WHEN I WAKE UP, I am in a white, white room. My arms are restrained. I lift my head to get a look around. There is an IV snaking into my arm, machines gently beeping. My mouth is dry, my throat swollen. A hospital. A hospital. I look for a call button, but can’t reach it with my wrists in the restraints.
“Hello?”
The minute I speak, a pain shoots through my head. I flinch back onto the pillow and try again.
“Hello?”
There is the sound of footsteps in the hall. Flat, boring shoes. A nurse is coming. I let my head fall back and stare up at the ceiling. Leroy. His basement. Was it the sandwich or the water? Stupid mistake. The door opens, and a young nurse walks in. She looks unsure of herself. New.
“Where am I?” I croak. She looks over her shoulder before closing the door behind her and walking over to my chart.
“The Evergreen University Hospital,” she says in a clipped voice.
“How did I get here?”
She won’t look at me. “You should talk to the doctor. He’ll be in soon.” She walks around the room, humming, and I wish that my arms were free so I could strangle her.
“You have to tell me what’s wrong with me at least! Why am I here?”
She walks to the window and closes the blinds. The room is suddenly in twilight.
“You overdosed,” she says. “Then slit your wrists.”
“Where?” I ask.
She pauses. “In the hospital parking lot.” I feel a flicker of admiration. Leroy is a lot smarter than I gave him credit for.
“Why are you restraining me?”
“The doctor will be in shortly,” she says.
And then, before I can ask any more questions, she walks briskly from the room. I let my head sink back into the pillow and chew on my lip. What has he done? What has he done?
The doctor doesn’t come right away. They feed me lunch, releasing me from my restraints long enough to allow me to spoon a brown broth into my mouth. I ask the new nurse if she can leave them off, but she shakes her head sympathetically. No one will answer my questions. The doctor’s name is Fellows; he comes to see me a few hours later, walking cautiously into my hospital room like he’s lost. He is an older man, balding, with crooked yellow teeth that remind me of Chiclets.
“Hello, Margo,” he says, staring down at me. I feel sudden panic. I can’t move; they have me here against my will and won’t tell me anything. Something bad has happened. I yank on my restraints, and I must look crazy because he takes a step away from the bed.
“Do you have any idea what happened to you?” I shake my head.
“An orderly found you in the parking lot when he came in for his shift. You were behind the wheel of your car—a Jeep?” He looks at me for affirmation, and I nod my head. How had Leroy found my car? How had he known where to look?
I close my eyes so my anger doesn’t betray me.
“There was more,” he says. “A note…”
My eyes snap open. I want to speak, but I can’t.
“Do you remember writing a suicide note, Margo?”
I shake my head. Dr. Fellows folds his lips in, like he doesn’t believe me.
“You’ll talk more about that with a doctor over at Westwick.”
“Westwick?” I say. What is that?”
“Sleep,” he says, patting my feet. “We’ll talk more later.”
A nurse comes in and puts something in my IV, and then my head is spinning. I drift.
When I wake up, Judah is sitting in his wheelchair next to my bed. I struggle to sit up.
“Judah?” I say. “What are you doing here?”
It’s then that I notice the two people standing in the corner of the room. One is a woman—overweight and pink-faced, holding a file in her hands and staring at me like she expects me to jump up and attack her. The man beside her is black, wearing simple blue scrubs. He glances at his watch twice while I watch him.
Judah looks over his shoulder at them and lowers his voice. “Margo, they’re here to take you somewhere safe.”
“Somewhere safe?” I repeat. There is something wrong with this moment. Something strangely off about the back and forth glances, the shifting of bodies from one foot to the other. I feel as if we are all perched on the edge of a moment, about to fall off.
“What’s happening? Why are you here? Why are they here?”
“You tried to kill yourself,” Judah says. “The police found my number in your phone after they found you passed out behind your car, covered in blood.” My phone? Had Leroy found that, too? I’d left it in the trunk of my Jeep, parked in the garage of the abandoned house.
I shake my head. I’d never take drugs. It wasn’t my style.
“You carved the word ‘Icarus’ into your arm with a knife, then swallowed a bottle of sedatives. They had to pump your stomach when they brought you in.”
I am shaking my head, eyeing the bandage on my arm, but he keeps talking. Icarus? Leroy. Suddenly my chest feels tight.
“You had other drugs in your system too…”
Sedatives? Drugs? Something I would never do. I do not wish to die, only to live with purpose. I tell him this as I sit slumped in the scratchy white sheets of the hospital bed, two strangers looking on. Leroy did this. As what? A punishment? A warning? Why wouldn’t he just kill me, like I was planning to do to him?
I lower my voice. “Suicide? I don’t do that shit, Judah. You know that.”
“I don’t know anything anymore, Margo. You’re not the same…” He won’t meet my eyes. I feel something curl and flare inside of me. Anger? Resentment?
He steps back, as the two people in the corner step forward.
“Miss Moon, my name is Charlotte Kimperling, John and I are here to escort you to Westwick Hospital.”
“Westwick? Isn’t that…?”
“Miss Moon, you were found to be a danger to yourself. At Westwick, you will be able to get the help you need. It’s one of the best—”
“I’m not crazy!” But, even as my words echo around the room, I know I sound every bit like a woman tethered to denial. How many movies have I watched where a woman at the edge of her acumen screams out I’M NOT CRAZY to a group of frightened observers?
I can’t believe Judah. That he’d connive with these people to lock me away in a nut house. I look from one face to another, all of them grim, determined. I don’t have a choice in this. They are going to take me, and the best chance I have is to be limber … compliant. I can fight, or I can demonstrate my sanity. For that reason, I press my lips together and study the wall to my right with the intensity of a woman trying to prove something. They wheel me to the ambulance, and when I glance back, I see Judah in his chair. It looks like he’s crying, except this time I don’t care.