If Casper is disappointed in me, she doesn’t show it. She just watches me watch the turtle, and the turtle does his thing. I’d like to be that turtle, underwater, quiet, no one around. What a fucking peaceful life that turtle has.
Casper says, “To answer the question that you asked Bruce last night: you have been at Creeley Center for six days. You were treated in the hospital and kept for observation for seven days before they transferred you here. Did you know you had walking pneumonia? Well, you still have it, but the antibiotics should help.”
She picks up something chunky from her desk and slides it to me. It’s one of those desk calendars. I’m not sure what I’m looking for, but then I see it, at the top of the page.
April. It’s the middle of April.
Casper says, “You just missed Easter at Creeley. You were a little out of it. You didn’t miss much. We can’t really have a giant bunny hopping around a psych ward, can we?” She smiles. “Sorry. That’s a little therapist humor. We did have an egg hunt, though. Thanksgiving is a lot more fun around here: dry turkey, lumpy gravy. Good times.”
I know she’s trying to cheer me up, get me to talk. I slide my face to her but as soon as I meet her eyes, I feel the fucking sting of tears and so I look back at the stupid turtle. I feel like I’m waking up and going back into my darkness, all at once.
Casper leans forward. “Do you remember being in Regions Hospital at all?”
I remember the security guard and the forest of hair inside his nose. I remember lights above me, bright as suns, the sound of beeping that never seemed to stop. I remember wanting to kick out when hands were on me, when they were cutting away my clothes and boots. I remember how heavy my lungs felt, as though they were filled with mud.
I remember being so scared that Fucking Frank was going to appear in the doorway and take me away, back to Seed House, to the room where the girls cried.
I remember crying. I remember the splatter of my vomit on a nurse’s shoes, and the way her face never changed, not once, like it happened to her all the time, and I wished my eyes to tell her sorry, because I had no words, and how her face didn’t change then, either.
Then nothing. Nothing. Until Louisa.
Casper says, “It’s all right if you can’t remember. Our subconscious is spectacularly agile. Sometimes it knows when to take us away, as a kind of protection. I hope that makes sense.”
I wish I knew how to tell her that my subconscious is broken, because it never took me away when Fucking Frank was threatening me, or when that man tried to hurt me in the underpass.
My broken big toe throbs beneath its splint and the weird foot-bootie Doc Dooley put me in. Now, when I walk, I really am a crazy freak, with my nesty hair and my clubby arms and trussed-up legs and limp.
What’s going to happen to me?
Casper says, “I think you need a project.”
