“I don’t understand why this patient, excuse me resident, is in Hall Five.” Sophia heard Kent - a new orderly on her floor - asking the question in the hall outside.
Another orderly, Debbie, answered him.
“She’s Dr. Kaiser’s patient, and he calls the shots. I’d cool your chops about it too. I heard another attendant ask that question last year and Alice just about flayed her alive.”
“But she’s not dangerous or disruptive,” Kent continued. “How can they justify keeping her in here? Why doesn’t she tell her family?”
“No family to speak of. Least I’ve never seen any. She’s been here going on eight years and never had a visitor.”
“You’re kidding me?”
Sophia curled into a ball and thought of Jack. Jack was dead. He would never visit her. Had it really been eight years since that fateful day Ruth pulled her car down the long asylum driveway?
Sophia had only hazy memories of the day. Her mother-in-law had given her a drink before they left, a sedative likely dissolved in the bitter tasting tea. She had no memory of being admitted, of being placed in a room. One moment she was sitting in Ruth’s black Chevrolet Fleetline and the next she woke in a stiff little bed, her clothes stripped away, her life gone.
“She’s spoken of children and a husband,” Debbie continued. “But they’re probably all in her head. You know how some of these people are.”
“Except she’s not that way,” Kent argued.
“Look Kent, you’ve only been on this floor for a few months. You’ll hear the stories. She… she tells people weird things.”
“Like what?”
A long silence lapsed, and Sophia wondered if they had moved away from her door.
“About dead people, about spirits and such. I’ve never heard it first-hand, but it’s not only the patients that talk about it. She’s told the nurses and orderlies things about their dead parents, siblings - all kinds of nutty stuff. Keep your distance, okay? The residents are manipulators. Don’t let her in your head.”
Sophia heard Debbie’s rubber-soled shoes move off down the hall, but Kent stood outside her door for several more minutes.
Near the door, Kent’s mother stood holding a dripping box of Popsicles that pooled orange on the floor. She had died twelve years prior, the day before Kent’s tenth birthday.
Sophia sat on the stiff white cot tucked against the concrete wall. Her room was square with a single, barred window looking over a grand courtyard. The grounds sloped and rolled, thick with towering oak trees. The flower beds burst with huge delicate peonies. When she looked out the window, she felt like Alice peeking into Wonderland, but her two-way mirror was blocked by a crisscross of cold steel.
Kent knocked once on her door and then turned the door handle. It would not matter if she sat naked on the cot, many of the patients did, or if she preferred a moment of privacy. The knock was a courtesy that many of the attendants didn’t offer, and Sophia warmed to Kent for that small acknowledgment of her humanness.
“Your mother doesn’t blame you,” Sophia told Kent as he started toward her with her medication.
She reached to take the little paper cup that held her pills, but Kent unfurled his fingers and it fell to the floor.
“What did you say?” he asked, alarm in his eyes.
Sophia bent to pick up the pills that had rolled beneath her cot.
“It wasn’t your fault, Kent,” Sophia told him, popping the pills into her mouth and swallowing them dry.
The young man still did not seem to notice he had dropped the pills to begin with. He walked a few paces backwards, stopping at the closed door.
“My mother is dead,” he whispered, and Sophia noticed how young Kent looked - no older than twenty-five. Only a bit younger than her own Jude and Peter.
“Yes, I know.” Sophia patted the space next to her. The metal edges of the frame bit into the backs of her legs and she could feel the springs poking through the mattress, but she didn’t exactly have a settee to offer him. “Denise visits me sometimes, Kent. She wanted me to tell you that you couldn’t have prevented her death. It’s true. She was going into town that day. She planned it before you asked for the Popsicles.”
“Begged,” Kent whispered, his voice strained. “I begged for the Popsicles.”
He had backed against the door, but something in his features softened. A look of sadness turned his dark blue eyes paler, they glistened with unshed tears.
“I’ve heard the patients talking,” he said. “But I thought, I thought…”
“That they were insane,” Sophia laughed and patted the bed again. “It’s okay honey, some of them are. Maybe we all have a little madness in us.”
“I’m not supposed to talk about these things. Dr. Kaiser…” Kent’s face darkened when he spoke the doctor’s name.
“Is evil,” Sophia finished, though he had not been about to use the term. She fought back the tremors that tried to steal over her at the mere mention of the doctor’s name. “Evil, and I don’t use that word lightly.”
Kent swallowed and glanced behind him at the slit in the door, perhaps expecting Kaiser’s blue eyes to stare back at him. Reassured they spoke alone, Kent crossed the room and sat next to Sophia. The cot sagged beneath his weight.
“Did you see her? Is she happy?” The desperation in Kent’s voice made Sophia’s heart throb with painful memories of her own family. Did her children lay in bed at night asking those same questions about their mother?
“Yes. Sometimes I can only hear her, she speaks to me, sings to me, Dream a Little Dream.”
A stifled sob escaped him, and he pressed his hands to his face.
After a moment, he began, “Stars shining bright above you, night breezes seem to whisper I love you.” He sang the lyrics low, in a whisper, and shook his head as if trying to deny the memories. “She had a record of Ella Fitzgerald singing that song, she loved that song. Almost every night, I fell asleep to those words.”
“It’s a beautiful song,” Sophia told him, tentatively taking his hand in her own. Touching staff at the hospital could result in punishment.
He squeezed her hand back, wiping his eyes with his free hand.
“She looked beautiful, Kent. The two times she appeared in form, I saw long silver blonde hair and the most sparkling gray eyes. All smiles, no sadness in her face. I believe her only regret was you taking the blame. It hurts her.”
Kent nodded and squeezed her hand again as if a door that had been closed his whole life suddenly swung open.
“I begged for those Popsicles and she gave in. A drunk driver hit her head on, at two in the afternoon!”
“She intended to go anyway, honey. Death comes for us when it’s time, it’s that simple. We choose long before we come here when we will die.”
“But why? Why would she leave us all behind?”
Sophia smiled and tried to answer as best she could.
“Before this life, beyond this life, there is no end. So, it’s easy to choose death because we know there will be growth for those left behind. And no one is left for long. We all come together again. It is only here in these physical bodies, bound by the laws of our physical world, that we forget that.”
Kent nodded, but Sophia saw a hint of turmoil in his eyes.
“Why doesn’t she come to me? I’ve prayed every night since she died for a dream, anything, a hint of her, but nothing.”
“I don’t know. I have come to believe after a lifetime of seeing those who have passed that we are not all meant to talk to the dead. We are meant to stay in the land of the living, to be present to what is now. But to see the bigger picture, we need people who can see beyond the trivialities of this life. This gift has ruined my life here on earth in many ways, but it has liberated, taught, and enlightened others. It has brought peace.” Sophia lifted his hand, kissed it and placed it back in his lap.