The Measures Between Us (31 page)

“Stay with us, honey,” one of the nurses kept saying, picking up her chin when it fell. “Just stay with us, you're going to be okay.” Cynthia knew the nurse. Her name was Eleanor, and Cynthia liked her because she had once walked by the nurses' station and overheard Eleanor arguing with her husband. Any nurse willing to have a fight with her husband in front of the mental patients is a nurse I like, Cynthia thought. It made her real, less like a robot than many of the other staff members, who were wooden and often spoke as if they had memorized a script. Evan liked Eleanor, too, because she had once sneaked in McDonald's fries for Evan when she had a craving.

“Stay with us, honey. Evan, honey. That's it, stay here.”

It was strange. There were so many people, and so much blood, and yet Cynthia could see everything clearly. There was no chaos, more a sort of inveterate sadness and sense of futility, as if no matter what sort of intervention unfolded, how desperately everyone tried, the conclusion would be the same. Cynthia knew what would happen: A stretcher would arrive, paramedics. Evan would be whisked away to an ICU. Maybe they would keep her alive—for another six months, a year, two or three. Her wrists would scar over, reminders. She would keep seeing a therapist, keep making “progress.” She would take her antidepressants and have moments of lightness and air, even love and gratitude. But of this Cynthia was certain: Evan would eventually kill herself.
If not tonight, then another time. She was determined to end her life, to put a stop to her suffering the only way she knew how. That she hadn't already was due to nothing but luck, stupidity, and the existence of dull knives.

No one spotted Cynthia for several minutes. She wasn't hiding. She was standing just outside Evan's doorway. At some point the paramedics rushed by, too busy to notice she wasn't supposed to be there. Eleanor moved away when the EMTs took over. She kept saying Evan's name, though, as if Evan wouldn't shut her eyes or stop breathing as long as her name was in the air.

It was one of the orderlies who spotted Cynthia. They were a nameless bunch, a half dozen stocky men with heart-attack chests. Usually they didn't speak, deferring to the doctors and nurses. But tonight, when one of them eyed Cynthia, he pointed and yelled: “Hey, what's she doing here? You're not supposed to be here.” The paramedics didn't turn away from Evan. They were rewrapping her wrists with fresh bandages and giving her an injection in her thigh and fitting an oxygen mask over her face. Behind them a nurse readied a stretcher. Eleanor, however, when she heard the orderly, stopped saying Evan's name and marched over to Cynthia.

She took Cynthia's arm at the elbow and led her out of the room. Now that she was next to her, Cynthia could see her watery eyes, the tears she had trapped there while she was cradling Evan.

“You need to go back to your room,” Eleanor said, walking her down the hall.

“I know,” said Cynthia, offering no resistance. “I'm sorry.”

“I wish you hadn't seen that,” said Eleanor.

“Me too.”

They walked in silence, solitary twins striding down the empty hallway. Maybe they could keep walking for hours, Cynthia thought, numb this tragedy away with marathon laps around the hospital. They didn't see any other patients, no more rushing paramedics or nurses or orderlies. Outside it was dark, and there were people, miles from the hospital, who were loving the blackness. But here the fluorescent lights were bright, and if you listened closely you could hear a small, needling hiss.

“I understand you had quite a night,” Dr. Eliot said when Cynthia met with him the next day.

“Is she dead?” Cynthia asked.

Dr. Eliot looked surprised for a moment, taken aback by her bluntness. Then he slipped back into his unreadable mask.

“Is that what's important to you?” he asked.

“Jesus, you're unbelievable,” said Cynthia. “Of course that's what's important to me! I like Evan. I was just starting to get to know her, and I want to know if she's okay. I think that's pretty normal.”

“Fair enough,” said Dr. Eliot. “But I want to talk about your experience of what you saw. You had to be disturbed by it. Anyone would be.”

Cynthia shook her head and flexed her fingers into and out of a fist. She exhaled theatrically. “Can't you just fucking tell me whether she's dead? Why is that so hard? I want to know if my friend's still alive. What, there's some fucking rule against that? I guess I missed that one when I was admitted. ‘Lights out at ten o'clock, mail at noon, shitty sandwiches for lunch, we won't tell you if your friends die.' ”

Dr. Eliot looked at her, unmoved by her outburst. He didn't even write anything on his pad.

“Are you afraid I'll be a copycat? What if I promise not to try to kill myself? I'll sign something. We'll draw up a contract—you've got paper and everything. Just tell me where to write my name.”

Dr. Eliot looked down at his desk and rolled a couple pens back and forth. Then he picked one up and jabbed lightly at his mouth with it.

“Evan's recovering at a nearby hospital,” he said. “She severed two veins in her arms, lost a tremendous amount of blood. But she's going to be all right. I'm not sure whether she'll be returning to Rangely or not, so I don't know if you'll get to see her again. Even if she does, she might be housed in a different unit.”

“Where will she go, what unit?” Cynthia asked.

“I don't know. I'm sure that decision hasn't been made yet. And I wouldn't be able to tell you anyway.”

Cynthia felt a surge of sadness, and she was grateful too. She closed her eyes and left them shut for a few seconds, because she didn't want to cry. She hated crying in front of Dr. Eliot. She didn't like revealing that he had tapped into something.

“Thank you,” she said when she opened them. “I'm sure you're probably not supposed to tell me that kind of stuff, so I appreciate it.”

“Okay … what about you. Tell me how you're feeling today.”

Cynthia thought Dr. Eliot had done something special for her, trespassed a boundary, and she wanted to repay him. He seemed, at that moment, more alive than he ever had before, someone larger than just her doctor. For once her urge wasn't to clam up and be difficult.

“Eleanor took me back to my room after it happened,” Cynthia said. “She saw me get into bed, and then I fell right to sleep. I don't even remember her leaving the room.

“This morning I thought it was weird how easy it was for me to fall asleep, since I can never fall asleep, and then last night I witness this totally horrible thing and my head hits the pillow and I'm out for like eight straight hours. I slept through breakfast.”

“You were tired, overtired,” said Dr. Eliot. “Troubling events like that can be very draining, mentally and physically.”

“I guess. But I thought I'd lie down and shut my eyes and I'd just keep seeing Evan and all her blood. I thought it would be a picture that would be pasted on the insides of my eyelids, and then when I opened my eyes the same picture would be on the ceiling. If I picked up a magazine or a book, it'd be in there too, page after page, superimposed over what was supposed to be there. I thought it would be totally inescapable.

“I decided that the reason I was able to fall asleep was that my body wanted to protect me, not torture me. It was like some way to cope with the nightmare I'd just seen, for my body to just shut down completely and let me sleep so deeply. Usually I wake up a couple times during the night too. Not last night, though. It was like I was hibernating.”

Dr. Eliot wrote something on his pad.

Cynthia watched him and said, “Are you making a note that I think I'm a bear?”

“Very funny,” he said, grinning slightly.

Cynthia was happy to have made him smile. “Do you know why Evan tried to kill herself?” she asked. “I mean, was there a note or anything?”

“I don't know. I do know that she was very troubled.”

“Is that how you'd describe me—‘very troubled'?”

“Is that how you'd describe yourself?”

“Oh, we're back to this dance again,” Cynthia snapped. “You answering my questions with other questions. Today I'll play along, because you told me Evan's not dead, and I appreciate that.” Cynthia stared out the window for a moment. The sky was dull silver. Few patients were out walking or sitting. She wondered how many of them knew about Evan, how many were planning some grisly end like that. Some of them were probably jealous. A lone groundskeeper was grooming the rhododendrons on the edge of one of the lawns.

“I wouldn't say I'm ‘very troubled.' Not like Evan. I mean, she had a cocaine problem—I never had that. And she was a lot more hyper than me, and I'm not saying that just because of the drugs, and it might not even necessarily mean she's crazier than me. But she had all this manic energy, like she was rarely at peace with herself.”

“Do you feel that, at peace with yourself?”

“Sometimes.” Cynthia turned a ring on her thumb, white gold and tourmaline, a gift from an ex-boyfriend she had lost touch with. “Sometimes I actually do. I never know when I'm going to feel that way, and I never know how long it will last. But I have moments.”

“That's good,” said Dr. Eliot. “I'm glad to hear that.” He smiled at her warmly, and Cynthia felt again, for a few seconds, that he thought of her as more than a patient, that he cared about her very deeply and wanted her to be happy for longer than just moments.

“Any recent times like that?” he asked.

Cynthia shrugged. “Nothing that comes to mind specifically. Not for a while.”

“What about when your mom came to visit—how was that?”

“My mom?” Cynthia said. “You mean when she was here with my dad last week?”

“Right,” said Dr. Eliot, looking away. “Right … last week, when they visited you together.”

“I don't remember it being particularly peaceful or not peaceful,” said Cynthia. She was confused about why he was zeroing in on her mother again.

“Do you know why Evan might try to kill herself?” Dr. Eliot asked.

“No,” said Cynthia. “She told me the butter-knife story that got her admitted here, but that seemed more funny than scary. She was laughing about it. I think she was just really, deeply miserable. I think maybe she genuinely hated herself, way more than most people.”

“Do you think most people hate themselves?”

“Probably. Don't you?”

“So you think Evan did, and enough to do something so violent?”

“Well, I have no idea what triggered it, if that's what you're asking me,” said Cynthia.

“Let me clarify,” Dr. Eliot said. “I'm not asking you to name the specific event that you think caused her to try to take her own life. I'm asking you if you can imagine what it was that she was experiencing that would make her do that.”

“There's the cocaine thing,” Cynthia said.

“What do you mean by that?” Dr. Eliot asked.

“Evan had told me how hard it was to come down off a cocaine
high. Maybe she got some cocaine in here somehow, did it, and she was coming down and it was too painful.”

“Okay. Any other ideas?”

Cynthia shrugged. “Maybe it was just simple loneliness.”

“Can you take that any further?” Dr. Eliot said.

“Do I have to?”

“It would help.”

“I guess I mean that she had this realization that she was truly alone in the world, that she would always be alone, and she couldn't deal with it. She didn't trust that her boyfriend or her family or anyone else would be there for her. She showed me pictures of him, and she seemed worried he was going to break up with her.”

Dr. Eliot stared at Cynthia intently. “Say more about that,” he said.

“About what?”

“You mentioned loneliness.”

“When I was a child, four years old maybe, my parents rushed me to the hospital—a real hospital, not a mental hospital—because my fever had shot up to 103,” Cynthia said. “I was put in this room and there were baby-blue curtains around the bed, and doctors and nurses kept coming in. They would tell me things like, ‘You're doing great. You're such a big girl.' They kept poking at me and listening to my chest and my back, and they took blood a couple times. They shined that weird light in my eyes and stuck that scope in my ears.

“Anyway, it ended up being nothing, and I was discharged a couple days later. They gave me lollipops and a stuffed animal. But that first night I remember waking up and not knowing where I was. The curtains were open a sliver and I saw someone
else, sleeping, with a tube going right into his neck. I started screaming. Horrible, train-whistle screams. The nurses and doctors came rushing in, checked all the monitors and took my pulse and my temperature, and then they asked what was wrong and they told me I was okay. I guess they thought it was physical. A nurse told me my parents had been forced to leave because of a hospital rule. But I still remember how terrified I was to wake up in that strange bed with some machine beeping and not have them sitting there to explain what was going on, or even to just see their faces.”

“How does this relate to Evan?” Dr. Eliot asked.

“Maybe last night she woke up like that, and she didn't even realize it. She could have been asleep, and she heard some random noise that woke her up, and she blinked a few times, and she saw this crushing idea in front of her, even though we're so much older now. Maybe it had nothing to do with cocaine. Maybe she just finally understood: that you are alone, totally fucking alone, there is no one who will always be there for you, to take care of you and tell you everything is okay, and that's what you are destined to be in this world, no matter what you do, how much good you do, how much you let yourself love someone—alone, no matter how much anyone tries to love you and hold you, and she didn't feel strong enough to face that. It was easier and less painful to give up. More painful for a few seconds, but then, relief, just relief.”