Me for You Read online

  Bee still hadn’t come downstairs and that wasn’t like her. Rudy worried she wasn’t feeling well. Maybe she’d had another heart attack. Hopefully a milder one. Like an aftershock after an earthquake. Rudy started up the stairs two at a time to check on Bee, but he couldn’t seem to reach the landing at the top. There were too many steps. Floors and floors of carpeted stairs, as though he were in a hotel. He called out Bethany’s name. Where was she?

  Rudy was back in bed now. He felt the warm, moist small of Bee’s back, which had become padded with more flesh now that they were in their fifties. Both of them were thicker around the middle. In their thirties they’d spread out and sprawled around in their king-sized bed—a luxurious, grown-up purchase. In their forties they lumped in the middle, giving in to the trough that had slowly formed from their weight. Legs entwined. He liked to watch her back or side rising and falling under her worn pink nightgown.

  He thought he might start swimming again to trim down and shape up. Then, when Bee retired, they could swim together. Turkey bacon and fresh fruit after morning laps.

  For now he focused on his own rhythm, kicking off from the deep end of the pool. His arms sliced through the water, his mind floating away from the worry of how to pack up Bee’s clothes and where to take them, instead picturing his elbows marking out a neat crawl stroke.

  “Good morning, Rudy. Rudy? Can you try sitting up for me?”

  That damn department store PA woman! Sucking the serenity out of a perfect moment. Although she was right: You did have to get out of bed before you could swim laps. Rudy swam to the surface, up through the blue-green water of the Y’s pool, and clutched the pool’s dry, porous cement edge. Rudy tipped back his head to see white, pockmarked square ceiling tiles above.

  In a chair beside the pool—no, his bed?—sat a young man. A very young man, indeed, dressed in tan corduroys and a V-neck sweater, wearing a badge and holding a clipboard. He probably had one of those petitions to sign. Something earth-shattering when your arms were full of groceries in the parking lot outside the Whole Foods.

  “Good morning, Rudy, I’m Quinn,” the fellow said cheerfully. He held a Styrofoam cup with a straw in it. “Your assigned medical student. I’ll be checking in with you once a day. Hey, and I’m a musician, too. I play the clarinet. You’ll also meet with a resident once a day, and an attending psychiatrist. That’s your treatment team.”

  This was a lot of information for anyone who hadn’t even brushed his teeth yet. A tan table was pulled up beside the bed at eye level, its items coming into focus: a pink plastic pitcher, another Styrofoam cup with a straw, and a tiny plastic cup of pills. Rudy managed to sit up on one elbow, looking across the room to a whiteboard on the wall. Someone had written neatly in marker the date, a doctor’s name, a nurse’s name, a letter, and a number. Unit and floor? Right. Rudy was in the hospital. The curtains were open, but only a little way, like a suggestion. Maybe sunshine would be okay now.

  Quinn handed Rudy the cup with the straw. The ice water was heavenly inside his dry, sticky mouth. He closed his eyes. Hospital. Rudy was in the hospital. Psych ward. Teaching hospital, he remembered, knowing the drill from Bee. Her hospital. Rudy felt shy and exposed. He’d been to holiday parties with Bee’s coworkers from these buildings.

  Sleep, Rudy thought. Sleep. It seemed all of Quinn’s information and the cup of pills and juice were enough for the day.

  “How’s your depression today?” Quinn asked.

  Rudy pushed himself up onto the other arm, too. “Heavy? It’s making it a little hard to tread water here in the deep end of the pool, Quinn,” Rudy said.

  Quinn scratched out a few notes. “And your anxiety?”

  “It’s making me want to go home and scream.”

  “Why do you want to scream?” Quinn asked.

  “I don’t know.” Rudy sat all the way up, ran a hand over his lumpy hair, struggled for the right words. “It’s like an itch. It’s not too bad. Don’t worry. I won’t scream.”

  “Well, if you need to, I’m sure we can work something out,” Quinn said, finishing up his notes. Rudy imagined he might be one of those kids who followed one band around the country attending all their concerts—a kid who didn’t want to grow up.

  Rudy recognized his two antidepressants in the little clear plastic cup. Suddenly the capsules filled him with sadness and shame as he thought of Bee, at work downstairs on the first floor in the pharmacy. But she wasn’t there and Rudy was up here. On the psych ward. He wasn’t doing a very good job of being a widower. What a nuisance he must be for CeCe. He began to sniffle, as he pointed at the little vial of pills.

  “Pharmacy,” Rudy told Quinn. He could not express how the sight of the pills made him want to pull the waffled blue blanket up over his head and stuff it into his mouth to silence the scream that he felt like an itch, a sob, percolating in his chest.

  “Your wife. She worked in the pharmacy.” Quinn nodded.

  It was funny, at the hospital the staff knew basic personal information that some might find intrusive. But Rudy found it a relief not having to explain everything. Not having to explain finally falling apart, falling into bed, as heavy and bloated as sandbags swelling to block floodwaters.

  Quinn pointed at the cup of pills. “I understand. Trigger. That’s a trigger. So we can get rid of it.”

  Rudy nodded, opening a little carton of cranberry juice that was also on his table, and swallowing all the pills at once with a refreshing tart swig of juice. The nurse had returned, watching to be sure Rudy got his medication, then handing him a graham cracker.

  “It’s good not to have an empty stomach,” she told him.

  Maybe what people needed to get well was this simple, Rudy mused. The words I understand, followed by a graham cracker. He thought that in the afternoon, during their free time, he might try out the piano in the dayroom. He might noodle around and work on a quiet tune called “Fuck Platitudes.”

  After Quinn left, the nurse came to take Rudy’s vitals, then he met his assigned shrink. This left him little time to wash up. He did so quickly, pulling on a sweatshirt and black track pants from the top of his bag, brushing his teeth and splashing water on his face at the shared sink and mirror near the door to the room, then combing his hair, a hopeless spongy mess. He was careful to hang his hand towel and washcloth on a hook on one side of the mirror, should a roomie materialize for the other bed in the room.

  Frankly, he didn’t mind this pared-down version of his life. Not exactly freedom from his dead wife’s belongings, but a tone of nonjudgmental low pressure the unit conveyed.

  As Quinn escorted Rudy to the dayroom, he felt embarrassed by his day-old beard and his cobbled together outfit—his navy sweatshirt from the science museum, worn over his pajama top, didn’t even match his black track pants. He hadn’t had time to change his white gym socks and was ashamed for some reason by his scuffed brown corduroy slippers, which CeCe had chosen for their hard soles. They should be at home, in his closet!

  “I assure you,” Quinn told him, pushing his thin, gold wire-rimmed glasses up on his nose, “many people are in their pajamas. Plus, I guarantee you’ll wake up a little earlier each day, with more time to get ready if you want it. It’s not the army, I promise.”

  Rudy had seen the community room the evening before, only now the long table was populated with sleepy comrades quietly eating. His outfit anxiety dissipated as he saw that everyone was disheveled to some degree. They pushed their chairs about to make room for Rudy. As he sat down, a few of them introduced themselves and others just said good morning. These didn’t look like whack-job Cuckoo’s Nest droolers. These looked like everyone from Nordstrom shoppers, to overworked working stiffs, overwrought students, and people who were just, well, tired.

  Clearly, everyone on the floor had been trying for some time to merely hold it together; now that they were in the nuthouse, they could let go a little—stop trying to pretend they were okay! Still, Rudy believed himself and his cohor
ts to be a fair sampling of the general population—citizens who’d just been T-boned by life. Broken by a family death or illness. Crushed by stress. Wrought with a predisposition for depression, anxiety, and serotonin run amok. Rudy now took umbrage at the descriptor “he looked like he just escaped a mental institution!”

  Quinn explained that the kitchen had sent Rudy a generic breakfast for this first morning, but on his tray there was a form of choices to fill out for his coming meals. The table was scattered with sections from the San Francisco Chronicle. Sports pages and film reviews and crosswords that normalized the breakfast scene.

  It was funny: The patients who clearly lived with others at home—who bore wedding rings or spoke of parents or family—complained that the eggs were lukewarm or the oatmeal was runny. Those who lived alone, were visibly depressed, and had no one to cook for them lifted the silver coverings over their plates and declared: “Eggs!” Rudy was in the latter group. He knew that the hospital kitchen workers must have gotten out of bed very early for the breakfast shift. It was nice that his tray had both scrambled eggs and oatmeal. It wasn’t perfect, but it was hot, thanks to an insulated thermos bowl, and came with a little packet of raisins, brown sugar, and a carton of fresh milk. Not sour milk lingering at the back of the refrigerator stinking up the remaining bits of good food. Not withering apples from the crisper. No bread with corners of mold. No little cups of yogurt that had been your wife’s and peered out at you daily, whispering: expired, lonely.

  After breakfast, Rudy followed his cohorts as they shuffled through the dayroom to a set of double locked doors leading to the lockdown side of the ward. They waited for an attendant to buzz them over. Rudy’s side of the ward was medical-psych. He and his fellow unit mates weren’t allowed to go beyond the end of the floor on either side of the U-shape from the nurse’s station unless they were checking out against medical advice—patients on the lockdown side were in the hospital for a mandatory stay.

  The mixed group of patients filed into a dayroom on the other unit. It was certainly nice enough, given its locked status. Tables that could seat four, potted palms, big windows. On the other side of the room was a large circle of armchairs, couches, and dining room chairs that could double for a group therapy or TV room. There were coffee tables and a tall cupboard filled with board games, cards, and old VHS movies. Here it was clear that anything went in the wardrobe department. After all, those in this group had clearly come in on the fly, against their will, or after an accident of some kind, self-inflicted mishaps included. People certainly hadn’t packed their cruise attire.

  Patients shuffled and stumbled in late, apologizing to the leader, who had introduced herself as Candace. She was soft-spoken but enunciated well, introducing herself again, pointing to the badge clipped to her sky-blue sweater, adding that she was a PhD therapist who specialized in cognitive behavioral therapy. A few more latecomers arrived, looking as though they’d been unwillingly rounded up.

  “Thank you just for being here,” she told them. Rudy was comforted by this statement. So what if you were in a cobbled together outfit of clothes and hospital pajamas and slippers and bed head? You showed up. Maybe it was Rudy’s imagination, but suddenly the grumpier latecomers didn’t look so unhappy to be in the room. He felt the weight of the air in the room clear, saw shoulders lift a little. If this was an accomplishment, who knew what you could do next?

  While they were a motley-looking sleepy group—sweaters with pills and petrified smudges of food, and a few patients even dozed off—this didn’t seem to bother Candace. In fact, she explained that some medications—especially when recently started—made it difficult to get up in the morning, but that just rising, eating a little something, and getting into the routine of coming to group was a big step. Rudy noticed one woman who lay on the floor, on a yoga mat, with an ice pack on her head, because she had a migraine.

  Candace, who was reassuringly calm, rather than chipper, asked everyone to go around the room and tell the others his or her name and briefly how he or she was doing today. “It can be something very small, like ‘I slept well.’ ”

  Some patients were so shy they just mumbled their names while studying the floor and mechanically replied, “okay,” in response to how they were feeling. Others launched into paragraph-long lists of worries and imprecations that Candace had a diplomatic, seamless way of kindly wrapping up so that they could move on.

  When the woman next to Rudy reported, “The doctor said I shouldn’t smoke crack with my asthma inhaler,” a slumped man came to life with a bark of laughter, then covered his mouth.

  The man shook his head, wagging his matted brown hair. “I’m not laughing at you,” he told the woman. “I’m laughing with you. Or else I have to cry. I hope you feel better.” He wore a huge cast on one of his arms that caused it to remain upright from the elbow on, dirty fingers emerging from where the cast ended just shy of his first knuckle.

  Candace smiled as everyone chuckled. “Thank you, Kevin. That’s right, we don’t want to laugh at anyone,” she said more seriously. “We don’t want to laugh or make judgmental comments—or even give advice—just a few words of support go a long way.” She thanked the smoking-with-asthma woman, who clutched a worn paperback from the dayroom shelves, pushing it between her knees, looking shy, but unoffended.

  When it came Rudy’s turn to speak, his voice was husky and dry from his medication. “I killed my wife,” he blurted.

  Suddenly all the fidgeting in the room stopped.

  “Oh, I know that’s not true,” Candace said. “Tell us your name.”

  “Rudy. My wife died. She died of a heart attack and I could not save her. The paramedics came and they couldn’t save her. She was already dead. She was dead when I woke up. I should have woken up when she got sick in the night. When whatever happened . . . I should have woken up. I talked to her. I told her there were buds on the cherry tree outside our window, when she was dead. Buds! Who gives a shit!” Rudy felt his voice escalating to a near holler. Then he saw the kindness in Candace’s green eyes and the sea of people, nodding or blinking, none of them alarmed or afraid or disapproving. Some of the nods even came knowingly.

  Candace spoke of grief and sudden death and survivor’s guilt and PTSD and survivor’s guilt again. The murmurs among Rudy’s cohorts were a soft, warm blanket around his shoulders.

  A few days after Rudy met Kevin in group therapy on the lockdown side of the unit, he was moved to the medical-psych side, and became Rudy’s roommate. As Kevin made his way down the hall with his arm bent and big cast raised in the air, he looked like the Statue of Liberty approaching. Rudy wondered if he’d put his fist through a wall or a window, or been in some sort of manly fight. Later, during a quiet lunch, he and Rudy got to talking. Kevin hadn’t punched anything at all, but had tried to kill himself by cutting his wrists. He’d carved out a brutal vertical gash down the inside of his forearm with a buck knife. Before he could get to the second arm, he’d passed out. His poor sister discovered him and called the ambulance. He had surgery to repair his tendons then was released to the lockdown unit. His biggest concern was how he’d frightened his baby sister. The tenderness with which Kevin spoke about her touched Rudy. The group tried to make him feel less guilty about that fateful night. One thing the population seemed to have in common was self-loathing, which Candace said could be replaced with more positive thoughts. Not kittens and bunnies and bows, she promised, but the simple replacement thinking that was at the core of CBT. Rudy took notes, and hoped against hope that Candace was right.

  A few days later, after lunch (which came awfully soon after breakfast when you considered that all they’d really done in between was sit and shuffle short distances), there was a message for Rudy on his cell phone. It was from Sasha, who was very worried about his sudden absence from work.

  Rudy hadn’t planned to tell her about his stay at the hospital. He’d called her after he was admitted, saying he was home with the flu. He could hear the co
ncern in her voice when he said he wasn’t well. “I can come over with soup,” she said. “Don’t be embarrassed about how you look—I’ve seen it all! My ex Gabor had many health problems.”

  “No, no,” Rudy reassured her, “it’s nothing like that.” He sighed. The truth was, he didn’t want to burden her. It was probably more burdensome to disappear on a person, though, to “ghost” her as CeCe had described. If they were ever to have a real relationship, Rudy should be honest.

  During their free time after lunch and before occupational therapy, he returned Sasha’s call. After they went over the details of how he was feeling—all of which were legitimate, he gave her the more precise picture—he was in the hospital. “I . . . I . . . had trouble getting out of bed.” Grrr. This wasn’t a diagnosis. “It’s the first anniversary of Bethany’s death and, well, CeCe came over and suggested that I recuperate with some help from doctors, and, well, the doctors thought I ought to do so, you know, be in the hospital.” Rudy held his breath during the silence that followed.

  “Oh, Rudy, are you okay?”

  “Fine. It’s only the psych ward.” He realized how ridiculous this sounded and broke into nervous laughter, then sucked in his breath.

  “Oh, Rudy, I completely understand. After Stefi’s death, if I could have gone to the hospital, I’m sure it would have helped. I think I would have crawled to such a place.”

  The compassion in Sasha’s voice was something Rudy knew, he knew was unique. Certainly you couldn’t call up just any friend, especially one you just happened to be falling in love with, and tell them you were in the nuthouse and they’d get it. And her description of the other department store pianist had Rudy in stitches.

  “He plays like Muzak . . . I don’t know some seventies songs about sailing and he SANG. Terrible!”

  This made Rudy go from pacing beside his nightstand as far as the phone cord would allow, to collapsing on his bed, laughing and trying to picture this. The store pianists weren’t supposed to sing!