“Sure,” Jacob said, fishing his phone out of his pocket as if it had just buzzed. The text message he’d received was indeed from Sara. I’m sending out Save the Date cards… He jammed the phone back into his pocket. It buzzed again, but he already knew what the second message would say: What’s your address?
Jacob hadn’t even been to his apartment under the church since December, nor to the city at all. He didn’t know anybody there anymore.
“Anyway, after my father passed, my rabbi told me I should take the year off. No big life decisions. No changing jobs, no starting new relationships, no moving to a new city.”
“Sure. That seems smart. Wait for everything to settle. Well, that seems — sure.”
But the last thing Jacob wanted to do was stay in this dead-end job. It was long past time to move on. Ever since Irene, he’d entertained a thousand escape routes. Heading up to Boston to be closer to George and Sara. Backpacking the Appalachian Trail. Joining a cult in Costa Mesa. Dusting off his old thesis and reapplying to Yale. Like crying, it seemed nice in theory, he was just out of practice.
“So?” Jacob asked.
“So what?”
“So how’d it go?”
Dr. Feingold thought about it. Finally he said, “Well, I’m still here.”
MARCH
Ward III was where patients came after being at Anchorage House for more than thirty days. Most kids were in and out in under a week, referred via psych consults and crisis managers and social workers and court orders. Oftentimes they just needed a break: an orderly schedule, a little counseling, an empathetic group session, and the usual medications. Lots of kids came in on stuff; lots had stopped taking whatever they were meant to be on. A couple of days, a week, and most had their heads screwed back on again. In Ward II, they could chill for twenty-one additional days. There the docs did what they could for the kids and then either released them, transferred them to special clinics, or moved them up to Dr. Boujedra’s group on Ward III. Long-term parking.
The Ward III kids were neither well enough to go home nor sick enough to be shipped out. Languid, world-weary, they sat wistfully in psychiatric purgatory while others came and went. A few kids had been there for over a year, their parents happy to foot the bill and keep them safe, not to mention out of their own hair. Some had even come to feel at home, waiting for their Godots while trained professionals took a daily interest in their thoughts and feelings. Not like the real world was so fantastic anyway. Jacob sometimes saw the appeal; who wouldn’t want to be constantly around people who were always hoping you’d soon be well?
He suspected that Ella Yorke was in this last camp. She seemed almost happy to be there, raising her hand in group sessions, standing around by the sorry excuse for a library, earnestly staring out windows, always annoyingly smiling and meaning it. Jacob found himself passing the hours imagining how she’d ended up there: bad breakup, penned some dramatic Plath-esque ode to sharp cutlery in an English class somewhere, meeting with perplexed teacher, misfired hysterics, a call to campus security… et cetera, et cetera? Or was she more the shut-in type? Cutting class to watch SOAP Network, first a few hours a day, then eight, then twelve, then twenty? Who knew? She could be utterly batshit. Secretly collecting the tabs off soda cans to trade with the Plutonians when they came to harvest everyone’s earlobes for fuel.
But Jacob had a hard time believing it was anything like that. Her biggest aberration was that she seemed so damn sincere about everything. He kept expecting to come in to find she had been released, but every time she was still there. And it began to be a strange reminder that he was still there, too. He hadn’t exactly decided to take Dr. Feingold’s advice to take the year off and avoid major life changes, yet every time the idea arose of actively pursuing something, he’d beg off.
“Why don’t you go back and get your master’s degree?” Oliver asked him one weekend as he lay in bed beside Jacob. “Don’t you think Irene would have wanted you to?”
Jacob stared up at the clean white carpet of Connecticut sky. What Irene would have wanted for him — he could answer ten different ways at ten different hours of the day.
“Or try something new, if you want. Jacob Blaumann,” he said dreamily, “master of law! You could do your own television serial.”
“We just call them shows here,” Jacob said. “Cereal’s for eating.”
Jacob had actually grown fond of the schoolboy Briticisms. He liked to imagine Oliver as a young boarding-school student, lounging around like this on Saturdays and enjoying the occasional company of men. During the week he was hardly ever in the mood, but on Saturdays he was like a giggly teenager who’d stumbled onto this new, secret activity.
“I’ll be Jacob Blaumann, Master and Commander!” Jacob said, stretching his arms to frame the opening titles.
“A master… piece!” Oliver clapped and Jacob left to take a shower. Minutes later he tried hard not to hear Oliver whispering on the phone to someone through the tiled wall. “No, he’s seeming better, I think.”
Toward the end of March, Jacob was reassigned to afternoons, and this involved watching over Sissy Coltrane’s group in the art therapy “laboratory” (her term). Sissy led the group through middle-school-level exercises: sketching their shoes, sculpting little bowls, banging out campfire songs on tambourines. Ordinarily it was the sort of rotation that Jacob would have begged Oliver to get him out of, but Jacob didn’t complain. Through a haze of clay dust drifting up from misshapen pottery, he kept half an eye on Ella Yorke.
It wasn’t as if he was seeking out information on her, just taking note when something appeared. Paul, one of the other orderlies, told him she was seventeen and had been in and out of Anchorage House four times over the past two years. This time she’d been admitted during the Christmas rush and after her thirty-day evaluation had been cleared to stay. She was supposedly so smart that, despite having missed portions of her junior and senior years, she had graduated in the top 5 percent of her class and been accepted at Columbia. But after one semester she was back on medical leave.
This week Sissy had them work on self-portraits in acrylic paint. Everyone was given a little two-by-one-foot canvas and a hand mirror to work with. Ella had worked on her self-portrait, spending two whole days endlessly erasing lines and redrawing them, walking a few paces away to see how it looked from a distance, then rushing back to make some tiny adjustment. Once she spent the entire hour just mixing brown paint, adding a little more umber, a little more ochre, a little jet black, to get the shade right. She’d hold the brush up to her own hair for comparison.
Jane and Annabeth snickered. They had plastic garbage bags over their smocks and held their brushes far away, as if they were CDC agents and the paint were a deadly pathogen. Jacob had a terrible urge to paint polka dots all over Annabeth’s picture. The boys made slapdash efforts: cartoonish versions of themselves with stick-figure arms, carrying hockey sticks or driving race cars. There was an epic game of paper football flicking they were always trying to resume.
When everyone else was washing out their paintbrushes in the sink, Ella sat at the table, daubing paint onto the canvas, then stabbing it repeatedly into the jar of milky brown-black water. Then she took a final, displeased look at her painting and slumped forward, mashing her cheek silently into the moonscape of dried paint that covered the table.