None but the wind should warn of your returning.
—TOWNES VAN ZANDT, “NONE BUT THE RAIN”
It wasn’t visiting hours. They let me in anyway, after I begged from a wall phone on the first floor. She was on the third floor. I needed a special code to work the elevator. After I buzzed, I was led into the TV room, which was also a lunchroom. She was waiting there, holding a book. I can’t remember what the title was, but I remember staring at the cover. It had a drawing of an ornate iron gate. Beyond the gate was a gray sea. We sat across from each other. She laughed. She told me about a guy who earlier that morning had called his mother from the phone at the nurses’ station and shouted, so the entire floor could hear, could she please get him out of here so he could kill himself in peace. She pointed to a boy—he couldn’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen—sitting at one of the lunch tables listening to headphones, peacefully drumming the table with his palms. That’s him, she said. He’ll be all right.
“You’ll be all right, too,” I said.
“It doesn’t really matter.”
“Don’t say it again, all right?”
I looked around the room. In the corner was a pile of tattered boxes of board games. A stack of old magazines. There was a computer inside what looked like a video arcade game, the screen behind thick glass, a keyboard dangling from a chain.
“I brought you a brownie,” I said.
We used to say we lived in the country of us. I’ve never been able to explain this to anyone, though everyone I have told has nodded like they understood. Nine years we lived there. I watched her eat a brownie.
“Aren’t I thin?”
“You’re too thin.”
“Want some brownie?”
“No, I brought it for you.”
“Take some.”
She handed me a piece of the brownie. Nine years. Our fingers met. A half hour later, the kind small man with an accent—Polish?—unlocked the door and let me out.