Girl in Pieces

One

I can never win with this body I live in.

—Belly, Star

Like a baby harp seal, I’m all white. My forearms are thickly bandaged, heavy as clubs. My thighs are wrapped tightly, too; white gauze peeks out from the shorts Nurse Ava pulled from the lost and found box behind the nurses’ station.

Like an orphan, I came here with no clothes. Like an orphan, I was wrapped in a bedsheet and left on the lawn of Regions Hospital in the freezing sleet and snow, blood seeping through the flowered sheet.

The security guard who found me was bathed in menthol cigarettes and the flat stink of machine coffee. There was a curly forest of white hair inside his nostrils.

He said, Holy Mother of God, girl, what’s been done to you?

My mother didn’t come to claim me.

But: I remember the stars that night. They were like salt against the sky, like someone spilled the shaker against very dark cloth.

That mattered to me, their accidental beauty. The last thing I thought I might see before I died on the cold, wet grass.

The girls here, they try to get me to talk. They want to know What’s your story, morning glory? Tell me your tale, snail. I hear their stories every day in Group, at lunch, in Crafts, at breakfast, at dinner, on and on. These words that spill from them, black memories, they can’t stop. Their stories are eating them alive, turning them inside out. They cannot stop talking.

I cut all my words out. My heart was too full of them.

I room with Louisa. Louisa is older and her hair is like a red-and-gold noisy ocean down her back. There’s so much of it, she can’t even keep it in with braids or buns or scrunchies. Her hair smells like strawberries; she smells better than any girl I’ve ever known. I could breathe her in forever.

My first night here, when she lifted her blouse to change for bed, in the moment before that crazy hair fell over her body like a protective cape, I saw them, all of them, and I sucked my breath in hard.

She said, Don’t be scared, little one.

I wasn’t scared. I’d just never seen a girl with skin like mine.

Every moment is spoken for. We are up at six o’clock. We are drinking lukewarm coffee or watered-down juice by six forty-five. We have thirty minutes to scrape cream cheese on cardboardy bagels, or shove pale eggs in our mouths, or swallow lumpy oatmeal. At seven fifteen we can shower in our rooms. There are no doors on our showers and I don’t know what the bathroom mirrors are, but they’re not glass, and your face looks cloudy and lost when you brush your teeth or comb your hair. If you want to shave your legs, a nurse or an orderly has to be present, but no one wants that, and so our legs are like hairy-boy legs. By eight-thirty we’re in Group and that’s when the stories spill, and the tears spill, and some girls yell and some girls groan, but I just sit, sit, and that awful older girl, Blue, with the bad teeth, every day, she says, Will you talk today, Silent Sue? I’d like to hear from Silent Sue today, wouldn’t you, Casper?

Casper tells her to knock it off. Casper tells us to breathe, to make accordions by spreading our arms way, way out, and then pushing in, in, in, and then pulling out, out, out, and don’t we feel better when we just breathe? Meds come after Group, then Quiet, then lunch, then Crafts, then Individual, which is when you sit with your doctor and cry some more, and then at five o’clock there’s dinner, which is more not-hot food, and more Blue: Do you like macaroni and cheese, Silent Sue? When you getting those bandages off, Sue? And then Entertainment. After Entertainment, there is Phone Call, and more crying. And then it’s nine p.m. and more meds and then it’s bed. The girls piss and hiss about the schedule, the food, Group, the meds, everything, but I don’t care. There’s food, and a bed, and it’s warm, and I am inside, and I am safe.

My name is not Sue.

Jen S. is a nicker: short, twiglike scars run up and down her arms and legs. She wears shiny athletic shorts; she’s taller than anyone, except Doc Dooley. She dribbles an invisible basketball up and down the beige hallway. She shoots at an invisible hoop. Francie is a human pincushion. She pokes her skin with knitting needles, sticks, pins, whatever she can find. She has angry eyes and she spits on the floor. Sasha is a fat girl full of water: she cries in Group, she cries at meals, she cries in her room. She’ll never be drained. She’s a plain cutter: faint red lines crosshatch her arms. She doesn’t go deep. Isis is a burner. Scabby, circular mounds dot her arms. There was something in Group about rope and boy cousins and a basement but I shut myself off for that; I turned up my inside music. Blue is a fancy bird with her pain; she has a little bit of everything: bad daddy, meth teeth, cigarette burns, razor slashes. Linda/Katie/Cuddles wears grandma housedresses. Her slippers are stinky. There are too many of her to keep track of; her scars are all on the inside, along with her people. I don’t know why she’s with us, but she is. She smears mashed potato on her face at dinner. Sometimes she vomits for no reason. Even when she is completely still, you know there is a lot happening inside her body, and that it’s not good.

I knew people like her on the outside; I stay away from her.

Sometimes I can’t breathe in this goddamn place; my chest feels like sand. I don’t understand what’s happening. I was too cold and too long outside. I can’t understand the clean sheets, the sweet-smelling bedspread, the food that sits before me in the cafeteria, magical and warm. I start to panic, shake, choke, and Louisa, she comes up very close to me in our room, where I’m wedged into the corner. Her breath on my face is tea-minty. She cups my cheek and even that makes me flinch. She says, Little one, you’re with your people.

The room is too quiet, so I walk the halls at night. My lungs hurt. I move slowly.

Everything is too quiet. I trace a finger along the walls. I do this for hours. I know they’re thinking about putting me on sleep meds after my wounds heal and I can be taken off antibiotics, but I don’t want them to. I need to be awake and aware.

He could be anywhere. He could be here.

Louisa is like the queen. She’s been here, this time, forever. She tells me, I was the very first fucking girl here, back when they opened, for God’s sake. She’s always writing in a black-and-white composition book; she never comes to Group. Most of the girls wear yoga pants and T-shirts, sloppy things, but Louisa dresses up every day: black tights and shiny flats, glamorous thrift-store dresses from the forties, her hair always done up in some dramatic way or another. She has suitcases stuffed with scarves, filmy nightgowns, creamy makeup, blood-red tubes of lipstick. Louisa is like a visitor who has no plans to leave.

She tells me she sings in a band. But my nervousness, she says softly. "My problem, it gets in the way."

Louisa has burns in concentric circles on her belly. She has rootlike threads on the insides of her arms. Her legs are burned and carved in careful, clean patterns. Tattoos cover her back.

Louisa is running out of room.

Casper starts every Group the same way. The accordion exercise, the breathing, stretching your neck, reaching to your toes. Casper is tiny and soft. She wears clogs with elfish, muted heels. All the other doctors here have clangy, sharp shoes that make a lot of noise, even on carpet. She is pale. Her eyes are enormous, round, and very blue. There are no jagged edges to Casper.

She looks around at us, her face settling into a gentle smile. She says, "Your job here is you. We are all here to get better, aren’t we?"

Which means: we are all presently shit.

But we knew that already.

Her name isn’t really Casper. They call her that because of those big blue eyes, and the fact that she’s so quiet. Like a ghost, she appears at our bedsides some mornings to take Chart, her warm fingers sliding just an inch or so down the hem of my bandages to reach my pulse. Her chin doubles adorably as she looks down at me in bed. Like a ghost, she appears suddenly behind me in the hallway, smiling as I turn in surprise: How are you?

She has an enormous tank in her office with a fat, slow turtle that paddles and paddles, paddles and paddles, barely making any headway. I watch that poor fucker all the time, I could watch him for hours and days, I find him so incredibly patient at a task that ultimately means nothing, because it’s not like he’s getting out of the fucking tank anytime soon, right?

And Casper just watches me watch him.

Casper smells nice. She’s always clean, her clothes rustle softly. She never raises her voice. She rubs Sasha’s back when she sobs so hard she chokes. She positions her arms around Linda/Katie/Cuddles like a goalie or something when one of the bad people breaks free. I’ve seen her in Blue’s room, even, on the days Blue gets an enormous box of books from her mother, pawing through the paperbacks and smiling at Blue. I’ve seen Blue melt a little, just a little, at this smile.

Casper should be someone’s mother. She should be my mother.

We’re never in darkness. Every room has lights in the walls that ping on at four p.m. and ping off at six a.m. They’re small, but bright. Louisa doesn’t like light. Scratchy curtains cover the windows and she makes sure to pull them shut, tightly, every night before bed, to block out the squares of yellow from the office building next door. Then she drapes the bedsheet over her head for good measure.

Tonight, as soon as she’s asleep, I kick the sheets off and pull the curtains apart. Maybe I’m looking for the salt stars. I don’t know.

I pee in the metal toilet, watching the silent lump of Louisa beneath her pile of covers. In the weird mirror, my hair looks like snakes. I squeeze the mats and dreads in my fingers. My hair still smells like dirt and concrete, attic and dust, and makes me feel sick.

How long have I been here? I am waking from something. From somewhere. A dark place.

The bulbs in the hallway ceiling are like bright, long rivers. I peek into the rooms as I walk. Only Blue is awake, holding her paperback all the way up to the ping-light to see.

No doors, no lamps, no glass, no razors, only soft, spoonable food, and barely warm coffee. There’s no way to hurt yourself here.

I feel jangly and loose inside, waiting at the nurses’ station, drumming my fingers on the countertop. I ding the little bell. It sounds horrible and loud in the quiet hall.

Barbero rounds the corner, his mouth full of something crunchy. He frowns when he sees me. Barbero is a thick-necked former wrestler from Menominee. He still has a whiff of ointment and adhesive. He only likes pretty girls. I can tell, because Jen S. is very pretty, with her long legs and freckled nose, and he’s always smiling at her. She’s the only one he ever smiles at.

He puts his feet up on the desk and pops some potato chips into his mouth. You, he says, salty bits fluttering from his lips to his blue scrubs. What the fuck do you want at this time of night?

I take the pad of sticky notes and a pen from the countertop and write quickly. I hold up the sticky note. HOW LONG HAVE I BEEN HERE?

He looks at the sticky note. He shakes his head. "Uh-uh. Ask."

I write, NO. TELL ME.

No can do, Silent Sue. Barbero crumples the chip bag and stuffs it into the trash. You’re gonna have to open that fucked-up little mouth of yours and use your big-girl voice.

Barbero thinks I’m afraid of him, but I’m not. There’s only one person I’m afraid of, and he’s far away, on the whole other side of the river, and he can’t get to me here.

I don’t think he can get to me, anyway.

Another sticky note. JUST TELL ME, YOU OAF. My hands are shaking a little, though, as I hold it up.

Barbero laughs. Chips clot the spaces between his teeth.

Sparks go off behind my eyes and my inside music gets very loud. My skin numbs as I walk away from the nurses’ station. I’d like to breathe, like Casper says, but I can’t, that won’t work, not for me, not once I get angry and the music starts. Now my skin isn’t numb but positively itches as I roam, roam, looking, looking, and when I find it and turn around, Barbero’s not laughing anymore. He’s Oh, shit-ing and ducking.

The plastic chair bounces off the nurses’ station. The container holding the pens with plastic flowers taped to them falls to the floor, the pens fanning out across the endless beige carpet. The endless, everywhere beige carpet. I start to kick the station, which is bad, because I have no shoes, but the pain feels good, so I keep doing it. Barbero is up now, but I grab the chair again and he holds out his hands, all Calm down, you crazy fucker. But he says it really soft. Like, maybe he’s a little afraid of me now. And I don’t know why, but this makes me even angrier.

I’m raising the chair again when Doc Dooley shows up.

If Casper is disappointed in me, she doesn’t show it. She just watches me watch the turtle, and the turtle does his thing. I’d like to be that turtle, underwater, quiet, no one around. What a fucking peaceful life that turtle has.

Casper says, To answer the question that you asked Bruce last night: you have been at Creeley Center for six days. You were treated in the hospital and kept for observation for seven days before they transferred you here. Did you know you had walking pneumonia? Well, you still have it, but the antibiotics should help.

She picks up something chunky from her desk and slides it to me. It’s one of those desk calendars. I’m not sure what I’m looking for, but then I see it, at the top of the page.

April. It’s the middle of April.

Casper says, You just missed Easter at Creeley. You were a little out of it. You didn’t miss much. We can’t really have a giant bunny hopping around a psych ward, can we? She smiles. Sorry. That’s a little therapist humor. We did have an egg hunt, though. Thanksgiving is a lot more fun around here: dry turkey, lumpy gravy. Good times.

I know she’s trying to cheer me up, get me to talk. I slide my face to her but as soon as I meet her eyes, I feel the fucking sting of tears and so I look back at the stupid turtle. I feel like I’m waking up and going back into my darkness, all at once.

Casper leans forward. Do you remember being in Regions Hospital at all?

I remember the security guard and the forest of hair inside his nose. I remember lights above me, bright as suns, the sound of beeping that never seemed to stop. I remember wanting to kick out when hands were on me, when they were cutting away my clothes and boots. I remember how heavy my lungs felt, as though they were filled with mud.

I remember being so scared that Fucking Frank was going to appear in the doorway and take me away, back to Seed House, to the room where the girls cried.

I remember crying. I remember the splatter of my vomit on a nurse’s shoes, and the way her face never changed, not once, like it happened to her all the time, and I wished my eyes to tell her sorry, because I had no words, and how her face didn’t change then, either.

Then nothing. Nothing. Until Louisa.

Casper says, It’s all right if you can’t remember. Our subconscious is spectacularly agile. Sometimes it knows when to take us away, as a kind of protection. I hope that makes sense.

I wish I knew how to tell her that my subconscious is broken, because it never took me away when Fucking Frank was threatening me, or when that man tried to hurt me in the underpass.

My broken big toe throbs beneath its splint and the weird foot-bootie Doc Dooley put me in. Now, when I walk, I really am a crazy freak, with my nesty hair and my clubby arms and trussed-up legs and limp.

What’s going to happen to me?

Casper says, I think you need a project.

It isn’t true that I want to be like the turtle and be alone. What’s true is that I want Ellis back, but she can never come back, ever, ever. Not the way she was, anyway. And it’s true that I miss Mikey and DannyBoy, and I even miss Evan and Dump, and sometimes I miss my mother, even though missing her feels more like anger than sadness, like I feel when I think about Ellis, and even that, really, isn’t true, because while I say sadness what I really mean is black hole inside me filled with nails and rocks and broken glass and the words I don’t have anymore.

Ellis, Ellis.

And while it’s true that my clothes are from the lost and found, it isn’t entirely true that I have nothing, because I do have something, they just keep it from me. I saw it once, when Doc Dooley told me to stop watching the movie during Entertainment and come to the nurses’ station. When I got there, he pulled a backpack, my backpack, from beneath the desk. Doc Dooley is super tall, and handsome, the kind of handsome where you know he knows how handsome he is, and that his life is that much easier for it, and so he tends to be kind of easygoing with the rest of us, the unhandsome. So when he said, Two boys dropped this off. Does this look familiar to you? I was momentarily blinded by the whiteness of his teeth, and fascinated by the velvety quality of his stubble.

I grabbed my pack and sank to my knees, unzipping it, shoving my hands inside. It was there. I cradled it, sighing in relief, because Doc Dooley said, Don’t get excited. We emptied it.

I took out my tender kit, the army medical kit that I’d found when I was fourteen and trolling the St. Vincent de Paul thrift store on West Seventh with Ellis. The metal box was dented, the large red cross on the front was scratched and losing its paint.

My tender kit used to hold everything: my ointment, my gauze, my pieces of broken mason jar in a blue velvet pouch, my cigarettes, my matches and lighter, buttons, bracelets, money, my photos wrapped in linen.

The box made no sound when I shook it. I dug deeper in the green backpack, but it, too, was dark and empty. No extra socks and underwear, no rolls of toilet paper, no film canister filled with panhandled cash, no pills in a baggie, no rolled-up-tight wool blanket. My sketchpad was missing. My bag of pens and charcoals was gone. My Land Camera, gone. I looked up at Doc Dooley.

We had to take everything out, for your safety. He offered his hand to me, and even his hand was handsome, with slender fingers and buffed nails. I ignored it, standing up by myself, clutching my tender kit and the backpack tightly. You have to give the bag and the box back. We’ll keep them for you until you’re discharged.

He reached out and tugged the backpack away, slipped my tender kit from my hand. He put them behind the desk. But you can have these.

Doc Dooley pressed the square of linen into my hands. Inside, protected by the soft fabric, are photographs of us: me and Ellis, Mikey and DannyBoy, perfect and together, before everything blew to hell.

As I walked away, pressing the photographs to my chest, Doc Dooley called out, Those boys, they said they were sorry.

I kept walking, but inside, I felt myself pause, just for a second.

My photographs are what I’m doing when Jen S. comes to find me the night after the toe incident: thumbing through them, greedy like I always am when I let myself think of Ellis, poring over the black-and-white images of the four of us in the graveyard, posing stupid like rock stars, cigarettes in the corners of our mouths, DannyBoy’s harelip almost invisible, Ellis’s acne hardly noticeable. DannyBoy always said people looked better in black-and-white and he was right. The photos are small and square; the Land Camera was old, something from the sixties, the first kind of Polaroid. My grandmother gave it to me. It had bellows and made me feel cool. We found some film at the camera store by Macalester College. It was a cartridge, and you slipped it into the camera, took the picture, ripped the film strip from the side, and set the little round timer. When it buzzed, you peeled back the film and there we were, old-timey and neat-looking in black-and-white, Ellis so beautiful with her black hair. And there was me, dumb little me, arms folded across my chest in my holey sweater and my hair all ratty, dyed red and blue in the real, color world, but muddy-looking in black-and-white. Who could look anything but gross next to Ellis?

Cool. Jen S. reaches down, but I wrap the photos back up in the linen and slide them under my pillow.

Dude, she sighs. Okay, whatever. Come on, then, Barbero’s waiting in Rec. We’ve got a surprise for you.

In Rec, the smell of popcorn clings to the room from the movie we watched earlier; the empty bowl rests on a circular table. Jen licks her finger and swipes the bowl, sucking off salt and bits of congealed butter. She makes oinking sounds. Barbero’s floppy lips curl. Schumacher, he says. You kill me. She shrugs, flicking her wet finger against the hem of her baggy green T-shirt.

She digs in one of the several everything bins, looking for her favorite deck of cards. The colorful bins are stacked on top of each other against the ivory walls of Rec. They hold playing cards, frayed boxes of crayons, markers, games.

A bank of three computers is tucked against one wall. Barbero fires one up and shoos his fingers at me while he enters the password.

Here’s the deal, crazy. Barbero flings a booklet at me. I have to bend to pick it up. He starts typing. ALTERNA-LEARN. THE RIGHT PLACE FOR YOU pops up on the page. The good doctor thinks you need something to do to curb your anger issues, of which there are apparently many, and also your weird habit of not sleeping. So, looks like it’s back to school for you, dumbass.

I look over at Jen S., who grins wildly while shuffling the cards. "I get to be your teacher," she giggles.

Barbero snaps his fingers in my face. FO-CUS. I’m over here! Here.

I glare at him.

Barbero ticks off his fingers. Here’s the deal: don’t look at anything but the school site. Don’t look at your Facebook, your Twitter, your email, anything at all but the school pages. Your friend Schumacher here has volunteered to be your teacher and she’ll check your quizzes and all that shit when you finish a lesson.

He looks at me. I stare back. You don’t wanna do it, he says, "the good doctor says you have to start taking meds at night to sleep and I have a feeling you don’t wanna do that. She’d rather have you in here than creeping down the halls like you do. Because that’s fucking weird."

I don’t want drugs, especially at night, when I’m most scared and need to be alert. Doctors filled me up from the time I was eight until I was thirteen. Ritalin didn’t work. I bounced off walls and stabbed a pencil in the cloudlike flab of Alison Jablonsky’s belly. Adderall made me shit my pants in eighth grade; my mother kept me home the rest of the year. She left lunch for me under plastic wrap in the refrigerator: spongy meat loaf sandwiches, smelly egg salad on soggy toast. Zoloft was like swallowing very heavy air and not being able to exhale for days. Most of the girls here are doped to the gills, accepting their pill cups with pissy resignation.

I sit in the chair and type my name in the YOUR NAME HERE box.

Good choice, freak.

Jesus, Bruce, Jen says, exasperated. Did you skip that day in nursing school when they explained bedside manner?

I got bedside manner, baby. Let me know when you wanna try it. He flops on the creaky brown Rec couch and pulls his iPod from his pocket.

One whole wall of Rec is a long window. The curtains have been opened. It’s dark outside, after ten o’clock. Our wing is four stories up; I can hear the whoosh of cars in the rain down on Riverside Avenue. If I do school, it will make Casper happy with me. The last time I was in school, I was kicked out the middle of junior year. That feels like a lifetime ago.

I peer at the screen and try to read a paragraph, but all I can see are the words fucker and pussy bitch scrawled on my locker door. I can taste the tang of toilet water in my mouth, feel myself struggling to get free, hands on my neck and laughter. My fingers tingle and my chest feels tight. After I got kicked out of school, everything went haywire. Even more than before.

I look around Rec. Like a fussy little mouse, thoughts of who’s paying for this nibble at my brain, but I push them away. My mother cooked meat loaf with onions and ketchup and hills of mash on the side, in a diner for years, before even that went away. We aren’t people with money; we’re people who dig for change at the bottoms of purses and backpacks and eat plain noodles with butter four nights a week. Thinking about how I’m able to stay here makes me anxious and afraid.

I think, I’m inside and warm and I can do this if it means I get to stay. That’s what matters right now. Following the rules so I can stay inside.

Jen’s fingers shuffle and flutter the cards. It sounds like birds rushing to empty a tree.

Casper asks, How do you feel?

Every day, she asks me this. One day a week, someone else asks me—Doc Dooley, maybe, if he’s pulling a day shift, or the raspy-voiced, stiff-haired doctor with too-thick mascara. I think her name is Helen. I don’t like her; she makes me feel cold inside. One day a week, on Sundays, no one asks us how we’re feeling and that makes some of us feel lost. Jen S. will say, mockingly, I am having too many feelings! I need someone to hear my feelings!

Casper waits. I can feel her waiting. I make a decision.

I write down what it feels like and push the paper across Casper’s desk. My body is on fire all the time, burning me away day and night. I have to cut the black heat out. When I clean myself, wash and mend, I feel better. Cooler inside and calm. Like moss feels, when you get far back in the woods.

What I don’t write is: I’m so lonely in the world I want to peel all of my flesh off and walk, just bone and gristle, straight into the river, to be swallowed, just like my father.

Before he got sicker, my father used to take me on long drives to the north. We would park the car and walk the trails deep into the fragrant firs and lush spruces, so far that sometimes it seemed like night because there were so many trees, you couldn’t see the sky. I was small then and I stumbled a lot on stones, landing on mounds of moss. My fingers on the cold, comforting moss always stayed inside me. My father could walk for hours. He said, I just want it to be quiet. And we walked and walked, looking for that quiet place. The forest is not as quiet as everyone thinks.

After he died, my mother was like a crab: she tucked everything inside and left only her shell.

Casper finishes reading and folds the paper neatly, sliding it into a binder on her desk. Cool moss. She smiles. That isn’t a bad way to feel. If only we could get you there without hurting yourself. How can we do that?

Casper always has blank sheets of paper on her desk for me. I write, then push it to her. She frowns. She pulls a folder from her drawer and runs her fingers down a page.

No, I don’t see a sketchbook on the list of items from your backpack. She looks at me.

I make a little sound. My sketchbook had everything, my own little world. Drawings of Ellis, of Mikey, the little comics I would make about the street, about me and Evan and Dump.

I can feel my fingers tingling. I just need to draw. I need to bury myself. I make another little sound.

Casper closes the folder. Let me talk to Miss Joni. Let’s see what she can do.

My father was cigarettes and red-and-white cans of beer. He was dirty white T-shirts and a brown rocking chair and blue eyes and scratchy cheek stubble and Oh, Misty, when my mother would frown at him. He was days of not getting out of that chair, of me on the floor by his feet, filling paper with suns, houses, cats’ faces, in crayon and pencil and pen. He was days of not changing those T-shirts, of sometimes silence and sometimes too much laughter, a strange laughter that seemed to crack him from