Chapter Thirty-One
They came for me the next morning when I should have been going to breakfast. I hadn’t decided yet if I was going to the cafeteria, but it didn’t matter. They had other plans for me. I knew that when two orderlies arrived at my door with the nurse.
“Good morning, Mrs. Mayfield.” That’s what the nurse said to me. She spoke as if everything was normal. She greeted me like it was a typical morning, like we were two acquaintances— neighbors, perhaps, as if she were about to ask to borrow a cup of sugar.
“Please come with us.”
I knew I had agreed to the therapy, but did I really have a choice?
I pulled my legs to my chest and began scooting back on my mattress. I had nowhere to hide. No place to run. I moved backward until the wall stopped me. I wrapped my arms around my legs, cowering in a ball as a chill gripped my entire body.
“Please, Mrs. Mayfield. It will be easier if you come on your own.” One of the orderlies made a move to step in front of the nurse, but she stopped him.
I remember the time I took Wesley to the doctor, when he needed an immunization. He had trusted me that morning, gone along as a good boy, held his mother’s hand, and smiled at the doctor. But when he heard the word shot, his trust in me left him. He begged me not to. He didn’t want that pain. I knew it was for the best. He didn’t realize the protection that shot would give him. He began to plead, shake, cry. When that didn’t work, he jumped from
the exam table. The doctor stood in front of the door, blocking any exit, so Wesley darted beneath a chair. I reached down and pulled him out, my strength greater than his. He flailed in my arms, kicked his legs, screamed his disapproval, but I picked him up and held him down.
It was for his own good, I had told myself.
It’s for her own good, they told themselves.
I didn’t want to be Wesley then. I had no escape, nowhere to hide, no spot that would protect me from the strength of those orderlies, who would simply grab me like I was a toddler.
So I listened. I stood up. I followed the nurse down the hall.
“I haven’t had breakfast this morning,” I told her, hoping to delay their plans by reminding her of my physical needs.
“That’s for the best.”
Dr. Ruthledge was already in the room when we walked in, along with a few other nurses. The room was small, with an exam table in the middle.
“Good morning, Mrs. Mayfield.” Why did everyone act as if this was typical? “This will only take a few minutes, and then you’ll feel much better.”
How did he know that? Had he felt this for himself? And perhaps I would feel better in a few minutes, but what would I feel like before that?
“Please take off your rings,” the nurse said to me.
“My rings?”
“Yes, all metal objects,” Dr. Ruthledge explained.
I looked at the diamond solitaire and the plain silver band beneath it. Since the day Henry had placed them on my finger in the church in front of our friends and family, I had never removed them—not when doing dishes, not when taking a bath, not even when my fingers swelled during pregnancy.
“Please,” the nurse said in my hesitation.
My hand shook as I gave them to her.
“It’s okay,” she said to me, her eyes full of the same kindness as the nurse at Esther’s delivery. “Everybody gets scared. But you don’t need to be.”
I wanted to believe her. I wanted to trust her just as I had trusted that other nurse, the one who had cheered me on, held my hand, encouraged me to keep going. But look how that had ended.
They made me lie down on the table. They didn’t use straps. They didn’t fasten me in place, but they stood around me, the orderlies watching, waiting in case they needed to grab me like I had Wesley. Poor Wesley. Where was he just then? Was he still asleep? Probably not. Henry’s mother probably had him on a schedule. And who knows what she was making him eat for breakfast.
The nurse who had taken my rings smeared a thick grease onto my temples so that my forehead cooled beneath the damp, sticky gel. Of all the people, in that moment, I thought of Bitsy, those dimples, the distant stare, the short staccato sentences, her severed mind.
You aren’t her.
There, laid out on the metal table, I heard the voice, not through sound waves moving into my ears, but through a knowing reverberation in my core.
You aren’t her.
I knew that to be true. We were very different people whose lives happened to intersect on Twyckenham Court. I wasn’t her. She wasn’t me.
And yet laid out on that table, I thought we seemed more alike than we were different.
I know noises happened around the room, but my world grew quiet. I escaped inside myself as they busied themselves around me. I closed my eyes and fled to the tree of my childhood. I saw the leaves blowing in the wind, heard the creek trickling beneath me, felt the rough bark on my hands. I began humming to myself, bringing Wesley’s favorite song to mind as I lay
still, in air so cold it seeped through my skin and gathered in my bones.
“Open up,” Dr. Ruthledge said to me, like he was a dentist about to examine my teeth. Instead, he placed a rubber bit into my mouth. I felt like a horse on Daddy’s farm. “It’s so you don’t hurt yourself.”
I wasn’t sure how I could hurt any worse than I had over these last few months.
I bit down, my teeth sinking into the rubber, the taste bitter and stale like a balloon that had long since lost its air. I told myself to think of that tree, to imagine myself sitting in its branches once more. I thought of squirrels and ladybugs, crows that cawed overhead, and happy little bluebirds that flew across the painted sky.
And then it happened in a flash. A jolt moved through my body. Tightened my muscles. Arched my back. Twitched my mind until I felt nothing. Knew nothing. Recalled little of the monotony of that place, as if with a flip of a switch, Dr. Ruthledge lit the embers that melted those days so they forged together into an indistinguishable mass of time.
But what I wanted was for that treatment to burn the memories of the last year to ashes that would scatter in an instant, too elusive to rebuild. Too scorched to try.
