Arden Attachment Center — Intake Form for New Students
The room at the Holiday Inn in Evergreen, Colorado, had one big bed for both of them. It was good in the room, quiet and dim, and Mirela had Jane all to herself. Mirela zonked out under the covers in front of the TV, before her usual bedtime.
They woke up in the deep dark, cold and wet. Jane flipped on the bedside lamp, called the front desk for new sheets, stripped the bed, peeled Mirela’s pajamas off. She soaked the pajamas in the bathroom sink and filled the tub with warm, sudsy water. Mirela didn’t fight the bath, although she did fight the towel, the rubbing of it, as if her skin could peel off with the water.
“Air-dry, all right, Mirela, whatever works,” Jane said. She felt a purposefulness that edged into happiness. She felt sated by what she’d accomplished. The two of them understood each other.
There was a knock on the door. Jane went to answer it, and a lethal wail went up behind her.
“Mirela, my love, it’s the new sheets, that’s all,” Jane said. “This nice helper is bringing us clean sheets for the bed.”
“Are you all right in there?” came the voice on the other side of the door.
“We’re fine, hang on a sec—just a tantrum situation with my kiddo—” Jane said over Mirela’s noise. Jane wanted to get the door open to get the new sheets. Mirela wanted it shut to keep out the light and sound and people. The door slammed into Jane’s hand—the fingers, between the big and middle knuckles—and Jane cried out, and Mirela was all of a sudden calmer. Now they were both in pain. Fair enough. Mirela curled up in front of the shut door.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” the voice asked, and Mirela pounded her fists against the door to drown out the talking with a more righteous noise.
“Yes—please, just—I don’t mean to be rude, but it would be best if you would leave,” Jane said. “Thank you, good night.” She crawled past Mirela to the bathroom and stuck her hurt hand in the sink, with the soaking pajamas.
“Usually you love meeting new people,” Jane said from where she was kneeling next to the sink. “I wonder what’s different tonight.”
“I want nobody,” Mirela said from the carpet.
“Honey, do you want a blanket?”
“I want nobody!” Mirela yelled. She was naked and shivering. Jane wondered if shivering was even better than rocking, more precise and efficient in its calming effects, like a cat’s purr, a velvety real thing burring in her throat, curled inside her rib cage buzzing. Jane’s hand throbbed through her whole body, a rhythm in search of a discordant music. Her throbbing hand and Mirela’s shivering limbs in syncopation.
“We have an early start tomorrow,” Jane said, taking her dripping hand from the sink. “It’s going to be a big day, Mirela. The people at Arden will help us get better.”
She considered attempting to open the hotel room door and decided against it. With her hand that wasn’t hurt, Jane took the top bedcover off the floor, gave it a quick whiff to make sure it wasn’t soaked with pee. A shiny-satiny sheath of green. Jane laid it down a couple of feet away from Mirela. Mirela inched close enough to the blanket to kick it away.
“I want nobody,” Mirela said.
“You won’t always feel that way, sweetie,” Jane said, sitting down next to the heap of blanket. “The people at Arden will help you feel a different way. Don’t you want to get better?”
Mirela said something that Jane couldn’t hear.
“You look cold—are you sure you don’t want the blanket?” Jane asked.
Mirela said the same thing again that Jane couldn’t hear.
“What did you say, honey?”
“I want you.”
The cumulus cover of the pain had started to clear, and Jane could think a bit about this. This was, on the one hand, the type of “nice” thing Mirela would say when she thought she was in trouble. On the other hand, here they were, on the same side of the slamming door. Ordinarily, Mirela would be alone behind it. This was progress.
Mirela crawled over to the blanket and pulled it over herself. She hugged her knees to her chest and rested her forehead on the floor.
Jane got up, lay down on her side on the bare mattress, and watched the quivering little heap on the floor.
“Do you want to come back into bed with me, Mirela?” she asked. “We could share the blanket.”
Mirela lifted the blanket to watch Jane with one eye. They watched each other to the beat of Jane’s throbbing fingers and Mirela’s waves of shivering.
“What are we doing here, Mirela?” Jane asked her.
Mirela lowered the blanket.
“Are we sure we want to do this, Mirela?” Jane asked.
Mirela didn’t answer.
With her good hand, Jane switched off the bedside light with a theatrical crispness, a gesture to extinguish all doubt.
MODULE: Establish relationship with therapist through directed small talk, enforced eye contact, question completion, and holding therapy.
Notes from session: Focus student appeared happy and engaged with conversation about favorite foods and activities. Focus student maintained poor or no eye contact. When co-therapist redirected her to resume eye contact, focus student deflected through laughter, jumping, turning, and making “funny faces.” Therapist interpreted this behavior as attempt to maintain control. Introduction of holding therapy led to similar deflective responses of smiling, laughter, fidgeting, and kicking.
MODULE: Rapport-building continues. Intensive verbal directives/corrections, compliance exercise, biographical narration, and holding therapy.
Notes from session: Focus student engaged with Simon Says and hide-the-shoe game. Deflective response (laughter, spinning, falling on ground) as commands became faster and more complicated. Deflective response (laughter) when therapist used therapeutic hostile command tone. Difficulty during biographical questions and answers. Focus student repeated questions back to therapist but did not answer. (Prompt questions included “Were you a bad baby?”; “Did no one take care of you?”; “Why didn’t anyone love you?”) Second holding therapy session cycled rapidly through deflective response to frustration response. Focus student exhibited physical resistance requiring compression-therapeutic intervention from co-therapist.
MODULE: Compliance exercise continues with additional rules, increased speed, and intensified therapeutic hostile command tone. Regression role-play followed by holding therapy.
Notes from session: Role-play cast therapist as focus student’s birth mother and co-therapist as orphanage nurse. A third co-therapist placed focus student in modified holding position. Focus student was asked how she felt to see her birth mother and nurse. This question only elicited laughter and other deflection. Third holding therapy session bypassed deflective and frustration responses to rage response, with extreme physical resistance to therapy requiring compression-therapeutic intervention from two co-therapists.
Notes from session: Therapists attempted to direct the focus student’s anger toward birth mother. (Prompt questions included “How does it make you feel that she left you?”; “Why did she leave you?”) Adoptive mother expressed concern that drama practice was inappropriate for focus student’s age and English-language skills. Fourth holding therapy session commenced during rage response, again requiring therapist and two co-therapists. Therapists introduced use of blanket during holding therapy as precursor to forthcoming rebirthing session. Adoptive mother expressed concern that focus student could be injured during holding therapy.
MODULE: Therapeutic return to state of infancy using bottle-feeding, cradling, swaddling, rocking, lullabies.
Notes from session: Focus student’s deflective response to first set of babying tactics converted immediately to rage response when swaddling was introduced. Responded well to bottle-feeding and sweets. Responded well when given a teddy bear she was “in charge” of. Repeatedly told therapists throughout the session that the teddy bear belonged to her. Adoptive mother again expressed concerns about potential injury to the focus student during holding therapy. Adoptive mother also expressed concerns about the next day’s planned rebirthing session.
Carolyn Dewey, founder and clinical director of the Arden Attachment Center, shrugged her marathoner’s arms out of her lavender blazer. She folded her hands on her desk, which contained two short stacks of papers, plaques and awards to her left, wood-framed photographs to her right. She took a lip gloss and a compact mirror out of the mauve leather handbag on her desk, flipped the compact open with her left hand while glossing her lips with the right, pulled her lips over her teeth and kissed them together twice, pop-pop, baring her teeth at the mirror to check for stains, and slipped the gloss and compact back into the bag—all in one flowing vapor trail of a gesture, without breaking the line of her monologue.
“When mothers bring their children to Arden, I want them to see something to aspire to. To see it inscribed in me. To be sure, it’s not about me or what I have done, it’s not about envying me—I’m not that vain—but rather envying the time, wanting the time back, seeing the intent and the effort expended, and thinking, If I had all the time she had to work on myself, I would walk across all the deserts of the world, or I would rekindle three friendships I lost to the parenting years, or I would read all of Proust, or whatever it would be.
“I see my upkeep, if you will, as a pact I keep with myself and with all of my fellow Arden parents. I see myself as one of you, and I want you to see yourself in me. In all this paint and coiffuring and visible workouts I want you to see a clock, and the hands of the clock are moving backward and giving you back your life. Not the life you had before you were the mother of an attachment-challenged child. You’re not getting that life back, and you wouldn’t want it back. But a life where you come first again, because if you’re not taking care of yourself, then you can’t take care of anyone else.”
Carolyn started almost imperceptibly, as if sensing a mosquito somewhere behind her right ear. Her frosted blond hair was brushed and blown to curl under, tickling at the places where her slim shoulders met her neck; a front curtain swooped out of a deep side part and over a thinner translucent canopy of wispy bangs. In another compound gesture, Carolyn put her hand inside the mauve leather to retrieve a small aerosol spray can. If Lauren were here, she might scold Carolyn for ripping a slightly bigger hole in the ozone layer. Carolyn misted the area in question with a spiraling flourish, and patted the calmed zone with one hand while slipping the can back inside the bag with the other.
A few stray particles of the spray misted onto Jane’s face, and with them a memory. The party at Rhonda’s. Brad Bender swinging the cheerleaders around, Pat setting his hand on fire with the hairspray and the lighter, Colin screech-laughing at Pat in pain. And yet nobody whisked them off to Colorado for behavior modification therapy. Fifteen years later, a patch of Pat’s left hand was still raw pink and mottled where it had gone up in flames.
“Sore paw?” Carolyn asked, and Jane felt a momentary calm surprise that Carolyn’s clinical training equipped her to read minds. But it was Jane’s own bandaged hand that Carolyn was pointing to.
“Oh, this—it’s nothing. I caught it in the door . . .” Jane said.
Carolyn nodded, eyes wide, lips pressed together significantly. “I judge no one who comes here, though I do invite them to judge me,” she said. “Because no one failed like I did at putting myself first. When my boys were four and six, when we hit that first wall after I adopted them out of foster care, I lived on Hershey’s bars and Wonder bread. Literally, when I was hungry I would take a piece of bread out of the wrapper and ball it up in my fist, like I was returning it to its primordial dough state, and take bites off it, or if one of my boys was about to light the other one on fire I would cram the whole lump into my mouth at once and start yelling at them with my mouth full. I mean, sell the movie rights, right? I wore the same grubby sweatpants for days. I didn’t leave the house except for therapy appointments—not appointments for me, God forbid I do something for me, only for my sons. Sometimes I didn’t bother brushing my teeth. I thought that I didn’t have time for me to matter, which is the same as saying that I didn’t matter. And if I didn’t matter, then how could I possibly matter to my boys? How can someone who doesn’t matter be a mother? You get to a point where you think, I’m a wreck because my boys need help, when it’s really My boys need help because I’m a wreck.”
Carolyn twirled a strand of iridescent beads around one finger. An artful tangle of gold and brass nestled against her chest under the open collar of her silk blouse. “I took women’s studies in college. Bryn Mawr. I know, I know. The clothes, the jewelry, the dieting—it’s all a trap. I read the books. I know the theory. But I was also learning how to live in it. You start to see living in the prison as a form of rebellion. I mean, if you’re in jail, you must have done something transgressive to get there, right? I used to only wear clothes I didn’t care about, dark machine-washable fabrics that didn’t stain—now I wear creams and pastels. I wear white, for goodness’ sake.” She motioned to her blouse. “I wear stuff you only want the dry cleaner to mess with, because I now refuse to see myself as an object you can puke or piss or shit on, pardon my language. I wear a lot of jewelry because I now refuse to accept that someone is going to rip my earrings out of my ears or try to strangle me with my own necklace. I eat well and sparely because I refuse any longer to self-medicate with food, I refuse any longer to eat ice cream straight out of the pint over the sink for dinner because that’s all I have time for and that’s all I deserve, stuffing sugar and fat into my mouth like a pacifier, like a drug—shove it all in the garbage disposal that is me, grind it up, fill the empty hole inside.”
Carolyn patted her collar and smiled. “I hope none of this is shocking to you. I can speak to you like this because I am no longer that person. She no longer exists, so I can’t hurt her feelings. And, again, none of what I have to say is a judgment on others. Everyone should wear what they want and eat what they want. But whatever one does should be a conscious choice. What I’m saying is that every Arden mother needs to choose her own forms of resistance. Smart, tactical, self-affirming resistance. You have biological children, yes?”
“Three,” Jane said.
Or four. Had or have. She was never sure which to say.
Two choices here
She had had four babies inside her.
It wasn’t that she hadn’t had four children.
Mirela is her fourth child.
Mirela was her fifth child.
With her good hand, Jane rummaged around in her own handbag for a mint or a stick of gum. Like the version of Carolyn that no longer existed, Jane had not brushed her teeth that morning. Her fingers curled around something unfamiliar: the Bugs Bunny lighter. She couldn’t remember how it had gotten there. Had Mirela been playing with the lighter? Her eyes darted to one side as if the girl would appear beside her, laughing and on fire. But no. Mirela was down the hall, in another room, in front of another one-way mirror.
“You must have questions,” Carolyn said at last. “What are they?”
Jane stuck a piece of Juicy Fruit in her mouth with the hand that held the lighter. Carolyn’s eyebrows sat up. “Do you smoke?” she asked.
Jane smiled as she put Bugs Bunny away. “Maybe I should start,” she said. “So—your literature has prepared me well so far, and I recognize a lot in it—a lot of Mirela, a lot of myself—but can you explain the idea behind the holding therapy?”
“I’m so glad you asked,” Carolyn said. “We are in the process of trademarking holding therapy, in fact.”
“Oh, congratulations,” Jane said. “So is it like—like holding her down, like showing her who is boss, breaking down her ego?”
“That’s a way of putting it,” Carolyn said.
“Because that starts to feel like corporal punishment, and we don’t do that in our house, we don’t spank—”
“Oh my goodness—”
“—we wouldn’t ever use any kind of physical coercion with our kids—”
“Jane, please, do let me interrupt. Holding therapy is not corporal punishment, it’s not abuse or coercion; it couldn’t be further from it. Holding therapy is also known as compression therapy, which, come to think of it, might be the preferable term.”
“You could trademark that one, too.”
“A good idea. Think of applying pressure to a wound when a patient is bleeding. Under normal circumstances, pressing an artery against bone is the last thing you’d want to do, because you’re keeping the artery from working properly. But in an emergency, your only option is to suppress it, shut it down—temporarily, of course. Same goes for the unattached child. Under normal circumstances, holding down a child, inhibiting his movement, goes against everything we think and feel about caregiving. But the children who come to Arden express their trauma through their bodies, through movement: the hitting out, the rocking, the spinning. These are memories activating at the cellular level. The memories and trauma are kicking the kid around, jerking his arms and legs like a master puppeteer. It’s an emergency, and so in holding therapy, we step in and apply pressure to the wound. We stop the trauma from working.”
“But the holding is—what? What does it do?”
“There are several different techniques. One that you’ve seen is the basket hold: the child has his arms crossed in front of him, his back pressed against the therapist’s chest, and the therapist is either holding his hands behind him or has her arms wrapped around him.”
“I do this with Mirela,” Jane said. “I didn’t know it was a—a technique—”
“You used your intuition. Because you’re a born mom.”
“I get her turned away from me and hold her tight—not tight but firm, and I rock her and sing to her until she calms down. I showed my older daughter how to do this, too. Mirela rocks and hums and holds herself when she is upset, so I’m kind of mirroring what she does anyway, but in a way that gets her more under control.”
“Yes, you’re doing the basket hold.”
“I call it the squeeze.”
“Basket hold is an easy one—it’s rather like the Heimlich maneuver. It gets results, simple as that.”
“I don’t know that it does. Maybe Mirela would calm down on her own without it. But it helps me feel as though I’m doing something.”
“There are also the prone positions, which you’ve seen. The position where the child is laid out on a therapist’s lap, looking upward at her, with perhaps a co-therapist helping to apply pressure. Or the child laid out on the floor, with a second or third co-therapist applying therapeutic pressure.”
“Yes, this is what concerns me—Mirela flat on the floor, these people on top of her. It’s just—I know I’m new to this, but—”
Carolyn nodded. “It is intense. But it’s a perfectly safe, evidence-based therapy carried out by trained professionals.”
“But why is it done?”
“Well, the child doesn’t want to be held, right? And that refusal affords us an opportunity. As the child—”
“Mirela.”
“—as Mirela strains against the hold, she feels on the cellular level that she herself is both powerless and profoundly safe. The universal condition of the loved infant. In this powerless and safe condition, she can release her rage against the absent mother, returning the rage and pain back where it belongs.”
“She’s giving the rage back to Mom.”
“Well, she’s giving it back to bio-Mom. Bio-Mom, or absent Mom, or abusive Mom will always be in the room with her, but she can no longer get a seat at the table. In the holding position, the rage of the child—I must speak in generalities, forgive me—the rage eventually succumbs to exhaustion, and the child surrenders to a feeling she hasn’t experienced before, sinking into rest in her loving caregiver’s arms.”
“But she’s being forced to do it. She’s not coming to it on her own.”
“Think of infancy. During the baby stage, the mother is the baby’s prisoner, you might say, but the baby is the mother’s prisoner, too. The baby didn’t choose that, but she’s mostly okay with it. In fact, being okay with that arrangement is the foundation of her whole life to come—because that’s the beginning of attachment, and attachment is the name of the game.”
“But these are—you’re talking about it like it’s surgery, but really it’s metaphors. You know? How does such a small child grasp these metaphors? Somehow this narrative is taking shape through her own experience?”
“On an intuitive level, yes. You talked about intuition before, and she has it, too. On a cellular level, most definitely she can grasp it all. The body knows these things even if it cannot put them into words. Words aren’t everything, you know. But the thing is happening even if you can’t articulate it. You have to temporarily make something stop working in order to save it—break down cells in order to give birth to new ones.”
“And rebirthing? That’s what’s on the schedule for tomorrow.”
“I think, as with your questions about holding therapy, that what you’re really asking is Why does she need that? and I can’t tell you exactly until we’re in the middle of it. Attachment therapy, for all its rules and protocols, doesn’t necessarily follow a script. It’s more of an improv class.”
“But what are the basic, I don’t know, principles of rebirthing? The brochure didn’t say.”
“Well, we can’t fit everything we do into one brochure.”
“How does rebirthing grow out of holding therapy?”
“So when we talk about attachment—what was the first attachment? It was the embrace of the mother’s womb, yes? But for the child who comes to Arden, that embrace may have been poisoned by—well, let’s back up. What do we know about bio-Mom?”
“Not much. Mirela had hep B, but we don’t know where she got it from.”
“But—was the mother dead? Unfit? Did she sign away her rights?”
“I adopted Mirela out of an institution. An orphanage.”
“But that can mean so many things. A lot of kids in Eastern European orphanages aren’t orphans—rather, their parents have signed away their rights. I mean, you know this.”
“Yes, I do, and I didn’t meet anyone claiming to be Mirela’s mother. What I have are reams and reams of paperwork.”
“And what did the paperwork say?”
“I don’t—I’m sorry, but I don’t see how this is any of your business.”
“My goodness!”
“I’m sorry, I just—I don’t know if anything in her medical records is accurate. I don’t know what happened to her before I met her. I do not. I never will. I can only imagine, and I imagine the worst, and it’s unbearable, so I don’t. So—so we just have to deal with what’s in front of us.”
“I see. Well, then. We can keep to generalities. The embrace of the mother in utero may have been poisoned by drugs, alcohol, or nicotine; by poor nutritional choices; by abuse or trauma suffered by the mother during her pregnancy; by a difficult delivery. These environmental toxins were force-fed to the baby during her earliest stages of development. But it goes back further than that. It is no coincidence that we say a sperm ‘attaches’ to an egg: the journey of attachment begins at that moment of conception, in the nature of that mother-father relationship. So what was its nature? Was it abusive? Loving? Respectful? A one-night stand?”
“Like I said, I don’t have any answers. I know nothing about Mirela’s mother. The biological mother. I mean, I’m—I’m her mother now. I’m the mother she has known.”
“And there is rage born there as well, because Mirela deserved better than that. By which I mean that she deserved to find her mother—to find you—sooner than she did. Deep down, she knows that, and she’s angry about it, and that is only right and rational. And then to be torn from whatever family she did know, whatever its shortcomings. Being ripped away from the only body she ever knew. Familiarity is its own privilege.”
There is one further point; his own mother was really his, because he invented her . . . From Johnny’s point of view, however, when he was born this woman was something he created. That was Winnicott.
“Well, Mirela doesn’t remember any of it, or she wasn’t aware of it in the first place. There’s no—there’s no history.”
“She is aware of all of this on the somatic level. The cellular level. That’s where her history is inscribed, although we can’t read it. She knows, at the very least, that something went very wrong. Otherwise, why would she be here at Arden?”
“So—so what you’re proposing is a sort of do-over. She was born once into bad circumstances, and now, here, she can be reborn into something else?”
“And in that rebirth she needs to release the rage of that first and greatest loss, so that she can accept your love.”
“But is that—the rebirth takes the form of more people holding her down? Like they’re re-creating the birth canal or something, and she has to escape?”
Carolyn smiled. “You look scandalized.”
“It’s a little hard to take in, I guess.”
“It seems fringe to you. Do you want to know how fringe CRT is? Elvis does it in a movie.”
“CRT?”
“Coercive restraint therapy—what you do with Mirela, essentially. You and Elvis. Fifty million Elvis fans can’t be wrong.”
“Elvis?”
“Change of Habit, from 1969. Elvis plays a doctor. He does CRT with a young girl who has autism. Gets results, too. Mary Tyler Moore plays the nurse, or perhaps she’s a nun—I can’t recall now. But you can’t get more all-American mainstream than those two, can you?”
“Mirela and I can inquire about screening the film tonight in our hotel room,” Jane said. “But could we go over—”
Carolyn looked at her watch and tapped at it significantly. “We’re going to have to end there, Jane, as I have another appointment.”
“Okay, but maybe we could talk again? Before tomorrow and the rebirth?”
“My assistant can see if my schedule will allow for it. And I’ll be there, Jane—I make a point of observing all the rebirths. Wouldn’t miss it for the world.” Carolyn stood up.
Jane remained seated. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’m not sure about this.” She looked up at Carolyn in what she hoped was a pose of supplication.
“You are at the end of your rope, Jane, and you must trust us to catch you.”
“I don’t know that,” Jane said. “I don’t know where the rope ends.”
“Usually mothers call us when they’ve found it.”
“I haven’t found it. But I wonder if she’s already run out of time.”
“She has not.”
“If you took my kids away from me when they were born and then a few years later you just handed them back—”
Jane stared at the biggest plaque on Carolyn’s desk until it went double.
“I meant my other kids,” Jane said. “If you took my other kids away.”
“I understand, Jane.” Carolyn prayed her hands together in a chop-chop motion. Jane got up.
“Here at Arden, we’re composing a new origin story for Mirela,” Carolyn said. “We’re going to write it down and keep it safe. It won’t erase that first legacy of pain, but now she’ll have another story to tell, and that story will belong only to her and those who love her.”
“Well,” Jane said, “I guess I’m proud to be Mirela’s biographer.”
They couldn’t leave Colorado with nothing to show for it.
This had to be Jane’s thesis.
She fitted all of her available evidence to its mold. She disregarded any clues or data that couldn’t be pounded into its shape. She poured her doubts into the chasm of all that she lacked: expertise, a college degree, fluency with diagnostic jargon and acronyms and Elvis movies. When her doubts overfilled that space, they flowed instead into the one left open by her shame—the shame of the expense, the flight and the hotel and the astronomical price tag on the clinic itself, the shame of what she’d brought on herself and her family and Mirela, the shame of her arrest, of her bad marriage and her teenage sluttiness and swinging her hips in front of Dr. Vine, the shame of staring at a naked, freezing child on the floor of a hotel room and thinking that this, on balance, all things considered, this had been a good day.
In the morning, she would get Mirela into the rental car and drive back to Arden with no qualms, the open road winding ahead of them, mountain majesty all around, or so she gathered. As in Romania, Jane hadn’t gauged her surroundings beyond how they matched up to the map in her hands. Perhaps she could blame Buffalo for her tunnel vision. Living between two Great Lakes meant living under a watery gray dome—you forgot to look around you because there was so little to see. Tomorrow she would remember to look.
Maybe Jane watched a CRT session and saw violence where someone knowledgeable and credentialed saw closely observed protocol and measurable progress. This dichotomy could apply to so much of medicine, in fact. What would brain surgery or a cesarean section look like if you didn’t know what you were looking at? What would you say, thirty years ago, if a doctor had given you polio to keep you from getting polio?
Arden prided itself on innovation, boldness, being first. Getting out in front required ruthlessness, ambition, a willingness to make mistakes. How many patients had been butchered in the first brain surgeries and cesarean sections?
Jane’s mother had a great-aunt Katinka back in Hungary who died of cancer, not yet thirty-five. She left behind two small children and a handsome widower, who remarried within the year. They opened up Katinka’s body, Jane’s mother told her, and tried to burn out the cancer cells with gauze soaked in disinfectant. “It was before any of those so-called doctors knew what they were doing,” Jane’s mother said. “She suffered. She wasn’t the only one.”
Katinka’s timing was bad: a few years earlier, she might have died peacefully in her bed, dreamy with morphine or ether as loved ones stroked her hair, held her hand; a few years later, there would have been others who had already suffered in her place, and the surgeons would have learned from their pain. Somebody had to be the first one. The first to be cut open, or poisoned, or held down while they screamed, for their own good. And somebody had to be the first one to commit these premeditated acts of violence, and accept that they would almost certainly end in disaster, because disaster was integral to success.
In the darkness, as Mirela’s light snores wafted up from the carpet, Jane’s mind was shrugging out of her grip—and this was another form of the obscure pleasure, to reject nighttime prayer in favor of submitting to the most irrational urges of her memory and imagination, walking half willingly right up to the monster, letting him put on the blindfold and turn you around, one, two, three. She floated in the shallows of sleep and corpses floated past in the stream, black tornadoes above in the shapes of gaping mouths and Saint Teresa’s billowing dress. Bugs Bunny stood on the shore, detonating a blast on the outer bank. His whiskers were singed, fur blackened in patches, one of his eyes swollen almost shut. As the rapids pulled her under, it occurred to Jane that somebody had to be the first one to start a fire with a lighter and canned aerosol, long before Pat’s hand had gone up in flames. Somebody was the first to think of it, and then attempt it, at great risk of harm. And that person, too, might have thought of it as a necessary violence.
Jane frequently asked members of her family to try to see things from Mirela’s perspective, but until the last day at Arden, she had never demanded it of herself.
Every day at Arden they held her down, at least for a little while. On the day of the rebirthing session, they used a blanket. A quilt, really, heavy, almost like a carpet. It looked like it smelled like stains. Two therapists, then three. She called out for Jane. She could see shapes through the blanket, arms and legs, but the blanket got tighter and the pressure got more and more until there was nothing to see, nowhere to move. She was laughing and then she was screaming and then she couldn’t scream, or she tried to scream but only empty air came out, and the air had nowhere to go and so she was breathing in her screams, she was screaming backward, her whole body was a scream that made no sound under the blanket. No one could see or hear or feel her. The only way to get away from the blanket was to become the blanket, and the only way to become the blanket was to stop fighting the blanket. Her skull going soft, the knobs of her spine spinning into cotton. Her arms knitted to her sides, her legs stitching themselves together. Her whole self flattening and going stretchy like the webs between her fingers. She could be spread on the grass for a picnic, or laid out on the floor with toys for a baby. The toys in all the rooms were always the same: the stacking rings, the puppy on wheels that goes tock-tock-tock, the barn with the swinging clacking hinges, the popcorn-popping vacuum cleaner, the trucks, the blocks. All laid out on the blanket. She could keep Jane warm at night without Jane having to know she was there. The tiny gaps between the threads inhaling and exhaling, like a frog who breathes through her skin, like gills she could use when she went through the wash with the sheets and towels and pillowcases. Then she would be clipped to a clothesline outside, the breeze would nudge her up and back like on the old swing at Saint Benedict’s, the air going past and through her, and as the sunlight drew the damp from her, she would grow lighter and lighter, so that one big push from the wind could send her up, up, like a lost balloon that caught briefly on the highest branches of the beech tree before continuing up, up, past the blue and into the clouds and the white, into the light that exploded her, only she was the light now, she was the air, she was herself, and she was everywhere.
Then the clouds burst with rainwater, and she was inside the clouds, and as she fell back to earth her arms and legs ripped away from their sutures, her head yelled as it hardened into bone, and she was thrashing to get away from herself, but her self was not the blanket anymore—the blanket was on the floor of the room and she was on her feet, and inside it was raining and out the window the sun was shining and the grass was brilliant green, and the people who had held her down were screaming “Fire!” and running out of the room, and they were gone and it was only Jane in the room now with her, the rain pouring down and Jane staring down at her hands, what looked like two small toys she was holding.
“Mirela, I set a fire!” she said, laughing, and holding up her toys. “Mirela, we set this place on fire!”
She was saying they had to get out of there, right now, Mirela, let’s go, Mirela, listen, we have to go, and over the sibilant din of the fire sprinklers Mirela called out, “No Mama! No Mama!” and she was laughing, too, laughing along with Jane, and she spun around and around in the rain, tilting her head upward to drink the sky.