Visiting

Count All This — Chapter 7: first time in the psych ward

Just when Jo Kasten’s adult son encounters schizophrenia, she discovers she has breast cancer. Meanwhile, her marriage faces a test. Count All This is a story about love and loyalty, addiction and madness. This is the seventh chapter. Find the first chapter here.

When we got home the night Eddy checked into the hospital, it was 1:30 in the morning — 10 hours after he had called home with a bleeding hand. I knew I wouldn’t want to go to work in the morning. In the morning, I would want to stay in bed staring up at the ceiling, trying not to wonder what was happening at that moment to my brilliant and handsome offspring. Trying not to think at all.

I don’t remember how we passed that night. Probably we clung together in the darkness, beneath the covers, both of us on our sides, Larry’s arm circling around my waist and across my chest, pulling me in. I don’t think we cried. I couldn’t have survived crying. Crying would have been like ripping open a fresh wound held together by flimsy stitches, like flinging open the door on a cage full of feral rats. I don’t think we talked, either. Most of our words had been used up at the hospital — on the doctor, the psychologist, the nurses and security guards. On Michael and Eddy. On ourselves. Now that we had come home without our son, now that we had left him in the hands of strangers, in an institution, our word bank was empty.

So I’m guessing we held each other mutely. Eventually, Larry started to snore. Then he would have released me and rolled over, facing the window. Then I would have fused in behind him, my forehead pressed against his soft, threadbare tee shirt,wrapping my arm around his chest just above his pot belly, burrowing my fingers between his torso and his bicep, drawing warmth from his body into mine.

I do remember a creepy dream. I dreamt that I was abandoning my crippled baby, like I’ve read they did in ancient times. I laid him down on a flat rock at the edge of a forest, his little legs kicking. One foot broke through the swaddling; it looked twisted, deformed. I heard him shriek as I turned and ran downhill, faster and faster, first stumbling then falling to my knees on the rocky hillside, hands hurt and bloody, vision blurred by tears. When I turned to look back at him over my shoulder, I saw a big man, a black-robed stranger, scoop him up.

Five hours later, the alarm clock was beeping. I groaned before swinging my heavy legs out of bed. I showered and pulled on my clothes numbly. Larry stayed in bed. He had recently become unemployed. Michael said he wanted to stay home from school. I didn’t object. I got in my car like a zombie, drove to work, pulled into the parking lot of the hospital and trudged towards the huge edifice in a trance.

I knew Eddy was in there, somewhere, locked up in the psych ward, but I wasn’t going to see him. My work was in the Planning and Marketing Department where I wrote stories for my boss Mandy. I thought I would be okay; I thought I would check in with the receptionist, walk to my office, shut the door. But the first person who said “good morning” to me in the elevator commenced the unraveling. I couldn’t speak. As I walked down the wide hallway full of nurses and visitors, three more people extended the customary greeting. The pressure to respond to them weighed down on me. Once I reached my department, I stumbled to the receptionist’s desk.

“I don’t think I can work today,” I whispered, exhaling loudly, despite the fact that I already didn’t have enough air. “I thought I could, but…”

“Why? What’s the matter?” Her voice was warm and full of concern.

“My son is here, in the hospital. We were up all night.”

“Here?! What happened?”

A graphic designer was watching us now, feeling the intensity of the conversation from across the room. A few writers were oblivious, hurrying past. Mandy was sequestered in her office. I tried to marshal words.

“He hurt himself…He’s okay, though. He’s in the psych ward.” I knew I wasn’t giving the right impression. It sounded like he had tried to commit suicide. But it would have to do. It was what I could muster.

“Oh, Jo. I’m so sorry. Just go on home. I’ll tell Mandy and call to cancel your interviews.”

“Thank you,” I nodded before turning. I rode down the elevator in a daze. As I plowed across the parking lot, making a beeline to my car, I saw the new head of the Cardiology Department walking toward me. I had just interviewed him the month before for a cover story in our hospital newsletter. He was an attractive young man, who had married an attractive young woman in Surgery. I had no doubt that one day they would produce healthy and attractive young children, the kind of children who would never aspire to be homeless, or be escorted by two big security guards into a locked psychiatric ward.

“Mornin’ Jo. How’re you doing?” the cardiologist smiled.

“Not good. My son is in the hospital. I’m going home.”

“Oh, no! What happened?”

“He hurt himself. He’s in the psych ward.” The words came out of my mouth of their own volition. I didn’t want the crying. The doctor tried putting his arm around me stiffly. I felt embarrassed and ashamed — like a tricky imposter, as if my misery was something I had manufactured to impress him.

Back home, I found Larry sitting up in the bedroom. “Visiting hours are 12:00 to 1:00,” he informed me, unsurprised by my immediate return from work. “We should stop and get him something healthy to eat. I can’t imagine he’s going to want to eat the hospital food.”

“Okay.” I got under the covers fully clothed.

When the hour arrived, Michael, once again, wanted to come with us. I wished I had made him go to school. We left early and stopped at a health food store where we bought a variety of items we thought Eddy might like: a candy bar made of raw oats and honey, kombucha tea in a bottle, almonds mixed with raisins, and carrot juice. Larry drove the car and I directed, showing him the back way employees used to enter the hospital grounds. We found what seemed to be the last parking space in the lot, out near the shed where they stored the gardening equipment. A crew of gardeners was having lunch on a small island of green amid the asphalt, sitting at a picnic table beneath a towering eucalyptus tree.

“That looks like a job I would like,” Larry said as we got out of the car.

“You should apply here. Everybody gets a pension.”

After 20 years in the restaurant business, Larry had decided to strike out on new career paths after a site he had opened failed spectacularly, wiping out his taste for the industry along with our bank account. We’d all be happier when he found another job.

I led the three of us across the lot to the back entrance, where big trucks made deliveries and the CEO of the hospital had a parking space reserved in his name. On the landing dock, retractable metal doors opened to a supply room behind an enormous round scale with a square, silver base for weighing big loads. We walked around the industrial-size scale and down the extra wide hall, built big enough for supply transports, to the ground floor elevators, which we took to the third floor.

Despite having worked at the hospital for three years, I had never been to the psychiatric ward and didn’t know what to expect. After turning a corner, we found ourselves standing in front of locked double doors. A small stainless steel plaque seemed to apologize. “Doors must remain locked at all times. High risk of elopement.” Another sign directed us to use the phone on the wall to notify people inside if we wanted to come in. I picked up the receiver.

“Unit 780,” a woman’s voice answered.

“Hello. This is Edward Thibedeaux’s mother, Jo Kasten. We’re here to visit him.”

“How many of you are there?”

“Three. Me, his father, and his brother.”

“Okay. Well, we’re only supposed to let two in at a time, but I think it will be okay for today to let the three of you come in together. But it’s not visiting hours yet. You’re early. Sit down in the hall and someone will come out to get you when it’s time.”

“Okay.”

The three of us waited on upholstered chairs by the elevators. Larry picked up a newspaper he found on a side table and began to read. There was a family of four standing stiffly in the hall, a young man and woman flirting with each other in front of the elevators, and an older man reading a newspaper in a chair by the window. I wondered who they were waiting to visit. Spouses? Children? Siblings? Friends? I wondered what environment we would find inside. Larry was silent.

“How do they keep the doors locked?” Michael asked. “I don’t see a keyhole.” I had no idea. His father ignored the question. “I wonder how hard it would be to escape,” Michael continued. “Maybe we should try to smuggle Eddy outside with us.”

“No, Michael, we shouldn’t do that. He’s not a prisoner here. They aren’t torturing him. They’re helping him.”

Larry joined the conversation to give a more detailed account of how the door was probably secured.

Five minutes later, a short man with muscled arms emerged from the unit, but when I rose to follow him back inside, he motioned me to sit back down. “One group at a time,” he said, taking the young couple who stood by the elevators before us.

It was another five minutes before he came back through the doors.

When it was finally our turn, we followed meekly. Our escort took the bag of groceries out of Larry’s hands before we got inside. The doors opened to a nurses’ station that blocked our passage, guarding both the door to the outside and a large room behind it that was filled with tables and couches. A hall to our right led to bedrooms that seemed to be off limits to visitors. I scanned the common room quickly, but couldn’t locate Ed. Before passing through, we were asked to write our names and other information on a clipboard while the nurse in charge went through the items in our bag. “No glass,” she announced, removing the kombucha. “We’ll put his name on this and keep it in the refrigerator back here. He can ask for it when he wants it.” Then she returned the bag.

As we turned from the counter, I saw Eddy sitting at a round table by himself in front of a plate of food that he was stirring aimlessly with his fork. He was wearing a blue and white print cotton hospital gown over similar pants and green hospital-issue socks with white painted tread. His hand was bandaged. Despite the clean look of his clothing, he didn’t seem to have showered. His hair hung in greasy, brown clumps down to his shoulders. He looked even thinner than he had in his regular clothes.

“Hi Eddy,” I said cheerfully as we sat down beside him, me on one side, his father on the other, and Michael next to Larry. “We brought you some health food.” I put the brown paper bag on the table. “You don’t have to eat that stuff if you don’t want to.”

“Thank you,” he said crisply. “The food here isn’t bad. I like it.”

“Really? You don’t seem to have eaten any of it.”

He looked down at his plate of stirred potatoes and started to laugh. “Actually, you’re right. The food here is crappy!” He seemed delighted. “But it doesn’t matter, because I’m not very hungry anyway.”

We sat uncomfortably together for a minute. A man my age wearing green shorts, a yellow polo shirt, white ankle socks, and black loafers was loudly haranguing someone over a pay phone nearby. His topic of conversation moved from politics to the stock market to a trip he took to Florida. He never paused for a response from the listener. His voice grew louder and subsided with rhythmic surges unrelated to what was being said.

Next to him was a young blonde woman Eddy’s age on the hospital phone. “Aren’t you going to come to visit me?” she whined pathetically. “It’s 12:15 already. I’m the only one here who doesn’t have a visitor.”

Behind Eddy, on a couch, was an extremely fat woman in a print shift, white anklets, and black patent leather shoes who was staring into space, ignoring a thin cord of drool swinging from her chin.

Another table held a younger woman, whose arm was bandaged from wrist to elbow, talking cheerfully to the young couple I’d seen out in the hall. “She’s a cutter,” Eddy told us — too loudly.

A disheveled man paced back and forth in front of the nurses’ station, muttering. Other patients were scattered across the room, alone or with company; most were in extreme states of silence or volubility.

“Don’t you want to see what we brought you?” I prompted Ed, forcing everyone’s attention back to the table.

“Yes,” he said with the same cheery crispness. But his actions didn’t reflect his tone. He looked in the bag lazily, pawing the contents halfheartedly with one hand.

“So what’s going on here, Eddy?” his father asked. “Have you seen a doctor?”

“No. I haven’t seen a doctor. They told me a doctor was coming this morning, but the doctor never came. This morning someone interviewed me in a room for five minutes. Maybe he was a doctor. He wrote down what I was saying. But I didn’t want to talk about what he wanted to talk about. I couldn’t sleep all night because the guy next to me was moaning. I think I’m done here. I’m ready to go home.”

“I don’t think they’re going to let you out of here until you see a doctor,” Larry said. “They’re going to have to evaluate you.”

“Hey Eddy, can I have your brownie?” Michael interrupted.

Eddy shoved the tray across the table to him, making a loud clatter. “Michael, would you just leave the table?!” he shouted. “I don’t want you here! Go sit over there!”

“Okay…” Michael turned to leave, but then froze, looking around. Where would it be safe to go?

“Wait a minute. What’s the problem?” I interrupted and tried to protect Michael from his brother, a job I’d been failing at for 14 years. “Do you want to keep your brownie? Michael doesn’t have to eat it.”

“No, it’s not about the friggin’ brownie!” Eddy yelled, then looked over at the nurses’ station furtively. “Come on, let’s get out of here. Come with me. Over here.”

We followed him nervously across the room to a few chairs lined up beneath the windows. Outside was a view of the runways at SFO, crawling with planes, and beyond that the blue water of San Francisco Bay. The windows were tinted, but the day was bright and clear.

“I just want to talk to Mom,” he announced. “You two wait over there.”

I was instantly anxious. What was going to happen? Why did he want only me? “Why, Eddy? What’s the problem?” I glanced back at Larry. “Can’t Daddy and Michael sit with us?”

“Shit. I don’t care,” he shook his head in exasperation, herding me into a chair directly across from him. Larry and Michael sat behind me. Eddy took up both of my hands.

“Look, Mom. I’ve figured out what my problem is.”

“You have? That’s great, honey!” I felt a stab of hope. Maybe this misadventure would soon be over. “What is it?”

“My problem is separation anxiety.”

“Separation anxiety? But that’s something two-year-olds get! What do you mean by ‘separation anxiety?’ Do you mean when you moved out of the house to the eco-commune six months ago, you weren’t really ready to be separated from us?”

“No, no. Not then.” He was impatient with my stupidity. “When a child is born, he doesn’t want to leave the womb. The womb is the perfect environment. All his needs are taken care of. He can hear the heartbeat and feel the squishy blood all around him,” he stopped for a moment to smile gleefully at the morbid image. “Then he’s thrust out into the world alone, against his will. It’s deep in my subconscious, Mom — a deep hurt. It’s the pain that’s driving me. So I need to go back and re-experience the birth to rid me of it.”

“Are you saying you’re hurting now because you were born?” I couldn’t keep the anger out of my voice. Wherever this was going, I didn’t like it. And I definitely didn’t want to be blamed. “But Eddy, there’s no solution for that! You had to be born, didn’t you? No one can stay in the womb forever.”

“Obviously!” he dropped my hands in disgust. “You’re not trying, Mom. You’re not paying attention.”

“I am trying, Ed. I’m trying to understand what you’re saying. But I don’t understand. How can the pain of being born cause you to put your hand through a window 18 years later? How are these things related?”

“My hand? My hand?!! That’s not the issue here! Nobody is talking about my hand!”

“Well your hand is what landed you here in the first place.”

Larry tugged on my shirtsleeve from his spectator’s seat behind me. “Maybe you should just drop it. This doesn’t seem like a productive topic of conversation.”

“No. In fact, this whole visit doesn’t seem productive,” Eddy announced dictatorially. “I want you to leave now. All of you. And don’t bother coming back again.” Eddy stood angrily and stalked across the room without a glance back at us, turning at the nurses’ station down the forbidden hall.

Larry, Michael, and I shuffled sheepishly after him, stopping first to pick up the brown bag full of health food items on the round dining table and taking it to the nurses’ station.

“Could you put Eddy’s name on these, too? Could you see that he gets them?”

The nurse nodded at me with disapproval. Eddy belonged to her now, apparently. He was her patient. And I was the dumb and careless visitor who had set him off.

When we got back home, Michael walked without speaking to his bedroom and shut the door loudly behind him. Larry and I curled together on our double bed. And when nighttime visiting hours arrived, Larry went to the hospital alone.

He came back radiant. “He was perfectly normal!” Larry reported excitedly. “He didn’t say anything crazy. We sat and talked together the whole time.” Relief shone through his unshaven face.

“That’s good news…” I faltered. I wanted to believe him. I truly did. But how did that happen? “Did you talk to the doctor?”

“No. He wasn’t there. But Eddy said he’d talked to him. They’re giving him some kind of medication, apparently. Maybe that’s what’s doing it. He also seems pretty freaked out by the hospital. He wants to come home. Maybe just being there shook him up enough to make him come back to his senses.”

“That could be…” I allowed a sliver of hope. “Claire and Jean called,” I continued, naming two of my four sisters. “They want to visit him — if you think that’s a good idea. When are they going to let him out, exactly? The day after tomorrow? Did anyone tell you?”

“I’m not sure. We might be able to ask the doctor about it tomorrow. The nurse said he’s not supposed to tell us anything, since Eddy is 18 years old, and he hasn’t given them permission to talk to us. But since he’ll be coming home with us, we might be able to get some information.”

“He’s coming to our house? Not going back to the eco- commune? Did he agree to that?”

“Yes. Yes! He’s perfectly reasonable, I’m telling you! Maybe it’s you that was making him crazy,” Larry’s eyes sparkled as he teased me for the first time in eons. “Maybe only I should be allowed to talk to him from now on.”

Larry grabbed me around the waist and I laughed, pleased to see him full of good cheer. And his report was good. It checked all the boxes. So why I full dread?

That was the seventh chapter of my novel, Count All This. To continue, follow the free chapter links below or buy a digital copy of the whole book on Amazon, where leaving a rating or review will help others find my story.

>>>NEXT CHAPTER << TABLE OF CONTENTS

NEW CHAPTER ALERT! Here’s a head’s up to people who’ve clapped or commented on my fiction in the past that a new novel’s running and the next chapter’s been published. ❤

Alan Tabor, Alberto García 🚀🚀🚀, Brendabrown, Catherine Caruso, Catherine Durkin Robinson, Chidi Michaels, Christiana White, Deb Clark, Dennis Abrahamson, Esther Spurrill-Jones, Evelyn Jean Pine, Frank Delaurier, Gregory Bell, Hidayatullah, HJ Free4Life, Jackie Sacco, James Finn, Jen Maidenberg, Kenny D, L. A. Jackson, Lilit A. Sargsyan, Maddy Wylie, Matthew John, Nini Mappo, Paul Morriss, Rebecca Ruth Gould, Ripley J. Cloud, R.L. Raymundo, Rolli, Sandra Salamander, Shannon Mary Sims, Skippy von Alte Welt, The Old Grey Wolf, Wendy Allen, Yvonne Vávra

My writing is free to readers who follow my links from Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, but if you’d like to browse more, click here to join Medium for $5 a month and they’ll give me some of that money. (Yes!) For an email when I publish a new story, click here. Find more of my fiction, including another novel, on this List. And for more of the good stuff, follow Fourth Wave, where we’re changing the world for the better, one story at a time. Got one of your own? Submit to the Wave!

Copyright © 2021 by Patsy Fergusson. All rights reserved.