Open Mind: Chapter Eight

I don’t remember much after the fall. There were flashes of blurred consciousness where I can piece together memories, but it’s all shrouded in this dark cloud. I remember a sharp pain and piercing cold wetness. Scattered voices and beeping. My mother’s face, free of make-up and hair a mess, looking over me and crying. A sterile lobby and the overwhelming smell of bleach.

When I finally fully came to, I first sensed my surroundings through smell and touch. I could feel the awkward plastic bedding beneath me and the smell of piss. There was a faint, artificial “clean linen” smell trying to mask the piss smell, but it was losing that battle. I opened my eyes to find an unfamiliar ceiling, off-white and speckled with stucco. I attempted to lift my head, but the dull aching of my neck begged me to stop. I lifted my whole torso to sit up with great strain -- my whole body was listless.

What the hell happened?

The room was sparse and completely foreign to me. There was a plastic desk bolted to the ground next to the bed -- plastic made to look like cheap wood. The edges were rounded off and friendly, which was the first sign of trouble ahead. Some of my clothes were piled into the closet shelves across the room from me.

When I tried to stand, I grew lightheaded and stumbled a bit. I caught myself on the desk beside my desk and rode the wave of vertigo. I turned my head to the side as best I could and caught a glimpse of the setting sun outside of a barricaded window. I muttered some strong, choice words to myself as I regained my composure. Once the world had stopped spinning, I staggered to the swinging door in the corner of the room. I peered outside the door frame to find a long, carpeted hallway with rows of the same white swinging doors. On both ends of the hallway were two sets of large double doors.

A girl walked out of her room at the same time I did. She looked to be a few years younger than me, but not all that much smaller. She was dressed in a puke green hospital gown -- the same gown that I was horrified to find on my own body. She looked at me with a toothy grin that stretched her plump lips.

“’Bout time you got up, Skylar. They don’t usually let us sleep all day like that.”

“Who the hell are you?” I muttered. Her overly familiar tone with me frustrated me.

“I’m Adrianna. Don’t you remember, Skylar? We’ve had this conversation like, five times now.”

My head tilted, sending a small sharp pain down my spine. “Why do you know my name? And what do you mean we’ve had this conversation? I don’t know you.”

Adrianna shot me a pained glare through gritted teeth. “You best go to the lobby and talk to Donna yourself.” She walked away from me as she spoke and headed down the hallway. Her voice carried all the way down the hall. “Hey, Jeffrey! You got my sheets done yet? I been waiting on those to get dried all afternoon!”

I could hear a deep, distant “yeah, yeah,” from someplace down the hall to my right. I decided to head down the hallway in the opposite direction of Adrianna. Each door was adorned with different handcrafted notes, pictures, and coloring sheets. I could tell that there were all ages represented in this place -- not all of the coloring pages were filled within the lines, and more than a few pages had words misspelled and entire letters backwards. I felt a creeping sense of dread.

After a dozen or so rows of doors, I came to the set of double doors. To my left, the hallway extended further. On the walls of that hallway were two large, bright boards -- empty at the time but soon to be filled with inspirational quotes, upcoming events, and whatever else. I followed that hallway a short distance before it opened up into a large lobby. In the lobby was a small television set, perched oddly on top of an empty bookshelf. There were about a dozen chairs pointed towards the one television set, and a few of the chairs had children of various ages and sizes in them. They pulled their slack-jawed gaze away from the TV just long enough to look at me before returning to their cartoon.

On the opposite side of the room was a large counter that extended along several feet of the wall. It reminded me of the type of counter you would find at the library when you needed some dusty old book from the reference section. And just like the library, there was an old woman stationed behind this counter as well. The woman pulled her focus from the computer screen in front of her and plastered a fake smile across her face when she saw me.

“Well, it’s about time you decided to join us, kiddo,” the woman joked. Her southern drawl was raspy and hoarse -- no doubt the victim of years of cigarettes and bouts of pneumonia. Even her laugh sounded painful, though she didn’t seem to mind. “Thought I was gonna have to come in after you with the hose to wake your butt up.”

I looked past her to see a door on the other side of the counter. The sun was streaming through the glass of the door, begging me to journey outside. I said nothing to the woman and headed towards the door. She stumbled up from her office chair and walked the length of the counter towards me.

“Hey! Skylar! Where do you think you’re going?”

I stopped and turned to face her. “Why does everyone know my name? I didn’t tell you my name.”

“Of course I know your name, silly. I know all of the residents here by name. If there’s some other name you prefer, like a nickname or something, you’ll have to remind me because I’ll probably forget. That’s what happens when you get old.”

“I’m sorry, you said I’m a … resident?”

“Yes, honey. That’s what we call ya’ll here at Dogwood. Residential. It’s in the name, after all.” The woman paused, clearly affected by whatever emotion must have registered on my face in that moment. “Oh God, they really did a number with those medications, didn’t they?”

“What medications,” I asked, even though the pieces were beginning to fall into place.

“Oh, no. No way. I am NOT letting Amy get away with this one. All the time, they are trying to pass off the hard stuff onto us. I’m over here busting my balls to keep things running on this side and the damn therapists can’t even --” The woman stopped and took a deep, sharp breath.

“That sounds like a lot to deal with,” I said casually. “Good luck with all that.” I walked towards the glass double doors that led to the outside. The woman shouted unintelligibly at me but I did not heed her warning. As soon as my hands touched the metal handles of the door, a blaring alarm sounded. I stumbled backwards from the door.

“Goddamn it,” I heard the woman shout. “Breezy, go make sure Isaac doesn’t lose his mind in the living room please!” She ran around the lengthy desk and towards me. She grabbed my arm roughly and pulled me away from the door. She walked over to a pin-pad on the wall and punched in a few numbers. The combination stopped the alarm from blaring, and in the silence I could hear screaming from the living room.

“No!” A shrill voice screamed from living room. “No! I hate it! No! Leave me alone, assholes! No!” A couple men came down the hallway and entered the living room. They emerged from the room with a tiny boy -- no older than five -- held between them. The men each held one arm, with a woman behind them to monitor the situation. The boy continued to cry out and kick his legs. “I hope you all die! You deserve it, you ugly ass jerks!” His screams continued down the hallway, past the point at which we could not longer see him.

The woman spun me around to face her. She placed her hands on each of my shoulders. “I’m going to let you off with a warning this time, since you didn’t know no better. Never touch these doors. Next time you’ll be spending the night in the Comfort Room.”

I didn’t know what that meant, but the way that she said “comfort” made it sound distinctly not comfortable. “I… I don’t know what is going on.”

The woman sighed and released her grip. “I know, Skylar. Just … sit down over there for a second for me, please.” The woman pointed to a large blue chair on the opposite wall from the counter. I did as I was instructed and sat in the rocking chair. It was surprisingly heavy -- filled with some sort of sand mixture to keep it weighed down.

The woman walked back behind the counter and picked up the chunky white phone at one end of the counter. She held the phone to her lips and her scratchy voice echoed throughout the building on the speaker system. She paged for “Doctor Lau” to come to the “residential wing.” She slammed the receiver down with a ear-shattering clank that reverberated through the hall. She and I both winced in pain; it was clear that she didn’t mean to make such a terrible sound.

As I sat, waiting for this mysterious doctor to appear, a girl turned the corner of the hallway to look in my direction. Her wide, blue eyes pierced through me -- it was a judgmental look that seemed to ask what the hell I was doing here. The girl had no way of knowing who I was, but her breathless stare suggested that she knew me better than I knew myself in that moment. Two men approached from behind the girl and grabbed her, one on each arm, and ushered her down the hallway. The girl cackled all the way down the hall.

I could feel the pounding of my head start to grow. I hadn’t noticed the fog over my eyes until the tiles of the floor started to come into greater focus. The ugly piss-white checkered pattern of the tiles transfixed me in that moment -- I couldn’t pull my eyes away. The lines dripped and slithered between tiles, forming nonsensical shapes.

I would often space out as a child and look for patterns in wallpaper, ceiling tiles, or whatever else I could find. The designs of the tiles refused to conform to any shape, and the harder I tried to force it, the more my head pounded. I shut my eyes tight in an effort to stop the pounding and regain control of my mind. When I opened my eyes, a clear image had formed -- the black silhouette of a large bird, with wings extended and claws spread out beneath it. The image grew bigger and bigger, the wings extending past the confines of the one single tile. It spread rapidly for several tiles, threatening to swallow my feet beneath me. I shook my head violently to shake the image from my mind, but when I looked down, the image had only grown more pronounced. Whispers crept in as I felt a loss of control over my own mind and body, and it caused my heart to pound.

The whispers finally coalesced into one singular word -- Skylar. I turned to the source of the sound to find a beautiful woman with immediate intensity. She leaned forward towards me, studying my admittedly odd behavior with keen interest. Her dark eyes darted from me to the floor and back again. There was a sly smile of red lipstick that spread across her thin face.

“I hope I’m not interrupting something,” she said.

I would have ordinarily had a quick response to jab back at her, but my brain was mush and I couldn’t form a coherent thought.

“No comeback,” she retorted. “Odd.” She jotted down a few notes with her pen on a notepad in her lap. “I will definitely need to have a word with Mary Beth about your zolpidem levels.”

“What… what are you talking about?”

“Sorry, I am just rambling,” the woman chuckled. “Would you care to join me in my office?”

“I don’t even know who you are, lady.”

She scratched a few more notes on her pad. “That is troubling.” She looked up from her pad and directly into my eyes, which was deeply unsettling to me. “I don’t mean to alarm you, but we have spoken several times in my office. You have no memory of this?”

My mind was racing. I was so frustrated with all of these people claiming to know me and having no memory of them. It felt like a swarm of gnats buzzing around in my brain, urging me to dredge up some piece of a memory that wasn’t there. I put my head in my hands, unable to process everything that was happening.

“Why don’t we go to my office? It might help trigger something in your memory.”

I looked up at her, utterly lost and defeated. In my mind, I had no other choice. This woman, whoever she was, was my best chance of getting some answers as to where I was and how I got there.

As if she had registered my train of thought, the woman straighten up and cleared her throat. “My apologies. You must have no idea who I am, given the memory loss and all.” She outstretched her thin hand to me -- her spindly fingers were dressed up with gaudy gold rings and beet red acrylic nails. “My name is Doctor Lau, and I am this facility’s designated grief counselor.”

“... grief counselor?”

“Yes, Ms. Miller. I am certified for regular old counseling, of course. But my real passion is for helping people suffering from grief and loss. My calling, if you believe in such things.”

“The hell do I need a grief counselor for?”

Doctor Lau sighed with a coy smile. “Just a educated hunch.” She rose to her feet and straightened her back. She extended a hand to me and beckoned for me to follow her.

“I’m going to pass, thanks.”

“We do this every week, Skylar.”

The vein in my neck twitched at the thought of weeks of lost time. I refused to let the horror of this register on my face, however. “Cut it out,” I snapped. “Stop throwing this memory loss shit in my face. I don’t know you, and I sure as hell don’t need you.”

“Do you want to get better?”

“I am better. I’ll be even better when you piss off.”

“You tried to kill yourself. Do you remember that?”

“Kill myself?” I exclaimed. “Is that what my mother told you?” I scoffed and turned away from Dr. Lau. “That’s classic projection. She’s the one who ought to be here talking to you, not me.”

Dr. Lau leaned in closer to me. “Well, it’s you that I want to speak with right now, not her.” She extended her hand once again. “Won’t you please come to my office?”

There was a syrupy, artificial core to her words. I wasn’t sure in the moment, but I could sense that there was something amiss with this woman. There was some missing piece of her that was preventing me from getting a solid read on her.

It turned out, once I was in her office, that the piece that was missing was understanding what a sardonic, miserable human being she was behind closed doors. You know this -- I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know about the esteemed Doctor Lau. But it bears repeating.

Once she closed the squealing wooden door to her cramped, dark office, she immediately kicked off her sandals and kicked them, one foot at a time, at the wall behind her desk.

“Alright, Skylar. You probably won’t remember any of this, so let’s go ahead and get it over with.” She plopped down behind her cheap, plastic desk and placed her tiny, bare feet on top of the stack of papers.

“I… wait… what?”

“I spent a lot of time going out of my way to be really accommodating and friendly with you, and each time you spat in my face. The first time, literally spat. Each time you completely forget what happened, and each time I make an absolute fool of myself for no reason. Well, not this time. Consider this… an experimental approach to therapy.”

The doctor vaguely gestured to the leather armchair in front of her desk. It was clearly a hand-me-down piece of furniture, likely donated by some well-intentioned elderly couple when their kids bought them a new furniture set for Christmas. There were deep rips in the arms of the chair and all throughout the back and seat of it. When I sat down, the rough edges of the rips scratched through the thin hospital gown to irritate my skin.

“So, I guess you can catch me up on what you already know so that I don’t repeat things over again,” I said. Doctor Lau grabbed an green apple from the corner of the desk and took a bite from it, studying me closely. I could sense I’d said something wrong. “Or did I not tell you the truth?”

“See, that’s what is interesting,” she said with a grin. “When you can’t remember which story you’ve told, you’ll tell a million different ones. All that I’ve been able to confidently piece together is that you were born and raised here in Missouri, you used to live in the country, and your father died when you were pretty young. Does that about cover it?”

“I mean, I wasn’t that young,” I muttered. “But yeah, those are all true.”

“Once you found out that I’m a grief counselor, your stories became a bit more morbid. You mentioned that your mother is actually your stepmother who killed your mother and took her place, you had a brother who died overseas in Timbuktu, a twin sister that you ate in the womb, and a dog named Sally, who also is inexplicably also deceased. As you know, half of those things are things I could check in your records if I really wanted to, and you don’t strike me as a dog lover or a cannibal, so those bits also ring a bit false.”

“Wow, those meds really are something else,” I laughed. “Yeah, I definitely made that shit up. And I don’t dislike dogs, by the way. They just annoy me.”

“Yes, the medication can have very strange side effects. Make sure you keep me in the loop on what you experience so that we can make recommendations to the nurses on adjustments.”

I leaned back in my chair and sighed with my whole chest. “So are you going to tell me what I’m doing here? When can I leave?”

“Both are good questions and both kind of have answers.”

“What kind of half ass answer is that?”

“You are here because your mother is concerned about your safety. She mentioned something about an attack of another girl a little while back, an attack towards her, and then an attack against yourself.”

“Okay, and the second question?”

Doctor Lau cleared her throat. “So we are accepting all of what I just said as fact?”

“Well, no. But I’m more interested in when I’m leaving.”

“That depends largely on you. You aren’t here under any court order or mandate. There is a treatment team here, made up of your therapists, case manager, teacher, and nurses who monitor your progress and more-or-less decide when you leave.”

“So I just need to sweet-talk you for a few weeks and I can get out?”

“Me? Absolutely,” Doctor Lau scoffed through an artful grin. “But the others on the team are a bit of a harder sell.”

I pondered this thought for moment, and responded shortly, “I can try.” My eyes drifted to my left as the doctor began to speak about procedure and protocol. She had a body-length mirror that stood beside a row of beige filing cabinets. The mirror was ornate and framed with flowery wooden designs. There was a small hairline crack in the upper right corner of the mirror that was just barely visible in the dim lamplight, and it distracted me for no good reason.

For so many reasons, I hated mirrors. I had an idea in my mind of what I looked like -- scrawny, splotchy, and unattractive. The mirror only served to double-down on that reality and show me the worst possible version of myself. Every moment I looked into my sunken, sad green eyes, the more I felt compelled to look away. I closed them, and when I opened them again, the cracks had spread to cover my entire face. The pieces of my face that had fractured were unrecognizable, and when I shifted slightly to the left, the cracks followed.

The doctor cleared her throat, and I turned to face her with a look of mild shame. “You didn’t hear a word I said, did you?”

“I would think a therapist would be a bit more sensitive about a bout of disassociation,” I said, offhandedly, with my gaze back on the cracks of the mirror. They deepened with intensity, threatening to tear through the back of the mirror.

“If I thought that’s what was going on…” she said, transfixed with my newfound fascination. “Is there something that --”

“--if I said that I was seeing things in the mirror, is that an example of something going wrong with my medications that I should keep you in the loop about?”

For the first time since I’d entered her office, Doctor Lau sat forward in her chair. She leaned in with a curious light in her eyes. She raised one thin eyebrow and tapped her nails against the desktop. “Go on.”

“It’s nothing. Just some cracks in the mirror that aren’t there.”

“Is there a bird-like creature?”

I was speechless. If it was a shot in the dark, it was a half-court shot on a pitch black court. My heart dropped out of my chest and into the floor. Did I tell her something in one of my past sessions? I must have -- there was no way that she could have known something so personal. I’d never told another soul what I’d seen that night -- and there is no way that she could have contacted Candice, right? Although I suspected that my face had given away my secret, I decided to play dumb.

“That’s a weird thing to assume,” I jabbed. “Do you ask all of your patients about birds? What are you, a birdwatcher or something? Weird.”

Doctor Lau scribbled something in her notebook. I asked her what she wrote, and she responded, “patient didn’t say no.”

“No, okay? No. Just cracks.”

Doctor Lau looked down her nose at me, disappointed in my defensive response. “We will revisit this. You’re free to go back to the residential side -- it’s probably lunch time by now.”

I rose up from the chair, my legs wobbling. The doctor reminded me to take my medication and keep her informed of any changes, but my mind was racing. Who was this woman? As I opened the door to leave the office, Doctor Lau called out to me.

“I almost forgot. Your mom insisted that you have a tutor while you’re here so that you don’t fall behind. My niece Amy is looking for a placement, so I’ve set her up with regular visits. She will be here tomorrow.” I opened my mouth to speak out, and she interrupted me with a sharp, “be nice!”