Dr. Travis had gone home for the day, and it was a huge black man named Beldon who led Emily into the dining room at five o’clock. He wore street clothes—baggy trousers, a striped jersey, high tops. His pockmarked face was vaguely familiar, like a retired sports celebrity selling aspirin on TV; he looked like he could be strong when necessary.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Beldon announced when they entered the dining room. “We have a new guest with us tonight. I’d like to introduce Emily Scaive from Hedden Academy. You all be nice to her, hear?”
Perhaps six people looked up at her. About six others stared gloomily at their plates. They all looked normal to Emily, but then she guessed she probably looked pretty normal to them.
“Sit with me,” suggested a guy about Emily’s age, rising.
He was massively handsome, Emily thought, suddenly nervous.
“Keith Wight.” He held out his hand and Emily shook it, then followed him to the table set near the stainless steel cart. “See, here’s the deal: we can’t be allowed to go down to the cafeteria, so they send up a menu every morning and we check what we want from their awesome list of delectable gourmet meals. Of course since you’re new here, you’ll have to take what they sent you tonight.”
Emily stacked her tray with utensils, a paper napkin, a plate of macaroni and cheese, broccoli stewed into submission, a carton of milk, and a bowl of apple crisp. Beldon grabbed up a bowl of apple crisp and ate it as he strolled around the room.
“The only way to convince your palate this is edible is to smother the food with salt,” Keith was saying, “and salt of course as we all know makes you retain water and that makes you depressed, but since the main purpose of this hospital is to provide fine working conditions for the kitchen crew, things aren’t about to change.” As they sat down at the table, he asked without taking a breath, “So what are you here for?”
Emily just looked at him.
“Don’t pay any attention to him,” said the woman sitting next to Emily. Her hair was lank, her eyes lusterless, and she was only turning her food over and over. “He thinks he’s the Kathie Lee of West Four.”
“All right, I’ll guess,” Keith continued, unfazed. Folding his arms, he leaned back in his chair and studied Emily. “Okay, it’s not bulimia or anorexia.”
“Definitely not chem depp,” added the guy seated next to Keith. He was in his early twenties and lean, with black circles around his eyes and a slight tremor to his hands.
“And we all know it takes one to know one,” said Keith.
The chem depp stuck out his hand. “I’m Arnold.”
“Hi, Arnold.” Emily shook his hand.
“I’m Cynthia.”
Emily returned Cynthia’s shy smile. “Hi.”
“Cynthia’s manic-depressive,” Keith said. “She gets great drugs.”
“Why are you here?” Emily asked.
“Split personality,” Keith answered archly. “I’m gay but my parents’ son isn’t.”
Cynthia said, “She looks situational to me.”
“Yeah, I think she’s not endogenous,” Arnold agreed.
“What does that mean?” Emily asked.
“Girl, you will learn such great words in here! Endogenous means you’re here for a problem in your system, like chem depp or neurosis or manic-depression. Situational means you’re normal but something happened. So that’s what we think you are. Are we right?”
Emily nodded.
“What happened?” Cynthia asked.
Emily shrugged and looked down at her plate.
“You go to Hedden?” Arnold asked.
Emily nodded.
“Must be nice to be rich,” Cynthia muttered.
Emily looked at her. “We’re not rich.”
“Right,” Arnold said.
“We’re not. It’s just that we live on a farm in the middle of Massachusetts and the schools there …” She couldn’t find the energy to continue.
“Do you hate Hedden?” Cynthia asked.
“In-ter-est-ing.” Keith stroked an invisible Freudian goatee. “So it’s not the school.”
“Is it love?” Cynthia asked.
Emily shook her head, but Arnold leaned forward. “You’re lying. She’s lying. I can tell. It is love. Look at her!”
Emily raised her eyes to his. “It is not love.”
“Oooh,” Keith cooed. “Honey, you’re turning red. I do believe you’re lying to us.”
“And I do believe you’re a bunch of morons,” Emily snapped back, angry. “Believe me, you don’t have a clue. You aren’t even close.”
“Children,” Beldon said from behind her back, “play nicely.”
“We’ve got to hurry.” The seriously overweight, pasty-skinned man at the end of the table spoke in a monotone. “We’ll miss the beginning.”
“Star Trek reruns at seven o’clock,” Keith informed Emily.
“We all have to watch them,” Cynthia added, grinning. “Bill gets unruly if we don’t.”
“He’s got a little problem with reality,” Keith said under his breath.
“We’ve all got a little problem with reality,” muttered Arnold.
“We’ve got to hurry,” Bill said.
Emily hadn’t touched her food, but when the others rose, she rose with them, scraped her debris into a trash barrel, stacked her tray on the cart, and followed Bill as he lumbered out the door and down the corridor toward the glassed-in living area. The television was mounted up high, out of reach, near the ceiling, but there was a remote control, which Bill grabbed up.
“Hurry,” Bill said.
She dragged a chair into the spot Keith and Cynthia had left for her between them. Somehow, she realized, she’d joined a group, this collection of peculiar characters who seemed to be the elite of West 4, for as the others entered the room, they sat in chairs scattered elsewhere instead of joining the semicircle Emily was in. Bill had gotten a chair with arms and she could see from the corner of her eyes how his hands clutched the ends of the arms, as if for support during turbulence.
She settled back in her own chair and surrendered to the hypnosis of television.
It was a little like being back in her dorm, watching television with her friends, and when Star Trek ended, and Emily looked around, she was startled to see her parents standing patiently outside the glass wall.
Bill, Cynthia, Arnold, and Keith rose.
“Where are you going?” Emily asked, alarmed.
“We’ve got group. You will, too, later,” Cynthia assured her.
Keith darted forward. “Tell me what you’re in for and I’ll stay here with you, give you moral support.”
Arnold grabbed Keith’s arm and lightly twisted it behind his back. “You terrible little ferret. Get out of here.”
They half shuffled, half wrestled from the room. Some of the other patients remained, two engrossed in a chess game, another one reading, another just staring at his hands.
Linda smiled and waved at Emily as if she were on a train arriving from another country. She looked so pitifully hopeful it made Emily want to weep. Emily wished the glass were some solid material from Star Trek technology that could not be shattered, that would keep them apart forever.
In fact the door was standing open, and Linda and Owen entered the living area.
“Hi, honey,” Linda said. “How are you?”
Emily shrugged. Her mother smelled so good, so familiar, like cinnamon and flowers, it made Emily feel weak and childish. But the perfume was a lie. Emily was not a child, and her mother had not protected her.
“Shall we sit down over here?” Linda suggested brightly.
They settled in an empty corner of the room around a card table. Emily folded her arms over her chest defensively and stared fiercely at the floor, fighting back tears.
“You look good, honey,” Linda said gently.
“We brought you some clothes,” Owen said. “The nurse has the stuff. It’s in your duffel bag.”
“Cordelia said to tell you hello.”
“We’re staying at the Academy Inn.”
“We had dinner there tonight. It wasn’t bad. A little on the heavy side, what I suppose they call ‘traditional.’ ” Suddenly Linda reached across the table and put her hand on Emily’s. “Sweetie, sweetie, Emily. Can’t you tell us what’s going on?”
Emily didn’t want to look up; she couldn’t bear to see her mother’s expectant face, her furrowed brow, eyes open so wide, as if they were spotlights shining on Emily’s darkness. When her mother touched her hand, Emily snatched it away and hid it in her lap. She was one inch away from screaming at her mother. From hitting her stupid face.
Owen cleared his throat. “We took Bruce out to dinner. He says hello. He said he’d come tonight, but we didn’t know …” He let the sentence trail off.
“He brought a girl with him!” Linda exclaimed, sounding as if she were talking to a preschooler. “Alison Cartwright. Do you know her?” When Emily didn’t respond, Linda babbled on. “She’s lovely. Good sense of humor. She lives in New York. Bruce will get to see her when he goes to New York with Whit. Maybe that’s why he wanted to go to New York with Whit. I mean he hasn’t been close to Whit before this year, and suddenly … Emily, I wish you would talk to me. I’m so worried about you.”
Owen said, “Emily, we want to help you. We’ll do anything we can to help you.”
“Please, honey,” Linda urged. “If you could just talk to us … Emily, you’re my brave, strong darling girl! What could be so bad—”
Emily stood up so fast her chair fell over. “Leave me alone!” she shouted. “I don’t want to talk to you! Can’t you get that?” She glared at them, teeth bared, hands clenched. “I don’t want to talk to you ever again! I don’t want to see you ever again. I hate you!” Her mother’s face withered, her eyes were full of pain. Emily ran from the room.
Beldon found her in her little cell of a room. She was crying again, the horrible retching, ripping-up crying that she sometimes thought would eviscerate her with its strength. Beldon shut the door and leaned against it. “You okay?”
“No, I’m not okay!” Emily yelled. “Does it look like I’m fucking okay? I want to die, all right? I don’t want to live another moment!”
“Why don’t you lie down and rest a bit? We’ve got adolescent group/young adult in half an hour.”
“I don’t want to be in your stupid group! I don’t want to be anywhere!” She dragged her fingernails down her cheeks, drawing blood. “I just want to die. Why won’t you let me die?”
“Oh, honey, now look what you’ve done,” Beldon said, coming over and taking her hands in his.
Sitting next to her on the bed, he wrapped his arms around her and held her while she cried. He was so large and strong and sexless. Emily wanted to dissolve into his body.
After a while, when she’d exhausted herself, Beldon said, “I’m going to get a nurse now to put some ointment on those scratches. We don’t want you getting infected. And she’ll give you something to help you rest a bit.”
“Make her give me a lot,” Emily said. She collapsed onto the bed. The pain in her belly was so great she wanted to gnaw it out with her teeth. Her hands burrowed under her sweatshirt. She clawed at the flesh of her fat stomach. That pain was clear, brilliant; it distracted her from the other pain. For a while.
After a while a fat old nurse came in with two pills and a paper cup of water. Emily sat up to take them, then sat docilely as the nurse gently washed her face and dotted it with antiseptic cream. The nurse smelled like vanilla and was restfully quiet. She didn’t say a word, but hummed a waltzy kind of tune under her breath. When she left, Emily curled up on her bed in a fetal position, saying to herself, “It will stop soon. It will stop.”
And in a while the pills took effect and she slept. At some point she was aware that Keith stuck his head in the door. “Hey.” He gave her the thumbs-up sign. “Looks like you got some good drugs. Way to go.”
Later the humming nurse came in to escort her to the bathroom where she listlessly pretended to brush her teeth, then back to her cell where she helped Emily change out of her clothes and into her pajamas. Then she tucked Emily into bed as if she were a child. Emily knew that if the old nurse had a clue about how filthy Emily really was, she wouldn’t treat her so gently. She wouldn’t even touch her.
All the rooms of the Academy Inn had a kind of old-sweater-and-lavender smell that over the years had become so familiar to Linda that it was homey, and in the very early morning light sifting through the curtains, she floated on the tide of wakefulness, incorporating that aroma into her dream.
In her dream she and Owen and Emily and Bruce as well were together at Linda’s grandmother’s house and in the logic of dreams Linda was young, even younger than Emily, which made a kind of sense, because her grandmother had died when she was thirteen. They were waiting for her grandmother’s cinnamon buns to come from the oven. They were safe. They were all safe. Her grandmother’s cat was purring erratically and Linda knew with the liquid knowledge of the dream that the noise was really Owen snoring in the bed next to hers.
The phone rang, shattering the dream.
Linda lurched upright in bed, her heart thrashing in her chest.
She stared at the instrument on the bedside table. Its imperative shrill was different from those on the farm, more electric, a kind of electronic bleat.
The clock on the bedside table said 7:30.
Owen picked up the phone.