overlook. Almost entirely gray, his beard appears to be aging faster than the rest of him. His clothing is eclectic and, Isabel notes, hemp in spirit if not in reality.
“Because I see we have someone new in our evening session I want to start tonight by quickly going around the room. Let’s start to my right, here.”
Isabel’s heart races, knowing she will be second.
Oh, God, I hate these things.
“Um, I’m Kristen. I’m here for a lot of reasons. I’m bipolar and I have obsessive-compulsive disorder. Among other things.”
All eyes settle on the newcomer: “I’m Isabel,” she says, her voice an octave higher than usual.
“Why are you here, Isabel?” Larry prompts.
“I don’t know,” she says, feeling her blush deepen. “I mean, I guess I’m here because the doctors thought I should be here.”
Please move on to the next person.
“Well, welcome, Isabel,” Larry says. “You’ll get the hang of this pretty easily.”
“I’m Ben.” The giant can’t wait until it’s his turn. “I’m here because the judge ordered me to be here.”
“I’m Melanie. I’m manic. I mean manic-depressive. I mean, I’m bipolar.” She directs this to Isabel. “People aren’t quite used to the whole ‘bipolar’ diagnosis yet so I always start by telling people I’m manic-depressive. Which is really the same thing. People say ‘bipolar’ isn’t a proven diagnosis yet but, you know, it really is. Doctors know that but people, like the general public, I mean, don’t realize that yet. And that’s all I have to say about that.”
“Okay, Melanie,” Larry gently interrupts. “Thanks. Next?”
“I’m Lark.”
“Lark? Do you want to tell Isabel why you’re here?”
“No.”
“Okay, then.”
Larry politely waits for Sukanya to introduce herself. When it appears she is not going to speak he moves on. Leaning on the empty chair in the middle of the circle, he surveys the group, noting that Keisha is absent. He checks a small notepad and nods to himself.
How’d that girl Keisha get out of this?
As she realizes that her facial expression is mirroring her dread, Larry points directly at her.
They can always smell fear.
“Isabel,” Larry begins, “you’re new to the group so let me explain what we do here. The purpose of this meeting is to get more intensive work done. We set aside two hours for the session because we’ve found that extra time allows us the freedom to dig deeper.
“The chair here represents someone or something you would like to address. Maybe it’s someone you’re angry with. Maybe it’s something that has caused you pain or suffering. Only you can know what it means, this chair.”
Larry stops talking. He waits patiently for Isabel to begin.
“Um,” Isabel clears her throat. “I don’t know. I don’t have any anger,” she lies.
“You don’t?” Larry asks with mock incredulity. “No anger? That’s a bit unusual. Not to generalize, but most people wouldn’t exactly be here at Three Breezes if they had not experienced some form of anger. Hmm. Let’s see.” He consults a file that until then had been sitting on the table next to him.
“Isabel, why don’t you begin by telling the group why you took all those pills.”
Isabel feels like her cheeks are on fire. Her stomach is in her throat and her throat is rapidly closing up. She hears a rushing sound in her ears.
I can’t believe this man I’ve never met wants me to talk about this personal thing in front of these people. Plus, he looks like Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Isabel stares at Larry’s Birkenstocks.
“I don’t really feel like talking about that right now,” she manages to say, fighting to keep her voice from cracking as she chokes back her tears.
“When do you think would be an easier time to talk about it, do you think?” Isabel knows Larry is asking a rhetorical question.
“I get your point, okay? I get it,” she says. “It’s just that I don’t really feel angry at the moment and I don’t have much to say.”
Why can’t you just move on, you big hippie.
“I know it’s tempting to retreat when you first get here, Isabel.” Larry sounds kinder. “It’s just that in the beginning, when everything is still pretty raw, pretty fresh, it’s usually a good time to talk about emotions in general, anger in particular.”
“I don’t feel like talking,” Isabel repeats herself, adding a tone of warning. “Just go on to someone else.” She clenches her jaw.
“Isabel, what are you so angry about?”
Goddammit.
“Isabel?”
Goddammit.
“Right now I suppose I have anger toward you, Larry.” Isabel tries to mimic the group leader’s controlled tone of voice.
“Why me?” Larry asks, a sardonic look on his face.
“For starters, where do you get off reading something from my personal medical file to this entire group?”
“This is group therapy, Isabel,” Larry soothes. “That’s what we do here. We talk about the tough stuff in front of one another.”
Isabel swallows hard.
A moment later, giving in to her exhaustion she says, in a whisper, “I couldn’t do it anymore.”
“Couldn’t do what?” Larry softly urges her on.
“I was on one of those Habitrail wheels they have in gerbil’s cages, you know?” she starts, looking back up at Larry. “I couldn’t keep running on the wheel. I couldn’t live anymore, disappointing so many people like I was.”
“Who? Who were you disappointing?”
Isabel pauses once more and then slowly begins bailing out the water that is sinking her.
“My marriage is over so I’m sure my husband’s disappointed with me. My parents have been disappointed in me for as long as I can remember, I screwed up majorly at work so I know my boss is disappointed in me…” She trails off, knowing she hasn’t scratched the surface.
“Keep going, Isabel. We’re listening.”
“It’s hard to explain.”
Isabel turns her head from Larry to the empty chair. She stares at it for a long minute.
“For me that chair represents all that I expected of myself,” she says sadly. “I was supposed to be perfect.”
Nine
Isabel had been friends with Casey since the third grade. They were close in the way a rose befriends the stake that is meant to help it stand tall. As time passes stalk and stake become interchangeable: they take turns propping each other up, bending into each other with every gust of wind.
When Casey found a lump in her breast it was Isabel she called first.
“Will you come with me for the biopsy?”
“Of course.” Isabel stifled her tears and nodded into the phone.
“You’re crying, aren’t you?” Casey asked.
“No,” Isabel lied. “I think I have a cold.”
“You can’t cry. You’re not allowed to cry right now. I need you to be the strong one. If you cry I’m gonna start freaking out. And you’ve seen me freaking out. It ain’t pretty.”
“Okay, okay.” Isabel sobered up. “When’s the appointment?”
“Tuesday. I’ve got to be there at eight in the morning. I think they said it’d only be a couple of hours.”
“You’re staying in the hospital, right?”
“No. It’s outpatient. I’m going to need you to drive me home and put me to bed. They said I’d be really groggy.”
“Tuesday. No problem. I’ll be there with bells on. Where are you having it done, by the way? UCSF?”
“Yeah.”
“So, what’re you doing tonight? Want to go to a movie? Your pick, Lumpy.”
Casey laughed. “No, thanks. I think I’m just going to take a nice long hot bath until my fingers get all shriveled.”
“I’m coming over.”
“Okay, bye.”
“Bye.”
* * *
“Isabel? I’m assuming you’re on your way. It’s 7:50. If you’re not on your way, you’re in big trouble. I think I just heard a car door slam. That’s probably you. Bye.”
* * *
“Okay, it’s 8:05. Where are you?”
* * *
“I’ve called a cab. I hope you were in an accident or something. That’s the only thing that’s going to keep me from killing you later.”

“After the crash of TWA Flight 800, the FAA intensified its scrutiny of center fuel tanks, not only in 747s but in other, older, aircraft with similar design. Then, an alarming discovery. On Sunday, Boeing notified the FAA that recent inspections had turned up a high degree of wear and tear on wiring in and around fuel tanks in three 737s. Now, airlines have a seven day deadline to inspect and replace wiring and conduits in certain pieces of equipment. Sixty days for others.”
—Isabel Murphy, KXTY, San Francisco.

“Okay, great job, guys,” Isabel said, rubbing her cold hands together. “I’m heading back to the station for the conference call.”
“Fine,” said Mike, her cameraman. “But you’ll have a lot of time to make it there. The conference call isn’t till tomorrow.”
“What’re you talking about? It’s always on Wednesdays. When did they change that?”
“Since today’s Tuesday they didn’t have to.”
“Today’s Tuesday?”
Oh, my God. Casey.
Ten
Casey was propped up in bed.
Isabel, shamed, buried her head in her hands. “Casey, I’m so sorry. Words can’t express how sorry I am. It’s just…”
“You got called to do a story,” Casey sighed. “I know the drill by now. I never should have asked you to take me.”
Isabel shook her head emphatically before her friend had finished the thought. “Don’t say that! I feel terrible, okay? Nothing you can say would make me feel worse. Tell me how I can make it up to you.”
“How can you make it up to me? Jesus! I went to have a lump removed from my breast and you weren’t there and now you wonder how you can make it up to me? You blew me off for my own biopsy. What else am I going to think but that you don’t give a shit about your friends? You’ve always been Miss Career Woman and I understand that. I’ve been your biggest supporter. You know that. But this was important. This was a goddamn biopsy. And you totally forgot. And it’s not like this is the first time that’s happened. Every week you’re standing one of us up. I talked to Nancy last week and she said she was waiting at the café for forty-five minutes before she finally gave up and left. And Paula went to the movies alone three weeks ago, after buying you a ticket and waiting outside the theater through the first half of the film practically. At the rate you’re going you’re not going to have any friends left! Are you even listening to me? Furthermore, you haven’t even asked me about the surgery.”
“That’s because you laid into me the minute I walked in the door.”
“Can you blame me?”
“No. No, I can’t.”
They looked at each other.
“How was the surgery?” Isabel asked.
“It sucked, if you must know. And now both my boobs are sore. I don’t know why they both are since they only worked on one. But thanks for asking.”
“Casey, I know I screwed up. It kills me that I let you down. You have every right to be pissed off at me. I’m pissed off at me, too. I don’t know why I’m such a terrible friend. I don’t mean to be. I love you like a sister. I would do anything for you—don’t make that face. I would. Something happens when work calls me. I can’t explain it. It’s like work overrides everything else in my brain. Like I don’t have room for anything else but work. I wish it weren’t true but it is.”
Isabel started to cry but continued through tears.
“I am so sorry. I hate that I let you down. I will never forgive myself for this. For all of it. Please forgive me. Please?”
“Aw, Iz. Don’t cry,” Casey said from the bed. “I’d hug you if I could but I’m afraid I’d ooze pus.”
Casey had wanted her to laugh but she couldn’t. On the contrary, Isabel’s sobs became three-dimensional.
“I know you’re sorry,” Casey sighed. “I’m sorry I was so tough on you just now. I understand how important your job is to you. I’ve always known you’re really kick-ass driven. You get that from your father, if you want my opinion. You’ve always tried to work as hard as he did. That’s your model. And your mother. Well, let’s just say that I get where your perfectionism comes from. And I respect that, don’t get me wrong. But somewhere you’ve got to take a break and have a life outside of work. That’s something you didn’t see your dad do so maybe you don’t know how to juggle it all. But try, okay? For me?”
“I promise. I will. I love you, Casey.”
“I love you, too, kid.”
Eleven
“What are you thinking about?” Dr. Seidler was assigned to Isabel when she entered Three Breezes days ago. Though her perfect posture and severe haircut suggest an aloof personality, Dr. Seidler’s hands more than cancel out the implication of cruelty. They are long delicate hands punctuated with ribbons of veins that add to their character and grace. Isabel can do nothing but stare at them.
“Isabel?”
Silence.
“I realize it’s been quite an adjustment to get used to life here at the hospital and I’ve chalked our last two sessions up to being quiet times for you to be contemplative,” Dr. Seidler continues. “But we do need to work together—you and I—if you’d let me help you. I guess what I’m saying is, you have to let me in, Isabel.”
“What do you want from me?” Isabel asks, reluctantly looking up from the hands.
“I don’t want anything from you. I want to help you. Let’s start by looking at why you’re really here.”
Jesus. Why are you here? Why are you here? I’m so sick of that question! I don’t know why I’m here. I don’t belong here. Look at me: do I have bandages on my arm to keep me from scratching? Do I babble incessantly about bullshit? Do I sit all day staring into outer space? I don’t belong here. Just give me my privileges and let me go down the driveway, for God’s sake.
Dr. Seidler’s stare is unwavering.
Okay, I’ll blink first if that’s what you want.
“I’m here because I want to kill myself,” she shrugs.
“Why? Why do you feel you can’t live any longer?”
“Um, I don’t know.” Isabel feels like a third grader.
“This isn’t a quiz, you know. It’s not like there’s a right or wrong answer to the question. I’m just curious.” The therapist looks at Isabel’s file and reads from it.
“You mentioned when you first got here that you felt like you were disappointing everyone in your life. Like you couldn’t stay on the treadmill at work and keep everyone else happy. Is that how you feel? You couldn’t make everyone happy so you might as well kill yourself?”
“When you say it like that it sounds ridiculous,” answers Isabel. “Which, I assume, is your point. But it’s not that simple. I feel like I’m being pulled in every direction.”
“What about today? Do you feel suicidal?”
Grounds privileges. The driveway.
Isabel is torn between telling the truth and risking a doctor’s recommendation that she stay hospitalized, or lying in order to be free of this place. “Um, well, no. Not like before.”
“What does that mean exactly? ‘Not like before’?”
“Well, I don’t think about it like I did a few days ago. When I got here,” she continues the lie. “I mean, I can actually think about next week, whereas before I couldn’t see that far into the future. I figured I’d be dead by then.”
Tell her. Tell her how you only buy single rolls of individually wrapped toilet paper. Buying in bulk would be a waste. Tell her.
“So now you can see living? At least another week, or a few days or what?”
“Yeah, I guess so. A few days…”
Tell her.
“What about Christmas?”
“As in Christmas of this year?” Isabel knows where this is going and is confronted with the truth dilemma again.
“Yep. The Christmas that comes in a few months. Can you picture yourself celebrating Christmas?”
She’s got me.
“No.”
“You can’t picture Christmas?”
“No.”
“It’s okay, Isabel. You don’t have to feel crestfallen about that. You’ve only been here a short time. We don’t expect miracles. Patients aren’t expected to go from suicidal ideation to long-range planning in that short period of time. It’s okay.”
Isabel begins to cry.
“Can you tell me why you’re crying?”
Through her tears Isabel’s voice cracks. “I want to get out of here.”
“I hear this is highly upsetting to you,” Dr. Seidler says, trying to soothe her. “But as I told you yesterday, I am going to recommend to my colleagues that you stay with us a little while longer. That will help you in the long run.”
Isabel can barely hear her. Her depression is floating away, disappearing like an airline tray neatly folding back into its cave underneath the armrest, patiently waiting to again emerge for the next flight. She has stopped crying.
“Isabel? Isabel, what are you thinking right now?”
“I don’t know. I’m just blank.”
“Try. Try, if you can, to tell me what is on your mind right now. You’ve got a strange look on your face. You look scared.”
“Huh? Oh. No, I’m not scared.”
“What’s the first thing that pops into your mouth when I ask you to speak?”
Isabel’s eyes settle directly on Dr. Seidler’s face. “There’s no way I’m living until next Christmas. No way.”
“Why? Isabel? Stay with that thought…why? Can you hear me?”
Isabel is already gone. In her mind she sees the truck speeding toward her. She hears the screech of the brakes, the truck’s tires locking up too late. She closes her eyes imagining the impact, the feel of the pavement beneath her bloody body, the relief.
I refuse to be someone who’s in and out of institutions. I will not be Zelda Fitzgerald.
“Isabel. Listen to me for just a minute.” Her therapist is trying to get her attention. “While you’re here we need to work on your coping skills. I see you get a little overwhelmed with life. We need to teach you how to deal with the stuff that’s thrown at you. That way you won’t need to dissociate yourself from it, like you seem to be doing right now.”
“‘A little overwhelmed’?” Isabel snaps back and is crying again. “‘A little overwhelmed’? I’d say it’s a little more than that.”
“Okay, tell me.”
“Well, first of all, I have absolutely no control over my life and what I do with it. ANN has me on call twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. They’ll beep me at three in the morning and tell me to get to the airport and sometimes I don’t even know where I’m going until I call from the back of the taxi. I have to have a bag packed at all times so that I can just walk away from whatever I’m doing and go to work. I’m in the middle of getting divorced. I don’t even have time to go to couples counseling—not that that’s any big loss, though….”
“Before you go any further,” the therapist interrupts Isabel, “let’s look at these things one at a time. You bring up some very good points. Let’s start with the divorce. What happened in your marriage?”
Isabel softens and slumps into her chair.
“My marriage?”
“I think that might be a good starting point for us.”
“Alex. That’s his name. Alex.” Isabel is sobbing again.
“Tell me about Alex.”
Twelve
“What can I get you?” the bartender asked as he slapped the paper cocktail napkin in front of Isabel.
“A greyhound, please,” she answered while rifling through her purse for her cigarettes. “Actually, could you make that a double?”
“No problem,” the bartender said. But he looked as if it were.
“Where’s Stu, anyway? Tuesday’s not his night off.”
“Yeah, well, it is tonight.” The bartender talked as he surveyed his cage of bottles. He tentatively picked one out, looked at the label and slid it back into its dusty cell. “He’s sick.”
“Is it too late to change my mind and order a gin and tonic?” She knew it wasn’t, as the bartender was looking up “greyhound” in his bartender’s guide.
“Nope,” he said, looking relieved. “That I can do.”
Isabel took a long drag of her cigarette. “What’s your name?”
“Alex.”
“I’m Isabel.”
“This is on the house,” he said as he delivered the drink. “For going easy on me with the order.”
“Not necessary but thank you.” Because she had an audience she decided to sip not gulp her drink. “Slow night, huh.”
“Kind of. I’m not complaining, though. I’m not used to bartending, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
Isabel smiled. “I knew it.”
“How’d you crack the code?” he asked.
“Well—” she fiddled with the swizzle stick poking out of her drink “—first of all you aren’t studying a quartered-up section of the want ads. You must not have heard it’s required reading for all barkeeps.”
Alex laughed.
“Whoa! You’ve got Kennedy teeth,” she said.
“Kennedy teeth?”
“It’s like you have more in there than the rest of us. It’s really quite amazing. Open up, let me see them again.”
Alex clamped his mouth shut.
“Come on,” Isabel mock begged. “One quick peek.”
Careful to cover his teeth with his lips, Alex shook his head and said, “Good Kennedy or bad Kennedy?”
Isabel laughed. “What’s good Kennedy and what’s bad Kennedy?”
“You know: JFK Jr. or Chappaquiddick?”
“Uh-uh. I’m not falling into that trap….” Isabel took another sip of her drink.
“What trap?”
“If I say JFK Jr., you’d get a big head and then I’d have to spend the rest of the night breaking your spirit…”
“Yeah, ’cause my spirit is flying so high here behind the bar…”
“…and if I said Chappaquiddick I’d have to spend the rest of the night hearing a laundry list of things that make you a swell guy…”
“It’d be a short list since my only competition would be an adulterer who let his date drown…”
“…so I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t.”
“And to think this all started because my dad’s a dentist….”
“Aha! So you do have an unfair advantage over the rest of us, dentally speaking, I mean.”
“You saw right through me.”
There was a brief pause in the banter.
“What do you do normally? I mean,” she laughed and corrected herself, “what do you normally do?”
Isabel knew she was flirting, but she was sinking into her comfortable buzz and didn’t care.
“I wait tables. How come I’ve never seen you here before? You I would have noticed.”
“I don’t eat here. I just come for liquid nourishment.”
“Always this late?”
“I just got off work. So, yeah. Always this late.”
“We’re both night owls, then.”
“Guess so.”
“Excuse me.” Alex left to serve a couple who should not have been served. Isabel watched him put napkins in front of them.
The drink was settling her stomach, filling it with warmth.
“Sorry about that,” he said as he leaned back against the space of mahogany in front of Isabel. “Duty calls.”
“Let me ask you something.”
“Shoot.”
“Seriously.”
Alex forced his smile into a frown. “Go ahead.”
“How do you like your job?”
“You mean tonight? Bartending? Or serving?”
“Serving.”
“It’s fine, I suppose,” he answered, and gave the question more thought. “I like the fact that I have complete control over my life. I don’t have to answer to anyone, really. I can make my own hours, more or less. Like I have the days to myself, I can do what I want, and then I can come in, serve and make a killing with tips. I think it helps that I’m not always going to be doing this.”
“Why? What are you going to be doing? Could I get a refill while you answer?”
“Sure.” He cleared away her empty glass. “Another double?”
She paused as she decided whether the look he gave her was judgmental or just inquisitive. She decided it was inquisitive and she nodded.
“I’m going to open my own place.”
“Wow. That’s cool.”
“I know what you’re thinking.”
“I’m not thinking anything.”
“Yes, you are. You’re thinking ‘Just what San Francisco needs, another restaurant.’ Don’t worry—I’m used to it. And I agree with you.”
“I wasn’t thinking that.”
“Yes, you were. But that’s okay. Because my place is going to be different.”
“Seriously, I wasn’t even thinking that.”
He leaned into her as he replaced her drink. “So…what were you thinking, then? That you wanted to go out to dinner with me? Saturday night?”
Isabel smiled as she gulped.
“That’s what you were thinking, wasn’t it?”
Isabel felt emboldened by the booze. “You hit the nail on the head.”
“Meet here? Eight?”
“Right again.”
Alex smiled as he went to check on the couple a few seats away from Isabel.
* * *
“Case, he’s so amazing,” Isabel said as she spread out the blanket for their picnic.

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