Oh, my god, you’re back.” A grinning, skinny, black-haired guy came running up to me, waving his arms around his head like he was trying to hail a taxi in a downpour. “Don’t ask me to pretend I’m not glad. It’s awful here without you. It’s awful here with you, too, but it’s just a little bit better. Who brought you in? Was this your idea or someone else’s? How long are you staying? Do you have a roommate?”
“Indy,” I said, overwhelmed. “Give me a minute.”
“Sure, of course,” he said. He shoved his hands into the pockets of his sweatpants. “Commencing backing off.” He took a couple tiny steps away from me. “Is this better?”
Indy—called that because he wore an Indianapolis 500 T-shirt most days of the week (“ironically,” he insisted)—was loud and funny and irreverent. When I hung out with him and Michaela, I could sometimes forget we were on a psych ward.
“What happened to your eyebrows?” I asked.
He put his hand up to where little patches of hair were starting to grow back. “I thought they were snakes and so I shaved them off.” He shrugged. “That was right before my parents brought me back. You know, paranoid delusions, suicidal ideation, NBD.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
I noticed his fingers were ink-stained. Last time we were here together, Indy spent most of his time drawing labyrinthine M. C. Escher–like rooms on paper scraps, then filling in the margins with microscopic writing that Michaela swore contained the secrets of the universe. Once, when one of the aides made like he was trying to decipher it, Indy punched him.
“Walk with me?” Indy said. “Tell me everything about the other side.” He leaned in and sniffed my hair. “You smell like freedom.”
“I smell bad is more like it. I need a shower.”
“Well, you’ll have to wait,” he said, tapping an invisible watch on his wrist. “Because right now it’s slop time.”
Of course. That was another thing I hadn’t forgotten. If there was a higher power in a mental health unit, it wasn’t God: it was the Almighty Schedule.
At Belman Psych, you ate your meals when it told you to. You went to group therapy when it told you to, and to individual therapy when it told you to. You took your medicine when it told you to, got your vitals checked when it told you to, and turned your lights out when it told you to.
And you did all those things again and again, day after day, until some doctor decided that you were better.
Or that you couldn’t be helped.
Together Indy and I walked down the long, white hallway. There were a bunch of double rooms for patients on the right-hand side. On the other side was the nursing station, a few therapists’ offices, and a small lounge with a kitchenette. We used to be able to use it to make popcorn, but then two patients got into a fistfight over the microwave and the nurses declared it off-limits.
At the end of the hall was the big room that served as the ward cafeteria on one side and the lounge on the other. The walls were painted a color that one of the nurses told us was called Serenity Peach.
An obvious example of wishful thinking, Indy had said.
Michaela called to us from a table in the corner, and we walked over and sat down with her. “It’s lasagna day,” she said.
Indy rubbed his hands together. “My favorite.”
I couldn’t tell if he was being serious, but my stomach was growling, and I was ready for whatever rolled up to us on the food cart. I watched its slow progress around the room, as a girl not much older than any of us passed out the plastic trays to all the ward residents. When she finally made her way over to us, I took my tray gratefully. There was the promised lasagna, plus yogurt in a plastic cup, a few pieces of broccoli, a packet of Oreos, and a carton of milk.
“Are we sure this is lasagna? Because it looks like a square of vomit,” Michaela said mildly.
“Oh, shut up,” said Indy. “You aren’t going to eat it anyway.”
“Not if I can help it,” Michaela said.
Once Michaela had told me that she wanted to live on water and sunlight. It sounded so poetic and pretty, but the reality of starving herself was anything but: her skin yellowed, her fingernails turned brittle, and when she showered, clumps of her hair fell out.
She was doing better now, though. She didn’t look as frail as she used to, and she was willingly depositing spoonfuls of yogurt into her mouth.
Me, I shoveled the food in like I hadn’t eaten in days. And for all I knew, I hadn’t. The lasagna was salty, tomatoey, cheesy—honestly, it was delicious.
Indy stabbed his spork ineffectually at a tough broccoli stem. “I hate plastic utensils. It makes every day the worst kind of picnic.” He abandoned the spork and picked up the vegetable with his fingers. “We really did miss you, Han,” he said.
“Indy left, too, you know,” Michaela told me. “Then I was all alone.”
“First of all, I was only gone for a month, which is pathetic. And secondly, you weren’t alone,” said Indy. “There’s Beatrix and Kevin and Jade, plus Andy and Skye and Cayden.…”
I knew a couple of the patients he pointed to; others I’d never seen before.
“You know I don’t talk to them,” Michaela said.
“What’s stopping you?” Indy asked innocently.
“Gee, I don’t know,” Michaela said. “Beatrix creeps me out, Kevin can only talk about World of Warcraft, and Jade doesn’t talk at all. Ugh, do I have to go through the whole list?”
“No.” I opened my milk and drank half the carton in one gulp.
“What Michaela is trying to say is that she missed you, too,” Indy said.
I swallowed, nodded. It was definitely weird to be welcomed back to a psychiatric ward. The way I saw it, being readmitted meant that normal life was a test you’d failed again.
Not that my life was what you’d call normal. But I knew that Indy and Michaela were trying to be nice.
“I missed you guys, too,” I said.
“Julia died,” Michaela blurted.
There was a sudden roaring in my ears. I closed my eyes and clenched my fists as a wave of nausea flooded through me. These were words you never wanted to hear.
Julia had roomed with Michaela, too, once upon a time. Julia was from a little town in Connecticut, but she’d always talked in a British accent. She used to call me Dahling and Duck. She had the most beautiful copper hair I’d ever seen.
I remembered the last conversation we had. It was spring, and we were sitting in the hospital garden.
“I don’t want this anymore,” she’d said.
“You don’t want what?” I’d innocently asked. Like she was talking about the granola bar Amy had given her.
She gestured to the trees, the flowers, the sky. To herself. “Life,” she’d said. “I mean, I’m done. I don’t know why no one can understand that.”
I crumpled the juice cup in my hands.
“She killed herself on Christmas Eve,” Michaela said.
I put my forehead down on the cool table and let all the feelings—sadness, resignation, and an awful, unexplainable relief—come over me in a rush.
Julia was dead and I was alive. This place was terrible. This place was home.