13

“That was close.” A man in scrubs leaned over me. His head was brown and fuzzy and he smelled like cinnamon. I wondered what this snickerdoodle was talking about, and then I saw black hairy stitches crawling across my wrist. “Were you trying to kill yourself, Miss Crane?” He asked.

“Umm,” I said. It felt like a war in my stomach. I recognized something I hadn’t felt in a while: hunger. I craved donuts.

“Was this a suicide attempt?”

“Where’s Bianca?”

“Do you have a relative we can contact?”

I thought about Mom. I thought about her phone calls. I thought about the last time we had spoken, how proud she was “to have her daughter back.”

“When you come visit, you won’t believe these tomatoes,” she’d said. She was right. I couldn’t believe the tomatoes. I wanted to camp out in her greenhouse and tug her tomatoes off the vine and squirt seeds all over my white shirt and taste the sweet juice. “Chris finished the barn last month,” she’d said. She had two horses so far, boarded by neighbors. She fed them apples from her tree every day. I couldn’t have them call her. I couldn’t disappoint her like that. Especially now that she had horses.

I said, “I wanted to feel…different.” A chubby nurse arrived and told me to sit down in a wheelchair. She pushed me through the corridors into an elevator and across a pathway to another part of Davies Medical Center.

“Are we going to get something to eat?” I asked her.

“They’ll answer your questions at intake,” she said. A weary couple was watching Oprah in the waiting room. I wondered if I was being held prisoner. I wanted to go home but realized in that moment that I couldn’t, not to Bianca’s house, not with the mountain of meth on her desk. I could go to Wasteland and find a co-worker to crash with. I woke up to my name being called and walked up to the little window.

“Down the hall, second door on the right. Knock on Dr. Beemer’s office.”

I smelled meat and heard furious laughter. I hoped for food: pancakes, muffins, fruit.

A puffy, tan guy wearing all white with a long, scraggly beard and silence beads around his neck answered the office door. There was a Bob Marley poster behind him. He was dressed in all white.

“Have a seat.” I sat down. There was no way in hell this hippie had food for me. There was a rose quartz heart on his desk. Sandalwood incense burned. I wrinkled my nose.

“What’s going on at home?”

“Nothing. I got in a fight.”

“With a serrated knife?” He fingered a rubber ball and laughed softly.

“I didn’t want to die. I just wanted to feel something else.” There were several books on chakras on a shelf.

“Hold this crystal. When you feel angry—have you tried yoga?” I took the rock. It was cold and slick. I wondered how many dirty fingers had caressed it.

“When can I go home, Dr. Beemer?”

“You want to go home?”

“Yeah. I want to eat. And sleep.”

“That’s a good place to start. In seventy two hours, you can go home.”

I didn’t go home to Bianca. I crashed on a friend’s couch and borrowed her clothes. I was petrified to be alone. Even though I wanted to, I knew I could never go back to that speed hut. I could never see Bianca again. I didn’t trust myself, and I knew I’d never be the same.